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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 Theory everybody. Welcome to Impact Theory. You are here my friends because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless. But you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it. So our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that are actually going to help you execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is a hyper intelligent, furiously educated, one man army hell bent to to create a brighter future. While others may look forward and see only a dystopian world where the machines enslave us for our heat energy, he sees only amazing possibilities. And this optimism, coupled with a metric ton of grit and degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and an MD from Harvard Medical School have helped him shape himself into one of the most potent entrepreneurial forces on the planet. He is committed to helping at least 1 million entrepreneurs create companies that matter. And he believes that the best way to predict the future is to create it. As Such, he's founded 17 companies himself and invested in countless more that are designed to alter the very fabric of human society. From Human Longevity Inc. And Cellularity, which together aim to keep us all healthy and add 30 high performance years to the human lifespan, to Singularity University which is disrupting education and business Quite frankly, and. And Planetary Resources, a company that builds the spaceships humankind will need to, you guessed it, mine asteroids. He's literally constructing our future, one game changing enterprise at a time. He's also the founder and executive chairman of xprize, the legendary nonprofit that gave birth to privatized space flight and continues to incentivize some of the biggest scientific and technological breakthroughs of the 21st century. It is not hard to see, my friends, why Fortune magazine is named one of the 50 greatest leaders of our time. So please help me in welcoming the man who has a stamp with his face on it. The multiple time New York Times best selling author of Bold and the Future Is Brighter than youn Think. Dr. Peter Diamandis. It is so good to have you on the show, man.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
It is so great to be here, pal. I need to get a copy of that introduction so I can send it to my mom.
Tom Bilyeu
That is, I think, very reasonable. I love the story about the fact that your family really wanted you to go to medical school, which you did dutifully, as a good Greek boy.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
I did.
Tom Bilyeu
Sent them the diploma and then rapidly pursued your dreams.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Yeah, that was my parents. Both were born in Greece in the island of Lesbos, and came over after World War II. And I grew up in a medical family. And of course back then, right, you know, you were either a doctor, a lawyer, or maybe an engineer. But doctor and lawyer was the highest profession. And so it was expected that I become a physician. And it drove a good part of my life. At the end of the day, I sort of rationalized becoming a doctor was a great sort of stepping stone towards my desire, my true desire of going into space. Because when I looked at the actual stats, out of every hundred astronauts, the largest chunk were military and I was not likely to go in the military. The next largest chunk were doctors. And then it went down to scientists and engineers. And so I said, okay, doctors, I can do that.
Tom Bilyeu
There's a lot of familial pressure to go into that, especially as a son of immigrants. What was the narrative you were telling yourself when you said, okay, actually, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Well, I kept it secret.
Tom Bilyeu
Really?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I mean, I sort of. I externally was the good Greek head of the altar boy, going to MIT to study biology on my way to medical school. And all of my space interests were extracurricular. Up in my room, I had a closet packed with explosives. Literally my best friend, as you're just buying them, right? Yeah. Back then you could you could mail order explosives and my friend Billy and I would buy the very best stuff we could. We start with potassium nitrate, saltpeter and charcoal and sulfur, which makes a reasonably good gunpowder.
Tom Bilyeu
How'd you figure that out?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Oh, I had this great book called Poor Man's James Bond, which was. And then there was in the Anarchist Cookbook. Both of those gave me every formulation I wanted. Listen, I'm just saying the stuff was available back then. That's amazing.
Tom Bilyeu
You're really in trouble with two boys, by the way.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Oh, listen. And if they ever watch this show, I have to ban the show for them. But my friend Billy and I used to build explosives and we learned that potassium perchlorate versus potassium nitrate generated its own oxygen so it could explode underwater. And that was really great because we made these little bombs that we'd throw in the pool blow up. Until one day, I remember at Jonathan Lynn's home, we threw it in and it, you know, you got this explosion of water going out and then we heard this crack and his pool basically cracked across the entire. I learned one of my rules of physics that fluids are not compressible.
Tom Bilyeu
It's a good lesson.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I had a fun childhood, but all of the non medical stuff was sort of literally in the closet.
Tom Bilyeu
And so you've got pretty specific advice of following your passion and doing that. At what point do you tell your parents, how do they react? How do you keep going in that direction?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Well, so it was an interesting moment in time because I went to MIT and I was doing molecular genetics during the day and at night and weekends I would go and sort of hang out at the mvl, the Manned Vehicle Lab, which is where the astronauts were being trained. And I'd volunteer to do research and I would do that on the side.
Tom Bilyeu
And were you doing molecular genetics because you thought it would feed into.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Yes, that was, it was, that was the medical. That was the highest probability path to getting accepted to medical school.
Tom Bilyeu
Got it.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Which was sort of like the second to last goal. Graduating medical school was the target. And so I did everything space I was. While I was an undergrad, I started my first organization ever. It's called Students for the Exploration and development of space SEDs. It still is, God knows, 35, 40 years later, the world's largest college space organization. And Jeff Bezos I met through seds. He was the president of the Princeton chapter. And I found myself running a national and international organization of fellow student space cadets. And a lot of the guys I work with now that have co founded companies came out of SEDs, who sort of my sedge was my magnet for attracting like minded people around the world. Right. It's sort of like this. You put out this call and say, this is what I stand for, this is what I care about. Anyone who wants to join me.
