#681 Creating Breakthrough Innovations w/ Peter Diamondis

Peter H. Diamandis is an engineer, physician, and entrepreneur best known for being the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation and the cofounder and executive chairman of Singularity University. In this conversation, we discuss innovation, disruption, longevity, bitcoin, space travel, X Prize, Singularity University, and how the best in the world create breakthrough moonshots. ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com. ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Peter Diamandis is an engineer, a physician, and an entrepreneur, best known for being the founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, and the co-founder and executive chairman of Singularity University. In this conversation, we discuss innovation, disruption, longevity, Bitcoin, space travel, XPRIZE, Singularity University, and how the best in the world create breakthrough moonshots. I really enjoyed this conversation with Peter, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Circle. Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce, and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also the principal developer of USD Coin, or USDC, which is the fastest-growing, regulated, fully-reserved dollar stablecoin in the world. They've now got over $30 billion in market cap, and they're adding nearly $300 million of net new digital dollars in circulation every single week. The free Circle account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading DeFi and NFT marketplaces. You can learn more at circle.com. Again, go to circle.com and you can learn all about their business and USD Coin, which is the fastest-growing, regulated, stablecoin. Go check it out and let me know what you think.

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Next up is Crypto.com. They're helping to mainstream their crypto industry, signing major global partnerships with multiple sports, including Serie A, the Italian Football League, the UFC, and my personal favorite, Formula One. With over 10 million users around the world, Crypto.com offers an easy way to buy and sell more than 100 cryptocurrencies. You can even buy Bitcoin with as little as $1. New users enjoy 0% credit and debit card fees in their first 30 days. Crypto.com also pays some of the most competitive interest rates in the industry. You can find out how much you can earn by visiting Crypto.com. Crypto.com is also Visa's biggest crypto card partner. My listeners across North America, Europe, and most of APAC can apply for the Slick Metal Card, offering up to 8% back on most

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Purchases. Get $25 today when you download the crypto.com app and use code POM. Again, 25 bucks when you go and you download the crypto.com app today. Go check it out and let me know what you think about crypto.com, all those new partnerships that are signing and that mobile app. Last but not least are my friends over at LMAX Digital. LMAX Digital is the number one institutional crypto exchange, offering clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet. It's underscored by 100% uptime track record through volatility spikes. They leverage LMAX Group's liquidity relationships and ultra-low latency technology. LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading and custodial services.

• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

  They feature a central limit order book, streaming spot Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, and it's all paired with US Dollars, Euro, and Yen. LMAX Digital, you never heard of them? Well, that must mean you're a retail investor because they only serve institutions. They're the number one institutional crypto exchange. LMAX Digital, secure, liquid, and trusted. Learn more by going to LMAXdigital.com/pomp. Again, LMAXdigital.com/pomp. All right, let's get into this episode with Peter. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:42Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys, I've got Peter here with me. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Great to be here.

• 3:46Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Let's just jump right into your background. I think you've got this really fascinating, multidisciplinary approach to what you're, spent your time doing over the last couple of years. So maybe walk us through very quickly, when you explain to somebody what you've done in your career, how do you talk about it?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  I tell them I'm a nine-year-old kid having a blast. You know, I grew up, my parents were both immigrants from Greece. My dad was a doctor and they thought I should be a doctor and I ended up going to medical school, but never used my medical degree. It was, it was the Apollo program and Star Trek that lit my fuse and I became enamored by opening the space frontier. You know, to date, probably built 25 companies, a third of them have been in the space arena. And pursued that as my life's passion. I talk about having a massive transformative purpose.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  And my first was opening up space and how do you do that? And various companies from XPRIZE and Zero Gravity Corporation and Space Adventures. And from there, went on a deep dive into exponential technologies. I realized that, you know, the old technologies of the 60s, 70s and 80s were being massively blown away by computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, augmented virtual reality. And so I became enamored with these so-called exponential technologies and the converging of these.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  And that's where I started with Ray Kurzweil, something called Singularity University, Abundance 360. And the XPRIZE really blossomed from a focus on space to a focus on, you know, breaking breakthroughs and fixing the world's biggest problems. And then my third chapter in life has been focused on longevity. You know, as I get older, adding 20 or 30 or 40 healthy years on your lifespan starts to become more important. And I think it's also the world's biggest opportunity. So I'm a serial entrepreneur, a medical doctor, aerospace engineering degrees, and mostly a nine-year-old having a lot of fun.

• 6:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. So let's talk first maybe about XPRIZE. I don't think people really understand just how impactful and how aspirational XPRIZE is. What exactly is it and then how has that played out over the last couple of years?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Sure. So again, as a kid, you know, it was the Apollo program and then that scientific documentary called Star Trek that really lit me on fire. And I wanted to be an astronaut and I wanted that above everything else. And so at night I dreamed about that. During the day I was doing my medical work. And I was becoming, you know, really angry that NASA was moving so slowly. Nothing was happening. It was never going to repeat the Apollo program. And a friend of mine, Greg Marinac, gave me a copy of Lindbergh's autobiography called The Spirit of St. Louis. And he gave it to me to finish my pilot's license, which I did. I love flying, I'm a private pilot. And I

