Dream Bigger - A Chat with Visionary Peter Diamandis

On this episode Seano McFarland interviews entrepreneur, physician, and futurist Peter Diamandis. They explore Diamandis's journey of perseverance through failures, his groundbreaking initiatives like the XPRIZE Foundation and Zero G, and his thoughts on the exponential growth of technologies like AI. The conversation delves into personal anecdotes about resilience, the importance of mindset, and the transformative potential of technology for humanity.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
How many times have you failed?

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Oh, endlessly and you fail endlessly on the way to success.

Speaker 3 (00:07):
And we go into zero gen.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
We gently raise him up and let him, you know,
let go, and then float there. And we've got three
doctors and two nurses monitoring everything. We had, you know,
sensors all over him. And at the end of the
first parabla, we look at him. Now he has no

(00:29):
ability to move any parts of his body. And if
you google Stephen Hawking and zero G flight, you'll seek
the photos there, and he's just smiling ear to ear.
This growth of exponential technologies has empowered us all to
do amazing things. You know, we have the ability to

(00:49):
positively impact the lives of millions and billions of people
as a single individual.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
And I think if you can.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
You should, and I I'm always asking people to dream bigger.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Welcome back to the SINO Show. I'm your host Cina McFarlane.
Today Whoop Special Day. Here we're diving into the future
where someone who's been shaping it for decades. Right, he's
an entrepreneur, physician and one of the world's leading futurists.
What is a futurist? What we're going to find out today.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
You might know him as the founder of X Prize Foundation,
co founder of Singularity University, or as a best selling
author who's written about exponential technologies and how they can
transform humanity. Please welcome my brother from another the visionary
Peter Diamendus C No, I am back on your couch here. Oh,

(01:49):
you're back on the couch. You're welcome, brother, welcome, So
good to see you put on this couch.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
Sir.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
It's been a number of years because we shifted from
during the COVID sessions or pre COVID from the.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Couch to walks and talks, wats and talks.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, you know, trying to do double duty, get some exercise,
get some fresh air, some sunshine, and have good deep conversations.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Good deep conversations. But how long we known each other now.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
I want to say it's at least a decade. Yeah, yeah,
And we met through a dear friend, Keith Frazie.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Keith Frazie our guest next week. Keith's amazing. I love him.
We love you, Keith, Yeah, we do.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
He's a he's a such a good giving, brilliant soul
like you. I mean, it's it's that DNA you know,
you meet people who are constantly wanting to give, who
want to like, you know, what do you need?

Speaker 3 (02:43):
How can I help you?

Speaker 2 (02:45):
And they're there from from a mindset and a heart
of contribution. And I view you and Keith very much
in that fashion. And Keith said, you know, I was
going through struggles on the personal side, both from how
do I think about relationship, marriage and being authentic to

(03:07):
myself And Key said, you've got to meet Sina McFarland,
and I did, and You're like, amazing.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
I appreciate that. Yeah, you know, Peter, one of the
things and one of the things I love about you.
And it's a long list and we're going to get
into it, Okay.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
You obviously, Mama, you're listening.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
You get to hear a long list and I shout
out to mom too, Oh my god. But you you've
always been blessed with an extraordinary brain. But you're ridiculously curious,
and you always want to go higher, and you always
have a level of humility of like knowing what you
don't know, this plan I don't know, you know, And

(03:48):
that was the blessing of spinning all our walks and
everythings and our journey continues, and you've been a great
friend and teacher to me. And actually part of the
reason why the show here is because you kept pushing me, like, see,
how come on, you're not going to do a book,
do something game, buddy, bigger game, hit the world.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Game.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yes, So buddy, For folks who don't know about you,
why don't you tell us a little bit about growing up?
Will work our way maybe into I.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
T X prize. So my parents were both born on
the island of Lesbos, which is one of the islands
in Greece. I like joking and saying, hey, my mom
and dad were both lesbians, which they are by definition
from the island Leswos. You know, it's like my my

(04:32):
you know, two truths and a lie that would that
wouldn't catch them.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
It's a good one, it is.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
And my dad became a physician, you know, he left
the island for the very first time after high school
to go and and enter medical school exams. And tells
me the story of he's on the dock, he's on
the boat for the first time, leaving the island, going
to Athens for the medical entrance exams, and his father's
on the pier saying if you don't pass, don't come back.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
Well. Pressure, yeah, pressure.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
And he met my mom when she was nineteen and
he was in his mid twenties and they were engaged
inside of a week, which was you know, I guess
a thing back then, and he followed her to the US,
not speaking English, became a very successful physician, obgu i

(05:27):
n And I sort of viewed his journey from the
small island town of Mistigna and then the bless to
New York successful physician as this incredible arc of life
and journey, right, And so many people have that through
their family history.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
I mean, America is a melting pot that enabled that.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
And so when I grew up, I grew up in
Mount Vernon, Westchester, year I was born in the Bronx,
grew up in Westchester, then in Great Neck, and it
was always expected I had become a doctor.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
It was like that was the thing I was going
to be.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yes, you know, I wanted to be an astronaut, and
Apollo and Star Trek got my juices going and it
captured my heart. And I told my mom one day, Mom,
I want to be an astronaut, and she goes, that's
a nice son. You're going to be a doctor, and
that was the story of my life for the first
thirty years. So I went to MIT undergrad studying molecular biology,

(06:27):
doing space stuff on the nights and weekends. Started my
first ever space organization, a group called Students for the
Exploration and Development of Space. SAIDs it's still going strong,
God knows, forty decades later, four decades later. Yeah, I'm
very proud of it. Jeff Bezos was the president of
the Princeton chapter and I was the national chairman of

(06:49):
the group. And a lot of great people going through
that in the days when in the eighties space was
not I mean this idea of private commercial space, it
didn't exist back then, right, It was this is something
governments do. This is something the Soviet Union, Russia, China,

(07:12):
the US, India and China and in Europe does. Anyway,
that captured my heart. I did go to medical school barely.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
Why did you go to med school? So you were
so fascinated with space.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
I promised it to my parents.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
My mom and dad wanted to be a doctor, and
so I go to medical school. I went to Harvard,
got into a joint MIT Harvard program and it was
a It was an interesting sort of splitting of my
personality because my heart and soul and true authentic self

(07:54):
was in space, and but intellectually I was like, I'm
going to come a doctor, and it's interesting, you know.
One of the things that you and I explored in
our conversations is splitting yourself being you know, being true
and authentic to what your needs are and desires versus
what you're doing to please other people. Right. That was

(08:15):
very much a people pleaser, still am, and just recognizing
that in myself, which is a whole nother conversation.

