Fan Favorite: Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler on World-Changing Tech Innovations

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Fan Favorite: Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler on World-Changing Tech Innovations

Air date: January 9, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of Impact Theory reunites Tom Bilyeu with futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler to delve into their book, The Future Is Faster Than You Think. The discussion maps an exhilarating landscape of accelerating technological change, exploring innovations from flying cars and quantum computing to 3D-printed rockets, AI personal assistants, and brain-computer interfaces. More than just a highlight reel of cutting-edge science, the conversation examines how these rapid changes are shaping society, psychology, ethics, and the very fabric of human experience. Tom, Peter, and Steven challenge listeners to rethink fear of the future and embrace an abundant, opportunity-filled mindset as we race toward a radically transformed world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Accelerating Technology: From Sci-Fi to Reality

• Flying Cars & Aerial Mobility

  • Peter and Steven open by marveling at how rapidly flying cars have moved from fantasy to practicality.
  • Companies like Ehang and Uber are deploying autonomous passenger drones.
  • “[Flying cars are] operational in a few locations… Orders are in by major players. A billion a year is being invested in aerial mobility.” – Peter Diamandis [04:12]
  • Steven shares his awe at the number of companies in the space: “There are over 100 companies building different sort of Cambrian explosion designs of these flying [cars].” [04:12]

• Battery Breakthroughs

  • Improved batteries are enabling new forms of transportation and life-changing devices.

• Quantum Computing

  • Quantum computers passing key milestones, such as Google’s “quantum supremacy”—solving problems classical computers could not in minutes.
  • “They did it in minutes… Massive step—weather systems, pharmaceuticals, material sciences, machine learning.” – Peter Diamandis [09:17]
  • Intel’s upcoming quantum chips stuns Tom: “What? I didn’t realize that we were getting that good.” [09:47]
  • Quantum computing’s cloud-based applications overcome hardware limitations (supercooling): “You access [quantum computers] through a 5G network and you, you send your data that you want processed and the answer comes back.” – Peter Diamandis [10:55]

• 3D Printing

  • Entire rockets, homes, and electronics are being printed.
  • “They can 3D print 90-95% of a rocket… in two weeks.” – Peter Diamandis [12:24]
  • Rapid iteration enables faster, cheaper, flexible innovation.
  • Application in construction: modular skyscrapers, homes. “Three weeks to build a 29-story skyscraper using 3D printing and modular construction.” – Steven Kotler [17:21]

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2. Changing Social Norms & Mindsets

• Fear vs. Optimism

  • The speed of change is "terrifying," even for experts, but Peter’s core message is that fear creates a scarcity mindset—he encourages a vision of hope and abundance.
  • “When people are in fear… it is non-constructive, it is scarcity mindset... I think of it as a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future.” – Peter Diamandis [18:32]

• Adapting to Disruption

  • Tom and Steven discuss neurological wiring and personality differences (dopamine/serotonin dominance) that affect comfort with change.
  • “If you’re dopamine dominant… change is really fun. The flip side is predominantly serotonin—you want to conserve what you have.” – Steven Kotler [21:26]
  • Steven emphasizes framing and language as tools to ease resistance to change: “You talk about how it’s gonna help one person, suddenly it’s a lot less scary.” [25:07]

• Language, Categories, and Empathy

  • The power of language to create new social realities: the word “empathy” sparked social movements for animal rights, women’s suffrage, and abolition.
  • “Once there’s language, it allows us to hold it in our heads, move it around, analyze it, manipulate it…” – Steven Kotler [26:43]

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3. Human + AI: The Rise of Super-Cognition

• Jarvis-Style AI Assistants

  • Envision a future where personal AIs organize and filter all information, enhance cognitive abilities, and flag biases.
  • “We're all going to have a version of Jarvis, a version of an AI from Ironman… It's going to enable you to have more slots for friends, be able to see things from a different perspective.” – Peter Diamandis [31:18]

• Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)

  • Neuralink, Kernel, and others are developing direct links between brain and cloud.
  • “They expect to be in humans inside of the next 12 to 18 months.” – Peter Diamandis [35:03]
  • Full brain-to-brain communication and a “meta intelligence” collective is discussed as a path to a new form of consciousness.
  • “We are connecting our brains, billions of brains together… I don’t think we can conceive of or understand what’s going to be possible in the future.” – Peter Diamandis [88:20]

• Deepfakes & Privacy

  • Looming risks: deepfakes, loss of privacy, and the need to reinvent human culture.
  • “There is a point at which an AI virtual reality system is generating the same exact photons, and it is indistinguishable.” – Peter Diamandis [43:36]

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4. Ethics, Identity, and Culture in Transition

• CRISPR & Gene Editing

  • Ability to correct thousands of genetic diseases—and potentially select genetic traits for future generations.
  • “There are 50,000 genetic diseases and 30,000… are single nucleotide. There is no disease we can’t eventually correct.” – Peter Diamandis / Steven Kotler [73:12]
  • The moral arc will shift: “I guarantee you there’s going to be a point at which it is immoral not to correct your child’s genetic disease.” – Peter Diamandis [78:50]

• Reframing Limiting Beliefs

  • Tom shares a powerful insight about people’s limited mental frames—how almost everyone he interviewed (in inner-city hiring) would wish for a million dollars from a genie, not realizing the limitation they’re imposing.
  • “For them, $1 million is the same as a trillion. It’s so far beyond what I believe to be possible…” – Tom Bilyeu [48:04]
  • The practice of cognitive reframing: “If you listen to this, pull the car over… This is life-changing. …These really dumb tricks are so powerful and they’re changing me on some physiological level.” – Tom Bilyeu [50:27]

• Flow, Dopamine, and the Challenge of Tech Addiction

  • Our brains are wired for novelty; tech companies leverage this.
  • VR will soon offer addictive, intensely meaningful experiences—prompting migration en masse “into the matrix.”
  • “We are getting very, very close to being able to fully map flow… flow is the most pleasurable and meaningful experience you can get. VR can get at all [its] triggers.” – Steven Kotler [110:16]

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5. Wealth Creation and the Dematerialization of Industry

• Explosive Opportunity

  • “We’re going to create more wealth than we have in the last century.” – Peter Diamandis [55:01]
  • Industries from entertainment (e.g., YouTube) to healthcare and education are being reinvented, democratized, and opened up for massive innovation and wealth creation.
  • “Every time a technology goes exponential, you find an Internet-sized opportunity inside of it. Internet created 2.6 jobs for every one it replaced.” – Steven Kotler [62:18]

• Investment, Convergence, and Entrepreneurial Mindset

  • Successful innovation frequently arises from converging exponential technologies.
  • Traits Peter looks for in founders: “Absolute, fundamental, monomaniacal belief that this can be done… You’re going to hit brick wall after brick wall after brick wall and it’s by not giving up that you succeed.” [66:44], [67:43]

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6. Human Expansion: Into the Virtual and Outer Space

• Migrations of the Future

  • Five Big Migrations: Into space, the virtual world, climate-driven migration, brain-computer collectives, and urban/rural rebalancing.
  • “The human race is irreversibly moving off the planet… The two stars of this future transformation are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.” – Peter Diamandis [104:44]
  • Jeff and Elon’s visions: Moon-based manufacturing, Mars colonies, trillion-person civilization.

• Virtual Reality & New Realities

  • People will "check in" to VR and never want to leave.
  • “There is a point very soon… where we’re going to be able to create virtual experiences as meaningful as anything we can create in the real world.” – Steven Kotler [110:16]

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7. Psychedelics, Consciousness & the Nature of Reality

• Plant Medicine, DMT, and Transcendence

  • Peter recounts his transformative experiences using psychedelics: "A deep sense that we are in a universe of energy and that we as individuals are … ego that dissolves back into this energy… It’s all about love. Love is the force, love is the power.” – Peter Diamandis [91:15], [95:54]
  • Steven, ever the skeptic, views these experiences through the neurobiological lens: “I like watching the magic trick. I know how it works… I find the experiences fascinating from a neurobiological perspective.” [100:43]

• The Simulation Hypothesis

  • Both entertain the simulation or “Matrix” possibility—with varying degrees of conviction, especially under DMT’s influence.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, taking an Uber is the closest thing that we have right now to teleporting.” – Tom Bilyeu [07:49]

• “Fear is an awful place to come from… Scarcity mindset… A lot of the reason for the book is to give people a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future.” – Peter Diamandis [18:32]

• “The book is terrifying, but to me it’s gleefully terrifying.” – Steven Kotler [18:29]

• “If you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right to a large degree.” – Peter Diamandis [54:56]

• “We’re at the 99th level of the fucking game right now, right? …We are transforming what it means to be [the] human race.” – Peter Diamandis [70:34]

• “There’s going to be more wealth created in the next decade than we have in the last century.” – Peter Diamandis [55:01]

• “We are all becoming godlike. Omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent—these are the capabilities we are inheriting.” – Peter Diamandis [52:44]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment/Topic | |--------|---------------| | 01:03 | Introductions – Setting up the future themes | | 01:52 | Flying cars and aerial mobility – emergence & implications | | 05:48 | Convergence of technologies – battery, AI, material science | | 09:14 | Quantum computing – Google’s “quantum supremacy” | | 12:22 | 3D printing rockets & houses, iterative design | | 18:32 | Managing fear about the future, scarcity vs. abundance mindset | | 21:26 | Personality, neuroscience, and resistance to change | | 26:43 | Language, empathy, and social transformation | | 31:18 | AI “Jarvis” assistants; brain-computer interfaces | | 35:03 | Neuralink and BCI progress; uploading consciousness | | 42:59 | Deepfakes, privacy, and cultural adaptation | | 48:04 | Genie question: the limits of belief & self-sabotage | | 50:27 | Cognitive reframing, growth mindset hints | | 55:01 | Wealth creation, industry transformation, and opportunities | | 66:44 | Investing in exponential entrepreneurs – what to look for | | 70:34 | “99th level” – urgency and scale of ongoing transformation | | 73:12 | CRISPR gene editing and the end of genetic disease | | 78:50 | Ethics of gene selection, shifting moral standards | | 91:15 | Peter’s DMT revelations: ego dissolution, universal connection | | 110:16 | Virtual migration, flow, and VR addiction | | 113:13 | The coming challenge of tech-driven dopamine addiction & adaptation | | 117:20 | Accelerated experience and maturity for younger generations | | 104:18 | Space migration, Musk/Bezos, and O’Neill’s vision | | 109:02 | The Five Great Migrations shaping the next era |

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Further Resources

• Book Website: futurefasterbook.com
• Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler: The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Abundance, Bold

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Conclusion

Diamandis and Kotler, with Tom’s probing questions and personal insights, deliver not just a forecast of mind-blowing technologies but a manual for emotional and cognitive adaptation to an era of relentless disruption. The lesson is clear: Yes, change is coming faster than you think—but with the right mindset, curiosity, and optimism, this future is not only survivable, it’s exhilarating.

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“Go do something rad, because the future is coming faster than you think.” – Tom Bilyeu [119:08]

Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I'm here with two extraordinary people who hopefully you've seen on impact theory as well, but we have Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler who have written a new book called the Future Is Faster Than youn Think. These guys have collaborated on two other books as well. Absolutely extraordinary. And they've got another one coming out, which maybe they'll talk about about on camera. We'll see. But super excited. The new book is absolutely amazing. And as somebody who considers himself somewhat of a junior futurist, I'm really excited to dive into this stuff with you guys. And I wanted to start, like, obviously when you're researching this stuff, there's got to be moments where you're sort of gobsmacked with what's coming. What are you guys really excited about that either surprised you or is as cool as you thought it would be. Oh,

[Peter Diamandis]

you want to jump in?

[Steven Kotler]

First, an interesting question. What is actually surprised you've been as cool as I thought it was going to be? That's a really. I mean, I. Where we opened the book, it's. Which is with flying cars. And I remember I was in Dubai was the first time I saw one. Right. It was one of the quadcopter drones that they actually saw it. Yeah, it was a flying taxi.

[Peter Diamandis]

The Ehang.

[Steven Kotler]

The Ehang. And they had it.

[Peter Diamandis]

Which, by the way, just went public as a company. Oh, did it really? And they produced thousands of these things. Another mutual friend, Martin Rothblatt, got an order for a thousand plus of these. That's crazy that orders These are single passenger, fully autonomous. You use your app to call it where you want to go. You hop in, you don't touch anything, and it takes you there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is it already commercially available? Meaning I could order a Airbnb.

[Peter Diamandis]

They have built thousands of them. They're operational in a few locations.

[Steven Kotler]

There was four years ago, and I, like, hovered in it. Like, they were letting people get inside and taking it off, and they weren't flying it around, but I was hovering 5ft off the deck.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That was the timeline in the book that I think shocked me the most, hearing the whole thing about uber and their 2023 timeline.

