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Peter Diamandis
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Tom Bilyeu
You're listening to the Impact Theory podcast, your source of empowering ideas and actionable techniques from the world's highest achievers. Join host Tom Bilyeu, serial entrepreneur and co founder of the billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition, on a journey to unlock your potential and realize your vision of success. Welcome to Impact the. Okay, so I was going somewhere slightly different when I said thesis. So I don't necessarily mean investing, but I mean if I can create an overarching thesis on what it is that links all this stuff together. So your interpretation of where we are in the world right now, as I understand it, is your body no longer needs to be a black box.
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
Tom Bilyeu
We now have the imaging capacity to see what's going on. We have the ability to do something about it. It there are therapeutics that are advancing now very rapidly.
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
Tom Bilyeu
Where you can leverage the body's own systems in, in a intentionally triggered fashion, whether that's through vaccines, whether that's through some other mechanism. But we're getting, we have a deep enough understanding of the body's mechanisms that we're able to trigger those and get them to go in and clean up, whether it's LDL or something else.
Peter Diamandis
And people need to realize that your health is something you can do something about. And if I think about having a longevity mindset. And what does a longevity mindset mean? It means, I believe, and I do believe this, that this next decade we're going to see incredible progress and 10 years from now we're going to have the ability to live an extra 20 healthy years.
Tom Bilyeu
What do you think that progress is going to be in the ability to manipulate the immune system.
Peter Diamandis
So I think it's a lot of what we're doing on this X prize we just announced, right? So we get $101 million from Evolution from Chip Chip Wilson, who is the founder of Lululemon, who put up, you know, 26 million plus another $10 million purse for his disease called FSHD. It's a muscular dystrophy. And we're ask teams to reverse the functional loss in muscle, immune and cognition. Right, so you're moving well, you've got great immunity and you're thinking clearly. And so over the next seven years, we're going to have incredible progress in those areas. That's one of the, I don't call it, it's one of the thrusts that I'm focused on moving the needle forward. And so if you believe that we're going to have this progress, your longevity mindset needs to be. I'm going to do whatever it takes to live long enough to intercept these other breakthroughs. So I arrive at this point in reasonably good health. So for me, that's the thesis that we're going to have these breakthroughs from biotech, from cellular medicines, from gene therapies, from CRISPR technologies, from all of these things, AI. And if I'm able to keep myself in good enough health, I'm going to intercept these and it's going to buy me the next 20 years. And during that time, they're going to be additional breakthroughs. Will buy me the next 20 years. If you want that. If you love life and you want to see what's coming in the next century, there's good reason for you to take care of yourself.
Tom Bilyeu
What does that look like, taking care
Peter Diamandis
of yourself right now? There are things that people need to be doing and I just, you know, I wrote a book that just came out called Longevity, your practical playbook. I've, you know, I just wrote a book last year with Tony Robbins called Life Force. We did a conversation about that. It's a great book and it's 700 pages and it's amazing and very few people get through a 700 page book. So I wanted to write a very practical book that looks at and says, this is what I'm doing and this is what I think is science backs. And I put it into a few very simple chapters. Number one, what to do about diet. Because there are fundamental things we can come back to that. Sleep, exercise, like the most important thing, right?
Tom Bilyeu
You think exercise is more important than diet?
Peter Diamandis
And I'll come Back, come back to that. So they're all important, you know, diet, sleep, exercise, mindset. Super important. Not dying from something stupid, which I call doing your upload and fountain, like knowing what's going on inside your body and then meds and supplements. So the book looks at that. I actually, I made a reduction, that was the word, a reduction of that into what I call my, my practical, my, you know, Peter's Longevity Practices, which I have a copy over there which is free for people. It's a 2530 page. Like, this is what I'm doing and why@diamandis.com diamandis.com longevity and you can get my book there. You can get this, this PDF download and it's, it's very definitive. So listen, there's no one diet for everybody. I've been a vegan. I, I've been, you know, a keto diet. I'm mostly Mediterranean. But the things I've discovered is, number one, sugar is a poison, minimizing your sugar and, and why whole plants are critically important. Even the order in which you eat your food matters. Like if you're given, like you go out to, for dinner at a restaurant, when they bring you the bread and the wine, ask them to bring it back during the dinner course. If you're going to eat the bread, at least dip it in olive oil first to burn glucose. You're talking about not spiking your glucose immediately, right? Which is the worst thing you can do. It really drives you to a.
Tom Bilyeu
So why bring it back? Is it eating proteins first?
Peter Diamandis
So what you want to do is on your plate, eat your vegetables first. If it's, if it's asparagus, if it's broccoli, if it's a salad, the fiber slows down your digestion. Eat your protein next and then eat your carbs last. It slows down your sugar spike. It actually allows you to absorb the best nutrients out of your plate of food first. So even making that small, you'll lose weight, you'll get better nutrition, and you'll actually feel full having eaten the best stuff first. It's such a really small trick that I'm just like, you know, once I learned that, it's like, okay, I need to tell everybody about that. Just small. The order in which you eat your food matters, right? So there's a whole bunch about diet there. Exercise is probably the single most important thing. I have stepped up my exercise from like two or three days a week to five days a week.
Tom Bilyeu
Your physique has changed dramatically.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. I've added muscle and it's my goal to add muscle. Muscle is one of the most important pro longevity parts of your life.
Tom Bilyeu
Are you doing trt?
Peter Diamandis
I am. I do take a certain amount of testosterone and it's simply, I don't actually feel different. I am taking a small amount of testosterone simply to support muscle.
Tom Bilyeu
Do you base it on blood levels?
Peter Diamandis
I do.
Tom Bilyeu
What do you.
Peter Diamandis
I'm staying in like 800 range and sometimes up to a thousand. But does it increase your libido? It doesn't, it doesn't hit my pack.
Tom Bilyeu
My interesting.