Tom Bilyeu
Did you actually write like a manifesto?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Yes, I did write a manifesto in and it was interesting. The year was 19. It was about 1981, 1982. There was a magazine back then called Omni magazine. Do you remember Omni magazine? Okay, well there was. So it got this manifesto, got published in three magazines and it said, we students, that space is our future and the government is mortgaging our future. And it was this long letter to the editor that said, any students who are passionate about opening up space, it's our legacy, join me in this organization. I got letters from around the world of people who wanted to join and form a chapter of seds. Anyway, it was awesome. Fast forward. I get into medical school and I'm going through medical school and I'm still doing all my extracurricular space activities. I'm still running SEDs. I started a launch company, I had started a university. I mean, I'm running two startups during medical school, which was kind of an insistent thing.
Tom Bilyeu
So much time, so much time in medical school.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Yeah, we'll get back to that. But so we're at a point where we had to declare our internship and residency, this thing called Match. And it scared the living shit out of me. I found myself in a situation where I was able to skate by in medical school in that there was always someone else watching and if I made a mistake, it would be caught. And it sort of got known that my heart and soul wasn't in medicine, it was in other stuff I was doing. But when it came time to become an intern in residential, you're at that point you're going to become a real doctor and if you're not paying attention, you're going to kill people. And that scared me. It really scared me. So I remember going and calling the head of the manned vehicle lab at MIT and explaining the situation, said, can I come back and enter the doctorate program there? I need a timeout for medical school to figure out what I want to do with my life. And I got accepted back into the aerospace engineering degree and followed that and eventually got my aerospace engineering degrees, went back and finished medical school. But by then, if you work in
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Dr. Peter Diamandis
That time, the two companies I had started were going forward. I, like you said, mailed a diploma to my parents and said, okay, listen, I got to fess up. I'm not going to practice medicine.
Tom Bilyeu
Wow, you took that really, really far.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Really far.
Tom Bilyeu
But that is very impressive that you could do that all at the same time. I mean, just knowing you personally from a time management perspective, your use of time is unbelievable. I mean, it's literally unbelievable. And I'm a guy, dude. I grind, I work hard. I'm not afraid of that. But watching what you accomplish with 24 hours is pretty startling. So kudos to you.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Thank you.
Tom Bilyeu
One thing I want to talk about, you've talked about going back to your dad, and your mom and dad both grew up on Lesbos. You once likened your dad moving to New York and becoming a doctor being akin to you going to Mars.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Yeah, like, talk me.
Tom Bilyeu
So this is really similar to Lisa's dad's story. So he grew up in a tiny village in the middle of the mountains in Cyprus, goes to Athens, and then ultimately to London. And when you talk to him, that's what it sounds like. Like, the drastic change in worldview and how that impacted him. What was that like for your dad? What did that leave on you?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So I grew up with the stories of my dad, of him speaking about times where he did not have enough to eat, where when all his friends and he was in a small village called Misigna in island Lesbos. And he talks about tending to the sheeps and goats and picking olives. And that was how he helped keep his family fed, especially during the war. And when he left to go take his entrance exam to medical school, when he took the boat to Athens for the first time his father was there waving him off and saying, if you don't pass, don't come back and talk about pressure. Wow, he did pass. And he goes to medical school and has to work a job during the day and he couldn't go classes to pay for his medical school and to pay for room and board. And so he ended up studying at night. And I grew up with this, with this sense of you do what you need to do to make it happen and you pursue your dreams and education is like the most important thing you could possibly get. He doesn't speak a word of English and he just does what it takes. And when I think about the journey he made from this small village on Lesbos to becoming a very successful New York physician, it's like this epic journey of improbabilities. And I think about that, for me the equivalent of going from here to Mars, which is something I do intend eventually to do.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I love that. Did you look at your dad as a hero growing up?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Oh, he was very much a hero.
Tom Bilyeu
So you weren't dismissing him?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Oh God no. Oh no, I was not dismissing him at all. I was in awe and I listened to as much. And I have two six year old boys now, fraternal twins. And I think about how do I convey the lessons that I learned from my father because I'm not growing up in that level of hardship. I am, yes, squeezing every nanosecond of time out of every hour, but still, I just am so appreciative of what he did. Right. I would have had none of these opportunities had he not taken that leap. He did.
Tom Bilyeu
I love what you're saying about your dad, that he did whatever it took and he got the result. You've said this is one of my favorite quotes of yours, I'm going to paraphrase it. But people need to stop focusing on the problem and start focusing on the solution. How do you teach people to do that? Like what are you going to do with your kids to get them to be solution oriented?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So I have a belief that every problem is solvable. It may not be easy.
Tom Bilyeu
How did you come up with that? Because that for most people would seem pretty counterintuitive.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Well, because as I think about the world we're living in today, it's the realization that we have solved so many problems to achieve this extraordinary world we live in today in terms of global production of food, of energy, of water, of information. We're living in the world of Star Trek. I mean, you think about that, that we can Diagnose almost anything. I can read your genome for 100 bucks in a matter of a couple of hours and understand all 3.2 billion letters of your life and have an AI analyze it and tell me about yourself. I can, on one of these devices, call up any piece of information, talk to anyone on the planet. This is magic. This is crazy stuff. Just 20 years ago, let alone 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago. So the realization is any problem is only a problem contextually today. And we're going to be creating the tools and knowledge to be able to solve that problem. And I believe that any problem not forbidden by the laws of physics is solvable. And even then, we're going to learn where the boundaries of physics truly are.