Speaker 3 (08:23):
So I would be in medical school.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
Doing the medical thing, and night's weekends, every moment I
had any flexibility, I'd be focusing on space. I'd be
doing space research. I had started a space university and
a launch company, and you know my favorite sort of

(08:51):
in the movie business. It would be the end of
the of the of the second act of the of
the movie I find myself my fourth year medical school
running to companies in the space business, which is where
I really wanted to be, and just really torn about,
like I'm either going to become a really lousy doctor

(09:14):
and pursue my space interests, or I'm going to focus
on becoming a great doctor and just be really sad.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
It was like I couldn't I couldn't do both.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
And then I get a call one day from my dean,
Dean Tossas, and God bless him, he's longer with us,
who calls me into his office and I'm like, just like,
for no unexpected reason, I'm really really like concerned. And
so he goes Peter listening, I to talk to you.

(09:47):
Your residents are telling me you're on the phone all
the time. I had purchased one of those most motorola
brick phones. Yeah, and it was in my locker and
I would sneak out of seeing a patient or sneak
out of surgery to go and call and find out
like how's the rocket motor firing test going? Or like

(10:09):
how are we doing on these contracts? Because that's where
that's what was running in my heart and mind in background,
and medicine was like something I had to I had
to get through it. I'll do is graduate and he goes,
What's what's going on? You're a bright kid, but you're
obviously not applying yourself. You're like, you know, and I'm

(10:31):
like beginning to break down into tears because it's like
my my my finely tuned plan is eroding and unraveling
in front of me. I was I would I remember
my perfect day was I would work the night shift
ten pm to six am at the hospital. I would

(10:55):
then go and sleep from six am till noon, and
then I'd go to office from like noon until like
dinner time. And I was just running this crazy split
dual life, right, And so Dean TOSSI and Sis says like,
what's going on? And I fess up and I say,

(11:17):
I'm so sorry. I'm running this university and I'm running
this rocket company. And he's like, you're what what you idea?

Speaker 3 (11:25):
No idea?

Speaker 2 (11:26):
And it's just like, you know, yeah, Harvard had one
great advantage. It was hard to get into, but it
was harder to fail out of. And and it's like
it was an anathema to him because it's like, you know,
everybody here is just like twenty four to seven focused
on medicine. What And so he goes, do you want

(11:49):
to graduate? Do you want to and and what do
you want to do? I said, I have to graduate.
I promised my mom and my dad I would graduate.
And I'm so close and then he made an interesting
bargain with me, and he said, if you pass part
two of your medical boards and you promised never to

(12:12):
practice of medicine.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
I'll let you graduate.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
And and so he kept his end of the bargain
and I kept mine. So I got my diploma, shipped
it to my parents, and went full time into my companies.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, you have an angel that day.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
I had an angel like that, for sure, Listen, I had.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
I've had two points in my life in those early
years where I almost.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
Diverted to zero.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
There was that moment in medical school where things could
have very unraveled. It could have been you know, listen,
get out of here, or failing you out. There was
another point my freshman year at college. I was at
a place called Hamilton College from my freshman year and
then I transferred to my tea in my sophomore year,

(13:04):
and uh, I was pre med and I was taking
a biology course with a professor Frank Price. And this
is the first semester of my college career. And about
halfway through the semester, I come down with chicken pox.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
And the big.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Event of that biology course my freshman year was the
fetal pig dissection and it was like half of your
half of your points in your course are focused on
your fetal pig dissection.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
And I was.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
I was in the infirmary for like two weeks with
chicken pox, and I missed all of my fetal pig
lab sessions. And I was like just scared shitless about
about failing this fetal pig dissection an experiment. And so
I hatch a plan with my roommate Philip that he

(14:08):
was going to help me steal a fetal pig in
order that I could bring it back to my to
my you know, my room, my suite. We had a
refrigerator there and I'd be able to study the fetal
pig at night. But Hamilton had this incredibly strict honor
code and removing the fetal pig from the lab was verboten,

(14:30):
not allowed. And so on one day Philip, I opened
up my gym bag and Philip brushes the fetal pig into.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
My gym bag and I walk out.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
With it and put it into formaldehyde and all into
my refrigerator my suite. And the next day, the next
day in class, Professor Price stands up and he goes,
it has come to my attention that one of you
has left with one of the fetal pigs and this

(15:06):
is against the rules, and I would like you to
turn yourself in, or if anybody knows of this, please
tell me who it is. And I'm like just shitting bricks.
It's like, oh my god, my life is over. It
is over, And so what do you do. I go

(15:29):
the refrigerator, I pull out the fetal pig, and I
walk deep into the woods and bury it. I bury
this dead body in the in the woods. It's like
and I'm like, just like, this is all going sideways.
I don't have a chance to look at the fetal
pig to do anything, and so I'm like, I'm just

(15:55):
beside myself.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
My life is over before it started, you know.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
It's like I'm gonna be three and out of school
and all of my dreams are gone. And i call
my dad, God bless him, and I'm on the phone.
I'm in tears, and I'm telling him what's going on.
And he goes, Son, you have to go and turn

(16:20):
yourself in. You've got to be honest about this. And
he said he'd gotten to know the school physician who
was in the infirmary, and he said want you go
and talk to doctor so and so and get his advice.
And so I go into the woods. I axume the

(16:46):
fetal pig and I walk over to the infirmary and
I talked to this guy my dad had called him,
and he says, listen, you do need to go and
talk to doctor Price and turn yourself in. And I've
got the dead body in my bag and I'm walking
in to Professor Price and.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
And he saw me.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
He was he was doing office hours with some students
and he said, please wait there, and he finally comes
out after half an hour, and he looks at me
and I'm like, just I'm bawling. I'm like, I'm so sorry,
it's like and he looks at me and he goes,

(17:33):
have you learned your lesson?

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Damn?

Speaker 2 (17:37):
And I go absolutely, I'm so so sorry. He takes
the people pig and goes, okay, good luck on the exam,
oh man. And that was a guardian angel with me.
It could have gone. I mean, they had their honor
code was such that I would have been thrown out

(17:57):
of my freshman year of college. And so, you know
all that I've done and accomplished, I thank those two
men for their forgiveness.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
Two things.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
One, you never told me that story. I wish I
would have known that because I might change my treatment
on your psychology. I didn't know you had any to
bear in a decade. But two, what's so beautiful about that,
brother Peter, is we talk about this at show. We
have father boyle On like the power being seen by somebody.
They saw you, they saw who I was in my

(18:30):
heart walk me through after the president was the president
at Harvard.

Speaker 3 (18:34):
It was a dean of the heart medical.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
After he said, but don't be a doctor. But what
what was the feeling after?

Speaker 3 (18:40):
Were you relieved?

Speaker 1 (18:41):
Massive relief? Well, what did that feel like for you?

Speaker 2 (18:43):
It was like it was like release. It was like
permission to be who I was. Yes, yes, yeah, yes, permission.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
That's right. Sometimes we just need somebody to give us
a slip.

