The SECRETS to Longevity and Exponential Tech with Peter Diamandis

0:00Do you know the number one obstacle to financial success? time or lack of it without enough time you can't learn efficiently plan effectively or focus on the right strategies that's why real vision offers you a simple and efficient way to gain expert knowledge using time-saving market tools and leverage the brain power of our community to help you succeed faster get a taste of financial freedom with our offer at realvision.com forward slash free. That's realvision.com forward slash free. Hi, I'm Raoul Pal, and welcome to my show, The Journeyman, where I take that journey with you to the nexus of macro crypto and the exponential age of technology.

0:46This is a journey for me because it is my authentic journey of knowledge. Now, I'm actually traveling this week in Australia and Singapore, and I'm actually speaking at the Super AI event in Singapore, which I can't wait to go to, because AI is a really big area for me. I think it's obviously game-changing. I think it's going to bring about the economic singularity. It's going to change the economic model. I think it's going to change all of our lives. And I'm working with a lot of AI tools. I use them every day, but also we bring them at Real Vision. We've had AI for almost a year in Real Vision at realvision.com, which is free for you guys to join, and you should do, you'd be crazy if you don't.

1:31We've got embedded AI to help you understand financial markets. You can ask it questions. It'll summarize content for you. You can ask the content questions. There's extraordinary stuff there, along with all the other benefits of being a Real Vision member. And it's, again, free to join. So please join us there. This next interview is an old interview that I brought back. And I wanted to because this was part of my foundational journey to the exponential age. And it's my conversation with Peter Diamandis. Peter is somebody who's been at the forefront of all of this, whether it's space science or whether it's longevity.

2:11He's somebody that I rely on to learn from. We all need mentors in this space. And Peter is a mentor to me. I think what he does is brilliant. And so I wanted to resurface this interview for you because you won't have seen it because it hasn't been on The Journeyman. My conversation with Peter Diamandis about the exponential age. I hope you enjoy it. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto, and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

2:55Peter, fantastic to get in Real Vision. I've wanted to get you on for a long time to pick your brains about all sorts of things. Well, a pleasure to be here. And my brain is ready for the picking. Before we get into all sorts of interesting stuff, I'd love to hear your story because you've got an incredible story that I think people will find very inspiring. And it also frames how you think and why you think these things. uh sure in in brief um i was born in the 60s and it was really the apollo program and that what i call that scientific documentary star trek that got me going and excited about the world and i became passionate about space uh my parents were both in the medical field my father was a physician wanted to become a doctor and so i sort of buried my passions around space and went and got a six pack of degrees and a medical degree and molecular genetics and so forth.

3:55But all the time I was passionate about space. And when I got my medical diploma, I remember making a color photocopy and sending it to my parents and then promptly, you know, jumping out of the medical path and really focusing on space. And for me, the final frontier holds incredible opportunity for humanity, right? Everything we ever held a value on earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate are in near infinite quantities in space. And whatever we evolved to become, you know, as a species in the future, it's going to be off world. And the predominance of humanity will be off planet. Having said that, you know, I started a university called the International Space University, started a rocket company, satellite communications company, Zero-G, which is weightless parabolic flights for flying people into weightlessness, which I've done hundreds of times now, and flew Stephen Hawking into Zero-G, which was an incredible experience, the world's expert in gravity into zero gravity.

5:02We can talk about that. And then the XPRIZE, of course, which was a$10 million prize to inspire a new generation of rockets that can carry you and me and our friends into space. That became Virgin Galactic when Richard Branson bought the rights to create his vehicle. And, you know, after my focus in space, which I still am super passionate about, I became enamored with exponential technologies. I'd gotten to know Ray Kurzweil, who became my co-founder at Singularity University, and had read his book, The Singularity is Near, and realized that, you know, as much as my passion of space was capturing my mind, what really was happening right now that was transforming the entire planet was the implications of these exponential technologies.