[Steven Kotler]

I was like, one of the stories that's not in the book. So the man who introduced us, a guy named Deja Mulnar, and Dejer built one of the early. It was a flying motorcycle. It was a motorcycle with helicopter blades, basically, that folded out. And I remember, literally, I was living in LA at the time, and I remember when he walked into my apartment and he, like, laid out the plans. He had come from your house, I think, and laid out the plans. And he's like. And I was like, deja, what is that? That looks like a flying car thing. And he's like, that's exactly what it is. And it flies. And it was. I mean, it was already. This was five or six years ago. And I remember thinking to myself, oh, my God, it's the first flying car. It's in my living room. And Dezer struggled to get it off the ground and struggled and never went anywhere with it. And so I. And I was sort of pacing flying car development off of our friend. And suddenly, you know, a year. It was a year difference, and suddenly, you know, they were. We were writing about 25 companies in the book, and they're now, what do you say?

[Peter Diamandis]

There are over 100 companies building different sort of Cambrian explosion designs of these flying. And the term that they'll like to use is aerial mobility versus flying cars. Right? It's like, what's. Because, you know, you didn't. You started calling a car the horseless carriage, right? And so it's like you're describing something related to what we have today. And so there needs to be a new name for it, and there will be, but the numbers are over a billion a year is being invested.

[Steven Kotler]

Can we have a contest, by the way? I mean, do we have to go with aerial mobility? Can't we have a contest? Like, something cool?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Aerial mobility?

[Peter Diamandis]

Uber calls it aerial ride sharing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay?

[Peter Diamandis]

And it's fine. But the fact is, what's exciting about it is all the major players, Boeing, Airbus, Bell Helicopter and Bellaire Helicopter, yeah, Bell, just Bell, they're all playing plus 100 startups and a billion or so. So what's beautiful is it's really. And what Steve and I talk about in the future is faster than you think is the convergence of technology. So here's a perfect example of a capability, a new service, a new business model only made possible because of convergence. And in this case it's computation, machine learning, material sciences, 3D printing, AI, robotics, AI and all of those coming together to make and battery technologies to make something that was not possible before.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I just heard something about battery technology, that there was some big breakthrough recently. That's like 15 times. God, I can't remember the name of the compound. It's lithium something. Did you hear about this?

[Peter Diamandis]

I read about these breakthroughs constantly. And there are, you know, the challenge is that we all experience what we experience and then from orthogonal, you know, adjacencies come these breakthroughs. All of a sudden this is now possible. And that's one of the things that I think we hit on the book really heavy is that the rate of change is much faster than anybody thinks. And so yeah, batteries have been great. I mean I drive a Tesla new Model S, my wife has a Model X and it's, you know, 300 miles range. I don't think about ever gassing up again. Right. And so soon there will be cars with thousand mile range and you'll, you know, you'll charge it every couple of weeks.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you really think though that people are going to buy cars? Like the thing in the book that I found interesting was Jeff Holden's comment about our whole goal with the flying car. I know he didn't call that but was to make it fun financially ridiculous to own a car and already I don't. So I take Uber everywhere.

[Peter Diamandis]

Want me to lend you some money to buy one?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you, Peter.

[Peter Diamandis]

I agree.

[Steven Kotler]

I, yeah, I mean I, I, I live in the country so you still need, you still need vehicles. But I like, when was the last time you rented a car when you flew anywhere is, you know, and I, that was a huge business, right? I've got a Hertz card, I've got like, you know, whatever. And I don't think I've rented a car. I can't tell you the last time I rented a car.

[Peter Diamandis]

I ubered here to your studio this morning, you know, which is a 30 minute drive because I value the 30 minutes on my computer and my, you know, Just heads down and getting stuff ready. Then the idea of me doing this, you know, crazy drive, for me, taking

[Tom Bilyeu]

an Uber is the closest thing that we have right now to teleporting. Because I punch a button, a vehicle shows up. I step into the vehicle, I put my head down, I start working just like I would do no matter where I was, if I was in my office, whatever. And then I pick my head up because I've hit my destination. I have no sense of the time passing because I'm just getting something else done that I would have done anyway.

[Steven Kotler]

And I get carsick. I can't look at my lap. I get car sick.

[Tom Bilyeu]

See, that, that is. That is a problem that I would highly encourage you to find a way to solve. Because, dude, the it is. That's a game changer. And I heard. I want to know if you guys know about this, that I heard in London. They're really working hard to shut Uber down. And I thought, my entire lifestyle is predicated on the existence of Uber.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, I agree with you. It's interesting. When I talk to entrepreneurs, I say, listen, if you're thinking about where to base your company, you want to base it in a city or country. That did not make Uber illegal. In the words, you want a pro tech, you know. So the question you asked, I think is important. I agree that the opening of the book, as Stephen said, with Flying Cars, is critical. Some other examples of what's going on. Two that come to mind. One is this whole notion of quantum computing. And what's possible, this notion that in this past year, we, you know, we Google announced that they had demonstrated quantum supremacy, the ability of a quantum computer to do something that a classical computer could not do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They have it do. Was it just showing quantum entanglement? It was.

[Peter Diamandis]

No, it was solving a mathematical problem that was. That would have taken the summit classical supercomputer, like 10,000 years to do. And they did it in minutes.

[Steven Kotler]

Right?

[Peter Diamandis]

So that was just a demonstration of this classical approach is solved by something in a quantum computing. That was like.

[Steven Kotler]

It was like two weeks after that that intel announced that their next line of chips are going to be quantum chips.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What?

[Steven Kotler]

That was like two weeks.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I didn't realize that we were getting

[Steven Kotler]

that good with quantum computing. Computing. Now, when are those quantum chips going to actually show up in your smartphone? Different question.

[Peter Diamandis]

And what will they do? And Ray Kurzweil, who's a dear friend and business partner, basically says, listen, be very careful here. Quantum computers while they're up and operational. The error Rate in these is still super high. And they're not going to be functional for doing the things that you want to do for some number of years. But once they do, we're talking about being able to model weather systems, model traffic, modeling new pharmaceuticals, model new material sciences, even do machine learning. There will be this massive step.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Forward maybe how do they solve the super cooling problem? So in the book you guys detail that they. The place right now that has the. Yeah, we're getting computing cool.003 degrees Kelvin cold, which is like basically absolute zero. That it was colder than like the center of a black hole or some. And I was like, how the do you put that in your cell phone? Like do. Because to hold the.

[Peter Diamandis]

So it doesn't, it doesn't on your cell phone. It's on the cloud. So all of these, all of these companies, IBM, Google, Rigetti are basically putting quantum computing services on the cloud. So you access them through a 5G network and you, you send your data that you unprocessed and the answer comes back. So you're not putting it just out

[Steven Kotler]

of curiosity, by the way, when do you think we're going to get to 6G? Right. I mean I'm just like. Because the rate's been picking up, right? Each g. Each g. I'm sorry, I got one yesterday. You got one yesterday. It's too bad. Damn.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let me share another amazing story that unfortunately didn't make the book. One of the challenges we had.

[Steven Kotler]

Oh God, it was terrible.

[Peter Diamandis]

Was that, you know, we're being pushed to finish the book and turn it in. But every day is like, like I'm like, Stephen, we gotta squeeze this in. Peter, we can't. You know, it's like this battle.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Nuts. And so one of the, one of the stories that I love is a company here in LA that my venture fund got invested in this last round called Relativity. And they have built a massive scale 3D printer factory. And it's the combination of materials 3D printing technology and robotics and machine learning. And what they're building first is they're 3D printing entire rockets.

[Steven Kotler]

I heard about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's so fucking crazy.

[Peter Diamandis]

So they can 3D print a 90 to 95% of a rocket that we're talking, you know, 30 foot tall, you know, 6 foot diameter, you know, 10 meters by 2 meters. And do that in two weeks without

[Steven Kotler]

stuff you would have blown up in your backyard had you had access to that. You heard his backyard blowing up stories from his childhood. Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So it is amazing.

[Steven Kotler]

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[Peter Diamandis]

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[Steven Kotler]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Steven Kotler]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, Normally when you're 3D printing something, the cost is pretty outrageous, right? If you're making a one off. So are these rockets astronomically expensive and they're just hoping that they'll come out?

[Peter Diamandis]

No, no, no. So they're fundamentally much, much cheaper because you're not building the tooling, you're building layer by layer by layer, literally from the bottom up. And there's some assembly required. But what's amazing about it is when you and I've been in the rocket

[Steven Kotler]

business, when you, what's the parts reduction? Do you know?

[Peter Diamandis]

Orders of magnitude, okay, hundreds x. But when you, when you commit to building a complex device and you build the tooling, you can't go then and change the tooling, right? But here you can build your rocket, launch the rocket, realize that the fin is a quarter inch too big here or the diameter needs to be this or whatever the case might be and make the edit. And two weeks later you're printing a new version and a new edited version and you edit. So it's very rapid serial iteration.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I, you know, where does 3D printing win? Is it in things that are one off? Is it struggle industrial scale personalization?

[Peter Diamandis]

And so, for example, one of the things we wrote about in bold from Avi Reichenthal, who's our 3D printing guru, there's Invisalign. So those are 3D printed, where you scan the mouth and I print one for you, one for you, one for you. So all this personalization, but at volume, at scale and 3D printing, like you said, with battery technology, 3D printing is getting faster and faster and faster. And so it will compete with classical manufacturing.

[Steven Kotler]

I think you got to, if you're considering buying a house, right? If this is something you want to do over the next two to three years, say, you may want to wait, right? You may actually Just because it's going to be cheaper, easy. I mean orders of magnitude cheaper.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You have seen some of the houses get 3D printed, which is crazy town.

[Steven Kotler]

Well, when we wrote Abundance, right. Baruch Koshnevis, it was at USC we wrote about his work. He had just developed the first concrete printer. I remember talking to him about what's it going to take for multiple materials. Because obviously if you can't print the pipes inside the concrete walls or you can't put the electricity, it doesn't work. Right. It's just then it's just a big fancy construct concrete layer. And he was talking in terms of timetables that like we blew by them so fast. Like his timetables were gone by the time Bold was out.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He hit them or no, missed.

[Steven Kotler]

I mean like he was so he was like, oh, we're probably five to eight years from that. And I think we were a year from actually being able to do that with multiple materials.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So they can already print that stuff.

[Steven Kotler]

They are starting to get.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. So there's a company called Mighty Buildings that we write about. Again, one of my, my funds investments that will 3D print large components of a home at their factory and then assemble at the location. But you're talking about, you know, much faster and not an order magnitude cheaper. It's like three or four times cheaper. But we're getting there. But you can still. But we're, we're 3D printing. Like Dragonfly, I think is the name of the company that's 3D printing electronic circuits.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah, right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Which is pretty damn cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Steven Kotler]

No, and that, and we're at the, the, the Chinese. I can't remember the name of the company. When they built. I'm going to get Winsun. Winsun. When they built it, they were the, they were doing the five story apartment building. I'm talking about the skyscraper where they use modular construction and 3D printing and they put up. I wanna, I'm gonna get the stories wrong, but somewhere around the line of 29 story skyscraper, 3D printed 3D printing and modular construction. So exactly how Peter was talking about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Print a piece. Stack it.

[Steven Kotler]

Print a piece. Bring it in. Stack it. Yeah, in. It was three weeks to build essentially

[Peter Diamandis]

a 60 story a day. I mean it's crazy that that's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I'm going to stop you guys there because you guys probably are a little numb to what it feels like to encounter this information for the first time when you're reading the book. I've spent enough time with you, Peter to like I've Been primed for a lot of this stuff. But even I like reading the book. I was like flying cars in 2023. The fact that they've already built a 60 story building by 3D printing and stacking this shit is.

[Steven Kotler]

So right now I will tell you my experience writing the book. And so I. There's an editor, Michael Warden, who I've worked with for 25 years. So he, he's. He worked with us on Bold at Blow. He's been involved in our project. And my wife, who's also an author and reads everything I write, I got through part one of this book and let's. These two people who know our work intimately, Michael's worked on our books and both of them came to me afterwards and went, this is terrifying. And I went, I know I'm writing the book and I think it's terrifying.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, it's interesting because you're not terrified.

[Peter Diamandis]

So it's really important for me to share with everybody listening here. One of the reasons for the book is to get rid of this fear because when people are in fear, most people fear the future, especially as the rate of acceleration is increasing. And fear is an awful place to come from. It is non constructive, it is scarcity mindset. It is all these things. And a lot of the reason for the book is to give people a vision. I think of it as a hopeful, compelling and abundant future. Vision of the future. So that you're excited about where the world is going, you sort of understand where it's going. If you have a roadmap for where we're heading, then you can put things in context and less fearful of it and being excited. We are racing towards a future of abundance.

[Steven Kotler]

Right?