Speaker 3 (18:54):
Yeah, okay, yeah, wow.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
Let's can we What do you what's going through your
mind right now?

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Nothing? I'm just thinking about those days. It was. It was.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
Just a fascinating period of time. So I get my
medical degree, I ship it to my parents. I moved
to Houston to run my rocket company. This is way
before SpaceX or Blue Origin or any of the rocket
companies that people know about today, and so I spent

(19:29):
a decade in the space business, started a company called
zero G taking people weightless. I had the pleasure of
taking Stephen Hawking up into weightlessness, which was an amazing story.
You know, it took me eleven years. I got very
very patient in building my companies. A lot of these,
a lot of these companies in the in the space

(19:51):
world where I like to joke overnight successes after eleven
years of hard work, and so Zero was one of that.
I went into the offices of the FAA saying, I'm
going to take this large airplane, strip out all the
seats and I'm going to put it up in this
fifty degree level up and push over the top and

(20:12):
we'll be waitless and people will be floating around. And
they were like, huh, what are you going to do? No, no, no,
you can't do that. That's not allowable with commercial planes.
I said, but NASA has been doing it for you know,
God at that point thirty plus years, forty years. And
they said, just it's not allowed, you know, in commercial aviation.

(20:33):
And so I ended up just saying I don't care.
I'm going to make it happen. It's like, I get
very stubborn about making shit happen.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah, you do.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
And so it took me what's that, thankfully? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (20:48):
And so it took me eleven years from May nineteen
ninety three until September two thousand and four, and we
got approval to fly.

Speaker 3 (21:00):
People into weightlessness.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
I finally had the only person who could give me
approval in the entire FAA was the FA administrator, the
very top, amazing woman, Marian Blakey. I said, listen, I'm
taking people to Russia to fly on an Elusian seventy six,
a large cargo plane where you have to wear a
powachute on your back for takeoff and landing because there

(21:24):
are no seats in the cargo plane. And American businessmen
are doing that, but we can't do in the United States.
And I said, We've got an amazing safe plan, We've
done the engineering, we've done the test flights. We need
someone and so she said, well, we just have to
make that happen, and she did, and she basically, you know,
in these large bureaucracies, a lot of people are empowered

(21:46):
to say no, but very people are empowered. Very few
people are empowered to say yes. So we did.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
But the art of what you do in the trick
is finding the people say yes.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
Yeah, it's finding the right person. So it was interesting.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
A couple of years later, I met Stephen Hawking, right,
the world's expert in gravity. It was after the original
exprize was won, and we're on the phone with his
assistant and his computer. Right, he's talking through a computer only,
and he had heard about what we did with Spaceship
one and the exprize flights, and he said, I want

(22:22):
to find a space And I said, Professor Hawking, I
can't take you into space, but I can give you
a flight into weightlessness and too zero G. And he
said yes on the spot, which was amazing. Right, he's
wheelchair bound for forty years, very frail. And I end
up saying, okay, let's turn your flight into a fundraiser

(22:45):
for als lou Gerrig's disease what he had. And so
we put out the following week put out a press
release that we're planning to fly Professor Hawking into zero G.
And I get two phone calls, one of them from

(23:05):
our aircraft operator who was running our seven twenty seven
airplane for US and he goes, you're insane. You're going
to kill the world's most famous physicist and you're going
to destroy your company, and I don't think you should
be doing this. The other call I got was from
a government organization. I wouldn't mention who they are, but

(23:29):
their initials are FAA, and they said you're not allowed
to do this.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
And I said, what do you mean. I spent eleven
years getting the allowance to do this.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
And they said, well, you're operating specifications say you can
only fly able bodied people. And they said, clearly, he's
not able bodied. And I said, I had the presence
of mind to ask one question, which was who determined
whether he's able bodied or not? And it was the

(24:02):
clinch move because he said, well, I assume a you know,
an aerospace medical doctor or his physicians, you know. I said, okay,
that's all I need. So I went and bought malpractice
insurance and I got three letters from three doctors saying
that Stephen Hawking was able bodied to fly in this

(24:23):
urgery and we we took him up. Well, first we
did a test flight where we got a young sixteen
year old boy who had the same weight and height,
and we set up an emergency room on the airplane,

(24:45):
and we did a whole bunch of medical test procedures,
like what happens if he has a heart attack, what
happens if he cracks a rib, what happens if he
is you know, he has an embolism. And we ran
through all these medical procedures because the guy was really
extremely frail, and we were down at the Kennedy Space

(25:08):
Center and we you know, weren't sure how he was
going to do. And we had a pre flight press
conference because we had no idea if he'd be in
shape to do anything afterwards. So he made his statements
about why he's doing this. He wants to really focus
attention on opening up commercial space because he feels humanity

(25:30):
needs to be multiplanetary. And we end up doing the flight.
I'm at one end at his head. My partner in
zero GI, Byron Lichtenberg, who had been in space twice,
is at his feet, and we've got cameras like way

(25:51):
over there, strapped down, and we're in the forward half
of the airplane and we go into zero G and
we gently raise him up and let him, you know,
let go and then float there. And we've got three
doctors and two nurses monitoring everything. We had, you know,
sensors all over him, and at the end of the

(26:14):
first parabla, we look at him. Now he has no
ability to move any parts of his body other than
at that time a few facial muscles. And if you
google Stephen Hawking and zero G flight you'll see the
photos there. And he's just smiling ear to ear man right,

(26:37):
He's like, for the first time ever, he's free.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
He's free. And we talked to the doctors, how was it?

Speaker 2 (26:44):
They get my thumbs up, and we end up doing
a second and a third parablo, and we ended up
doing I think eight parables in total. We expect get
to only do one, so eight equate occasions in the

(27:04):
thirty seconds. His nurses in the last two proplets says
he wants to be spun around, and I still to
this day have no idea if he actually wanted to be,
but they were they were like wow. And but we
did spin him around, Mike, and he was great, and
he came down. And it was interesting because we were

(27:26):
in comms with mission control back at Kenny's Space Center.
We had code words depending on how badly he would
be injured on what to say, like, you know, off
the air, like you know, if he had broken something
or had a heart attack or had a lung collapse,
because I mean it was those were the fears. And
we came back and he was totally fine, and he

(27:48):
did a post flight press conference afterwards, and it was
it was one of those great great moments in life.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Well that's amazing. Yeah, that is beautiful. Wow, that must
have been incredible to see him.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
It was, and just you know, to the moment of
his you know, demise for him was one of his
greatest experiences in life.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
Yeah, you know, and I'm gotten to know his daughter
and all.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
The other part worth mentioning is the work that you
alluded to with the Xprize Foundation, which has been a
lot of my body of work. I was given a
book back in also in nineteen ninety three, the same
year that I started Georgy, I got a book called
The Spirit of Saint Louis, which chronicles Charles Lindberg's flight

