Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - How to Reprogram Your Mind To Become Successful w/ Roger Hamilton | EP #67

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

In this episode, Peter and Roger focus on the power and significance of mindsets, especially for entrepreneurs. Together they delve into the seven pivotal mindsets: gratitude, curiosity, moonshot, abu...ndance, exponential, longevity, and purpose-driven. These mindsets are the most crucial assets an entrepreneur possesses, often determining their success more than financial or technological resources.  07:15 | The Power of Mindset Shifts 59:22 | A Longevity Paradigm Shift 2:19:05 | Anxiety vs. Purposeful Living Roger James Hamilton is a Hong Kong-born, Singapore-based author, educator, and social entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Genius Group, a global entrepreneur education company. Hamilton mentors entrepreneurs to grow their enterprises and find their flow. He is also a New York Times bestselling author with books such as Your Life Your Legacy: An Entrepreneur Guide to Finding Your Flow and Wink and Grow Rich. He is also a member of my executive summit, Abundance360.  Learn more about Genius University _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Experience the future of sleep with Eight Sleep. Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/moonshots/ to save $150 on the Pod Cover.  _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog Get my new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity My new book with Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact, is now available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3P3j54J Learn more about my executive summit, Abundance360 _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Sasquatch here. You know, I get a lot of attention wherever I go. Hey Sasquatch, over here! So, when I need a judgment-free zone, I go to Planet Fitness. Get started for $1 down and then only $15 a month. Offer ends April 12th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. into Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time.
Starting point is 00:00:33 This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. We are living in a world of an abundant amount of opportunity. You are constantly being hit by opportunities left, right, and center and challenges. And your mindset is how you react to those opportunities and challenges. All the biggest breakthroughs happen when someone has questioned something, shifted it and then people go, why didn't I think of that? Like that's something that anyone could have thought of, but it comes down to basically
Starting point is 00:01:15 quality like you say, not of the answers, but of the questions that we're asking. Everyone can have these mindsets, no matter if you're in the hardest, most difficult situation, you can see the world through these eyes. We're constantly training our neural net. You can't have two mindsets at the same time. So if you can actually shift from what you are to what's actually going to like to think differently, that changes everything. Your mindset, it matters. Choose it, develop it, hang out with the right people. What's on your walls? What are you reading? What are you watching? Mindsets matter, please. It is one of the greatest things that you've got.
Starting point is 00:01:50 Welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with a dear friend, Roger Hamilton. He's the CEO of GeniusU, the Genius Group. I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite some time. We're going to go deep into mindsets, which, as you know, I believe is the single most important asset that an entrepreneur has. Roger, welcome, pal. Yeah, good to be here. Yeah, thank you for flying in from the other side of the planet to be here. Where were you yesterday? Warsaw. I was in Warsaw in Poland. Yeah. And then we're going to be around the US
Starting point is 00:02:20 for the next couple of weeks and then off to Asia. Yeah, well, thank you for being your first visit and your first meeting. You know, Roger, you and I have played jazz on mindsets. And so I've been excited to really share how you think about it, you know, the experiences you've had, how you teach this. When I'm explaining mindsets individuals, the example I use is, okay, think of the single top leader on the planet, the best entrepreneur on the planet. Was it Elon Musk? Was it Mahatma Gandhi? Was it Martin Luther King? Whomever it is, and ask yourself, what made them successful? Was it the money they had?
Starting point is 00:03:05 Was it the technology they had? The friend network they had? Or was it their mindset? And of course, everybody says their mindset. My next comment is if you believe it's their mindset, then what mindset do you have, right? If mindset is that important of being a successful leader, a successful entrepreneur. And then the next question is where do you get that mindset? If mindset is that important of being a successful leader, a successful entrepreneur. And then the next question is, where do you get that mindset?
Starting point is 00:03:30 What mindset should you have for the decade ahead? So there are seven mindsets I want to talk through with you today. And you may call them other things, but let's run through. Number one, a gratitude mindset, a curiosity or growth mindset, a moonshot mindset. Number four, an abundance mindset. Number five, an exponential mindset, a longevity mindset, and a purpose-driven mindset. So I want to jump into those. And if you don't mind, let's dissect them. What are they?
Starting point is 00:03:58 Why are they important? What examples do we have? Does that sound good? I think it sounds good. I think one thing before we jump right into it, which you and I've talked about as well, about how much you can not just be defined by your mindset, but that you can change your mindset. I think that's a really important thing. That's the most important thing. If you come away from this podcast without learning tools
Starting point is 00:04:22 and committing to upgrading your mindset, then, you know, you've wasted your time. Yeah, exactly. Plus, everyone has a mindset. The only thing is you may not be aware of what your mindset is, because you got it from your parents, you got it from school, or from some other area. And, and there is a distinct link between mindset, which is how you're perceiving things or what you believe in, worldview, which is what then starts showing up around you. Sure. And then the paradigm, right?
