Neil deGrasse Tyson on Understanding Our Current Reality (XPRIZE Visioneering) | EP #140

In this episode, recorded at XPRIZE Visioneering, Neil and Peter discuss all the exponential discoveries that have launched humanity forward. Recorded on Oct 24th, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. 12:53 | The Power of Scientific Analysis 39:56 | The Exponential Leap in Aviation 01:06:01 | Future Predictions: A Glimpse Ahead Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator, best known for making complex scientific concepts accessible to the general public. As the director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of popular science shows like Cosmos and StarTalk, he has become a prominent advocate for science education. Tyson's work spans both academia and media, with a focus on promoting scientific literacy and inspiring curiosity about the universe. The XPRIZE Foundation is a non-profit organization that designs and hosts public competitions intended to encourage technological development. Through incentivized competition, the XPRIZE mission is to bring about "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity." Learn more about XPRIZE: https://www.xprize.org/home Get Neil’s new book: https://a.co/d/8IinhVF Watch StarTalk: https://www.youtube.com/@StarTalk Pre-Order my Longevity Guidebook here: https://qr.diamandis.com/book-audiopodcast ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  Our brains are wired for linear thinking in an exponential world, and it's causing us a great deal of strife.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  This linear thinking prevents you from realizing a possible future that awaits you. This is a rich country. We can do whatever we want if we all agree to it. So it's really not a matter of a budget. It's a matter of what is motivating us. 1908, the quote, "Man will never fly from New York to Paris." 1908, you know who said that? Orville Wright.

• 0:33Peter Diamandis?

  That's my favorite request on stage. Can you give us a prediction for 2050?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  We will have designer drugs. They'll analyze your genome, find drugs that will have no side effects for you. All cars on the road will be self-driving electric. The entire solar system becomes our backyard.

• 0:51Peter Diamandis?

  And the only thing we know about these predictions are?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  They're gonna be wrong.

• 0:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:00Peter Diamandis?

  Before we get started, I want to share with you the fact that there are incredible breakthroughs coming on the health span and longevity front. These technologies are enabling us to extend how long we live, how long we're healthy. The truth is, a lot of the approaches are in fact cheap or even free. And I want to share this with you. I just wrote a book called Longevity Guidebook that outlines what I've been doing to reverse my biological age, what I've been doing to increase my health, my strength, my energy. And I want to make this available to my community at cost. So longevityguidebook.com. You can get information or check out the link below. All right, let's jump into this episode.

• 1:48Peter Diamandis?

  This is going to be a joint StarTalk and Moonshots here at X Prize Visioneering. And I need to do an introduction, if you don't mind. I just, you know, I know everybody knows you. I mean, who doesn't? But it's, do they know enough about you?

• 2:08Peter Diamandis?

  So, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an esteemed astrophysicist, celebrated science communicator, passionate educator, with a mission to ignite curiosity in minds worldwide. A graduate of Harvard University in Physics, Dr. Tyson earned his Masters at Princeton, his PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia, and now serves as Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. Through his wildly popular show, StarTalk, which reaches over a million listeners per episode, his reboot of Carl Sagan's, yeah, wow, his reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series reached over 135 million viewers in 180 countries.

• 2:50Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know which countries we're not watching, but they should have been. Neil has published over 15 books, including the New York Times Bestselling Book, which I love the title, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, which alone sold over a million copies. Today, we are honored to have Dr. Tyson here to talk about humanity's future in innovation and discovery.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Thank you, thank you. There was only some exaggeration in that intro, just what I want to say.

• 3:24Peter Diamandis?

  It was by the numbers.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  But am I the only one wearing a tie in this room?

• 3:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Okay, apologies. I just thought, Van Gogh's Starry Night, that I thought I'd get away with that. Is that all right? Okay, we good?

• 3:38Peter Diamandis?

  We're good. You know, you and I have met a couple of times, and I want to go back to our X Prize history, but first, I know you are a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, one graduate over there, maybe, okay.

• 3:55Peter Diamandis?

  Actually, actually, our Vice Chairman, Robert K. Weiss, who's watching on our livestream, was also a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, and I was born in the Bronx at Miser Cordia Hospital.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Born in the Bronx. The Bronx High School of Science counts eight Nobel laureates among its graduates, which is as many as the country of Spain, just to put some context.

• 4:17Peter Diamandis?

  That's good, that's very good.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:20Peter Diamandis?

  So...

• 4:21Speaker 01

  But that's all I get. That's good.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  That's very good. Like, you got something better than that that you gonna put on the list? This is excellent, but that's just very good. Eight Nobel Prizes. Thank you. Awesome. There you go.

• 4:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I want to go back to our first meeting. And so, we talked yesterday about the origin of the X Prize Foundation. And so, I read this book, The Spirit of St. Louis, which Greg Marinac gives me, and come up with this crazy harebrained idea about this spaceflight competition. And of course, the very first thing that any entrepreneur has to do when you come up with your great idea is raise money. And so, I have on my bookshelves these Penguin Pocketbook Science Fiction books. And I'm reading them, and in the back, there's this one-page tear-out that says, "If you'd like to fly on a future flight to the moon, Mars,

• 5:19Peter Diamandis?

  Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, without disregard to gravitational issues or so, please fill out this form and send it in." And send it in where? Well, to the Hayden Planetarium. And so, it hits me, oh my god, the Hayden Planetarium must have millions of these forms of people interested in private spaceflight. And so, I'm gonna go track them down. And so, I end up on your doorstep.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Just to be clear, that solicitation wasn't just a few years ago. It was many, many, many decades ago. I think it dated back to the 1950s.

• 5:51Peter Diamandis?

  It did.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And I'm pretty sure it was just a stunt that the Hayden Planetarium was not gonna launch people to Pluto. Alright, so, but you were right in thinking that if you were gonna have a core group of people, if they're still alive, a core group of people who are thinking this way, then you want to link up with them in any way you can.

• 6:16Peter Diamandis?

  So, I show up. Dr. Tyson, a pleasure to meet you. My name is Peter. I've got this idea for the Space Flight Prize. And by the way, would you be willing to share the names and addresses of all the individuals who've signed up?

• 6:30Peter Diamandis?

  Because I want to hit them up for money.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  I'm thinking, crazy man alert, right? Okay, let me just humor him, maybe he'll go away. Okay, I never told you that, right?

• 6:45Peter Diamandis?

  No.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  But I think what you do, look, I, in all fairness to those thoughts that I had, to do what you're doing requires a little bit of crazy.

• 6:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  You can't just be normal and do any of this. So, that's a compliment.

• 7:08Peter Diamandis?

  I resemble, I resemble those remarks. So, you bring out this shoebox. And, um, and there are these tearouts, and I'm amazed you had these shoeboxes. And you then go on to explain to me that the probability these people actually still live there and are still alive is like diminishingly low.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are addresses that predate zip codes, okay? So that's how you know.

• 7:34Peter Diamandis?

  Well, um, so at least-

• 7:36Speaker 01

  By the way, just because I, as an educator, who here is under forty? Okay, don't clap yet.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  You have no idea that the word zip is an acronym. I told you, see? Okay? Zip stands for Zone Improvement Plan.

• 7:56Peter Diamandis?

  Whoa.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  To help mail get to its destination faster. So now you, forty, forty-year-olds and younger can feel like- Where do we get zip codes? I, I think it was, it was, it had to get rolled in, so it was like late sixties, I think. Early seventy, or even, even early sixties. Because you are a hundred years old, sir.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  I was the first zip code!