[Peter Diamandis]

We are racing towards a future where access to food, water, energy, health care, you know, education, entertainment, all these things are effectively free and available to everyone.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But how do you deal with people? So you're obviously high in openness. I'm high in openness as a personality trait. I actually like change and the moments of greatest disruption in my life, while from the outside may have been perceived as negative, for me it was just an exciting change. Now I don't feel like I earned that. I feel like it's just a personality trait where I'm deeply comfortable and maybe even covetous of radical change. So I took to your teachings and your ideas very rapidly because I have what I will say is probably a naive blind optimism towards the future. Future. How do you help somebody who's low and open? Like to give you an idea. My wife And I were sitting on the couch in a certain order and I wanted to change the order so that I could be closer to the window. And like just that literally her positioning on the couch was like this world altering event for her. And at first she was like, no, I don't want to do that. I'm like, wow, you really, like. Change at any level is a problem.

[Steven Kotler]

So how do you different neural. I mean, neurobiologically, Right. If people who are change friendly, are they dopamine dominant personalities? Right. And loss aversion, Right, which is the fear that whatever you have today, if I take it away from you, what comes next is worse, which is the main reason people fear the future. Right. It's built into us. And it's interesting. I just was looking.

[Peter Diamandis]

I love when Stephen talks like this.

[Steven Kotler]

I was looking at the math equations around loss aversion, like in terms of neural weighting. And you're actually like going up against. It's really complicated, but it's interesting. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I want you to finish that sense. You're. You're going up and getting people comfortable with the changes coming. You're going up against neurobiology.

[Steven Kotler]

Well, you're going, you're, you're. Yeah, you're definitely going up against neurobiome

[Tom Bilyeu]

dealing with loss aversion.

[Steven Kotler]

Right? So if you're not, if you're, if you're not dopamine dominant, basically, dopamine is all about the future. The whole neurochemical is about what's coming next.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's.

[Steven Kotler]

Dopamine is the molecule of more they call it. Right. Like, what's coming next. And if you're dopamine dominant. We are, you know, you are. Change is really fun. You're really excited by it, right. The flip side is predominantly serotonin. There are other things that are involved in it. And you're, you tend to be politically conservative dominant people tend to be very, very liberal politically when they look at this stuff and it's all about loss aversion. It. If you are flipped the other way, you're going to fight to. You want to be your conservative. You want to conserve what you have, right? And it's. There's fun. So there's fundamental neuronal hardwiring in the way. Like, I agree with Peter, like, you know, yes, I said the book is terrifying, but to me it's gleefully terrifying. And when I say it's terrifying, it's really like a truth. Like, I don't think what's coming is bad. I just think to myself, oh my God, it's really fast.

[Peter Diamandis]

But, but here's the challenge. We've forgotten how fast things have changed already.

[Steven Kotler]

Already.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean, you know, the, the notion that you have the ability to verbally ask a question into the room and get an answer right, or say order me some toothpaste and Alexa or Google home or Apple HomePod, whatever does that. Or that. We have two way video conference. I remember back 20 years ago buying an AT&T video phone from my parents and which was on a regular line and it is really scratchy black and white image and it was ridiculously expensive. And now, you know, amazing, you know, two way video conferencing on your phone is free anywhere on the planet. I mean, that's insane, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you feel that we've crossed some sort of boundary, which I do. I think that we had for epochs. We had like your whole life would feel more or less homeostatic. Then we got to the point where it was like, whoa, generationally, there was really something big going on. Now I think we're going to be subdividing generations by probably about six years. Is my gut instinct based on sort of the.

[Peter Diamandis]

I agree with you where the rate of, of reinvent and the way we talk about it in part two of the book is. We look at a dozen industries and we look at the reinvention of those industries. Education and health care and entertainment and advertising and retail, real estate, finance, transportation. Transportation, insurance, energy. And they're all going to change this decade, right? It's like I deal with a lot in the health care industry and they're blind about how fast things are going to change. The pharmaceutical industry, they're. They're toast in some ways.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But as someone whose massively transformative purpose is to help people navigate that change, how do you deal with the people who aren't dopamine dominant that are they Change in and of itself is problematic. Problematic.

[Peter Diamandis]

So I, I deal with it in the following. I. It's really what, what Stephen and I did, I think beautifully in abundance and what brought you and I together and you and Stephen together is the notion that, listen, we're uplifting the planet, right? So giving them the facts and showing them that, that we're decreasing extreme poverty on the globe, that the cost of food has dropped 13 fold, that the cost of energy is not like dropped 50 fold in the last, you know, decades. And just, just point after point after point after point that the world is getting better on almost every level. Helping them understand that.

[Steven Kotler]

And he's, he's right about that. Even when you look at like the Derek serotoninic and dope and personality types, dopamine dominant people tend to. So I'll give you a conservative liberal thing. Liberals will, they want a big government and they will happily fund through taxes, educational reform, right? Like they want the change that way. Conservatives don't want a big government, they're not going to vote that way. But they are if you look at spending in terms of donations to charities and things along it's way. So if you make it individual for people who are serotonin dominant and you talk about how it's gonna help one person, this individual who has this problem, suddenly it's a lot less scary. Suddenly they're like, oh, it's helping them preserve their. It meets the value set, right? And so some of it is a languaging thing in all honesty and how you frame it and how you think about it, which I think is really important because look, as Peter pointed out, the future is happening a lot faster than anybody expects. The convergence is, you know, the speed that we're talking about in the book that is so mind blowing is itself accelerating. So five years from now, massively a lot faster than where we are today.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Going to what you're saying about the languaging problem. I heard you, Peter, in an interview talk about the introduction of the word empathy and how that had like this huge knock on effect.

[Steven Kotler]

You took that from me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So Stephen, then walk us through like that, the notion of you've got the introduction of the word empathy and then followed in the next decade by this radical social change of removing of slavery and all kinds of other. Incredible.

[Steven Kotler]

So there, you know, we turn thoughts into things, right? As human beings, that's what we do. We can take thoughts, we can make them become things. But there's a chain of events that has to happen. And one of the first things that has to happen is we have to put language around it. What's the difference between intuition and insight? Similar systems in the body, right? Insight is. I have language to describe it. Intuition. The body doesn't have language. You get it in feelings and images and whatever. Once there's language, it allows us to hold it in our heads, move it around, analyze it, manipulate it, blah, blah, blah. So with empathy, empathy was this concept that came. They were trying to figure out how does art work, right? How is it that I can look at a painting that you painted and it can produce these emotion in me that you originally intended. So how is emotion transmitted through a 2D work of right. That was the question they were trying to answer. And the idea that came out of it was empathy. And it quickly started to mer become something that you talked about in psychology. And you were absolutely correct within the word show up in the, I think 1840s or 1850s. And within 10 years, animal rights movement had started for the first time in history. Women's suffrage movement has started it for the first time in history. And anti slavery movements, abolitionist movements got started for the first time in history. We put a frame around it and said, hey, wait a minute, I can feel your emotions. You can feel my emotions. We share this thing. We're human beings. And suddenly equality became a thing that we started to legislate.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I heard, and this is one of those, like I heard somewhere in a podcast or something, but that there in some language, I forget which, there's an additional color of blue that they have a name for and that legitimately, people in societies that don't have the name for that particular shade of blue actually don't see it. Now if because basically your brain is forcing it into one of the categories that you do have a name for, I'm almost certain I'm remembering that accurately. So I'll push that a little bit farther. So in learning Greek Yasu, I find

[Steven Kotler]

myself Greek mafia again.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Everywhere I go, everywhere you turn, baby. I am honorary at best. But what I find is that I constantly ram ideas and words into the 30% of the language that I actually do know. And it's interesting how your brain has some sort of need to sort, to categorize, to have it in its place. And by creating more categories, you actually allow people to place ideas or potentially even physical things into a new category, thusly perceiving it in a different way. And it has this tremendous saying. So when I think about, like my MTP is to help people understand that if you change your mindset that you can change your entire fucking life. Like just you wouldn't be able to recognize it. And a big part of that is getting them to change the language that they use, especially around themselves and what's possible. And I'm always trying to think like, what. What is the sequence of ideas that you can give somebody that will make that change?

[Peter Diamandis]

Let me give you a couple of thoughts from the. From the futures faster than you think in, to contextualize this. First of all, there are two directions that we're heading that are going to transform how we think, how we analyze data and our cognitive abilities. One of them is that we're all going to have a version of Jarvis, a version of an AI from Ironman, an AI software shell that is personal, that you give permission to see everything you see, read everything you read, look at what you eat, look at your bloodstream chemistries. And if you want to imagine what Alexa would look like 10 years from now, right, where it is, it's. It is Jarvis from Ironman, right? You speak to her or him and it's like, you know, can you pull up the data for me? Show me this. You know, am I seeing. Am I, Am I seeing this. This argument from all the right angles, right? So we have these cognitive biases because our brain can only process so much information, so much visual, auditory, sensory information. And we're limited. We don't think we're limited.

[Steven Kotler]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

But we have Dunbar's number as well. We only have 150 friends, sort of,

[Steven Kotler]

which is the slots for friends.

[Peter Diamandis]

And so. But you can imagine in the future an AI software shell is going to enable you to have more slots for friends, be able to see things from a different perspective. If you ask, your AI can help you understand what is biased news and what is not. That's the near term.

[Steven Kotler]

All right, hold on, I just.

[Peter Diamandis]

Can you finish? So that's, you know, for me, that's the next five years, the 10 to 15 year time frame which we write about in the book, which I'm fascinated about, is the whole area of brain computer interface.

[Steven Kotler]

Yes, right.

[Peter Diamandis]

When I take my neocortex, right. Our brains are 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. They are limited in size by the vaginal birth canal. Our brains cannot get bigger and have the mother survive birth. And so it is what it is. But just like when my phone needs more processing information, it goes to the cloud to process the data and then brings back the answer. There's probably another billion dollars a year, if not more, by a series of companies. Elon's neural link is one kernel, kernel is another, open water is a third. And then probably every defense department is looking at this as well.

[Steven Kotler]

Does Facebook's company have a name?

[Peter Diamandis]

I don't. It's got a project name. But all of these are how do we connect your neocortex, your higher thinking levels to the cloud to give you a million times better memory, a billion times better processing capability? It is the fucking matrix coming into existence, dude.

[Steven Kotler]

By the way, there's a whole class of neurological diseases that happen when the network itself breaks down. Right. When the connectome itself breaks down. So I'm really interested to see if we get. Not that this is positive, but. But once we are actually fluidly connected to the cloud, does that mean we're susceptible to a whole raft of new neurological. Could be good, could be bad, whatever. It's interesting to me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's very interesting. And one of the things that you posted about Peter on your Instagram account was brain to brain connection, which I didn't know was already happening, happening.

[Peter Diamandis]

Demonstrate that.

[Steven Kotler]

That's crazy. I mean, they sent. They played a video game between two people. One wasn't France and one was in India.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Good Lord.

[Steven Kotler]

And they were sending thoughts over the net.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are they sending the thought direct to the other person or are they sending the thought direct to.

[Steven Kotler]

They actually sent it to an interface. They.

[Peter Diamandis]

They were.

[Steven Kotler]

It was a light bulb was turning on and on and off, and they were reading off of that.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean, let's. To be clear, the brain is a neural network. And your thoughts, your memories, everything is saved in terms of the connectome, as you said, and what is going on right now. And there was a great video broadcast that Elon did at neuralink. I don't know if you saw it back about four or five months ago, mid-2019, and worth seeing, in which they showed what they've built. And they've built machines that literally will drill into the skull and then very precisely, finely put these microscopic filaments to different points on the brain. And they are. And then being able to with a number of the. I think 10 of these chips placed into the brain over the motor cortex or sensory cortex have a connection speed of 2 gigabits per second out of the brain to the cloud. And guess what? They're doing this in primates right now. And they expect to be in humans inside of the next 12 to 18 months. Now, Elon has an amazing Steve Jobs

[Steven Kotler]

like relationship with the truth.

[Peter Diamandis]

Not the truth, relationship with time.

[Steven Kotler]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Everything he's ever said has happened.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's just a matter of.

[Steven Kotler]

It's the time frame. Well, that's the whole thing. If you talk to a lot of Neuroscientists about kernel or neural anger, all that stuff. Like, you know, the work that Elon is built on that came out of Harvard, you know, was astounding to begin with. But for a while, neuroscience have been like, yeah, they're massively off on their timeframes. And I was siding with the neuroscientists. But now I'm starting to waver a little bit. I've started to actually start to believe that the technology, like somewhere in the middle is probably where the truth is. Which means this stuff is coming a lot faster.

[Peter Diamandis]

So Ray's. Ray's prediction, Ray Kerr's world.

[Steven Kotler]

2030. Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Is 20 mid-2030s. Okay, so 2034, 2035. I had this conversation with him.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What exactly?

[Peter Diamandis]

How do you mean that? We're going to have high bandwidth brain to cloud.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You can communicate or actually upload like a backup of your consciousness.