5:58riding on top of Moore's law, this explosive capability, right? So computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, augmented virtual reality, blockchain, all these technologies were exploding at the same time that computation. So, you know, for 20 years through Singularity University, through a program where I coach leaders and CEOs and entrepreneurs called Abundance 360, I've really been tracking how all these exponential technologies are reinventing industries. And my third act, if you would, has been focused on longevity, which I really got involved in sort of going back to my early medical roots.

6:47I became enamored with the idea that we're in a position this coming decade to be adding 10, 20, 30 healthy years on a person's life. And my mission is making 100 years old the new 60, right? Or the new 50. But what are the implications for that? And if you can add those 10, 20, 30 healthy years, what new breakthroughs will you intercept, will you encounter that might add another 20, 30, 50, 100 years on your life? So I mean, these are the games I play in. I've got a half a billion dollar venture fund, Cobalt Capital, a bunch of companies in the longevity space, which we can talk about. That's me in a nutshell of New York Times books.

7:38I mean, incredible. Did you think when you started, when you were the boy thinking about space, that you would be so involved in the kind of future of where the world is going? I don't know that I was early on. What I found was when I followed my passion, what I wanted to do, not what I was told to do. It was extraordinary and fun. A few times I've started a business. I'm on my 24th or 25th company these days. A few times I started a company just to make money. And those were dismal failures because they didn't capture my heart and my soul. But when I started something, whether it's a nonprofit, a for-profit, whatever it is, where I really believe in it, where I'm willing to go that extra mile, that's where I end up with success.

8:33So I really speak to passion-driven entrepreneurial journeys. Hey, everyone. We're going to take a quick pause and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back. Hi you. Hey listen, if you're enjoying this, come and see me on the YouTube channel, Raoul Pal, The Journeyman. Sign up there, get everything I ever do. See you there.

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9:42That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash R-E-A-L-B-I-S-I-O-N. and i i guess that passion gives you both the momentum and the ability to cope with doing so much because you're doing an extraordinary amount of stuff for one person i mean sure you've got a team and everything else but it's a lot yeah yeah it it is i appreciate it and uh you know i like to say I've got two jobs. One is to allow my passion to keep me excited so I can convey it to people. And the second is to find great people to run the business day to day. So I typically, when I start a company, will take a role as chairman or vice chairman or executive chairman, whatever, and hire a CEO to run the business day to day.

10:37And sometimes I'm lucky in finding an amazing leader. And sometimes I'm not. And then it's painful, just like everybody else. Yeah, because suddenly you have to get your hands dirty because you've got the wrong person in the role, but you get there eventually. Yeah. So I'd love to dig into some of these kind of key areas. We had a fantastic conversation with somebody who's now gone into the space business, investing in the space business. And he came out of the Jet Propulsion Labs at NASA and kind of explained where he saw space going, which was, you know, he was talking about, yes, we should have a base station.

11:16on the moon pretty soon. Yes, we'll start mining. Yes, we're creating networks. Yes, all the satellites. How do you think space is going to evolve? If you're looking out, let's not worry yet about the next 20 years, but let's think about the next 10, because things are moving so fast now. This is a reality. They are. There's no question at all. They're moving fast for a number of reasons, which you know. Number one, two of the wealthiest people on the planet, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. I've known Jeff for almost 40 years and Elon for 22 years or thereabouts. And they have the disposable income, so to speak, or they have the ability to fund it.

11:58And up until now, up until the last decade, it's always been government funded. And government funding comes with a lot of risk aversion. It's like you're not willing to try something radically different if you're a government agency, because if it fails, there's a congressional investigation. you're going to get fired. And so if you're not willing to take risks, you're stuck in incrementalism. And ultimately, nothing moves very fast, right? The Apollo program was an exception because we were basically in the United States battling the Soviet empire. And they had crushed us with Sputnik in 1957 and getting the first human Gagarin in 1961.