Tom Bilyeu
So just to give you an idea of why this is such an important question for me, so the whole point of impact theory is me going, okay, now that I don't have to worry about money, like, what do I really want to do? What I want to do is overcome the poverty of mindset. So most people, I just think, have a frame of reference that is so counterproductive that they don't end up wringing the potential out of themselves. Right? So God forbid something happens to you and your wife and your kids end up growing up with somebody else. They just have a different frame of reference and that ultimately stunts their development. Right? That's like my belief, and somebody grows up in the inner cities or in Tanzania, you know, don't have access to the education system, whatever it is that causes them to have that mindset. They have that mindset. And so I'm trying to answer the question, how do you at scale, by leveraging behavior, not changing it, how do you make sure that everybody encounters that mindset?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So first of all, thank you for that. Because that mindset is the virus we need to let loose into the cosmos, right? It's the realization if people truly believe what you're saying, then everybody becomes a problem solver and then problems vanish. I mean, ultimately, at scale, 8 billion people solving problem after problem after problem means that this world is just dealing with higher order problems, which is fantastic. I think it's by story, I think it's by what you do here. It's the stories that we tell, it's the examples that we give. You have to ask yourself the question, is somebody who has got that mindset smarter? Probably not. They've just had better experiences and perhaps luck along the way. So I'll give you one example. I mentioned seds earlier. So seds was My first organization ever. I'm at mit, it's my sophomore year and I'm passionate about space. I find out there's no student space organization at mit. Oh my God, it's MIT should be a student space organization. And so I go to the MIT student center and I find out you need to get five signatures to start a group. And I'm the first. I get three of my fraternity brothers, Bill, Brad and Roland as the third, and then one of their girlfriends, Natalie, and that's our first five. And we get it, we submit it. And here I'm running the student space organization. And I go and I poster mit. This is before the days of the Internet, right before computers like rub on letter type of like, you know, photocopy days. This is 1982, thereabouts. And I posted the entire campus and 30 people show up at this meeting where I pitched this idea of creating a student space organization. And after that meeting, I was so enthralled by this level of energy, like, oh my God, this has a future. And I remember standing outside the student center, looking up at the stars and sort of seeing fast forward this organization actually becoming what it's become. And I sent out letters along with two of my colleagues and it gets published by Astronomy, Analog and Omni magazine. And hundreds of people write letters back in and the organization blossoms into an international student space organization. I find myself running in the living room of my fraternity right now. It was a success and I became addicted to that feeling of success. Now, had that been a failure, had I done that and next year no one showed up and it flopped, maybe we'd be having a different story. But in the success, I was like, okay, what can I do next? And next for me was something called the Space Generation foundation. And then International Space University, isu, which is another major nonprofit success, but is grown into a hundred million dollar university around the world. And it's just been amazing. But I think part of this is putting yourself out there and trying. It's the ratio of zero to one is infinite. And how do you get people to just try to overcome their fears? That's the hard part. And it's the realization that it's okay to fail, but it's even better to succeed.
Tom Bilyeu
Very well said. So the key moment in that for me, and you put your finger on it, is writing or getting the signatures to start the organization to believe that you could pull it off. Is that optimism something that you cultivated in your life or is it something that you come by naturally?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So interesting, right so it came when you peel that onion of taking that first step, that zero to one and getting those five signatures, what drove that, right? So what drove that was my childhood passion and interest in space. I was so interested in space, so enthralled by it, that ultimately I was sort of like miffed. There was no space group there. And I was like, okay, opportunity, I'll create one. So the question then becomes, you know, what drove that passion in me? And when I think about going back to my kids, I talk about the three things I want for them. I boil it down to the three most important things that are important for any child, my children in particular. That I'm driven with them is helping them find their passion. I don't care what it is. I don't care if it's like, you know, Barbie dolls or, you know, right now it's Minecraft and Legos, but it's find that passion that will drive them. Self driven learning and self driven investigation. The second thing is curiosity. In a world where you can know anything, curiosity is so critically important. And then grit and, you know, grit, you know, grit. And your story just speaks volumes. And so passion, curiosity and grit for me was what I happen to have learned. I learned grit from my dad because I saw him not give up. And so in my household with my kids, you know, we joke and seriously say, what's the one thing we don't do? And they'll say, we don't give up, right? So it's like, it's just, it's. And every day when I walk them to school, the last thing I say to them is ask good questions today. And when we're walking to school, I say, what question do you have for me? And so it's, I want to get a culture of question asking and a culture of not giving up and passion. It's my job to observe the natural passion and then just fuel it. What do you want to do? Okay, paper airplane's fantastic. We're going to learn about every paper airplane out there and why they work.