Starting point is 00:04:48 The paradigm you live in, which is, and they affect each other. If you go into a new paradigm, you're with a group of people that have a totally different way of thinking about health, for example, then your mindset will start changing as well naturally because you're already around other people who have different beliefs and are thinking different ways, right? around other people who have different beliefs and are thinking in different ways, right? And if I could start with a quick story, which I use quite often to show the blind spots of mindset. This is basically a case study from Stanford University when the MBA students were basically given an exercise, two hours, here's an envelope with $5, maximize your money. And what was super
Starting point is 00:05:24 interesting after two hours when they came back was some people had, maximize your money. And what was super interesting after two hours when they came back was some people had actually lost their money. Other people had made a little bit, but there was others that made thousands of percent on their money. In fact, the top one was over a thousand dollars, right? So what happened that allowed different people with different mindsets to think differently? Anyone who started with the money said, how do I turn the $5 into six or or $7? They always failed, right? Because they were starting with the fact that they thought the value was $5. There's one group that came back and they had made about $200 because they figured,
Starting point is 00:05:53 well, what we've actually got is two hours, right? That's the value. That's the asset. Exactly. So let's go out and use that two hours. We'll go to where the bikes are in Stanford. We'll basically charge people to pump up the tires. But we won't tell them how much,
Starting point is 00:06:06 there's just donation, right? So they got a couple of hundred. There was another group that got, I think it was like three or 400. They said, well, what's the true value here? Well, the value is that we're actually coming up to Chinese New Year and a big thing is giving out oranges, right?
Starting point is 00:06:20 So we'll go to all the Chinese restaurants, we'll go to all the people out there who might want oranges and we'll sell them at a premium, right? So they ended up basically, you know, going out there, you know, taking $5, getting some oranges, and then just buying more oranges and making a whole bunch more money. The ones that made over $1,000, they said the real value isn't the two hours, it's the fact that we have to come back and present to the class. And they basically took their five minutes when they came back to present and they got a sponsor who wanted that five minutes to talk to all the students and they basically then charged that right so so to me
Starting point is 00:06:49 that's a perfect example of mindset because because it starts by what are you seeing of value how are you thinking about things it links into abundance and links into growth curiosity mindset um but once you realize this changes your whole reality depending on how you're thinking about things and you and i have both had experiences with incredible entrepreneurs where we go, whoa, they're thinking about things totally different from the way I'm thinking about it. I need to recode my own thinking so that I also can be operating at whatever level I'm looking for. I love that. You know, we're living in the day of neural nets and artificial intelligence. And interestingly, you know, our brains are neural nets.
Starting point is 00:07:21 neural nets and artificial intelligence. And interestingly, you know, our brains are neural nets. And you train a neural net by showing it example after example after example. And it builds weighted elements of the neural net. And the challenge becomes to realize that we're constantly training our neural net. And what examples are you showing it? Right? So if you're hanging out with people who have a very linear mindset incremental mindset that's typically how you'll think and if you're hanging out with the Elon Musk's of the
Starting point is 00:07:53 world you're thinking how do I go not just 10x bigger but a thousand X bigger right it's the difference of that example at Stanford so I think let's talk one second before we jump into the mindsets of how do you shape your mindsets. So the first thing we've said is who you hang out with. I think that's one of the most important, the old adage or the average of the five people you spend the most time with, right? So asking yourself, okay, who am I hanging out with? And do they reflect the kind of mindset I want to develop? Yes. What else shapes mindsets?
Starting point is 00:08:29 I think one of the biggest ones is the unwritten rules. It's the game you're playing. I still remember a really great conversation I had with Lynn Twist, who wrote The Soul of Money. She set up Patch Mama, which is an alliance to help the rainforest. And she said one of the biggest challenges is we think the education system or the government or the media are affecting our mindset, which is true. But parents themselves can actually have the biggest impact. Of course.
Starting point is 00:08:53 She gives this great story about most kids, when they're young, they love playing. They haven't yet learned about lack or the lack mindset. Johnny's going to the uh birthday party super excited the music's on he's dancing he thinks this is fantastic the adults all put out these chairs in the middle of the floor he goes what's happening here uh and then suddenly the music stops and everyone jumps in the chairs because this is a great game i love this so he then goes and sits in the chair as well then the music starts again everyone's dancing so he gets up and he's dancing and then the parents come in and they take a chair away and he's like what just happened there's not enough
Starting point is 00:09:27 chairs anymore and then basically the music stops and everyone jumps in the chair and he jumps in and poor sally doesn't get a chair she's like she didn't get a chair and it's like sorry sally you're out right so he's like okay now i know what the game is right and so then the music starts and another chair goes and this keeps on happening keeps on jumping the chair until at the end it's just him and his best friend john and they take a chair away there's now only one chair and john is no longer his best friend right it's like it's like it's like we actually get taught lack mindset without even knowing it and then we think there's not enough there's not enough money there's not enough opportunities there's not and so we then end up in this energy where we have to
Starting point is 00:10:02 realize that's what's really going on and then reprogram and rethink, well, what is an abundance mindset as an example, which is the opposite, and realize that you can't have two mindsets at the same time. So if you can actually shift from what you are to what's actually going to like to think differently, that changes everything, right? Yeah. And we'll talk about that. I'm in the middle of reading the biography that just came out on Elon Musk. All right, yeah. And just learning about his childhood. And I've known Elon, I mean, very well over the last 23 years.