(28:41):
across the Atlantic. And again, me being a nine year
old space cadet, wanted to travel to space, and I'd
given up on NASA being the way I was.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
Going to get there.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
And I wanted to really do it privately commercially because
the idea that you get selected as an astrona on
your chances are like one in multiple thousands, and if
you do get selected, you fly like once or twice
during your career, right, not every weekend. And it turns

(29:13):
out that half the astronauts at that point who had
been selected had never flown. They were called penguins because
they had wings, but they couldn't fly right. So and
so there's like, Okay, there's got to be a better
way to do this. And I read about Lindbergh crossing
the Atlantic to win a twenty five thousand dollars prize,

(29:35):
and it's like, okay, I'm going to create a prize
to inspire private rockets to be made, and I'm going
to make it ten million dollars. I had been in
the rocket business, but these were for small satellites, not
for humans. And long story short, I came up with
the idea of, you know, could we do a ten

(29:56):
million dollar competition for a suborbital spaceflight that can carry
three adults, go up one hundred kilometers, come back down
and be reused, and go carrying three people to space.
Again within two weeks, and that became the X Prize
X for manumeral ten for ten million, xper Experimental.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
It just worked, and.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
X really stood for a variable.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
To be replaced by the name of the person who
put up the ten million bucks, like the Pulitzer Prize,
you know, you know the you know, the Ortigue Prize,
which was the prize for a spaceflight, and.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
The Nobel Prize.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
Long story short, I took me five years to raise
the ten million dollars. An amazing family, the Unsorry family,
funded it and a new Shan sorry who is now
the CEO of the X Prize Foundation, put up the money.

(30:59):
We had twenty six teams from seven countries who worked
on building these private spaceships, and a guy named Bert
Rutan not far from here in the Mojave Desert, backed
by Paul Allen, built spaceship one and won the prize
on October fourth of two thousand and four. Now what

(31:19):
was interesting was I started zero G and X Prize
in nineteen ninety three, both independent companies, very little to
do with them other than me running them. X Prize
was one with the flight on September twenty ninth and
October fourth of two thousand and four. Zero G did

(31:43):
its first flight ever on like September fourteenth of two
thousand and four, within two weeks of each other, having
started eleven years earlier. They both came to culmination within
a couple of weeks, which is my life was insane.

Speaker 3 (31:58):
Yeah, who is?

Speaker 1 (32:01):
That's such amazing story about you bring the money and
everything it took to get the money and the marketing
and kind of you know Barnam and Bailey kind of stubbornness. Yeah, stubborness.
But what was really touching is when you told me
is who some of your heroes were in the tenants.

Speaker 3 (32:18):
From Yeah, case you might touch that at all.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
So powerful.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
So the winning space flights for the ten million dollar
competition were again the first flight in September twenty ninth,
and then second flight on October fourth. And Bert Rutan,
who was who is the brilliant engineer designer who created
the voyager that airplanet flew around the world and spaceship one.

(32:45):
He planned it on October fourth, which was the anniversary
of Sputnik because he wanted to like, you know.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
Just oh yeah, he was kind of guy.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
He went in the is and you know, I had
my dad at both flights, which was super special for me.
But it was William Shatner, Captain Kirk was there, so
I you know, as a child, the Apollo program showed

(33:15):
us what was possible now, and then that scientific documentary
called Star Trek showed us where humanity was going. And
so I had the ability to meet Bill Shatner and
invite him, and he was there like a kid in
the candy store. And then since then Bill flew on

(33:41):
the Blue Origin suborbital flight and actually went to space
on a suborbital flight. So yeah, Elon Musk was there.
I got to know Elon a few years earlier.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
I pitched.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
I met him in two thousand and one, before he
had started SpaceX. He had just sold PayPal to eBay,
and he was trying to figure out what he wanted
to do next.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
You wanted to do this.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
Energy area like electric cars, and he wanted to do space.
And I was like, listen, don't build a rocket company, Elon.
It's like, you know, look at all these failed rocket attempts.
I show them videos of all the sent to millionaires
and billionaires who had tried before him to build rockets.
I said, fund my Exprize because I had not been funded.

(34:31):
When I met him, I said, make it the Musk
X Prize. And to this day he still needles me
by saying, you're the guy who remember you're telling me
not to build SpaceX and I'm so glad you didn't
listen to me.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
Yeah, we're going to talk a little bit more about
him in a little bit here. But one of the
reasons why I wanted you on the show, buddy, and
it is how many times have you failed?

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Oh endlessly? And you failed so endlessly on the way
to success, right, So I mean, just HARKing back to
the examples, I gave you zero G again I got.
I walked into the offices of the FAA and they say,

(35:17):
nowhere in the Federal Aviation Regulations, as far as they
govern it, does it allow you to do this zero
G thing. And I you know, I would go in
and petition and submit, and just it was.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
No, no, no, no no.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
And I was like, at one point, I was like,
You're either going to die or retire before I give up.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
And I just.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Was relentless on just trying to move it in some
direction and got some credibility and move something forward. Continuously
and running out of money, and like, okay, no, I'm
going to pick it up. This is worth doing. I knew,
I believed that this was possible. This had to happen.

Speaker 3 (36:06):
And today anybody can go now and get a zero
G flight.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Our airplane operates. You go to go zero g dot
com and you can book a seat. I think it's
around seventy five hundred bucks and experience weightlessness, true weightlessness
like an astronaut does. And you get fifteen parabolic flights,
a few martian which is one third year weight, a

(36:33):
few lunar which is one six year weight, and then
a dozen zero.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
G prowls.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
And the Xprize, which started in late ninety three as well.
I was told no, well over one hundred and fifty
times I walk in to I pitched countless billionaire on

(37:00):
this and CEOs of car companies and tech companies and like.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
You know, listen, here's the deal.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
We're going to inspire the first private commercial space flights.
Ten million dollar prize and the best part is you
don't pay until after it's one. Right, It's like throwing
yourself a touchdown pass. It's like a garage that That
was the pitch and it's like, we'll put your branding
on it. We'll name it the you know, the Nissan Exprize,

(37:32):
the Virgin Xprize, the Microsoft Xprize. I mean I was
pitching every I mean over the course of the first
six seven years, I mean everybody.