Tom Bilyeu
I love that. What I love about that is it's systematized, right? Like so few people can get to the point where they can explain how I'm going to inculcate this into my kids lives. I ask people about their kids a lot because kids are the one thing that really forces people to say, what am I trying to teach, right? What am I trying to pass on? I've got this universe of things that I think about and I'm gonna boil it down to Something that I can pass on to the next generation. When it comes to kids, people take that really seriously. So it cuts through all the BS and gets to the point where people are, you know, what they really believe in enough that they're gonna try to pass it on. But a lot of people fall down in the how well.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So it's interesting. My kids are going into kindergarten and I think about, honestly, will they ever go to college? And do we actually reinvent what school is like for them? What role do I play? I mean, one of the things that I'm excited about is getting them involved in Dean Kamen's First Robotics competition. Right? So First Robotics, if you don't know about it, is this incredibly rich after school experience where kids first, starting with Legos, build robotic Legos to do certain things. And then at the high school level, a First Robotics team gets basically a box of stuff. They have to build a robot that accomplishes a certain task, like picks up basketballs and shoots them into the hoop while knocking out other robots. And it's about learning how to think through a problem and build the system and become engineers. Ultimately, our society tends to make heroes out of who? Rock stars, sports stars. Your chance of becoming a rock star or sports star are probably the only thing less than that is probably becoming an astronaut. But at the end of the day, so we idolize these rock stars, these TV stars, these sports stars, and that's okay, I guess, but we should be idolizing people like yourself and engineers and scientists and incredible people on the planet. And so First Robotics is all about recognition and celebration of engineers and scientists.
Tom Bilyeu
All right, what is the most important elements to thinking like an entrepreneur?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Being fascinated by how you would solve it, and then creating something that you really want and that you authentically believe in. Like you do this show and then being able to express it to people. So, you know, I'm working right now on a, on my 19th startup and it's a, it's, it's.
Tom Bilyeu
I undersold you in the intro at
Dr. Peter Diamandis
the by two, but that's okay. But, but the, it's reinventing the news media, right? So it's, it's a really exciting one. I'm so excited about it, I can't say much about it. But right now, when you're watching the news on tv, whatever, you're counting on an individual called a news editor to decide what you put into your brain. And it's insane that you should allow the crisis news network or the constantly negative news network, whatever you call cnn. I love My little, you know, little tweaks, jabs on cnn.
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Dr. Peter Diamandis
But we allow them to decide what I should say over and over and over again. And your mindset is everything. So imagine if you could have some other mechanisms for controlling what you see and when you see it. Anyway, I won't go into more than that. But at the end of the day, I'm excited to buy this in theory and we are building the beta right now. And for me, the tire hits the road. As an entrepreneur, if I love it and I use it, and until I love it and use it all the time, it doesn't go into the ethos out there. It needs to be something I'm passionate about.
Tom Bilyeu
For anybody who doesn't know what is your fascination with Star Trek and how deeply have you baked it into, it's that green chick.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So I was born in the 60s and Apollo occurred. Apollo 11 occurred in 1969, which was an incredibly formative moment in my life, the entire Apollo program. And at the same time, you know, Star Trek debuted in 1966. I didn't see it then. I saw it in the reruns and it had three seasons in total. But when I was seeing it in 1969, 1970, Apollo showed me what was going on right now. And Star Trek is, this is where we're going. And that one, two punch just made me enamored with the future in space, that this was, this was the destiny of humanity we were about to launch into the cosmos. And so I became enamored with Star Trek. And the more you look at Star Trek, Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, the creator, writer, producer of Star Trek, I know his son Rod Roddenberry. Gene Roddenberry was a brilliant man. What Gene Roddenberry created was a set of technologies on that show that are still driving us today. So he had the communicator that you were able to just tap into and talk to anybody on the planet. And of course we take that for. That was a crazy idea back in the 60s with rotary dial, landline phones. He had the tricorder. And we have just within the X prize, as you know, we just had the awarding of the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize. And the tricorder was a thing that Bones or Spock would use to diagnose someone and go, jim, he's an alien, or he's got Rigelian fever or whatever the case might be. And so we challenged teams throughout the world here to create the Star Trek Tricorder, a device that could diagnose 15 diseases for you as a mom. 2 o' clock in the morning, when your kid is sick, he has the replicator device that you can create anything. And we're just on the way towards that with 3D printing. And so Star Trek just created these amazing. This view of the future. And probably one of the most interesting views of the future that no one talks about is the future of Star Trek had no economy. In a world in which you can create anything, money has little to no value. You're living in a world of abundance where you can create anything you want. Disease is cured, education is available through an AI, you can create anything through this replicator, you can go anyplace. And what really had value in the future and will have value for us in the future is raw material, like, you know, an asteroid worth, or a planet worth over here, energy from the sun or from, in that case, dilithium crystals or information sets to manufacture something. So I see the Star Trek universe as really a target we're heading towards. I love how so.
Tom Bilyeu
One of my favorite things is when somebody who's very successful, who I take very seriously as an entrepreneur, as a thinker, whatever, is so impacted by something, pop culture, that it makes its way into everything that they do. And. And so at the last year's Visioneering summit, literally all the teams presenting a new potential X Prize had to say how the X Prize was in line with Roddenberry's worldview. So that was amazing. And then the Tricorder X Prize. So let's talk about how somebody can go and see Star Trek and see this absurd device which everybody else discounts and just says it's fiction, it could never be it. And then the person, namely you, that goes, no, no, no, we can. There's a way to actually make that. Like, is it just been like, first you earn a little credibility with yourself and then a little bit more and a little bit more, and it stacks up till you're so brazen that you go for the tricorder. Like, how does that happen?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
First of all, I would posit that science fiction, all science fiction written television, movies, and so forth, create this believable future. And after you've read it or watched it, if you are all of a sudden back in reality here, there's this dissonance between this should be possible and we're here. And if you can make that leap to say, okay, it's possible, how do we get there? And X prizes are all about saying, I don't care where you went to school, what you've ever done, if you solve this problem, you win. And so it's putting out a bold, objective goal, right? Like here's the 15 diseases you have to be able to detect, and here are the vital symptoms that will detect. And if you do this, you win 10 million bucks. And we're not too far from that being possible for all of us. What I mean by that is we're within 10 to 20 years from us being able to be in a world where we can speak our desires to an AI. And that AI is able to drive 3D printing technology, synthetic biology technology, eventually nanotechnology. And your thoughts, verbalized, become matter. I mean it really is, it's going from mind to, to matter to the marketplace. And I talk about this, you know, we're all going to become entrepreneurs in the future where if I have an idea for something that I truly desire, like I want this mug and I can say to my AI, listen, I want something. You can carry some hot coffee and I'd like a, you know, I'd like a handle on it. And can you color it white and can you give it the thermal properties so that something inside it will stay warm for a much longer period? And I'd like it to be less than 10 cents. So pick a material that's cheap and I can look at it and say, yeah, can you scale a little bit larger? I haven't written a piece of code. I'm just expressing what I want that's in my mind, in my heart. And this AI is in taking that desire and converting it to the right code or the right whatever it might be so that it becomes a file that can be then manufactured. And that, that level of magic is coming very fast. It's coming very fast. It's sort of. Ironman and Jarvis materialized in the next decade.