• 8:25Peter Diamandis?

  So that began our friendship and relationship and grateful to have you here. But let's fast forward. There is a book you wrote called Starry Messenger: A Cosmic Perspective on Civilization. And when you and I, you know, met on one of your previous recordings of StarTalk, I mentioned to you that this is the 30th anniversary of the X Prize. And you said, "Wow, 30 years has a very special meaning in a recent book I wrote." You want to sort of riff off that?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, I can do that. So the more precisely uttered title is Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. Starry Messenger is the name of Galileo's first book on the universe, sidereus nuncius in Latin, of course. And it's where he reported his first observations, telescope observations, of the night sky. And in there were revelations that conflicted with what people were thinking of the day. He noticed that Venus went through phases, as the moon does. He noticed the moon is not a smooth surface, it's pitted and cratered.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  He noticed that the sun has spots on it. This idea of a perfect, smooth set of heavenly bodies was shattered by that. And this is information that would ultimately show that Earth is not the center of the known universe. These are the starry messages. This is the universe talking to us, telling us that our understanding of how things are might not be correct. And if the authorities are inflexible in what is or is not correct...

• 10:18Speaker 01

  It creates conflict.

• 10:19Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  And in his case, he ended up under house arrest. Basically died in house, under house arrest. For his views that conflicted with biblical genesis.

• 10:29Peter Diamandis?

  So.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Because any rational read of biblical genesis would have the earth formed before everything else. Okay, heavens and earth, the sun and moon came later. All of, so you can't square that. And one of his great quotes, which I will mangle is. Why would God give us these faculties of reason? And then expect us to forego their use? So, so.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  So.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  So anyhow, so that's the title of it. So I wanted to.

• 11:01Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, a cautionary tale for any disruptive thinkers this day.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, watch out who's gonna come after you for saying something different.

• 11:10Peter Diamandis?

  And they still do.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  With, not without, yes, but there's an improvement on that because they don't torture you in a dungeon.

• 11:20Peter Diamandis?

  That's true.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  So that's progress, that's progress.

• 11:23Peter Diamandis?

  But, but they may discredit you.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  So, um, so I thought today, there's so many things that permeate our society that could benefit from a rational analysis, scientific analysis, with a dose of a cosmic perspective. And so all the many chapters of the book are paired words that have generally created conflict at holiday dinners. Like, um, truth and beauty. Exploration and discovery, which is the subject of this conversation. Uh, earth and moon. Uh, uh. Meat eaters and vegetarians. Yeah, I went there, okay? Okay?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Uh, uh, color and race, gender and identity, law and order, risk and reward. Each of those is a chapter and the power of scientific analysis is brought to it. And when you do that. You learn that, you discover that there are perspectives on so many things that divide us that, that sit above where you have formulated your opinions. And if it sits above it, you say, wait a minute, maybe both of us are wrong. Or there's a whole other way to look at this that diffuses the conflict that would otherwise unfold. The entire book is that, on all of those subjects.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  And, and your man here, he decided to acquire that book for everyone in this room.

• 12:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, so you have a signed copy.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:57Peter Diamandis?

  You have, you have a signed copy by Neil for all of you here.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Personally signed with my overpriced fountain pen. Okay, so you have that. But, in there, getting back to your 30 years.

• 13:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  So.

• 13:12Peter Diamandis?

  And I want to hit one subject before then, if we could. But we're going to talk about the fact that X Prize being 30 years old this year, happens to map against some interesting thinking and logic constructs that Neil discusses in chapter two. But before we get there, I want to talk about something that's important as a precedent to that, which is the fact that our brains are wired for linear thinking in an exponential world, and it's causing us a great deal of strife.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's understandable that we have linear brains. Why, why would it be anything other than that? Think of, you know, we evolved on the Serengeti or wherever, and you, you know, you just don't want to be eaten by the lion. That's not exponential thinking, that's very linear thinking.

• 14:03Peter Diamandis?

  Can I get to the tree before the lion gets to me?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  That's linear, that's a linear exercise, okay? The speed of the lion is not increasing.

• 14:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  All right? And infinitum.

• 14:14Peter Diamandis?

  Luckily.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  We'd have to have a different brain to understand that.

• 14:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  So, I, I don't want to fault us for thinking that way, but to have self-awareness can bring you great benefits. If you know in advance you have linear thinking. And probably the cleanest example of the failure of our brain to understand exponentials is the one that involves a lake, and there's algae growing on a lake. And you see it there, and you, and you see that the area of the lake covered by algae Is like doubling every day. Like it starts out in a little patch. And you come back the next day, it's like twice as big.

• 14:53Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Next day it's twice as big. So that's, that's kinda scary.

• 14:57Peter Diamandis?

  That's classic exponential growth, the simple doubling.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, doubling, doubling, correct, correct. So now, so the question is, um, you're there and you go away for a month. And you come back and the lake is half covered with algae.

• 15:16Peter Diamandis?

  Your favorite lake, it's awful.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  It's half covered. So the question is, how much more time do you have to wait? For the entire lake to be covered? And most, okay, y'all are smart in here, that's what I'm saying. Most people say another month. That's linear thinking. No, the entire lake will be covered in one more day. With the doubling per day. And that's a, perhaps the simplest example of this. Another one is, there's an old story, uh, in ancient China, where there's a chessboard with sixty-four squares. And someone, I, I'm gonna get the details wrong here. But there's someone who did something, favor for the king. And, or the emperor.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  And the emperor wanted to return a favor in advance. And, uh, offered him, no, and the person said, I want one grain of rice for every square on the board, but doubled. For every square. And they said, well, don't you want these riches? And I'm like, no, I want rice for every. And the king didn't know exponentials. And so by the time, you can't reach sixty-four. There's not enough rice in China.

• 16:30Peter Diamandis?

  It's like, it's like a mound as big as Mount Everest.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's two to the sixty-fourth power.

• 16:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  And, and so.

• 16:37Peter Diamandis?

  Well, my, my favorite is with my kids, I, I did this with them. My, my two boys, I said, I'll give you, you know, do you want?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  But are they okay?

• 16:43Peter Diamandis?

  They're, they're fine.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:46Peter Diamandis?

  They're fine. As I, like, would you?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  You're performing experiments on your, your children, okay.

• 16:50Peter Diamandis?

  Would you rather have a mil-, would you rather have a million dollars now? Or a penny doubled every day for thirty days? And they actually got it correct.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 17:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Nice, yeah. After thirty days, it's more than five million dollars.

• 17:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 17:05Peter Diamandis?

  It's definitely, you want to.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Although, you might not have the five million by the end of the month, and you take the million now and run, you see? So, oh, and by the way, the five million is what your payout is on the thirtieth day.

• 17:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, you've accumulated.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  If you accumulate it all, you're up around ten million.

• 17:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're at ten million dollars.

• 17:25Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it stays in the family, though.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  So, so this linear thinking, it's, you said it gets us into trouble. No, it just prevents you from realizing a possible future that awaits you. And my, my best example of this is in the year nineteen hundred, New Year's Eve, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, then a newspaper, well-read, Brooklyn was its own town. Um, Brooklyn is the origin of the Dodgers, okay?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Just putting it out there. So, I, it's nineteen hundred, and they did what anybody does at the beginning of a century. They want to imagine what the next century will bring.

