← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
7 Key Moves to Build Wealth While Others Struggle in the Next 5 Years! | Peter Diamandis PT 2
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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Welcome back to Impact Theory. Today we're diving back into our conversation with Peter DIAMANDIS. In the second half, we're going to cover cutting edge quantum computing, AI's impact on content creation and game changing innovations in healthcare and biotech. Let's get into it.
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Kevin Rose
I have an obsession as an entrepreneur, which is as a human, but this really manifests as an entrepreneur. People need to stop trusting themselves so much. Yes, people are so convinced that they don't even recognize that they have a worldview. And if they do recognize that they have a worldview, they are utterly convinced that it is simply a reflection of what is objectively true. And so they're like, no, the way that I see things is the right way. And I'm like, oh my God, is that your view? Yeah, exactly.
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Salim Ismail
Confirmation bias.
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Kevin Rose
That's my view. And it's right, Peter.
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Peter Diamandis
I mean, one of the big things that AI is going to give us as a gift is, is the ability to overcome all of these biases we have, right? All these cognitive biases, recency bias, negativity bias, confirmation bias, recency, cost bias, all of these things which our brain is really sucks at processing. And so we have all these hacks, right? You trust someone who looks like you, you give higher weight to the most recent information you got. You give higher weight to negative information over positive information. And you know, there's going to be a version where you go to Jarvis your AI and you say, you know, I want to put cognitive bias alert on, tell me if I'm being biased.
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Salim Ismail
You know, when we were building Singularity University, I was the founding executive director there. A few years in, I'd written the book and I was off and Peter asked me to come to a board meeting and say, what should se look like in five years or 10 years? And I made a comment, I said, you know, you should shut it down because you build an organization and over time, you spend more time trying to sustain the organization than trying to solve the problem that you set out to solve in the first place. DARPA is the big organization. They do this. Every role, even the CEO is three years long and then you have to rotate out. You're not allowed to hold any role for more than three years. And then you're measured.
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Kevin Rose
You're worried about things getting stale.
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Salim Ismail
Stale. And therefore they keep things fresh. And your legacy is what did you do three three year patterns ago? And was it good or not? So now you're always focused on the long term. You take out all the politics, et cetera. And I think in today's world, if I had to kind of boil it down, I would say you build a company and after three to five years you just go, we're going to shut it down after this and force us to reinvent our.
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Peter Diamandis
Or reinvent the company. Right, reinvent it. When the X Prize got one and we had spaceship one fly, we held a meeting and said, do we shut it down or do we reinvent ourselves into a platform?
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Salim Ismail
Yeah.
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Peter Diamandis
And we did. And now we're getting ready to launch XPRIZE 3.0, which happened during COVID I said, you know, pull the board together and said, this is a perfect opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves. And so we've re. I need to brief you on it, but we've reinvented xprize and I'm excited about that. And so there is. You need to be constantly disrupting yourself and it's tough because we're lazy in some ways.
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Kevin Rose
Yeah. You tell a story in the book about Elon walking in, seeing him all long faced and saying, what's wrong? Walk me through that moment.
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Peter Diamandis
So I was amazed. So I, I've known Elon for 23, 20, 23 years now. And when, when Falcon 1, which was their first vehicle, failed on the first time, the second time, the third time, and it succeeded on the fourth time, they miraculously, and timing is everything, got a contract for the Falcon 9, which was a billion dollar contract and had they not won that, they may not be here today. But they did. And Elon made a incredible decision that took guts. He shut down the rocket line that just began flying and there were very few successful operations. He said, focus on Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is our future. And so that went on for some number of years. And I was coming into SpaceX and Hawthorne to have lunch with him and he was kind of like you said, long faced. And I'm like, what's up? And he goes, I just figured out Falcon 9 had been up and operating and doing damn well. It's the most successful launch vehicle on the planet by a huge margin. Right. It's like very few, no countries compete with him. He's like the number one spacefaring power. And. And I said, what's wrong? He goes, I just figured out the Falcon 9 is not going to get us where we need to go, meaning to Mars. Right. He's driven by this mtp, this massive transformative purpose, making human planetary, getting humanity to Mars. And I need to start afresh. And so that has become Starship. And then he goes on to make a comment that when Starship begins successfully operating, he's going to shut down the Falcon 9 line, which again is like, it's like, I don't know what the analogy is, but it's like you're the most successful at the top of the heap and you're about to shut down that entire revenue flow. Now, whether or not he does or does not, that was the statement he made. But it's that mindset of focus, of absolute focus. I'm going to do whatever.
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Salim Ismail
Dedication to the big, big goal. Yeah.
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Kevin Rose
Okay, so as somebody who knows this intimately from the inside of the need to disrupt yourself or somebody else is going to do it, the willingness to look at something and go, okay, we're going to have to start this all. How do you get your organization on board with that? Because the normal human is going to rebel against that massively.
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Salim Ismail
You don't. So the only model we found that works at all is to go to the edge of your organization and build a new capability aiming into an adjacent area or a totally separate area. So I remember one of the events at Singularity, Larry Page came to me and said, hey, I was the head of innovation at Yahoo. Before building out Singularity. And he came to me and said, hey, your unit at Yahoo is successful. Should I do an incubator model at Google? And I said, no, you'll have this immune system response. The more disruptive an idea we came up with in this incubator, the less Yahoo could handle it. And you're like, my job description is not workable. And so part of the result and lots of other inputs was Google X, which is separate, going into it. They use hardware to go into adjacent spaces, Google car, Google X, contact lenses, et cetera. The master of this model of going to the edge and doing something different is actually Apple. And yes, they have a great design capability and a technology supply chain. I argue that Apple's real innovation is organizational because what they do like anybody else is they will form a small team that's really disruptive, put the team at the edge of the company Keep them secret and stealth. And they'll say to them, go disrupt another industry, whether it's watches or retail or payments or glasses or whatever now. So they have a portfolio of teams looking at different industries at the edge in secret. And when they see something, they go into it, and that becomes the new gravity center. And there's hundreds of examples of this. Nestle for years tried to run Nespresso as a line of business, and it just failed. Finally, they set it up as a separate entity on its own. Boom. Every hotel room in the world has a Nespresso machine. And so that's the only model that we've ever seen before.
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Peter Diamandis
There is one more, which is the dictator. It is the larger than life leader who says, this is what we're doing. If you don't agree with me, leave.
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Kevin Rose
Do we have a good example of that?
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Peter Diamandis
Well, Elon and Bezos as well. Steve Jobs, for sure. It's like it's the founder leader. It's very hard to do it in an older legacy company that's hired a CEO, but it's people. When you have a strong enough MTP and the visionary has a strong enough MTP and they come to work for you, when they come to work for this vision, then they will have faith in you to make those right turns.
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Salim Ismail
Right.
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Kevin Rose
Going back to mindset, how does somebody cultivate that in themselves? Like, if you want to become that guy or gal, like, what do you do? What is it that an Elon has or Steve Jobs has that other people can replicate?
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Peter Diamandis
So we close out the book with mindset, and it's the area I'm spending most of my time, and I'll phrase it like this for everybody listening. If you look at the most extraordinary leaders on the planet, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, I don't care who's on your list. And you asked what made them successful, Was it the cash they had, the friends they had, the technology they had, or was it their mindset? Right. I think almost everybody would say it was their mindset. Your mindset is how you deal with challenges and opportunities. It's your reaction. It's how your neural net is wired. So the question is, if your mindset, if you agree that mindset's the most important thing a leader can have, an entrepreneur can have, what mindset do you have? First and foremost, where did you get it? And then ask yourself the question, what mindset do you need for the world ahead? And so I posit there's a few Key mindsets. And these are what I teach in my abundance community. First off, a curiosity mindset is fundamental. I know you, you believe this through and through aggressively.
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Kevin Rose
Can you go into a little detail on that? Like when you say curious, what do you mean?
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Peter Diamandis
So curious is a willingness to actually dig and ask and have conversations. In the chat GPT world, it's everything, right? So it's like, how do I use chatgpt? Open it up and ask it how you, you know, and then ask the next question, the next question, next question. So when you have a kid who is asking you que, it's go to your 8, 9, 10 year old self in that and just be openly curious and asking as many questions as you can. And going down the rabbit hole, Steve
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Salim Ismail
Wozniak calls it tinkering. Right? Where in the organization can you just tinker and play?
- [10:23]
Kevin Rose
What stops people from tinkering or being curious?
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Peter Diamandis
Time constraint, Quarterly targets. Yeah, Doing stuff that they were told is important. Not having the time and I think falling into ruts. So a curiosity mindset, especially if you're an entrepreneur, is like one of the most important things that you can incubate and have. The second mindset for me is an abundance mindset. And the abundance mindset is there is nothing truly scarce. We can talk about this also as first principle thinking, you know, and this is one where Elon and I have had lots of conversations about abundance and that there is nothing truly scarce, right? That, that your ability as an entrepreneur to take something that was scarce and make it abundant is what entrepreneurs do. Great. So, you know, the perfect example is energy, right? We used to kill whales on the ocean to get whale oil to light our nights. Then we ravaged mountainsides for coal. Then we drilled kilometers under the ocean, right? And then we frack natural gas. But we live on a planet that's bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species. And here's the key point. The energy is there, just not in a useful, useful form yet. So technology takes whatever was scarce and makes it usable and abundant. So water is another example. We live on a water planet, for God's sakes, right? Two thirds water, yeah, but 97.5% is salt, 2% is ice. We fight over a half a percent. But their technologies transforming scarcity into abundance. And first principle thinking. I wrote about this in futures faster than you think. When Elon decided to make Tesla, he basically looked at what was the spot price of lithium and nickel and could you get the cost of batteries down from first principle thinking. And the answer is, yes, we can get it there. And therefore, the cars don't have to be that expensive. And that led him to go forward. Long story there. So that's abundance thinking. That instead of if you have a pie, my favorite example of a pie, and friends are coming over for dinner, instead of slicing the pie into thinner and thinner slices, which is a scarcity mindset, you bake more pies, which is an abundance mindset. So we're living in a world where you can bake more pies. Everything can be abundant. And I mean, my whole mission on extending the healthy lifespan is about making time more abundant for people.
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Salim Ismail
Probably going to take pies out of that equation.
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Kevin Rose
Yeah, if you're gonna, Unfortunately.