Starting point is 00:10:34 And I've experienced his demon mode. I've experienced the various personalities and how driven he is. And it's so clear looking at that. It's interesting. I have's so clear looking at that. You know, it's interesting. I have two 12-year-olds. And as we're raising them, you know, a lot of the most successful people on the planet went through a lot of hardship when they were kids. Yep.
Starting point is 00:10:54 I mean, serious hardship. And Elon is, you know, a 9 out of 10 there. And when we coddle our children and protect them, we're not doing them a favor. We're not giving them that particular set of experiences to understand that the world is filled with challenges. And how do you actually take advantage of those challenges or navigate those challenges? So we talked about your parents. We talked about your friends. Obviously, I talk about the crisis news network and the constantly negative news network and the news.
Starting point is 00:11:29 Do you watch the news? No. I create my own news through my different Twitter lists where I choose who are the people I really respect and care about their opinion. And I'll use that as a news,%, not the mainstream media, because it's just getting crazy out there. So what else? What you watch what you read? I think the entire economic system. I mean, the fact that we are the whole of the current economic system we have was designed, like if you actually go back to the whole concept of even the word economy, which means to economize, right? It means to actually be managing scarce resources. And with that, everyone, I need to have a job because that's the way I get money. You know,
Starting point is 00:12:08 I need to basically fight over, you know, the limited zero-sum games that are being played, right? Whether it's, you know, trading on the stock market where the only way I win is someone else loses or, you know, chasing for a job where a thousand people are going to the same job. As well, right? And what country you're raised in. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, living in Bali, which is where I, when I first met you, I'd been living there for like 10 years, a totally different mindset and an energy. I still remember when we had an entrepreneur from Netherlands who came out and he says, look, I really hope when I'm here, I'm going to learn much more about how I can make
Starting point is 00:12:42 money. And we had like these entrepreneur programs at our resort there. And I said, maybe you'll have a whole different relationship with money once you come out here. And he goes, what does that mean? I says, well, just wait and just see what we go through. The next morning at breakfast, he comes over and he goes, I've had an awakening already. We're like, what are you talking about? He goes, Roger was saying yesterday, like, I'm going to have new relationship money. I didn't even know what that meant. But then I went down to the market on a walk this morning down at the village. And I saw the bananas there. And like in Europe, if you wanted to get like a bunch of bananas, it's going to cost you
Starting point is 00:13:09 euros to get that. Whereas here, it's like cents. It's like incredible. I realized I didn't even need all that money because it's so cheap to basically even just live here. That's something, what am I even chasing? And I go, that was your learning? He goes, yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:21 I said, well, what happened? He goes, well, I bought the bananas. I said, but there's banana trees out back right so what's really interesting is that when when you are in certain parts of the world you straight like travel is one of the best things right because you go to a different part and you realize you have a very different mindset many of the things that i know we're talking about today abundance mindset um even moonshot mindset you know what is it that makes people think, you know, differently? Obviously, if you're an entrepreneur and you're going to, you know, before Silicon Valley, now it's the likes of like, you know, Texas, Florida, the hubs of entrepreneurship.
Starting point is 00:13:55 You're going to be around other people that are thinking in that same way. But the actual system is also set up in a way to reward it as well. So the incentives that are designed and how they're set up. Education is going through a massive change. You mentioned Elon, what he put as a genesis for Ad Astra, his own school for his own kids, was very much about, okay, how do you become purpose-driven in your learning? Those kinds of things.
Starting point is 00:14:16 So I think what's really magical today is that we are having more and more of the top leaders and entrepreneurs in the world openly sharing what they are learning and the way they're thinking or how they're seeing things, right? And that just makes a huge difference because it means that we can all start seeing how they're getting the results they're getting through having a different mindset.
Starting point is 00:14:35 And then it's up to us to choose if we want to make that shift ourselves as well. Yeah. You know, I think one of the important things that people need to realize is we are living in a world of an abundant amount of opportunity. You are constantly being hit by opportunities left, right, and center and challenges.
Starting point is 00:14:53 And your mindset is how you react to those opportunities and challenges. And the same thing going to one entrepreneur versus another entrepreneur will have a completely different outcome based on it. One of my favorite examples of this is, I remember showing this in the early days of Abundance 360, was a video taken in a high school. There's like a 12th grader walking along, it's Halloween, and he's walking by a trash bin. And out of the trash bin jumps a person with a scary mask on to go boo. And what you expect is the person walking by to get scared and pull back. Instead, he punches the guy in the face.