Peter Diamandis
Doesn't touch my libido. I mean my libido is fine, but I don't if I'm off it or on doesn't make a difference. And you know, people who've got, you know, I don't think I, I exhibit grouchy old man syndrome. So I'm, you know, I'm like the most positive person.
Tom Bilyeu
No, no doubt.
Peter Diamandis
But I'm using it specifically for supporting muscle mass. But then I'm doing 150 grams of protein a day. I'm having creatine. I'm taking amino acid supplementation. I'm focused on adding muscle mass. As you grow older, adding muscle becomes harder and harder.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
And one of the unfortunate mechanisms that a lot of people die as they go into their 70s and 80s. I'm 62 right now is you fall because of muscle weakness. You break a pelvis or a hip, you end up in the hospital. It's painful to breathe, you get a pneumonia and you're down for the count. Right. It's happened to my dad. Happens a lot of people. And their survival rate post a hip or pelvis fracture if you're over 70 is like really low. So you don't want to do that. You want to maintain muscle mass. Also maintains your stem cell population and your blood in your, in your muscles. So there's an interesting stat. I memorized this one because it was important. If you're over 60 and you can exercise doesn't have to be super intense. But some resistance exercises can be with or without weights, twice a week. It reduces your all cause mortality by 50% and reduces your chance of cancer by threefold.
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Your body, the signals you give your body from exercise and moving is that I'm still useful. I still want to be here. Right. The other thing in the mental game is don't retire. You know, Google the correlation between retirement and death. It's like five years. It's really. So you know, when you retire and you don't feel purpose in your life. You know, I'm going to read something from this is the Longevity Practices book. And there's a section on mindset here. And I just think it's really so important. So I'm going to read this to you. It says, in a study of 69,744 women and 1429 men, this is unusual because it's more women than men. Published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. You know, super high end peer reviewed publication, it was found that optimistic people lived as much as 15 longer than pessimists.
Tom Bilyeu
15. Wow.
Peter Diamandis
Pretty amazing. Your mindset matters and you know, making use of your body and being out there and having purpose and all of these things are subtle clues, right? We all know people that very close to their husband or wife and their spouse dies and then they die weeks later, right? Here's another, here's another story here. One of my favorite stories illustrating the power of mind over a lifespan comes from the Annals, the Annals of American History. As it turns out, in an extraordinary demonstration of the will to live, two of America's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both willed themselves to live long enough to see the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wow. Even though in the early 1800s the average lifespan was only 44 years old, Jefferson, who was then 83, and Adams, who was 90, made it, made it to July 4, 1826, both dying on that exact date, the 50th anniversary of the nation's founding.
Tom Bilyeu
Wow.
Peter Diamandis
Amazing.
Tom Bilyeu
I didn't know that.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I love that story. Having purpose in life, being optimistic, making use of your body, all of these things are fundamental. And when I think about a longevity mindset, it is really, you know, I live with this every day. I care about this every day. I am, I think this is the most exciting time ever in human history to be alive with what's going on and opening up the space frontier with.
Tom Bilyeu
Because of the rate of change, because
Peter Diamandis
the rate of change, because of the rate of potential. It's like an infinite, you know, I mean, if you were born 100 years ago and every year, right at my Abundance360 summit, I look back a hundred years and I look at like what was life like a hundred years ago and what was the rate of innovation 100 years ago? And the numbers and the examples are crazily slow. And I don't remember 18, 1923. I remember 1922. There were seven breakthroughs in that year. I mean, not like seven in a week or seven in a month. It was seven in the entire year. And I searched everywhere. Patent filings, headlines, write ups. And so it was like, it was like the water ski was invented. The, A mechanical, mechanical garage door opener. A retractable roof for the Ford Model T Vegemite was on the list. I mean, I was searching for stuff. I was searching for stuff.
Tom Bilyeu
One of the seven is Vegemite blender.
Peter Diamandis
A blender for making malts. And it was like the pace of change was so slow. And we're living in a world today where there's like massive breakthroughs, you know, every hour of the day.
Tom Bilyeu
It's a rate of change though, that I think now is giving people anxiety.
Peter Diamandis
I've got.
Tom Bilyeu
How do you help people navigate that?
Peter Diamandis
Because I think that the ability I define entrepreneurs as, as people who find problems and solve problems. And I think entrepreneurs are more empowered than ever before to solve problems. And that, that they are entrepreneurs are in our world creating a better and more capable world. I mean, I think we take for granted the fact that, you know, on our phone we've got what we would have spent tens of millions of dollars if it was even possible to 20 years ago for two way free video conferencing, right? Every, every game, every book, every piece of music accessible for free. And we forget the incredible world we live in. I think people who are more in teaching, meditation and spirituality going to help people deal with the, with the anxiety. But I want folks to realize the magical universe they're living in. I think about creating a world in which every mom knows her kids has access to the best healthcare, education, all the food, water, energy. This is the world of abundance. When I first wrote Abundance with Steven Kotler 12 years ago, I talked about creating a world not of luxury, but a world of possibility. Right? And I still believe that. And there's no velocity switch, there's no on, off switch to this technology. It's happening. So what do you dream about? What do you wish you had? What do you want to do? I mean, you can put it all away and go live in the forest. And people will. And people will. But most choose not to.
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. I don't know if you, if I ever showed you the comic that I did called Neon Future, but it was contemplating this idea. What happens when AI shows up and when brain computer interfaces exist and people are able to augment their bodies? What, what happens? And my thesis is, and I think this will, will bear out that society will bifurcate.
Peter Diamandis
Absolutely.
Tom Bilyeu
And you will get people who are like, no way, I'm not going to augment myself in any way, shape or form. AI is the. And they will fight to keep society the way that it is.
Peter Diamandis
We saw a Luddite society occur. We have seen parts of that, a rejection of technology. Right. We saw the Amish rejecting, you know, the Ford Model T and electricity. But I think people desire convenience, they desire power, they desire having their hopes and dreams fulfilled. I, I don't know, I think they will bifurcate, but I think the vast majority will pursue says seeing all of it.