Tom Bilyeu
What are you most excited about right now with technology like that getting so near term? What's got you Jazz?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Everything. So I'm driven by two moonshots that I'm on right now. I'm on a moonshot for mining asteroids. And the mining of the asteroids is just a part of the opening up the space frontier, that during our lifetimes, in the next 10 to 20 years that we're going to be moving irreversibly into space. I'm so thrilled that Jeff Bezos is doing what he's doing with Blue Origin. I knew Jeff at the earliest days of Amazon. I remember him telling me I'm building Amazon, which by the way is a half a trillion dollar company. I'm building Amazon in order to make the money to go and open the space frontier. It was about two months ago he sold a billion dollars of Amazon stock to continue fueling his Blue Origin space company. And then Elon Musk, who I met now back in 2001, has been as passionate about opening up space. And really SpaceX is just light years ahead of most all the other aerospace companies. So you got two incredible, wealthy, passionate, driven entrepreneurs opening up space. My part of that is with a company called Planetary Resources that's going out to these asteroids that are rich in fuels. In particular hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket fuel from the shuttle main engine and then platinum group metals and construction metals and so forth. And these are trillion dollar assets. If I can, if I can lasso one of those and put it on the public markets, I'd be set for life. Our first target asteroid is something like a 10 to 100 trillion dol asset depending upon how you value it or devalue it. The other thing I'm passionate about is human longevity. It's the realization that we are now gaining the tools to begin to understand why we age and ultimately why we die. And the question is, do we have to? Certain species of life on this planet, sharks, whales, turtles, have known multi hundred year lifespans. I remember seeing a show on that while I was in medical school and I locked in and said, okay, if they can, why can't I? I said, clearly it's a hardware or software problem. And so I've dedicated a lot of my energy and you named in the two companies Human Longevity and Cellularity. Human Longevity is the genomic side of the equation. Cellularity is the stem cell side of the equation, which are just two of a couple of the different technologies and there are many others.
Tom Bilyeu
Why do stem cells excite you?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Stem cells excite me because they are our primordial stuff. So let me give you a 101 lesson in STEM cells. So when a woman gets pregnant and a fetus starts developing in the uterus, and what is surrounding that fetus and creating sort of the nest for it is the placenta and the placenta actually is supplying to that fetus all of the stem cells that it needs to grow every tissue, every organ, every part of its body. So a stem cell is a primordial cell that can develop into anything, brain, liver, heart, long skin, bone, cartilage, whatever it might be. And when that child is born, when my children were born, I actually stored their placentas. There's a company called LifeBank, people store cord blood. My recommendation is that's great. At a minimum, store the placental cord blood. And there's lots of companies that will do that. But I think storing the placenta is much more powerful. It's not just the cells that generate the hemopoietic system, it's all of the stem cells that create the child anyway. In a child whose blood and tissues are coursing with stem cells, whenever any damage takes place, any inflammation occurs, those stem cells go to that point of inflammation and very rapidly repair what's going on. But as we grow older, two things happen. One, our stem cell populations in our bone, in our fat, in our organs, diminishes hundreds or thousands of fold. So far less stem cells going through our body. And the stem cells in our body have undergone genetic changes because of radiation, the stuff you drink and eat. It's just normal degradation of your genome, which changes over your lifespan. So if I go and I extract stem cells in my body right now, if my bone marrow or fat, which are the two largest reserves, and I sequence it, and if I could compare it to the stem cells of my birth, I would see that that's changed. So my stem cells have now reduced in number and have become somewhat senile. So their ability to continue to repair me has reduced, which is one of the theories of why we age. And so one of my business partners, my co founder of Human longevity and my partner in founding Cellularity, Bob hariri. Bob's an MD, PhD, Navy fighter pilot, one of the rock stars in the stem cell world, has actually done the work to show if you take, in this case, he did the work in mice, you take the placentas of that mice, you convert it to dosages of stem cells that you then give to that mouse at the end of its life, like in this case, typically a 26 month old mouse, you will extend that mouse life another 30 to 40%.