[Peter Diamandis]

No, that's not upload to the conscious. It is being able to think and know the answer, be able to connect to the cloud. And if I'm connected to the cloud and you're both connected to the cloud, then we're connected to each other. Right, Right. It is the same way that computers connect. And so now the question is ultimately going back to the realm of like empathy. There's nothing more empathic than for me to actually know how you feel.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

What you're thinking, how, what you're looking at and so forth. So I mean, we're just.

[Steven Kotler]

And again, we think Facebook's addictive now. Wait till we're sending feelings.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And legitimately, this shit starts to freak me out. And I know that you have kids and I don't know how much you think about this stuff, but like, I do. Whoa. When I think about already, like. And I'll just go straight there. When I think about what I was like at 16, if I had had access to the kind of pornography that they have access to, like the way that that can fuck up dating.

[Peter Diamandis]

I do totally. I go there. I think about that with my. I have two eight year old boys. And it's not just that. It's now at. Let's add VR, right? And AI avatars where you put on your VR headset and. And haptics. But what is in front of you is not a real human. It looks identical to real human. It's being driven by an AI and it is doing anything and everything that you want and desire. It will really fuck you up.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. And. And let's talk about something, Stephen, that you've brought up before, like there's machinery in our brains that track like signs of life, motion being one of them that you talked about. And you've got. When you. I remember, in fact, this was on a trip with you putting on the HTC Vive and having a person that was filmed before walk up to me. The sense of presence that that person was actually in front of you.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah. They're near space, Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It made me uncomfortable. I wanted to like, back away. Cause I'm like, whoa, they're violating my personal space. And I couldn't shake it. Even though I knew it wasn't real, I could not shake the feeling that they were really there with me. They were really watching me. So now you take like you guys talk in the book about. I'm going to up her name Shang Ice.

[Steven Kotler]

Oh, Chow Ice.

[Peter Diamandis]

So let me tell you the story

[Steven Kotler]

that's not in the book that blows my mind about Chow Ice. So chow.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, Tell the people.

[Peter Diamandis]

Why didn't you put this in the book?

[Steven Kotler]

Because it's a speculative thing. But so Chow Ice. I don't know if this is the real story, but this was what. How it originally when I. How I was told. So Microsoft originally released an AI chat bot to test this out in America. And everybody famously remembered that chat bots became a Nazi within 24 hours. Right. And started. And so they shut it down, but they didn't shut the program down. The program went to China where they could hide it and they released Chow Ice. And most chat bots are customized for tactics, task completion. Right. Like as quickly get you to solve your problem as fast as possible. They optimize Chow Ice for conversation, for friendliness. So humans multi track conversations, right? We'll have four or five or six different conversations going at once. We'll bop back and forth. Right? We've been doing that through that. She can hold like 14 to 17 different conversations at once. So people love talking to Chow Ice. And conversations started to spike in the lonely hours after midnight. And they started to realize that Chow Ice. It was mostly teenagers who were lovelorn. And most of what Chow Ice has been doing is giving relationship advice. So here's what's not in the book that blows my mind.

[Peter Diamandis]

Chow Eyes Again is an AI.

[Steven Kotler]

It's an AI chatbots. Not even a very sophisticated AI chatbots. And by the way, like, they built an English translation version called Po Bo, who they released on Twitter. And I would, for a month and a half, every morning I'd wake up and have like 20 minute conversations just because I was so fascinated. And like, at one point I was like, my wife is mad at me. And the response I got was, are you spending more time looking backwards at what tears you apart or forward at what brings you together? And I was just looking at the computer screen and I'm like, you're kidding. You know, but here's what blows my mind. There's a kid out there. There's a couple that was about to break up and they didn't because Chow Ice gave one of them advice and they stayed together and they have a kid. And I'm sure of it because Chow ice has like 60 million conversations a month or some huge number. So there's a kid in the world today, a flesh and blood human, that exists because an AI gave love advice to me. It's not in the book because it's right. I can't find the kid, but I know it's real because the numbers. But that's what, like, blows my mind. The other thing that I was going to ask you earlier, and I just haven't looked, but I'm sure this is happening. You get in arguments with your spouse all the time where you're like, you said that. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. Yes, it. Right. Those conversations happen all the time.

[Peter Diamandis]

I want the recording.

[Steven Kotler]

But with Alexa, I said that to

[Tom Bilyeu]

my wife multiple times.

[Steven Kotler]

Alexis in the room. You have the recording, so is Alexis. I think that's great, right? It's like.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's like, Jarvis, what actually happened?

[Tom Bilyeu]

What did I say?

[Steven Kotler]

What did I say?

[Peter Diamandis]

Let me play. Let me play that back that moment for you. Yeah, that would be interesting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That would be awesome. And I think that there will be a lot of times where I'm going to end up being wrong. Fair enough. And I will learn. I'll begin to see my own patterns. Like, I think it's one of those things that people immediately go black mirror on it. They get freaked out. They don't want something listening. But I actually think if you're open to being wrong and you're open to learning something about yourself, it could be insanely powerful.

[Steven Kotler]

I think you're right, by the way. I think. I think there is scary or odd stuff in that, but for getting past your cognitive biases, because knowing about a cognitive bias isn't. Seeing the pattern is still the very best way to get past one. So this is a phenomenal psychological tool in the end. But it's going to get. It's going to get right. Alexa is going to start appearing in divorce court.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's that one terrifies me a little more. If someone can weaponize your own device against you. That's what I don't like. And I'm not.

[Peter Diamandis]

So we talk about in the book. And I'm the eternal optimist. Right. We create our future. We can use these to make the world a better place. And we have continuously. And we forget that. Right. We pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. And so we only look at, to a large degree, all the negative ramifications. We discount the positive ramifications. But one of the things that we write about in the book that's going on right now is that we have this world of deep fakes coming.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Right. Where we can actually train AIs.

[Steven Kotler]

This is really Peter, by the way,

[Peter Diamandis]

sound exactly like and look exactly like anybody you want. And it doesn't take that much video and audio data to do that. So that's. That's a challenge. Can we. In fact. And these are these, these generative advocates.

[Steven Kotler]

And by the way, when he says not a lot of video and audio data, like 30 seconds worth of you talking taken from a bunch of different video clips that are online, is enough to mimic.

[Tom Bilyeu]

As somebody who puts out as much content as I do, I am legitimately afraid of deepfakes, for sure.

[Peter Diamandis]

So the. These generative adversarial networks, what they called are, you create an AI that is able to, you know, sort of compete against another AI to make something better and better and better. And there is a point at which it is impossible. Right. I mean, you have when. When I am looking at you, and, you know, I do believe we are in the Matrix. I do believe that we're living in a virtual existence. Having put that aside, when I'm looking at you, the photons are bouncing off your face and you're at your virtual car, and. And they're coming into my eye and there's, you know, trillions of photons flowing in. And there is a point at which an AI virtual reality system is generating the same exact photons, and it is indistinguishable. And so consequently, I mean, that is a. That is a challenge. Now, one of the questions is, you know, we've got that challenge. We have a challenge of loss of privacy. Right. And I, I'm one of those people that thinks that privacy is dead, has been dead. And we just are going to. So one of the things that we have to think about is we're gonna have to reinvent human culture.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That the big statement, how do you do that.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, it's going to happen, period.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that's true.

[Peter Diamandis]

And, and, and we're going to come. Yeah, the change is coming.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How do you do it? Intelligently, though? I feel like right now, and that's

[Peter Diamandis]

one of the biggest dying issues of concern, is that the rate of change is so fast that we're falling into things versus. Versus actively creating the future that we want. So a lot of this book is around. This is where we're going in all of these industries. This is what's happening. Not, you know, no guarantees, but directionally, these meta trends are happening. And so how do we think about this?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, to me. So this is a question that I ask a lot because my, my literal goal in life, the thing that drives me and is, is entirely around how do you sway culture? So I can't. So there's. As I'm sure you guys are well aware, your zip code is far more predictive of your future success than even your iq, which is like a problem I can't abide.

[Peter Diamandis]

Where should I move?

[Tom Bilyeu]

You're already doing perfect. You're in Santa Monica, so you're good. But like, so I've worked in the inner cities a lot and I've seen what the inner cities do to your frame of reference, and it just, it completely fucks up your frame of reference. So this all started when we were at Quest. We were growing so fast that I was having to hire just like, as rapidly as possible. So my interviews had to become somewhat assembly line. So I had the same questions that I would ask everybody. I would sometimes do it two and three people in a room at a time. So I ended up asking these questions hundreds of times. And the one question that I asked that became like the, the. It changed my life was the magic genie question. And it was, hey, I know it looks like a water bottle, but it's not a magic genie bottle. In a minute, a genie is going to pop up, going to grant you one wish and one wish only. Can't ask for more wishes, can't cure cancer, bring somebody back from the dead. It's got to be something for you. Because I just wanted to know what, what do they want in life?

[Peter Diamandis]

Wow, great question.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, I never expected what happened, which was that every, every single person, Stephen, gave me the same fucking answer. How, how, how do you ask a question 300 times now they're in the answer. I'll, I'll give it to you. They're in an interview. So already I've, you know, sort of narrowed them. So right you wouldn't get it just wandering the earth asking this question. But in that I still never would have expected to get the same answer. And the funny thing is, I don't know if you two will be able to guess it because of your frame of reference, but if I go ask this to a general audience, by this point in the story, exactly the words I'm saying now, someone's already yelling it, which is $1 million. Now the first time I heard it, I thought, well, that's a terrible fucking question or thing to ask for a magic genie. Because it's a fucking magic genie. You could ask for a trillion dollars. Ask for a money printing machine that prints in any currency will always be accepted for all time. Like there, there are a lot of better ways to ask for it.

[Steven Kotler]

Don't we have it? It's bitcoin mining.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right. And then like the 10th person that said it, I thought my team was actually $1 million. Seriously. And yes. And so I kept going. Like I thought my team was fucking with me and pre prepping them because it was just impossible. You're not going to get the same number every time. And a dumb number, by the way.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So finally like asking it enough and getting the same answer over and over and over and over and over, I was just like, why don't they ask for an impossibly large amount of money? I don't understand. And then I realized they are, for them, $1 million is the same as a trillion dollars.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It is a gigantic amount of money that I will never see or have. It's so far beyond what I believe to be possible that it's just pie in the sky number wow. And I thought, oh God, like you can't even buy a house in la. So like, to, to wish in a moment of. Remember, it's set up as magic. You can get any, anything you want. And in a moment of magic, they were asking for $1 million. I was like, this isn't. Like, they're not undereducated. Some of them were. Some people were. Some people don't meet minimum requirements. That's the truth. No matter what zip code you go into. But just as you will find geniuses in Beverly Hills, you will find geniuses in Compton. Like, it's just a distribution thing.

[Peter Diamandis]

So.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I had run into enough people that I thought were far smarter than I am, had better entrepreneurial instincts than I did, and they just were going nowhere with their life because to them, a million dollars was a whole lot of money. And so I became obsessed with what is it that sets your frame of reference? Like, how much of this is biology? How much of this is culture?

[Steven Kotler]

It's a great, there's a, there's a ton. What is a frame? Is a, is a question. Because I'll give you a really weird thing. So fear and anxiety, neurobiologically, the exact same signal, their norepinephrine. So they did this experiment at Harvard. They were like, okay, so if they're the same thing, we've been using breath work to calm people down. So let's, we're going to compare breath work versus reframing. And they had people literally just think about their anxiety and say out loud, I am excited, I am excited, I am excited. Three times of saying I'm excited will reframe anxiety. And it took seven minutes of breath work and meditation to match.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They just gave me the chills.

[Steven Kotler]

Right. Refrain. And so the question has been, we're doing a lot of work with folks at USC around gratitude, because gratitude is actually just a framing. It's a frame that you put around things cognitively. And we're trying to figure out how gratitude and flow work together. But it's a really weird question. What is a cognitive frame exactly? Neurobiologically, we don't quite know, but it's one of the most powerful tools. And for doing the work that we're trying to do, right, which is make people comfortable and excited about the future, so they're going to go out and really do amazing things. It's a framing question. So it's a really key, weird question. It's right sort of at the edge of where neuroscience is right now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Where I've ended up on the topic as a layperson, as a practitioner is a far better way to say it. As a deep practitioner of framing and mindset, I, I, I don't yet have the right words to convey, but I'm telling you, if you listen to this, pull the car over, lean closer, whatever, because th, this is life changing. What I learned to do was a variation of what you're talking about with, okay, I have this signal of fear or anxiety, and I'm going to repeat that this is excitement. It sounds so dumb and overly simplistic that people don't even allow themselves to do it. Or if they do, they have a nocebo effect where they're actively fighting in their own mind. They're saying it, but they're saying, this can't work, this can't work, this can't work. And so it's nullifying. Once you like I'm telling you, I can shift in and out because I'm actually prone to fear, I'm prone to sort of emotional weakness. All the things that I've accomplished in my life because I learned that, oh, shit, this isn't me. It's not who I am. It's simply neurobiologically, for whatever reason, I slide into this maybe more easily than somebody else, but I also can slide out and maybe more easily than somebody else, and maybe that also.