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Peter Diamandis
Okay. Anyway, so an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, a purpose driven mindset, and a gratitude mindset. Other mindsets I speak to, and we could talk forever about those, but there are mindsets that are important for us in this day and age.
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Kevin Rose
Yeah, I want to go back to curiosity. So when I think about what derails my team, I love them to death. But one thing that I've encountered over and over is when people's ego gets tied up in being right. And they're not just obsessed with finding the right answer. It's because I think they have not yet accurately identified the way the world works, which is that if you are obsessed with being right, you will be wrong most of the time. If you're obsessed with identifying the right answer, then you can actually make progress. And so, I mean, this was certainly the trap that I fell prey to in my early 20s. That is like a demarcation line in the sand. My life before, I realized that if I built my ego around being willing to stare nakedly at my inadequacies and figure out what the right answer is, instead of trying to position myself to look smart, that I could actually move forward. And that switches everything. Because there's not only no emotional friction to admitting that you're wrong, there's like a little twinge of excitement of like, ooh, I. I've gotten this far being wrong, and now somebody's going to remove the scales from my eyes. Now I really can make this forward momentum, but, man, I really like I for all the time that I spend on camera telling people how to think in this way, I find it very hard to get somebody who isn't ready for that to hear it make that switch and change. If you guys have the magic words,
- [14:45]
Salim Ismail
I'd love to hear them. So actually, this is music to ours in a sense, because organizationally individuals are pretty good. We have a lot of tool sets for transforming individual thinking. Tony Robbins, nlp, psychedelics nowadays, et cetera, to change your own mindset. But the group think that comes inside an organization is really hard to change. And what we found in exos, the characteristics that add up to an exponential organization by default have it be embracing of this mindset. So one of the ways we talk about what we've done in the same way that a Tony Robbins, you go in there and you completely change your subconscious state from A to B, right? From a scarcity to an abundance mindset, whatever, we're able to do that at the organizational level. We can take an organization that is old thinking, stuck in particular markets, et cetera, and you open it up using a combination of these characteristics, the mindset, the mtp, et cetera.
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Kevin Rose
How do you introduce the ideas, but how do you get them to actually use it?
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Peter Diamandis
Let me give you the hack. I learned this from Astro Teller. Had him on stage at a360 a few times, and he shared with something that I love. You're in the midst of developing a product, everybody's absolutely sure of what's going on and how you're going to launch it, how it's going to work. And you hand out a piece of paper to everybody and you say, listen, guys, it's six months from now and the product has just failed. And you know why it's failed. Write it down. You know exactly why it's failed. Write it down right now. And you are incentivizing someone to actually flip their situation and look at the flaws and elevate those. And then you go around the room and review why people say it's going to fail. And if you got two or three people saying the same thing, it's maybe you got to look at that.
- [16:39]
Salim Ismail
Test that one first. Yeah. The other one we've come across that's a great hack is Amazon. They created something called the Institutional. Yes. Have you ever heard of this?
- [16:46]
Kevin Rose
No.
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Salim Ismail
So they realize in any big company, it's really easy to say no. 1 of 20 people can say no, it'll kill the idea. Whereas if you're in a startup and you go to one investor and they say, yes, you're after the racist side. You deal with that impedance mismatch. So they came up with a policy so that if you're inside Amazon, you come to me with an idea and I'm your boss, I'm not allowed to say no. My default Answer must be yes. If I want to say no, I have to write a two page thesis as to why it's a bad idea and post it publicly. So they've created friction and embarrassment to say no. It's much easier for me to go, go ahead, you'll fail at the next level anyway. Da da da da da. And actually one of the outcomes of this policy was Amazon Web Services. Nothing to do with their strategy. Not on the roadmap. But nobody could figure out how to say no to it. And now it's one of the most successful products of all time, delivering, I think 75% of their global profits.
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Kevin Rose
Wow.
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Salim Ismail
Because nobody could figure out how to say no to it. So we found a collection of little hacks and cultural transformations in companies that allow you to basically operate in this new modality. Being very curious purpose Dr. Constantly testing assumptions, using small agile teams, operating at the edges as autonomously as possible, and then getting the business of the organization done.
- [17:58]
Peter Diamandis
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- [18:28]
Kevin Rose
Wow. I love that so much. I've taken a lot from Bezos over the years. Like he's got some really amazing ideas. I do have to chuckle a little bit that this business genius still got taken down by dick pics. But just the human mind is absolutely hilarious. You're all frail, but yeah, none of that. Look, I don't even throw shade at the guy. I get it. Live your best life. But that's really brilliant and I will implement that immediately.
- [19:00]
Salim Ismail
We've had the luxury of watching hundreds of big companies deal in different ways, right? And it used to be that big companies were terrible at this. And then about five or seven years ago, they got started getting better. So instead of Google or Yahoo or somebody saying we're just going to compete with that little startup, they would just buy them. Zuckerberg saw that he was going to get disrupted by Instagram and WhatsApp, et cetera, bought them instead. And in general, you should leave them alone. Over time, the corporation can't handle it, gets its grubby fingers messed and then they tend to typically kill it. But we're Starting to learn now. If you look at, say, Google with LLMs, they were actually too scared to release them. And Amazon just went, let's just go for it. And boom. And OpenAI. Oh, sorry, Microsoft.
- [19:44]
Kevin Rose
I was like, wait, Amazon.
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Salim Ismail
Sorry, sorry. Microsoft just went, what about Bard?
- [19:48]
Kevin Rose
What do you guys think about Bard?
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Salim Ismail
How's it doing? Very impressive.
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Kevin Rose
I haven't touched it.
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Salim Ismail
We've been playing with it. It's very impressive. It's early days yet.
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Peter Diamandis
I'm finding fun doing stuff on OpenAI and at Bard at the same time and comparing them. And there are a few places where OpenAI failed and Bard succeeded and vice versa. So they're both useful. And what I'd like to mention if I could, just because I want to go back to the thesis on the. On the book, you know, again, our mission is to give. Give people who are running large scale companies who want to survive the next 10 years a series of this is what you should do if you want to reorganize your company. And if you're a startup, this is what you should do to be able to thrive in this decade. Because the world has changed. I mean, fundamentally, how you start a company today and how you succeed today is very different than 30 years ago,
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Salim Ismail
very different than six months ago.
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Peter Diamandis
Well, yeah, true.
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Kevin Rose
That crazy scares me. We've really just lived through the most disruptive six months. Nothing has ever more instantaneously impacted my business model, the way that I approach my employees ever, than the release of COVID Yeah, I mean, no, honestly, that did not impact my business. Nearly. It did. Like the day to day, as you're not seeing people. But the fundamental way that we ran our business.
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Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I do it.
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Salim Ismail
I mean, we're in a world right now where every doctor in the world is freaked out if they see this. And every lawyer in the world is freaked out. Every teacher in the world.
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Peter Diamandis
I love the fact that OpenAI ChatGPT passed the US medical licensing exam two months after it was launched. Right.
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Kevin Rose
And the bar exam, crazy. It passed the Turing test. That was the one I didn't see coming. The signing of the hey, let's slow down letter. And so I had Yoshua Bengio on the show, who's considered the godfather of AI, And I said, hey, your name was on that. What made you sign it? And he said, in no uncertain terms. I did not expect it to pass the Turing test as fast as it did. That set off every alarm bell that I have and like pumped the brakes.
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Salim Ismail
This is the thing that we find most interesting because We've known Imad and all these guys for a while that they are blown away by the success of these models. So that's really fascinating that the folks themselves are just blown away.
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Peter Diamandis
It's still early days, ladies and gentlemen. It's still early days. We're going to see so much more coming and the recursive nature of self improving capabilities. I showed this work done where a group of physicians were shown these case studies to diagnose a patient and it was like they took 55 minutes and got 60% right and the AI took like 12 minutes and got 85% right.
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Salim Ismail
Whoa.
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Peter Diamandis
And the physicians are going to change next year, but the AI will get much better and you know, seconds and 100% right, bro? Yeah, yeah.
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Kevin Rose
This is where this gets really interesting. So I know you have another company, Fountain Life, you guys are using AI. Are you open to talking about this?
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Peter Diamandis
Yeah, sure.
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Kevin Rose
So longevity. I couldn't be more obsessed with the idea. And so as you were talking about it, my first question is, how are you guys going to start getting the patterns down? Because to me, this is the big thing. You talk to somebody like Peter Attia and he's like, look, it is just next to impossible to do really good studies on diet and nutrition. What works, what doesn't work. There's just too many confounding variables. And I was like, AI is going to answer that. Like it can pull a pattern. Anything that can be reduced to a pattern, they can figure it out. Regardless of like amount of variables. If there is a pattern to be had, it will suss it out. And given that we have some people that live to 120 and some that don't, there is a pattern.
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Peter Diamandis
Yep. Yeah. And I'll put it this way, you, there's a lot of interesting things. Not only are there some people who live to 120 and some people who make it to just 65, there are large species on this planet, like the bowhead whale that lives to 200 years or the Greenland shark that lives to 500 years. And my question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? And I said it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. All right? And we're going to understand that this decade is the decade. We're going to understand that it's going to be AI and quantum technologies that give us that insight. So Fountain life is just fountainlife.com we have these 10,000 square foot facilities. We have four of them right now. We have a waiting list of like 50 that we'll build out globally. And you come and we digitize you. It's a full body, 150 gigabyte upload of you. Full body, MRI, brain, brain vasculature, brain function, coronary CT, all of this with AI overlay, 80, 80 blood biomarkers, genomics, metabolomics, you know, your, your gut. And then we do this year on year. This is not a one and done. Right. So in the, the first time you do it, we're going to see is there anything going on that you should worry about. Most of us are optimists about our health and we don't actually know what's going on inside our body. Fuck. And by the way, the body's really amazing at hiding disease.
- [24:51]
Salim Ismail
Yeah.
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Kevin Rose
I'm going to put myself.
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Peter Diamandis
You know, it's like, it's like you are. You think you're fine, but, you know, 70% of all heart attacks have no precedent.
- [25:00]
Kevin Rose
Dude, that, that one freaks me out. That the what? The first symptom of heart disease in most men is death.