• 18:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Okay. And there's a whole pullout section where, where economists, politicians, scientists, engineers, they all proclaim their, they all lay down their predictions for the future. Here's the most interesting prediction there. It is by the head of the New York Central Railroad, okay? So he's in the transportation business. At the time, think back nineteen hundred, sir, you are around in nineteen hundred, yes, okay?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Don't be bragging about the zip code and not just accept this.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  So.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  In 1900, there was steam ships crossing the Atlantic in record time. There were, you know, the railroads crossing the country. You can get to California faster than you ever could before. There were airships. There was, the bicycle was perfected. Early combustion engine. So, he was riding high.

• 19:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, transportation was moving.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  He, I see what you did there.

• 19:27Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  I know you're capable of better than that.

• 19:35Peter Diamandis?

  Exponentially better than that.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Okay, good. So, here's what he said, and I quote. "We can scarcely imagine that advances in transportation of the 20th century will be as great as were those in the 19th century." Whoa! That has got to be the most boneheaded statement ever made by anyone ever, especially someone who's in the business of transportation. He could not imagine the airplane, which was three years later. He was, this was not in his head. That we're flying supersonic or going to the moon, okay? And so, and by the way, he's saying that in 1900,

• 20:19Speaker 01

  and by 1930, we had already crossed the Atlantic in an airplane that would be invented three years later. I think it's 1927. Lindbergh, thank you.

• 20:30Peter Diamandis?

  And we have Eric Lindbergh someplace here in the audience. Eric, where are you?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  I know Eric, we met once. He's artist Lindbergh. Is that the one I remember? Yes, hey! I have one of your pieces on my desk.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  It's one of those beautiful, sort of retro-style rockets coming off of a...

• 20:52Speaker 01

  There you go. Okay. Uh, pleased to see, I hadn't seen you in 25 years. Good to see you again. So, um. See you another 25.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  So, uh, so you go from 1900 to 1930, that's a 30-year period. Yes. And life in 1930 would be wholly unrecognizable to anyone from the 1900. And this 30-year increment, I got to thinking about 30 years. Yes. I was sitting in the library at Princeton. I didn't get my masters there, but I postdoc there. You're postdoc there, okay. So I'm sitting in the library, the astrophysics library, which is like dying and going to heaven. Cause here's your favorite subject and this entire library just for that subject. Okay.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  They decided to put our feature journal, the Astrophysical Journal, which was birthed in 1895, on one wall, okay, rather than on multiple shelves. So there they were, 1895, and when I did this experiment, it might've been 1994 or something like that, 1995. And that was down over here. And I asked, it's one wall, all the journals of the Astrophysical Journal.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  And I thought to myself, I wonder what year the midpoint of this wall is. That would be the doubling time. That's a great question. That, the doubling time of published research. Simple question, easy to answer. So I'm doing this exercise in 1994, that's how old I am. So, uh, when I was in graduate school. So, coming out of, I was in postdoc in there. So I found the middle of the wall. It was 1965, 30 years.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  I said, "Oh, that's interesting." "What's the middle of the..." Of that point. Of that, before that. What's the middle? It was 1930. Okay? And the middle, so this goes, and I thought to myself, "Wait a minute. It's doubling every 30 years." Now, of course, you can argue whether every published paper is it, you know, is it exploratory, is it a real discovery? That's a detail here. The fact is, we were doubling our output in astrophysics every 30 years. And that got me thinking. Can we measure society that way? Yeah. And how would you even go about doing that? You can go to the patent records. I looked that up.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yes, you did. I report on it in the book. Patents. They have a doubling time. It might have been 20 years, but it's not 100 years. It's not five years. It's some low number of decades. But what's incredible was the consistency of it. Yeah, the consistency of the doubling. Yeah. The exponential. Yes. Okay. Now, at the risk of stating the obvious to this crowd, even though half of you didn't know what the zip code was.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Just a quick, again, I'm an educator, so I gotta say this. Let's do it.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  The word acronym is actually modern. It had only been created not much longer before the zip code was introduced. Just the word acronym. An acronym is a series of letters that spell something you can pronounce. Okay, so IBM is an abbreviation, not an acronym. CIA is an abbreviation, not an acronym. SCUBA is an acronym. Self-contained, unordered breathing, you all know that. Okay. NASA is an acronym. Because you can say it. All right. So I looked this up and then I keep historical dictionaries and I found a dictionary from 1947. The word wasn't there.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  And it was like, whoa, how, it was like, how could that not... And so that was my exact reaction. And then I learned there were so many abbreviations that came out of the Second World War.

• 25:10Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  That all of those that spelled words, we invented a word for those that spell a word. And that was acronym.

• 25:16Peter Diamandis?

  Fascinating.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  So look in old dictionaries, it's not there. And I love words that come in and out of favor and their stock value. And I don't mean to brag, but I have a word that was lifted into the Oxford English Dictionary.

• 25:28Peter Diamandis?

  What might that be?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  But I was kind of bragging there, wasn't I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I named the phenomenon where the sun sets exactly on the grid of Manhattan. Because Manhattan's streets and avenues are on a grid. And that happens twice a year. And it's beautiful because it's aligned exactly and the buildings frame it. And I called it Manhattan Henge.

• 25:52Peter Diamandis?

  Ah.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  As a throwback to Stonehenge.

• 25:55Peter Diamandis?

  But you're better than that.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Sorry, sorry buddy. Okay, I'll work harder.

• 26:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Than getting my word into the Oxford English Dictionary. Let me see what I'll... I'll work, I'll keep, I'll keep at it.

• 26:10Peter Diamandis?

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• 26:55Peter Diamandis?

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• 27:39Peter Diamandis?

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• 27:53Speaker 01

  Let's go back to it. Let me finish, let me finish. So, so.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  I said, is there a way to measure this? I don't know if there's a way. So I just picked 30 years because it divides Eat Cleanly into the timeframes I was looking at. And I said, let me start in the year 1870. I was gonna go there. And then I researched real hard what everybody was doing in 1870. And then I just went 30-year increments to 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990, 2020. When this book was published. Yeah, the book came out in 2022, okay? Written in 2020. Yes, conceived throughout that, exactly. So.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  And I went into each timeframe and lifted up what everybody was chatting about as their modern way of living. And their predictions, which they were absolutely accurate about.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Not, okay. So, so this became a highly illuminating exercise. So, going from eighteen seventy to nineteen hundred.

• 29:00Peter Diamandis?

  Shall we?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Okay, alright, so I remember.

• 29:03Peter Diamandis?

  I took notes.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Oh, you took notes, yeah. What did I say in eighteen seventy?

• 29:06Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let's see, we got the steamships.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, steamships.

• 29:09Peter Diamandis?

  We got the golden spike.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  The golden spike? That's where the railroad was first laid. People say, yes, oh my gosh, we can cross the country as, as a new thing to celebrate.

• 29:18Peter Diamandis?

  We had the Orient Express.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Orient Express across Europe.

• 29:21Peter Diamandis?

  Right, uh, eighteen eighty, Benz and the engine.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yes, the internal, so between eighteen seventy and nineteen hundred, uh, the, uh, internal combustion engine.

• 29:31Peter Diamandis?

  Right, and the bicycle.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  The bicycle, the modern bicycle as we know it was perfected. It's got somebody's name associated with it, which we've long forgotten. So that's another means of transportation that did not exist in eighteen seventy. It's odd, though, when you think about it. No ancient painting of anybody, then is they're riding a bicycle. That's just kinda weird, right?

• 29:52Peter Diamandis?

