Summit Flagship Event: Interview With Peter Diamandis

 *An interview I conducted with Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Singularity University and XPrize Foundation, co-author of The New York Times bestsellers Abundance: “The Future Is Better Than You Think” and “BOLD: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World”, and co-founder of the International Space University. Interviews were conducted while working as a journalist for Summit at their annual flagship event

To anyone down on the state of the world right now, what is your elevator pitch for optimism?

Peter Diamandis: We innately pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. 100,000 years ago, that was an evolutionary benefit, because if there was a rustle in the leaves that was a tiger instead of the wind, that innate hyper attention to negative news would save your life. We evolved an ancient piece of our temporal lobe called the medulla that scans everything you see and hear for negative news. It puts you on red alert when you do.

For that reason, the news media will fill its airwaves, 10 to 1, negative stories over positive stories. Their business is delivering your eyeballs or your ears to the advertisers. It's not that the news they're stating is false, it's just not a balanced view of the way the world is. We're not hearing the incredible amount of positive news going on all the time. One of the things that I tell people is if you look at the data, the world has been getting better at an extraordinary rate. For hundreds of years, by almost every measure, increasing health, increasing literacy, increasing access to energy per person, increasing access to water per person, decreasing cost of food, decreasing cost of almost everything. We're living in the most extraordinary time ever in human history. We're actually alive during a time where we have the least violence on the planet than we've ever had. We just don't see that because we're bombarded by so much negative news all the time.

With technology, the inverse correlation to mental health is clear. How can you see us utilizing technology in a way that's supportive rather than adverse to our well-being?

Peter Diamandis: I think that technology has the potential to do negative and positive. Technology educates the world in a way beyond anything possible. In 2017, we had 3.8 billion people on planet earth connected. By 2024, we're going to be connecting every single human on earth. Eight billion people are connected now at a hundred megabit connection speeds. Perhaps gigabit connection speeds.

Technology is giving us access to near all the entertainment, all the education, all the healthcare that we could want. I believe we're heading towards a world where we can meet the needs of every man, woman, and child. If you think about it, yes, there are going to be those people who become very isolated or become addicted to particular types of games, whatever the case might be.

On the whole, I'm taking a step back and looking at the entire planet. For the entire planet, the impact of technology is not a little bit better, not a lot better, it's extraordinary. You think about a kid in the middle of Nigeria on a smart-phone having access to all the world's information from Baidu and Google, more than President Clinton had when he was president of the United States. That's awesome.

Then add to that, that that piece of technology will ultimately be that child's best educator, giving them as a poor child in Sub-Saharan Africa the same education as the son or daughter of a billionaire in Manhattan. It's completely democratizing, completely demonetizing. 

Yes, there are negative side effects, and it impacts us in different ways,  but it doesn't change the fact that it is transforming the planet on almost every level.

Which technological innovations excite you most? 

Peter Diamandis: It's not any individual technology, it's a convergence of all these exponentials that are transforming everything. When I talk about transforming everything, it is things like we're going to connect every single human on the planet at gigabit connection speed with devices that are effectively free.

We're heading towards a world where the cost of electricity is very rapidly trending towards zero. We're on a planet with 8,000 times more energy hitting the surface of the earth from the sun than we consume as a species in a year. We just gave away the Water Abundance XPrize which was a team that could pull 2,000 liters of water out of the air for less than 2 cents a liter from completely renewable energy sources. Two-thirds of the planet's surface has humidity levels high enough to accommodate this.

We're going to, in my mind, defeat cancer in the next decade, well within the next decade. We're going to start extending the healthy human lifespan 10, 20, 30 years. We're opening up space. We've got Jeff Bezos racing to the moon and Elon going to Mars. This is the most exciting time ever to be alive.

The message I'm here delivering to you folks at Summit, is we're more empowered as individuals at any time ever. All of us have access to more capital than at any time. All-time highs at seed funding, venture funding, ICOs, crowdfunding, sovereign wealth fund investments, and entrepreneurship. More capital than ever before. More computational power than ever before. Everything is becoming cheaper to do. More people connected at any time.

It’s a time where I believe there is no problem we cannot solve. That’s the message I'm delivering to folks here, ‘do not let anyone tell you no.’ You're empowered at a level like never before. What do you care about solving? What do you care about doing? Then go and do it.

Do you see negative consequences of extending life expectancy?

Peter Diamandis: Three points. Number one, average life expectancy for most of the human race was late 20s. I am amazingly thankful that they moved that needle. 100 years ago, it was 38 to 40. It is now 78 to 80. My expectation is that we'll continue to push it. Second point is that people are concerned about overpopulation on planet Earth. Guess what, we're heading into an under-populated planet Earth.

If you look at the numbers, we're below the US replacement rate. We're at 1.72 children per family, the US replacement rate is at 2.1. Most of the wealthier nations are in that trajectory. Do two things to a country or a city or a region: make them healthier and better educated, and they go into population decline. One of the biggest concerns is going to be we're going to peak at 10 billion and rapidly fall off.

The third thing is that if we are extending people's lives at age 70, 80, 90, 100  my motto is to make 100 years old when you're 60. It also has a massive economic boom because people are at their highest earning potential at the end of their life, right? It has to come with vitality, not just living longer. The potential downside could be the displacement of potential jobs, but that's going to come more from tech than it is from people living an extra 10 or 20 years older. We've got to deal with that in a different way which is an area I'm still thinking about.

From Singularity to longevity projects, to Xprize to blockchain, it seems superhuman at times. What makes Peter ordinary?

Peter Diamandis: I have two seven-year-old boys, fraternal twins, that I love dearly and I see the world through their lives. I'm super excited about the life they're going to live. I struggle with how much tablet time they should get for sure, and right now it's none during the week and then they overdose on the weekends and I've got to figure out, "Do I pull back over there?" I feel blessed and feel that there are so many amazing opportunities in the world right now, and it's all about balance. I've learned there's no work-life balance, so I'm trying work-life integration as my new theme.