Starting point is 00:15:37 Do you remember that? And it's like, okay, that's a very different mindset. How you react to things, right? So, you know, most people would be scared by that. This guy is a fighter, whatever it might be, and his reaction to fear is to attack. And all of that is wired into your neural network. entrepreneur if you're hit by some massive challenge do you cower or do you actually go on the attack and you know and fix it and so that's going to be discussing today i think the importance of these mindsets um in creating the neural net you want in the world to take advantage of this exponential growth we're in the midst of. Yeah. Anything else before we jump into our first mindset? I think one of the interesting things about even ordering the mindsets was I was having a conversation with you about what I spend my life on, which is really thinking about consciousness itself. Like the fact that we have these different levels of consciousness that we can all see or experience when we meet different people and questioning, well, to what extent is there
Starting point is 00:16:48 a hierarchy to these? Obviously, with Pavlov's hierarchy of human needs, he's looking at where we are in our lives and what we need to do before we do the next step, right? Like, okay, physiological safety, you're talking about fight or flight. Do we have, first of all, our needs met? And then do we have the safety, and then do we have connection, and then getting into recognition and self-enlightenment. And these, you can't be starting from the top, because if you don't have the safety at the bottom, then you have that
Starting point is 00:17:15 challenge. And what's really interesting is that, in my experience, the mindsets at every single level of those, almost always by by default ends up being the one that doesn't serve us for whatever the reason and for us to then consciously having to shift our mind shift shift our paradigm so that what we thought was difficult becomes easy right and actually moves to next level and i know that order we're going to go through actually links in with um what i call basically the the the wealth spectrum or the talent spectrum which is these levels of consciousness, which is super interesting because then you can almost start at the right level and then move up and go, oh, that's why that mindset is super important to have because if I don't have that
Starting point is 00:17:52 one, this third or fourth one later is going to be really difficult to jump up to as well. So just that final thing that I'd love to go a bit more into what that looks like and why it's in that order. And for each of these mindsets, I really want to dig in to why it's important and what you can do to develop it, exercise it, right? It's not like going to the gym once and doing one set of reps and assuming that you're going to be fine. These are mindsets you cultivate and you say, I'm going to focus on and it needs to become second nature. A lot of these mindsets that I've been developing over the years, and you have too, like the abundance mindset wasn't something I always had. And it was something that I developed over time and it's become second nature now.
Starting point is 00:18:37 And everyone can have these mindsets, no matter if you're in the hardest, most difficult situation, you can see the world through these eyes. And let's begin with the first one, which is one that I think everybody has heard of, everybody hopefully has played with, but may not be living in it, which is a gratitude mindset. So let's define a gratitude mindset. How do you define it? So the way I, and the reason this is for me is so important that it's the first one is that a default for many of us, especially because of the world we're living in right now is one where there is fear, where there is this idea that we don't have enough or that we're not enough. This idea that we are in some way lacking. And so if you start thinking, okay, so this idea of, and by the way, this isn't just from the point of view of feeling you don't have enough, it's feeling you deserve something that you don't deserve.
Starting point is 00:19:31 So fundamentally entitlement, right? Like the entitlement mindset, which is why. We're talking about opposites here, right? Every mindset has an opposite. So in a way, gratitude, the opposite is entitled. So I deserve this thing. I should have this thing. I don't have it, right?
Starting point is 00:19:43 That's not fair. That person has it. I don't. So effectively, the opposite of gratitude is judgment. It's judgment where you're basically having a negative charge against someone or something because you're fighting against that, right? Kind of like the victim mindset. Whereas gratitude, suddenly it's like, oh, there is enough. So I'll give you an example. If you wake up in the morning and you need a job, right? And you basically say, all right, like I'm not happy today because I don't have a job. More importantly, I'm going to spend today going out looking for a job, right? That's a totally different thing from wake up in the morning and going, wow, I have these incredible skills to do web design. That's an incredible
Starting point is 00:20:16 opportunity for someone. The fact that I have this set of skills that are available right now, right? So I'm going to go out and I'm going to give that opportunity to someone, right? Or I need money for my business. Okay, no, I've got a great investment opportunity for someone. Totally different way of thinking about it. So starting by saying, well, what am I grateful for today? Knowing that whatever your biggest problem is,
Starting point is 00:20:34 is actually someone else's biggest opportunity, right? So what is it that I have to give? Because there's a limit to what I can get, but there's no limit to what I can give. And what you can give is what you're grateful for, right? So starting always from that place means you're starting the day already having one. And I remember hearing this from Tony Robbins, who basically was like saying the most important starting point is having a gratitude mindset because it starts you not being at a disadvantage
Starting point is 00:20:57 to the world by having nothing to give and feeling that everything should be coming your way. And it's actually the opposite. That's beautiful. You know, we have to realize that when you're exhibiting a specific mindset, it's either attracting people to you or it's pushing people away. Yes. Right. And a gratitude mindset where you're coming at and you're like, it's, I woke up, I have a roof over my head. You know, I have a family that loves me, I have an education, all of these things, and feeling grateful that is something which in a conversation with someone else comes across. People like hanging out with grateful people, right? No one wants to hang out
Starting point is 00:21:38 with someone who feels like, I deserve this, I need this, you owe this to me I mean that instantly defeats you before you even start yeah what's also really interesting is that when you look at people who are super successful who get to level success whatever they choose success to be is that is that point at which they already chose to have it before they had it like so I said like that yeah I remember, like this is when I was very early 20s and I was like, I'm going to be successful in life. And I was looking at one of these CD sets,
Starting point is 00:22:10 which was from, you know, one of the classic motivational speakers. And he was like, are you the kind of person who is constantly saying I'm going to be successful one day, that I'm going to make it one day? And I'm like, yeah, that's me.
