#201 – Exploring the intersection of healthcare and artificial intelligence | Peter Diamandis & Josh Clemente

According to Peter Diamandis, MD, we’ll make more technological progress and breakthroughs in the next 10 years than in the past 100, including current developments in fusion, humanoid robots, avatars, and ChatGPT. Listen as Levels Founder Josh Clemente talks with Peter Diamandis about technological breakthroughs and what they mean for the future of medicine, and how to shift your mindset as an entrepreneur to make a real change in the world. Peter Diamandis was recently named by Fortune as one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders. He’s the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, executive founder of Singularity University, and bestselling author, and is a never-ending source of positive inspiration for entrepreneurs.

Helpful links

– Peter Diamandis’ website: https://diamandis.com
– Moonshots and Mindsets podcast: https://diamandis.com/podcast
– Singularity University: https://su.org
– Peter’s Free Abundance 360 Metatrends Report for 2022-2032: https://abundance360.com/metatrends-2023
– The Singularity Is Near book by Ray Kurzweil: https://amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology-ebook/dp/B000QCSA7C
– Longevity Insider: https://longevityinsider.org
– Lifespan book by David Sinclair: https://amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/1501191977
– Life Force book by Tony Robbins; Peter Diamandis, MD; and Robert Hariri, MD: https://amazon.com/Life-Force-Breakthroughs-Precision-Transform-ebook/dp/B09KY7ZXV6
– Peter Diamandis’s Metatrend #9, Trillion-Sensor Economy: https://www.diamandis.com/blog/metatrend_9_trillion_sensor_economy
– Open Exo by Salim Ismail: https://openexo.com
– Dr. Mark Hyman: https://drhyman.com
– Connect with Peter Diamandis, MD on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PeterDiamandis
– Connect with Peter Diamandis, MD on Instagram: https://instagram.com/peterdiamandis
– Connect with Peter Diamandis, MD on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/peterdiamandis
– Watch Peter Diamandis, MD on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@peterdiamandis

**8:18 — Chat GPT may have applications for metabolic health**

Chat GPT by OpenAI is a chatbot that was released in late 2022. While this specific artificial intelligence technology is new, Dr. Diamandis is already finding applications for it in the realm of nutrition.

> It’s a fascinating future that’s moving super fast, right? To come back to Levels… The other thing you can do is you can say, “This is what I have in my refrigerator. I want to have a low-glycemic dinner. What do you recommend to cook?”
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**16:23 — AI, in the future, may help us better use biomarker data**

We’ve only seen the beginning of AI technology. But Dr. Diamandis predicts how AI, in the future, may empower us to further use biomarker data to optimize health and well-being.

> AI is coming. And we’ve seen just a peak under the covers, right? We’re going to have some version of Jarvis, and I bring it back to health. We’re going to have an AI that you give permission to watch what you eat, to listen to your conversations, to monitor your blood chemistry. The future versions of Levels technology: that’s not only monitoring blood glucose, but 30 other parameters. And all that data’s uploaded to your AI constantly, and your AI is advising you on what to eat. Maybe eventually your robot chef is making things that it knows you enjoy but are optimized for what your blood chemistry is—you need more vitamin D, you need more of certain proteins. That’s an exciting future that is coming.
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**20:28 — Technological inventions are moving at a rapid pace compared to 100 years ago**

In his Abundance 360 course, part of Singular University, Dr. Diamandis includes an exercise that looks back at inventions throughout history to illustrate the pace at which advancements occur today and how remarkable every advancement is.

> Every year for the last 11 years, I go into the program and I contextualize it by saying, “Okay, what was the world like a hundred years ago?” And by the way, a hundred years ago, the speed of technological progress was molasses. If you look at the breakthroughs in the year 1915, 1916 through 1922, it’s hilarious. Vegemite was invented and was a breakthrough in 1922. The water ski was invented with a board and some rope. That was a breakthrough in the year 1922. I kid you not. And typically, it’s like five, six, seven things that occurred over the course of the entire year that you don’t even think of as a breakthrough. So that’s one thing I’ve been doing for the last decade. And then I would look a year back, and then I would look three or four years forward. And every year I can guarantee you—because I can put myself back in that mindset every year—it was exciting. Every year was like, “Wow, we’ve just had some amazing things.” We’re just jaded now at what those amazing things were.
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**22:39 —The future of technological advancements can seem mind-blowing**

The potential for new technology is accelerating at such a rapid pace that conceptualizing the possibilities is complicated. But not too long in the future, today’s technology, including in areas of medicine, will seem antiquated, Dr. Diamandis suggests.

> We’re going to make as much progress in the next 10 years as we have in the entire past century. That’s the speed of the acceleration of the curve. And it’s hard to think about how fast things are getting. And it’s going to be AI and biotech and to some degree robotics that are leading the pack. And I haven’t even mentioned what’s going to come down the pack with quantum computing. One of the things at 360 this year is I’ve got a guy named Jack Hidary, who’s the CEO of Sandbox AQ, which spun out of Alphabet. It’s their quantum technologies play. Eric Schmidt is the chairman. Jack is the CEO. And I’ve had a preview of what we’re going to be discussing on stage. And it’s insane. It’s quantum technologies. Quantum compute. Quantum chemistry is going to be the revolution that makes medicine and biotech in the future look like today it’s standing still.
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**28:08 — Entrepreneurs can feel empowered by the potential the future holds**

Dr. Diamandis aims to empower entrepreneurs to harness today’s technological advancements and those coming in the near future to effect change that will have wide-reaching impact.