• 6:57Speaker 02

  It also got me thinking about aviation prizes. You see, I found out that Lindbergh in 1927 flew from Long Island to Le Verger in France, not on a whim or on a dare, but to win a $25,000 prize. And I said, wow, that's amazing. This guy Raymond Ortega offers $25,000 to the first person to fly this impossible flight between New York and Paris. And he doesn't pay any of the losers. He automatically backs Lindbergh, who was the least likely to win this aviation prize.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  In fact, that $25,000 prize offered in 1919, there was nine teams who spent $400,000 trying to win the $25,000. And by the time I finished reading The Spirit of St. Louis, which is an amazing book, by the way, I had written down in the margins at the end of the book, the letter X and the word prize. And I said, interesting. What if I offered up a $10 million prize for a private spaceflight? And said, anybody around the world, I don't care where you're from, what you've ever done, if you build a private spaceship that can carry three adults up to 100 kilometers altitude, land and do it again within two weeks, you'll win $10 million. Long story short, announced the prize without having the money.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  It took me five years to raise the $10 million. And it was won in 2004 by Bert Rutan, backed by the late Paul Allen. And then Richard Branson came in and bought the rights to create Virgin Galactic. You know, I've known Jeff Bezos since college. He was at Princeton, I was at MIT. And, you know, the X Prize created the rules and regulations that the FAA used for private spaceflight and really launched that industry.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  And on the heels of the prize being won back in 2004, I got Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, and Elon Musk on our board, and we started looking at how do we do other prizes? How do we do prizes to solve other big problems where, again, you know, all of these exponential technologies are making it possible for small teams to do amazing things? So we've launched a little over $300 million worth of prizes where we define the finish line and say, again, I don't care where you're from, what you've ever done, if you build and demonstrate this technology, you win and the world gets the benefit. So we've done all kinds of prizes.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  The last prize we launched, I reached out to Elon on January 7th, I'm not going to forget, it was the day he became the wealthiest person in America or in the world, and he was getting criticized for not being philanthropic, and said, let's do another X Prize, because he had funded a prize earlier, a few years earlier. And we discussed it, and he said, we'll do one in carbon removal. And so we launched a $100 million, gigaton carbon removal X Prize. And, you know, the most amazing thing I remember was the speed at which he made the decision to do it and then got it going. That's, you know, that's tribute to his, his drive. But we've done prizes for pulling water out of the atmosphere at 2 cents a liter for

• 10:19Speaker 02

  renewable, renewable energy, mapping the ocean floor, stem cell grown chicken and fish. And I'm working on a $100 million age reversal X Prize, too, but we can talk about that. But that's what we do in the X Prizes. We're, we're trying to find the world's biggest problems that are not being solved and launch a competition with a clear finish line to get entrepreneurs around the world to attack and solve those problems.

• 10:47Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you raise the money? So you go and you say, hey, the, the first X Prize, $10 million, you don't have the money yet. What are those conversations like? And then it's obviously gone from $10 million prizes to now $100 million. So how, how exactly does that happen?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  So, you know, X Prize has gone through three generations here. The first X Prize was focused on space. It took us eight years to go from the idea to the prize being awarded. And we had 26 different teams around the world competing for that first $10 million prize. And then it became really a matter of, you know, who I was having dinner with. I meet with Sergey Brin at Google and all of a sudden we gave birth to a $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. I would have, you know, dinner or lunch with Paul Jacobs, who was back then the CEO

• 11:42Speaker 02

  of Qualcomm and we ended up with a $10 million Qualcomm Triquarter X Prize. When the BP oil spill was going on and oil was pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, Jim Cameron was on our board of trustees and said, "You got to do something about this." And we came up with a oil cleanup prize. Can you clean up the oil rapidly in the ocean surface? And so I put out an email to our trustees, our directors, our, you know, our benefactors and Wendy Schmidt and Eric Schmidt from Google raised their hand and said, "We'll fund it."

• 12:20Speaker 02

  So it's, to date, it's been working with a lot of wealthy, private individuals and we're probably better known in Silicon Valley and a few of those worlds that we are. And we're about to go into X Prize 3.0 and we're calling it Global Visioneering, in which we're going to be focusing on probably six domains: energy, climate, education, food and water as one domain, space. What am I leaving out? I'm forgetting something.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  And we're going to be asking the question, what is possible from first principles thinking? What's possible 20 years from now in energy or healthcare? That's the one that's missing or in healthcare. And what's the roadmap to getting to that abundant future? And then what are the challenges we need to get there? So we're going to envision that future, identify the breakthroughs needed to get there and launch the prizes there, but we're going to really do this in a global way that the public can be involved in choosing which prizes we launch and in backing those prizes with 10 bucks or 20 bucks, you know? And so it's really about this engine of innovation. What is the problem? Let's create a clear finishing, a finish line.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Let's... Value the problems that the world wants fixed the most, raise the capital, launch the prizes, solve the problem, launch the next one and create an engine in that dimension. So, you know, folks who are interested, you know, Xprize.org, X P R I Z E dot O R G. Learn about what we're up to, get our newsletter. I mean, we're living in a time now that I think there is no problem we cannot solve, right? What I tell people is the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.