Starting point is 00:22:20 That's me. And he goes, well, if you are, you're never going to be successful. And I'm like, why not? He says, because if you wake up every day, being the person that's striving and he goes well if you are you're never going to be successful why not it's just because if you wake up every day being the person that's striving to be successful well then the universe is going to basically deliver that to you and you're going to go through the next week the next month being that person trying to be successful you're not successful right but if instead you basically said i'm grateful already for the success i have in the journey i'm on you
Starting point is 00:22:41 actually already start operating differently you you don't, you're not in a, in a energy of needing, right. Or grabbing you're in an energy of offering or giving. And so you're going to meet with the right people. They're going to respond to you totally differently. We all know that if you want money from the bank, they're only going to give it to you when you don't need it. Right. So it's like, I keep on saying that, right. Exactly. And, and on, on this point of, of, cause I think there's some really interesting exercises. I'm sure there's some really interesting exercises. I'm sure there's some you've done you could share. I have some that I do every day, actually, to really reset and make sure that I, especially if you are growing your success, the biggest challenge of not having a gratitude mindset or not reminding yourself is your fear of loss of what you've got.
Starting point is 00:23:21 It's like, oh, I can't risk it because I might lose this thing, as opposed to realizing, no, it's the value you have for tomorrow which makes a difference. I was in Hong Kong. This was decades ago, and Richard Branson was visiting. And he was in the same hotel, the Ritz-Carlton that I was in, and he was doing this big stunt by the swimming pool because they had just launched their London to Sydney Virgin flight. And I was thinking, wait, hang on, why is he in Hong Kong,
Starting point is 00:23:50 which has nothing to do with either London or Sydney, and the flight didn't even come through Hong Kong. There must be something he needs, right? But I knew that if he needs something, he never ever shares about him needing something based on him saying, I need this. Can anyone help me? Because you never get what you need.
Starting point is 00:24:04 Instead, he's going to be basically sharing what he's grateful for, right? He's going to be sharing what he's offering. And then from there, he's most likely going to get it. So I listened in to what he was sharing and he did the whole stunt where he threw the stewardesses in the swimming pool. Then he jumped in himself.
Starting point is 00:24:17 And then when they said, well, why are you in Hong Kong? He says, well, I'm so grateful that we're able to go to all these different international places. It's fantastic to see. And I'm also very grateful that Virgin Mobile is now launching in China and that we're able to go to all these different international places. It's fantastic to see. And I'm also very grateful that Virgin Mobile is now launching in China and that we're going to be having all these incredible partners that are going to come join us. And if you happen to be someone in the industry who would like to connect with us, we're here in town. So he basically, his big need was the fact he needed partners in China, but the whole thing was based
Starting point is 00:24:39 on his gratitude and on what he was offering. And so, of course, he then was able to attract it far more effectively. So let's talk about gratitude practices, because I think you can flip your mindset from lack to gratitude in a heartbeat. Yes. It really is that fast. A few different practices that I've played with is, I do this actually at night when I go to sleep, is thinking back of what were the three things from the day that I was most grateful for. And it's a beautiful practice to put your mind at ease in the day.
Starting point is 00:25:13 Typically, it's amazing. It's not about a business deal. It's typically about my kids. It's about the basics of life. I'm in good health. My children, which went to the Dodger game last night, loved that. I'm in good health. My children, which went to the Dodger game last night, loved that.
Starting point is 00:25:32 The other thing is in the morning when I meditate, I have played a game where I said, can I be 20 or 30% more grateful and happy today? Just, and like, and so when I'm encountering people, it's like just, just being that much more grateful and happy. And the two go together. What about you? What do you play with as gratitude practices? One thing I started in my 20s, and I still do today, is a practice of eight questions, which I ask myself in the morning. And I might be on a run. I might be basically in meditation. I might be having my breakfast. But I'll always take the time to do them. And I use questions rather than any kind of mantra, because I never know what the unconscious is going to serve up. But the questions help me direct myself into different areas where
Starting point is 00:26:14 gratitude can show up. So the first the first question that I asked myself, is what am I grateful for, which is an obvious one, right? So there's always going to be something that shows up. If things are tough, like, oh, everything's going wrong. Sometimes I'm grateful for, which is an obvious one, right? So there's always going to be something that shows up. If things are tough, like, oh, everything's going wrong. Sometimes I'm grateful for the learning that's coming out of that, right? But there's always going to be something you're grateful for. The second thing that I ask is, who do I love? And I find that's a super interesting one, because it's another form of gratitude, right? But it's a stronger form. And what's super interesting about that is, you know, I have a rule, I think most of us do, if you've got some crazy or mad email that comes through, and it's like, you want to just like answer back at this
Starting point is 00:26:49 person who is creating an issue, and then you realize, wait, no, I'm going to sleep on it, right? And the next morning... By the way, that's always the right answer. Always the right answer. Exactly. Always. And then when the next morning is like, who do I love? Sometimes they're the ones that show up. It's like, oh, okay. And then you realize there's a whole different way to deal with it, right? And the third one, which is probably the one I find most valuable out of all three of these, is why am I so happy? And that one has been super powerful for me because we've all gone through tough times in life. In fact, I don't see success as something which means you go higher. I see it means something you go further out to sea where the waves get bigger, right?