> I believe that we have the ability, given the tools that we inherit—what you and I have been talking about for the last 20 minutes—to up our dreams. And so my mission is to incentivize entrepreneurs to take bigger moonshots, to take on solving the world’s biggest problems. Do something that scares you and inspires you and has the ability to make a dent in the universe because that leaves the world a better place.
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**31:25 — AI can help us find the content that’s beneficial to us**

We can easily fall prey to doomscrolling or doomwatching, which then trains the algorithm to give us more negative content. Dr. Diamandis offers an example of using AI to customize a feed he wants to digest—one he shares with others.

> If you think about what is the business model of a newspaper or a television news show, the business model is to deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers. And we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. As a result of that, we are bluntly just being bombarded by negative news, so we don’t turn off our TV and they can sell us. And it’s training the neural net. It’s crazy, right? And so I choose to not do that. I choose what I read carefully. I choose what conversations I have, like the one we’re having now. I think you’re familiar with this. I built an AI engine that scans the world’s news and generates custom newsletters for folks to get information that is highly validated and highly positive semantic. I trained one around longevity. I call it longevityinsider.org. Folks can go there for free. And every day I get the top 10 to 15 articles on breakthroughs around longevity.
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**34:22 — Our mindset is a precious thing, and we can train it**

We can protect and train our mindset through careful curation of the media we consume, the environment we’re in, and the people we surround ourselves with.

> The things that train your mindset are what you watch, what’s on your walls, what you listen to, who you hang out with to a large degree, right? So choose your podcasts carefully. I invite folks to Moonshots and Mindsets and obviously to A Whole New Level that we’re in today. What you read is important. There are incredible books in the longevity world. You know, David Sinclair wrote a book called *Lifespan*, which was excellent. Tony Robbins and I wrote a book last year called *Life Force*. Mark Hyman has a book coming out. There’s a whole bunch of great books out there. You’re the average of the people you spend the most time with. So who in your community is super positive and has a mindset that you want to emulate, and how do you spend more time with them?
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**36:32 —The longevity of content can sometimes be a metric for filtering**

Josh Clemente discusses a concept Sam Corcos, Levels CEO and co-founder, often talks about. The 24-hour news cycle means breaking news is fast and ever-changing, generally reporting on what’s in the moment. But content that has longevity often has more nuance and context and may be more worth your time. It’s a concept that can help you strategize if you need an “information diet.”

> This is something that my co-founder Sam talks about is that a book takes a lot of time. Somebody invested thousands of hours to pull that information together and synthesize it. And podcasts take many hours, and movies and things like this. But something that doesn’t take a lot of time is breaking news that is intended to really just generate clicks for advertising. There’s this Lindy effect concept where the longer something is around, the more likely it is to stay around. Well, the news cycle we have is less than 24 hours. And so keep your guard up and the filter strong for the information you’re bringing in.
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**45:02 — Nanotechnology is a trend that may help change the medical field**

Dr. Diamandis predicts that nanotechnology with tricorders and wearables is the future of medicine and will change the way we diagnose and manage symptoms and conditions.

> The meta trend that is coming in the field is moving medicine out of the hospital and out of the doctor’s office, into the home, into the body. So I’ve got my Apple watch, I have my Aura ring. You can’t see. I’m wearing my Levels right here. It is my Levels CGM. And I have a little radio frequency ID chip embedded here, which I did on the stage in Amsterdam years ago. It has my business card on it, but eventually this subcutaneous device will be measuring different micro RNAs or vitamins in my bloodstream and so forth. We’re going to head towards a world where these sensors on our body, in our clothing, in the chair of our desk, in our beds … are monitoring everything 24/7. And all of it’s being ingested into an AI that is looking for slight little clues.
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**46:56 — Tech advances may force healthcare industry disruption**

Dr. Diamandis predicts the evolution the healthcare industry will see in this decade and beyond and how that will hopefully make healthcare more affordable and accessible.