• 14:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And talk to me about Singularity University. I think that that's very similar in terms of kind of the thought process behind it, the idea of progress, innovation, but has a different model to it. And so what was the idea there and how did that come about?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So, you know, I serve as the founding chairman of both organizations and they're sister organizations of each other. Back in 2007, I'd gotten to know Ray Kurzweil, who is one of the most recognized and most brilliant innovators and futurists on the planet. He had just joined my board at the X Prize and I was reading his book, which came out that year called The Singularity is Near. And I remember I read it and said, you know, this book looks at all of the exponential technologies, again, computation, quantum computing, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, augmented

• 15:17Speaker 02

  virtual reality, blockchain, all of these incredible technologies and how they're converging and how they're reinventing every industry, every company, right? We're going to have massive transformations in every industry this decade. And I said, there's no place on the planet you can go to actually get an overview. I mean, you go to MIT, alma mater, or Harvard, or Stanford, and you become a world's expert in a very, very, very narrow niche. That's what getting a doctoral degree is about. But there are very few places you can get an overview. And I said, we should create a university where anyone who just

• 15:59Speaker 02

  sold their company, or if you're the leader, government leader, or corporate CEO, or an entrepreneur, and you want to understand

• 16:08Speaker 02

  You know, what's coming in the next decade? What's coming in the next year or two or three years? That's going to change your business. There needs to be some way that you can get an overview of these exponential technologies. And we created this institution based out of Silicon Valley. And we've had many or not most of sort of the world's top executives and billionaires come through it, people who've just exited their family business or they're saying, what do I do next? And I still run the highest level version of that called Abundance 360. And we do that out of Beverly Hills every year. And it's about getting a gut level.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  See, the problem is that our brains, it's 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections that shape everything we see and feel and hear and have learned. And our brains evolved for a very different world. They evolved for the world 100,000 or a million years ago, back when the world was local and linear. And so we are local and linear thinkers with these cognitive biases that that drive us. But the world is changing globally and exponentially. And so we are unable to really fathom that. And the only way to really get a sense of this rate of change is to update what is

• 17:30Speaker 02

  what you believe is knowable and possible every, you know, on a regular basis, on a quarterly basis, on an annual basis. So that's what Singularity University and Abundance 360 is about, is helping leaders really fathom and understand this exponential world that we're that we're building that's accelerating.

• 17:52Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that's fascinating to me is as you end up kind of creating these things, whether it's XPRIZE, Singularity University, is you have a very different way of thinking about brand new technologies, human progress, how innovation is accelerating. Walk me through these four mindsets that you've kind of created this framework to evaluate where somebody is, how they can think about it moving forward. And you actually spend a lot of time teaching people the four mindsets. So what are those four and how do you think about them?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  You know, if I were to ask you what Distinguishes the most amazing people, you know, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk, or Bill Gates, or, you know, Arianna Huffington, Anusha Ansari, whoever you want to put on the list of very successful entrepreneurs out there, or leaders, you know, Mahatma Gandhi, or, you know, Martin Luther King, whoever it is, was it the capital they had? Was it the technology they had access to, or was it their mindset? I would say that mindset was the single most important attribute that these leaders had that differentiated themselves from everybody else. It's how they took incoming information, how their mindset processed it, and what

• 19:05Speaker 02

  they did with it. The challenge is that very few of us take the time to actually actively choose the mindset we want, and then shape that mindset. Our mindsets are shaped typically by, you know, the stuff that we hear and see, the people we hang out with. And so if you're watching, you know, CNN every day, I call it the crisis news network, or the constantly negative news network, whatever you want, or I don't have a cute acronym for Fox, but our brains are neural nets. They're shaped by the data in, like Google or Amazon shapes a neural net.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  And if you're watching all the negative news all the time, your brain is being wired to be on, you know, red alert constantly by all of this negative news. So how do you change that? And I think it's about actively deciding what you're going to learn, what you're going to read, who you're going to hang out with, and what mindsets you want. So let me give a little bit about, let's talk about abundance first, and then we can talk about exponential next. On an abundance mindset, it's the realization that every year there are more and more opportunities. So, for example, in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, we had the most venture

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Capital ever deployed, more than 2019 and 2018. And 2021, we'll see the most venture capital ever deployed again. And so there's more and more, there's an abundance of capital, right? There's an abundance of energy. We used to kill whales on the ocean to get whale oil. Then we ravaged mountains to get coal. And then we drilled kilometers under the ground. And today, we are moving towards a massive solar economy. At the same time, there have been some recent breakthroughs in fusion. But we're heading towards an all-electric economy where there's not an abundance of energy. There's a squanderable abundance of energy. We get hit by 8,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  So there's very few things that are truly scarce, but our brains are wired for scarcity. Right? And so one more example there is, you know, if we, you know, in the old days, if you had a pie and you had more and more people coming over, you'd have to, you know, slice the pie into thinner and thinner slices. In an abundance mindset, you're just like, screw that, we're just going to bake more pies. So that's a realization that changes the way entrepreneurs and leaders think about it. It's not about, it's turning your competition into collaborators and it's about not looking backwards, but looking forward.

• 21:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So the, when you start thinking about the, the abundance component, there's a whole bunch of other frameworks that you use here. When you look at something like moonshots, explain that a little bit more.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So a moonshot, as defined by Astro Teller, who is the captain of moonshots at SpaceX and Alphabet. An amazing guy, right? He's brilliant and I'm lucky to call him a friend. His, his grandfather on his maternal side and his paternal side were both Nobel laureates. How's that for having a great lineage?