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa. Right.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
You'll add another year almost onto it. And that's been repeated a number of different ways. There's a whole thing called the young blood experiments being done at Stanford. And right now the experiments are going on in humans as well, that if, you know, it's sort of like sort of Dracula and the vampire, but if you take the blood of a young individual and transfuse it or the plasma, not the cellular portion into an older person, you will get a lot of return to youthful state. And in reality, it turns out that there are a number of stem cell clinics outside the United States and I happen to know a number of 80 something year old billionaires who go and don't get young blood infusion, but get stem cell infusions.
Tom Bilyeu
Why not young blood?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Well, it turns out that the stem cells actually generate the growth factors and all the chemical milieu that is in the plasma and they live for 100 days.
Tom Bilyeu
Now, is it stem cells from themselves?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
No, it's stem cells from newborns.
Tom Bilyeu
Really.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
It's the stem cells from the placentas or the cord blood that are typically thrown away.
Tom Bilyeu
That is utterly fascinating. I could do an entire show just picking your brain about that.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
And these are kinds of conversations that I think were verboten or were crazy before, but there are a lot of scientists today talking about aging as a disease, not an inevitability.
Tom Bilyeu
Right. How do you feel about augmenting yourself? Like, are you going to do it? Maybe you won't be an early adopter, but would you?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Oh, I would be an early adopter, yeah. I was on stage speaking at Singularity University and the guy who spoke after me was talking about implantables and he says, yes, we have these little RFID things that you can put data onto and you plant them. And so afterwards I said, can I? And he said, sure. And so we went back on stage and he implanted right here. You can feel it. Whoa, whoa. I've got this little rfid. If you take your near field ID with your phone, you get my business card off of it.
Tom Bilyeu
Are you serious? Do you have one on your phone?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
I don't have it turned on, but we'll turn it on after this.
Tom Bilyeu
It'll take a little while. That's crazy.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So listen, I think there's gotta be some level of safety, but I'm much more risk fellow than average individual, I would say. Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting because today, if you think about the world of sensors, I've got heart rate and steps on here. Very soon we'll have glucose and blood pressure and other elements and we're probably within five years. Apple, Samsung, Google, Facebook, everyone's working on sensors for your body.
Tom Bilyeu
So man, I could keep going on forever, but so limited time there's two things I want to talk about. Is it true that you have like a board of advisors that are science fiction writers?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
We do. We have created at the XPRIZE Foundation A board of 35 science fiction writers that we will. We've just formed it, but we'll call on because at the end of the day, coming up with X prizes, coming up with big, bold, crazy ideas that are on the verge of just being doable, why not call them people? Whose profession is to come up with those things?
Tom Bilyeu
And what do you think they do to stay at the edge of that? Are they just researching real world technologies?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
I've asked. It's becoming harder to write stuff which is real hardcore science fiction because all the things we used to think of, I mean, once you've got AI and nanotechnology, nothing's impossible, right? We're sort of like game over or game start.
Tom Bilyeu
Well, that brings me to my next question. So. And very interesting that you switched it from game over to game start. As this happens, AI comes on just. We're at a place where robotics, AI, we can create just about anything we want. Humans are essentially wiped out from the current way we think about jobs, or call it roughly 50%. What happens societally? What happens to the generation that would have to make that transition? What does Universal basic income look like? Yeah, what is all that?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So when people sort of ask me, are you fearful of AI? You know, is AI the devil? Is it going to, you know, destroy. Is it the Terminator going to destroy humanity? I answer, no, it's not. I think AI is probably one of the artificial intelligence. When I say AI is one of the most important tools humanity will ever create that will become our partner in solving any challenge we want. And so I differ with Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk and Bill Gates. It's kind of hard to go up against those guys. But I disagree. I think that's, that's their amygdala speaking and they've seen Terminator too many times. But at the end of the day, I am concerned about AI taking our jobs. I am concerned about AI and robotics disrupting a lot of our current jobs. I'm not concerned in the long term because I think we're going to adapt society to, that's fine. But in the near term, it's the rate at which we're going to be losing jobs. Right. We've all, we've lost jobs over and over and over again. I remember the number, particularly in 1810 we had 84% of Americans were farmers and today it's under 2%, 84% to 2% wiped out all those jobs. And of course, we became far more efficient. And now robots, robotic tractors and so forth will do the farming and such. And that's that kind of magnitude change is fine of going from 50% of our jobs. I tell my sister all the time, who's an anesthesiologist, that her job is going to be replaced much better by an AI and robot than the human doctor. And all surgery will be done by robots and all diagnosticians will be replaced by AIs. But it's the rate at which we do those transitions. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, all those things being replaced. And today our meaning of our life is wrapped up in what we do. So the two issues with technological unemployment is how you earn your living and then what you do to create significance in your life. And so the first, I think, is going to be solved by universal basic income. I think ultimately we're demonetizing the cost of living. It's becoming cheaper and cheaper to live. So the example I give today is this device will eventually become your teacher and your healthcare provider for free. The same way that access to the world's information is available across the world for free. A car today, I love my car, and I'm not a car guy, but I love the Tesla. But I'm going to park it or get rid of it when autonomous Teslas and autonomous cars come online, because autonomous cars are going to be 10 times cheaper and far more convenient. So we're going to give up car ownership for something that's one tenth the cost. And then a whole bunch of things change. But how we deal with the significance of our jobs and our lives, that's going to be an interesting question. And so. So I'm concerned about that. I'm concerned about people feeling angry towards technology for disrupting their lives. And that's something I'm spending a lot of time thinking about these days. Did you read Fahrenheit 451, God, back in high school?