  A fundamental discovery that's persisted ever since, uh, and has been extraordinary. You know, one of the things you point out that I think is so important to say here is that every age, we think now is the most incredible time ever.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:06Peter Diamandis?

  Like now is like.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  One of the great delusions of it all.

• 30:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  You say, oh, oh, oh, all the great discoveries happened while I'm here and while I'm leaving. No, no, no, so. So, if you plot an exponential, alright? If you plot an exponential, so time is on the X axis.

• 30:24Peter Diamandis?

  Are we on the log scale or on a linear scale?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Linear scale, have to be linear scales to see this effect.

• 30:28Peter Diamandis?

  Alright.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Okay, so.

• 30:30Peter Diamandis?

  Just checking.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Good thing to check.

• 30:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  So, the X axis is time. The Y axis is whatever is the thing you're measuring that's changing exponentially. It doesn't matter what. If you plot it, it will look like it's mostly horizontal and just in the last timeframe, it goes up like this. And you're at the top of that because you're in modern day. You say, look at all the new advances that just happened.

• 30:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  What a, what a privilege it is to be alive today.

• 30:57Peter Diamandis?

  We must be special.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  We must be special. So now, why? This is a, that, that's the big problem.

• 31:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Of humans thinking we're always special. So now, if you truncate it anywhere, I don't care where, truncate it to like here.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Where you said that's pretty flat. Now re-plot it? It'll look exactly the same. It's because the exponential of today tamped everything else down relative to it. You cut it off midway? That's the exponential you'll think is your special day.

• 31:28Peter Diamandis?

  Except where you were is now back down here. Right? So if like 10 years ago, you thought you were at the top, and now 10 years later, that top is now back down here and you're at the top again.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Correct, because it keeps ascending.

• 31:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yes. And so this is another, what we, it's a delusion that we live in.

• 31:47Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I keep on thinking like now with, you know, with Starship and with AI and with, you know, humanoid robots.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  You're thinking you're living in special time.

• 31:55Peter Diamandis?

  It's like, my god, we must be in a simulation. Otherwise, why would we be alive right now?

• 32:01Speaker 01

  So, so that urge is strong.

• 32:04Peter Diamandis?

  It is.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  And I recognize it. And I, I'm victim, I fall victim to it every now and then. But then,

• 32:09Peter Diamandis?

  But not right now.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  I look back, I have a lot of books that go back several centuries. One, I, because that's what I do. One of them is a book in 1898, written by a professor of astronomy, and he's reporting on discoveries made about the sun. And this is the second edition of his book on the sun. When was the first edition? 1895. He said, "In the last three years, we've learned so much about the sun, I have to put out a new edition." He has no idea what he doesn't yet know. We, we don't know that there's thermonuclear fusion in the core. He doesn't know how the sun is making energy. As far as he knows, there's a lump of coal cooling off over the past 10,000 years. So they were idiots.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  They didn't know it, but they're celebrating what they knew. So, reading passages such as that keep you humble in the present moment. And that's important. Because this, everyone, like the guy from 1900, saying we would never rival those other advances.

• 33:14Peter Diamandis?

  One of the points you make is we all think we're super special living right now, but none of us say, "Oh, my God, we're such, we're so backwards and so inane compared to what we're going to be."

• 33:24Speaker 01

  No one says that, but that would be a completely legitimate sentence to utter. Correct. And, and what X Prize is doing is, of course, uh, making that happen. So you're making it more real.

• 33:36Peter Diamandis?

  We're trying to, we're trying to accelerate the future into the present day.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  So if you get everyone to think to themselves, "Gosh, we're such idiots compared to what we'll be in a hundred years," that might be another engine of progress, because nobody wants to be an idiot.

• 33:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So, let's move on.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go a couple of...

• 33:52Peter Diamandis?

  1900 to 1930.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, 1900 to 1930, we have the invention of the airplane. We have a total world war. We have a pandemic that kills more people than did the war.

• 34:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  We, we have, up to 1930, okay.

• 34:06Peter Diamandis?

  The atom? The structure of the atom?

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yes, we finally learned the atom. Quantum physics is discovered. We are on the centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics in the 1920s. And there is no creation, storage, or retrieval of information, digital information, without an exploitation of the quantum. And what another heels of a quantum advance with quantum computing. But computing itself can only exist as we know it because of the foundations that were laid in that decade. And by the way, we did that without even knowing that the neutron exists. The neutron was discovered in 1930. Look at how much we even got to figure out about the atom in the absence of the neutron.

• 34:51Peter Diamandis?

  The radio comes online?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Yes, the radio comes online. We have the early cinema. It's silent.

• 34:57Peter Diamandis?

  Black and white and silent.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  And black and white, but it's, oh, my gosh, a moving image. There's stories where people, one of the early movies was the, uh, was it The Great Train Robbery? It was one of the great early movies. And they have a scene with the train coming towards the camera, and people were in a cinema and they were like...

• 35:15Speaker 01

  And you think, if you've never seen that... What, how would you react? I saw some, was it an episode of Beverly Hillbillies or something? Where he sees a TV. He says, "Who's that man in that box?" And he takes his gun and shoots it, okay? Because that's what we do in America if you're from overseas here. So, you shoot, then you ask questions.

• 35:41Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, we saw the diminishment of horse manure.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yes, yeah, oh, oh, oh, oh, so. So, sorry. There are two photos. One from 1905, Fifth Avenue, New York, Easter Sunday.

• 35:55Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  There's nothing but horse-drawn carriages. Nothing, okay? And they're tack, they're horse taxis, it's horses. They are the currency of urban transportation and of farming, okay? Ten years later, 1915, that same photo was taken. There are nine, no, more than that. There's like thirty automobiles for every one horse-drawn carriage. We went from a civilization that literally and figuratively was built on the backs of horses. And within ten years, you couldn't give away a horse. You couldn't give away a horse.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Because everyone was using a car. Now, lesson to visionary.

• 36:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, visionaries, visionary.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Okay, lesson. It's 1900. There's the fear of the great manure catastrophe.

• 36:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  There's an article written, tongue-in-cheek.

• 37:02Peter Diamandis?

  Piles.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  But it was in Manhattan, which is not a large place. And you access it by bridges and tunnels. It's an island.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  There were horses and horses do what they do. You feed them, they poop. The poop goes in the street. The horse, you don't take it to the horse bathroom. It's in the street. And the people's whole job was to clean up the manure. Now what do you do with it? You bring it to another place and it makes a pile. Then somebody else comes in with multiple horse drawing carriages to haul the manure out of the island. Okay? But those horses that are hauling the manure, they are pooping. Okay, so if you run the arithmetic on this, people imagine the manure catastrophe. And manure was a, a, a, a, it attracted flies. There were no indoor supermarkets back then, at least in the, in the inner cities.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Most of, of, of food was sold by street carts. Your fish, your fruit, your, all of this was street carts. So the flies were everywhere. And it smelled.

• 38:10Peter Diamandis?

  You, you read the descriptions and the horse urine and horse poop just permeated the conversation.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  It was just in the air. And so there was a lot of visioneering discussion about what to do about the horse poop. Or the flies. So they said, let's put something in the feed so that when it comes out as poop, the flies will not be attracted to it. Cause that was one of the health issues. How do you get rid of the flies? If you're not gonna get rid of the poop. Then another one was, what can we feed the horse to reduce the amount of poop that comes out the other side? This, by the way, is a question NASA has addressed over the Apollo era with their astronauts. Cause they're sitting there in the capsule and they gotta eat, but you don't want them to poop. So you wanna reduce the poop? Why not only feed you things your body's gonna use and have no waste at all? So these are thoughts.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  So I'm imagining linear thinking.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Visioners back then would have been trying to solve the manure problem in that way.