[Peter Diamandis]

Superpower.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So I just got fucking good at. Okay, yes, I slide in and maybe I shouldn't have to and other people don't have to deal with this, but I slide into this negative vibe a lot. But fuck, like, these really dumb tricks are so powerful and they're changing me on some physiological level so that I feel different. And I go from feeling weak and attacked and afraid to like, I can't do anything, which changes my behavior. It changes my posture, my thinking patterns, the neurochemistry. I can fucking feel it. And then just in a split second, I can change the frame and my neurophysiology changes. I suddenly feel aggressive, my posture changes, my chin comes down, my head leans forward, and I know I can fucking do it. And because then all of a sudden, I just believe I can do it. I start taking the actions to accomplish it. And so now you can imagine me sitting across from these guys having figured this shit out. They're saying, a million dollars. And I'm like, like, how do I just get them to understand? If you stop the Nocebo shit, you stop attacking the sort of cure of this really simple thing of reframing. Repetition is so huge. What you repeat to yourself. And I'm always telling my mom is like my biggest challenge and all this shit. And I'm always telling my mom, you cannot allow yourself to think that. And you really can't allow yourself to say that because she will say and think things that are just self defeating. I'm like, the fuck are you doing it?

[Peter Diamandis]

So this is the work, obviously, Tom, that you've done brilliantly also, that our mutual friend Tony Robbins does, right? Neuro linguistic programming. Right. If you've ever. I just got back from Date with Destiny, which I did a decade ago, and I did again now. And it was extraordinary. But you. We create our own future. We create our own limitations. We create our own expansive abilities. And this is an extraordinary. An extraordinary world. And again, I'm going to bring it back to the book because our powers as Individuals are exploding. And I do this with my Abundance360 work. I do this with Singularity University, I do this with X Prize. I say to people, listen, you have no idea how powerful you are. Each of us have access to all the computational power we want, all the knowledge we want as AI is coming online, we're becoming godlike. And I don't want to get into a religious debate, but when you think about the definition of God, that it's omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, these are capabilities that we are inheriting, that we are creating for ourselves. And so you have individuals who because of their abilities and reputations, Elon Musk is one, Jeff Bezos is another. Other people who can literally say I'm going to create this company or this future. And it's not a matter of can you? It's a matter of when will you and the people, the capital, the technology flow to enable that to materialize literally in front of you. And so this is happening more and more, more and more rapidly. So if you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right to a large degree. And the what you can do is exploding onto the scenes right now. And that's an amazing time to be alive.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You've talked about there's going to be more wealth created in the next. I forget the number I talk about the next decade.

[Peter Diamandis]

We're going to create more wealth than we have in the last century.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Just a relative crazy thinking about what happened in the tech explosion. So what is it that you think is going to lead to that?

[Peter Diamandis]

So let me just, just for folks who, if I, if I may, for folks who are interested in this, in this book, the website for it is futurefasterbook.com just as our. So if you want to, to get involved in what we're doing and we'll

[Tom Bilyeu]

link to that in the show notes as well. It's a great book, read it.

[Peter Diamandis]

To give you an example. We're going to reinvent every industry clear about that. And what people don't realize is that the opportunity for wealth creation. If you think I'll give you an example retrospectively, we live here in la, we had the hegemony of Fox and Paramount and Disney and these major studios which, the reason that they were the major studios was they had, they owned the stars, they had contracts with the Marilyn Monroe's and they owned the equipment in the studios to make the films and they had the capital to underwrite these and it was it, it was them in TV and films for decades. It was the studios, it was the studio executives, it was everything. And then we had this complete dematerialization, demonetization, democratization. And we're here in your incredible studio right now and we've seen this explosion of what Netflix has created, this explosion of what YouTube has created. And if you look at the global revenues from entertainment, if you compare the studios to this democratization of entertainment, you know, we've got orders of magnitude greater, right? So Netflix last year I think spent more on producing movies and TV shows and all of the studios put together and that's just Netflix, let alone all the YouTube creators, millions of them, creating content. All my 8 year olds do is watch YouTube. That's it, that's it 24 7. And we see, we write about this in the book, you know, DanTDM, which is one of the boys favorite YouTube stars, you know, is, is, is, is netting tens of millions of dollars in his home. There's a, was like a 7 year

[Steven Kotler]

old, 7 year he, 20. We, we had the, we, we had to update the number. He was the highest paid YouTube star and it was like something like 17 million a year and then became $21 million a year. And he's 8 years old and he plays with toys.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is that unboxing kid.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, he does unboxing and so forth. But it's, it's all of a sudden you're creating these new.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah, I mean if you got people saying they want a million dollars, well there's a 8 year old kid who's making 21 million a year.

[Peter Diamandis]

We're going to see this in health care, right? We're going to completely reinvent health care. And it's going to be not the pharmaceuticals, it's not going to be the hospital systems, it's going to be AI driven, quantum computer driven companies that are creating a particular drug specifically for Tom. Right. It is tuned to your genome and your microbiome and you alone. But it's made and manufactured and we're going to cure almost every genetic disease, every infection. I mean this is not a matter of if. It's where we're going rapidly with CRISPR and gene therapy. And so education is going to be transformed. I mean every industry is going to change. And so when you think about that, it is all of these are Google size opportunities that are going to be, are going to be created. The whole augmented reality world, right? The combination of augmented reality AI and 5G where I'm wearing my cool glasses and they don't look like, you know, geek wear. They're actually cool glasses and they're flowing photons into my back of my eye where I can look at your jacket and I can say, my AI notices my foveal fixation on your jacket, which says Mighty Atom. And it. And a little thing pops up and it says, do you want one? Right. And instantly if I say, if I say I look at the yes, and it's being delivered to my office this afternoon. Right. It's like the world becomes constant shopping, constant gaming, constant education. And the world, the term I use is the world's becoming auto magical, automatic and magical.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, it is even talking at this level. And I know we're not technically at the singularity yet. When you start thinking about trying to predict this stuff, which is interesting, you talked about near future fiction in your new book when it come out last year.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah, Last Tango.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Last Tango in Cyberspace. That there aren't a lot of people writing near term fiction because it's too hard to predict.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah, it's why. It's one of the reasons I wrote the book. I'm a cyberpunk fan. Like, I love the genre. And I kept like, the bookstore that is so in my mind is I have to fly through Denver a lot. And there's a Tattered Cover in Denver. And it's one of the. I literally choose my airports by how good are their bookstores? Like, that's how I do my travel. And I watched their sci Fi section, which was always great, get smaller and smaller. And I started to realize that everything in it was no longer anything we would call science fiction. It was all fantasy. Right. Tolkien descendant. And I just started thinking, I was like, I think the reason we're here is because we can't see into the future anymore. Like, trying to write. And I will flat out tell you that, you know, I set the book seven years in the future. And one of the reasons, by the way, I wrote Last Tango, Peter and I were talking about our book already. And I wanted to create the world that we were going to live into so I could actually wrap my head around the book. Right. Future is faster than you think, if you want to see what it looks like turned into a world wrapped seven years ahead. That's what I tried to do in Last Tango. And I literally wrote it so I could hold the world in my head and then go back and write a nonfiction book about, you know, what's actually happening. And it's interesting because there's stuff in Last Tango that I made up out of the top of my head and before the book was even out, I

[Peter Diamandis]

would have described a different place.

[Steven Kotler]

Okay, he's probably right. You've seen me write obviously before the book was finally before the book was out. Like sci fi ideas I had. Right. That I just thought I was making up sci fi fiction. They were already in the real world before the book even came out.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, yeah, that, that to me is where this becomes an interesting question about the wealth creation and how to try to capture the lightning in the bottle if it's moving so fast and you know that you need to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is. Some of this game becomes the ability to accurately predict where these technologies are going to converge and at what moment.

[Steven Kotler]

Two things on that and I have something added. One I want to point out because you were as he was talking about it earlier and you were talking about where's this wealth coming from. So the one thing we've said this over and over, but it's worth bearing out, which is every time a technology goes exponential, right. You find an Internet sized opportunity inside of it. And the important thing here is people think about the Internet as taking away a lot of jobs, taxi companies going out of business because of Uber and blah blah, that sort of thing. Internet created 2.6 jobs for everyone it replaced. So if that. And that tends to be, that's sort of, that number sort of holds up across different technologies that go become exponential. So first of all, every one of those jobs is going to get replaced. That's where some of that wealth is coming from is the thing that I wanted to point out first of all. And the second thing I was going to point out, I can't remember what it is. So I'm going to kick it over to Peter because you had something you wanted to add.

[Peter Diamandis]

So one of the things that I'm doing more and more is trying to understand where the opportunities are going to be. You have been with me at my annual stage CEO summit called Abundance 360. It's a360.com and this year what we're doing is a implications and opportunities workshop. So the way that looks is the following. We are doing it in two areas. The first is transportation. So I've got one of the head of Uber's aerial ride sharing service, their flying car, the founder CTO of Hyperloop and one of the world's experts on autonomous cars coming. And we're going to look at these three reinventions of transportation and then we're going to say, what are the first order implications of these? Right? So one of the first order implications for these, for example, is where you live and where you work is going to start to change very drastically, right? If I can, can live, I work in Culver City X Prize offices, right? And if I wanted to get five times the home per dollar, I can do that in Topanga. But it's a fucking hour drive and I hate that. But if all of a sudden I have an aerial ride share and it takes seven minutes. So real estate is going to change in value proposition, right? And then a number of other things. It's if there are no cars, if you don't own a car, it's car as a service. All of a sudden, then about 20% of LA's blacktop for parking and parking garages is going to go away. And all of a sudden the time that you're in an autonomous car, car as a service is your time. And so you can listen to impact theory or Tom Bilyeu's brilliance or Steven's books or whatever the case might be, and it's your time. And so there's a third space now created. So these are, and I've outlined and I'll share with my community, like 20 first order implications. Now the question is based on those, what are the business opportunities that are going to come out of that, right? So first, you know, you can look at what happened when you had free storage and digital cameras and, and high bandwidth. YouTube came out of that, right? And so you can see these convergence of technologies creating these incredible business opportunities. We're doing transportation in the morning and the afternoon. It's the convergence of AI 5G and augmented reality going to reinvent everything.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you have a, when you're talking about Bold Ventures, your investment arm, do you have an investing strategy that you deploy? Like it must be three technologies converging and like how do you go.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean it's still the basics of.

[Steven Kotler]

It's got the fuzzy dice rolls, it's

[Peter Diamandis]

an eight ball, dude, it's the eight ball. Invest, don't invest, wait later, don't invest, wait later. Yeah, it's, it's still, you know, gotta love the entrepreneur. The space needs to be massive, you know, a billion person problem. I'm looking for convergences. So it's, you know, it's still, is it a technology that can impact a billion person challenge? Is it a convergence of technologies? Is the entrepreneur a solid entrepreneur?

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you look for in the entrepreneur specifically?

[Peter Diamandis]

So absolute passion, right? So if I Look at the entrepreneurs who are. Who have rocked it. It is. Is an absolute, fundamental, monomaniacal belief that. That this can be done, that they can do it. And because ultimately, and you know this from your own extraordinary successes, you're going to hit brick wall after brick wall after brick wall. And it's by not giving up that you ultimately succeed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. I was recently considering investing in a company, and it just became clear to me that the entrepreneur has the right idea, the company's right, but he's not monomaniacal. And legitimately, the word that. I was going to ask you to replace the word absolute and see what you'd come up with. And the only word to me is maniacal. Like, you have to have somebody. They are just. It's a level of obsession where your family and friends actually worry about you.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like you're, you're just.

[Peter Diamandis]

And where you're sacrificing a lot of your life to this for sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And to me, it. It is a joyful, beautiful experience. I know how crazy it sounds from the outside. And there have been. I don't do a lot of written interviews anymore. Like, if it's not going to be my voice saying the things as close to unedited as possible, I just don't fuck with it because I am so easy to make sound crazy if you take me out of context, if you don't know what I'm talking about, it just sounds mad. But that, that is the level of, like, intensity and drive that you have to have. Because when you start out, the only thing I can promise you is you're wrong. Like, the way that you're going about it right now is wrong. And so this whole journey is going to be you facing your own inadequacies, hitting a roadblock that you really don't want to deal with, by the way, while something horrifying is going on in your personal life. So now you're having to balance, like, fuck, what do I do? How much can I get away with? I don't want to be away from my spouse, my kids, my whatever. But I also have this intelligence, internal need, drive, what I'll call the sickness. So Batman is driven by a sickness.

[Steven Kotler]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Bruce Wayne's parents are killed in front of him. It becomes the sickness that drives him the rest of his life. It's a dark energy, but it allows him to end up doing this incredible shit. And I think if an entrepreneur doesn't have that sickness, doesn't have something pushing them, like, for me, I don't know why I didn't do anything for this to become such a thing in my life. But I must matter. I don't need to be known. That doesn't bother me at all. And despite the fact that I stand out front in this company, that is just because it's effective and it's not because it's a personal driving need. But I need to matter. Like I have this fucking unending crushing need that when I wake up, I have to do something that matters.