12:40And we needed to do something to demonstrate. So we took a lot of risks. I mean, the Apollo program was very risky, but nothing really since then, or very few things since then. And individuals have a much higher predilection for taking risks and the ability. And so we see folks like Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and a multitude of others. So that's the first thing that's different. The second thing is the technologies available now to do these things like 3D printing, rocket engines or 3D printing entire rockets. My venture fund is called Bold Capital. One of the investments that we made at Bold was a company also out here in Los Angeles, one based called Relativity Space.

13:25Two young co-founders, one out of Blue Origin, one out of SpaceX, said, could we 3D print an entire rocket? They started on that journey. They built the world's largest metal 3D printer they call Stargate, which is a cool name. And the idea is that if you can 3D print the entire rocket, in their case, they're hoping for 95%, then you could do that 3D printing of a rocket in LA, Detroit, Abu Dhabi, you know, Colombo, Sri Lanka, you know, it's any place. And the idea being that you dematerialized and democratized access to these technologies. So it's insane. And then finally, of course, the whole, you know, microelectronics and data that's enabling us to do so much more in smaller packages.

14:30But what's coming this decade, to go to your question, what I'm tracking right now is without question, it's what SpaceX is doing. So, you know, Elon and Gwen Shotwell, who runs SpaceX for Elon on a day-to-day basis, are, it's not a little bit better or not 2x or even 10x. It feels like it's 100x better than any other space company out there. You know, they've gotten Falcon 9 operational with reusability very consistently on the first stage. And then what's coming next is Starship, which is a capability that's fully reusable, that has the ability to take 100 people to orbit, you know, and land on the surface of the moon and go beyond the moon to Mars.

15:18And it's a transformative approach. And everything we've, you know, ever built thus far doesn't compare. So a lot's coming there. And of course, Bezos is a brilliant entrepreneur and CEO, and he's behind the power curve on SpaceX right now, but he'll catch up. And he's committed whatever capital it takes. Elon's focused on Mars, moon first, because NASA wants to go there, Mars in the long term. Jeff is focused on the moon and really setting up the moon as a base, but then going from the moon to free earth, what we call O 'Neill colonies. These are large rotating cylinders where you're living on the inside and accommodating a million people, eventually taking humanity off the planet irreversibly to the stars.

16:14I don't think it's a matter of if, it's just a matter of when these days. One of the things I look at is these exponential charts. One of them is satellites going up into space. For years, it was steady. Then the US opened it up, and now it's gone truly exponential. If you map out what Elon's doing alone, and that's excluding what people like India are now doing, I mean, everybody's setting satellites up, and they cost nothing in comparison. That creates a whole different set of opportunities of linking all of that space around of the Earth. Yeah, no question. We're going to have laser communication satellite to satellite.

16:53We'll have basically the interplanetary internet where you'll have connectivity around the moon, connectivity around Mars, connectivity wherever we go. And what I'm most excited about, Ru, is the notion that the real opportunities are going to be mining the asteroids. And that's been a passion of mine, right? these rocks that are flying sometimes near the Earth, if they hit us, it's a problem. The ones that are between Mars and Jupiter and what we call near-Earth approaching asteroids, some of these rocks are either rich in water or ice, particularly, which can be broken down to make hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket fuel.

17:40Or they're rich in platinum group metals, platinum, palladium, iridium, osmium. These are multi-trillion dollar assets in space that we're going to, just like when the European settlers came over from Europe to the Americas, they brought their tools, but they were able to mine, if you would, the resources locally to develop the societies, the early American colonies. The same thing will happen in space. It feels to me that this is basically going to add an entire layer of GDP that didn't exist, because we're confined by the physical world. We'll talk about the metaverse and other stuff in due course.

18:26But in the physical world, we're constrained by resources. And what you're basically saying is a lot of those resources will no longer be constrained. They won't be. And I teach this in my Abundance 360 executive programs. It's a year-round program, and it's the highest level for Singularity University, that in an abundance mindset, you begin to realize that there's nothing truly scarce. and that what exponential technologies are is the force that takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant. We can talk about multiple examples, right? Energy used to be scarce. We used to go and kill whales on the ocean to get whale oil.