> All of this is massive data that’s going to be plowing into our 24/7 diagnostics. So I think this is the decade that we completely reinvent healthcare. I think it’s ready for massive disruption. It’s about what I call the six D’s of exponentials: when you digitize something in the slow days, it’s deceptive; then it becomes disruptive and it dematerializes, demonetizes, and democratizes products and services. And so we’re going be doing that with healthcare. It’s going to make it a hell of a lot cheaper. It’s going to make it available to everyone, and it’s going to be a lot more efficient. And as all the data is aggregated and we begin to learn from it, it’s just going to accelerate how fast things are moving.
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Peter Diamandis (00:06):
We’re going to head towards a world where these sensors on our body, in our body, in our clothing, in the chair of our desk, in our beds are monitoring everything 24/7. And all of it being ingested into an AI that is looking for slight little clues. I think the ultimate tricorder is a myriad of sensors that are in our environment. The audio assistance like Alexa, Google Now and Siri and so forth are able to listen to the quality of your voice or if you cough what the cough sounds like. All of this is massive data that’s going to be plowing into our 24/7 diagnostics. So, I think this is the decade that we completely reinvent healthcare. I think it’s ready for massive disruption, and so we’re going to be doing that with healthcare. It’s going to make it available to everyone, and it’s going to be a lot more efficient.
Ben Grynol (01:11):
I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and along the way we have conversations with thought leaders about research backed information so you can take your health into your own hands. This is a whole new level.
(01:41):
When it comes to exponential technology. There is no shortage of ideas to discuss. There’s no better person to talk to these ideas about than Peter Diamandis. Peter, if you know him as a futurist founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University. He’s also an author, a podcaster, and he’s very much on the forefront of being a futurist. He’s been predicting what is going to happen from an exponential technology perspective for many years.
(02:11):
Now, what is exponential tech if you’re outside of that world? On the periphery of it, exponential tech is anything that involves these different pillars. Things like quantum computing, things like nanotechnology, things like wearables, artificial intelligence, the list goes on. And so Peter sat down with Josh Clemente, founder of Levels, and they discussed where things are going. What’s it like from an AI perspective when it comes to things like healthcare? How can we think about some of these things that are happening in the world right now? Things like ChatGPT, AI that’s used to help you formulate these ideas and come up with your own plans as far as how you might execute from them.
(02:47):
Now, when it comes to technological development, things get faster and faster. Now we’re at this point where things are developing faster than our brains can even process them. Peter predicts that we’re going to have more technological advancement in the next 10 years that we had in the past 100 combined. So Josh and Peter sat down and they talked about this cross-section of healthcare as it relates to all of these frontiers happening in exponential tech, specifically AI. It was a great conversation where they rift on these ideas and talked about what might happen and why it’s important to double down on some of these technological advancements. Anyway, no need to wait. Here’s Josh.
Josh Clemente (03:31):
Today I’m extremely excited and honored to have a chance to speak in person with someone that I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with unexpectedly over the past year, who I admire and have admired for as long as I can really remember thinking about technology. And as someone who’s now an engineer and has had a chance to work in a few of the industries that Peter talks a lot about, I could say that he has predicted many of the trends that I got a chance to be a part of, which is quite exciting. So Peter, thank you for joining us. I’m really excited for the conversation.
Peter Diamandis (03:58):
Hey Josh, pleasure to be here. A fan of what you and your team have been building at Levels, a user of it and someone who thinks the technology is important for our increasing health span.
Josh Clemente (04:13):
Well, I think given where you’ve invested your time and attention, you really do mean those words, and that’s something that I really appreciate as well. Your support has been tremendous as we’re working on Levels.
(04:25):
I want to just kind of start off because this is a very interesting moment in time and your most recent book, which was released in 2020, called, The Futurist Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies are Transforming Business, Industries and Our Lives. So this is a little excerpt from that.
(04:40):
“There’s little doubt that the decade to come will be filled with radical breakthroughs and world changing surprises. Every major industry on our planet is about to be completely re-imagined. For entrepreneurs, for innovators, for leaders, for anyone sufficiently nimble and adventurous, the opportunities will be incredible. It’ll be both a future that’s faster than you think, and arguably the greatest display of imagination rendered visible the world has yet seen. Welcome to an era of extraordinary.”
(05:02):
I love that because it was from 2020 and what you were kind of predicting there is that we might see or would see a repeat that that would be even more fantastic and amazing than what happened a hundred years earlier with the Roaring twenties, which are kind of the moment in time where radio, automobiles, airplanes, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, we saw this explosion of technology and the transformation of lives. And so I’m a big proponent of this. I love the idea of a new roaring ’20s.
Peter Diamandis (05:28):
It is. I love it too.
Josh Clemente (05:31):
Well, what’s amazing is at this very moment, there are two things that just happened essentially, and I really want to talk to you about these because they’re so relevant to this statement and this prediction. The first one is on November 30th, OpenAI, which is a company producing AI tools, they released a new tool called ChatGPT. So the way I’ve been describing it is this tool is not general artificial intelligence, but it is absolutely the first generally useful artificial intelligence. I would love to just hear from you, what are your thoughts on this thing? Elon calling it scary good.
Peter Diamandis (06:05):
Yeah, I think Scary Good’s a great example of it. So Folks Haven been tried ChatGPT, it’s built by OpenAI, which is a company that’s run by Sam Altman. It was funded in part by Elon Musk. Microsoft’s invested a billion dollars. You may know it for GPT and DALL·E and DALL·E 2 but ChatGPT is a generative search engine, so to speak. You ask it a question and it doesn’t give you a link on the web to an answer, typically what we think of as Google. It actually goes on the web and it synthesizes and gives you an answer. So this morning I was doing one of the podcasts… I have a podcast called Moonshots and Mindsets, and I was doing a podcast on Bitcoin with Anthony Pompano. And so just for fun, I went on to ChatGPT, and I said, what are the five most recognized benefits of Bitcoin? And it wrote me this beautiful page long list of five and why each one was in fact… And they said, what are the five major risks that people are concerned about with Bitcoin? And he gave me that.
