The Stats Traditional Media Will Never Show You | EP #131

0:00So I want to talk about going from fear and scarcity to abundance and optimism. I truly believe that technology is a force that transforms scarcity into abundance over and over again. You know, the perfect example I love giving is we used to go and kill whales on the ocean to get whale oil. Then we ravaged mountains to get coal. Then we drilled kilometers under the ground to get oil. Right? Technology was increasing access to energy, which was scarce. And now the earth is bathed in 8 ,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species. And we're on the very verge of fusion. There is no energy scarcity.

0:50There's lots of energy out there. It's just not in a usable form yet. technology takes the latent capacity that's out there and makes it usable. We talk about water wars and water scarcity. We live on a water planet, right? We're a blue -green planet. Two -thirds of our planet is covered by water. The problem is 97 .5 % of salt, 2 % is ice, and we fight over half a percent in our rivers and But there's technology now that's enabling us to pull water out of the atmosphere or convert that 97 .5 sailing into drinkable water. We just launched a water abundance or water scarcity exprise, it's called for making water conversion from salt to drinkable more efficient, right?

1:43on the last subject we just launched a health span X prize. I want to share with you a few slides in rapid fashion with the intention of helping create for you an abundance and optimism mindset. Hopefully you've got this longevity mindset from the five days we've just been together and that's been cemented in. Allow me to gift you an abundance mindset. So I want to share what I call proof of abundance. And I was at Singular University with Neil Jacobsdine and Ray Kurzweil talking about how tech was transforming scarcity into abundance when it hit me. Oh my God, the world doesn't think this way.

2:31And so I wrote my first book, Abundance, The Future is better than you think 12 years ago based on this. But here's the data and every year it gets better and better. So extreme poverty is falling. We've gotten from 90 % extreme poverty in the world down to under 10%. Global literacy has gone from 15 % to over 80%. And we're about to take it to close to 100%. Kids are in school longer.

3:11For me as a dad and for many of you as parents, this one hits me very close. 200 years ago it was a coin flip about whether your child survived to age 5 or not. There are certain countries that don't name their kids until they're 5 years old because it hurts less if you lose your child. Right? It's down to some 4 % today, which is still too high. Global fertility rates are slowing down. This is important as we talk about longevity and people say, well, the world's overpopulated, at which point you just say no. No, we're not going to have an overpopulation issue. We're going to have an underpopulation issue.

3:54Yes, in the 1950s, we were above five children per family. But what's happened over the last 70 years is the birth rate has dropped precipitously. You know, the replacement number is 2 .1%, or 2 .1. And we're now at 2 .4 and dropping. Here you see it break down for Africa, US, Japan, Italy, China, Italy is vaporizing. As is China and South Korea and Japan, and as we move technology into Africa, the birth rate there will drop as well. Global life expectancy has skyrocketed. You know, this is numbers here. For all of human history, we were living on average into the thirties and we We doubled it now into the late 70s and 80s.

4:55You know, the tech we're talking about now will take us beyond 100. Will it take us to 150? I hope so. Right? That's a whole idea of longevity escape velocity. People think that we don't have enough food on the planet. We have plenty of food on the planet. It's just not properly distributed. Right? So we've seen daily calorie supply increasing steadily for 70 years. Deaths from malnutrition have plummeted. I mean, when I show you these charts, my guess is this is counterintuitive to what you think. What the media has shared with us. Solar has plummeted in costs orders of magnitude. At the same time that energy from biogeothermal, hydro, offshore winds, solar, all of these things are continuing to plummet.

5:55Increasing access to electricity, look at that green line, it's Afghanistan, that went from near zero to near 100%. Global access to the internet has skyrocketed, critically important. At the same time that 86 % of the planet, nearly 7 billion smartphones are out there, and that smartphone means what? It means your child's educator and your healthcare provider, your entertainment, your access to all of the knowledge in the known universe. I was shocked by this slide. You know, in this end and the data in 2014 to be clear, and I need to do the research with Sophie's help to find more, but the share of people who are happy has been increasing.