• 22:31Speaker 02

  The, so Astro talks about a moonshot as sort of the convergence of a really big opportunity and big problem.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Using, you know, exponential technology. To solve it with a bold vision of where you want to go. It's going 10 times bigger when the rest of the world is going 10%. So in most, in most industries, in most companies, you're happy with 10%. You know, 10% increased revenues this year, 10% lower costs, uh, good soul this year. And that's the way most of us are going. But in a moonshot, you're looking for tenfold, not 10%, a thousand percent. And the only way you get there is really, um, you know, Elon calls it first principle thinking. It's using a clean sheet of paper.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  The example that Astro gives is if you're a, you know, a automotive designer and you're getting 50 miles per gallon. If I were going to ask you to, um, to try and get it from 50 miles per gallon to 55 miles per gallon. You could do that working hard, you know, lightweighting the car, getting better aerodynamics. But if I said to you, instead of going from 50 to 55 miles per gallon, go from 50 to 500 miles per gallon. You need to, you know, come up with a brand new clean sheet design. It's what Elon Musk did in SpaceX, uh, you know, taking a 50 year old aerospace industry of expendable rockets. And saying, you know, you know, bullshit, we're going to go with reusable rockets.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  We're going to go and re-land and reuse the technology. And now he's going from Falcon 9 to Starship, right? It's going from computing on vacuum tubes to computing on silicon wafers. These are moonshot breakthroughs. And so it's the realization for entrepreneurs, um, that you can go 10x. And if you're not trying to go 10x inside your company, uh, someone will come and disrupt you. And, you know, I'll close on that one by saying, you know, the day before something is truly a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  So where in your company, in your organization, you're trying crazy ideas. If you're not, then you're stuck in an incremental mindset and you will be disrupted this decade. There's no industry, uh, that's not going to be transformed fundamentally this coming decade.

• 25:06Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of the exponential mindset, what does that mean?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Again, you know, we talked about evolving on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago. Our brains wired for that linear world, right? If, if there's a lion coming at you this way and you're running towards a tree this way, can you get there before the lion gets you? That's the linear world we live in. But that's not the way the world is changing on the technology side. So linear is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, right? In 30 linear steps, I'm 30 meters away. And exponential growth is a simple doubling. It's what our computers have been doing. It's 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. In 30 doublings, you're not 30 meters away. In 30 doublings, you're a billion meters away.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Put differently, you're gone 26 times around the planet. And so if our brains are linear thinkers, but the world around us, the technologies we have access to are changing exponentially, there's this massive disconnect. And so in an exponential mindset, you're trying to understand which technologies have been digitized and which are growing exponentially. And we just massively under-evaluate where those technologies are going to change our businesses. And so again, you know, 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.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  And so this, this decade ahead of us, AI is going to disrupt every business. You know, I like to say, you know, at the end of this decade, there are going to be two kinds of companies, those fully embracing and utilizing artificial intelligence, and those that are out of business. It's going to be that black and white. Another technology that's growing exponentially is the whole field of biotech. And we're going to see a massive turnover in the healthcare industry. You know, today it's all sick care, it's not healthcare. And so who provides us our health, how we get our health, all of that's changing this decade significantly.

• 27:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me about longevity mindset. This is probably one of the most fascinating ones to me.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  So I spend a lot of time focused on the field of longevity. And the older I get, the more time I spend on it, right? So it's like, I also think it's the world's biggest business opportunity. Who doesn't want, you know, an extra 10, 20, 30 years? And so it's a multi-trillion dollar marketplace. And the realization, when I was, I was doing a joint MD PhD program and I remember watching this television show on, on long-lived sea life, that certain species of whales and sharks and turtles could live two, four, or 500 years and longer.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  And I remember thinking, if they can live that long, why can't we? And I said, it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. And so we're beginning to understand why we age and why we don't have to. And over the last five years, there have been incredible labs and incredible work done on slowing, stopping, and potentially reversing aging. So a few thoughts on that front. I think that we're going to be able to add at least 10 years onto our life sometime in the next 10 to 12 years.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  There is a concept called longevity escape velocity that Ray Kurzweil talks about and other incredible leaders like George Church and David Sinclair talk about that. For every, you know, science today, for every year that you're alive is adding about a third of a year to your lifespan. But there's going to be a point in the near future that for every year you're alive, science is adding more than a year to your lifespan and it becomes divergent. And that's called reaching longevity escape velocity. So the predictions from a number of people I trust is we're going to see that sometime in the next 10 to 20 years. So what does it mean if you're living an extra 20, 30 healthy years? Well, during

• 29:30Speaker 02

  that time, science is not standing still, right? We've got fields like quantum computing and AI that's going to change our understanding of why we age, how we age, how to slow it, how to stop it. And so there's conversations going on right now about, you know, at 100 years old, having the aesthetics, so you look good, the cognition, so you're thinking clearly, the mobility, so you're moving, moving strongly at 100 that you had at 60, and then at 120, and then 150. So, you know, it's kind of an insane conversation, but I think it's one of the most important ones. So I've got a half a billion dollar venture fund, Bold

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Capital. We're putting, I don't know, probably 75% of our investments in the biotech longevity space. Tony Robbins and I have a book coming out in, in February called Life Force. And it's looking at all of the clinical trials, all of the, the strategies adding life onto our, you know, healthy span, healthy lifespan onto our years. And it's amazing what's going on. It's a truly a revolution. There was a study that came out a few months ago from Harvard and London School of Business that said for every year added on to the global

• 30:51Speaker 02

  lifespan, it's, it's worth $38 trillion to the global economy. So it's one of the biggest business markets coming in. You know, I've started now four companies in the longevity field, and it's, it's super exciting and, and something that I'm passionate about.