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. I think it will play out something like this. I think that the rate of change is going to cause a lot of people a lot of turmoil. They will get addicted to things like social media and the dopamine cycle. Their sense of well being will be tremendously disrupted by losing a sense of purpose to AI. And the reason that even in the face of all of that, I consider myself wildly optimistic about the future, I am very aggressively a techno optimist is because I don't think that evolution, and that's probably is the right word though I don't just mean it from the sort of standard perspective of your DNA mutation. Mutations accumulate and you get better. I mean technological evolution, societal evolution, I don't think it cares about any one generation. And it will gladly create a period of 15 to 20 years of just absolute brutality. But on the other side of that will be a generation that grows up with just oh, this is all de rigueur. And yeah, I have a quantum computer in my pocket and there's fusion energy and it's abundant. Anything I can imagine becomes real. And the person that I want to speak to is the person that wants to map out where this goes and how to ride this wave. Well, and to your point, and I don't know if this is what you meant by power, but to me power is the ability to close your eyes, imagine a world better than this one, open your eyes, acquire the skills to actually make that world come true. And when I think about as a filmmaker all my entire journey to getting into business and growing Quest and spending 20ish years of my life doing something sort of to the side of what I really wanted to do was because I had no idea how to break into the industry because making a film was a no budget film was $100,000.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And now it will be. If I were to have kids today, my kids would grow up in a world where you just type onto your phone the kind of movie in Fact, they're not even going to type. They, they would go. And the, the thing that they are most likely to want to see in that moment would exist.
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
Tom Bilyeu
And as long as we're able to understand our baser natures and not be a slave to algorithms, but instead go, okay, I understand how I have to create distance from this. I can't allow myself to get addicted. I want to use these things in order to. Whatever experience whatever thing you want to experience, then I think that that will be okay. And I think so I'll make a prediction. I think you agree with this. I think I've heard you talk about this, but if not, let me know. The reason that the Fermi paradox isn't a paradox is I don't think people end up exploring space. I think they explore virtual worlds, which will be far more interesting than anything that's a slave to physics. And that's the reality that I think that we're moving towards. And between here and there, many people will be broken emotionally and they simply won't be your competition. And so for those that are paying attention and figuring out how to leverage this technology, you will create the next wave of opportunity and you will thrive.
Peter Diamandis
I agree with all of that. And I do agree that there's going to be a period of turbulence over the next five to 15 years. And that turbulence is going to come because we're in the midst of a phase change in society. You, you know, you've had, you've had Mo Gadot on the show, right?
Tom Bilyeu
Twice.
Peter Diamandis
Twice, yeah. And Mo's become a dear friend. We're working on a documentary together around Scary Smart, his book, which I commend to everybody. And you know, I've had this conversation with Elon that on the flip side of AGI, we do have abundance, defined as access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education that you want. Everybody has access to. It's completely democratized and demonetized. And I think that's a more peaceful world as well if you can have what you want. It's also somewhat of a post capitalist world. We can talk about that separately. Then you're less likely to blow yourself up in a suicide vest. And you know, if you, if everybody could be expansive and they're almost in their own light cone, sort of speak instead of having to oppress other people, you just go and you, you build and you create.
Tom Bilyeu
How do we cross the chasm, though?
Peter Diamandis
Because there's. So that's the issue is the chasm. Over the next five to 10 years, when AI comes in in the near term and I think we're going to see this. I think, you know, Mo and I have talked about patient zero being the 2024 presidential elections. Right. Because I think it is, you know, in 2020, Cambridge Analytica moved the needle and caused a disruption with, you know, massive budget. In 2024, a kid in their garage using generative AI can do that by creating deep fakes. Deep fakes, Deep, you know, creating, you know, social persuasive arguments that get traction and are sway people's thinking whether they're true or not. I mean, say something enough times to somebody in enough ways and they believe it and stop asking, well, is this true? And where to come from? It's just, you know, we have all of these cognitive biases which are fascinating. It's a whole field, I'm fascinated by that our brain takes all these shortcuts because we can't process all the information. So I've got a recency cognitive bias. I give more value to something I recently heard. Right. I've got a familiarity bias. If someone dresses and looks like me, I give it more credence. I have a negativity bias. I give much more credence in negative information than positive information. And this sort of stuff saved your life on the savannahs of Africa a hundred thousand years ago. Today you could be manipulated by them. So I think I forgot where I was going.
Tom Bilyeu
Let me ask what, what is the thing about the 2024 election that you're
Peter Diamandis
most afraid of, besides who might become president?
Tom Bilyeu
Well, if that's the thing you're most
Peter Diamandis
afraid of, well, I think it's going to become. I think we have a divisiveness coming and people are playing full out and it's no longer gentlemanly politics. And I think, you know, part of this is a post truth economy where you can't tell whether something is truthful or not. And one of the things I'm afraid about is more civil war than anything else. Yeah, right. So this next, I'm the, you know, I'm the person who. The glass is not half full, it's overflowing. But yet I do see this period of turbulence. We have a whole population, we have a whole generation having gone through Covid, who are now going to step into a world where they're not getting the jobs they expected because AI is coming in and taking a number of those jobs. So there's going to be youthful social unrest. Sounds like Arab Spring almost over again. So how do we, how do we navigate that And I've been thinking about that. My wife, Kristen Mogadot and I have been, you know, talking about what do you teach people? How do you navigate this? And part of it is, how do people survive traumatic experiences? Because it's going to be traumatic for a lot of people. But yet on the flip side of this, we're going to see, I think, tremendous abundance. So it is something we have to navigate. But humanity navigates these things over and over again. We navigated World War I, World War II, you know,
Tom Bilyeu
do you have any rules or insights? I'm not sure what the right moniker to put on it is that you want people to understand about themselves or whatever to help us navigate this.