• 39:13Peter Diamandis?

  I'm gonna.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  The actual solution was the car.

• 39:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, yes.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  That was the solution.

• 39:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's a lesson to us all. And that that happened within 10 years. So somebody in 1900, coming back in 1930, they would not recognize the landscape. They said, where's the horse? Well, it's a horse drawn carriage without a horse. How do you do that? Oh, it has an engine. What's an engine? Oh, it's a used on fuel. What's fuel? Oh, it's gasoline. Where do you get it from? Under the grass. It's a. The heads would explode.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  That's just, that's just 1900 to 1930.

• 39:50Peter Diamandis?

  Well, and let's not forget the fact Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic. We electrify our cities.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Cities are electrified. Oh, I got another quote for you. I got a quote. 1908, the quote, man will never fly from New York to Paris. 1908, you know who said that? Orville Wright.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Orville frickin Wright said that. He invents, he and his brother invent the airplane, but he cannot think exponentially.

• 40:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Cause to get to Paris is an exponential thought from flying a few yards in Kitty Hawk.

• 40:30Peter Diamandis?

  We go with meters, by the way.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's in America, Jack.

• 40:37Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day where you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look.

• 41:18Peter Diamandis?

  We don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning, when it's solvable. You're gonna find out eventually. Might as well find out when you

• 41:59Peter Diamandis?

  can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family,

• 42:41Peter Diamandis?

  the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  I don't know if you know this, that from 1930 to 1960, we introduced the first commercial jet plane.

• 43:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  The Boeing.

• 43:10Peter Diamandis?

  707.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  707. And that was done in 1956, 7 or 8.

• 43:15Peter Diamandis?

  58.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  58. Okay. Do you know, by the way, that's within the next 30-year period, 1930 to 1960. Watch. Do you realize that the wingspan of the Boeing 707 is greater than the distance flown by the Wright brothers on their first flight?

• 43:36Peter Diamandis?

  That's awesome.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  That's frickin', oh, just, yeah, give it up for the Wright Brothers, yeah, okay.

• 43:44Peter Diamandis?

  And, and, and their, and their sister.

• 43:48Peter Diamandis?

  And their sister.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Tell me about their sister.

• 43:50Peter Diamandis?

  Um, we'll find out, there's a great documentary coming out that she actually did most of the work.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  As these things go.

• 44:02Peter Diamandis?

  As these things go, so.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Well, was she the one who took the picture of them?

• 44:05Peter Diamandis?

  No.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Somebody's gotta take the picture.

• 44:07Peter Diamandis?

  I, I wanna, I wanna.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Wait, you left out that, oh, also, we have an orbiting satellite.

• 44:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:17Peter Diamandis?

  Sputnik, what, what day, what day, what year was Sputnik? October 4th of 57, yes.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  1957, and before that, not, well, 10 years before that, we break the sound barrier.

• 44:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Now, if you said to the Wright Brothers, hey, one day this will go fast enough, it'll be greater than the speed of sound, they'll laugh you out of, you know, out of Ohio.

• 44:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  So, so, okay, so that's in those 30 years.

• 44:42Peter Diamandis?

  We get, we get atomic power.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sorry, oh, there's a world war, we crack the atom, and, oh, by the way, we discover plutonium, named after the object formerly known as a planet, and.

• 44:55Peter Diamandis?

  Ooh.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Don't get me started on that.

• 44:58Peter Diamandis?

  We want Pluto back, Pluto.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Hold on, hold on, I, by the way, I'm a.

• 45:05Peter Diamandis?

  So what do you stand on that, by the way, yes or no?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  No, it's not a matter of stance, it's a matter of what is true.

• 45:11Peter Diamandis?

  No, no, no, no.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  All right, all right, Peter, where do you stand on whether Earth is round? Yeah. It's not a stance, it's just the truth.

• 45:18Peter Diamandis?

  No, it's a definition.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Pluto had it coming. Pluto had it coming.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Earth, Earth, our moon.

• 45:29Peter Diamandis?

  Dwarf moon, my butt.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Our moon.

• 45:32Peter Diamandis?

  Dwarf planet, I should say.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Who here is a Plutofile here, raise your hand, okay.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Our moon has five times the mass of Pluto. I bet they never told you that, did they?

• 45:44Peter Diamandis?

  No.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Okay, you know, more than half of Pluto's volume is ice, so that if it were brought to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice and it would have a tail. It has no kind of behavior for a planet.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Don't get me started. Okay. So now.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  I think we're in 1960. Uh, no, but, but before then, I, I'm, I'm, I, I love the periodic table and I just gotta say this about it. Okay.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  When Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, and it was finally named Uranus. Properly pronounced? Yeah, yeah. If you're older than eight years old, you should say Uranus. Okay?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  You get a hall pass if you're younger than eight to call it Uranus if you want. Alright, so, um, this is, the planet Uranus is discovered, within a few years, a brand-new element is discovered, turns out to be unstable, we would use the term radioactive later on, but they named that after the new planet that was discovered, that was the element uranium, element 92. Uranus, the sky. Now watch. Yeah. Some years after that, 100 years after that, we discover another planet, and we name it Neptune. The next element in the periodic table heavier than uranium, now number 93, was not yet

• 47:11Speaker 01

  named and not yet discovered until just after that planet. So they named that after the next planet, and that would be Neptunium. And there's element 94, not yet discovered, waiting its turn. The object formerly known as a planet called Pluto was discovered in 1930, okay? Shortly after that, we discover element 94, it's named after the ninth planet, plutonium. So the periodic table preserves uranium, Neptunium, and plutonium in sequence. Nice. With Pluto getting a, a, a, an element named on false pretense. Okay, so now.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  But here's the point. We discover plutonium in 1930. It is weaponized, turned into a bomb, and deployed 15 years later. That is the pace of what's going on at the time. The two bombs was a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb. We knew uranium would work. We were not sure about plutonium. It was new boy on the block. And so that's what was tested at, famously now portrayed in the film Oppenheimer. They tested the plutonium bomb, not the uranium bomb. And that's the one that then was dropped on Nagasaki. Point is, between 1930 and 1960, we cracked the atom, weaponized the atom,

• 48:36Speaker 01

  break the sound barrier, go into space. Oh my gosh, is there anything about 1960 that would be recognizable to anyone from 1930? I think not. Let's keep going.

• 48:49Peter Diamandis?

  So, 1960 to 1990.

• 48:54Peter Diamandis?

  A lot.

• 48:57Peter Diamandis?

  A lot.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Computers go from specialized, room-sized equipment that serve the military and scientists to things you have on your desk. Standalone computers. This is something they got wrong in the movie 2001. Old timer here, when was the movie released?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  1960, oh, 1968. He's good. He's good.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  1968, the vision of life in the year 2001. We all saw that. It was like, wow, that's how we'll be living in 2001. And in there, the main ship's computer was one huge computer. Because back then in 1968, if you want a more powerful computer, it had to be bigger. This whole idea that the computers get smaller and carried on your hip, that's not a thought. They're linearly extrapolating this.

• 49:52Peter Diamandis?

  They got sort of FaceTime in a tablet, correct? A little bit.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Okay, we can cherry pick that and say, wow, look how brilliant they were. They got this correct. I can tell you this, that in 2001... Oh, there's a quote from someone from the futurist.