• 31:09Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about the idea of slowing or stopping aging, let's start there. To me, I've been blown away by the idea of aging as a disease, right? And then just like, for whatever reason, that idea has really stuck with me. How do you think about the things people at home can do to actually slow or stop the aging process?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:29Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the big things out of the gate?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, listen, everybody here already knows the big things, but I'll tell you them again, and where we're going next. The first is sleep. If

• 31:43Speaker 02

  You could have done away with sleep evolutionary, it would have happened a long time ago. While you're sleeping, you're not reproducing, you're not being productive, you're not getting food, you're very vulnerable. The body needs eight hours of sleep and I prioritize sleep. I never did. I used to like five and a half hours was more than enough for me and through medical school and all of that, but the reality is getting eight hours of sleep is critical and there's tricks on how to do that. We'll talk about that in Life Force. Matt Walker wrote an incredible book called Why We Sleep and I commend it to everybody. So eight hours of sleep. The second thing is exercise. There's not to be a lot of exercise. I strive for, you know, 10,000 steps every day and then I do light

• 32:28Speaker 02

  weight workouts at least four times a week. But exercise is critically important as well, stimulating your muscles. The next is diet and there's no single right diet for everybody, right? My, my heritage is European and Greek and I have a Mediterranean diet. I mostly eat fish and whole plants and that's what I prioritize. There is one thing that everybody should do and that's eliminate sugar. Really hard, but you know, high glycemic index foods like bread and rice and, and sugar, it's poison for the body. The human body never

• 33:09Speaker 02

  evolved to have access to that level and it causes neural inflammation that causes Alzheimer's, it causes all kinds of inflammatory reactions in the body. So minimizing your sugar is, is one. The fourth thing right now is mindset. Who do you hang out with? Right? Are you hanging out with an old and dying crowd or are you hanging out with younger people who inspire you or people who are really focusing? So mindset is really critically important.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  And then there's a whole bunch of supplements. Another great book that I commend is Lifespan. Lifespan, New York Times bestseller by Dr. David Sinclair, talks about the work on things like NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotides, a supplement you can get that is about raising the energy levels of your NAD in your cells. I'll talk about one scientific element I think is very cool people will get. So, you know, if I were to ask you, do you have the same genes at birth and at 20 and at 80 years old? Do you have an answer?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Do you have your same genome, you know, on the average, putting away mutations at birth and later on in life?

• 34:26Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm cheating, I'm cheating a little bit in that I believe that you have similar genes, but I read a book about the telomeres, which makes me just dangerous enough to sound like I have no clue what I'm talking about. But that was generally my, my thought process is that they're the same genes, but there's some kind of differences that occur, there's like evolution of them, but they're really the same genes, is my understanding, maybe I'm wrong.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  You're, you're, you're right. We have the same exact genes. We have 3.2 billion letters from your mother and from your father, some 30,000 genes. And your genome in, in the 30 trillion cells in your body doesn't change. It's the same genome. So the question is, you know, why aren't you ripped at 80 like you were at maybe at 25 or have your bikini outfit or whatever it might be? It turns out it's not the fact that your genome changes, it's which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off. And as you age, your epigenome, epi coming from the Greek word for above, your epigenome loses control of which genes have turned on and which genes are turned off.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  And there are approaches for basically being able to reset your epigenome to your younger years. And that's the work. That I think is Nobel Prize winning type work that David Sinclair and George Church have done. And the technology, we believe, is there to reset your epigenome and bring you back in actual age to earlier in life. In fact, one of the things I'm working on is a hundred million dollar age reversal X Prize. That with a treatment of like, you know, three months or less, we could reverse your age by 20 or 25 years.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  And then be able to like go forward and then reverse your age again. Now, it's going to have massive change in the entire, you know, healthcare field. And I just gave a keynote this morning to the life insurance industry of America around the world. And I mean, talk about an industry is going to be changed if people are living an extra 20, 30 or 50 years. And I don't think that, you know, you still can take it with you. So there's nothing more valuable than that. So when I'm, you know, on the, in my abundance 360 program with the leaders and CEOs that I mentor,

• 36:57Speaker 02

  I'm like every year bringing them, the top scientists who are making the biggest dent in the universe on age reversal. Not just longevity, it's you need to have your health, right? Age reversal. And then eventually people get and go, oh my God, this is real. I mean, the science over and over, you get hammered by this over and over and like this breakthrough and this breakthrough and this breakthrough. You start to realize that, that the world is going to change. And how does that impact your business? How does it impact what you're up to?