Peter Diamandis
Well, I want to have those. I'm not sure I have them formed yet. I think that the most important thing is a hopeful having hope about the future. You know, if you ask yourself the question, in the year 2023, would you rather live here now than the year 1900, do you have an answer for me? Yes. For you?
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, obviously.
Peter Diamandis
Right. And I think the vast majority, when I ask people is, you know, and people who say the, you know, the good old days in 1900, they're fooling themselves for sure. You know, the first time they got an infection, they'd be like, whoa, yes, I'm dead. You know, the streets of any major city stank from urine and manure from horses. Life was short and brutish. The average age was 40. You got, you were dead from tuberculosis by then. I mean, it was really brutal. And you would, you would work 70, 80 hour work weeks and your kids were working to try and make ends meet. Child labor was, was prominent back then. So we romanticize the past. And between the year 1900 and today, I did the work. I'm right. I have a book, I'm. I'm got a book coming out in the first half of next year called Age of Abundance, which is my follow on to my first book. And I looked at what were the number of needless deaths over this last century. And if you look at disease, warfare and starvation, it was about 240 million people died from those. Whoa, right. So you had 50 million people dying from just the Spanish flu in World War I. And you look at just. I mean, it's pretty. We lived a pretty brutal life over the last 123 years.
Tom Bilyeu
20th century was rough, and yet we got here.
Peter Diamandis
And so I think ultimately it's about the human spirit overcoming these things. And so I am hopeful that the human spirit will allow us to evolve to this next level. And we are. We are evolving as humanity. We're evolving technologically and societally, and we are also going to evolve in other ways. We're going to go from evolution by Darwinism, natural selection, to evolution by human direction. And it's moving fast, right? This is what Ray Kurzweil talks about in the singularity that, you know, in his, you know, there's lots of singularities. Singularity comes from physics as a. As a event horizon you can't see beyond, right? And so we're really close to the AI singularity singularity, which is. I can't tell you what's going to happen in five years, let alone 10 years with AI. It's moving so incredibly fast. And then Ray talks about the singularity is the convergence of all of these bioinfo nano, information technologies from AI biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, which is transforming life at such a rapid rate.
Tom Bilyeu
How real is nanotechnology?
Peter Diamandis
I think it is definitively real. Right now, today, there are people working on elements of it. A good friend of mine has dropped off the planet to go invest his wealth in building it.
Tom Bilyeu
What does it do today?
Peter Diamandis
So. So today we are building molecular machines versus atomic machines. So what is nanotechnology? In the first place? Nanotechnology is the ability to assemble things atom by atom. So Eric Drexler wrote a book in 1986 called Engines of Creation, in which he looked at nanotechnology and the ability to the physics and the energetics of being able to build things atom by atomic. And he writes about an idea called an assembler, which is a machine that's able to grab a silicon atom or an oxygen atom or a nitrogen atom and bond it and assemble things. And the assembler, I could have an assembler in my hand and I can command it to take atoms from my skin and manufacture an assembler and give it to you. And now you have one, and you can have that assembler replicate itself. And these are atomic machines. And now I can drop it in the soil and I can say, produce me an electric Lamborghini and it can go to the open source and find a design for an electric Lamborghini. And then it will take the atoms out of the soil. It'll need energy. Energy is abundant in the universe. And it'll say, I need a kilogram of titanium or kilogram of lithium or whatever the case might be. And you'll provide that. Feed that raw feedstock, and it'll manufacture this for you. Now, we. We know this like an oak tree. Seed is a, is a, if you would, nanotechnology. You take a seed for an oak tree, you plant it, it just does it very slowly. It takes the, the atom, it has the information set inside of that, that oak seed, and it grabs atoms from the soil and then energy from the sun. And over time, it builds a mighty oak. It just does it at a very slow time frame. And so the question is, can you build atomic machines that can manufacture things at a much faster time frame? And so there is nothing that has been ever shown that says it's impossible from the laws of physics. And we're building things now at a molecular level and in some cases an atomic level. And I believe, you know, Ray Kurzweil's prediction is that it is, you know, in the next 15 years that we'll see these coming into existence and AI will become probably our most valued tool for being able to produce those, those atomic assemblers. And then it's between AI and, and nanotechnology, it's. The universe is reinvented instantly. We're in a post capitalist society at that point. What has value anymore? Very few things.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So what is a post capitalist society then?
Peter Diamandis
Oh, my God, you really want to go there. It's says that Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called Zero Marginal Society, which talks about this. And it's a, it's a, it's a world of massive abundance where you can have almost anything you want. There is wealth accumulation for the people who get started earlier in that. But I, I would rather just focus on the notion that in this world you can have access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education, everything you want, it's available. I don't know. Listen, I can tell you the world's going to get very strange very fast.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, My, my concern going back to the nearest term strangeness would be the 2024 election.
Peter Diamandis
Richard Feynman, that's his name. Okay. Richard Feynman, professor, yes. Wrote about this. He wrote in, in The, I think 1958, he wrote a very famous paper or gave a lecture called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. And he said, let's look not at macro structures and the universe, but let's look at atomic structure. And Richard Feynman wrote effectively the first paper on nanotechnology. And then Eric Drexler wrote the first book on the subject and really explored the physics of it.
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
I don't know a lot about Feynman, but certainly somebody that comes up a lot. So the thing that I'm most concerned about in the immediate term, the 2024 election. The thing that I'm worried about is that people will do deepfake videos. And it is distressing to me, one, how good they are. And two, if you know what you're looking for, you can usually tell pretty quickly what's fake and what's real. But the average person can't. Doesn't know. And I'll see a video come across my X feed that clearly is a deep fake. And people are riled up in the comments as if it's real. And I'm like, the barrage of things that will come will be.
