Douglas Goldstein: Peter Diamandis is the chairman and CEO of The XPRIZE which is probably
best known for encouraging private space flight and also for the 100-mile per gallon equivalent
cars which is an amazing prize.
He also wrote a book called Abundance.
All of the excitement you talk about in the book and I strongly encourage everyone to
read it.
Shouldn’t we kind of tamper that with a bit of caution because after all you put a
lot of hoping technology but that’s the same technology that’s brought us global
warming and nuclear engineers that not only bring us energy but bombs, I mean there’s
so much risk involved.
Peter Diamandis: About a year ago, I was closing out the Clinton Global Initiative and President
Bill Clinton the book and as he introduced me, he goes “Peter why you’re so positive
about the future.
Don’t you watch the news?” and I said “President Clinton, I’m positive about
the future for two reasons.
One, I try not to watch the news and second is I look at
in data.”
The reality is we as humans pay ten times more attention to negative news and positive
news and it’s an evolutionary benefit because as we are evolving hundreds of thousands millions
of years ago, if you missed a piece of good news like some food over there, too bad but
if you missed a piece of bad news like Russell in the bushes, tiger and not the wind, your
gene is right at gym pool.
So all of us have opened piece of our temporal lobe called the amygdala that scans everything
we see and everything we hear for negative news.
We pay ten times more attention to negative news as a result, most news program, I call
CNN the crisis news network, constantly negative news network, whatever it might be, will feed
us not news that’s not true but disproportionate ratio of positive news to negative news, meaning
far more negative news and that colors the way we see the world.
It’s not to say again this isn’t happening and that the world does not have a lot of
improvement but the fact is the world has gotten extraordinarily better over the last
hundred years by almost every measure and the data shows us per capita income for almost
every nation, the planet has more than tripled.
The world bank just this really month reported that we are now reaching a point where less
than 10% of the world is in extreme poverty, down from 99% of the world being in extreme
poverty.
The human life span has more than doubled and has the potential to double again.
The cost of the food has dropped 13 fold, the cost of energy has dropped 20 fold, the
cost of transportation a hundred fold, communication over a thousand fold and Steven Pinker at
Harvard has demonstrated that on a global basis, we’re living during the most peaceful
time ever in human history, your chance of dying a violent death around the world on
the average is 1:500 what they used
to be.
Douglas Goldstein: Is there a connection between what you’re talking about and what normal
people can benefit from and how they can say “I’m going to invest in this new technology
or this new idea and it will change my life no just that I’m going to buy a new Iphone”?
Peter Diamandis: The companies that are crushing it, that are becoming the most valuable companies
in the planet are technology companies.
There are companies that are data driven.
They are using a combination of all of these technologies riding on top of what we call
more as rapidly growing computational power.
These are companies that are using massive computational power, the cloud, using AI robotics,
network censors, 3D printing and these are the companies that are disproportionately
growing fast and changing our lives.
We’re going to see these exponential technologies and all these I have to mention sits inside
of a university I co-founded with a gentleman named Ray Kurzweil, one of the smartest people
in the planet, one of the leaders in AI.
Ray and I realized that there was no place on the planet you could go and really get
an overview of all of these technologies.
You can go to the top technological universities in Israel or MIT or whatever it might be and
become an expert in one area but where would you go to really get an overview of all of
these fields and where they are converging and where they are going because it’s the
convergence of all of these rapidly growing fields are causing this amazing unexpected
changes.
I would say that these fields are going to have the potential to re-invent our lives.
They are going to lead towards doubling the human lifespan once again as we make healthcare
preventative and predictive as you are monitoring everything that’s going in on your body
from censors and networks that we have and your AI has become your physician.
It’s going to allow us to have a world that’s for more literate.
funded the XPRIZE foundation which I run with $15 million prize to allow for autonomous
scalable education.
How do you build an android app that sits on top of a tablet or a phone that can help
us bring 250 million illiterate kids around the world to literacy.
Douglas Goldstein: Watching these changes that you’re talking about, if regular people
want to be involved, what should we be focusing on?
When investors or regular people say “I want to be part of the future” pretty much
we all get signed up for our healthcare plans so we don’t benefit from that and we buy
whatever cell phone has the best ad or the cheapest monthly fee.
What’s the path that you would advice people to really follow?
Peter Diamandis: First of all, it’s about education.
It’s understandingwe as humans think in a local linear fashion because our brains
have a little bit of time that’s local linear and we’re living in a global exponential
world.