• 37:32Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think through, there's aging, there's space, and then we'll get to Bitcoin in a second. But what is the commonalities that you use to identify like innovative technologies? Right? Like, it's so clear. When you're talking about longevity, you're talking about space earlier. It's clear that you put them all in this like frontier technology category, whatever you want to call it. Like, how do you identify which ones are in that category?

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Sure. So.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  I, one of the space companies I was working on about five years ago was a company called Planetary Resources that was focused on mining asteroids. And it's a company that I'll come back to when I can, you know, make a hundred million dollar bet of my own capital because it's an expensive business to get into. But everything we hold of value in space, minerals, metals, real estate, energy are in infinite quantities in space. It's a multi-trillion dollar market. Some of these asteroids are worth trillions of dollars. And I was in the shower one day thinking about, you know, mining asteroids and longevity. And I realized, oh, my God, nothing's changed in 500 years. And it's like, huh?

• 38:43Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, when the early explorers from Europe were coming to the Americas, they were looking for the fountain of youth and they're looking for gold. And so we're always looking for greater wealth and longer life. And that's a connection for the two of them. But there, you know, we're living in a day of these exponential technologies are enabling us to take on bigger and bigger bets and solve the world's biggest problems. And there's more and more capital available every year. And so, you know, what I teach at Singularity University is if you want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. We can, we can do work at billion person scale, right?

• 39:25Speaker 02

  That the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. And so I'm enamored with that. If you're gonna, because you have the ability as an entrepreneur, even as a small team, right? That's the work we do at the X Prize. We inspire small teams to take on massive problems using these technologies. That why wouldn't you want to? Why wouldn't you go and play at that scale if you're able to, you know, make no small dreams?

• 39:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you think about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, what's your current view on that? That feels like it would fit very similarly into some of this other stuff you're talking about.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, I'm, if you want to use a religious connotation of a believer, you know, I'm probably 80% in Bitcoin and 20% in Ethereum right now. And I, you know, just I use Abra to store it. I get great interest rates on my crypto in my Abra wallet. So, I mean, that's, I've moved my money out of cash into, into property, high performing stocks and crypto, just because at the end of the day, we're devaluing the dollar at such an extraordinary rate. Michael Saylor, who I know you know, is a friend of mine. We were at MIT together. We were effectively roommates in the same, next to each other in my fraternity. And, you know,

• 40:46Speaker 02

  cryptocurrencies are a means to, you know, to save ourselves from an annual 25 or 30% inflationary rate. You know, it's amazing how many people saying, oh my God, my real estate value is going up and everything is going up, up, up. I'm such a brilliant investor. Well, no, you're just living in this massive inflationary universe. And so how do you protect yourself against that? And every single business industry is going to be changed by, by these exponential technologies. And cryptocurrency is, is nothing more than a digitized, dematerialized and democratized

• 41:26Speaker 02

  access to, to capital and, and moving capital at a higher and higher velocity. It's all about agility of capital, moving it and having it make a difference in the world. So, yeah, the whole cryptocurrency world and, you know, what's coming in that space is, is, fits very much into my framework for, for the decades ahead. One of the areas I'm super excited about is the convergence of AI.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Crypto or blockchain and the virtual world, you know, the web 3.0 or the spatial web, where everything is going to be have a digital representation, a wallet and the ability to move between the real world and the virtual world, that we're going to live our lives in these two universes going back and forth. I don't think people quite are ready for the level of change we're going to see this decade, because it's going to be extraordinary.

• 42:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell me a little bit more about the convergence of those technologies, because I think that when people hear, okay, there's, you know, two or three different technologies that most people evaluate on their own and they see this is going to be more important in the future than it is today, and it'll have, you know, material impact. When you start to put them together, that tends to be the massive inflection point. So how do you see that happening?

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it is, it's no longer investing in a company that is a 3D printing company or an AI company. It used to be that, you know, any one of those exponentials was a great bet. Not anymore. It's now it's the convergence of these. It's two, three or four of these coming together and the new business models that are created out of that. You know, I, my, my business, my world, from the books I write, I put out, you know, three blogs a week on this, is I track all of this information and it got to a point where I was unable to keep up with all of these technologies because it's just, it's epic what's going on right now and it's accelerating.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  The speed of these technologies is not slowing down, they're accelerating for many reasons that we can talk about. And so I had a research team, you know, sending me articles and what it means. I ended up building a neural net, an AI algorithm, which is available for free, anybody can use it. It's just, it's futureloop, F U T U R E L O O P dot com, futureloop.com. And what this algorithm or this neural net does is it consumes all every tweet, every journal article, every newspaper article out there. And it's looking for, first of all, positive minded news. I don't need the dystopian stuff I get from CNN and Fox.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  It's all 10 to one negative articles out there because we pay attention to negative news. So it's future forward news, meaning it's positive. And it's about where converging technologies are reinventing companies, industries, you know, products and services. So I get my news, I get like the top 15 articles per day on what's going on across industries, health, transportation, insurance, whatever it might be. And for me, Future Loop sort of gives me that feed that allows me to sort of keep my finger on the pulse of what's going on because it's that fast.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  I have a version of Future Loop called Longevity Insider and it's free again. It's longevityinsider.org. You can go and sign up and I get all of the breakthroughs every day going on in the longevity space, what's going to add health on my years, right? Because I, I think about from a business investment standpoint, there's nothing bigger for investing in than converging exponentials, including AI and longevity. It's to, you know, it's where most of the wealth is going to be made in the decade ahead. So I track that in that regard. But remind me where we were on, where did we get off on that track?