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Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Crazy, right? And 70% of cancers that kill you are not screened for. So it's this shit that drives me nuts. And so it's like an idiot not to be looking inside your body. And we used to not look because, well, if I find out, can I do anything? The answer is, yes, you can. So you want to know. And so we screen people first and then every year, upload you every year. And it's looking for the patterns and what medicines. And we have a large corpus of data and the AI ability to analyze that. To say with your genome, with your microbiome, with these meds, with. This is going to be huge learnings out of this, right? And so I'm trying to build fountain life into an exponential organization. So I'm building around this book that we've built and every company I'm involved with is like, we need to use these 10 attributes in the book, otherwise we're not going to be able to have the impact globally that we want.
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Kevin Rose
What are you going to tell the AI to look for?
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Peter Diamandis
So right now you don't have to tell it to look for anything. You have to ask it to find any kind of anomalous patterns you're looking for. It's data over time. So you're looking for changes.
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Kevin Rose
Tell me what's changed, Tell me what's
- [26:36]
Peter Diamandis
changing and tell me. So I'll give you one of the examples we're building. This is a fun part about fountain life. We're building a brand new health Insurance company on top of it. So if you get fountain life insurance which is available today, your employees insurance is a perverse business. Fire insurance pays you after your house burns down. Life insurance pays your next akin after they're dead. Health insurance pays you after you're sick. What we've done instead is when you sign up your employees go through a set of pre testing for us to discover any kind of disease and prevent it from a big payout later down the stream. Right. So it's keeping your employees healthy and what we want to do.
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Kevin Rose
Wait, wait, how does that model work though? So is the employee paying roughly what they would pay?
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Peter Diamandis
Are they playing exactly the same or less? The numbers are the same and the,
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Kevin Rose
the insurance company is actually saying we're going to do preventative testing.
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Peter Diamandis
We're doing preventative testing. Yes, preventative testing. And so here's what we're doing. One of the interesting things is there's a number of expensive tests we can do and a number of cheap tests we can do. And one of the things we're doing with AI is correlating which of these lower end tests correlate highly to the expensive tests. So you'll do the lower end cost test to find a signal in the noise and then you'll verify with the expensive test. Did you see recently both DeepMind and OpenAI released weather prediction models that were accurate 11 days out.
- [28:09]
Salim Ismail
Whoa.
- [28:11]
Peter Diamandis
So this is fascinating. And I saw this morning a prediction model on bitcoin.
- [28:17]
Tom Bilyeu
So tell me more, Peter.
- [28:18]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, well it was trending up through the end of the year. Not a huge amount, but it was trending up. I'm a bitcoin believer. But anyway, so anyway, the point being interesting, right? Can AI make accurate predictions in seemingly massively complex systems like weather? I mean I can't think of anything more complex than weather or the financial markets. I mean now it becomes fascinating if you're actually able to predict. And then the question becomes, well, if you can predict that, and I know is that change my behavior when that changes?
- [28:56]
Tom Bilyeu
In weather? No. In financial markets?
- [28:58]
Peter Diamandis
Yes. Yeah. I mean this goes back to, you know, I, I'll ask you the question. My thesis is we're living in a simulation and it's an nth generation simulation. We're living within a simulation within a simulation, within a simulation. Because I think we're going to have the technology to be able to do that. And we will, because we can. And if that's in fact the case, I would do nothing different than I'm doing right now. We're in a game. How do you feel about that?
- [29:32]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. So the. I'm actually wearing the shirt right now. So I'm wearing a shirt for the video game that I'm building called Project Kaizen, which takes that as its hypothesis, which is everything you've ever known is a simulation. You have no body anywhere, there is no biological you. This is a simulation. And then once you know it's a simulation, then you can begin to manipulate it effectively. And that is me again as a sci fi writer trying to explore what it will mean to understand the rules by which all of this apparent complexity is born out of. So I for a long time. And look, honestly, it's only been in the last like month or two that I've started thinking maybe this really is a simulation. Just because the more I do thought exercises, probing at the edges of what would it mean for this to be built on a set of rules and why would it be built on a set of rules? And what built it on a set of rules? You just start asking things back recursively and look, I map to what I understand and since I understand simulations and video games, I map it to that. And so there could just be a fundamental flaw in my thinking and I'm perfectly happy with that.
- [30:46]
Kevin Rose
But
- [30:48]
Tom Bilyeu
it does get harder and harder for me to exempt myself from the likelihood that this actually is a simulation.
- [30:55]
Peter Diamandis
I believe it inherently and I can't prove it. And again, even though I believe doesn't change anything, I remember I had a. I was at years ago, I was at a birthday party that Elon had Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Elon and I are having a conversation before the falling out, having a conversation about whether we're living in a simulation. And I think, I don't know if it was Larry or Elon said, yeah, the only way we're going to find out is if you try and tamper with it and the system resets. Yeah, I mean it's fascinating. I wonder if this has been a subject conversation in ancient philosophical times as well. Have you ever seen any references to that? Plato's cave?
- [31:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, yeah, very much the same idea again, mapping to what he knew, he knew campfires and shadows and so two dimensions and three.
- [31:58]
Peter Diamandis
Yes, exactly.
- [31:59]
Tom Bilyeu
So that becomes the way that you think about it. But I, I think as people really begin to investigate the human mind, it is inevitable that you start going, hold on a second, you're seeing the world differently than me. And so then you go, wait a second, are either of us seeing the world the way that it actually is. And then once you understand that we're not. That we necessarily couldn't be, that my umvelt is different than a bat's umvelt, and therefore, we are going to perceive everything very differently. And then you start going, wait a second. We're perceiving the world instead of just encountering it as it actually is.
- [32:37]
Peter Diamandis
So the technology that's going to come to make a dent in that is going to be bci brain computer interface. Right. So if I'm able to connect my mind to your mind, I think there's going to be an interesting set of correlates. You know, can I. So there are dozens of companies right now working on. So you had 100 billion neurons in your brain, 100 trillion synaptic connections, and the neocortex, the top layer is your sensorium and your. Your homunculus of action and all your visual cortex, auditory cortex and such. And one can connect the digital signals in your brain or the electrical signals in your brain to electrodes and connect them to a computer. And those things are happening right now. You know, Elon's got his neural link. There's a company actually here called Paradromics which is doing that as well. There's a lot of amazing companies. And so we're going to start to be able to understand visually. One of my favorite recent AI blow your mind examples was a group took subjects and put them inside of a functional MRI machine, which is looking at blood flow going through different parts of the tissue in your brain. And the more the blood flow, the more the neurons are active because they're using more glucose and oxygen and so forth. And they took the output of the MRI and they fed it into stable diffusion, and they gave the subjects in the functional MRI machine an image to look at. Look at an image of an airplane. Look at it and think about that. And then they took the signals out of the FMRI and were able to see the person was looking at an airplane. That's crazy, right?
- [34:27]
Tom Bilyeu
And they could interpret the brain signal. Say this is what you're looking at.
- [34:30]
Peter Diamandis
Yes. Yo. Awesome.
- [34:32]
Tom Bilyeu
That's mind reading.
- [34:33]
Peter Diamandis
That's mind reading. Yes. And it's mind reading. And so we're heading in that direction.
- [34:39]
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- [35:08]
Peter Diamandis
And so one of the things I think about is you and I both are not a single living organism. All right, you have to think about that. We're a collection of 40 trillion human cells. 30 trillion if you're smaller, 50 trillion if you're bigger. And those human cells are each individual living organisms working together and also competing for resources. But the competing, or. Yes, and supporting each other in the, you know, distribution of resources. You also have more than those 40 trillion life forms in the form of bacteria and virus and fungi as an ecosystem in your body, but you're not. You know, we think of ourselves as Tom or Peter, but we're far more. I think we're heading towards a point where if I can connect my brain to the cloud and you can connect your brain to the cloud, and all of a sudden I've got godlike powers with a small G. I'm omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. I can know anything. I can think in Google. I can look through your eyes, you know, or through the eyes of someone watching a sunrise in Tokyo. It is. We're now a meta intelligence. We're at a new level of empathy and connection between humans. You know, I love Star Trek, as you well know. Are you Trekkie or Star Wars?
- [36:43]
Kevin Rose
Star Wars.
- [36:43]
Peter Diamandis
I'm so sorry for that. You're wrong. You picked the wrong. Pick the wrong part, but it's okay. You know, the only thing. And I, you know, the only thing that Roddenberry got wrong was the Borg. You know, the Borg are the, you know, the evil, you know, networked minds. But I think. I think we're going to head towards a level of consciousness on the planet. As we start to connect millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of individuals, I think we become conscious at yet another level. I call that a meta intelligence, and I think that's coming as well. Enabled by AI, enabled by this brain computer interface. You can imagine if I gave you the ability to connect your brain to the cloud and you plugged in for that moment and all of a sudden you could understand what you want. You knew anything you wanted. You were connected to this new vault of, you know, of infinite knowledge. And then I unplugged you, how would you feel? I think you'd feel so lonely and disconnected. So I think once you plug in, you know, this is more the Matrix than Not so we can go to one of your favorite genres, but I think that's coming enabled by AI. You know, let me go one other slight subject and then we can, you can take it back where you want. We just had visioneering at xprize. Xprize we hold an annual event called Visioneering where we brainstorm ideas and that would become great X prizes. And this past visioneering, we had a couple of good AI X prizes. One is AI for truth. When someone makes a statement, can you have an AI algorithm that's able very rapidly to say factual truth? Here's the roots of that. This is opinion or this is disinformation? I think that'd be very useful in our coming world. The other one, which was AI mediated communication between any two species.
- [39:05]
Salim Ismail
Whoa.
- [39:05]
Peter Diamandis
Right. Can I talk to whales or dolphins in a consistent, accurate two way fashion?
- [39:14]
Tom Bilyeu
That'd be nuts.
- [39:14]
Peter Diamandis
That would be amazing.
- [39:17]
Tom Bilyeu
I'd love that for my dog.
- [39:18]
Peter Diamandis
That would be a trip. I know.
- [39:20]
Kevin Rose
Be a trip.
- [39:21]
Peter Diamandis
It'd be take me out food, get me. But on a consistent basis. I mean, you can imagine if you could talk to whales and dolphins, they'd help you explore the oceans or talk to birds. There's a kid that's missing in the forest here. Help me find them, dude.