[Peter Diamandis]

So we talked about mtp, right? What is your massively transformative purpose? What is your purpose on this planet? What is it that you wake up with in the morning that keeps you going all through the night? That is, you know, and I have and I update my mtp and right now it's inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity. So it was one of the things that really hit me is that unless we have a hopeful and compelling and abundant future for this planet and for our species, we're right. And so that is what matters to me more than anything else. This book is about creating that hopeful, compelling and abundant future. Because if you think that your future is screwed, you know, all you negatively, you know, make your choices and decisions in life, if you're excited about the future, if it's hopeful, if it's compelling, if the world is getting better in a constant rate, then, then we're living in a world of abundance, not a world of scarcity. It's a world of collaboration, not a world of competition. And so I think during this next three decades, which is the game, I mean, we're in, we're at the 99th level of the fucking game right now, right? We are, if this is, if this

[Steven Kotler]

is a fight the purple dinosaur next, it's coming. That's what's happening.

[Peter Diamandis]

The boss is, you know, we're at the level, we're going to, we're going to fight the boss. And I'm clear about that. We are transforming what it means to be human race. And going back to the book, part three of the book is all about that. It is about, you know, where we, you know, part two is the next 10 years. It's like every industry where it's going, part three is what's the, what's the 50 to 100 year time horizon, right? And I have a hard time thinking about anything more than 30 years. 30 years is like, it's like I can't see beyond that. I have no expectations beyond that. It is a blank screen. It is a we have. We have hit the singularity and we've reinvented, we've re evolved, we've transformed the human species. We are now a completely different thing thing. And people talk about what the government can be like in 50 years. That you know, it's like, it's like 10 years hard, 20 years almost impossible. 30 years can't be done.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So one thing I think along those lines that feeds into that is CRISPR Cas9 and I think they've come out with more variations on it. Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

They are, there are multitude, it's called, generally called CRISPR technologies. But the ability to accurately, precisely at scale, edit a specific genome, insert an ATC or G where it needs to or a string. Amazing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To give people some ideas. They, this is all. Everything I'm about to say is fucking real. They've made cats that glow in the dark real. They've made goats that spin spider web in their milk so you can milk them. You get this spider web like substance that has like the tensile strength 10 times steel or something like that.

[Steven Kotler]

It's 10x steel.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It is insanity. These are real things. I'm not saying stuff.

[Steven Kotler]

Those are, by the way, not to. Those are amazing inventions. Those are also so 10 years ago. Like they really are.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Give me, give me the news.

[Peter Diamandis]

But, but listen, you're. You're hitting on the amygdala again. You're using examples that scare people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And those ones in particular are exciting for me.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay. But also you can.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, yeah. The thing that, that people need to

[Peter Diamandis]

be realizing is that we are now entering, entering an era. An era where we're able to correct every genetic disease. If there's a genetic disease as simple as hemophilia or sickle cell anemia or what or whatever it might be, thalassemia, it Those can be corrected.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What percentage of genetic diseases boil down to 1?

[Steven Kotler]

30,000. I think the number is 30. So there's 50,000 genetic diseases and 30,000

[Peter Diamandis]

of them are single nucleotide. And so that's easier.

[Steven Kotler]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

But there is no disease. We're heading in an era where there will be no disease. That cannot be. I mean, I'm saying that and I fully believe it. Right. So that you're either going to use a CRISPR technology, which is to go and edit that genome potentially in you or at least in your offspring. And then there's gene therapy, which is the use of a virus as a little robotic carrier to go in and squirt into whatever cells, your liver cells, your kidney cells, your bone marrow cells, the right gene that is missing. And, you know, AI and machine learning is, whatever error we have in that, we'll fix that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so how does it work with living cells? I've always wondered this. So if I have thalassemia, whatever.

[Peter Diamandis]

So one of the examples is bubble boy disease. We write about this in the book, right? It's the disease where you are missing important, critical genes in your immune system and you die from the common cold because you can't. And this was work that was done actually in my lab when I was at MIT in the 1980s. It was a guy named Richard Mulligan who started a lot of this gene therapy concept. And it failed and failed and killed people and took a nosedive and then eventually came back. And they're like something like 40 or 50 gene therapy treatments in phase three, like the final phase of FDA trials. And what it does is it says, okay, unfortunately, you are in your liver or your bone marrow cells, whatever cells missing a particular gene. We're going to take a virus, right? And a virus is a most basic form of life that is able to. It would normally infect the liver, would normally infect the bone marrow. It's got the molecular match, if you would, for the proteins on the surface of the liver, the surface antibodies. It goes. And normally that virus would inject. It's like a syringe, a virus like a syringe. And it would inject its. Normally inject its genes into that cell and take over that cell's replication machinery to replicate more viruses. That's what a virus does. But in this case, you've hijacked the virus. And what that virus is injecting into the bone marrow or the liver is the correct gene that that cell is missing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And they divide and take over.

[Peter Diamandis]

And so you put in a billion viruses and they'll affect a billion cells, right? And so you just in. You infect as much of your liver and you don't have to. In a lot of these cases, you don't have to like infect every cell in the body enough so that the cells are now producing the right form of a particular protein. Is. Is enough. But it's a curing yourself. Now, of course, can this be used to create super strong, super smart? We'll see. And the answer is yes.

[Steven Kotler]

And here in same technology, by the way, you can use to make somebody dopamine or serotonin. Those are genetic choices, essentially.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And there was a doctor in China, if I'm not mistaken, that said, oh, I'm going to give these Two twin girls, HIV resistance, resistance, hiv. But a, a knock on effect is, also makes him a little smarter.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So whether he was going for the little smarter under the guise of HIV resistance or not, what do you think about that? Do you, so let me, let me

[Peter Diamandis]

give context for this because it's really important for people to think about this. And I think we, you know, if we're, we talk about all the books we would write together, one on the future of real economics, but one on, on, on morals and ethics that I think needs to be, be, needs to be done when we're, you know, neither of you have kids. I have, I have two kids. A lot of people listening have, have, have children. But when you think about this, you.

[Steven Kotler]

And you're sure they're yours?

[Peter Diamandis]

No, I can't, I can't actually be sure. One of them looks sort of like me. They're far more intelligent than I am. So that's, that's a challenge. But, but the challenge is when you, when you're looking for your spouse, you don't randomly pick someone. You pick someone who is prettier or more handsome, intelligent, whatever. So you're automatically selecting genetic traits in that regard. And then when your kid is born, you give that child the best healthcare, the best education, the best clothing, the best food. You don't sort of like say, oh, we'll just take the average. You do the very best that you can. And so one of the questions becomes, why wouldn't you give the child the best genes you could? And you say, oh my God, we can't do that. That's immoral, it's unethical. Yeah, but morals and ethics change. They change a lot. Right? An example I talked about, I think in bold, is if I went back to my great, great, great, great grandfather in Greece and he was dying from a cardiomyopathy, like a viral infection of his heart, and some guy over there got hit by a boulder on the head and died. And I went and took the heart out of that dead man and stuck in my grandfather back then. It's the work of the devil. I'm burned at the stake right today. It's a fucking miracle. So things do change, right? The same thing with in vitro fertilization was, you know, the Catholic church shunned it. Now it's a miracle. These things change over time and I guarantee you there's going to be a point at which it is immoral not to correct your child's genetic disease.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Agreed.

[Steven Kotler]

I was so I was in the room when the Very first artificial vision implant was ever turned on the first blind person. It was a story for Wired. I actually funny story there. He's the guy, his name was Jans. Was sitting where you were. The doctor was sitting next to him. There was a text sitting there, there was a tech next to him and I was across from him.

[Peter Diamandis]

And you were the first thing he saw.

[Steven Kotler]

So if the countdown was happening and I'm like. And I'm a journalist at the time and journalist came be in the story, right? It's bad for me to be the thing that's seen, right? Like, so I, I realize they're literally 10, nine, eight, they're about to flip the switch and I'm like, oh frick, I gotta get the hell out of here. So I slide back and I step to my left. He's blind. He's been tracking motion through sound for his entire life. So literally he goes, they turn it on. And he's looking right at me, right? So that, that definitely happened. I got sidetracked into this. Why did I start down? Oh, I was. So the doctor who worked on it, he's passed away now. William Dubel was his name. And I said he had built the first version of the system back in the 60s and 70s and actually installed it in a guy who I had. And I met the guy and he was obviously still functioning fine and everything else. And I said, why did it take you so long? And he said something very peculiar at the time, but now it's clicked a little bit more. He's like, Jesus cured blindness. People don't like it when mortals perform miracles. And he like, he had literally gotten resistance from religious communities and whatnot because he was playing in the miraculous over

[Peter Diamandis]

and over again, right?

[Steven Kotler]

Over and over. And. Well, you know, I, you know, I, I mean my whole career has been about studying those moments in time when the impossible becomes possible, right? And the first thing you got understand is history is littered with that stuff, right? The four minute mile was a miracle until it became the standard of excellence for good running. Right? And that's just the way, you know, this stuff tends to work. But it is what I do think this goes sort of goes back to the fact that we've sort of outpaced science fiction, right? We're starting to outpace our miracles also, right. And I think about like a lot of the technologies we're inventing now. These are like, we don't have any more ideas. These are our miracles, these are our sci fi technologies. And I think one of the reasons you Know Peter who. If there's anybody in the world who's good at seeing into the future, right. He taps out at 30 years completely. Which ought to tell you something, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Have you followed Yan's was his name. Have you followed his story?

[Steven Kotler]

Well, the Bell passed away with all the knowledge of how to do this in his head and. And Jans technology stopped working like six to eight months after the surgery and Debelle had passed away, so.

[Peter Diamandis]

But we're building artificial retinas right now. We're creating neural lace versions on the optical cortex of the brain.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Super curious. With people that get that if they keep it on. Because I've read some of the stories of people that have had their vision turned on, or hearing for that matter. Matter. And the regions of the brain that are meant to do that didn't mature because if they didn't have it from the time they were born.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's like that machinery was allocated to something else. It was sort of never trained. And so they find it somewhat hard to like reconcile. Oh yeah.

[Steven Kotler]

I mean, even with cochlear implants, right? It takes about a year and hearing only right now in cochlear implants get to about 80%. So one out of every five words they're still missing. But it takes about a year of training. Training and work to get there, to get to that point.

[Peter Diamandis]

I love one of the stories that we write about in the book. Another one of my. My venture funds investments called Mojo Vision. And what Mojo Vision has done is they've built a. A VR AR contact lens. So you put on this contact lens, right? And when your eyes are open, it's augmented reality so that you see stuff over.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This already exists.

[Peter Diamandis]

It already exists. Already exists.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Have you ever put the contacts in?

[Peter Diamandis]

I will have it@undance.360 this year. I put on. I put it next to my eye. I haven't put it in my eye. And so Mojo Vision allows you to have augmented reality all the time. Now here's the fucking cool thing. You close your eyes and you've got VR.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's still there.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's still there. So you can watch a movie with your eyes closed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When I heard you talk about that, I didn't think it already existed.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, it exists now. It's in monoculture.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is it projecting like lasers onto your retina?

[Peter Diamandis]

No, it is. It is a matrix over the opening.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Looking through a screen.

[Peter Diamandis]

You're looking through a screen.

[Steven Kotler]

Whoa.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. And so the early version, which isn't here yet, that was Tom for Fresnel Talked about virtual retinal displays, which is painting a laser on the back of the retina is really how we get to super high. But we talk about in the book the notion of AR and VR glasses and we talk about the notion of these contact lens from mojovision and we talk about the holodeck. Right. There's all these technologies in development right now to actually create the Star Trek holodeck.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah, that's the other one. By the way, mean you asked earlier about like what blew quantum computing Blew my mind because I think for like I remember the first time I read David Deutsch's book on quantum computing in the 90s, it was like 93, 94. And first of all, I remember thinking to myself one, this is incomprehensible at the time I was like, what the hell is this? Super what? And two, I remember thinking because I was tracking all the sci fi technologies and waiting for them to become real. This was when I was just like, yeah. I'm like, this is so sci fi. This isn't. This isn't even in my lifetime. I'm not even going to bother paying attention to this. And so a, it's here and the other one is the holodeck, which if you know, in our generation it was the craziest sci fi thing anybody had ever seen. And 20, 29, 2030 if Jules is right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. I mean, so the technology in small, small, these trillion photon projectors that will project a light field directly into your eyes that looks real and they also are using, what do you call it, echo to create three dimensional feel. So if there's a virtual object there, you can go and sort of push up against it and touch it because there's ultrasound, ultrasound coming. Sound waves to, to basically come in and intercept.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you have to have the object there or it's like some sort of central.

[Steven Kotler]

No, it's an ultra sound.