• 50:07Peter Diamandis?

  Arthur C. Clarke?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  That says, "In the year 2000, there'll be 50,000 people living and working in space."

• 50:17Speaker 01

  That was, maybe he was trying to think exponentially, but he definitely got that wrong. Okay, in the year 2003, people were living and working in space. So, space has a unique problem.

• 50:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Where, up until Sputnik launched, space was an inaccessible domain, and people imagined it would be centuries before we landed on the moon. When Sputnik was launched, everyone went into exponential mode, but they erred in the wrong way, and I'll tell you why in a minute. Kennedy announces we're going to the moon before the decade is out, and he said that at a time we didn't yet have a vessel that could launch and not blow up that was capable of carrying people.

• 51:06Peter Diamandis?

  It was prophetic.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  This was a badass prediction.

• 51:10Peter Diamandis?

  It was.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Okay, before the decade is out. All right. So, he says this, and then everyone who's trying to predict the future, we're on the moon by 1969, we'll be on Mars by 1980, 1985.

• 51:24Peter Diamandis?

  And of course, the space task group, you know, part of the White House, was predicting by 1984 that we would be going to Mars.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they were clueless. They were clueless.

• 51:34Peter Diamandis?

  On budgets.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  No, no, no, it's good. Budget is irrelevant here, for the reasons I will about to say.

• 51:42Peter Diamandis?

  Educate me.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Uh, so, uh, the problem that, oh, by the way, I wrote a whole other book on this. It was titled, when I submitted it, Failure to Launch: The Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts, because the predictions never matched the reality. And the publisher, no, we can't have delusion and failure in the title, so it got reworded, um, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier. Took all the teeth out of the title. Here's the problem. Everyone naively...

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Presume, well, we're Americans and we're explorers. That's why we're going to the moon. And this is a natural progression of exploration. And at no time did anyone ask themselves, why are we doing it? They presumed it's because it's in our DNA. No, it may be in our DNA, but it doesn't happen unless somebody pays for it. And who's going to pay for it? Not just anybody, not just the National Science Foundation, not just NASA. It's somebody's got to write the check. Who's going to write the check? Congress. And so when Kennedy says, we'll put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. We think that's the stirring rhetoric of a, of a future-thinking young president. Excuse me, let's go back to that same speech.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Delivered on May 25th, 1961, to a joint session of Congress. Oh, what happened just six weeks before that? Yuri Gagarin had been launched into space and came back safely.

• 53:14Peter Diamandis?

  What's the date?

• 53:16Speaker 01

  April 12th, 1961.

• 53:17Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, Loretta.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Oh, April 12th, 1961. Add six weeks to that. A joint session of Congress is called. Okay? Oh, by the way, I have to slip in, put a pin in that. Come, why, why did we lose our ship? Lose our poop when Sputnik launched? I'll tell you why. Sputnik, a radio transmitter, was launched in the hollowed-out shell of an intercontinental ballistic missile. So if that could be deployed over our country, that meant Russia could deliver a nuclear warhead over our space.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  And back then, we, there were international restrictions on access to your airspace. You can't just fly anywhere unless you have permission. But there was no treaty about your space, space. The space above your air. All right? So there it was. We lost it. We told, within a year, NASA was founded. A year and a day later.

• 54:22Peter Diamandis?

  And this became a military priority.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you. Oh, under the, hey, under the guys.

• 54:28Peter Diamandis?

  But it does go back, it does go back to budgets.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  No, I'm, wait, it's not just budget. Budget's like, put a number here or a number there. I'm talking about motivation. Because, in that sake, back to Kennedy's speech.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Go to Cape Canaveral. This, uh, Kennedy Space Center there. The center. The front entrance is a bust of Kennedy. Chiseled in the granite are those words. Put a man on the moon, return him safely to Earth before. It's there and you just say, yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  In that same speech. Here's what he said several paragraphs earlier. I quote. If the events of recent weeks couldn't even utter the man's name. Yuri Gagarin. If the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to know the world, the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. That was the battle cry. Against communism that dislodged the money. To go to the moon. That's what did it. It's not just budget with add the budget. It's what is your motivation? I agree with you. It was the I don't want to die. But it was, you know, anyway, listen.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  No, no, what I'm saying is, no, no, what I'm saying is, this is a rich country. We can do whatever we want if we all agree to it. So it's really not a matter of a budget. It's a matter of motivation. What is motivating us? Okay? Okay? It's not about a budget about what motivates, uh, our guy to fly across the Atlantic. He had a paycheck at the other end of that. That wasn't about budget, it was about motivation. Okay? So. I wrote an essay. Late 1990s. Um. For the Columbia History of the 20th Century. And it was called Paths to Discovery. And I wanted to assess. What were the drivers? Not the budgets, the drivers.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Of people doing major. Major projects, civilization committing to major projects. And if I could find out what motivated people over the centuries and millennia. Maybe I could find a way to motivate people to go to Mars. Cause it's really expensive. Let's find out what the motivational. So I had, we set up this table. At the end, there are only three motivators. Fear, curiosity and greed.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Curiosity is not one of the motivators.

• 56:49Peter Diamandis?

  Do you know, do you know?

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Are you gonna allow me to tell you what the three motivators? I did the work, okay?

• 56:53Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, fine, but, fine.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  The three motivators.

• 56:56Peter Diamandis?

  I've got something to add.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  It has nothing to do with curiosity. Nothing to do with curiosity, that's the problem here, okay? Number one drive is the "I don't wanna die" motivator. That's the fear, we'll give you that. I don't wanna die, okay? Next, "I don't wanna die poor," so that's the money one.

• 57:15Peter Diamandis?

  That's great.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  The third one is the will, perceived will or real will, of royalty or deity, much less in operation today than it was in past centuries. So, list the most expensive things humans have ever done. There's like the great pyramids, there's the Manhattan Project, there's the Apollo Project, there's...

• 57:42Peter Diamandis?

  The Human Genome Project.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Uh...

• 57:45Peter Diamandis?

  Well, not the most expensive thing, but it's...

• 57:46Speaker 01

  I'm talking expensive.

• 57:47Peter Diamandis?

  Alright, there's only 3 billion.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  That's nothing.

• 57:49Peter Diamandis?

  I know.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  I got that in my left pocket.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Okay? They can be big without being... I'm talking about expensive, in human and physical capital. The cathedral building of Europe. If you can list them, we can quibble on the sequence, but all of them will be drawn from one of those three drivers.

• 58:06Peter Diamandis?

  Do you know what the...

• 58:06Speaker 01

  In modern times, remove the royalty and deity, it leaves economics and war. And I'm telling you that everyone thinks we went to the moon for curiosity sake, and because that's what they thought, they believed we'd keep going. The moment we got to the moon, looked over our shoulder and the Ruski's weren't there?

• 58:25Peter Diamandis?

  We...

• 58:25Speaker 01

  They weren't there? We ended the Apollo program.

• 58:28Peter Diamandis?

  We did.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  We got Apollo 18.

• 58:30Peter Diamandis?

  But we have 60 years more to go and 6 minutes on the clock.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry, sorry.

• 58:34Peter Diamandis?

  So, so, I will say this, there is a, there is a...

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 58:38Peter Diamandis?

  There is a scientific ratio of the motivator of fear to curiosity, and it's the ratio of the defense budget to the science budget.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that ratio is infinite.