- [39:37]
Tom Bilyeu
So that's very interesting. And I know the way your brain works. And you take a very beautiful, optimistic look at that. It would be utterly fascinating. So killer whales are vicious. Vicious. And they will go eat a great white's liver just because they can. And they will toy with dolphins. There are dolphins that will kill other dolphins and they'll mess with them. Dolphins that try to have sex with humans. I mean, just on and on like it's crazy stories. And I have a feeling that were we to actually be able to communicate with animals, it may be a little more distressing than we want to believe. I read a story a long time ago and I did find this very interesting. This speaks to your interpretation of the Borg as being a misread. And it was these creatures that had these tails that had like these almost fiber optic tendrils. And when they would connect them.
- [40:31]
Peter Diamandis
Sounds like Avatar.
- [40:32]
Kevin Rose
Yes.
- [40:33]
Tom Bilyeu
I would be shocked if he hadn't read this story because it is very similar to that.
- [40:38]
Kevin Rose
But this was years ago.
- [40:39]
Tom Bilyeu
I read this probably 30 years ago, 35 years ago. And they would connect their tales and they would instantly know the entire history, emotional milu of the person they were connecting.
- [40:51]
Peter Diamandis
Amazing.
- [40:53]
Tom Bilyeu
And what was interesting was how once you could no longer lie or hide anything from anybody, there was There was a relaxed sort of acceptance.
- [41:04]
Peter Diamandis
This is who I am, like it or not.
- [41:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [41:07]
Peter Diamandis
This is who I am. You got your own bullshit, I've got mine. I mean, honestly. And when I think about it on a relationship side, and this is something that talked to Lisa more about the ability to be absolutely brutally honest about your feelings, about your desires, about everything you've ever done. I mean, how many people actually have people in their lives that know everything about you, where there's zero to hide? I mean, it's like. Like in a relationship and you look at a woman and go, wow, she's gorgeous. And you're willing to say that and. And. Or, you know, something that you were ashamed of having done, but everything is fully disclosed. I think that level of intimacy would be amazing. Amazing.
- [41:55]
Tom Bilyeu
It would be you. You. Oh, man.
- [41:58]
Kevin Rose
The.
- [41:58]
Tom Bilyeu
The symmetry. That would have to be there, though, because if there's even slight imbalance of.
- [42:03]
Peter Diamandis
Sure. And therefore a lot of relationships would not work. But when they do, click. And there's full disclosure, and your deepest likes, deepest fears are fully known to both sides. It is a level of complete honesty. And I mean, someone who knows you as well as you know yourself. I mean, that. I mean, we're going in a very different conversational subject, but I think that is a. That was something I would desperately love. And I have a few friends in my life where it's like they know almost everything possible. And it's not that I wouldn't disclose things to them, it's just we've never had those conversations. And those are the people closest to me. Right.
- [42:52]
Tom Bilyeu
For whatever dysfunction I have, only my wife knows me like that. I don't know why I. I don't
- [42:59]
Peter Diamandis
just share them with. Share it with me now. Right now.
- [43:01]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, there you go.
- [43:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Live. Live on camera.
- [43:03]
Peter Diamandis
And then you have a billion people know about it.
- [43:05]
Tom Bilyeu
The funny thing is that I don't actively hold things back. Like, I'm a pretty open book. But it is like, there's something about sharing your life with somebody where they see all the. Like, what do you like when you're sick? What do you like when something goes really well? When something goes really poorly. And there's. There's just too much intimacy for there to be any posturing whatsoever, because they just see you too often. Yeah. It's interesting.
- [43:32]
Peter Diamandis
So these are the things that I are going to enable. You know, imagine with this level of BCI where you can't lie. I mean, interesting, right? Because you could probably make up simulated truths that you honestly believe, and people do do that. Anyway, going back, where do you want to take this back to? Let's rewind the tape here.
- [43:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, so the thing that I want to know. So this is all very interesting to me in terms of where this goes and how far out it gets and it really does become quite fascinating. But right now there are tremendous opportunities for people that really understand what's going on. Obviously, bold capital, this is a big part of where you place your bets is do I understand a little bit more than other people where this is all going? So what, what is the right now, today bridge? What are the opportunities that somebody listening to this should understand? Whether it's AI, quantum computing, longevity, where are the big opportunities?
- [44:34]
Peter Diamandis
So I, I believe without question the two biggest business markets on the planet are AI and longevity. Right. If you think about, from a national standpoint, a national leader of a country should care about the health and the, the integral of intelligence over their country. If you could increase the intelligence of your nation by 20%. Right. Or the health of your nation by 20%. Massive. Right. Or in a company, increase the intelligence of your, of your, your workforce or the health of your workforce. These are huge levers to move. You know, I'm often keynoting inside of companies or YPO events or other, you know, about those two subjects. I mean that's my typical, like that's all that matters right now. AI and longevity. And, and I'll ask people in a, in a, you know, a wealthy group, individuals, honestly, how much of your capital would you give up for an extra 20 healthy years? And if they're honest about it, it's well over 50% of, of their, of you're going to spend it anyway at the end of your life.
- [45:48]
Salim Ismail
Yeah, right.
- [45:49]
Peter Diamandis
Trying to like deal with.
- [45:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Wouldn't you give a hundred percent?
- [45:52]
Peter Diamandis
I think people would, but then they say, well, I'm gonna leave it to my kids or going to leave it to my philanthropy or whatever the case might be.
- [45:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Hold on, hold on. I want to paint a scenario. You, you are before I, I am,
- [46:05]
Peter Diamandis
I am with you. I'm, you know, listen, I don't want
- [46:07]
Tom Bilyeu
to leave the money on their behalf. I want to understand this mind shocking to me, you were before a credible source. Let's call this credible source. God, just to make it easy. And God is like, hey bro, button on the left, you get 20 extra years, but you're going to give me every dime, all of your assets, everything. Yeah, button on the right, you die tomorrow, but you get to give your family all your assets.
- [46:34]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
- [46:35]
Tom Bilyeu
You're telling me that there are people that hit the button 100%.
- [46:38]
Peter Diamandis
Whoa. Because people want to leave a legacy. Why the hell do you give a billion dollars to Harvard? Do they really need another billion dollars? You know, you want a legacy there. People want to know that they're going to live their. Their legacy is going to live after them, whether it's in the form of their kids or the form of their name. And so, yeah, there's a balancing act. Maybe it's 20% that they would hold back.
- [47:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Those are not the buttons before you. There is no 20. There's all or nothing.
- [47:12]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. But you.
- [47:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow, okay. That's crazy to me.
- [47:16]
Peter Diamandis
And going back to your question, I think longevity is one of the largest business opportunities that's going to materialize.
- [47:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Take advantage of it. What. What are you doing to be ahead of the curve?
- [47:30]
Peter Diamandis
Well, building companies there in that. So Fountain Life is my biggest company. I'm building for a global footprint, for enabling everyone to have access to the best therapeutics and the best diagnostics. Right. The diagnostics are. Is there anything going on inside your body right now you need to know about? If there is, you want to know because you can take action. We find 2% of the people who go through Fountain Life have a. Cancer they don't know about. 2 1/2% have an aneurysm they don't know about. 14.4% have E. Metabolic disease, neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease. Something you need to take action on right away.
- [48:11]
Tom Bilyeu
And so the thesis there is your body no longer needs to be a black box.
- [48:16]
Peter Diamandis
Yes. The. The thesis is your body's amazingly good at hiding disease. Incredibly good.
- [48:21]
Tom Bilyeu
And you're better off confronting.
- [48:23]
Peter Diamandis
You're better off knowing as early as you can because you can do something about all of these things.
- [48:29]
Tom Bilyeu
And why now?
- [48:29]
Kevin Rose
What.
- [48:30]
Tom Bilyeu
What is.
- [48:30]
Peter Diamandis
Because. Because the tech is there to image at high fidelity without the false negatives. And the tech is there to understand what the data means. Right. So a friend of mine, super successful individual who I'm doing business with in. In Fountain Life, and, and. And he wanted to go through the experience. Goes through the experience. And we discovered two aneurysms in his brain.
- [48:56]
Salim Ismail
Wow.
- [48:57]
Peter Diamandis
Serious aneurysms. He's in surgery a week later, they're clipped and blocked, and he's fine. And that threat. But had he not. It was a ticking time bomb for him. Right. We all know people who have, oh, my God, they died in their sleep. Or they go to the hospital and the doctor says, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you got stage three or stage four, whatever is. It didn't happen that morning. It's been going on for some time. You just don't know how. So the stats are the following. 70% of people who have a heart attack had no previous symptoms, right? You don't detect cancer until it's stage three or four from a pain or something going on. It is a slow. Your body's amazingly good at hiding it. You don't develop a Parkinsonian tremor until 70% of substantia nigra neurons are gone. And so you need to look. And people say, I don't want to know. I say, of course you want to know as early as you can fully
- [50:03]
Tom Bilyeu
know, because there's now things you can
- [50:05]
Peter Diamandis
do about it, things you can do about it. For sure. Medicine has progressed incredibly well, and it's moving. And if you're wealthy, you want to know, because I'm going to fund the research to solve that thing, right? So in Fountain, the two questions is, is something going on, you know, about today? And if there isn't, fantastic. I go every year for my upload, and then I'm tested throughout the year on stuff that I'm incrementally improving. The second thing is, what are you likely to develop and how do we push that off? How do we solve that? How do we reduce your chance of heart neurovascular, whatever it might be? So that's what I'm building. I built a couple of companies. One in stem cells with Bob Hariri, who's a CEO there, called Cellularity, another one called Vaccinity, that's developing vaccines. So vaccines are amazing things. Your brain is the most complicated machine in the universe that we know of. Your immune system is the next. Your immune system is protecting you against infectious disease and against cancers.
- [51:06]
Salim Ismail
Right?
- [51:06]
Peter Diamandis
We're all developing cancers all the time. And your immune system, your natural killer cells, find those cancer cells because cells replicate a certain number called the hayflick limit, 50, 60 replications, and then they should have the decency to die. If they don't, they can become senile cells putting out inflammatory factors, or they can become cancer cells, immortal cells, and they grow. And your natural killer cells detect those cancer cells and zap them. But as you grow older, you have something called immuno exhaustion, your immune system starts to slow down and you don't detect it, and they can start to grow. And so if you can find cancers on mri, there are things called the grail tests, which take a liquid biopsy, blood biopsy, and Looking for cancer DNA in your bloodstream. And so you can do something about these now. So vaccines, that's where I was, I was talking about vaccines. So vaccines, we know about it from MRNA vaccines for, from, for Covid and such. But we can now develop vaccines to activate your immune system to fight cancer.