Peter Diamandis
I have to tell you a funny story. So you know my podcast, it's called Moonshots, and it's been fun. And I focused mostly on interviewing entrepreneurs who are taking big moonshots in the world, folks who want to, you know, do amazing things, and their stories of getting there and the difficulties and how they overcome them and such. About three months ago, my team created an avatar of me. I saw the interview and I interviewed myself, and I was blown away. I call it peterbot. And it's both visual. It looks like me, it moves its arms around, it sounds like me, lips are in sync, it's trained on all of my books and all my blogs. And so. And it's great. And it's. I'm really proud of that, of that interview. And I said it did a better job as a orator and as someone communicating my ideas than I did. It was. It was amazing. And I asked it to talk about what were the downside scenarios of deep fakes and tell me a story. And it instantly whipped up a story about a young female politician who's running for election, and the opponent creates a deep fake of. Of her and information gets out there. And despite the fact that, that it's not true, the story starts spreading virally and her ability to overcome it when it's out of the gate was impossible. And that is problematic. Yep.
Tom Bilyeu
Lies go around the world faster than the truth could put on his shoes.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I love that saying.
Tom Bilyeu
Oh my God, that's terrifying. Yeah, I think that's exactly what's going to happen. You said something earlier. You said, people are playing for real or for keeps, or I forget the exact phrase you used, but that is true. Right now, people are playing for all the marbles. So one, I would like to see the blockchain used to watermark somehow signify this thing is real.
Peter Diamandis
I think it's the most important technology for that. And it's actually the Most important use of blockchain. You know, I've always been like, okay, besides like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and so forth, what's blockchain really going to be valuable for? I think it's truth authentication.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, correct. This thing is real. Obviously cryptocurrency, the blockchain has become incredibly divisive. Some people are totally for it. And as again, somebody developing games, I'm like right at the intersection of people hate or love this technology. But if I could get them to understand it's just a technology, it lets you do a thing.
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
Tom Bilyeu
And so what is that thing that it lets you do? And what it does is it brings the laws of physics to the virtual world. And if tomorrow is going to be more virtual than today, and it is, then you better have something that brings some of the laws of physics, like the ability to say, okay, I can authenticate this thing. So sitting across from you now, obviously I don't have any concerns about whether you're real or not. And for a very long time it was, well, a picture or a video, that's easy. And then it became, well, a picture you can fake, but video is still real. And now it's okay. Even video man is super easy to fake. So that becomes really disconcerting. And if we don't have a way to market and say this thing is real, this thing is not, and make it ubiquitous so that when it shows up on my feed, I, it, it is self evident this one is real
Peter Diamandis
and this one is what is the blue check equivalent?
Tom Bilyeu
Right, exactly. And so that to me becomes really, really important. To your point about the election being patient zero, it's like this is coming right now, right now. This is not a tomorrow problem, this is a two day problem. And who's running this is going to be a nightmare. And so I'm, I am super worried. And when you look at Ray Dalio, who's up to the last prediction I saw was 40% likelihood of civil war in the US, 50% likelihood of a global world war. And so it's like, whoa, like these are terrifying odds.
Peter Diamandis
Yes, they are. And it's the human element that's at stake here, right? It's humans doing this to themselves. It's one important things people need to realize that technology is not inherently evil. It's how humans utilize the technology. And we have so much to live for and so much potential ahead of us. Right? Infinite adjacent potentials. You know, when I think about why AI is important, it may well be to navigate all this stuff. I don't know. That we humans are able to. I don't know. Given all of the complexities of politics and social beliefs and distrusts, you know, is there. Is there some means by which a more brilliant, more capable, more gentle AI is able to step in and support us during this transition period? It's a conversation that's out there, and we're one. We're thinking about. We talk about AI being the massive disruptor. Can it be the massive stabilizer as well?
Tom Bilyeu
Let me paint a scenario for you. And as somebody with. Are you kids, 11 now?
Peter Diamandis
My kids are 12.
Tom Bilyeu
12.
Peter Diamandis
As somebody for those listening to fraternal twin boys. Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes. Somebody that has kids who this will impact. I'll be very interested to get your take on this. So I am actively building an artificial world with artificial characters that as the technology matures, we can't do this yet, but this, this will be real very quickly. I want to build characters that you have a real relationship with that you get to know. They get to know you, they react differently to you, they have memory. And when I think about. I think technology has really created a loneliness epidemic for a lot of people. But ironically, I think technology is going to be the solve for that loneliness. Now the question becomes, will it be a better or worse world that.
Peter Diamandis
That.
Tom Bilyeu
That remains to be seen. But with my optimistic hat on, I think people's best friends, certainly in 10 years from now, most people's best friend will be an AI in 20 years, barring just absolute nuclear catastrophe, like for sure or biological weapon, that's probably more likely. That seems a certainty. And that. So people will have friendships that are AI, but they'll also have romantic relationships. And even potentially. This one freaks me out. But potentially sexual relationships with AI. What do you think about that?
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I. I think that we're going to have relationships with AIs that are intimate because they know you better than you know yourself.
Tom Bilyeu
Literally.
Peter Diamandis
Literally. Right. I'm writing. I just finished my chapters on AI in Age of. For Age of Abundance, and I'm working on the humanoid robot chapters today. And so AIs will, in fact, you're going to give Permission to your AIs to listen to your phone calls, read your emails, watch what you're eating, watch what you're doing. And you're going to do it openly because when you give it that permission, it can help you in an amazing fashion. Right. So it'll remember everyone you've forgotten. So when the person's approaching you, it'll Be, you know, my favorite, right? You're know the kid's birthday and so forth. If you want to be, if you want to, you know, follow my diet recommendations. It will for your AR glasses, it will tell you don't eat that or it'll have pre ordered for you at the restaurant. You'll listen, you'll listen to your conversation so it'll remind you of everything. And people go, I don't want it knowing this stuff. I mean, well, come on, be serious. I mean Alexa is listening in your bedroom right now. Google knows everything you've searched for. Microsoft knows everything on your email. You know, it's Apple knows all of your, you know, I mean if you think you have privacy today, don't fool yourself.