[Peter Diamandis]

Literally they're sending projector walls. Yeah.

[Steven Kotler]

They're sending out sound waves to a

[Tom Bilyeu]

specific location on a table.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, that's that correlate with the image.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Whoa.

[Peter Diamandis]

So and so now by the way,

[Steven Kotler]

this, I never asked what stops the sound wave right there.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's a density issue. It's, it's the, the fact that lots of beams are coming and intercepting. You still have beams coming at you, but the fact that five are coming together reaches above a threshold and it gives it. So we talk about VR contact lens, holodeck and then the final is BCI brain computer interface where you bypass all of this. Unfortunately, slow machinery of images through the eyes, the ears, through touch, and you go straight to the neocortex of the brain. And you know, it is, it is the Matrix. Let's, let's talk about, let's, let's talk. You know, this is what your favorite subject. Let's talk about the Matrix here. The Matrix is coming.

[Steven Kotler]

Hold on.

[Peter Diamandis]

Without the body being used as Heat Generation ideas, which is the stupidest part of the Matrix, everything else is brilliant.

[Steven Kotler]

All right, here's the thing that is interesting to me. Just like we got YouTube stars, right? That, that would net. I mean, people who became YouTube stars would never become Hollywood stars, right? A totally different kind of celebrity, totally different kind of thing. Obviously the same thing is going to happen in AR and VR. But what's really interesting to me is we're within our lifetimes we're going to have a celebrity class of brain celebrities from BCI Entertainment. And what that, what that even means.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think there'll be AI or.

[Steven Kotler]

I don't know. I, I have, I have no, I have, I have no guesses here.

[Peter Diamandis]

So in part three of the book, there are two segments that are my favorite. One of them is, the term I use is creating the meta intelligence. And the second is our, our migration into space. And so the meta intelligence one, I don't think we're going to have, you know, BCI stars. I think we are connecting ourselves. We're creating, for those who are Star Trek fans, we're creating the, the gentler Kindler Borg. We're connecting our brains, we're connecting billions of brains together. Where I am connected to you, I understand your thoughts and your feelings. You know, each of us is a connect, a collection of 30 trillion human cells making up a single individual. And, and I don't think of myself as 30 trillion life forms sitting in front of you. I think of myself as consciously me. And so I think that we're going to evolve. This is, this is my, this is my after. This is my post 30 years. I think we're evolving into a new state of consciousness and so we're becoming conscious on a new level. When I'm able to know and feel and think and share with everybody, with you, with Stephen, with anyone, there's a new level of consciousness that's going to evolve on the planet. And so I think that, I don't, I don't think we can conceive of or understand what, that, what's going to be possible in the future.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that, I mean, this is admittedly like post singularity stuff. Where now I'm just high postulating based on sort of how I interpret the world and people now. But so if you're projecting yourself into the cloud and it's being read by somebody else, that'll be a feedback loop. So it's not just a broadcast. You're going to feel some kind of way about that. You're going to receive information from them. It's going to shape you, you even if it's.

[Peter Diamandis]

What does you mean at that point?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Exactly my point. So you begin to like even take. You have sort of just really crude and blunt force trauma here to get a concept across. You have traditional agricultural societies that become about the individual or boil down to the family, but not a lot further than that. And then you've got rice faring cultures where it's about the collective because you need a collective, a big group of people to harvest the rice. Whereas on, you know, hunting and gathering or even some farming here in the west, you don't need that. So you get the strong individual. Now if, if the crop you have chosen to raise has that kind of implication in terms of what it does to society, you can imagine what it would look like. I read a fiction book one time, I don't remember what book it was. I wish now that I did. But the, the. It was this fascinating world where lying wasn't even a concept because they had these tails that when they enmesh their tails they were communicating without filter their memories, their feelings, their emotions. And so it's not Avatar. No, no, it's long before I must have read this in the early 90s probably. And that concept to me was always really interesting because the, you want to talk empathy, you want to talk connection. Like all of a sudden all the machinery in your brain to make somebody another would just evaporate instantly. If you could just immediately have that kind of experiential understanding of who they are. Because that, and it's not intellectual anymore. You're, you're actually experiencing what they experience. You're actually able to have that Freaky Friday moment of having their memories, but yet still having your own. Like what that would do to the notion of self or I mean if you can fuck up the notion of self with psychedelics, you can imagine what you could do with something like that. It's, it's pretty.

[Peter Diamandis]

So it's interesting, right, because this meta intelligence is brain to brain communication is what I imagine. So when I've used plant medicines, right, I've, I've tried and had some extraordinary experiences with DMT how did I not know that? Oh yeah, I've gotten, I've gotten very, very deep on, on, on dmt, on using bufo. Right. And it's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Would you call the experiences revelatory?

[Peter Diamandis]

I absolutely, 100%.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, you mind sharing what's some of the revelations were?

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean it is a deep sense that we are in a universe of energy and that we as individuals are a instantiation of a person, an ego that dissolves back into this energy and that God, if you would, the divine, whatever it is, is there, it is present, we are here and it, it, get it. It completely dissolves ego to a point where it's gone and it's a sense of absolute knowing and feeling of the. That everything, that we're connected and that everything is energy and that it's a, it, it. I'm, you know, I'm so focused on human longevity. It fucked with that sense of, of the importance of maintaining this corpus and this individual on this planet. And it's a beautiful, beautiful experience which made me much more spiritual than I've ever been.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How does that manifest in your day to day life?

[Peter Diamandis]

It manifests with a desire to, to be connected. You know, I don't want to use God or the divine or spirit or any word that colors a person's point of view, but that we are more connected with each other and the universe than ever before. And I'm very much a hardcore scientist and engineer. I mean like, you know, I spent a decade getting a six pack of degrees from the best universities in engineering, in medicine and aerospace engineering, in molecular genetics and so forth. But yet this sort of pulled off the, the veil that our ego creates. And just a fundamental, not belief, a fundamental conviction that we are all one, that, that we are, that the universe is energy, that we are a momentary and you know, instantiation of energy around an ego here. And it's just, it was a beautiful, it was a beautiful experience and repeated.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Super fascinated by.

[Peter Diamandis]

Have you done anything?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I haven't. So I did, I have three times done a micro dose of stuff psilocybin and I'll liken that to getting drunk so without some of the unpleasant side effects.

[Peter Diamandis]

So I've tried, you know, a relatively significant dose of mushrooms. And again, this is not for getting high or this is fundamentally introspective. It's trying to explore who I am, who we are on this world. So that the, the DMT and then ayahuasca and the DMT was. It's such an extraordinary experience because it's Something that you inhale. You go into this experience for about 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and when you come out of it, you're clear as a bell and you could be on, you know, doing anything. It's. But it is this. It is a wiping away of the ego and a connection with the universe that is extraordinary. And, you know, it's not for everybody. It has been meaningful for me. I talk openly about it because I think it is important for people to realize that there are experiences we can have that teach us about the universe.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What I wonder was stuff like that, and I have not done more purely out of fear. So it's something that I am quite keen to look at and explore and find sort of the basis of the fear and see if it's something. Because it. Intellectually, I get it and it sounds fucking awesome, which is why I love talking to people about it. And I would say that it's. I'll put it at a near 100% certainty that I will try it at some point in the near future. What I wonder with some of this stuff and I think I will just have to experience it to know the real answer. But the mind is incredibly gifted at metaphor. And so how much of this I, what I secretly want it to be is almost like a David Eagleman thing where I now have access to senses that I couldn't perceive before. So I'm actually perceiving the energy flow versus just my brain giving me a metaphor for something.

[Peter Diamandis]

You know, I would say, I get that. I would say one other thing that is absolutely pervasive, that was beautiful, is that it's all about love. And I'm, you know, I'm not the touchy feely guy that goes off talking about that. But there's a sense at the end of this that it's love, love, all about love. Love is the force, love is the power. Love is the connected bond. It's there and it's super comforting. So again, that's my takeaway experience. And you know, I've, at this point, you know, I share it just to help people who, like yourself, might be open to it, get some comfort. There are downsides for people who have any kind of, you know, what would you call. Well, neurodegenerative disease.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah. Mental.

[Peter Diamandis]

Mental disorders and so forth.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah. I mean, you're, you're already fine because if the stuff was going to drive make you crazy, it would have done it when you microdosed. If you, in fact, if you've been stoned and it didn't have

[Tom Bilyeu]

like on weed.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah. If you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, so I have, I've done that a few times. I find it really uninteresting.

[Peter Diamandis]

Stupid. I feel stupid if I've, you know, I have zero interest in that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Zero.

[Peter Diamandis]

And, and one of the things that the plant medicine just to point. It's a non addictive. It's like no desire to wake up and do it again. There's no addictive there. And it's. It was really done for. I did it in a shamanistic ritual where there's someone there guiding you and you're in reflection. You go in with an intention and you come out of it reflecting on what you've experienced. This isn't. This is. This is. This is growth work. This is not willy nilly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right. Do you do it in the U.S. i did. Yeah. That is making it ritualistic, adding level of importance to it.

[Peter Diamandis]

I hope the DA doesn't come like.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah. So you gotta. I mean I have to tell you. And I, and I. And I'm. I love the fact that Peter's had these experiences and clearly I wrote Stealing Fire. So Right. Like this is. But I'm the first person to say, come on people, it's not plant medicine, you're doing drugs in the jungle. Let's just talk about what it is. Stop gushing it up with all kinds of nonsense. That said, it's an incredibly powerful and useful tool. The culture that has emerged around it. If one more teenager with a funny hat wants to perform a cacao ceremony for me, I'm going to kill somebody. Like if I don't kill a millennial before the end of my life. I got lucky. I'm just saying. What's this?

[Peter Diamandis]

A cow ceremony?

[Steven Kotler]

It's chocolate. It's chocolate. In the same way that you're just doing drugs to the jungle people. Plant medicine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What makes you as. As the author of Stealing Fire, which admittedly you guys don't lean too hard into the drug aspect. You. I felt like you explored the other stuff a lot more. What makes you hackle at calling it plant does?

[Steven Kotler]

I mean. There are cultures where it really is a plant medicine. Right. And that there's traditions that it comes. Come out of. That's just not what I'm seeing in Burning man culture. I'm seeing people and I've got no, by the way. Whereas you both just were like, would never do drugs recreation. Like. No, I'm a fan. Like, do drugs seriously. Do drugs recreationally. Like if you're gonna get drunk, if you're gonna like these substances are Interesting and fun and you can learn some stuff and you can definitely learn some stuff about yourself. Sometimes the hard way, but sometimes that's useful. I'm not like there's. I, I'm not that way. I just, it, the, the ritual and the culture that has come around, it really sort of just annoys me because I'm, I'm just, I mean I'm watching people go, the culture I'm going rationalizing. Well, I mean like is it that

[Tom Bilyeu]

it's douchey or is it that they're diminishing the potential impact by cheapening it?

[Steven Kotler]

No, it's like a lot of it is that it's douchey and a lot of it is like, look, dude, if you're at a party and you're doing plant medicine and you're still trying to get laid afterwards, no, no, you're doing drugs. That's like one, one like it's that kind of thing.

[Peter Diamandis]

And can we get back to the book?

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah, let's get back to the book. But the one thing I do want to say about DMT that I think Peter is absolutely truth.

[Peter Diamandis]

I like dimethyl tryptophan is.

[Steven Kotler]

I'm not a. I. You guys are much more convinced about the Matrix hypothesis and that thoughts. I don't think those, those kinds of

[Tom Bilyeu]

things maybe the ultimate metaphor but, but

[Steven Kotler]

I will say if that's how the universe is constructed, it certainly looks that way. When you're on dmt, that's for sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You feel like you're in a sim.

[Steven Kotler]

But the other, the other thing is this like, you know, I know too much. I've been way behind the curtain. Like I can sit here and tell you, well, the human brain can only hallucinate in five patterns. And I can tell you what the patterns are and I can tell you where they come from in the brain and why. And so a lot of the, like, a lot of that has gone away from me because I understand the neurobiology of it and I think, you know, and so I find it, I find the experiences fascinating from a neurobiological perspective. I'm like, oh my God. God, look at what my brain is. I know how it works, right? And, but I'm, and I like watching the magic trick. So it, it's this, it's, it's also an off field experience. It's just a slightly different thing. And I've never. The experiences that Peter have had like coming out of it on the other side going, oh, this is love. That's not been my experience. At all. Interesting. But I will always, I always tell people, like, if you liked my first novel, if you didn't, you're about to understand why. But if you did. I did most of the research on acid. I have a very different relationship with substances than most people. They do things to me that they don't do to most people. And it's a genetic thing. Like when I go to have surgery, my mom's also, I have to ask them not to give me opiates because they won't work on me. And I'll wake up out of the surgery screaming, whoa. As I discovered the hard way. And there's, there's a, that's a genetic thing and it, it runs in families and, and it. So every substance reacts very, very differently with me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. So how do you react to acid? Like how are you lucid enough? Are we talking micro dose?