- [52:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Go attack that you can vaccinate against cancer.
- [52:28]
Peter Diamandis
There are cancer vaccines now being developed. The first one that was approved by the FDA was for melanoma which is one of the most deadliest cancers. One of my companies, Vaccinity has a vaccine in phase two for Parkinson's, going to phase three for Alzheimer's. We have a phase one asset in hypercholesteremia. So going a vaccine which goes, you vaccinate yourself, it activates your immune system to go and go after particular enzyme in the liver called PCSK9 which creates the bad cholesterol, LDL, low density lipoproteins. And that vaccine which you'd vaccinate yourself twice a year for two injections a year. Injections might be 20 bucks, 50 bucks basically drops your cholesterol level down. So I have hypercholesteremia in my family. My dad had very high cholesterol, whole slew of medical stuff. So I'm very sensitive to it. I don't want to do statins. I take a very small amount of statin for an anti inflammatory effect. That's a different story. But I take something called a, I take something called Repatha which is a, a antibody that's manufactured in a vat and I get a few mls of this and I have to inject it every two weeks. That antibody goes to that PCSK9 enzyme in my liver and blocks it from producing LDL. Now it cost me $10,000 a year and I have to do it every two weeks. But it drops my LDL level down into a beautiful green zone. I'm using these antibodies produced in a manufacturing plant and shipped to me. What we built in vaccinity was a vaccine that I inject and it causes my own immune system to manufacture that same antibody for free to block that PCSK9 enzyme. That makes sense.
- [54:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes. And you're doing that now?
- [54:48]
Peter Diamandis
Yes, I'm not. Well, we're developing the vaccine right now. The first results were amazing. We're going from phase one into phase two. Long story short, the ability there are these monoclonal antibodies which are the top selling drugs and it's using these antibodies which are proteins to go and block a certain process. We talked about that a little bit earlier, but they're expensive. But the idea now is instead of manufacturing these monoclonal antibodies in a vat, in a pharma manufacturing plant, can you just teach your own immune system to produce that same antibody? And that's the future of vaccines. Your vaccine, the vaccine is playing your immune system like an app.
- [55:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, let me see if I can boil that down to a thesis. So for somebody that is trying to figure out where the opportunities are right now, because we're living in this hyper disruptive time, I want people to be aware of the ways in which things are being disrupted so that they can go in and take advantage of there's.
- [56:00]
Peter Diamandis
So yeah, okay, so I'm going, we're going back to the investment side here. So listen, we're in the middle of a biotech winter right now. Just to be clear, there was. If you look at all the biotech companies out there, they're significantly depressed. So if you're playing the public markets and you find companies that have good cash position and have strong potential drug candidates, it's a great time to buy because the stocks are all like 10 or 100 fold depressed. So I just put that out there, one second. I think health, I think the medical system, the healthcare system is so broken it's pathetic. I think we're gonna, I think it's gonna crumble under its own weight. And so we're gonna reinvent how we deliver healthcare. I think at home you're going to all be, we're all going to be monitored. So I'm wearing a continuous glucose monitor right now. I've got my OURA ring, I've got my Apple watch, there's going to be a whole slew of wearables. All of that wearable data is going to monitor me 24 7. So one of the things we do at Fountain as well is we bring in all your wearable data. So in between your annual uploads, which are deep dives into you, we're monitoring what's going on. So we're going to see, are you
- [57:17]
Tom Bilyeu
making recommendations based on what you see?
- [57:20]
Peter Diamandis
Absolutely, absolutely. So for supporting your sleep, for supporting your diet. So my, my continuous glucose monitor, right. And there's companies like Levels or there's Free Libre, there's others that measure how your body reacts to eating those peanuts or that Snickers bar and how quickly your blood sugar elevates and how quickly it goes back down. And based upon that, you know, going into pre diabetic or becoming a diabetic, your glucose is, is a poison in the body. I don't know if people realize that our bodies were never designed to eat as much sugar as we do, and glucose sticks to proteins. And then your immune system sees that glycosylated protein as a foreign and attacks it and causes inflammation. So a lot of cardiovascular disease and neuroinflammatory disease is a result of people's diet. But you don't talk about that. No one talks about that.
- [58:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, So I was going somewhere slightly different when I said thesis. So I don't necessarily mean investing, but I mean, if I can create an overarching thesis on what it is that links all this stuff together. So your interpretation of where we are in the world right now, as I understand it, is your body no longer needs to be a black box.
- [58:52]
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
- [58:53]
Tom Bilyeu
We now have the imaging capacity to see what's going on. We have the ability to do something about it. There are therapeutics that are advancing now very rapidly.
- [59:02]
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
- [59:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Where you can leverage the body's own systems in intentionally triggered fashion, whether that's through vaccines, whether that's through some other mechanism. But we're getting. We have a deep enough understanding of the body's mechanisms that we're able to trigger those and get them to go in and clean up, whether it's LDL or something else.
- [59:26]
Peter Diamandis
And people need to realize that your health is something you can do something about. And if I think about having a longevity mindset. And what does a longevity mindset mean? It means, I believe, and I do believe this, that this next decade, we're going to see incredible progress. And 10 years from now, we're going to have the ability to live an extra 20 healthy years.
- [59:55]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you think that progress is going to be in the ability to manipulate the immune system?
- [60:00]
Peter Diamandis
So I think it's a lot of what we're doing on this XPRIZE we just announced. Right. So we get $101 million from HEVolution, from Chip Wilson, who is the founder of Lululemon, who put up, you know, 26 million plus another $10 million purse for his disease called FSHD. It's a muscular dystrophy. And we're asking teams to reverse the functional loss in muscle, immune, and cognition.
- [60:30]
Salim Ismail
Right.
- [60:31]
Peter Diamandis
So you're moving well. You've got great immunity and you're thinking clearly. And so over the next seven years, we're going to have incredible progress in those areas. That's one of the. I don't call it. It's one of the thrusts that I'm focused on moving the needle forward and so if you believe that we're going to have this, this progress, your longevity mindset needs to be, I'm going to do whatever it takes to live long enough to intercept these other breakthroughs. So I arrive at this point in reasonably good health. So for me, that's the thesis that we're going to have these breakthroughs from biotech, from cellular medicines, from gene therapies, from CRISPR technologies, from all of these things, from AI. And if I'm able to keep myself in good enough health, I'm going to intercept these and it's going to buy me the next 20 years. And during that time they're going to be additional breakthroughs. It'll buy me the next 20 years. If you want that, if you love life and you want to see what's coming in the next century, there's good reason for you to take care of yourself.
- [61:47]
Tom Bilyeu
What does that look like, taking care
- [61:50]
Peter Diamandis
of yourself right now? There are things that people need to be doing and I just, you know, I wrote a book that just came out called Longevity, your practical playbook. I've, you know, I just wrote a book last year with Tony Robbins called Life Force. We did a conversation about that. It's a great book and it's 700 pages and it's amazing. And very few people get through a 700 page book. So I wanted to write a very practical book that looks at and says this is what I'm doing and this is what I think is science backs and I put it into a few very simple chapters. Number one, what to do about diet. Because there are fundamental things we can come back to that. Sleep, exercise, like the most important thing, right?
- [62:46]
Tom Bilyeu
You think exercise is more important than diet.
- [62:48]
Peter Diamandis
And I'll come back, come back to that. So they're all important, you know, diet, sleep, exercise, mindset, super important. Not dying from something stupid which I call doing your upload and fountain like knowing what's going on inside your body and then meds and supplements. So the book looks at that. I actually, I made a reduction, that was the word, a reduction of that into what I call my, my practical, my, you know, Peter's longevity practices, which I have a copy over there which is free for people. It's a 2530 page. Like this is what I'm doing and why@diamandis.com diamandis.com longevity and you can get my book there. You can get this book, this PDF download and it's, it's very definitive. So listen, there's no one diet for everybody. I've been a vegan. I, I've been, you know, a keto diet. I'm mostly Mediterranean. But the things I've discovered is, number one, sugar is a poison, minimizing your sugar and, and why whole plants are critically important. Even the order in which you eat your food matters. Like if you're given, like you go out to for dinner at a restaurant, when they bring you the bread and the wine, ask them to bring it back during the dinner course. If you're going to eat the bread, at least dip it in olive oil first to burn glucose. Not spiking your glucose immediately. Right. Which is the worst thing you can do. It really drives you to.
- [64:21]
Tom Bilyeu
So why bring it back? Is it eating proteins first?
- [64:23]
Peter Diamandis
So what you want to do is on your plate, eat your vegetables first. If it's asparagus, if it's broccoli, if it's a salad. The fiber slows down your digestion. Eat your protein next and then eat your carbs last. It slows down your sugar spike. It actually allows you to absorb the best nutrients out of your plate of food first. So even making that small, you'll lose weight, you'll get better nutrition, and you'll actually feel full having eaten the best stuff first. Right. So it's a really small trick that I'm just like, you know, once I learned that, it's like, okay, I need to tell everybody about that. Just small. The order in which you eat your food matters. Right. So there's a whole bunch about diet there. Exercise is probably the single most important thing. I have stepped up my exercise from like two or three days a week to five days a week.
- [65:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Your physique has changed dramatically.
- [65:27]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I've added muscle. It's my goal to add muscle. Muscle is one of the most important pro longevity parts of your life.
- [65:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Are you doing trt?
- [65:38]
Peter Diamandis
I am. I do take a certain amount of testosterone and it's simply. I don't actually feel different. I am taking a small amount of testosterone simply to support muscle.
- [65:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you base it on blood levels?
- [65:52]
Peter Diamandis
I do.
- [65:53]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you go?
- [65:54]
Peter Diamandis
I'm staying in like 800 range and sometimes up to a thousand. But does it increase your libido? It doesn't. It doesn't hit my pack. It doesn't touch my libido. My libido is fine, but I don't feel if I'm off it or on. Doesn't make a difference. And you know, people who've got, you know, I don't think I, I exhibit grouchy old Men syndrome. So I'm, you know, I'm like the most positive person I know.
- [66:21]
Tom Bilyeu
No doubt.