6:50I know this isn't true for you, but annual hours worked per worker per week per year has been dropping We forget that we used to work 80 or 90 hours a week to survive. As Saaguru told me, technology is the means by which we take a vacation from survival. I found this incredible. Democracies are on the rise. And the right to vote has been increasing steadily. Now, you probably are not going to believe this, but the data is here. Conflicts are less deadly. So this peaks in World War II, deaths per 100 ,000 including soldiers and civilians from fighting, excluding deaths from disease and famine, has precipitously dropped.

7:52You know, not what you're going to hear on CNN, the Crisis News Network, right?

7:59This is fascinating. It used to be really dangerous to be alive in the Middle Ages. Homicides are way down. And this is a shocker. Reported crime rates in the US are down 50 percent. And this is from source data at the FBI. median income has increased steadily in almost every nation on the planet and in summary GDP is exploding on planet Earth and as we see AI and robotics come into play it will grow infinitely. I think one of the most important conversations all of us can have as leaders, as entrepreneurs, as parents, as CEOs is around mindsets. And I want to talk about the mindsets that I think are critical for the world ahead.

8:59And I think it's one of the most important conversations that we can have as entrepreneurs, as CEOs, as parents, as leaders. You know, if you look around, it's so easy to forget the extraordinary world we're living in because we get caught up in all the challenges that we have. I love this saying, our ancestors would consider us as gods. This morning we saw Starship fly. And what that means is the extension of humanity beyond the balance of Earth in the irreversible, permanent fashion. We saw CyberCab launch, we saw Optimus. We've also been learning about a huge range of biotechnologies that are likely to extend the healthy human lifespan.

9:53We saw the work that Max Haudak is doing on restoring sight. Right, these are all biblical in nature. These are godlike activities that we somewhat take for granted. We're the frog boiling in the water. But every once in a while, it's critically important for us to stop and realize this amazing world that we're in. So let's talk about mindsets. If I were to ask you, what makes the most extraordinary leaders on the planet successful. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, whoever you think of as the greatest entrepreneurs and leaders, what made them such incredible leaders was that the tech they had was that the money they had was that the friends they had, what made them amazing successful leaders?

10:46I imagine that hopefully all of you would agree, It wasn't those things. It was their mindset and that if you took away everything from them But they retained their mindset. They would regain their success And so if you agree with me that mindset is the most important asset we have as leaders The next question I want to ask you is what mindset do you have? And where did you get that mindset? from your parents, from your brother or sister, from your friends, from the TV, and better yet, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? And I think most of us don't stop to consider and think about the mindset that we have and what mindset we need for this exponential road ahead.

11:40You know, our mindset is how we react to things. Something negative hits you. What's the judo move that you have? If some opportunity comes your way, do you see it as a problem or do you see it as an incredible solution? Right? This is all mindset. So I want to talk about a few mindsets in particular. One's that I'm super passionate about. ones that I think are important as exponential entrepreneurs. The first is a purpose -driven mindset. What I call an MTP or a massive transformative purpose. There's a great quote by Mark Twain that I love. He said, there are two important days in your life, the day that you were born and the day that you found out why.

12:27And I hope all of you connect with this because when you're driven by a purpose, something bigger than you, there is nothing that you cannot do. You know, I've started now 27 companies in my life. On two occasions, I started a company because I thought it was a great way to make money. And they both failed. You know, everything from a distance seems like a great opportunity. And the closer it comes, the more you see the problems, the issues, all of the challenges that exist. And if it's not driven by a purpose, you're going to give up before you succeed. You know, for all the things that I've done, that 3 a .m.

13:17in the morning, when everything is against me and you've hit failure after failure unless you're driven by a purpose you're gonna give up you're not gonna keep going and in our businesses right you succeed by overcoming hurdle after hurdle. I remember when I was founding singularity university with Ray Kurzweil on the first day of our graduate studies program. We had a hundred students from around the planet. They had gone through some extremely competitive process to get to there. Best students out of Stanford and Harvard, MIT and the University of Tokyo and the top universities around the planet.