• 58:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, unfortunate. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called OneSkin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin, and I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna finish up the 1990s by saying we've got, you know,

• 59:30Peter Diamandis?

  the desktop computer, we've got women entering the workforce, we got the transistors, you know, creating the entire chip revolution, we go to the moon nine times, a pretty good time. 1990 to 2020, let's take it to this last 30-year segment. A lot's occurring there.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so 19, so 1960 to 1990, that's obvious. The Cold Cold War, all of this. 1990 to 2020, that's in the lifetime of most of us in this room. I, I remember 1990 with the, you know, the dial-up modem to try to get, you know, back to my computer at my office.

• 1:00:10Peter Diamandis?

  You've got mail.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the internet wasn't really a thing yet, and, yeah, in the movie You Got Mail, people look forward to their email.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Oh, I got mail. Let me like stop everything and go read it. All right. Here's one of my favorites is, 1989, if you had a fax machine, you were badass. Fax machine, okay. 1989 was the release date of Back to the Future Part II, which took place in the year 2015. Okay? So Back to the Future Part II was made in 1980, released in 1989, took place in 1989, and they go to the future 2015. So you get to see how they imagine it. Fine.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  If you remember the movie, our lead character Marty, he irritates his bosses, eh, his boss, and he gets fired. Well, he's living in a home of the future. And any home in 1989 has one fax machine. That home has four fax machines. Because that's the home of the future. And the boss alerts him that he's fired, and you see this montage of fax machines showing that you're fired, you're fired, you're fired. And by the way, the fax machine is dot matrix, um, in the future.

• 1:01:33Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God. We, we, we sequenced the human genome during this period of time.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:38Peter Diamandis?

  Pretty extraordinary. Three billion dollars today.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Well, I got one other thing. I gotta finish the fax.

• 1:01:42Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Okay. Old timers will remember, early 1990s, AT&T had a series of ads called "You Will." And they asked, "Have you ever wanted to..." whatever? And they say, "You will, and AT&T will bring it to you." So they're imagining the future. And they got a lot right. I don't, I don't want to take it away from them. But one of them, they show somebody doing something I've never thought of doing, never wanted to do, never will do, never did do. It was somebody on a, on a beach chair, on the, in the surf, okay? In the sand. And he's working on a tablet. That was a good prediction.

• 1:02:18Peter Diamandis?

  Uh huh.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  And he says, "Have you ever wanted to send a fax from the beach? You will." So, this, it's like, that's linear thinking.

• 1:02:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  The future. So, uh, if I were to leave people with a lesson, it's try to break out of your linear thinking. And imagine what other technologies might come from the side. That you, it's things you're not even thinking of.

• 1:02:45Peter Diamandis?

  The convergence of technology.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Look, that's what the smartphone is.

• 1:02:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  The smartphone didn't invent GPS, it didn't invent digital storage, it didn't even invent touchscreen.

• 1:02:54Peter Diamandis?

  Or the digital camera.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Or the digital camera. The touchscreen, in fact, was invented by a, an, was it NSF? A grant to the, the archives, to the US Archives, to the museum grouping of the archives, because they didn't want people typing on keyboards to get information. Uh, and so they developed this screen that can respond to you as you're a tourist moving through the facility. That's how it got invented. It was the innovation just for that. And that then has transformed our lives in almost every way. Little things like that. And today... If you show someone a little, you bring someone from 1990 to today, and they take them to a restaurant, and they say, "Well, where's the menu?"

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  They say, "Oh, it's that little pattern of dots in the middle of the table." They won't, they can't, they won't relate. "Oh, uh, uh, can we get a taxi?" "Uh, no, I'll just pull out my smartphone." What's a smartphone? By the way, it would be seven, how many, 17 years from 1990 before the smartphone arose. Okay? So this whole thing about, "Well, I have a cellphone," and that, you know, I, don't you all remember seeing the movie, um, um, Wall Street? And, and I remembered seeing Gecko on the beach with his shoulder-mounted cellphone. And I said, "Wow, I wish I was rich so I could have a phone like that and talk without any wires."

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  And it was like, that was my imagining the future, and I had no idea what the future would bring. And, and last thing, last thing, and... "Sir, you, you have kids?" This is my 100-year-old man in the front row. So, um, had your kid said to you, "Dad, one day I want to grow up and be a YouTube influencer."

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  "And I want to out-earn any money you've ever made in your life doing it." You, I don't, this is, these are conversations... This is the thing. We don't even know how to have them, yes. Yeah, yeah. I, I will just for the hell of it. And, "You're here in LA." I'm trying, I'm, we don't have this in New York yet. We're going down the street, and there's a car with no driver going by. It's like, "Where is the driver?" "What, what is that?" And so, they're making left turns, it's, you've seen these, right? LA people, it's just like, the driverless cars. They're just in the middle of the traffic. Like, "Where's it going?" "I don't know." But it feels like it knows it belongs there, right? Because it's got all the sensors, the cameras and things. So, I don't know.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  People said, "In 2020, let's imagine 2050." You can't. You can't. You're not.

• 1:05:39Peter Diamandis?

  That's my favorite request onstage. Can you give us a prediction for 2050?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  I'll do it. I'll still do it.

• 1:05:44Peter Diamandis?

  I can barely give a prediction for 2030.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  I'll still do it, but I'm doing it in the spirit of how humbled I would be when the actual 2050 comes, based on what I've researched for the past 150 years. So, I'm gonna make three predictions. I'm gonna make three predictions. One, we will have designer drugs. They'll analyze your genome, find drugs that will have no side effects for you. Why do we have to be a statistic in the reported side effects? You know, I'm not very side effect prone, so I generally ignore that. But many people are. So, figure that out, medical community, so that there are no side effects. Have the medicine do only what it's supposed to do.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Don't make it make you throw up, or give you diarrhea, or depressive thoughts, or rashes. Fix that. Okay, that's one. Two, I think in the not-too-distant future, all cars on the road will be self-driving electric. And you say, "No, that can't be." No, no, but because we went from horses to cars in 10 years. I'm just talking about going from cars to another kind of car. That can surely be less time than going from horses to cars. Self-driving, and, you know how you start that? Only self-driving cars in the HOV lane. Then, then, these cars know where all the other cars are.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  If you want to change lanes, it tells the other car, "I'm changing lanes now." They part, it changes lanes. And they can even text and drive at the same time with no loss of their acuity on the road. Because they're frickin' electric computers. And they can drive 120 miles an hour with two cars' distance between them, because there's not gonna be something they don't anticipate. And so, once you see that, cutting down your travel time...

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  I think it's gonna go quickly. And suppose, but you're a car enthusiast. What do you do? I'd like my, my, a classic car. There'll be car parks for you to drive them.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Is that any different? From people who like riding horses and you go to the stables and ride horses? It's quaint, a quaint memory of a bucolic past.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  So, you've got your Ferrari, whatever. You park it at the car park. You'll take an electric car to get there and you can do your thing. As we now people who ride horses. So I see that happening. Last thing.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  I'd like to see space. People ask, where should we go next in space? All of space. Why does it have to be a next destination? When we built the interstate system. Which to the tune of a hundred billion dollars, by the way. About the same as going to the moon. What drove that? Well, war drove that. What's the other name for the interstate system? Old timer? Are you scratching his head? The Eisenhower Internet System. He went to Europe in the Second World War. Saw the autobahn survive under rain and snow and tanks could roll over without it falling off the side of the road. He says, I want that in my country. As a defense project. And so, the initial monies for that all came from the defense.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Were informed by our posture as a country that didn't want to get invaded and wanted to keep our military ready on the. And, you may know, the interstate system doesn't go over mountains. It goes through them. And after every distance, there's a certain stretch that is straight. So you can land an airplane on it if you have to. It is to military specs. That's how that money got this large. So, I'm saying, when you build the interstate, you don't build, let's just go from New York to LA. No, give people choices. So you'd send the interstate everywhere. Let people's creativity take them to wherever they want. To start whatever businesses they want. Or have whatever free life they want to lead in a country that we still think is free.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  And so, so when I think of space, I think of not a rocket to go here or there. Get a warehouse of sort of strap-on boosters. And I say, "I wanna do science on the backside of this comet that's coming through. We need these three boosters and this rocket, and we'll schedule the launch in three months." Think about that.