(07:27):
Another example is a friend of mine, we were on a XPRIZE board meeting… It’s all about the prompt. It’s like what is a question you ask and how do you ask it? And so he said, write a poem about XPRIZE helping uplift humanity or something like that. And it wrote this incredible poem. It was like, I mean, if you would’ve hired a poet and spent some amount of money, I’m not sure how much poets getting paid, and waited a day or so and you got something back for free in the millisecond. People have used it for design advice for their home.
(08:14):
And then you can take the output of ChatGPT, which is words, sentences, paragraphs, and you can then put it into Stable Diffusion or DALL·E and have it create a visual representation. If I saw someone who was like, I want to create a living room that’s super fanciful and open and bright, and it said, write me a description of what that room would be like, and it wrote this long description and then it used, Stable Diffusion or what it was, but it generated these photorealistic images of the rooms and it’s like, holy shit, that’s amazing.
Josh Clemente (08:57):
Incredible visuals.
Peter Diamandis (08:58):
Yeah. I have two 11-year-old boys, and this thing is going to destroy as the teacher’s ability to give kids homework because it’s like, write me an essay about this, or here’s the math question, you put it in and it’ll answer for you. So I mean, it’s a fascinating future that is moving super fast. I mean to come back to Levels. The other thing you can do is you can say, this is what I have in my refrigerator. I want to have a low glycemic dinner. What do you recommend I cook for myself. I mean, it’s that scary crazy.
Josh Clemente (09:46):
It can give you those personalized recipes. I did the exact same thing. It’s like, here are my ingredients. I have 30 minutes. Give me something personalized. It can do that. It can teach you calculus at whatever pace works best for you. I mean, it can debug and write code. This thing shook me when I tried it for the first time and I spent some time with it. And I really want to dive into some of the implications there, but I also want to tee up the second of the two big changes that have happened.
(10:14):
I think it’s safe to say that anyone I know who cares a little bit about technology has been surprised at ChatGPT. But what is the next one that I’m really excited about is, this hasn’t even really happened, but tomorrow the US Department of Energy is set to announce that researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have demonstrated net energy in a fusion experiment. So this is nuclear fusion energy. This is something that you, Peter, have been talking about forever, but that scientists have been chasing for literally decades. And according to Financial Times, they have achieved this experiment, the formal announcement is tomorrow. But I just want to take a second here because we haven’t yet heard the announcement, what’s about to happen.?
Peter Diamandis (10:56):
So I’ve read the articles and I’ve been tracking fusion now… I mean, listen, the joke about fusion is it’s the technology of tomorrow and it’s always been 50 years away. What is fusion? It’s the combination of hydrogen atoms to form helium. It’s the reaction that goes into the sun. And when you put two protons and two hydrogen atoms together to form a helium nucleus, there is a small amount of the mass that is converted into energy according to Einstein’s famous equation, equal MC squared. But since C, the speed of light is so big, a little bit of M makes a lot of E. So our sun is a fusion reactor that’s 93 million miles away, and all of solar energy is based upon the fusion reaction in the sun.
(11:53):
So people have for decades said, I don’t want nuclear power. And I mean, it’s a shame because nuclear’s gotten such a bad name from Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the three most famous failures. But those were old style nuclear reactors, and they were fission based reactors where you’re taking uranium and splitting it to make into smaller nuclear atomic number atoms. And again, in that process of splitting it, some mass goes into energy, but it’s radioactive. The containment of that is radioactive. The products are radioactive. The uranium’s radioactive. And so you have a lot of waste.
(12:44):
And it’s a shame because the new generation of vision reactors are fail safe. When they fail, they’re still safe. And I think we’ve been decommissioning reactors and stopping them, which is a problem. But the good news is fusion is not radioactive. You don’t get a radioactive byproduct, you get just energy. I talk about an abundance of energy, what we have the potential for here is a squander abundance of energy. And we know there’s a direct correlation between the amount of energy a community, a nation or the world has, and its economic prosperity. So, energy in the world, used to be muscle, used to be human muscle, and then oxen and horses. And then we went to water wheels powering our grain mills. And then we went to coal and then oil and natural gas and now solar. But fusion reactors once they’re up and operating… And the prediction has been for a while now that we would see net positive fusion reaction. So we’ve been able to have fusion for a while now, was very short duration and it was not putting out as much energy as you put in. It was net energy negative.
(14:09):
The holy grail has been going to net energy positive. And what we just heard was we’re going to have that announcement tomorrow that it’s been achieved. And so with that in hand, the potential is to provide energy anywhere and everywhere in the world. And these fusion reactors, the cost of the energy production is de minimis and they can operate 24/7 safely in a community, and that’s a big, big deal.
Josh Clemente (14:36):
Yeah. Thank you for summarizing that history because that that’s exactly where I wanted to go is just fusion has been on the table in the background for so long now. It was the hot thing for decades I’m sure. But in my life it’s kind of just dismissed as you might as well call it cold fusion, which is where you don’t even need to manage incredible heat and temperatures. But with this announcement, I think what you just described, the abundance concept. It sort of breaks our brains to imagine having enough energy that you can ethically and morally waste it.
Peter Diamandis (15:15):
Yeah, I remember when I was a kid, my parents were always turn off the lights, don’t leave the lights on. Make sure that you’re always trying to get the energy bill down. Now listen, there’s still going to be energy costs. There’s still going to be the cost of transmitting and managing the reactors. But the potential is for generating energy anywhere on the planet on what’s called base load and not only just peak energy. Anyway, it’s incredibly powerful.
Josh Clemente (15:53):
And with minimal byproducts, yeah. I think the confluence of these two things just in this moment in time, like I said, we talked about ChatGPT, which again has an unassuming name, but what I think it represents is the potential for abundance of information in an immediately useful format. So you don’t have to take a Google link and read a reference that is formatted for an entirely different audience and then try to contextualize it for yourself. It is distributed to you in exactly the format you asked for. And then that abundance of information combined with the potential, in the next few years, an abundance of energy. And I’m just curious, these are exponential technology predictions you made a long time ago. Is this something that you see actually happening? Are we about to see this revolution over the next few years?