- [66:23]
Peter Diamandis
But I'm using it specifically for supporting muscle mass. But then I'm doing 150 grams of protein a day. I'm having creatine, I'm taking amino acid supplementation. I'm focused on adding muscle mass. As you grow older, adding muscle becomes harder and harder.
- [66:37]
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
- [66:38]
Peter Diamandis
And one of the unfortunate mechanisms that a lot of people die as they go into their 70s and 80s, I'm 62 right now is you fall because of muscle weakness. You break a pelvis or a hip, you end up in the hospital. It's painful to breathe, you get a pneumonia and you're down for the count. Right. It's happened to my dad. Happens a lot of people. And their survival rate post a hip or pelvis fracture if you're over 70 is like really low. So you don't want to do that. You want to maintain muscle mass. Also maintains your stem cell population and your blood in your muscles. So there's an interesting stat. I memorized this one because it was important. If you're over 60 and you can. Exercise doesn't have to be super intense, but some resistance exercises can be with or without weights twice a week. It reduces your all cause mortality by 50% and reduces your chance of cancer by threefold.
- [67:40]
Kevin Rose
Whoa.
- [67:40]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Your body, the signals you give your body from exercise and moving is that I'm still useful. I still want to be here. Right. The other thing and the mental game is don't retire. You know, Google the correlation between retirement and death. It's like five years. It's really so, you know, when you retire and you don't feel purpose in your life. You know, I'm going to read something from this is the Longevity practices book. And there's a whole section on mindset here. And I just think it's really so important. So I'm going to read this to you. It says in a study of 69,744 women and 1429 men, this is unusual because it's more women than men. Published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. You know, super high end peer reviewed publication, it was found that optimistic people lived as much as 15% longer than pessimists. 15.
- [68:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow.
- [68:45]
Peter Diamandis
Pretty amazing. Your mindset matters and you know, making use of your body and being out there and having purpose and all of these things are subtle clues. Right. We all know people that very close to their husband or wife and their spouse dies and Then they die weeks later. Right, here's another. Here's another story here. One of my favorite stories illustrating the power of mind over a lifespan comes from the annals of American history. As it turns out, in an extraordinary demonstration of the will to live, two of America's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both willed themselves to live long enough to see the 50th anniversary of. Of the Declaration of Independence.
- [69:32]
Salim Ismail
Wow.
- [69:33]
Peter Diamandis
Even though in the early 1800s the average lifespan was only 44 years old, Jefferson, who was then 83, and Adams, who was 90, made it. Made it to July 4, 1826, both dying on that exact date, the 50th anniversary of the nation's founding.
- [69:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow.
- [69:53]
Peter Diamandis
Amazing.
- [69:53]
Tom Bilyeu
I didn't know that.
- [69:54]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I love that story. Having purpose in life, being optimistic, making use of your body, all of these things are fundamental. And when I think about a longevity mindset, it is really, you know, I live with this every day. I care about this every day. I am. I think this is the most exciting time ever in human history to be alive with what's going on and opening up the space frontier with.
- [70:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Because of the rate of change, because
- [70:22]
Peter Diamandis
of the rate of change, because of the rate of potential. It's like an infinite, you know, I mean, if you were born a hundred years ago, and every year, right at my Abundance360 summit, I look back a hundred years and I look at like, what was life like a hundred years ago? And what was the rate of innovation 100 years ago? And the numbers and the examples are crazily slow. And I don't remember 18, 1923. I remember 1922. There were seven breakthroughs in that year. I'm not like seven in a week or seven in a month. It was seven in the entire year. And I searched everywhere. Patent filings, headlines, write ups. And so it was like. It was like the water ski was invented. The mechanic, a mechanical, mechanical garage door opener. A retractable roof for the Ford Model T Vegemite was on the list. I mean, I was searching for stuff. I was searching for stuff.
- [71:30]
Tom Bilyeu
One of the seven is Vegemite.
- [71:32]
Peter Diamandis
A blender. A blender for making malts. And it was like the pace of change was so slow. And we're living in a world today where there's like massive breakthroughs in, you know, every hour of the day.
- [71:47]
Tom Bilyeu
It's a rate of change, though, that I think now is giving people anxiety. How do you, how do you help people navigate that?
- [71:56]
Peter Diamandis
Because I think that the ability. I define entrepreneurs as people who find problems and solve problems. And I think entrepreneurs are more empowered than ever before to solve problems. And that, that they are entrepreneurs are in our world creating a better and more capable world. I mean, I think we take for granted the fact that, you know, on our phone we've got what we would have spent tens of millions of dollars if it was even possible 20 years ago for two way free video conferencing, right? Every, every game, every book, every piece of music accessible for free. And we forget the incredible world we live in. I think people who are more in teaching meditation and spirituality are going to help people deal with the, with the anxiety. But I want folks to realize the magical universe they're living in. You know, I think about creating a world in which every mom knows her kids has access to the best healthcare, education, all the food, water, energy. This is the world of abundance. When I first wrote Abundance with Steven Kotler 12 years ago, I talked about creating a world not of luxury, but a world of possibility. And I still believe that. And there's no velocity switch, there's no on off switch to this technology. It's happening. So what do you dream about? What do you wish you had? What do you want to do? I mean, you can put it all away and go live in the forest. And people will. And people will. But most choose not to.
- [73:48]
Kevin Rose
I am very much. What do they call that where materialist. Like it's all cause and effect. The odds that our sense of. That I control my life is probably an illusion. And yeah, that just all makes sense to me. Like if you had a computer that could track every atom since the beginning of time, that you'd be able to predict where we're going to be in 10 years and you'd be able to replay the universe all the way back to the Big Bang. That just makes sense to me. And that doesn't diminish my sense of awe in the slightest. Like I look at.
- [74:20]
Peter Diamandis
And by the way, I asked the question, if you knew with certainty that you were living in a simulation, would it change anything? No.
- [74:30]
Kevin Rose
And the answer is no A, no B. So you were talking about Project Kaizen before we started rolling. That's its premise is that this is a simulation and it doesn't matter. It's still all the same.
- [74:43]
Salim Ismail
So if I could finish that story with this weird coincidence. I got to a point about five, seven years ago where I was having not this insane kind of coincidence used to happen about once a year in my life. Started happening quarterly and then it started happening every two weeks. And I Can barely process one and the next ridiculous coincidence on me. And I was freaking out because I was really messing with things. So I have a cousin who's done 40 years of Taoist meditation in the woods, etc. So I said to her, she's my resident understanding the universe person. So I said, help me with this. She's like, well, listen to me for a bit. She goes, well, duh. You've told the universe you're ready for anything, they'll give you everything. I'm like, wait, what? She goes, you have to come to an agreement with the energies in the universe to only give it to you when you're ready for it. I'm like, where's the manual for that? So she coached me on this. And you can do this if you did it at the fully reductionist level. It's creative visualization. You visualize what you want and things can happen, et cetera. And we all do that. You do that. That's what the MTP is all about. You program yourself and your surroundings, your subconscious for the outcomes. You. And then those things happen.
- [75:52]
Peter Diamandis
But. There's a but. But those outcomes occur to a large degree because I'm outwardly communicating my massive transformative purpose. I'm telling the world those people who gravitate to it are coming to me and they're bringing things to me that are in line with that mtp. It's not like I'm just meditating on in silence and the world is changing.
- [76:13]
Salim Ismail
But what you're actually doing is you're
- [76:15]
Peter Diamandis
programming reality or I'm programming how I deal with reality.
- [76:20]
Salim Ismail
Both.
- [76:20]
Peter Diamandis
Right. Reality is happening. And again, a mindset is how I deal with opportunity or scarcity. Someone comes to me with something that someone would be scared of and I'm like, excited about it. And I go in a different course than the other person.
- [76:35]
Kevin Rose
So I didn't know you'd done psychedelics. What was your response? So you guys have both done it, I assume.
- [76:40]
Peter Diamandis
I went into a psychedelics not for joy or pleasure, but with shaman guiding. And I have done ayahuasca number of times. I've done a combination of psilocybin and mdma, but for me it was my DMT journeys that were the most significant. Have you done dmt?
- [77:04]
Kevin Rose
No, I haven't done any. I've microdosed psilocybin to virtually no effect.
- [77:08]
Peter Diamandis
So the. The dmt, which is also called the toad or bufo, dimethyltryptophan, I think is dimethyltryptamine. Triptamine was Extraordinarily compelling. And it is a dissolution of the ego and a connection with the universe that lets you know that love is a pervasive force and we're all connected in that regard. And that I had my most significant visualization about. If you asked me the question, what do you think happens after we're alive, after we die? That was my first of all. It got rid of the fear of death 100%, which is probably the most extraordinary because you realize everything is connected. Everything is connected and we're just part of the universe and it's a transitory. So I want you to imagine this is the visualization I had, which gives me goosebumps still to this day. I'm coming out of my journey in these DMT journeys are very short, 20 minutes thereabouts, unless you're selim, because they last longer there. But let me finish. So I'm seeing this sea of energy, just like a frothing sea of infinite energy, a plane of energy in every direction. And I see coming out of the sea of energy to double helices. And they come out of the energy and they're there and then they go back into the energy. And that was it. And it was the realization. I can see it like it was yesterday. It's a realization of this infinity of creation and energy and life emerges from it, consciousness emerges from it, and then re enters it. I can, you know, listen, this is my mind giving it meaning. We are meaning making machines.
- [79:07]
Salim Ismail
But so let me. So you've had that. You're just kind of rationalizing it in your previous experience. That's fine, that's fine. But let me give you, tell you why I got excited by this whole world. 2012. We had a lecturer at Singularity, I think it was Christisharm. And what he'd been doing was doing a whole bunch of clinical trials with people taking different dosages of MDMA, psilocybin, et cetera, and putting them through an FMRI machine. So in the 60s, when Timothy Lurie and all these guys were taking drugs, they had no idea what, they were just chucking it down, right? But now we know exactly that this dosage substance of substance A will do this to neural circuit B and know exactly the emphasis and how much of an impact it'll have, et cetera. And I found that fascinating because now we have a feedback loop. What got me interested in dmt.
- [79:56]
Kevin Rose
Feedback loop, to what end?
- [79:57]
Salim Ismail
Well, because now you can see what neural circuits are being amplified or implied impact. And you can now play with it.
- [80:03]
Kevin Rose
Okay, So I have to ask then, so knowing how you're creating that state by manipulating certain neurons in your brain, how do you see an allergy or a scar?
