On curiosity, finding purpose in life, the future of longevity science, and the importance of space.
Recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter H. Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies.
As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He is co-founder of BOLD Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250M investing in exponential technologies, and co-founder and Vice Chairman of Cellularity, Inc., a cellular therapeutics company.
Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of three books: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think, BOLD – How to go Big, Create Wealth & Impact the World and The Future is Faster Than You Think.
Diamandis is described by many as “the best and most dynamic speaker in the industry.” Diamandis’ mission through his keynotes and speaking engagements is to help his audiences understand the pace and implications of exponential technology, and how to drive innovation within their organization.
Peter Diamandis
[TRANSCRIPT IS AUTO-GENERATED]
[00:00:00] Alex: Recently named by fortune as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders, peter Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the X prize foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large scale incentive competitions. He's also the executive founder of singularity university, a graduate level Silicon valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies.
As an entrepreneur Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education. He's co-founder of bold capital partners, a venture fund with $250 million investing in exponential technologies and co-founder and vice chairman of cellularity incorporated, a cellular therapeutics company.
Diamandis is a New York times bestselling author of three books: abundance: the future is better than you think, bold: how to go big, create wealth and impact the world, and the future is faster than you think. Diamandis is described by many as the best and most dynamic speaker in the industry.
His mission through his keynotes and speaking engagements is to help his audience understand the pace and implications of exponential technology and how to drive innovation within their organization. Peter sort of a hero of mine, so this was a really cool conversation to sit down for.
We talked about curiosity, finding purpose in life, the future of longevity science and the importance of space. Hope you enjoy.
[00:01:25] Alex: So let's see Peter. You're prolific and a lot of ways. But you strike me as one of those people that really, I think triples down on what you're curious about. I'd say for most of us, if something comes up that we're interested in, we might read a book or two and maybe chat about it with some friends.
You're the kind of guy to get into something and write three books on it and then start a couple of companies for good measure. So before we, before we dive in here, I'd really love to know where do you think that curiosity and then that capacity for action really stems
[00:01:51] Peter: from. Hmm. Interesting. I think everything we're going to talk about here is going to stem from your core passion.
What is it that you want to do with your life? What is it that excites you about the world? And then some how some time, a realization. You can do anything or you can be involved in anything in some way, shape or form of it. So for me, you know, I'm a child born in the sixties during the Apollo program and star Trek.
And I came from a family that was very much medical oriented, right. My dad was a doctor. My mom should have been and it was expected to become a physician. And so I did sort of the medical pre-med. Going through road all along the way, but it was finally, it was like, aha. What I really want to do is become an astronaut, but I really want to do is build a rocket company.
What I really want to do is all of this other stuff. And so, because that has had, you know, sort of had to happen for me outside of my traditional universe, it drove me to pursue my dreams. It drove me to do. You know, at nights and on weekends. And and that became a habit. And I learned, you know, I was an awful speaker growing up in the words.
I was nervous in front of crowds. I didn't consider myself a very good writer and. All of, you know, I consider myself now you know, a very strong writer and a hopefully compelling you know, keynote speaker in or inspiring CEO. And all of those things came from doubling down. Like you said, on realizing I just need to do it and do it and do it and practice and become good at it.
And it's like, everything else, you know, it's that, you know, that, that crazy 20,000 hours. And I just put myself in front of crowds and try different things and put myself, you know, pen to paper and said, I've got to write something that's compelling. But it all stems from passion. It all stems from like, what do you, what do you wanna do with your life?
And I think ultimately a lot of people don't know. And so it's then critically important for them to find out. What's your
[00:04:05] Alex: advice, your go-to advice in that vein. If somebody who's a bit directionless in that sense, do you have any sort of strategies
[00:04:13] Peter: you recommend? I do Alex, and I think, you know what I, so listen, first of all, it's important to realize that if you don't, if you're not clear when you do with your life, you're not alone.