Speaker 3 (37:43):
I was raising money. You know. I put the first
money in to the We formed it.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
As a nonprofit, and I put the first monies in
and then I would collect like checks for twenty five
bucks and one hundred bucks here and there, keep things going.
And then I'd collect checks for twenty five thousand bucks.
We moved the group to Saint Louis because the notion
was Saint Louis, which is where Lindbergh got his money,

(38:11):
would have a historic tie to it. And we ended
up raising about half a million dollars of working capital
through some great people in Saint Louis and Al Kurth
who was our patron saint there, and our fundraising stalled,
and so we gambled.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
We rolled the dice.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
And we decided we were going to have We're going
to announce the X Prize without having the money. Yeah right,
and so so Al and I in cahoots we were
going to have a huge announcement event under the arch.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
And he was senior EP at.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Fleischman Hill, at one of the top PR companies, And
so I had learned an idea of giving birth to
a crazy idea above the line of super credibility. So
in each of our minds, there's a line of credibility,
whether you know it or not. When someone says something

(39:16):
to you, you either believe it's credible or it's not right.
And if it's below the line of credibility, like if
your next door neighbor kid says I'm flying to Mars
in a couple of weeks, you know, it just very
rapidly falls off as not credible, or maybe you watch
it a little bit and see the trajectory and if

(39:37):
something magical happens. And then there's this if you're if
you hear an idea above the line of credibility, you're like, oh,
that's interesting, I'm going to see where it goes. But
then we also have this line of super credibility, and
when you hear about something that's super credible, you go, wow,
that's amazing. When's it going to happen? You know, I

(39:58):
remember when dream Works was announced, you had Geffen and Spielberg,
I think, and Paul Allen a few other people announcing Katzenburg,
and I remember I remember my reaction hearing about it
and seeing a clip on TV going that's going to
be super successful and amazing, and I started said, why

(40:19):
do I think that? And I realized, I think that
because these gentlemen have an incredible track record, and I'm
just it seems super credible to me. And that's where
this idea of super credibility came. So on May eighteenth
of nineteen ninety six, after having raised a half a
million dollars and making the decision to announce the prize,

(40:44):
I had two of my board members resign because they
didn't want They said, you're nuts. You can't announce the
prize with having the money. But I ended up creating
a super credible event. So on stage with me under
the arch in Saint Louis, I had not one astronaut,

(41:06):
but twenty astronauts on stage with me, including Buzz Aldrin
right from Apollo eleven. I had the head of NASA
on one side. I had the number two person, Patty
gray Smith that from the FAA. I had the Lindberg
family there wow. And so we announced this event and
it was like front page news around the world, Saint

(41:28):
Louis entrepreneur announcing ten million dollar private spaceflight to space.
We didn't have any teams, we didn't have any money, yea.
But but I was like so hyper confident that someone
would fund this thing. And so I went out on
the road like you know, Bravado in hand, and people

(41:51):
start saying no, and I was like, what up. It's
like their feeling was like, Okay, someone's going to die trying.
And that was the killer, Like they said, Okay, why
isn't NASA doing this? Can anyone really pull it off?
And someone's going to likely die trying, and I don't
want our brand to associate with us. And so it

(42:14):
was six years of no's, well over one hundred and
fifty rejections, but still in my heart of hearts, I
was like, I know that this is a good idea,
and I know that this can work. And I read
one day in Fortune magazine about a woman, a newsheim Sorry,

(42:38):
who had just sold her company, Telecom Technologies. She sold
for one point three billion dollars to Sonus Networks, and
in her biography, now this was an issue of the
World's Wealthiest forty Women under forty, And I wasn't married
at the time, so one of the financing options was

(42:59):
it was.

Speaker 1 (42:59):
That brothers got to do what he brother's gotta do.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
He just got her, but this show was married.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
But in her biography it said her dream was to
fly on a suborbital flight into space. And I read
this like three times to make sure my mind wasn't
playing tricks with me, and I go, oh my god,
this is her, This is her, This is her, I mean,
and we're like, I'm five years into this competition having
been announced, and teams are building spaceships and they're calling

(43:30):
me saying, do you have the money? We're going to
make our test flight soon. A lot of pressure, A
lot of pressure. My entire reputation, everything I've ever done
is on the line, here on the line. And I
burned the ships, right, Sometimes you burn the ships and
you just can't move back. And I track down in Nusha.

(43:54):
She had sold her company, all thees an asset sale.
All her company employees are gone, and I find her
old executive assistant.

Speaker 3 (44:03):
I get her on the phone.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
I explain the situation and I say I'm gonna I'm
gonna FedEx you packaging materials, would you please get it
to miss I'm sorry, and I would love to meet
with her, and she does, and Anusha tells her side
of the story that she got her call from her
assistant about some guy wanting to talk about private spaceflight
and new Show's like, yes, absolutely, I want to meet

(44:25):
with him. And so Byron Lichtenberg, my co founder of
zero G and really one of our early co founders
of Xprize, and I fly to Dallas, Texas to meet
within Yusha, and I met with her, her husband, her brother,

(44:46):
her brother in law, and we end up parting ways
without definitive yes. But I was like, Okay, she's really interested.
We'll call you a couple of days. And they did,
and they said yes, and it became the Unsorry Xprize
as a result of that, and since then, you know,

(45:08):
because you know, success has many parents and failure has
but he has none, Right, It's so true. On the
heels of that, I was able to go and recruit
Larry Page onto our board of trustees and Elon Musk
and Jim Cameron, and on the heels of this success,

(45:29):
it was like, oh, this is a great idea, you know,
overnight success after eleven years of hard work, and you
know it died a thousand deaths on the way. And
we've since launched thirty xprizes over over thirty years. Now,
hard to believe it's thirty years old, five hundred and
fifty million dollars in prizes, yeah, and driving some ten

(45:52):
billion dollars in R and D.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
And again, it's.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Only there because we were able to power We're through
on that first one, and it was we were only
able to power through because, in my heart of hearts,
I refuse to give up despite all of the nose.
You have to remember, you know, we had nine to

(46:17):
eleven during the course of this, and then we had
the Columbia Space Shuttle accident where it burned up on
re entry, and I had friends of mine saying, listen,
give it up, Peter, this is not going to happen.
Good friends, yeah, good friends, friends, yeah, yeah, families friends,
and and it was like, give it up. It's just
like you're you're torturing yourself. This is not going to happen.

(46:40):
And I was like, no, no, I'm not giving.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
Up, right, Wow, thank god he didn't. What's interesting about
that is I always talk about here at Shell is
you got to make a bet on. You make a
bet on, You make a bet on you Peter, knowing
my audience, knowing what we do here at Shell, I
think what I'd like to move in direction is you've

(47:03):
written so many great books, probably about it's my favorite,
talk to my audience about some of the things you've learned,
and about techniques and technology. I want to move into
AI a little bit. How can AI? You're you know,
one of the leading experts in the world in air right,
how can AI be helpful for people in recovery?

Speaker 3 (47:22):
Yeah? Sure, you know.