Peter Diamandis (16:38):
Oh, we have so many more revolutions coming it’s not funny. Listen, when there’s a moment in time where something becomes possible and then a moment in time when it becomes distributed, the old William Gibson who says the future is already here, it’s just not equally distributed. So ChatGPT by the way, has gone from zero to a million users in five days, and that is the fastest growth of any product out there ever. I think Facebook went from zero million users in like a year or two years, and we see the speed at which this stuff is accelerating is incredible. But AI is coming and we’ve seen just a peak under the covers. We’re going to have some version of Jarvis. And I bring it back to health, we’re going to have an AI that you give permission to watch what you eat, to listen to your conversations, to monitor your blood chemistries.
(17:46):
The future versions of Levels technology that’s not only monitoring blood glucose, but 30 other parameters and all that data’s uploaded to your AI constantly, and your AI is advising you on what to eat. Maybe eventually your robot chef is making things that it knows you enjoy, but is optimized for what your blood chemistry is at the moment. You need more vitamin D, you need more certain proteins. I mean, that’s an exciting future that is coming.
(18:24):
The other thing we’ve seen recently, if you’re looking for the best of 2022 in the exponential tech world. Is we saw optimists announced Tesla Bot. This is a humanoid robot that was unveiled and is supposedly going to be less than the cost of a car, under $20,000. But imagine a human right robot powered by AI that can go and do the things you need. It’s fall here in Santa Monica, go rake the leaves, go and fix the leaky sink, go shopping and grab me food. I mean, it’s a future of robotic labor to a large degree. Also, as you mentioned, I’m the founder executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, and we just announced the winner of our Avatar XPRIZE, and these are robotic avatars where the robot’s not autonomous. There’s a human driver at a distance with a VR helmet and a haptic suit operating inside the robot at a distance someplace, and so that’s here. Massive growth in the whole biotech gene editing, writing, reading, oral. Amazing.
Josh Clemente (19:48):
It’s moving so fast, and I think many of us recognize the avatar as sort of a mechatronic suit sort of configuration, which [inaudible 00:19:56]-
Peter Diamandis (19:55):
I can’t wait for them to be battling each other.
Josh Clemente (19:58):
Right, exactly. Well, I want to get to the healthcare stuff in a minute, but I think it’s unpredictable what’s going to be announced tomorrow, but based on the experts that have been interviewed, this is going to be a big moment. And I just want to look back a little bit because we’ll say this next decade plays out the way we hope and we see true exponential technologies hitting the knee and going vertical. Because we have this long linear growth pattern and exponential technology, and then all of a sudden it seems to go crazy overnight. We might be at that inflection point with a few things.
(20:33):
What do you think about the last decade? So last decade, a lot of people I talked to, they kind of describe it as it known for the rise of social media, for software as a service companies where you’re solving an increasingly niche problem for an increasingly niche subset of an industry, eCommerce getting large. We also saw some impressive stuff. We saw DNA sequencing go exponential. We saw AI technology, crack protein folding, we saw reusable rockets, electronics and photonics, so the iPhone and the miniaturization of things. How do you think about the last decade? How will you talk about it? Was this the success that you would’ve expected [inaudible 00:21:10]-
Peter Diamandis (21:10):
Yeah, I mean, listen, I think the last decade was super exciting. So I run a CEO entrepreneur yearlong executive program called Abundance 360. It’s the highest tier level of Singularity University, and I’ve been running it now for 11 years. So every year for the last 11 years, I go into the program and I contextualize it by saying, okay, what was the world like 100 years ago? And by the way, 100 years ago, the speed of technological progress was molasses. I mean, if you look at the breakthroughs in the year 1915, 1916 through 1922, it’s hilarious. It’s like Vegemite was invented, was a breakthrough in 1921. The water ski was invented with a board and some rope, that was a breakthrough in the year… I kid you not, I mean, that’s the kind of stuff. And I searched high and low and typically it’s like five, six, seven things that occurred over the course of the entire year that you don’t even think of as a breakthrough.
(22:24):
So, that’s one thing I’ve been doing for the last decade. And then I would look a year back and then I would look three or four years forward, and every year I can guarantee you, because I can put myself back in that mindset, every year was exciting. Every year was like, wow, we’ve just had some amazing things occur and we’re just jaded now what those amazing things were, whether it was getting a drone on Mars or Falcon 9 returning its first stage to a successful landing and then Falcon Heavy, and then going to the Space Station, I mean, amazing things over the last decade.
(23:11):
One of the things I’m clear about is that the next decade, what we’re going to see in the next 10 years, and I’m putting out at this very moment, a megatrend series where I have looked at the top 20 megatrends where the year 2023 through 2033, and folks can go to diamandis.com and you’ll have a chance to get my blog and the megatrend there. But when I look at these the next decade, we’re going to make as much progress in the next 10 years as we have in the entire past century. That’s the speed of the acceleration of the curve. It’s hard to think about how fast things are getting. It’s going to be AI and biotech, and to some degree robotics that are leading the pack.
(24:13):
I haven’t even mentioned what’s going to come down the pack with quantum computing, One of the things at A360 this year is I’ve got a guy named Jack Hidary the CEO of SandboxAQ, which is fun out of Alphabet. It’s their quantum technologies play. Eric Schmidt’s the chairman, Jack is the CEO. And I’ve had a preview of what we’re going to be discussing on stage, and it’s insane. It’s quantum technologies, quantum compute, quantum chemistry is going to be the revolution that makes medicine and biotech in the future look like today is standing still.
Josh Clemente (24:53):
This is the nature of big numbers and exponential functions is that our brains can’t do that. We weren’t designed to do this. And one way to capture that, which I really love this quote is you often over-predict what you can do in a short time and under-predict what you can do in a long time. And that’s essentially what we’re talking about here.
Peter Diamandis (25:12):
For sure.
Josh Clemente (25:12):
It’s like we get frustrated with trying to pay bills and these antiquated systems and the DMV and all this stuff, but if you can zoom out and look at what you just said, more progress in the next 10 years than in the past 100, and think about what life was like in 1922, that’s a big statement.