You know, I had created something called singularity university that would bring together the top graduate students from around the world. You know, interested in the world's biggest problems you know, across exponential technologies. And this was a really competitive admissions program. We'd have a hundred graduates in our graduate studies program every year, and I'd go and I'd in the opening talk, I'd say to them, Hey, so how many folks here are clear about your purpose and passion in life and laugh and less than half the audience would raise their hand and I'm like, you gotta be kidding me.
That's amazing. You got to this level of extraordinary academic achievement without having that clarity. And so you're not alone. If you don't know if you do know that's fantastic and you can double down on it and I'll come to my hacks and tricks on how to find it in a moment. But I think another thing to realize is that your purpose and passion in life can change over time.
Right? So early on for me, it was very much opening up the space frontier. It was Apollo and star Trek that got me going I've started a dozen companies in the space. And then I got very fascinated with the idea of how to use exponential technologies to take on and solve the world's biggest problems.
And that became sort of the next decade of my life. And today I'm focused on reinventing the healthcare industry and and age reversal adding 20 or 30 healthy years on people's lives. I guess as I get older, that's more of more interest to me, but and I'll go back to space as a passion. And so I think about decatal long purposes and passions for some people, the rest of their lives, some people it's a year you can change, but what you need to do is play full in once you've found something, because once you've connected with that passion and you're learning and you're reaching out Alex's as you.
Something magical happens. People love people with passion, you know people are attractive to folks. Who've got a passion and a desire to learn and so forth. And if, if it's authentic for you, people will see that and want to support you. Like I have you. So where do you find your passion? Okay. There are a couple of tricks to give you a hint.
I'm actually creating a program called passion finder to help people find that it will be a sort of mid 20, 22 program. I think it's just very important. It's the number one thing I can help people with. And I'm working on right now, an interim bridge there called a 30 day mindset boot. Helping people shape their mindsets.
And we can talk more about that. But the hacks I use is first of all, what did you want to do when you were a kid before the world told you you couldn't right? Cause you can make a career out of anything. And what the single most important thing to connect with your passion is it has to be emotionally driven.
It has to be emotion and really positive emotion or negative emotion. It can be. Awe and amazement and desire for discovery and, you know, going to the stars or unwrap unraveling, you know the secrets of something, or it can be from something from pain that, you know, I refuse to let this go on any further, but to do anything big and bold in the world requires a it's a long journey and you need to have the emotional energy to supply you along the way.
So what you want to do. The second thing is if I gave you a billion dollars, Alex and you couldn't spend it on yourself, but I said, I want you to use this money to make the world a better place. What would you do with it? You know, what would you start dreaming about? And the third is. You know, where are your feet leading you?
In other words, when you have time off and you know, most college kids don't necessarily have that much time off, but if you did, what would you be reading? What would you be researching, you know, of your own accord? Not for an assignment, not for your parents, not for your teachers. What is it that's fascinating for you.
And and then who do you want to be a hero to? Who do you want to most. Make proud of you besides our parents and our teachers, you know, is it for me, it's entrepreneurs. I, I think about what I call a massive transformative purpose, and I've had a number of these and mine today in the context of our conversations right here is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity.
So the biggest impact I can have is if I help individuals like yourself, You know, by inspiring you or guiding you to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future in any way, shape or form. So those are sort of the tricks that I think about in terms of really how to help people sort of go through the clutter and start to reflect and focus in on.
[00:09:13] Alex: That's really insightful. You know, I think a natural place to go a bit deeper here as with something you alluded to before, something you're working on now in longevity science, you know, you're one of a few prominent figures really, really optimistic about the future of longevity and aging. So I've got to ask, you know, whether it's a concept like longevity, escape, velocity, or anything else like that, what's your basic pitch on the future of the space.
When you explain it to someone otherwise.
[00:09:39] Peter: Great. Great question. So here's some of the facts, there are species on this planet, the bowhead whale, the Greenland shark sea turtles that live 2, 3, 4, 500 plus years, if they can, why can't we? And you know, it hit me early on when I was in medical school that it's either a software problem or a hardware problem.