• 1:10:10Peter Diamandis?

  I do.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Then the entire solar system becomes our backyard. And it's not this other place. It is a, we will have a relationship with it. And, yeah, let's mine some asteroids. We have wars on Earth over the limited access to resources that are plentiful in the universe, in our own backyard. The future of space is one where an entire category of warfare will be rendered obsolete because access to resources will be unlimited. We'll still fight over which gods you worship, or what your skin color is, probably. But this category of war would be gone forever. If the entire solar system had lanes that you would take,

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  and you decided where you wanted to go, and it wasn't something, a single national destination.

• 1:11:00Peter Diamandis?

  And the only thing we know about these predictions are?

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  They're gonna be wrong.

• 1:11:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:11:16Peter Diamandis?

  Alright, everybody. Let's give it up for Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Thank you. Let me shake your hand. Come here, let me shake your hand. Come here.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  Here's our old timer right here. Here we go.

• 1:11:36Peter Diamandis?

  Alright, um, we are, we are woefully over-scheduled, but I cannot not take a few questions. Which is, which is definitive side of saying, "Let me take a few questions here."

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Okay, real quick, okay.

• 1:11:52Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, alright, so, we've got microphones. Okay, so, raise your hand, kids first. Um, okay, so we've got two over here. The microphone givers, you decide.

• 1:12:07Peter Diamandis?

  Come on, come on, give it, come on, we're losing time. Hand them out.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  When you were mentioning all of the innovations in the different periods, you didn't list contraception.

• 1:12:20Peter Diamandis?

  Now, there's a thousand ones we didn't list.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Well, I know, but that's a, I think it's a really specific one, particularly where we are at this time.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so, important, there are advances that are very important in our culture, especially in health and well-being. You know, there's discovery of vaccines, but that goes even farther back. There's the discovery of sanitation. These contributed to our life expectancy. It's not just the discovery of contraception, it's how widely available it became and how inexpensive it was.

• 1:12:52Peter Diamandis?

  Women enter the workforce, women's right to vote, all of these things occurred during the last century.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  At the exact same time that you said that, voting rights. So that period of time, that was a huge social change. Women in the workforce, women being able to decide.

• 1:13:05Peter Diamandis?

  Half the population of the United States.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so, I tried to keep the advances international, and votes came to different people at different times.

• 1:13:15Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, we've got, we've got two more microphones over here.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  These are important. Yes, I can tell you this, that there are people saying, "Oh, it's worse ever for women, or blacks, or I'm trans, or I'm gay." No, it's not worse than ever. If I had a time machine, and I said, "You can go in here and put any time you want to go, in the past or the future, if you are a female person of color, on the gender spectrum, there is no time in the past that you would choose it." Well, it was much better in 1960, when the Sunday paper, the Sunday paper had a section, old timer remember this. Sunday paper had a section, it was called "The Women's Section." It had the recipes, and the, okay?

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  That, that, the women had their place. All that's different and gone. And so I'm saying, those, if you're not white male...

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Go to the future, not the past. In this time machine.

• 1:14:13Peter Diamandis?

  All right, fantastic. Let's go over here, then we'll come here. Please, go ahead. Yes, you.

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm an undergrad student. I think I'm the only one here.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  So, you were a big portion of my childhood and why science was cool. In the late 90s, early 2000s. But my question is, what would your 12-year-old self say to you now?

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  If my 12-year-old self showed up like right here?

• 1:14:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think you're saying you're pretty cool.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  I don't know, I haven't thought about that.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  You know, probably be, it's like, you can actually make a career of the universe? That's probably what I, because I-

• 1:15:02Peter Diamandis?

  Let's flip the question. What would you tell your 12-year-old self now?

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  No, she did not ask that question. That question, everybody asks that one. So, I'm saying-

• 1:15:11Peter Diamandis?

  But you're not answering it.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  When I was 12, I was not certain, because I knew at age 9, I was interested in the universe. By age 11, you ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I say astrophysicist. Okay, to that annoying question that adults ask kids. So, by age 12, I'm not entirely certain I can make a career of being an astrophysicist. So, I made sure that I went into college, I majored in physics, which has many more pathways from it than just astrophysics. My college degree is in physics, and I even considered engineering just to broaden the job spectrum for me to come out. So, I would just be delightfully surprised

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  that I could, what my deep interest at age 12 could be pursued all the way into adulthood.

• 1:16:00Peter Diamandis?

  Excellent.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:01Peter Diamandis?

  One last question.

• 1:16:02Speaker 04

  All right, Chris, I just want to really thank you for carrying the torch of Carl Sagan, for the love of science and just bringing it to the current-

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Carl famously said, "When you're in love, you want to tell the world." So, yes.

• 1:16:16Speaker 04

  I agree.

• 1:16:20Speaker 04

  So, what I want to ask you is, if you had to choose an X Prize in astrophysics, what would you choose? If you had to create an X Prize for astrophysics?

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  I, the, what I would choose would be the same as what would get a Nobel Prize.

• 1:16:37Peter Diamandis?

  No, you're, you're asking what would you want the world to work on that is a, you know, a 10x bold problem, a moonshot, something that people don't think is possible, but if enough people work on it, it might get...

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Scour the solar system for life that has a genesis other than what occurred on Earth. But if that happened, it would get a Nobel Prize. So we don't, we don't need the X Prize for, for the science. I think, because we have our, our reward system built in.

• 1:17:06Peter Diamandis?

  But, but the Nobel Prize is a retrospective for something done in the past. It's about incentivizing new people to come in and take on something that's worth doing.

• 1:17:15Speaker 04

  Something audacious we should be doing, but people feel too limited.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  You mean a single goal that'll, okay, uh, how about, uh, ooh. Now I have my own personal X Prize. I, I, I want suborbital flight so that I can go to Tokyo, have lunch and come back for dinner to New York. Because if you're suborbital, any two places on Earth are within 45 minutes of each other.

• 1:17:39Peter Diamandis?

  That gets pitched every other year here at Visionary.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  All right, so where is it? Where is it? Okay. Um, and so, I, I... Asteroid mining? Uh...

• 1:17:49Speaker 04

  Asteroid detection.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we got, we got that. Yeah, but I like the mining, asteroid mining. The first person who, or group who can send a lander to an asteroid, dig, get material from it and bring it back to Earth. Or take it to the moon, where it might be useful for colonies that would be set up there. How's that for an X Prize?

• 1:18:11Peter Diamandis?

  That sounds great.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  An astro X Prize. Less than the cost of getting it.

• 1:18:14Peter Diamandis?

  All right, everybody. Again, let's give it up for Neil deGrasse Tyson.