• 45:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So when the, when the technologies come together, right? Let's take a kind of Bitcoin cryptocurrencies. If you look at things like artificial intelligence, et cetera, like how do you see them actually coming together in terms of the opportunities?

• 45:57Speaker 02

  The spatial web. Dear friend of mine, Eric Poole, he is one of the leaders in that field. We talk about this all the time. The spatial web is going to be the convergence of AI, crypto and VR. We're going to be in a VR world and in that VR world, you can have the actual world, but we're mapping the actual world into VR. And in the VR world, it might be an augmented reality overlay or maybe a full VR world. In that world, everything is going to be, have a blockchain identifier and a crypto wallet where whatever you see, you can buy and your AI is there to help you identify

• 46:40Speaker 02

  what you want and buy it. You're going to go into a virtual world, for example, in the retail space where, you know, you're talking to your AI, it's a version of Jarvis and from Iron Man, and you say, I have an event this Friday night I need to go to. Can you give me some fashion advice? And you end up in a virtual showroom where everything you see is your size and you spin up a virtual fashion show and you've got 100 avatars of you, you know, sort of on the runway in front of you, wearing different outfits. And you say, you know, I want to see that. And all of a sudden, you look in a mirror and you're

• 47:23Speaker 02

  wearing that outfit that you just saw on the runway. And you say, I wonder how it looks like with my, my sports jacket or my shoes in the closet. And you're wearing that because there's a digital twin of everything that you own. And it's just, you know, all of this technology is about the speed at which we can do things and the velocity and bringing down barriers. So it's going to reinvent retail, it's going to reinvent advertising. You know, in the spatial web, there'll be, you know, you'll be walking down the street and you'll see something overlaid for sale and you can buy it, you can own it in your wallet, and then you can post it back on the street for, you know, 20% more and see

• 48:08Speaker 02

  if anybody wants to buy it from you. Again, it's the agility and speed of this world. And I mean, these are just a few small examples.

• 48:17Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start to think about as an investor, there's so much opportunity, right? Kind of going back to that idea of abundance. And you could literally put dollars in various industries and there's multiple players within each industry. How do you think about where you want to spend your time investing? And is there a framework that you use? Like if you have $1, do you say, hey, 20 cents is going to go to this industry? 40 cents to this one? Or just like, what's the framework?

• 48:41Speaker 02

  In an abundance world and abundance mindset, something else comes into play, which is my purpose in life, my massively transformative purpose. What do you love? What do you care about? Why are you on this planet? And if you're clear about that, putting your money to work in, in, in, in support of that vision is critically important. So do you love space? Do you love transport? Do you love uplifting people in the developing world? Do you love longevity? So for my venture fund, for example, Bold Capital, it's about 75% goes to work in the healthcare and longevity space.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  You know, I'm clear, I'm going to do everything I can to topple the existing healthcare industry, which is baroque and broken. It's a travesty what we have here in the US for healthcare. It's not healthcare, it's sick care. So I want to reinvent that. And I've got companies like Vaccinity, Cellularity, Fountain Life, that are all working to reinvent the healthcare industry, demonetize, democratize, dematerialize those industries. The other three quarters of, the other quarter of, for my venture fund is focused on where exponential technologies can transform industries. I mean, where can you make a 10x difference in, in any of these industries? So it's passion-driven investment.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  For companies and industries that have a potential for not just an incremental, I have zero interest in 50% change, or even 100% change. I'm looking for 1,000% change. Because that's the world we're living in right now. You know, I was having a conversation with Kathy Wood, who's going to be one of our speakers at Abundance 360 this February, it's February 2nd through 4th. And we're talking about, you know, her backing, you know, both Bitcoin and Tesla. And it's, there's a new species of animal in the, in the business world. And these are these exponential organizations, these companies that are operating 10x, not

• 50:47Speaker 02

  10%. And there's lots of them. So, you know, you don't have to be too smart. I mean, being lucky, but, but what are you passionate about? And backing the ones that are making the world a better place, and are creating the vision of the future you want, and are operating on a 10x platform.

• 51:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating when you start to kind of think about this. One of the things that I'm just personally interested in is what do you do all day? Right? So you've got so much cool shit going on. You, you spend time, obviously, thinking about this, but like, what does your day look like? Do you wake up and just sit and think all day? Is there other things that you spend kind of structured time on? What does your day look like?