And we're getting the ability to crack both of those things. That's the first point that, that there are incredible existence proofs of multi hundred year lifespans. The second thing is, if you look back at sort of a Darwinian evolution as humans, we never evolved to live past age 30 we're in our peak performance in our twenties.
How old are you now? 21. Perfect. You know, you got a great decade ahead of peak performance, but it turns out that, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, millions of years ago as early hominids we would go into puberty at age 12 or 13 before there was birth control. We'd be having a baby at age 12 or 13 or 14.
And then by the time you were 28, your baby was having a baby. And you were a grandparent now and before food was abundant, right before McDonald's and whole foods was around. The last thing you wanted to do to perpetuate your species was take food out of the mouths of your grandchildren. And so you would do the very best thing you would die.
Give your bits back to the environment you wouldn't compete against the newer generation. So we never evolved to live past age 30. In fact, it was a disincentive. And so most of the diseases of aging of cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease are happening in our forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, because they were never, they were never you know, Darwinian li you know screened against you never got that old, so it didn't really matter.
And so that's going on. And then the third element is that the tools of genome sequencing, CRISPR gene therapy, to really begin to understand why we age, how do we slow it down? How do we stop it even how to reverse it is happening now? And so I'm in the midst of working with some of the top leaders in the field Dr.
Davidson Clara, Dr. George Church from Harvard medical school. To design a hundred million dollar cancer X prize. And we're asking, you know, teams to reverse the age of an individual 20 years. You know go from age 60 to age, 40 age, 80 to eight 60 and so forth. And as you mentioned before, there's this idea called longevity escape, velocity that that Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de gray had popularized.
And it's the notion that. No today for every year that you're living science is extending your year, your life on the average a quarter of a year, but there's going to be a point in which the progression of science is accelerating and so fast. That for every year, you're alive. Science is extending your life for more than a year and it becomes divergent and that's longevity, escape, velocity.
And the prediction from Ray is that's a dozen years away from Ray Kurzweil. George Church. I just did was saying, you know, very much 10 to 15, 20 years at the outmost. So what happens when we can start to add 10, 20, 30, healthy years on your life? And by the way, science isn't slowing down, it's accelerating.
Right? So during those additional years of healthy life, you're living that much longer.
[00:13:24] Alex: Got it. You know, a lot of people bring up some problems that arise when we all start living to 120 or so maybe over population, depletion of resources, even things as comparatively trivial, as like insurance get thrown into the mix.
Is there anything you really think is going to become disrupted as a result of this? Or is it all something that gets figured out as we get.
[00:13:43] Peter: Well, let's take it a piece at a time. The first is people have a misconception of overpopulation and it comes from a lot of work done. 30, 40 years ago, there was a book called the population bomb that scared the daylights out of everybody.
We're going to explode. We can't control our growth. We're going to use up all the resources. Well, if you look at the data which I have, and I wrote a blog. If you go to diamandis.com, you can just search in the search bar on population. I wrote a blog on this, that it turns out we're actually going to have an under population problem.
50 years ago, the average number of children per family was like 5.5, 5.6 children per family. Today globally. It's down to two points. The us Europe, Japan, many countries are below the population replacement, which is 2.1. I did a, a webinar with Ilan in April. We were announcing the a hundred million dollar gigaton carbon rule prize that had.
And when I was asking him about what his biggest concerns were, one of them was, he said under population of the planet, not having enough people to, to the work we need in such. So longevity is an important part of that. There was a study recently done at Harvard. London school of economics and an Oxford that said for every year that we extend the average life span on the planet, we add $38 trillion, the global GDP, which is insane.
Right. So, you know, are we going to have problems around some people living longer than they should. Or are we going to have issues around people staying in their jobs and not making room for new individuals to come in? I don't buy that. We've always created more and more jobs. And I think the future is really going to be one around living and working in the metaverse humans, partnering with AIS in ways.