Peter Diamandis (25:29):
To give people some ways of thinking about this. Our brains evolved 100,000 years ago to a million years ago, back when the world was local and linear. Nothing that affected us was not within a day’s walk. And the world didn’t change year to year or decade to decade or century to century, it really was pretty much constant. The life of your great, great, great, great grandparents and the life of your great, great grandchildren was pretty much the same back then. And our brains, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections evolved to understand that world, we’re linear thinkers. What was really important to us is you’re crossing a prairie and you see a lion there, and the question was, could I get to that tree before the lion got to me? That’s linear physics. Today is not linear. So if you take 30 linear steps, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 30 linear steps, you’re 30 meters away. If you do 30 exponential steps where an exponential to simple doubling, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 in 30 doublings, you’re not 30 meters away, you’re a billion meters away. You’ve gone around the planet 26 times. And it’s that disconnect between us as linear thinkers and this exponential world that really catches people by surprise.
Josh Clemente (27:02):
Yeah, exactly. Interesting about it is that when talking about these sorts of concepts… And I will say, I don’t know the number of times you’ve been vindicated on your predictions, because I don’t have a full catalog, but I’m sure you’ll keep it score somewhere, but I think-
Peter Diamandis (27:20):
Not really, but it’s fun. It’s fun. And listen, I have to give credit where credit’s due. One of my mentors is Ray Kurzweil, one of the great thinkers in this world. He’s written numerous books, including The Singularity is Near. He’s my co-founder of Singularity University. And really I’ve learned from him, and he’s been an extraordinary friend, co-conspirer, co-founder and mentor.
Josh Clemente (27:47):
Highly recommend reading anything he puts out as well. It’s really interesting stuff. I think, again, proven to be, although sometimes unpredictable and un-timing, but very, very prescient in terms of what we’re seeing rollout.
(28:04):
I think one thing I’d like to ask is that you’ve been making these predictions and deep in the future of technology for a long time, and inherently that attracts skeptics, people who don’t see the world in an abundant sort of mindset and don’t see the world in really an optimistic way. What I’m curious about from your perspective is how do you see yourself? Do you see yourself as sort of a missionary who should change the minds of people who don’t believe these things? Or are you seeking to primarily coalesce and inspire and motivate people who do see things similarly but feel like demotivated by the pressure?
Peter Diamandis (28:41):
That’s a great question. What I see myself as is someone who is passionate about getting entrepreneurs to think bigger. I think entrepreneurs are the means by which we solve the world’s grand challenges. I like to say that the world’s biggest problems, the world’s biggest business opportunities, and if you want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. It’s that kind of alignment. I believe that we have the ability, given the tools that we’re inheriting, what you and I have been talking about for the last 20 minutes, to up our dreams. And so my mission is to incentivize entrepreneurs to take bigger moonshots. To take on solving the world’s biggest problem is do something that scares you and inspires you and has the ability to make a dent in universe, because that leaves the world a better place.
(29:38):
So I think my responsibility is inspiring and guiding entrepreneurs. So I do that through Abundance 360. I do that through my venture fund, Bold Capital. I do that through my podcast. I do that through all of my companies, through Singularity University, through the XPRIZES that we launch. Is all about giving entrepreneurs a big target and saying, I don’t care where you went to school, what you’ve ever done before, if you can solve this problem, you win the money and the world gets that benefit.
(30:11):
So I think part of what I’m looking to do, Josh, is also change people’s mindsets. I say this all the time, and it is so deeply true for me, that your mindset is the most important thing you have. If you look at what were the greatest leaders and entrepreneurs, what did they have that made a difference for them? Was it their cash, their technology, their relationships with their mindset? I hope most everybody listening would agree, it’s their mindset. You take away everything else and keep their mindset and they’ll probably regain a good part of it. And so if you believe your mindset is the most important thing you have, then my question for you is simple. What mindset do you have and where did you get it? And what mindset do you want to have and how do you shape it?
(31:09):
We started this conversation by talking about ChatGPT and AI and a lot of current AI or neural nets, and you train a neural net by showing it, example after example, image after image. ChatGPT is a large language model based on GPT3 and GPT3.5, whatever, and it was those large language models were trained on data from the internet. And so our brains are neural nets and our brains are shaped by what we show it every day. And so I ask entrepreneurs and folks that are in my conversations, what are you training your neural net with? If it’s like most people, it’s on CNN, the Crisis News Network, and you’re watching every murderer, every despot, every crooked politician in your living room over and over and over again every 10 minutes, and it’s like, stop. I don’t want to see this stuff. It’s not to say it’s not true, but it’s not balanced for what’s going on in the world.
(32:26):
If you think about what is the business model of a newspaper or a television news show, its business model is to deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers. And we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. So as a result of that, we are bluntly just being bombarded by negative news, so we don’t turn off our TV and they can sell us stuff and listen-
Josh Clemente (32:56):
Training the neural net.
Peter Diamandis (32:57):
It’s crazy. And so I choose to not do that. I choose what I read carefully. I choose what conversations I have, like the one we’re having now. I think you’re familiar with this, I built an AI engine that scans the world’s news and generates custom newsletters for folks to get information that is highly validated and highly positive semantic. I train one around longevity, I call it longevityinsider.org. Folks can go there for free. And every day I get the top 10 to 15 articles on breakthroughs around longevity. And so if I’m watching these breakthroughs and the AI gives you a paragraph summary of the article, a link to the article and an image. And it’s great because I’m training my neural net with like, wow, that’s an amazing breakthrough. Wow, that’s an amazing breakthrough. Wow, that’s an amazing breakthrough. And it gives you much different perspective on life.
Josh Clemente (34:06):