Speaker 1 (47:23):
Can we talk about that at a bit of course.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
So one of the organizations I founded after Xprize and
these others is Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil, one of
the most prophetic successful thinkers in the field of exponential
tech and AI. And so we're living during a time
of rapid exponential technological growth. We're all riding on top

(47:48):
of computation, which has just been doubling in power over
every couple of years, and in the last ten years
it's been ten xing per year, and so on top
of this computational power is writing, sensors, networks, AI robotics,

(48:09):
three D printing, synthetic biology, augmented virtual reality, blockchain. All
of these technologies are writing on top of the massive
increase in computational capability, and it's transforming our world. We
don't think about it. One of my favorite slides I
use is a series of images that says, our ancestors

(48:30):
would consider us as gods today.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
Oh God, right, beautiful man.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
It's amazing the things that we the things that we do.
We're omnissient, omnipotent, omnipresent, you know, the ability to just
sid things that if you just think about the things
that we do every day, Like I can ask a
question and get an answer to anything instantly for free,
right on Google or Gemini or or chat GPT. I

(48:59):
can FaceTime with someone the other side of the planet
again for free. I mean, it's extraordinary. You know, we
have autonomous cars driving down the streets here in Santa Monica,
little delivery robots, drone technologies, flying cars will be here

(49:20):
soon enough.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
And we are the proverbial.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
Frog in the water that's increasing in heat and ultimately boiling.
And we take this all for granted. We don't notice
the amazing world we're living in. I mean, we are
uplifting humanity across the board. And so my first book,
Abundance the Future is Better Than You Think, was a

(49:46):
book to look at how technology is crazy. This incredible
world of abundance, this world in which we're uplifting everybody,
but we're so decimated by the news industry.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
Right. One of the things I learned about wrote about
and I'm on the.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
Top of the hilltop preaching as loud as I can,
is you know, our brains are neural nets. Our brains
are one hundred billion neurons, one hundred trillion synaptic connections.
And just like today's large language models and neural nets,
our brains are shaped constantly by who we hang out with,

(50:28):
what's on our walls, what we listen to, what books
we read, what we watch.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
All of this.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Stuff is constantly shaping our minds, shaping our minds, and
so in the world of large language models and neural nets.
You know, if you want to train a neural net
to people to recognize a cat, you show it images
after images after images of cats, and then it, you know,
sees cats. If you showed a dog, it said it's
a cat, because that's all it's ever seen is cats.

Speaker 3 (50:54):
And if you're.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Watching the evening news every night, or opening and reading
the newspaper, which I don't do either of those things,
you're bombarded by negative news over and over again, right,
And there's a reason for that. As we were evolving

(51:16):
on this savantage of Africa two hundred thousand years ago,
we developed an ancient piece of our temporal lobe called
the amegula that everything you see and everything you hear
goes there first. It's our danger alert, it's our early
warning system. And if you hear a rustle in the leaves,
you don't think when you think, you think lion. And

(51:39):
you see a squiggle on the ground, you don't think stick,
you think snake. And so because that would save our lives,
and so we were in a constantly in a state
of fear and scarcity. That's the default mindset of the
human brain, fear and scarcity. I'm fearful and I'm hoarding
because things are scarce, and it still drives us. But

(52:03):
it evolved for a very different world that we're living
in today. And so the old adage if it bleeds,
it leads is so true. We pay ten times more
attention to negative news than positive news. And so if
you do the experiment, pick up the paper and count
the number of negative stories to positive stories, it's at

(52:24):
least ten to one. You know, watch the evening news.
Every murder, every crooked politician, every problem in the world
is being beamed to your living room in living color,
every thirty minutes, over and over and over again. And
it's no wonder we think that the world is going
to hell in the handbasket, right, So we're just decimated

(52:45):
by this negative news. And so I learned that, and
I learned the fact that we're actually, if you look
at the data on almost all levels, not all levels,
but almost all levels, we're living during the most extraordinary
positive time in human history. We've taken extreme poverty on
Earth from ninety percent extreme poverty to down below ten percent.

(53:09):
Literacy has exploded globally over the last two hundred years,
from twenty percent of the world to you know, close
to eighty five or ninety percent of the world has literacy.
We've exploded access to communications. There are seven billion smartphones
on the planet, over nine billion, you know, mobile phones.

(53:32):
You know, we've dropped child mortality rates from forty five
percent to under five percent. Maternal mortality rates during childbirth
have plummeted. Our age, our longevity has doubled over the
last hundred years, amazing up into the right situations. But
we don't you know, we don't know that to see that.

(53:54):
In fact, it's interesting. Violence has dropped precipitously and deaths
due to homicide have plummeted over the last fifty years.
But because we now have every negative effect on the

(54:15):
planet beam to you, you think it's ever present and
it's worse than ever before. And so I actively feel
like people need to shape their mindsets, to choose who
you spend time with, what you read, what you listen to,
And thank you for listening to this right here, right now.
You know ultimately you can and shape and should shape

(54:38):
your mindset. Your mindset is the most important thing you have.
You know, do you have an abundance mindset? You have
a purpose driven mindset? Do you know why you're on
this planet and why you get up every day?

Speaker 3 (54:49):
Right? You know?

Speaker 2 (54:50):
What's your what I call your massive transformative purpose in life?

Speaker 3 (54:54):
What is it?

Speaker 2 (54:54):
Inspires you? It keeps you going, captures your shower time,
you know, there's a thing. There's a great Twain quote
that I love. He goes, there are two important days
in your life, the day that you were born and
the day that you found out Why. I love that
all right? And it's it is so powerful. And this
growth of exponential technologies has empowered us all to do

(55:19):
amazing things.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
You know, we have the.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Ability to positively impact the lives of millions and billions
of people as a single individual. And I think if
you can, you should. And I'm always asking people to
dream bigger. You know, what's the game you want to play?
How big do you want to go?

Speaker 3 (55:41):
Right?

Speaker 2 (55:41):
You ask these questions all the time. You help me,
you uplift me in that regard. You're constantly reminding me
of those things. Where's your heart? Where is your faith
in God? Where are you? So bringing you back to
your question without any question. AI and its derivatives are

(56:03):
the most powerful technologies that we have. So AI as
a concept began in the late fifties. There was a
very famous conference at Dartmouth University gathered a number of
engineers and physicists to.

Speaker 3 (56:23):
Come up.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
They coined the term AI and to develop the first
AI and they came up with a lot of ideas,
but the computational power to run these algorithms never existed.
And it's really the last five six years that we
have enough computational power in the form of these GPUs,
these graphical processing units which originally were developed for video games,

(56:47):
and then we're used to mine bitcoin, and then Nvidia
hit the triple jackpot of their product. These GPUs, now
the H one hundreds and the A one hundreds are
the ideal processor units for running these AI algorithms, these
large language models, and so you know, okay, last ten years,

(57:12):
but really the last five six years we've seen enough
computational oomph to run these algorithms and to create these
large language models. And you know, GPT two, which came
out circa was a very cute elementary student who could

(57:40):
tell a few cute poems. And GPT three came out
and was more capable in GPT four and chat, GPT
escalating and capabilities.