14:07And during the course of the conversation, I asked a question which was, how many of you here are clear about your purpose in life? And I expected all of their hands to erase, and only about a third of them raised their hands. And I was like, just floored by that. And I said, okay, your goal this summer here at Singularity is not to learn about exponentials. You have one goal. Find your purpose in life. Find your massive transformative purpose. because it's about intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. It's about understanding why you're on the planet. Having an MTP is what wakes you up in the morning and keeps you going through the day.

14:52And a purpose -driven mindset and an MTP is an emotional energy. You don't cognitively go there. It's you are driven my favorite saying it's an old Indian saying you're driven like a man whose hair is on fire seeks water I love that. It can come from two places you know an empty being come from awe and amazement my first massive transformative purpose was to make humanity multi -planetary species and that's what drove me to create my first you know or 10 organizations. But it can also be, rather than just awe and amazement and desire, it can be just anger. It can be a refusal to let this injustice going on in the plant and any further.

15:50You know, it's desire is to solve a grand challenge. So getting clear about your purpose is fundamental. There's another reason. We're living in this time where we have every day this massive abundance of opportunities, right? I mean, just in the conversations we've had this week, I mean, huge number of opportunities. How do you sort between them? How do you choose what to say yes or say no to? Right? Morteen Rothblatt, who you might meet next year on the East Coast, Morteen is an extraordinary woman who had a her daughter was dying. She used to be he, Martin Rothblatt, and Martin had started XM radio and serious radio and went through his now her sex change and her and Martin quit everything and set out to cure her daughter, which she did.

17:08And in the process built a $15 billion company called the United Therapeutics. She started with a high school biology book and progressed from there. So when you're driven by the need to do something like Stephanie Stravdy and Kering her husband's life, saving her husband's life, you can do anything. Please don't do something just for the money. There's lots of ways to make money. It's about doing something that is driven from the heart. The next mindset that I deeply about and built singularity on and x -price on and abundance 360 is what I call exponential mindset or 10 to the ninth plus thinking.

17:5810 to the ninth plus, what does that mean? It means that you have the ability, if you truly desire, to impact in a positive fashion the lives of a billion people on the planet. That's an incredible statement to make, but it's true. There are single individuals, and none of us are discluded if that's our mission, where you can reach, touch, and support, and help a billion people on the planet. That's exponential thinking. Ray Kurzweil and I last year were on stage at abundance talking about this. that we're going to experience as much technical progress in the next 10 years as humanities had in the entire past century between the Ford Model T and the Cyber Taxi.

18:53All right, the Cyber Cab. That's incredible. So how do you think in an exponential fashion? You know, you know, our minds are wired for linear thinking because in the world they evolved in, Nothing changed, decade to decade. Nothing changed in exponential of fashion. The best you could do was to think in a linear way to look at, can I get to that tree before the lion gets to me? And that's the way our minds are wired. We're wired in a linear fashion. So despite all the exponential changes going on, most people cannot believe it when we talk about adding 30 years to your health span. No, don't believe it, haven't seen it.

19:40Or we talk about taking people to Mars, they discount it. And we have to remember that our minds default to linear thinking, but we're in an exponential world. And the only way I know how to think exponentially and have an exponential mindset is to constantly be updating what is possible today and extrapolate for a year or six months. And we've seen this in the whole AI world. Right? In 1956, there was a conference at Dartmouth University brought together by a group of eight scientists, mathematicians, physicists to talk about artificial intelligence. And they thought they were going to actually solve it during that summer.

20:29Well, it's been a while now, right, some 60 plus years, and it's just now that we've gotten to a point of AI becoming extraordinary. And you know, back in 1999, Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called The Age of the Spiritual Machines, in which he predicted we were going to hit human level AI by 2029 so he predicted in 30 years we're going to hit human level AI people laughed at him They said you're insane first of all it's never gonna happen, but if it's gonna happen it's gonna happen a hundred years Why because between in 1956 and 1999, there had been little to no progress. And so all they could imagine was that continuing little to no progress.