Tom Bilyeu
I think the thing I found really interesting about that, and it planted a seed in my head, was that there exists out in the woods the people who so were unwilling to give up books, that they were more prepared to give up society. And so they move out into the woods. And that seems an inevitability as we, especially when I think about it not so much as AI, but I think about it as human machine interface. So as we begin implanting things into our brains that augment it, or even just as we begin messing with our own gene sequencing and people that, you know, refuse to start doing selection on genetic criteria for their babies and, like, eventually they'll lose. Like, it just doesn't seem like eventually
Dr. Peter Diamandis
those people will lose. The people who are the Luddites. Yeah. So it is true. I think we're going to split humanity into those who want to retain their old ways. And that's been the case always. And those who choose to. If you would plug in. And I think it's interesting because I've thought a lot about that and I've written about that. I think that once we are able to connect the brain to the cloud, and Ray Kurzweil puts that date as early to mid-2030s. Right. 2033. 2035 times. Check. That's, you know, 16 years from now, thereabouts. That's not very far away. I mean, 16 years ago was, you know, 2001, right?
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Nothing.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
I mean, not, not. I remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, you've got amazing individuals like Brian Johnson with Kernel and Elon Musk with Neuralink and a whole bunch of other players out of Facebook, out of Google, working on this technology as well. It's about how do you enhance human intelligence? And then ultimately human intelligence is the most important thing we can have. And I think once you're able to enhance your intelligence and sort of plug into what I call the meta intelligence, where if you plug into the cloud and I can know the thoughts of every man, woman and child on this world and know anything I want at any time, it's so powerful, so addicting, that I think to unplug from that would be to feel like you're shut off and you're blind from the world.
Tom Bilyeu
It's so interesting how much fear and anxiety people have over the change and all that. And my whole thing is you get what you focus on. So if you're focusing on that, then it's going to be big and scary. But at the same time, if you focus on the potential beauties of the billions of new minds coming online and being connected to them and the revelations that will happen and as we really take control of the next phase of our evolution, like how interesting it gets. Have you read homu?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
I haven't yet.
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, it's a dude. You're going to love it. You're gonna love it. So I've become a total evangelist for this book. Absolutely obsessed. Gotta get the author on here. And he basically walks through sort of how the way the human mind works you know, my obsession with narrative and fiction. He does the most eloquent job of explaining that our fictions, the stories that we tell are like David Foster Wallace's notion of this is water. Like they're so ever present, these stories that we're telling each other, we don't even realize that they're stories. So one of the examples he gives is money. Right? Money is an intersubjective truth. It is only real in as long as we.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Everybody believes it. Right?
Tom Bilyeu
Right. The second people don't believe in it like that, like it ceases to have any value whatsoever. And he said, and he lists like, I mean, just five, six, seven different narratives. And one of the. That we're all taking for granted. And one of the most beautiful was how during the Crusades, the Christians and the Muslims lined up perfectly and it is in their cemetery in that they're telling the same fiction just from opposite sides, right? One true God. One true God that wants us to reclaim the Holy Land. That wants us to reclaim the Holy Land. The only part that's different is their true God is different than theirs. And so they collide and kill each other. But. And he talks about how if either of them, like, the story had been different, like, oh, pretending one true God, what he wants is for you to live in peace and harmony. And landmass is totally irrelevant. When it meets this force that has to have the landmass, then they would acquiesce, right? It is only because they're telling the exact same story from opposite sides that you get the historic collision that we got. And he talks about how to anybody living back in that time, it would have made sense, right? So if you're this kid growing up in England that's about to go fight the Crusades, the woman whose attention you want, like, she's looking at you like, oh, my God, you're gonna go off to the Crusades. And, you know, she's fluttering her eyelashes and their families, like, oh, my God, you're gonna bring glory to the family and to the church. Like, this is amazing. You should be doing it. But now when we look back at it, it seems so absurd.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And so. And he says there, you can take any time in history you want. And to those people, the fiction would have been invisible. It would have all seemed absolutely objectively true. And it was being mirrored back to you at every level of your society to the point where you can't see it, but that with enough distance, you'll say, well, that was obviously ridiculous. And he said, so what do you believe in right now that 100 years from now will seem patently ridiculous? Just got the chills. So it's like that to me is when I look at the stories people tell themselves, whether it's the Terminator, whether it's the Borg, whatever story they're telling about this scary future, it's like, okay, well, as long as you're in a group that's sort of self reinforcing that I get it, I get what, why it seems like we have to, like we're already at war with AI, like emotionally, and it hasn't even been truly created yet. It's just, it's the other. Right. It's the difference. So how we get over that as a species is something that I find utterly fascinating. I don't think at all that I have the answer and we're going to
Dr. Peter Diamandis
find out during our lifetimes. I mean, that's the most incredible thing that I keep reminding people, like, wake up the next 20 years. This game plays out right. Which is why I'm so convinced we're in the middle of a video game anyway. You know, it's like we're living during the most extraordinary times. It's all playing out. We're in the final phase of the gameplay and we're right here, right now. Clearly this is a simulation.