Speaker 3 (57:52):
To the point where you know it is.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
I think we've past the point of what's called AGI
artificial general intelligence. People argue that we haven't. I use
AI all the time, and hopefully everybody here is experimenting
with AI, it's very easy to do either on Gemini
or on open aies chat, GPT or Anthropic has a

(58:21):
great systems on it. All of these are effectively free
or twenty bucks a month. But it's the most powerful
technology in the world. We saw. You can measure these
ais by in different ways. One way to measure it

(58:45):
is by its equip IQ equivalents and Claude three point five,
which is when from Anthropic reached an IQ of one
hundred and one about a year ago, nine months ago,
which is by definition above average human intelligence. Right, and

(59:07):
then GPTO one reached NIQ one hundred and twenty about
four months ago, and we're going to see that skyrocketing.
So Ray Kurzweil, who's my partner in Singular University and
my board of trustees at the Xprize called by Bill Gates,

(59:28):
the most brilliant man in AI in the world, who
is the futurist at Google. He's written a number of
books The Singularity is near, the Singularity is nearer. I'm
not sure he's the greatest mind on books, but hey,
the next book will be The Singularity Came and went.

(59:48):
But he in nineteen ninety nine predicted that we would
have AI more intelligent than human and by twenty twenty nine.

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
And people laughed at him, said it's crazy, it's one
hundred years away, it's never going to happen. But in fact,
you know, he was right within a couple of years probably.
I had Elon on my stage at the Abundant Summit
last year, which was fun, talking about AI, and.

Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
We ended up.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
You know, he said, listen, we're going to have AI
vastly smarter than any human by the end of twenty
twenty five, and we'll have AI equal to the intelligence
of the entire human race by twenty thirty.

Speaker 3 (01:00:44):
Wow. So we're in a.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Very steep part of this growth curve, and we're about
to have a a series of transfer informations where AI
is going to become ubiquitous and everywhere. We'll have AI
in all aspects of our lives. Our car, our bed,

(01:01:10):
our office, our chairs, wherever. We'll have artificial intelligence intelligence
imbued in all parts of our lives. For me, the
best analogy is Jarvis from Iron Man, Right. So Tony
Stark has Jarvis and he talks to Jarvis and says,
you know, display this information for me, make me a

(01:01:31):
cup of coffee, Can you like build this device for me?
And Jarvis does. Jarvis is is Tony Stark's interface with
the world, and we're not far from that. And that's
the next few years. It's going to reinvent healthcare, it's
going to reinvent education, it's going to reinvent your industry,

(01:01:52):
my industry. And you know, some interesting things about AI
in health and in a you know, coaching, is that
AI is infinitely patient. M you are too, especially with me,

(01:02:15):
and I love you for it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:17):
Yeah right, I'm man, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
And and AI auh is turned into a damn good.

Speaker 3 (01:02:27):
Therapist and counselor because and people.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
There's a study that was done recently in the Journal
of American Medicine that said uh AI is viewed far
more empathic than physicians. And you know, if you'd asked
me years ago what's going to be the stronghold for humans,

(01:02:55):
I would have said empathy, all right, as one of
the things. But it turns out that you know, and AI.
When people go and speak openly to an AI, and
there's lots of multimodal versions where you can have this conversations,
you don't feel judged by the AI and the AI

(01:03:20):
will give you all the time in the world you need,
versus in the medical field where you're seeing a patient
every seven minutes. So it's going to be an interesting
partnership that's going to be developed with professionals. And I

(01:03:42):
think humans still love and want to be connected with humans,
at least currently. But I think it's going to be
physicians and AIS and therapists and AIS, and I think
this partnership will evolve. There will be a point where

(01:04:02):
it's I think malpractice to diagnose without AI in the loop.
I don't think that's very far away. I was on
stage in Saudi with a group of physicians, including doctor
Mehmet Oz who has become a friend, and I asked them,
when do you think it's malpracticed to diagnose without a
solution without an AI in the loop. And the answer

(01:04:25):
was from all of them within two years.

Speaker 1 (01:04:28):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:04:28):
So interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Wow. Okay, why is self love so important? Feter o?

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Yeah, I wish I had a smooth answer, but it
is because if you don't love yourself, no one else
can love you fully. I think that self love is
a journey I've been on, and you've been my greatest

(01:04:59):
supporter for and you need to love yourself sufficiently to
be true to yourself, to be able to be authentic
to yourself. And you know, for me, one of my
greatest trials and tribulations has been authenticity in what I

(01:05:21):
say versus how I act.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Did you go into that a little bit more? I could,
but they don't have to kill you, I know a lot? Yeah,
I just I think it's just.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
The I, you know, exemplified by you know, even my
earliest life in pursuing medicine versus my space interests.

Speaker 3 (01:05:51):
Right. It's it's being a people pleaser.

Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
It's doing things to make other people happy versus yourself.

Speaker 3 (01:06:00):
And I think that is.

Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
That is important because you know, I still half of
my work is an AI. Half of my work is
in longevity.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
Right, So.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
You know, as hard as I'm pushing to extend, you know,
many decades of life, we still only live one life.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
Yeah, And right on, what's the greatest thing you've learned
from Elon?

Speaker 3 (01:06:31):
There's a lot. First principle thinking is fundamental.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
Right, So when he goes into building Tesla, an electric
car company where everyone else has failed, He's like, Okay, well,
what should battery technology really cost? Well, let's look at
what batteries are made up of. They're made up of
lithium and carbon and nickel and copper. And what's the

(01:06:58):
cost of those elements when you buy them on the
spot market, And batteries are being charged here, but the
cost of those elements are here, and so there's a
real opportunity to lower the cost of that significantly. And
that was his conclusion. And now he's building gigafactories that
has brought the cost down.

Speaker 3 (01:07:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
When he looked at rockets, he was like, okay, why
are these rockets so damn expensive? And they're ridiculous expensive
and because they were built by military contractors as throwaway vehicles.
You take the warhead off and you put a spaceship
on there. And he said, we need to get to
full reusability. And if we do that, then you know,

(01:07:43):
the cost of the fuel is like less than one
percent the cost of a rocket. And so if you
make the rocket reusable, you can get massive and he
did that with Falcon nine reusability the first stage, and
now with start ship. So this this first principal thinking.

(01:08:05):
The second is his questioning of how long it takes
to do things, and so he is just massively compressed time,
like when he built Xai's first colossus cluster of one

(01:08:28):
hundred thousand GPUs to create his AI system called GROC
while everybody else was taking years. I remember I was
on one of his early investor calls for this. He
was raising six billion dollars out of the shoot. I mean,
it's amazing when you have enough of a reputation you

(01:08:49):
can say I'm going to do this and I'm going
to raise six billion dollars and massively more than that
comes in. But he says I'm going to I'm going
to This was like May and he says, I'm going
to before the end of the summer, I'm going to
build the largest computational cluster out there. And he did
it in one hundred and twenty two days. He beat

(01:09:11):
his own objectives and it snap. People says like, holy shit,
how do you do this? And he sets ridiculous objective goals,
inspires people. But the guy is amazingly brilliant. He gets
in there when there's a hard problem and he doesn't tolerate.