19:12Then we ravaged mountainsides to get coal. Then we drilled kilometers under the ocean floor. But we live on a planet that's 8 ,000 times more energy coming from the sun that we consume as a species. It's just not in a usable form. Right. What would you think of as more scarce than a perfect diamond, right? A four or five, six, 10 carat diamond. And, you know, De Beers taught us that you should spend, like two months, two months of your salary to buy your diamond engagement ring. Well, Well, it turns out that we can now manufacture perfect gems, perfect diamonds, rubies, emeralds, whatever you want.

19:53And for effectively no cost, it's the cost of methane, electricity, and water. And there are companies like the Diamond Foundry that manufacture this. In fact, the largest jewelry company on the planet just announced this past year that they're going to stop buying naturally mined gems, and they're going to manufacture them because there's no child labor, no ethical issues, and it's a better deal for everybody involved. So we go from scarcity to abundance, right? Google has given us an abundance of information. We'll talk about longevity later. And if we can start to add 10, 20, 30 healthy years, that buys you the next 10, 20, 30 healthy years, then time starts becoming abundant as well.

20:47Yeah. I mean, one of the things I've been looking at is anything that gets digitized goes to zero in cost, which is essentially what you're talking about. And we're going to be in a world not far away where the cost of electricity is zero. Yeah, it is true. And if you've got abundant available energy, right? And one of the things that I talk about is that the poorest countries in the world are the sunniest countries in the world, right? Really important implications there. If you have abundant, or let's call it even a squanderable abundance of energy, you can get all the water you want. You can pull water out of the atmosphere.

21:28You can desalinate water. And if you have clean water, half the disease burden of planet Earth is due to unclean drinking water. So all of these dominoes begin to tip. You have electricity for internet or to have lights at night for you to read if you're a student. So this becomes an extraordinary world of abundance. Hey, everyone. We're going to take another quick break and hear a word from our partners, and then we'll be right back.

22:04Looking at the next part of your thesis is the exponentiality of all of these technologies. We can't talk about all of them, but there's so many things that are now not ideas. They might have been 10 years ago, like 3D printing was just rolling out, but now these things are all going exponential as they're starting to be adopted, and all these networks are interconnecting. How is this all playing out? Because I'm not sure humans are quite prepared for the amount of change we're about to see, because everything is about to change. I agree with you. I agree with you. Well, I mean, listen, I've got 10-year-old twin boys, and they are thriving in this universe, right?

22:47The challenge is that the majority of our government leadership are typically in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and they're not prepared for the level of change. So it's the institutions, whether it's government institutions, religious institutions, or the industrial complex that's in place, those are the groups that are going to have the hardest difficulty. I wrote my last book, which came out a little over a year ago, called The Future is faster than you think. I looked at what the next decade looks like. What does 2021 through 2030 look like? And painted the picture for how every single industry is going to change.

23:30Not a little bit, dramatically, right? I don't care what industry, health, education, insurance, finance, all of these industries are going to get disrupted. And it's not going to be your traditional company that's disrupting you, right? It's not going to be the healthcare companies, you know, down the street that disrupts you. It's, you know, if you're in healthcare industry, it's going to be Amazon or Google or, you know, Apple or the multitude of startups coming our way. And the beneficiary for all of this disruption is going to be the general public. It's not going to be just disrupting for the heck of disrupting.

24:14So when Zoom disrupts the travel industry and allows people to work for a home, listen, the travel industry suffers and the large real estate companies that are holding all these office buildings suffer. But the public, the general public, it's like, oh my God, this incredible free resource that makes my life that much easier. So yes, there's going to be challenges, and we're not prepared for the speed of change. But I am an optimist in terms of these technologies, for the most part, serving humanity and elevating humanity. And how do you think through the replacement of humans in the labor force, and how we prepare for that.