And I think the younger. Of either a mind or, or, or age someone is the more versatile they'll be in these areas and they'll dominate. You know, if you've been a great roadblocks player, all your life. You're going to continue to dominate in the AI human collaboration space. I'm not concerned about that so much.
And ultimately the big question that is concerning in the early days, but not in the long run, is, is this technology going to be only available to the wealthy and like most things cutting edge technologies available to the richest in the beginning when it doesn't work very well, like the first cell phones that costs.
10, $20,000 in a briefcase and dropped a call every block in Manhattan. And now when they're 40 bucks, they work amazing. And there are more cell phones on the planet than humans. So the early treatments may be expensive, but the ability to monetize these treatments to the point where they're tens of dollars, we've proven that with very recently the, you know, Moderna and Pfizer MRN vaccine.
Very complicated capabilities, effectively, a gene therapy, but delivered for 15 bucks when you're making hundreds of millions or billions of.
[00:16:56] Alex: So to shift gears again, I believe it was in med school. So early on in your career that you started a few space companies, you know, as, as I'm saying this, I'm realizing my first question is, how the hell do you start a space company in med school?
And secondly, but more broadly what got you interested in it to begin with? Like, why is space so foundational for you?
[00:17:15] Peter: Yeah. So thank you. This is going back to the child. You know, passion in my heart. Right. Just make sure. Like just all inspired by this. So, you know Apollo, I was alive put the Apollo program in 1916, you know, actually in the mid sixties we saw Apollo one Apollo 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 through Pollo 17.
And it was like, holy shit, we're going, we're landing on the moon. People are up there walking around. That's amazing. What's more amazing is we haven't gone back yet and we will. But then that showed me what was possible today. And then that incredible, I call it, you know, a sort of scientific documentary star Trek showed me where the world was going.
There's that one, two punch that captured my heart. And it was like, I want to be part of that. It's like, this is possible for me. And I became enamored with space. I started when I was at MIT as a sophomore, I started the world's large. College space organization called said students exploration and development of space, maybe a chapter on your campus or chapters around the world.
If you can go to CEDS dot Oregon and learn more about it. You know, Jeff, I was the MIT chapter president and the national chairman and Jeff Bezos was the Princeton chapter. And And that was amazing. Then co-founded something called the international space university ISU, which is now when the leading institutions with the study of space in Strasburg, France.
And I just went whole hog, like space was my purpose medicine. Something I was doing to make my parents happy. And, you know, there was a connection to space. I was studying space medicine, but I wanted to build rockets and asteroid mining companies. And so my fourth year of medical school, I almost flunked out because I was running a rocket company and a international space university and just barely just barely succeeding, but it was so passion driven that that's what I needed.
[00:19:24] Alex: I don't think this would be a podcast recorded in 2021. If I didn't talk to you at least a little bit about crypto. I heard somewhere that you were friends with Michael Saylor in college, is that right? Yeah.
[00:19:35] Peter: Yeah. We were basically roommates in our fraternity, TDC at MIT. So Michael and I have known each other very well.
We were we were going through unified engineering and our Astro together. Got it.
[00:19:49] Alex: I don't think there's really anyone on earth is pro Bitcoin as that guy. So I'm curious, where do you lie on that spectrum? Is Bitcoin it for you or do you see promise and things like Ethereum for creating these decentralized?
[00:20:00] Peter: Listen, I think I'm inspired by Michael's clarity of vision and his thesis. He's extraordinarily brilliant. And. What I'm most impressed by was that this wasn't something that came over course of a decade. He had a cathartic moment after the pandemic started in the spring of 2020 when he started seeing economic downfalls and all of this.
And he's like, holy shit, what's going on here? And then when he dug in, he said, No, there is no other protocol. There is no other financial platform that's going to deliver what Bitcoin Bitcoin is and MIS fundamentalist I'm close. You know, my holdings are 80% Bitcoin and 20% of Ethereum. And I shift everything I can out of dollar.