I absolutely love that perspective because we have a lot of heuristics around, you are what you eat, and we have all these sort of one-liners to describe how what we ingest is important. And I don’t even know that we take those that seriously. But the information diet conversation, which is increasingly being had, I think, thankfully, is such an important one because exactly like you said. I mean, look at what, what we do when we train a neural net with information. Now, it can be an incredibly capable tool, but we can see that we can bias it very quickly by just having it ingest information of a certain source. And what we’ve done, I think with ourselves is we’ve biased towards stress and pessimism, and unfortunately it’s a hard one to get out of.
(34:52):
But I think the tools that work best for me are conversations like this. I see the most inspiration in my own mindset when I am around people who are a few steps further along the route towards a mindset of optimism, especially around technology. What else is there? What do you recommend for people who are currently feeling that they do not have the mindset that it would take to be positive about the future?
Peter Diamandis (35:21):
So great question. I mean, listen, the things that train your mindset are what you watch, what’s on your walls, what you listen to, who you hang out with to a large degree. So, choose your podcast carefully. I invite folks to Moonshots and Mindsets, and obviously what the whole new level that we’re in today. What you read is important, there’s incredible books in the whole longevity world. David Sinclair wrote a book called A Lifespan, which was excellent. Tony Robbins and I wrote a book last year called Life Force. And Mark Hyman as a book coming out. There’s a whole bunch of great books out there.
(36:18):
And then you’re the average of the people you spend the most time with. So who in your community is super positive and has a mindset that you want to emulate, and how do you spend more time with them? I mean, that’s basically it at the end of the day. And then what I tell people is, don’t watch the news, you don’t need to. You honestly do not need to. I will look at Google News for 10 minutes to figure out is there something going on in the world I need to know about? And my mom calls me when there’s something I need to know about as well. Otherwise, they could never pay me enough to watch the evening news or read these papers. I mean, if you pick up tomorrow’s newspaper and you count the number of positive stories and negative stories. It’s 10 to 1 negative to positive minimum, if not worse.
Josh Clemente (37:12):
Yeah. I’ve been on a no news diet myself really since starting the company. It started off with just not having the time and realizing where my attention was going. And then it’s sort of translated into a recognition that the quality of the information is proportional to, or probably there’s a multiplier here to the amount of time it takes to produce. This is something that my co-founder Sam talks about is that a book takes a lot of time. Somebody invested thousands of hours to pull that information together and synthesize it, and podcasts take many hours and movies and things like this. But something that doesn’t take a lot of time is breaking news that is intended to really just generate clicks for advertising. That is something that is specifically not… There’s this Lindy effect concept where the longer something is around, the more likely it is to stay around.
(38:03):
Well, the news cycle we have is less than 24 hours. Just keeping your guard up and the filter strong for the information you’re bringing in. For me, I don’t need any news platforms on my phone because I have conversations and people filter out the information that’s most relevant or most important. I will know about things like a fusion energy net demonstration without needing the news app.
(38:29):
On the people side of this, what’s really interesting there is that it’s information sources you can get without any human sort of interaction, but then there are the people that you’re surrounded with and you choose to interact with. Elon Musk used to talk about people as vectors, and everyone has a vector, and a vector is basically a line with direction. It’s like you’re moving in a direction specifically, and if a vector isn’t aligned, basically if a person is not aligned with the direction that you’re trying to move in, they’re moving you in a non-parallel direction. So that’s a little bit of a complicated way to describe it, but essentially it’s like Elon would select for people whose vectors were pointed in the same direction. He didn’t spend a lot of time trying to change people’s minds, it was you either understand why we’re here, what we’re trying to accomplish or you either understand the inherent value in what we’re describing, or I’m going to find someone who does. What I’m getting at here is how do you select for people you work with? Does that resonate with you? Is that a [inaudible 00:39:34]-
Peter Diamandis (39:37):
100%. Especially the people in my organization, it’s like I’m clear that we have a massive transformative purpose. One of the things I teach at Abundances 360, and I talk about in my books and Abundance Bold and The Future is Faster Than You Think are the three books that are around these mindsets is the most successful companies on the planet have a clear MTP, a massive transformative purpose. And it’s set early on by the founder or founders. And the goal is to hire people that are on board in that vector, that MTP. It’s clear what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and where we’re going. And if you disagree with what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, where we’re going, then this is probably not the right place for you to work because you’re unlikely to change it.
(40:36):
Now, when you’re in the organization and you’re helping make that future happen, new data comes along and the organization can move its vector slightly. But I’ve never seen a company where the vector moves 90 degrees. A few degrees, yes. If it’s moving that dramatically, then it’s probably falling apart.
Josh Clemente (41:04):
Yeah. I think when people are trying to figure out where to look for inspiration, who to work with or who to bring on to a team that you’re building a team, this one, it’s tricky because there are so many people who have credentials and have obvious capability and are super intelligent, but this element of vector pointing and trying to change someone’s mind, I like what you said, you like to change mindsets, not minds.
Peter Diamandis (41:31):
Yes. By the way, I think an organization has a mindset and a team has a mindset, and if you’re counter to that mindset, you’re going to be a lot of wasted energy. And when I hire a new member on my team, I typically have a 90 day rule, which is, come in, do the best, can, I’ll do the best I can for you, and in 90 days, if it’s not working, you leave. And so at the end of the day, what I’m looking for during that 90-day period is when this person is in the room and they’re talking, do I wish they’d shut up? It’s like, I don’t want to hear you. I don’t want to hear what you have to say, and so forth. That’s not a good sign. On the other hand, if they’re in the room and I’m not hearing their opinion and I want it, that can be trained up. It’s like, I want to hear your opinion. It’s been always true for me because mindsets align and those vectors align in that way. And so yeah, I think some of the rules are don’t jump in someplace expecting to change it, as well as if you know what your strength is and what your weakness are, focus on doubling down on your strengths and not trying to improve your weaknesses.
Josh Clemente (43:01):
Yeah, I like that. The focus, same goes for companies and organizations, just stay focused on the things that you’re good at. Of course, you need to get better at the things you’re not, but it’s that doubling down-