Tom Bilyeu
Also, here's what I would invite people to think about. Imagine. Because right now they're thinking about Jeff Bezos knowing what they're up to or Larry Page knowing what they're up to. That doesn't feel good. But if you think of it this way, hey Peter, you just got into an argument with your wife and I see from your aura ring that your blood pressure has gone up. You know, I like obviously you've invited me to listen into these things. Here's a perspective you might want to take. Like, you know, if you remember, she's very sensitive to this and you said that and that, you know, might have been what set her off. But look, hey, I totally understand where you're coming from. I see your position 100 super empathic.
Peter Diamandis
Exactly, super empathic. In fact, there was a study recently done. It was published in jama, the Journal of American Medical association, something like that in which in a study of humans and AIs giving advice to patients, the AIs were like 10 times more empathic than the humans. And another study looking at therapists. You're more likely to be open and honest with an AI than a human therapist because the AI is not going to judge you.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. You can also tailor the AI. I don't want you to try to solve the problem AI. I just want you to understand my feelings.
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
Tom Bilyeu
And it will do as told.
Peter Diamandis
So we're going to be, it's going to be interesting, but I think you are going to that AI. If the AI has access to the backward looking cameras on augmented goggles so it can see where your eyes are looking and if it sees me staring for an extra microsecond at a logo on your shirt that shows curiosity or if it sees my eye avert from something that I don't like that is so much information. That's almost subconscious information to you. Right. If you're looking to buy clothing and you see it knows from a conversation you had with a friend that you're looking to find a new blazer. And so you look an extra few seconds at a guy's blazer as they're walking by, and it may say, do you like that? And you're like, I do. I said, okay, I'll order it for you. Right. So it's like knowing the ability for it to know you more intimately than you are honestly willing to know yourself is there. And that will build an extraordinary relationship.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. And to, you know, for. For better or worse, here is the human psyche at work. If you have a friend who effectively lives to understand you, to feel your
Peter Diamandis
pain over and over again.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes. Like, you will feel seen. There is something so wonderful about feeling.
Peter Diamandis
It goes back to that conversation about, is there someone in your life who knows you intimately and doesn't judge you?
Tom Bilyeu
It's exactly right.
Peter Diamandis
Right. Yeah. It is a level of connection that few people know.
Tom Bilyeu
And. Yeah. I think we'll also be able to give the AI a personality so that it isn't. I was thinking about this when you were talking about how we will all become the Borg. Borg and Kinder.
Peter Diamandis
Kindler. Kinder, Gentler Borg.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes. And I was thinking, you know, it's interesting because the. The way that we individualize ends up a really cool part of the human experience. That my wife has a unique perspective that she sees the world in a certain way that is complementary to the way that I see the world makes her an incredible partner. And I don't want her to be exactly like I am. So I don't want my AI companion to be a mirror. That's not interesting. I want my AI companion to be that perfectly tailored, complementary thing to me so that they're. They're siding with me at times, but then other times they're sort of pulling me along.
Peter Diamandis
By the way, you can fracture that AI into five different personalities, all who know you well.
Tom Bilyeu
Also true.
Peter Diamandis
Wow. One is sensual and sexual. One is funny. One is funny. One is pushing you to do better. One is commiserating through with you.
Tom Bilyeu
You know, this is going to get weird.
Peter Diamandis
It is going to get weird. Very weird. Very fast.
Tom Bilyeu
I love that you just gave me an idea for a story that is so interesting.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. I want to see this world. And for those who say, oh, my God, slow down. I don't want to see it. I like the way it is right now. You know, I hate to say this, there's no velocity knob on this technological world. There's no on, off switch. It is moving at lightning speed. Our job is to steer it, to navigate, to inspire and guide it. Right. To avoid that 40% civil war or 50% world war, all of those things. Because on the back end of this, I do believe there is a stabilized society and a world of extraordinary abundance out there. I don't think, think we have a, I don't think we have a choice. We're, we're evolving. We're evolving very rapidly. So, you know, bringing this back, I mean the work that we do at the XPRIZE foundation is trying to evolve, to guide, to create that positive world of the future and guide us and guide where entrepreneurs invest their time and energy in a positive world. So I mean, it's fun. We've launched now $400 million in X prizes.
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa.
Peter Diamandis
Which have driven, you know, on the at least $4 billion in R D. And what we're trying to do at the X prize is say this is what's possible in the year 2040. In energy, in health, in education. Right. Education is another massively about to be transformed world. I'll come back in a minute. And saying, okay, what's the road map to get there and what are the breakthroughs we need to get there? You know, so I mentioned earlier of two 12 year old boys, I don't think the educational system is getting them ready for the world that's coming at them.
Tom Bilyeu
What would they need to be ready?
Peter Diamandis
Not the stuff they're learning in school right now. I've set up a meeting. I won't mention my kids go to a very super high end, amazing private school in, in Santa Monica. And. But it's based on the traditional old educational system. Right. So this past year they learned the 50 capitals of the US states. And I'm like, huh? Why are. I mean, that's why God created Google. I mean, I would rather you. And so I wrote a blog, I put out two blogs a week and folks can get it@diamandis.com but I put out a blog on what the schools need to be teaching kids today. And part of it was this is what I think. And Then I asked ChatGPT what we need to teach our kids and it was very, very similar. And it's not memorization, Right. So it's how to ask great questions, it's finding your passion, discovering that and really diving deep into that. Whether it's developing video games or Whether it's, you know, space, which it was for me. I mean, video games is for my kids. It is learning how to. How to argue your point, how to be lead, how to be a great leader, how to be empathic. Right. These are some fundamentals. Maybe it's more philosophy than anything else. And. And it's not what we're teaching our kids today. So what is the world like? My, my dad didn't want to buy me a calculator when I was growing up so I could learn, you know, basics. And I ended up getting a calculator and learning how to program on it. But what's the world like in, like inside of five years, where everything is intelligent, everything is imbued with intelligence. You're talking to your refrigerator, your car, the desk chair, whatever it is, Right. Intelligence is innate in all physical things. And where even more than that, AI has achieved and exceeded human level intelligence. Right. So this whole concept of AGI, Artificial General intelligence. Ray Kurzweil predicted we would have it in 2029. He made that prediction in 1999. Whoa. 30 years early. And guess what? Everyone is agreeing on that date.