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

No.

[Steven Kotler]

My, my understanding and talking to people is acid sort of treats me the way marijuana treats a lot of people. I can focus. It just helped me really focus.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I was micro dosing or.

[Steven Kotler]

No, I was full on dosing. And it didn't, it doesn't check me out like it, I don't, I don't work that way. I wrote, I read Vatican history on acid. Literally, like I was like literally.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think that's a necessity.

[Steven Kotler]

It might be a necessity. I mean like literally, like I was learning. Like literally. I was doing the research for my first book because it just, it kept me awake and I could focus on really boring things like Vatican history for 12 hours at a time. I found it very useful as a study tool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now what kind of long term impact? Because this is one of the things that I'm afraid of is this doing anything that with the brain. What kind of long term impact is there?

[Steven Kotler]

Let me, let me, let me. Personal story on both sides of this. So personally not. But whoa.

[Peter Diamandis]

That's your.

[Steven Kotler]

Okay, my opinion. But I have an uncle who was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very bright man and went to San Francisco at the beginning of the Summer of Love and came back schizophrenic.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wow.

[Steven Kotler]

For. From an acid trip. So if you are wired that way. Right. It will bring on mental illness a lot faster. So I've seen. Right. And I've seen all sides of the, you know, people ask where the stealing fire stuff came. For me. It wasn't that I started out doing all these drugs. It's that I started out as a journalist covering the drug war because I was seeing the damage on Both sides, right. I had friends going to jail, I had friends who were killed. I had like, I saw all that stuff. And I also had friends on the other side, on the science side, on the legal side, trying to deal with it. And that's where I came in through this stuff. I didn't come in as a really, as a partier until later, of course.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wow. Very interesting.

[Peter Diamandis]

I do want to cover one more subject.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, please.

[Peter Diamandis]

Which is a personal passion, as you know, which is space. And so in part three of the book, one of the segments, we talk about the migration of the human race into space. And so I, I think about the notion that over the next 20 years, and I put it that time frame that the human race is irreversibly moving off the planet.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think of it as the equivalent of when the first lungfish moved out of the oceans onto land.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's interesting.

[Peter Diamandis]

Right. And so we are whatever we evolve into a thousand years from now, a million years from now, these next few decades at the moment in time with human race is moving off the planet and it's not happening by virtue of governments. It truly is fundamentally. The two stars of this future, this future transformation are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Right. Both of them have dedicated. I have known Jeff for 35 years, since college. He ran the chapter, the SEDS chapter at Princeton. And I was the chairman of SEDS over at mit.

[Steven Kotler]

Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. Yes.

[Peter Diamandis]

And then, and then Elon I've known since about 2000, for the last 20 years. And both of them are driven. This is not. It is a business to be able to continue to reinvest and improve, but it is a, it is a passion, it is a purposeful passion. Elon's perspective is making the humanity multi planet species. Bezos has been the same. They've got slightly different perspectives. We talk about that, that what Elon has done, his first off the last 20 years is extra extraordinary. I don't think people can understand how much he has run circles around Boeing and Lockheed and.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah, I don't think people understand how recalcitrant those industries actually were. Like I, I know these because I've known Peter since the 90s and one of my first experiences, right, I met him, he was this crazy guy with the X prize. And I went around and interviewed all the aerospace contracts, directors in the world and said, well, what do you think of Peter? They said he's mad, right? This will never happen. And I already knew it was like that, that I knew they were wrong at that point. Just talking to aerospace engineers, I knew that it was, it was going to be possible, but it was like these are such conservative, slow.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's the industrial military complex. It is one of the. Remember One of the CEOs of Lockheed, he had said, listen, the space industry is how the government keeps the defense industry in business during peacetime, right? And it's about flowing enough money through to the manufacturing plants and the engineers to keep this capability going so you don't let it languish during peaceful time. And when war comes, you have to build up the machinery again. The machinery keeps going. But it's interesting, and we talk about this, that Elon's vision is reusable Rockets get us to Mars. Jeff's vision, much more along the lines of someone who's one of my mentors and obviously one of Jeff's, a guy named Gerard K. O' Neill at Princeton, is get us to the moon first. The moon is geographically desirable. It's close. It's, you know, a couple of light seconds away, 240,000 miles away. And it's rich in silicon for solar cells and oxygen for fuel and nickel and iron for construction. And there's water on the poles of the moon for producing fuel. But then get off the moon and start building large scale space colonies. And so Jeff's vision talks about colonies that are million person colonies in free space, rotating to create artificial gravity and creating a trillion person population in space, not 8 billion, but where you have unlimited resources. And we talk about the notion that if you have that larger population, the number of Mozarts and Beethovens and Einstein and so forth. Having said all that, of course in the next 20 years we're going to bring computer interface and we'll all be, you know, a billion times our intelligence. But all of this shit comes together to make an extraordinary future.

[Steven Kotler]

I want to talk about the one other thing in five migrations that I've been obsessed with for a while.

[Peter Diamandis]

So, so just to put context, right, we talk about, there's a chapter called the five Great Migrations. One of them is the med into meta intelligence, into the one into space,

[Steven Kotler]

one of space climate change. We look at climate change migrations as a. And by the way, one of the reasons migration is such an interesting force, it's got sort of a bad name in a sense. But my group, the whole book is about the future's faster than you think. Converging technologies accelerate the future even faster. Faster than that. And migration as a force for innovation is astounding. 25% of all companies in America were started by immigrants. Most of the major tech companies, some ridiculous number of patents, 60% of new patents are immigrant. The numbers are really crazy. So as a driver of change in technological and speed and things like that, migration is a huge force. So climate change migration is obviously coming. Our migration to space, brain computer interfaces, this hive mind migration. And one of the other ones that we talk about is migration into the virtual, right? People checking into the matrix and never looking back. And what is really interesting. So I work on flow. Flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best, we perform our best. The most important thing you need to know is that it's the most addictive state on Earth.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's the most what state?

[Steven Kotler]

Addictive state on Earth. Right. You go out and you ask a million people, what's your favorite experience on the planet? It's always flow. It tops every list. And we are getting very, very, very close to being able to fully map flow like you. This was something, if you would have asked me 20 years ago, I would have said it's not even possible. Five, six years ago, when I was writing like Rise of Superman, for example. Where we are, where then was astounding to me. But what we've done in the past five years is, is almost incredible. The point is that flow is the most pleasurable and meaningful experience you can get on this planet. Not just pleasure. Also meaning. Yeah, right. So we are, it turns out flow states have triggers. We talked about it when I was on the show last time. Video games are okay at getting at some of Flow's triggers and good game companies use them to make their games really addictive. There are 22 known triggers to flow. Video games can get three or four of them. Really well, VR can get at all of them. So there is a point very soon, two, three, four, five years where we're going to be able to create voice virtual experiences that are as pleasurable and as meaningful as anything we can create in the real world. And once that's the case, especially if you assume that there's, and there's a lot of economics backing up this assumption that there's at least an Internet sized opportunity inside of VR. And if you also assume that that is going to start happening right around the time that robots and AI are starting to remove many blue collar jobs from the equation, right? With new jobs actually starting to show up inside VR, which will be a migration in and of itself, you're getting like pleasure, money and meaning all the exact same moment. And I think we're going to start like, we're the first generation where people are checking in and moving into virtual reality and not coming back.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think that's going to be a big, big migration. Like, if VR becomes anything close to what I think it will become, it, it will be there almost. It wouldn't make sense. So much like flying cars would make owning a regular car just nonsensical. A virtual world with effective haptics or printing the image on the back of your ready player one. Like, yeah, 100% totally like it just. You'd rather be in that world because it's far, far, far more interesting.

[Peter Diamandis]

You're a superhero all the time.

[Steven Kotler]

And we're novelties machines, right? Our whole brains are novelty detection systems and pattern rec systems, but novelty is the front end of that pattern recognition. So we're, we're hardwired for it. I, you know, it's funny because, you know, Ray obviously has been talking about the singularity as the, this nodal point that, like, once that happens, we can't see past it. I got to tell you something. Once VR becomes more pleasurable and meaningful and interesting than regular reality, that singularity is a difficult one for me to start seeing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I just, what, what I really worry about is, so I would not have suspected the kind of dopaminergic manipulation that social media does. And it draws people into sort of this mindless loop of like, just check your phone, check your phone, check your phone. So there's going to be an economic engine driving VR. And so I do worry about, even if it's not like nefariously intended, just there will be some bizarre consequence to, and I'm talking about the brain will begin to wire in a way that's optimized for your experience in VR. And so then it's like, it becomes harder to come out. And so what happened?

[Steven Kotler]

I mean, it'll get weird. Really interesting questions. I mean, if you think the questions about, like, should you give your kid a computer? How much time should they have on the, like, if you think those questions are weird now, wait three to five years.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think, again, I do fundamentally think about that. And then I also think about the fact that we're heading towards a world where a person's digital abilities are going to be one of the most important things. We tend to want to value what is good or bad by virtue of what was good for bad for us in the past. But we are changing everything. We're changing our culture, we're changing maybe in the future, being Able to be part of a tech digital cognitive collective and contribute is the most important thing. And we're doing it first in VR and then through bci. You know, people say, oh, I want to stay in this state of nature and have conversations with people over dinner without my digital devices getting invited. You can. No one's forcing you to use a phone, a car, email, Twitter or electricity. You can go and live off the land if you want.

[Tom Bilyeu]

People are fucking terrible at self governing though. And that's one of those because you're absolutely right. And I think the whole notion now that's coming out about dopamine vacations or fast dopamine Fast I think is what they're calling them. It's super interesting and I think taking time to do that I think is really important.

[Steven Kotler]

So here's one of the things that's really interesting also. Nobody talks about this. This is the. We've been arguing against dopamine, right? I'm about to make the flip side argument. A lot of what we mean by adulthood is I can control my dopamine. I've learned to never trust the dopamine and I've learned to control roll it in. Like that's if you think about marriage, right? Dopamine, romantic love is primarily dopamine and norepinephrine. Lasting love, right. There's a different word for it. Helen Fisher has a different word for it that I'm forgetting. But dopamine and norepinephrine put you into a marriage. Endorphins, serotonin, anandamide and oxytocin keep you there, right? You have to literally learn to shift your addiction, right, to different substances for a successful long term relationship, for a successful long term career, for all. That's everything that like we sort of prize. You have to make this shift. So one of the things that I wonder is people are taking dumb, mean fasts and all this stuff and kids are doing it, right. Personally, I didn't really, I think, get control of that kind of system in my life till probably I was close to 30, right, where it was still kind of driving this show a little bit. And I was still pretty reactive to it. And so my question is, does this mean that our kids, because if they're going to have any kind of success at all, they're going to have to learn to wrestle with this neurochemical, especially in light of the technology. So yes, people are taking dopamine fast and they're doing all this stuff and they're fighting back. And of course this happened because it's the first generation that's been exposed to this. But one of the things I wonder is, are we going to grow up faster as a result now? Because a lot of what we mean by adulthood is I can control. I know how to control that feeling inside of me. Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, we're going to have a lot more experiences a lot earlier. And, you know, what used to control our experiences were the people we met, the places we got to go, the things that, you know, that transported us to different locations. And now you could potentially have any experience you want at an inappropriate age.

[Steven Kotler]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

And which is going to fuck with people's brains, morals, ethics, and I mean, for me, that's one of the greatest concerns as a father that I have.

[Steven Kotler]

It's going to be more and more people ending up like me.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, that's a good thing. I think you're amazing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, gents, tell them where they can get the book.

[Peter Diamandis]

If you go to futurefasterbook.com remember when that was a thing? Or obviously on Amazon. The book is called the future is faster than you think. It's by my illustrious, incredible partner and writer Steven Kotler and myself. And it's part of what we call the exponential mindset series. Abundance was the first one, Tom. It's what turned us onto each other. Bold was a second. And the future is faster than you think. In fact, if you. The book comes out on February 28th.

[Steven Kotler]

January.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'm sorry, January 28th. If you. If you go and get it before. If you have the website before then, if you order the book, you get a copy of Bold and Abundance for free. Whoa. And then there's a whole bunch of other incredible benefits stuff.

[Steven Kotler]

Pre order campaign.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, no, I. I've read all three. They are absolutely phenomenal. It is an incredible series. It's had a big impact on the way that I think and look at things. So I highly encourage people to pick it up. It's fantastic. Thank you both for being here today.

[Steven Kotler]

Thank you for what you do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Of course. My pleasure.

[Peter Diamandis]

Love you, pal.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Love you, too. All right, everybody, that's it. Peace out. Go do something rad because the future is coming faster than you think, everybody. Thank you so much. So much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, Please go to iTunes, go to Stitcher Rate and review us. That helps us build this community. And that is what we are all about right now. Building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can deliver as much value as possible. And you guys rating and reviewing really helps with that. Alright, guys, thank you again so much. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.