Starting point is 00:27:22 Which higher highs, lower lows, both ways. But if you are able to be navigating in such a way that you've got the horizon, you've got the balance, you're going to be fine. And why am I so happy? There's always something to be happy about, even if you don't feel happy. And that's a fascinating question to ask, right? Because it forces your brain to say, am I so happy? Okay, now why am I so happy? And start to list reasons that then self-validate the fact that you're so happy. That's right. That's right. And it's very difficult to ask that question and not smile, right? So these three are, I talk about showing up, stepping up, giving back, right? And you've
Starting point is 00:27:55 got to show up first, which is just have a level of self-awareness of what paradigm you're living in, right? And anything that's not serving you, well, go say, well, who else is being happy in the same situation? What did they learn from this as well? After that, it's about the rest of the day. So the kind of stepping up part, I always ask myself for four and five. And I think even if someone just does something similar to this first three, similar to what you do where you've got to focus at it, that already totally changes your state. The next part, which is the stepping up part, I ask two questions. What am I committed to?
Starting point is 00:28:25 Because this is not a to-do list. It's just a commitment, right? Like what is that commitment? And how committed am I, right? Which is always a percentage, right? Because sometimes I'll be committed to something, but it's just not fixing itself or not sorting itself out. And I realize often it's because I'm not as committed as I think I am. So that just helps me without any to-do list or any action
Starting point is 00:28:41 to just be present to what my direction is. And then my final questions are all about kind of the whole giving back part. I ask, what is my intention today? So that's what I do at the beginning of the day. Intention is not, again, about actions. It's about putting it out there, like in terms of the energy. Like if you're scowling all the time, you go around wondering why no one's smiling at you, right? It's because you're putting out there the negative energy.
Starting point is 00:29:03 You're going to get it back as well. But you put out the right energy of intention. And sometimes that intention, actually the one after that, which is what is my wish, which is how is the universe going to give back? Buckminster Fuller, he has this concept of lag where he says there is a lag time between thought and manifestation. And if you're on the right journey, if you're purpose-driven, you'll get rewarded very quickly, right? My intention is that I get the right person who's going to come and help fund my project. They might just call me during the day, right? If I'm on purpose. If I'm
Starting point is 00:29:32 not on purpose, it's like going against the current. I might have to wait months and I'm still not going to get that call. So I can then help guide myself on that. And then the final question is why am I here, right? And that is a very much a purpose-driven question as well. And we'll dive into purpose-driven, which is one of the most important. You know, try and experiment. If you're listening to this, enter your next business meeting and begin with gratitude.
Starting point is 00:29:55 Begin with why you're so grateful to have this meeting, to have the opportunity to get to know this person or grateful about how far you've come. People love hanging out with grateful individuals instead of coming at it from what you need and what you want. It's a transformative change in the whole tenor of the conversation. Absolutely. And especially relationships, family. And relationships. Friends. 100%. Coming to it from the point of view of that gratitude. Otherwise, you'll be always focused at where things aren't right
Starting point is 00:30:27 as opposed to what's already exactly where it's meant to be. It's a concept called being in the gap, which is if you measure yourself on how far you've come versus how far you want to go, which can be infinite, that ratio is really important. One of the things I do in the morning to, to be in a grateful state is I will look at all the things I need to do during the day. And I will say, these three are the most important. If I accomplish these three things,
Starting point is 00:30:59 then today is a massive success, right? Instead of at the end of the day, all the things I haven't done. So set yourself up for a win and to be grateful at the very beginning of the day. Two final things I think are really important around this concept of gratitude and practice, which is, first of all, it's as much about what you don't do as what you do.
Starting point is 00:31:20 So for example, if you go through a mantra and then you straight away get onto social media, right? Guess what, right? Like the whole of what the algorithm works on is conflict, right? Everything is about who's dissing who, right? Who's mad at who, right? The opposite of gratitude, right? No one's like nothing about great gratitude is showing up on the top of social media. So if you want to see conflict, if you want to see all of the things that make people feel they deserve more or things aren't right or that person is wrong. You're going to find it there, right? So that's a really important thing as well.