21:26But when you look at exponentials, they're deceptive. The first digital camera came out from Kodak and it took .01 megapixel images, .01. The next year it took .02 Megal pixel images, next year .04 .08. It all looked like zero. And in fact, when Steven Sassan, the founder, the creator of the digital camera, brought it into the Board of Maccodak, they said, you're crazy. You know, we make beautiful higher resolution images besides we're in the paper and chemicals business. There's no money in that here. And they ignored the technology. Well, 10 doubleings later, you're 1 ,000 times better. 20 doubleings, you're a million times.

22:2130 doubleings, you're a billion times, and Kodak is bankrupt. The same thing has occurred in exponential tech on the AI side. So all of a sudden, Ray goes from being super, super optimistic to Elon calling him conservative next last year. We're seeing the same thing in solar, right? We are just a few doubling away from solar being able to provide all of our energy needs. So, exponential mindset is not getting stuck in your linear thinking and recognizing that in the early days of any technology it is slow and incremental growth. One example as well is the 3D printer, right? The first 3D printer serial lithography was able to barely print a particular type of plastic that that are cross -linked.

23:19And today of course we are 3D printing rocket engines. We're 3D printing entire rockets. We're 3D printing homes. We're 3D printing everything. Again you can see the slow progress. All right let's go to our next mind set, which is moonshot mindset. In this exponential world, I want you to realize that 10%, which is what companies normally are looking for, right? If I could get 10 % more revenue, if I could get 10 % lower cost of good sold, if I could get 10 % more customers, that would be amazing. And that's what most companies are working towards. But a moonshot mindset is not 10%, it's 10x, which is 1000%.

24:10So how do you think about getting 1000 % more, 10x more? Bert Rutan, who won the UnSari XPrize 20 years ago, said the day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. That's a really profound thought. You know, if it wasn't a crazy idea yesterday, it wouldn't be a breakthrough today. It would be an expected incremental improvement. Going for a computer that's 20 % faster, that's expected. Going from vacuum tubes to chips, that's a breakthrough. So the question is how do you drive moonshots? How do you think about creating moonshots? Well, there's an amazing individual, Astro Teller, who's the head of X at Google, and I've had them on stage at the abundance summit a number of times.

25:14And what we talked about is, listen, if you're a CEO and you want to create a moonshot organization, it's really important to do two things. Number one, don't kill the goose that's laying the eggs. In other words, you've got an organization that's delivering you 10 % profits every year. Keep that organization going. And don't ask them to go and take crazy ideas forward and take on moonshots. Because you'll disrupt them. That's not the way they think. That's not what you hired them for. But you can create a moonshot organization. Find those individuals who are disruptive thinkers who are able to start with a clean sheet of paper and Put them in a separate organization with a head who is managing them who's saying listen I don't want you trying incremental progress if I catch you doing anything incremental you're fired You're here to do 10x a thousand percent and And that team needs to report directly to you as the CEO.

26:23Why? One other thing, that team needs to be physically separated from the main organization. The main organization is going to tell them they're crazy. Every day they're going to say, you can't do that. That's ridiculous. that moonshot group is threatening the very livelihood and existence of your main organization. And so you're going to get an immune reaction within the organization that's going to shut these people down. I don't care how big you are or how small you are. That immune reaction to 10x thinking is there. So you want want to have a CEO of that team that reports directly to the CEO of the primary company.

27:12And that CEO needs to give that person top cover and say, I want you trying crazy ideas. I need you trying crazy ideas. And when those crazy ideas begin to succeed, that new product or service is brought into the main company, the productized. Right? So think about that as an incubator and the main company as the operator. You see this a little bit, for example, when Disney goes out and buys Marvel, right? Or buys Lucas films. They had all of these channels, all of these channels for theme parks and movies, but their creative engine had dried up. So they went and got these skunkworks organizations and moved them in.