Tom Bilyeu
Wow.
Peter Diamandis
His predictions are amazing. So Elon's predicting like 2028. I just saw yesterday the. The CEO of Nvidia predicted it's within five years, which is 2829. So what happens when AI, human level AI, your best teachers, your best diagnosticians are all AIs. And an AI teacher knows your child's favorite color movie star sports, understands their grasp of language, understands that they're tactile learners versus visual versus auditory, where I can enter a virtual world that is spun up instantly. We just saw a stability AI, right? With stable diffusion, being able to create imagery instantly from just typing. And I'm learning about Plato or Socrates or ancient Saudi Arabia or ancient Egypt. And I'm living in a virtual world for me, and I'm walking around and meeting people, and my inquisitiveness is driving me to want to learn more. And he's going to be awesome. But it's very different from today.
Tom Bilyeu
It's very different from today. One of the things that when you were talking about the calculator and your dad wanted to make sure that you were able to do the basics in your head. Do you consider AI cheating?
Peter Diamandis
No, no more than having a book as cheating compared to what we had before books, which was memorizing texts. Right. When the printing press came out, you know, this art of storytelling started going away. I think AI is a new superpower. And how we utilize it. Now the big challenge is how do we reconnect purpose in our life? I think what you're jumping to there is if AI, if you love writing, which I do, I get up every morning and I write for an hour. It's like my precious time. If I can write for two hours, I will before hitting the gym or before taking the kids to school. So I love writing and I love that experience of like a well written paragraph. But what happens if I can say, hey listen, write a book called Age of Abundance. Click.
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
Peter Diamandis
I mean, it's kind of empty. It's like, okay, yeah, I published a book along with the other trillion books that are published today and it's meaningless. So we're going to have to reconnect meaning in other ways. So a purpose driven life is so critically important.
Tom Bilyeu
How much do you think the world is going to fragment? So when everybody can publish a book, when everybody can make a video game, when everybody can write their own movie,
Peter Diamandis
it becomes less valuable. So what happens then? I think we have to find value in different ways. I think we have to go after bigger challenges. I do believe a good after bigger
Tom Bilyeu
challenges because it will re aggregate people,
Peter Diamandis
because it will reinspire people. I think our biology needs challenge. I think one future is one in which we're just living in games and we find our purpose and our, our challenges in game universes. Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
I think ready player one is, is the inevitable future.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
So, but I'm talking about something slightly different. So here's the thing. As an entrepreneur, I think about this a lot. You say if you want to make a billion dollars, help a billion people.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
I don't know that that will be a thing in the Future. I think 10, certainly 20 years from now, everything is so hyper individualized that I, when I log into Netflix, which of course won't exist, but let's just pretend it makes it easier for people to think. When I log into Netflix and I'm scrolling, it's going to be making the movies based on where my eye lingered for a little bit longer with a
Peter Diamandis
conversation you had an hour ago. Right. So you're pissed or you're just had the most amazing day. What's your emotional status right now based upon your emotional feelings or who you're with? You want to pick a movie that is going to like relax you or inspire you or make you laugh, whatever the case might be. And this process of like googling or randomly walking into it instead, you know, the movie will be teed up and ready to go.
Tom Bilyeu
Correct. And it will be so individualized. There won't be this sense of shared experience, except for the fact that I'll create a sense of shared experience because my 17 AI personalities will all have experienced it with me and watched it and have their take. But now I'm not, you know, going back to the I as when I'm thinking as an entrepreneur, I started thinking, whoa, it's going to be very hard for me to build a big business because I'm going to pick it. It will inevitably be just a really deep niche. So I'll make something for, you know, to use Kevin Kelly's idea of a thousand true fans. And now everybody is making something just for a thousand true fans. Everything is bifurcated. So I'm, I'm making video games in an anime style for fans of vampire fiction that's in rhyming couplets.
Peter Diamandis
And, and by the way, your AI is producing 10,000 of those individualized variations for the 10,000 raving subgroups. Exactly. Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
So what do you think that does to entrepreneurship in general?
Peter Diamandis
I wish I knew. I think we're going from mind to materialization. I think we're going from deciding you want something to seeing it instantly created. And it's going to, it's going to get there hyper fast. Your whatever you desire is going to be enabled in ways that are shocking. So how do we give value? Because a lot of times we give value to the struggle. I've, I worked really hard, yes. To find this thing and I found this unique piece of whatever it is. Or I worked hard to get to that point. And when the struggle is gone, what does that, what does that mean?
Tom Bilyeu
I think you've already answered the question. I, this is why I think Ready Player One is inevitable. So Ready Player One imagines a world that is dystopian and so you create a far more enjoyable reality. But I think there's also, let's say that you make a utopian world. You will still end up in Ready Player One because you're going to need to create a world that's hard because until you augment the human mind, we will, I think there's a formula that we, that evolution is guaranteed that we will pursue, which is that you must work really hard to gain a set of skills that matter to you for whatever reason, that allow you to serve yourself and others. And you will need all of those pieces and you will pursue anything and everything until you get those things a slot in place. Which is exactly why video games are the all consuming medium.