25:06So what role humans might play in a different way? Real important question. And I write about this a lot in the following way. To date, we haven't seen a replacement happen, even though it's been discussed and talked about forever, for decades, right? The first time there was a letter written by a bunch of Nobel laureates and top scientists and economists to the President of the United States warning about the massive disruption in the labor force coming from automation. And that letter was written in the 1960s. And we've seen none of that, right? We used to have rooms filled with individuals, mostly women, copying ledger to ledger to ledger in these banks.

25:59And all the automation was going to replace that. And it did. But guess what? We have more employees and banks than any time ever in human history. And so what we're seeing to date is very few of those jobs actually getting replaced. We will replace the jobs that are dull and dangerous and dirty. Those will go away and robots and AI will replace them. But what we're going to see in the next decade is really around AI-human collaboration, where it's individuals working with AI, not being displaced by them. And the other thing I think we'll start to see is the realization that we can divide ourselves into two groups, people who are doing what they absolutely love, what you and I are doing right now.

26:52And then people who are doing a job because they want to put food on their table, get insurance for their families. And the hope is that technology will enable people to do what they love more than ever before and less for just having to earn a living. One of the things I've been thinking through as well is the development of the metaverse. So the kind of digital world that we're all going to inhabit in the future. And again, it feels like space to me. It's like discovering the Americas again. There's plenty of new opportunities that we can't imagine. And yes, we will be working alongside AI within that world.

27:30But it feels like the opportunities are going to be abundant in many respects. Yeah. So I tracked it very carefully. I think of the metaverse as the convergence of XR, VR and AR together, augmented and virtual reality, convergence of that AI and blockchain. and we're going to start to spend more and more of our time in the virtual world. We will have a citizenship. I'm a US citizen and I will have an additional citizenship in virtual worlds. And in those virtual worlds, the ability to experiment is a lot easier. You can experiment with new governments, with new voting systems, regulatory systems.

28:13You can experiment with new currencies. You can start to experiment. And so the velocity and the agility of experimentation is going to go up tremendously. I'm on the board of a company called VATOM, V-A-T-O-M, which stands for virtual atoms, that a brilliant entrepreneur, Eric Poulier, has created. He was the very first person to come up with NFTs back five, six years ago. He has a company called Spatial Web, which is sort of a three-dimensional metaverse application that's extraordinary. And I'm just tracking this. And it's a much bigger opportunity than when we first saw www. www. and the convergence of new headgear that's going to come from Apple and HTC and a multitude of startups, and 5G and 6G that's coming, all of these things are going to transform how we interact with content.

29:19It's going to transform the entire educational system, which is really insanely broken right now. Yeah, I 100 % agree. Also, I think you raise interesting point that I've been talking about as well, is we're creating digital sovereign states and the highly adaptive states that don't have the restrictions we have because they have a system of money, they have an organizing set of principles and all the things that make up a state or religion or however you can control complex adaptive systems. It feels like that's coming and your token is your access to that world, let's say. We're still desperate for digital identity.

29:56Yes, the digital identity is fundamental to this future universe. Sovereign identity, in other words, that you own your identity, not Facebook or Google or anybody else. And then having with that identity, a wallet that allows you to receive and make payments in crypto. So those two things are coming, and there are amazing entrepreneurs working on both. And then they just unlock a universe that we haven't really even a glimmer of understanding yet. Yeah, I think so. The other thing is, where do you think about the centralization versus decentralization debate? We can see Zuckerberg wanting to create some sort of centralized version of what he thinks the metaverse is, and Tim Sweeney and Epic Games and others saying, and the whole blockchain industry saying, no, no, no, we're going to have this fight?

30:52I think it's going to be a fight, and I think it will be decentralized. And you as a user need to be able to take your identity, what you own, your attributes, whatever superpowers you've developed, and take it from, I don't want to call them metaverse to metaverse, but it's going to be from application layer to application layer, But today, if you develop something in Minecraft or Roblox or Axie Infinity, you don't have the portability to take it to other locations. But that will change. The user interfaces, the ones that are open will win is the final, for me, is the most important thing. But open ecosystems will, in the long run, vastly outdo closed ecosystems.