Peter Diamandis (43:12):
Or you partner on the things you’re not good at.
Josh Clemente (43:14):
Right.
Peter Diamandis (43:17):
You can’t do everything. And so if you’re the world’s best machine coder but you’re lousy at writing, I’d rather have you be even better machine coding and I’ll hire writer to compliment you, or I’ll hire ChatGPT to compliment you.
Josh Clemente (43:33):
I was just going to say it. Yeah. Well, that’s a awesome advice and I think the 90 day rule, it’s mutual. I think people need to feel more ownership over where they are, who they’re surrounded by, what teams they join. And really, I think there’s no benefit to languishing somewhere. If you don’t feel like you’re being heard and no one wants to hear you, there are places that will.
Peter Diamandis (43:55):
I think that is so true in any kind of relationship. Fire fast and higher slowly.
Josh Clemente (44:05):
Yeah, love it. I want to circle back to in the last few minutes, healthcare, because we haven’t talked about it yet, and I know we both have strong opinions, and I remember, I think this was 2012 timeframe, but there was an XPRIZE announced for a tricorder competition. And the tricorder is a device from Star Trek, which is it’s capable of doing basically the most magical things about interpreting disease state, understanding the health of an individual essentially. And this tool, the announcement, I remember it pretty vividly. I don’t remember the details exactly. But it was intended to create innovation in the space, create a new device that is capable of detecting, I think diagnosing and understanding some biomarkers in an individual, a human. And that prize was one. But what stuck with me is that it was so surprising to me at that time that this device didn’t exist already, that you didn’t have a handheld thing that could take biomarkers and diagnose. I just felt like having had no exposure to healthcare, I would hope that that sort of thing was already in the hands of doctors.
(45:11):
Flash forward to now, I’d love to get an update from you on how you see health monitoring. You’ve talked a lot about nanotechnology, tiny technology that is ingestible, measuring analytes through devices like tricorders, wearables. Where do you see us right now on the monitoring side because it’s upstream of understanding and being able to intervene?
Peter Diamandis (45:34):
Yeah, I just published a blog on one of the meta trends on the trillion sensor economy that’s coming, that we’re basically entering a world where everything is knowable 24/7, and if everything is knowable, then it’s the quality of the questions you ask not what you know that’s important. And I think this is going to be true for medicine to a large degree. And the metatrend that is coming in the field is moving medicine out of the hospital and out of the doctor’s office, into the home, into the body. So I’ve got my Apple Watch, I have my Aura ring, you can’t see I’m wearing my Levels… Here it is. My Levels CGM. And I have a little RFID chip, radio frequency ID chip, embedded here which I did on the stage in Amsterdam years ago. It has my business card on it. But eventually this subcutaneous device will be measuring different micro-RNAs or vitamins in my bloodstream and so forth.
(46:45):
But we’re going to head towards a world where these sensors on our body, in our body, in our clothing, in the chair of our desk, in our beds are monitoring everything 24/7 and all of it being ingested into an AI that is looking for slight little clues. And so on my aura ring, for example, when I got COVID I detected my temperature rise on my aura ring before I detected it any place else. It was fascinating bit of data and we’re going to get there. I think the ultimate tricorder is a myriad of sensors that are in our environment. The audio assistants like Alexa or Google Now and Siri and so forth, are able to listen to the quality of your voice, or if you cough what the cough sounds like. All of this is massive data that’s going to be plowing into our 24/7 diagnostics.
(48:08):
So I think this is the decade that we completely reinvent healthcare. I think it’s ready for massive disruption, and it’s about what I call the six Ds of exponentials, that when you digitize something in the slow days, it’s deceptive, then it becomes disruptive, and it dematerializes, demonetizes and democratizes products and services. And so we’re going to be doing that with healthcare. It’s going to make healthcare a hell of a lot cheaper. It’s going to make it available to everyone, and it’s going to be a lot more efficient. And as all the data is aggregated and we begin to learn from it. It’s just going to accelerate how fast things are moving.
Josh Clemente (48:53):
I couldn’t agree more. I certainly believe and want to see as an individual, but also as someone who feels like the incentives are broken, I want to see the individual become responsible for and empowered to own their healthcare. And I think there are ways, I’m really excited about the trillion sensor future and about moving from the hospital into the home. But I’m curious if you have any thoughts, sort of a closing thought here on incentives specifically and what we need to look out for in the fast moving future that we’re entering. How do we make sure that we end up with a world where we’re not being sold more targeted advertisements based on our biomarkers?
Peter Diamandis (49:33):
So listen, we’re have that in our future, and we’re going to have the pros and cons. I think we’re going to have an AI that you can use to filter through that and shield things for you. In the interim, we have humans that do that. If you’re able to have a great executive assistant who filters your emails and shows you which ones are important, eventually your AI will cross correlate, knows what you want, knows who’s in your database, knows who’s a spammer, and can filter that stuff for you.
(50:10):
But I think it’s going to be the combination of AI and massive increase in sensors that are transforming all of this, and it’s coming fast. There’re going to be a lot more wow moments in the years ahead. The idea of the singularity, which Ray talked about, is the moment in time when the speed of change is so fast that it’s impossible to predict what comes next. His date is early 2040s for that, which isn’t too far away. That’s 20 years from now. But it’s going to be faster and faster and faster.
Josh Clemente (50:45):
Ray is a great person to check out. And in the last question, I would love to hear who else is out there that people should be paying attention to, who are, whether they’re particularly prescient, knowledgeable, especially maybe the people that most don’t know about who are doing amazing things out there?
Peter Diamandis (50:59):
Sure. I mean, dear friend Salim Ismail, the head of Exponential Organizations, he was the first president of Singular University, so his group is called ExO Works. ExO is Exponential Organizations. Mark Hyman is doing a lot of incredible work in the biomedical space. I mean, there are just a multitude of folks. I don’t know where to start, honestly. I’m caught sort of flatfooted on that.
Josh Clemente (51:28):
Start with Peter’s RSS feed of the optimistic longevity articles of the future.
Peter Diamandis (51:34):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and I hope folks will check out longevityinsider.org. I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s free. It’s a public service just to get people to understand what’s coming, that it’s an extraordinary future ahead.