28:02So that's moonshot mindset. I'll give you one last example there that Astroteller uses. He says, I want you to imagine that your car company and your car is getting 50 miles per gallon. If you want your car to get 55 miles per gallon, the 10 % increase. You can do that by getting better tires, improving your engine efficiency, changing the aerodynamics. You can work hard to get 10%. But if I asked you to go from 50 miles per gallon to 500 miles per gallon, you can't get there on incremental progress. You need to start with a clean sheet of paper. And again, this is what we've seen Elon do with SpaceX and with Tesla.

28:54He started with a clean sheet of paper and reinvented the entire system. It's the only way you get 10x. It's not incremental. So don't try to incrementalize your way to a 10x improvement. right, and that non -incremental drive that disrupts the approach needs to happen outside your main organization. So for example, when Steve Jobs created the Mac, he didn't do it inside of Apple headquarters. He took a rogue team and he rented out offices miles away. He put a pirate flag on top and he said, where the pirates leave us alone. Same thing happened with Lockheed Skunkworks, right? When Casey created the SR -71 and the first fighter jets in World War II, it was done in complete isolation.

29:55So there's something to creating a moonshot factory and how you manage that moonshot factory. So, can you have a moonshot mindset? Are you prepared to go 10 times bigger versus 10 percent? Because you can, and if you don't, your competition will. All right, let's talk about a longevity mindset, which is why we're here all together. You know, there is my favorite quote, But life is short until you extend it. We have to remember that the human body was never designed to live past age 30 until 100 years ago, or average life expectancy was 40. But hopefully you've seen from the technologies, this is a non -linear part of the scientific health world, right?

30:53where the time where converging technologies are allowing us to go much faster, much further than any time ever in human history. And the more that people become convinced that longevity is real, and probably the largest business opportunity on the planet, the more they're going to be investing capital. And the more capital that's invested, the more breakthroughs we're going to have. So it's this decade that I think we're in the health span revolution. That it's this decade that these technologies driven mostly by AI, new material sciences, you know single -cell sequencing, CRISPR gene therapies, all these technologies converging are going to lengthen the healthy human lifespan.

31:44But how you think about it is so important because if you don't believe that, then why would you take care of yourself now? Why wouldn't you just sleep in, not exercise? Why wouldn't you just eat all the desserts you want? Why would you go and upload your body? Why would you do any of these things if you didn't think there was a benefit? I remember when a dear friend of mine died from AIDS six months before the retrovaled drugs came out. He missed that revolution, right? You don't want to be the last person who doesn't get the health span revolution. So for me, a longevity mindset is fundamental.

32:33Final mindset and one of the most important ones I want to leave you with. I built the entire abundance summit around this. Is an abundance mindset. You know, we evolved on the savannahs of Africa 200 ,000, 100 ,000 years ago in a world that was filled with fear and scarcity. Our default mindset, and this is really challenging, our default mindset, when we're left alone in a situation, We default to fear and scarcity. It's how we're wired. And being in fear and scarcity is the worst place to live into the future. When you're in fear and scarcity, you're back on your heels, you're scared about everything, you're not engaging, you're not learning, you're not creating.

33:26So the question to ask yourself is, why is this happening? Why we're seeing all these up into the right movements. Is it that we're smarter or we have better politicians? Or perhaps is it the technology that we are engaging in and learning about? So this is what Ray calls the law of accelerating returns that the amount of computational power per dollar has been growing. And I want you to notice this is plotted on an exponential. And usually an exponential growth curve plotted on a log scale should be a straight line. But it isn't a straight line. It's curving upwards, which tells us the rate at which the technology is accelerating is itself accelerating.

34:16Right, we're in a super exponential. We also have the falling cost of all tech is plummeting through the ground. So I'll close on this. Protect your mindset. Careful what you let into your mind to shape your neural net. I said this before, our brains are neural nets, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections, and they're shaped by everything you read, everything you see. everything you hear, who you hang out with, and how you shape that neural net should be critically important to you. In the same way that we've learned not to eat sugar, to eat your broccoli, what you let into your body shapes your body's health, in the same way what you let into your mind shapes your mind's health.