Into, you know, block two Bitcoin and Ethereum or real estate holdings and just try and hold as little as I can in the U S dollar where the midst of this massive inflation. And so, you know, if you want to invest in, you know, I think one of the most important things I wish I had learned when I was in college.
What is the value of, of putting aside anything every week and every month, like, you know, 50 bucks a month, a hundred bucks a month. And just putting it, you know, have a few less beers and a few less dinners out and put it into something. And you can put that into a, you know, into a Bitcoin or Ethereum or into, you know, a you know, index like the NASDAQ QQQ or something like that, just to follow the top NASDAQ stocks.
But I think that discipline you know, fast forward 20 or 30 years from now, you'll be like, thank God. I listened to that guy, that podcasts and started doing that. It is incredible. What's gonna. So, yeah,
[00:21:50] Alex: one thing I think is really special about you throughout any of your work is just this innate optimism about the future.
But quite frankly, it's contagious. So, you know, one of the many things you've done to further that is founding X prize which as you mentioned earlier, is now dishing out these absolutely incredible sums of money like that a hundred million dollar prize for carbon removal. It didn't start that way though.
So what, what's the story behind
[00:22:11] Peter: extra. First of all, you're a great interviewer. Thank you for these questions that are they're perfect. I was an optimist from my perspective of space and Apollo and star Trek, right? Star Trek is a very optimistic view of the future. It is. Post singularity in one sense that there's nothing truly scarce.
The replicator can make anything we can move around. Money has been, you know, money has very little value. And in fact, there is a post-capitalist economy that will happen when you have nanobots and AI and robotics, and you can manufacture anything from the cost of energy, energy, raw materials, and time.
You know, money starts to have very little value. There's a great book, a call There's a I'm like, what is it? I'm blanking on it. I'll think of it in a second. Anyway the optimism sort of went away when NASA stopped delivering on the space promise and NASA was going no place in the shuttle program was a dead end.
And then I hit on the idea of the original X fries of like, you know, I'm not gonna depend on the government. I'm going to ask entrepreneurs around the world now enabled by all these exponential technologies to go and build rockets for the rest of us. And so I came up after reading, I read Lindbergh's biography, the spirit of St.
Louis. And that book said, you know, prizes really launched the aviation industry. And so I came up with the idea of a $10 million. For the first team who could build a private spaceship, carrying three adults up in the space land and do it again within two weeks we had 26 teams around the world. We spent well over a hundred million dollars going after the $10 million prize.
And on the heels of that, I realized how much cognitive capacity that was out there, how much welfare was out there of, of entrepreneurs. And I define an entrepreneur as someone who finds a problem and solves. Right. You know, I say the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities want to come a billionaire help a billion people.
Those sort of like truisms for me that I like to teach my communities and I, we plat, we took X prize to a platform and said, let's identify the problems not being solved. Let's create a very clear finish line because we do our best to. In, in competition, right in sports. It's the Olympics where you hitting your records.
Right. And you've been in dating, you know, we're competing against each other for that guy or gal. And ultimately I said, let's compete to solve the world's biggest problems. And we've launched about $300 million in X prizes so far. Are there a hundred, 200 million isn't about. And so I'm in numbered by the notion that every one of us today has access to more capital than ever before.
We had all time venture capital investments in 2020 in a pandemic, right. And 21 is going to be even higher. There's access to more knowledge, more computation, more people on the planet you can connect to. There are very few scarce resources as an entrepreneur, other than having a great idea. The grit to follow it through.
And I think there's lots of ideas out there, but it's really the grit to say, this is my purpose. It's my passion. I'm going to keep going. You know, a lot of my success is Alex had been, you know, I call them overnight successes after 11 years of hard work and it's not giving up at matters.
[00:25:42] Alex: Really excited to see what comes next for you, Peter.
Thank you so much. Again, really means the
[00:25:46] Peter: word pleasure. Alex, look forward to staying in touch with you.
[00:25:50] Alex: Cheers have a great rest of your day.
[00:25:51] Peter: You too. Bye now.