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. There are. I heckled you a little bit at XPRIZE when you brought that up. I want to believe that because it fits so well with my, like Matrix mythos. But for whatever, I can't get over time. And if somebody can explain to me how either the people watching. Because the only reason to do a simulation is to watch it play out. And if you don't live long enough to watch it play out, then there would be no point. So for us, yeah, but you could
Dr. Peter Diamandis
create a simulation, have it play out at a billion times the clock speed. So that's where I end up and replant it and restart it again. And this whole notion of parallel universes, I mean, the notion that, I mean, if I were a scientist trying to create a. If I could create a virtual computational world, right, Using whatever quantum computers and set up an AI inside and set the original conditions and let it play out and tweak the conditions and have it play out and run a Monte Carlo simulation.
Tom Bilyeu
What's that?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
It's a simulation in which you change as few small variables and run a million of them in parallel or a billion of them in parallel. Imagine a world in which, in Alien Civilization, you Set the starting conditions and literally let an infinite number of these play out in parallel and then see what happens. I don't know. I find these thoughts too compelling to just let go.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I'm with you. The one that I think freaked me out was when I realized that the DNA first of all can be represented as zeros and ones. So already just life could essentially be digital code. But yeah, I find that stuff utterly, utterly fascinating.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Yeah, and again, next 20 years, dude. Anyway, it's just an amazing life. I consider myself so lucky to be alive right now.
Tom Bilyeu
Exactly. All right, before I ask my final question. Where can these guys find you? Online.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So diamandis.com is my website. I put out a weekly tech blog. I work a lot on this on Friday and Saturday. Thank you. And on Twitter, I'm just. My name Peter Diamandis. You know, Singularity University, come and get involved in SU. We run programs for executives for graduates. Xprize.org, xprize.org you know, we're taking on the world's biggest problems. Anyway, fun stuff.
Tom Bilyeu
I love it. What's the impact you want to have on the world?
Dr. Peter Diamandis
So my mtp, what I call my massively transformative purpose, is to inspire and guide the transformation of humanity on and off the earth. And just to peel the onion there, I believe that we are undergoing a transformation as a species from what we have today to this notion of a meta intelligence. And that transformation is happening both on the earth and off the earth. I had to add the non earth part for the child in me. Right. And I think that's going to have to be inspired and properly guided to have the minimal negative impact. I think this is happening. I think we are the lungfish coming out of the land. I think we are speciating as a species. The rate of change is way too high. And so I think about that. I want to help make the human race a multi planetary species. For me, it's about changing the mindset of people from scarcity minded to abundance minded. I think that changes the game when people go from no, it's all mine to there's an infinite amount. Let's share. So far, so good. Having fun.
Tom Bilyeu
I love it, man. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dr. Peter Diamandis
Thank you, pal.
Tom Bilyeu
Absolutely fantastic. All right guys, I am telling you, this is somebody that you're going to want to get to know at every conceivable. I really believe that he is leading the world in terms of understanding not only where we are, near term future, where we could be and how we're going to get there into the future. And I think there are very, very few people that do it with a level of compassion, brotherly love. Like one thing about this guy that you learn very quickly behind the scenes, like he's got that Greek warmth. He is so kind, brings you into a big hug. It is amazing. And he greets the transition from where we are today to where we can be in the future with that same sense of love, compassion, empathy. And it's wonderful. I don't think there's anybody on the planet that I have met that would be better suited to do that, to introduce people to the technologies, the ideology, the things that we're going to need to do. And he knows how to go raise the funds to actually make these companies real, to get them to be profitable. And most importantly, and this is the thing he will never get enough credit for. He has a huge long range vision, but he always starts with what do we have to do today? How do we do today? And then tomorrow, One step after another until the grand dream becomes very blase, where you've seen him execute so many steps that it becomes an inevitability. I've never met anybody else as good as he is at that. And for that reason, I beg you, go learn from him. Don't even just listen to what he says. Watch what he does because that will highly instruct you in what you should be doing. All right, he and I are in the middle of a bet right now. It is the first to 3 million followers and I'm begging you, help this man beat me. Go follow him. It will improve your life. I'm not kidding. Dive in. Get to know him. And guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Hey everybody, thanks so much for joining us for another episode of Impact Theory. If this content is adding value to your your life, our one ask is that you go to itunes and stitcher and rate and review. Not only does that help us build this community, which at the end of the day is all we care about, but it also helps us get even more amazing guests on here to share their knowledge with all of us. Thank you guys so much for being a part of this community. And until next time, be legendary. My friends,
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Episode: Stem Cells vs. Death: The Real Breakthrough No One Is Talking About | Peter Diamandis (Fan Fav)
Date: May 31, 2025
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Guest: Dr. Peter Diamandis
This dynamic episode features Dr. Peter Diamandis, polymath founder of XPRIZE, Human Longevity Inc., Cellularity, and several other transformative organizations, in a wide-ranging conversation with host Tom Bilyeu. The discussion explores how personal history fuels world-changing ambition, why being solution-oriented unlocks abundance, and the technological breakthroughs—especially in stem cells and AI—that will define the future of humanity. Diamandis’s vision blends optimism, scientific rigor, and entrepreneurial grit, touching on space exploration, longevity, education, and the societal challenges posed by accelerating innovation.
This episode is a masterclass in actionable optimism: Dr. Peter Diamandis offers both a sweeping vision for humanity’s exponential future and concrete tools for individuals to seize agency, cultivate grit, and become problem solvers. Tom Bilyeu’s probing questions draw out both emotional backstory and technical detail, from childhood dreams and immigrant hustle to the mechanics of stem cell therapies and the societal implications of AI revolution. Whether you’re building your own moonshot or just seeking a new perspective on what's possible, this episode delivers high-octane inspiration and insight.