- [80:16]
Salim Ismail
I don't know that. I wish I did. I don't. But it's fascinating that that's there at the numbers that it's there. If it happened three, four times, you go, ah, three, four times, 3,500 times. I gotta start looking at that. And that's just the sheer numbers compel you to look at it a little more deeply. But so for me, let's look at what DMT does. Dmt, what it does is suppress the parietal lobe, which is where your sense of self sits. When you can take a dosage of it, you suppress that parietal lobe and you are now free to explore the higher realms of your consciousness that you didn't have access to before.
- [80:52]
Kevin Rose
So when DMT is going, is that all that's happening is are there any areas that are more active or is it literally just shutting off the sense of self?
- [81:00]
Salim Ismail
Unclear, but it seems the primary function is that it reduces the activity in the parietal lobe.
- [81:06]
Kevin Rose
I'm so fascinated by that.
- [81:08]
Salim Ismail
And then you start looking at other areas. And now what's really interesting to me on top of that is it turns out there's lots of old practices. Whirling dervishes, when they do their Turkish spinning, end up with a DMT release. They now know that DMT is a natural. DMT is natural. DMT is naturally occurring in your brain. It gets released twice in your life, once at birth, once at death. So when people have a near death experience, they see the white light, that's DMT releasing in the brain. Interesting. So now they've found religious experiences, almost all religious experiences are essentially you work the physiology of the body to a point where you have a DMT release. Tantra and Kundalini work results in that they take ground energy, lift it through your body and you end up with a dmt.
- [81:52]
Peter Diamandis
I don't take the DMT journey journey lightly at all. It's one of the most insightful and again, I experienced it with reverence and awe and as a means to explore myself in the universe in a different way. And I'm very thankful for it.
- [82:14]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, I'm very intrigued. I ask about this a lot and
- [82:18]
Peter Diamandis
by the way, I got to a point after it, I said, I'm just going to share openly. I don't plan to run for president and I don't care what anybody thinks about it. It was critically important to me.
- [82:29]
Salim Ismail
Yeah, it's beautiful. You met Michael Janssen a couple of days ago. So one of the most fascinating things about him. He's one of the most present people I've ever met. And I said, how do you maintain this? You have this incredible ability, just let things go, not worry about stuff. Things happen. Everything just passes through him and it doesn't stick. It's amazing. He just releases instantly. And he couldn't answer. And I kept wanting to pull it out. And he goes, oh, I've done a hero dose a few times. I go, hero dose. So normal dose, I guess, is 100 milligrams of psilocybin. A hero dose is when you do like 5 grams. It's like a factory reset on your nervous system. I'm like, holy crap, you've done that. He goes, I do it every year. And so all of cognitive biases that he may have built up, et cetera, are constantly getting released. And therefore he operates in this unbelievably present form. I think that's just amazing. And I'm completely impressed by the younger generation microdosing all the time.
- [83:23]
Peter Diamandis
One of the conversations I've been having at home recently is the human species waking up, right? You've heard of these conversations, Sam Harris and all.
- [83:34]
Kevin Rose
I was going to ask you guys if you've heard him describe his heroic dose.
- [83:38]
Peter Diamandis
And so when we talk about becoming conscious at a species level in the next foreseeable future, one of the questions that Kristen asked was, are we becoming conscious before AI becomes conscious? So this is an interesting conversation.
- [84:00]
Kevin Rose
That would be. I mean, it would be very interesting. I don't know if I can imagine an entire societal level awakening. But certainly as humans continue to progress, as we are able to share ideas so much faster in the same way that culture has stacked on the technological side, if it stacks on the insight
- [84:24]
Peter Diamandis
side, well, imagine having a brain computer interface connection to the cloud along with a billion other people and sharing one's thoughts. I call this the meta intelligence, where we become conscious on a large level, right? You and I and Salim are all collections of 40 trillion human cells. You're not a single life form. You are 40 trillion human cells and then trillions of bacteria, viri, fungi, and so forth. But you operate as one, right? And so are we going to become conscious yet on another level, to bring
- [84:59]
Salim Ismail
it back to exponential organizations, a traditional 20th century organization we would think of as unconscious. It's trundling along, trying to get profits, et cetera. And an exo is a Very conscious organization.
- [85:12]
Kevin Rose
What makes it conscious?
- [85:13]
Salim Ismail
Mtp. It's a massive purpose. Plus it's constantly sensing with a feedback loop. It's constantly experimenting. It's allowing its people to operate in a decentralized, autonomous way to make decisions on their own. It's like an amoeba moving around, sensing the world and little by little evolving.
- [85:31]
Peter Diamandis
So there's. I want to bring this back because I really want the community here to hear this and I want to use impact theory as the example here. So there are 10 attributes that make an exponential organization. They have the acronym scale and ideas. And if we could, I just want to tick off the ones that you hit. So let's begin.
- [85:58]
Salim Ismail
Staff on demand.
- [85:59]
Peter Diamandis
So you hire people, use staff on demand.
- [86:01]
Kevin Rose
We do a bit, but I actually don't love that. It was one of the things in your book I want to talk about. So okay. Staff on demand. Yes, we do.
- [86:08]
Peter Diamandis
Okay.
- [86:09]
Salim Ismail
Second, Community. Yes, very.
- [86:11]
Peter Diamandis
I mean, community is massive for you, right?
- [86:14]
Salim Ismail
Third, AI and algorithms. Yes, Aggressively, aggressively. Fourth, leveraging other people's assets.
- [86:20]
Kevin Rose
Don't know what you mean by that.
- [86:21]
Salim Ismail
Cloud computing.
- [86:22]
Kevin Rose
Yes.
- [86:23]
Peter Diamandis
You don't have computers, servers in your closet that you're using?
- [86:28]
Kevin Rose
We do have some of that, but not nearly as much as we leverage the cloud.
- [86:31]
Salim Ismail
The prototype there is Airbnb. That entire business model is tapping into other people's bedrooms, making them available. And the fifth one in scale is engagement, gamification, incentive Prizes, which is Web3. It's your whole thing. Right? You were like a master of that. So those are the five externalities and exos. Use one or more of them, allows them to keep a very small resource footprint and then scale very quickly. TED uses community very effectively, for example. Then there's five internal mechanisms that allow you to manage culture and drive the dashboard and the control framework of the organization. The first is interfaces to those externalities. So think about Uber's interface with its drivers or Apple's interface with its app store developers. It's an automated API driven interface that allows you to programmatically manage the abundance on the outside and then add value to it. The second one is dashboards and this is real time business metrics to track what's happening in the.
- [87:23]
Peter Diamandis
And I assume you use dashboards left, right and center.
- [87:26]
Kevin Rose
Not as much as we should, but for our funnels.
- [87:28]
Salim Ismail
Yes, for your funnels, sure. And then okrs for team performance and team management, we found. So those are dashboards. The E is experimentation, which is lean startup thinking. Constantly testing assumptions, nonstop running of experiments and the culture of risk Taking inside the organization, constantly testing the edges and seeing what works, what doesn't work, etc.
- [87:47]
Peter Diamandis
Etc.
- [87:48]
Salim Ismail
The a is autonomy, decentralizing decision making and allowing people to self select what they want to work on as much as possible.
- [87:55]
Peter Diamandis
Which is one of the hardest things for a CEO or an entrepreneur to do is say, listen, here's our mission. Our mission is 10 million viewers, whatever it is, doing this and this and this. We want to give you the authority and autonomy to go and work on projects that are aligned with our mtp.
- [88:15]
Salim Ismail
Go. Google does this a bit. The master of this. I should tell this quick story. There's a Chinese appliance manufacturer called Haier H A I E R. They make like 55 million fridges and ovens here.
- [88:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Jesus.
- [88:28]
Salim Ismail
Yeah. There's a huge company and 80,000 people operating in a classic pyramid form. Command and control. Hierarchical as heck. CEO one day decided, can't meet my corporate goals with this structure. Blows it up. Turns 80,000 people into 2,000 teams of about 40 people each. Each team has a P and L target. Each team elects their own leader. And most insane, each team decides to do whatever they want to do. Now you go to any business school in the world and say, I want to make 55 million fridges. And they'll tell you you need a ton of centralized demand forecasting, inventory management, supply chain, da da da da. Turns out you don't. These literally these 2000 teams work autonomously like a beehive. Every team is deciding what they want.
- [89:11]
Kevin Rose
How do they decide what team keep?
- [89:13]
Salim Ismail
They don't. The team decide on their own. You can't get fired if your team doesn't meet its P and L targets. You have an issue. And the way they meet their P and L targets is they work on a product and the products are. The revenues are pooled against that product. So when they want to.
- [89:27]
Kevin Rose
I literally can't imagine this.
- [89:28]
Salim Ismail
There's a whole book. There's a whole book written on this. It's an amazing case study.
- [89:32]
Kevin Rose
What's the book called?
- [89:33]
Salim Ismail
I'll get you the title. The case study is higher. And when they want to vote on decide what feature should we go in a new fridge, they vote. And 2000 teams that are constantly outwardly facing with vendors, suppliers, partners, customers come up with a much better decision than some product strategy team hold up with market forecasts and research groups. Right? And so GE Appliances actually gave up and sold that whole division too higher because they couldn't compete. Because you can do so much more with a decentralized Organization. We're not quite ready for daos, but we will be over time. And you're kind of building one in its not.
- [90:11]
Kevin Rose
I'm violently not building a dao.
- [90:13]
Salim Ismail
Well think about what you're doing right with your Metaverse environment. Anybody can come in self provision and play in that environment.
- [90:21]
Kevin Rose
They can play in that environment. They're certainly trying to build things so that they can build in that environment. But that's a platform play like I get platforms. And so our fantasy would be on a long enough timeline where like the YouTube of video games.
- [90:36]
Salim Ismail
That's right.
- [90:36]
Kevin Rose
So people can come in and build. We could go down a rabbit hole about how we're going to be different than Roblox. But we have a vision but leveraging some of that. But this is like I literally wrote before you started talking. The thing I want to talk about is how you leverage autonomy. So the way that we think about it at Impact theory is I want people to be able to make decisions in their area like okay, your function is art, for instance. I'm not going to come in and turn you into a pair of hands. I want you to think for yourself. You understand our objectives, go do the art thing. But we set the objectives as a company, then the department sets their own objectives and then the individual works with their supervisor to set it. But this is not, hey, you're in a team of 40 and like I hope you meet your P and L. Like I can't fathom how you get to that. I have to imagine that this is never going to be the standard.