Starting point is 00:31:49 Have that in context later when you're gathering information or when you're connecting to people and realize that's where you basically better have your armor on already. Because if not, you're going to have to go into battle and you're going to get whacked from the side, right? That's one thing super important. It's protecting your mind. Exactly. We'll talk about longevity later. I'm very careful about what I eat, right? And at the same way, I'm very careful about what I let into my mind, what conversations, what's on TV, who I'm hanging out with. All right. Our next one, curiosity and growth mindset. Love this one. How do you define it? So for me, the Carol Dweck's book, Mindset, which is all about the difference of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset,
Starting point is 00:32:35 is everything to do with the fact that if you're stuck in a situation and you have the opposite of a curiosity or growth mindset, which is a fixed mindset there, like this is the only way, or this is the only way I know, you're constantly going to get stuck because you have no flexibility in the way you're thinking, or you think there's only one right answer. Unfortunately, a lot of the education system is built this way, right? It's like fixed mindset. If you get the right answer, you get an A. If you get the wrong answer, you're going to fail, right? As opposed to the curiosity mindset, where it's not about needing to know in order to do, right? You're not going to learn how to ride a bike by reading a book on how to ride a bike, right? You're going to need to do in order to know, right? So that's more the entrepreneurial mindset, which is, I'm not going to actually
Starting point is 00:33:17 know the right way unless I actually experiment, try new things out. And whatever was the way things were working, this is why we see multinationals collapse. Because the model that did work, especially in fast changing times, it no longer works. And if a board has a fixed mindset, that business is going to collapse. So understanding that the curiosity and growth mindset is probably something that maybe 50 years ago,
Starting point is 00:33:40 when you had a stable job, when companies were going to be around forever, wasn't as important. Whereas today, it is essential because it's how you then find the best answer, which is going to be different from what it was yesterday. Yeah. The world actually valued a fixed mindset. It valued knowing how to work on the assembly line and do A, B, and C.
Starting point is 00:34:03 And I don't want you to deviate. I don't want you to be curious about what's happened on the other side of the factory. I want you to do A, B, and C over and over and over again. And this is our educational system today. We want people trained to the test. We don't want them to be, you know, their minds wandering about what else is going on. It's interesting, you know, a curiosity and growth mindset today is enabled to a large degree because of our ability to experiment. There was the tyranny of certainty. I'm going to explain that.
Starting point is 00:34:33 The tyranny of certainty was, in the old days, you would hire a consultant who was certain about how to market something or certain about who will want a particular product. And that's the best you could have done back then. Today, I don't care what the expert says. You know, I define the expert as someone who can tell you exactly how it can't be done. I want to run the experiments. I want to try a thousand experiments and actually see who wants what. You know, this is Amazon. This is Google.
Starting point is 00:35:02 This is every tech company out there, your ability to rapidly experiment and try a thousand different, you know, flavors of a product to find out what people want. Because a lot of time people don't even actually know what they want. That's right. That's right. And, and there's a level of humility. Humility is linked to gratitude as well. So if you don't have gratitude or that energy, which is that there's already enough that I don't have to hold on to all the best ideas or I have to be right, which is one of the worst parts about not having gratitude, which means that you then are like, well, I don't want to look stupid, so I better pretend I'm right when I'm not.
Starting point is 00:35:34 I still remember my first mentor when I was 19 years old. I'd never met a millionaire before. This guy was from Columbus, Ohio, and I was at Cambridge University at the time trying to start up my first business. This guy's name is Mike Bronson. He came out to see me in our little business where we had all these students creating like these maps with little logos that were giving companies a charge to be on the maps. And we thought we were doing pretty good growing it. But for sure, there was so much I didn't know, and I was getting really stuck in the business. And he looked at what I was doing, and he says, you know, Roger, I don't think you're ever going
Starting point is 00:36:07 to be successful. Because every time he was giving me a suggestion, I was like, no, we thought about that already, right? We tried that already. So he goes, I don't think you're going to be successful. And I said, well, why do you say that? And he says, because you're smart. And I go, what do you mean? He goes, you're smart. You're from Cambridge. You're smart. You know all the answers already. And I'm like, okay, well, how did you get successful? And he goes, well, you're smart. You're from Cambridge. You're smart. You know all the answers already. And I'm like, okay, well, how did you get successful? And he goes, well, I got successful by knowing I'm stupid. Because if I'm stupid, that means I'm never going to think I have the right answer, right? And even more so, I'll be hiring smart people like you to come up with all the answers for me, right?
Starting point is 00:36:36 I love that. And I was like, okay, that's a whole different way of thinking about it. And so true. Always hire smarter people than yourself. That's right. I mean, the curiosity mindset today is so critically important because you can know. One of the things when I drop my kids off at school in the morning, they're sick of me saying this, but I say, ask great questions. Right? I think the ability, you know, the curiosity mindset, the growth mindset is one that is always asking questions.