Peter Diamandis
Let Me take you on a short journey over 3 billion years, please, and give some vision of where things might go on a single trajectory. The Earth forms. Four and a half billion years ago, the earliest life forms were somewhere in the 4 billion to 3 billion single cell life forms without a nucleus. These are prokaryotic life form and as they advance, they become. They go from prokaryotic life to eukaryotic life. That meant they incorporated technology into them. Mitochondria, Golgi apparatus and plasma reticulum, nuclear structures. They became more capable as individual cells of supporting energy and information. Then those prokaryotic cells, now more capable individual cells, became multicellular. And then those multicellular life forms started differentiating into life forms that were not just multicellular, but subspecialized cells, tissues and organs, and eventually evolved to us. So there's a direct line between these very simple individual cells and you and I at 40 trillion cells. I think in the same way that we went from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life, by taking technology in mitochondria and plasma reticulum, nuclear structures and so forth, that allowed us to use energy and information more effectively. We humans are the equivalent of that early prokaryotic life. We're about to take in technology into ourselves that's going to allow us to connect with each other the same way those individual cells became multicellular lives. And so we're going to become this meta intelligence where I'm going to connect with 8 billion people. And my experience of life is no longer a single ego. I'm now part of a much larger intelligence, a meta intelligence that's conscious on a brand new level.
Tom Bilyeu
It's really interesting. What I love two things about that. One, it's a very clear vision of where this could go. Tying back to the way that we have evolved thus far and really showing technology is just another step in that evolution. And the idea of humans as midwives for artificial intelligence is, while somewhat disconcerting, is still cool to me. But the other thing I like about that is how much that reveals about you and the way that your mind works. It's very interesting. Like as I paint the picture of where I think this goes, I think I reveal more about myself than I am accurately predicting the future. Because I think we'll both agree, like on the other side of AI is a singularity. We just can't. Who knows what's really going to happen when artificial super intelligence exists. Like the idea of something being a billion times smarter than we are now. Like we we just can't predict. But it is utterly fascinating what it tells us about each other to imagine what that future looks like. Like for me, all I can see is ready player one and. And I'm working as fast as I can to make that become a reality because that to me is, is just beyond fascinating. What happens like, because I imagine a world where we're not changing the way the human mind works, but we're giving it unlimited technology. The reality is we probably will change the way the human mind works. But it's far more. I'm far more capable of imagining the world with technology and my normal brain than I am what I will want and desire and push into as my brain changes. But when I think about. In fact, my listeners are going to get tired of me bringing this up, but I'm really having a moment right now with Minecraft. Have you played Minecraft before?
Peter Diamandis
Of course. 12 year old boys right now. Exactly.
Tom Bilyeu
So. Because I don't. I discovered it very late in life and am utterly fascinated by what I respond to in the game because it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs without the top part of the pyramid.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And seeing how compelling I find it to be like I'm effectively naked and alone.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
Build shelter, find food. And it is compelling. Like yeah. When, when you can really like it's. I feel like the rat in the cage that's able to stimulate the dopamine receptors in my own brain. And so now I'm just like pressing that button over and over and over. It is really, really fascinating to think that we will be able to create entire worlds that are designed to stimulate all of our. Whether it's love, pleasure.
Peter Diamandis
And so this is where I come back to the desire to live long enough to see as much of it as possible.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
Right.
Tom Bilyeu
Let me ask you a question I find fascinating. Let's say that to see the future you will have to witness unimaginable bloodshed because AI triggers such a panic that humans just go against each other. But we get to the other side and we get to that world of abundance that you're talking about. But it's going to cost half of humanity. Do you want to be in the half that lives or the half that dies?
Peter Diamandis
The hat that lives.
Tom Bilyeu
You and me both.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
That's not universal though, which I'm very surprised is true.
Peter Diamandis
Listen, I, I will do all that I can. I mean my, my ethos through the X Prize, through singularity University, through abundance360 through all the things that I do is all about how do you make life better? How do entrepreneurs solve the world's biggest problems? How do we enable all that we can? And I will do all I can to minimize the downside. But my mission is to create such a compelling vision of the future that people truly want it and will give up the dystopian potentials to enable this future that they want.
Tom Bilyeu
I love it. For people that want to follow you on that mission, where can they connect with you?
Peter Diamandis
Check out the Xprize foundation, xprize.org We just announced in Riyadh our 101 million dollar X prize on adding 20 healthy years on your life. And thank you to Hevolution and and Solve FSHD for their underwriting of that X prize. I love what I do. I love my friendship with you, pal. Right back to you. I think this is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. And I want to, I want people to be inspired to, you know, create the vision that they want to because you've got access to more capital, more tech, more abilities, more knowledge, more people than ever before in human history. So, you know, part of what I do is help people take moonshots. Like, what inspires you to go big and bold? What's the moonshot? What's the dent you want to make in the universe? To quote Jobs. Right. So, and that, that's the final one. If you're interested in my, my podcast on that subject, it's. The podcast is called Moons.
Tom Bilyeu
It is a fantastic podcast.
Peter Diamandis
Thank you, buddy. Thank you.
Tom Bilyeu
Speaking of things that are fantastic, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace now. Audible gives you audiobooks, podcasts, Audible originals and more all in one place. Whether you want to dive into a series, listen to a popular bestseller, or check out the latest episode of a great new podcast, Audible has you covered.
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This episode of Impact Theory features futurist, physician, and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis (XPRIZE founder, author) in a wide-ranging conversation with Tom Bilyeu. The discussion explores the disruptive promise and peril of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, longevity, potential societal upheaval, and the simulated/virtual future. Diamandis offers an optimistic but clear-eyed account of how exponential technologies are reshaping humanity, challenging listeners to adopt a “longevity mindset” and deliberate proactive engagement with these chaotic but opportunity-laden times.
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Diamandis and Bilyeu’s dialogue is both a warning and a rallying cry. This is a moment for audiences to:
Connect with Peter Diamandis:
Peter’s new book: Longevity: Your Practical Playbook