- [91:27]
Salim Ismail
It's non trivial to implement but when you can implement, it's very powerful. Let me give you two examples of that bridge the spectrum. One is if you're an employee and you join Google as a new hire, okay, you're not placed on a team. What they do is go, you've got six months, float around, meet different teams, work with them, da da da da da.
- [91:45]
Kevin Rose
How do they decide to hire you?
- [91:47]
Salim Ismail
You have to hire, they hire.
- [91:49]
Kevin Rose
Basically that's it.
- [91:51]
Salim Ismail
And we know we need Python developers, so hire the Python developer. Now do you work on Gmail, do you work on Google Maps, et cetera? What you do is you float around as that developer or, or front end person or designer, whatever your skill set is. And you float around, you meet the different teams, you see where you have chemistry. You go, I really love what they're doing on Google Maps team. Seems like me, they go, sure, come and join us. Now if after six months you haven't found a Team, bigger conversation. You probably don't fit there for some reason. But if you found a team after choosing over six months, all of a bunch of different options, you're probably where you really, really like being.
- [92:23]
Peter Diamandis
Right?
- [92:23]
Salim Ismail
So now off they go. So that's one example of implementing this in the new hire model. The full extent of autonomy. I'll give you the example of Tangerine bank in Canada, which used to be ING Direct. So they operate on this fully autonomous basis. They have no CEO, no reporting lines, no management teams, no middle management, no meetings of any kind. They literally operate on a beehive where each employee self selects as to what they want to do. Now you're a regulated bank. Canadian banks are very regulated. What happens is when the marketing guy goes, oh, let's do an online promotion because he's self selected, wants to focus on that, and they launch an online promotion. Everybody floods to the phone banks and helps out getting phone calls. When it's regulatory reporting time, they all flood to the regulatory systems and fill out all the paperwork to fill out all the forms to show the Canadian government that they're viable. The most amazing example I've seen of this is Valve Software out of Seattle. That makes the steam platform about 400 people. Same ethos, no CEO reporting lives. So if I spot a bug in the software, I grab three people, we go fix the bug, we disband. Every employee self selects what they want to work on. And it sounds completely like a joke, but they get more revenue per employee than Microsoft. They make a fortune. So it's very doable. You have to start it. You have to start it with that principle in mind.
- [93:42]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, it's like physics. Something a particle born above the speed of light can't go slower and below the speed of light can't exceed the speed of light. I think you have to. This is founding starting conditions for your company.
- [93:53]
Kevin Rose
Yeah. I don't know what I find harder to believe, reincarnation or that you can do this. But look, I don't shut down emotionally. I'm very open. I just. Everything that I know with perhaps just my limited skill set, that is a recipe for chaos. Or you have to hit a certain size. When I think about Google being able to do that, there's no way that you can start like that. I get how you can get so big, you have so much surplus money that you can let a person wander around for six months with no like real specific job or that you can hire somebody just, oh, you know, Python. And you're smart, great.
- [94:29]
Salim Ismail
You know Valve Software is about 400 people. It's not that they're also the company.
- [94:32]
Kevin Rose
When you said oh, we're doing a case study on Valve in the book, I was like, oh, you mean the company that couldn't get half life three or two whichever it was out for 15 years. I was like yeah, I'm not surprised. But then you said that they make more per employee.
- [94:46]
Peter Diamandis
So I was like ah, fuck.
- [94:48]
Salim Ismail
So directed execution turns out to be non trivial in these organizations. It's like dao governance. Right. It's an oxymoron. It's very hard to to Right. So but in terms of resilience, unbelievable. Because you cannot break that organization because everybody's self selecting. When there's a problem, they naturally find the problem, they go fix it.
- [95:09]
Peter Diamandis
I think you need to hire for that. People need to absolutely have to hire.
- [95:14]
Salim Ismail
You can't hire. You know, Tony Hsieh tried for three years to implement that into Zappos and it just failed. You can't bring it into. This is why we say when you're an existing organization and you want to turn into an exo, so don't go through the nightmare of trying to transform yourself, create new exos on the edge and let those slowly become the new gravity.
- [95:32]
Kevin Rose
I want to see example of the company. Maybe it was the washing machine company or the fridge company, but they literally were like, oh, we're firing everybody. And then a third of them left and they restarted with 2/3 and they did just fine.
- [95:46]
Salim Ismail
Zappos did that and so did Haier.
- [95:48]
Kevin Rose
It was hired that in the in
- [95:50]
Salim Ismail
fact Zappos, when Tony Hsaith first suggests, he voluntarily said who wants to move to this model? And everybody was like yeah, this is crazy, we're not doing that. So then he went, we strongly suggest that you move to this model. Then finally he said if you don't move to that model, you're fired. And even then it failed very hard to implement into a legacy organization.
- [96:08]
Peter Diamandis
Did we finish the attributes?
- [96:10]
Salim Ismail
Oh, so autonomy. And the final one is social technologies. Asana, slack, zoom, chatter, yammer, et cetera, et cetera.
- [96:17]
Peter Diamandis
It allows you to glue people together peer to peer.
- [96:20]
Salim Ismail
We have really good evidence today that peer to peer collaboration is much more powerful than traditional top down command and control thinking.
- [96:28]
Kevin Rose
So what do you guys think about what Elon is doing at Twitter? He recently was interviewed and he said it is immoral to work from home. And I was like, wow.
- [96:39]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. We had this conversation yesterday about listen, I miss having an office setting. I do. And I miss and I. I recognize and realize that the intensity of the amount of work that gets done when a group is together is substantially higher than alone. But, you know, the flip side of that is the geographic arbitrage that I can get access to talent that I might not otherwise get to. Move to Santa Monica.
- [97:09]
Salim Ismail
Yeah, yeah. I mean, my COO lives in the Bay Area. My VP Finance is in Spain, My head of Communities in Cape Town. We have a totally distributed organization and yes, we're less efficient than if everybody was in one place, but I can operate across multiple time zones seamlessly. People are living where they want to live, they're living with their families, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm a believer in the remote work side.
- [97:33]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. I also think we're going to see a transition as the next generation of metaverse systems come online. There will be a point where we are sitting in the metaverse and I feel like I'm here with you and having this conversation and hopefully the glassware becomes light enough and easy enough where it's. It's very interactive.
- [97:55]
Salim Ismail
The key heuristic, I think, when you think about Elon with Twitter, etc, and people is do you trust them? Do you trust your people? Right. And most corporations operate out of mistrust. You're like checking things and you have to file travel expense reports, etc. Etc. And the entire structure is set up to mistrust you. And when we move to this new model of exos, by default, you tend to trust the teams to do what they're trying to do best. You're trying to trust.
- [98:21]
Peter Diamandis
Trust over control. Right?
- [98:22]
Salim Ismail
Trust beats control is one of the key implications. Jerry Mikulski is one of our community members, said this brilliantly. He said scarcity equals abundance minus trust.
- [98:34]
Kevin Rose
It's interesting. For me, it doesn't come down to trust. I don't even want to have to think about the people on my team. I want to play my position, I want them to play theirs. I never want to have to think about really comes down to results and focus. And like, you need, like, this is going to be interesting saying to you guys, but you need some variation of the immune system in that the immune system will detect cancer. So yes, it can say no to things that it shouldn't say no to, but it can also stop the free riders. And the just reality is that you will get people using game theory to be like, oh, you can hide in this company and everybody can just do whatever the hell they want. You will get people that then just become selfish and then Other people look at that and resentment builds. And so you get other people.
- [99:22]
Peter Diamandis
How do you know there's, there's a. My. I'm moving all of my companies onto something called eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It is, it's a, it's a, it's something. You can go look it up. Entrepreneurial Operating System. And, and what we do is we meet and it's a process of thinking and running your organization, sort of like an operating system for a company. And we have what's called a 10x meeting every week with the entire group. We're reviewing our rocks, our action items, our dashboards, and everybody's got assigned specific actions and, and it's not possible to hide in that regard.
- [100:08]
Salim Ismail
If you properly implement okrs, you really can't hide. And yet you can give people a lot of autonomy and they can go do their thing. But whether it's EOS or whatever the model is, it brings it together. So we have today very modern team and individual performance structures that allow us to handle that. You can hide in traditional organizations because there's 20 developers on some team and nobody knows really who the rock stars are. HR never knows. One thing we've noticed, the particular indictment I would have is today's most big corporations are structured in a matrix structure. Products on the verticals, and they have legal hr, branding, privacy, et cetera. And Terry Semmel, when he was running Yahoo, made the mistake of putting in a matrix structure into it. And it's like that structure is great for kind of command and control, but it's terrible for risk taking and it's terrible for speed because every time you try and do something, you have to clear all those levels. So it was taking us close to a year to release some feature on Yahoo personals, and MySpace was released and Facebook was the killer here where they came along. And Zuckerberg said, if you feel your code is ready, take it live on the live site. We'll give you access to the live site. Your code better be good, otherwise if you take us down, you're fired. But the developer has got such a sense of empowerment and autonomy from that and wow, he trusts us to let us take our code live. They're rolling out features every week.
- [101:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Do they still do that?
- [101:33]
Salim Ismail
I'm not sure if they still do that, but that was what got them. That was what blew MySpace away, blew Yahoo away at the time.
- [101:39]
Peter Diamandis
The early days of high risk taking for any entrepreneurial company is amazing. We don't have a legal department yet. We don't have an HR department and
- [101:48]
Salim Ismail
over time, power crews to the horizontals because they have no incentive in saying yes. And so when we coach CEOs, we basically say, take all those horizontal layers and every three, four years, just blow them up and reinvent them.
- [102:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Watch this conversation with Imad Mostaq to learn exactly how AI will disrupt the entire world.
- [102:07]
Peter Diamandis
How do we make sure it doesn't kill us? Or how does it make sure it doesn't enslave us? Or how does it make sure that
- [102:11]
Salim Ismail
it doesn't give us eternal suffering?
- [102:13]
Tom Bilyeu
And I realized this could be the
- [102:15]
Peter Diamandis
real thing that unlocks humanity. AI is not going to replace humans humans with.
- [102:23]
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