Speaker 3 (01:09:33):
Any bullshit.

Speaker 2 (01:09:34):
He doesn't tolerate people well, I mean his ability to
go in to Twitter and fire eighty percent of the team.
I mean that would be something most people fear.

Speaker 1 (01:09:50):
What's the biggest takeaway you got from our brother, Tony Robbins.

Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
So Tony has been Yeah, absolutely, Tony has been a
a full friend for for both of us.

Speaker 3 (01:10:03):
I know I've done We've done one book, Life Force.

Speaker 2 (01:10:07):
Which was a New York Times everyone seller, but we've
started a couple of companies together.

Speaker 3 (01:10:15):
I think.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
Tony wants, you know, when there's where there's a challenge,
it's going in to understand somebody and understand what's driving them,
what's causing them to think this way, what is it
understanding the individual first before making any kind of accusations
or making any kind of.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
Uh readdirection on them. And it's human it's human nature. Ah.
I think.

Speaker 2 (01:10:48):
His ah his connection between emotions and energy and drive,
the fact that we are emotional beings and that emotions
are one of the most understanding emotions and and and
and uh understanding that that that that is truly we are,

(01:11:13):
that that emotional being. We're not cognitive beings. We're emotional
beings first and foremost. And to do anything big and
bold means having that that clear connection with why and
that emotional desire to do something and the cognitive side

(01:11:33):
is a very weak secondary driver.

Speaker 1 (01:11:37):
Mm hmm wow, I love that. Man. Okay, final thoughts
to the audience, what do you want to say to everybody?
You got people struggling, you got people relapsed, and you
got people scared.

Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
You got yeah, let's go there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
First of all, I love you for who you are
and thank you for all that you've given me in
my life. Let me just start with that, with that gratitude.

Speaker 1 (01:11:59):
Mhm.

Speaker 3 (01:12:02):
We're in a.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
Moment in time where we can all reinvent ourselves. While
you think your future is tied to your past, it
doesn't need to be. Your mindset is the most important
thing you have. And you know, I like to say,

(01:12:26):
if you take the most you know, if you if
you ask what has enabled the most successful leaders on
the planet Mohamma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs,
whoever you think of as your greatest heroes, And you say,
were they successful leaders because of the money they had,
the friends they had, the tech they had or was

(01:12:47):
it their mindset?

Speaker 3 (01:12:49):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:12:49):
I would I hope you would agree it's their mindset,
the way that they saw the world the way they
dealt with oncoming challenges, you know, like the matrix just
you know, just brushing it away right, or or how
they saw challenge and flipped it into an opportunity, or
how they dealt with where they saw opportunities when no

(01:13:11):
one else did. All of that was mindset. And if
you took away everything those leaders had, but they retained
their mindset, I believe they would regain their prominence and
their abilities. And so if mindset is that important, the
question is what mindset do you have? Where did you

(01:13:33):
get that mindset? Your mom, your dad, your childhood traumas,
And then what mindset do you desire and what mindset
will serve you in the future, And then how do
you create that mindset? And that Remember, our brains are
neural nets. They're constantly being shaped, and they're shaped by

(01:13:57):
what you read, what you listen to, what you watch,
who you hang out with, what's on your walls. It's
just continuing to frame your mind. What are your beliefs,
what is your mantra every day? What is your prayer
every day? That's what's shaping your mindset. And your old

(01:14:19):
mindset can be terminated and eliminated and a new mindset
can put you on a new path, and so I
have become despite all of the work in technology and longevity,
my next you know years are focused on what I

(01:14:40):
call mindset mastery, and that is I think the most
important thing we can do. AI will play a role
in that helping you. There will be a point in
the very near future where our AI assistants or AI
avatars or version of Jarvis that you will give permission
to watch everything you see, to listen to your phone calls,

(01:15:04):
to read your emails. You'll give their AI permission because
the more it knows about you, like what you're eating,
where you're moving, all of those thing is the MORA
will be able to help you. Sound scary, but we're
already doing that anyway. You know, if you think lex
has not listened to you, or you know series not
on your on your phone, it's there already.

Speaker 3 (01:15:25):
But imagine a world in which.

Speaker 2 (01:15:28):
You can say to your AI, listen, I want to
I want to love myself more, I want to be stronger,
I want to be in better health, I want to
eat better food, I want to whatever your goals are
for yourself, then your AI can be there to say listen,
don't eat that right now. You know there's something else
in your fridge, go and grab that. If you're still hungry,

(01:15:49):
then to eat that. That coach that's there with you
all the time. Please take the stairs, not the elevator. Right,
it's right there, you know, you know, get down and
give me, give me five push ups, right, whatever it
might be. I mean, your AI can help you as
your twenty four to seven coach. You can turn it
off if you want, but if you want it, it'll
be there. The other thing that we have, and you

(01:16:11):
and I have talked about, is we have these cognitive
biases in our brains, Like we have this negativity bias.
We give more weight to negative information. We have familiarity biases,
we give more weight to people who look like us.
We have recency bias. We give more weight to information
we just heard versus contradicting information we might have heard

(01:16:32):
a week ago. And AIS can help us deal with
these cognitive biases, which evolved again over one hundreds of
thousands of years for very different reasons. And so I
think we're going to have a set of tools to
help us become who.

Speaker 3 (01:16:49):
We want to be. Right now. The tool is sino.

Speaker 2 (01:16:58):
But there will be a Cino AI in my life.
And I think it's it's making it's making the choice
the decisions of of you know, it's it's creating the
future you desire and having confidence in yourself that you
can create that future.

Speaker 3 (01:17:18):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:17:20):
It's all hard and it's all worthwhile. And it's just
taking small incremental steps every single day and having that
purpose in life that's pulling you through.

Speaker 3 (01:17:34):
It's like, who are you going to serve? Right on?

Speaker 1 (01:17:38):
Amen? Brother?

Speaker 3 (01:17:39):
I love you, brother, I love Peter. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:17:41):
This was extraordinary man. Thank you for your love and
trust and faith in me. And it's and and Dylans
just love you, great friend. I'm so proud of him.
He's kicking ass. Yeah all right, godspeed brother. Thank you.

Speaker 4 (01:17:53):
The Sales Show is a production of iHeart podcast hosted
by me Cina McFarlane, produced by Odd People in twenty
eighth av Our lead producer is Keith Carnelik, Our executive
producer is Lindsay Hoffman.

Speaker 1 (01:18:06):
Marketing lead is Ashley Weaver. Thank you so much for listening.
We'll see you next week.