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I typically get up at 5:30, which means I'm getting, I'm getting to sleep by 9:30. So I can get my eight hours of sleep. In the morning, I will meditate for not too long, you know, 15, 20 minutes. I'll do a quick, a quick workout with some weights. I have a great app that Johnson & Johnson put out called the Seven Minute Workout. And everybody can forge seven minutes. It's free. Again, you can go and get that. I'll go through my email. I, I still have never been able to give my email to anybody else to do for me. So I, I service that myself. And then I write. I'm typically working on at least a couple of books at the same time. We just turned in Life Force to Simon and Suster and working

• 52:12Speaker 02

  on exponential organizations. And then my first book, Abundance, was published 10 years ago. And so we'll be working on Abundance 2.0. The story's just gotten so much stronger. So I'll write in the early morning when I'm, I'm, Best and then I'm on reading, inputting stuff and then working with my team. So, you know, the only way I've learned to leverage myself is to build a great leadership team that supports me. So for all my companies, I'll typically take a chairman, executive chairman, vice chairman role and hire a great CEO. And so I have a small core team that is my management team across all my companies and

• 52:55Speaker 02

  with which I run my, some of my companies like Abundance 360 and Future Loop and so forth. And then support those teams. What do they need? It's like, you know, what am I most excited about and where are the biggest headaches? And then I've got two 10-year-old kids and so it's supporting them, taking them to school, pick them up. And there's a lot, there's a lot. We all, we all have more opportunities than ever in, in human history. So in a world of abundance, it's, you know, it's drowning in abundance sometimes.

• 53:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, uh, it's pretty incredible to kind of see your ability to context switch, but also to, to stay disciplined as well, right? And it seems like those are the two things that every high-performance person that I bring on the podcast, they always tend to, to have that ability is both context switching and also to, to just stay in a disciplined manner, do something the same way for long periods of time. And that kind of advantage compounds over time, which sounds like you've, you've been a beneficiary of as well.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  It's passion driven, right? It's, I learned early on, if I did something just for money, I was going to give up before I succeeded. It has to be something from my heart and soul, you know? I jokingly say there, you know, overnight success is after 11 years of hard work.

• 54:10Anthony Pompliano?

  That's how it works. All right. Where can we send people to learn more about you, follow you on the internet or, or learn more about any of the various books you're putting out and/or any of the other content?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Thank you. So if you're interested in the thinking that I do, I put out three tech blogs every week, typically on longevity or exponential conversion breakthroughs. And I pride myself on making them very readable, very consumable. And so go to diamandis.com, it's my website, and you can just enter your email to get those blogs. If you're interested in coaching that I do, it's Abundance 360, it's the highest level Singularity University program. And you go to abundance360.com. And then finally, if you're interested in the content from

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Futureloop, it's futureloop.com. And you can get a free daily download of 15 breakthroughs that are going on that day that you probably don't read about anyplace else.

• 55:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That is awesome. And for those that don't know, one of the most interesting things to me about the news is there's a bunch of academic studies that actually show if you wake up and you read three negative headlines, you're much more likely to say that you had a bad day at the end of the day than if you wake up and you read three positive headlines. And so obviously, things around innovation, progress, technology advancement, etc., kind of usually fall in those positive categories. So it's not only something from a learning perspective, but also it does have a pretty material impact on how kind of your day goes, how you started off.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, we're living during the most extraordinary times ever in human history. It's just that we have a limited amount of time in the day, right? The one area that, you know, I'm working on time abundance and adding 20, 30 healthy years on your life as part of that. You know, Google has bought us back time. If you want to research something instead of going to the library, you know, you can get it in microseconds instead of having to spend an hour finding the book. But we still have a limited amount of time. So it's how you spend your time that matters more than anything else. So if you're watching an hour or two of

• 56:32Speaker 02

  Of news, consider going on a news media diet and just really selecting the stuff that is going to make the world better for you. Listen to, you know, the right podcasts, who are you on pump, you know, and figure out what data you want to go into your mind to shape the way you want to think. What is the mindset you desire in life?

• 56:54Anthony Pompliano?

  The last question I want to ask you, and I've never asked this anyone before, but I feel like you'd be a great first kind of guinea pig, I guess, would be the day that you pass away, what is the, you know, like, vision that you have or the legacy that you want to leave? You know, people come together and they say, hey, he's a great guy. I remember or, you know, what is that?

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, wow. So I try not to contemplate my mortality more than I than I should, you know, I've done a couple of interesting plant journeys that have made me fear death far less than anything time, you know, I'm clear that, you know, we're living in an incredible universe and the energy of our life is sort of a full cycle, but that's another conversation we can go into into into plant medicine some other time. I think for me, it's it's helping inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity. So I work on what I call my massive transformative purpose. It's something that everybody in the abundance

• 57:58Speaker 02

  community will work on together. Who do you want to be our hero to? For me, it's being a hero to entrepreneurs. How do you want to serve them? I want to inspire and guide them. This is what's possible. This is where the world is going. This is what you can now do at a 10x level versus 10%. And it's really about creating a hopeful future. You know, if people don't have hope, then they give up. So a hopeful, compelling and abundant future. That's, that's everything for me right now.

• 58:26Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a pretty damn good answer, my friend. Awesome. Well, listen, I highly suggest anyone who doesn't already go follow you on Twitter, subscribe to to get the blog post and definitely check out the books. They are some of the best thinking I've seen. So thank you so much, Peter, for taking the time to do this. And we'll definitely have to do it again in the future.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Just I'm at Peter Diamandis on Twitter and on Instagram and the books, which I'm proud of, Abundance, The Future is Better Than You Think, Bold, How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World. And then most recently, it's The Future is Faster Than You Think. Which looks at what's going to be happening this decade. So, thank you, a chance to, to share what I'm so passionate about and the pleasure to be here.

• 59:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, listen, thanks so much, Peter. We'll definitely do it again.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Take care.