Singularity university, URL is www.singularityu.org, is a place that we built in executive program.
In Silicon Valley, we have a significant alumni based in Israel, it’s a very active nation,
we’re active in 80 countries around the world and Singularity U is working on creating
a singularity summit at the end of 2016 where people can come and learn about this stuff.
I put out a weekly blog post at www.diamandis.com where you can sign up for it and every week,
I’m looking at “here are the stories, here’s the technology that is changing your
life, here are specific examples of what you can learn about” but it’s really the same
with by bombarded by negative news, the question is can you allow yourself to be educated every
week by “This is the breakthrough going on in artificial intelligence or 3D printing
or synthetic biology that opens up your possibilities” because today it’s the realization that
40% of today’s Fortune 500 companies, largest companies in the world are going to be gone
in the next decade and we’re having companies going from “I’ve got an idea” to “I
run a billion dollar company” almost overnight.
Uber goes from zero to $5 billion valuation in five years and how do you do that?
We’re going to see these exponential companies intersecting with linear.
Governments are going to have these battles but the government regulation is only going
to last that long because the service is not much better for people that the government
is going to change their tune eventually.
I’ve just started a venture fund bold capital partners with partnership with Singular University,
specifically to invest in these kinds of things and I’ve start with 17 companies over the
years.
My latest one is a company called Human Longevity.
We’ve built the world’s largest genome sequencing facility in the planet and we’re
really focused on collecting data for millions of individuals, your entire genome sequence,
your entire microbiom, your full body MRI, all of these data gets data mine to actually
tell you “This is what you’re going to come down with before you come down with it”
and this is what you do to make sure it doesn’t harm you.
So we’re going to reinvent healthcare.
One of my other companies Planetary Resources, we build spacecraft and we launched our first
one a few months back that whose mission is to go out to prospect near earth asteroids
for fuels and precious materials.
We’re living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history.
Everyday science fiction is becoming science fact.
Douglas Goldstein: You created the XPRIZE in order to get people into space because
it’s clear you have a great deal of excitement about it.
One of the ways that you’ve discovered to fund it is sort of brought back the idea of
incentive prizes and it seems like a great idea the way we see it working out but how
come some of the other massive game changers, people out there like Bill Gates who is trying
to solve malaria in Africa, how come they don’t seem to buy into that?
What do they know about incentive prizes as a method that maybe the rest of us aren’t
seeing?
Peter Diamandis: I know Mr. Gates and he and I have had many debates over lunch and conversations
about this.
Incentive prizes work extraordinarily well and we’ve seen a rebirth of incentive prizes
over the last few decades.
It turns out that he thinks about it a thousand years ago, the only people who could solve
a problem on a local or regional basis where the kings and the queens.
Hundred years ago, it was barbarians who could build libraries, railroads, the steel mills,
the schools.
Today any of us who truly care about solving a problem can.
We’ve democratized the ability to impact the world because the power of tech, because
the availability of capital from angel funding, crowd funding and venture funding, all of
these areas and my belief is that you can choose a foundation, you can fund a particular
entrepreneur to try and solve a problem or you can say “Listen, here’s the problem,
the first person to accomplish this and here’s the very specific goal to build this device
wins the cash” and you can have not one or two or ten, you can have hundreds of entrepreneurs
competing to solve it.
There’s the XPRIZE foundation which is www.xprize.org.
We’ve just created platform called www.herox.com which is a platform where you can design and
launch a prize and the crowd can help co-fund it and compete for it.
These are the things that I think are very important, governments in some cases traditional
foundations where I would put the Gates foundation really want to have more control about where
their money goes.
They want this entrepreneur to be the person.
They want to pick where the capital goes and that’s fine but it limits your solutions.
The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea and a lot of us don’t
back crazy ideas.
We say “This sounds like a logical solution” and you fund that but that’s limiting the
solution to your pre-conceived notions of what the solution
can be.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people follow you, follow your work and get excite about the
future abundance?
Peter Diamandis: If you go to www.diamandis.com, I have a blog I put out every Sunday.
I have a newsletter called Abundance Insider that really curates what is the extraordinary
positive news in the tech field happening every week.
You can sign up for www.singularityu.org where you can learn about the programs we run for
executives for the public and what we’re going to be doing in Israel hopefully at the
end of 2016 and www.xprize.org to learn about the XPRIZEs and www.herox.com if you want
to design your own incentive competition and launch it, you can do it there, a lot going
on and I’m excited to have people learn about the extraordinary positive news in the
march of technology, it’s how it’s changing our world.