Starting point is 00:37:02 And, you know, the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. And I heard that first from Bert Rutan, who had built Spaceship One that won the Unsurrey X Prize and then built Spaceship Two that Virgin Galactic is using. And I was like, huh, the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. And I said, fascinating, because if it isn't a crazy idea, then it's an expected incremental
Starting point is 00:37:29 improvement. But if it is a crazy idea, then where inside your organization are you trying crazy ideas? Where are you playing with crazy ideas? Where are you curious enough to say, well, what if we don't actually build bookstores anymore and we only provide books online? Could that work? And most breakthroughs, most new business models, and business models for me are where the real juice is as an entrepreneur, um, are experiments that people try and say, huh, look, there's a signal here and I'm going to try a little bit more and try a little bit more, but you need to have, if you're in a fixed mindset, you're going to just keep on doing
Starting point is 00:38:16 the same thing that was always done. You're going to depend upon the expert consultant, uh, and you're not going to go and try things that people knowingly believe will never work. Yes. I think there's also a kind of really interesting sequence that leads largely to a fixed mindset, which when you reverse it, creates more of a curiosity mindset just in terms of like an actual process that people can follow that I've found works well for entrepreneurs. just in terms of like a, you know, an actual process that people can follow that I've found works well for entrepreneurs. The three C's, right? That basically when you go through the normal education process where there's like, here's a recipe, don't deviate, just do this thing, which is very much fixed mindset. It almost starts by saying, okay, first thing you need
Starting point is 00:38:57 is you need clarity, right? So like, okay, if you don't know how to do that math exam, start by reading the book and getting clarity, right? Okay, now I've got clarity, now I can take the next step. So what's the next step? Next step is certainty, certainty that I know the answer, right? So until I get clarity, sorry, I can't make a decision. Number of times, you know, you'll be with someone and they'll, have you started the business yet? Well, I haven't started yet, so I'm still trying to figure it out. I'm still trying to, like, like, so you get stuck on that first part because there's no clarity. After you get certainty, which is absolutely, I know exactly that I can do this. Now you can commit to doing it, right?
Starting point is 00:39:30 Now, if you actually look at anyone who's got a super high curiosity mindset, it almost starts the opposite way around. It starts by having the commitment first. I love the story of Elon Musk where he's like, I'm going to figure out a way to get to Mars no matter what, right? And how are you going to do it? I don't know yet, right? Richard Branson, right? I'm going to find a way to basically go somewhere. How am I going to do that? I remember you telling the story when you were launching the XPRIZE, right? And he was like, well, I don't know how I'd do it, but I know that if I come and see who's won,
Starting point is 00:39:55 I'm going to have the right person who can come and work with me around that. But that first part, which is saying, okay, let me just start with certainty, even in the face of uncertainty. Like, this is what's going to happen. I'm going to get a commitment towards this. And the fact that it's not about whether it's going to happen, it's just a matter of when. This might take a little longer. And my experience is that those who are successful, it's because it's not an opportunity that might happen, it's an obligation that must happen. The moment you're like, okay, I must- It's burn the ships, it's commit to go. That's right. Some people have a health scare where suddenly they realize, I've got to change my health.
Starting point is 00:40:27 And then they're so committed to changing it, they start getting very curious very quickly as to what they don't know. Because if you don't have that commitment, you can be curious but still not commit and you go off somewhere else. Once you've got that commitment, then the certainty draws other people in. Other people will come along and say, well, then I'll help out on this as well, right? I still remember when, just talking about Richard Branson, went to Necker Island once. I know we've both been there. When I went, I had never met Richard before as part of one of these entrepreneur groups, and I was all super excited to meet him.
Starting point is 00:40:56 And it was like the middle of the day. We were going to have dinner at night, and I went down to the beach bar, and Richard Branson was there, right? And he was just here, like, having a chat. Tending out. Oh, okay. So I went up and said, hi, Richard. I'm there, right? And he was just here, like having a chat. Tending out. Oh, okay. So I went up and said, hi, Richard, I'm Roger.
Starting point is 00:41:08 And he goes, oh, where are you from? I said, from Bali. He goes, oh, do you know about the Green School? And Green School, a school there that I was the chairman of the board in, I was like, yes, I'm the chairman of the board. I'm super into the Green School and I know you've been there.
Starting point is 00:41:19 And he goes, absolutely. You know, I'm trying to figure out at the moment how to make Virgin Unite, which is a charity, think more entrepreneurially. How do you do that at Green School? Have you figured out ways? And I'm like, well, let me tell you what we've figured out. And then I start realizing as I'm talking to him, I've been here for less than five minutes and I'm giving the billionaire some advice. Like, how did this happen?
Starting point is 00:41:39 Yes. And it's because he has this incredible talent for learned incompetence, meaning he knows answers, but he doesn't come saying, I've got these ideas. He comes with basically, I've got this commitment of where I want to go. How would you do it? Like, I don't know. Like, you know, what would be the way? And so the actual clarity comes by people filling the gap by saying, here's ways, right? Learned incompetence.
Starting point is 00:42:04 And so I want to talk about how do you cultivate a curiosity and growth mindset? And I think that's the first one. It's always asking questions, right? It's finding people, you know, success leaves clues. Tony Robbins always says that. So who are the successful people that you can learn from? And also it's asking crazy questions, right? And we'll talk about this in the moonshot mindset, which is, okay, I understand how I can go 10 or 20% bigger. How do I go 10 X or a thousand percent bigger? You know, what is the crazy idea that if it succeeds's going to transform the entire industry. And it's difficult to get into that mindset.
Starting point is 00:42:50 But I think it's absolutely mandatory if you really want to go and transform the world. I think that moonshot mindset almost definitely becomes easier if you had some small wins on being curious about things you didn't know how it was going to work out, but then it did work out because you were curious enough and you attracted the right people. Then the moonshot becomes easier because there's a very fine line between visionary and delusional. Elon might say, I'm going to go to Mars and people believe it. I say, I'm going to go to Mars, people wouldn't believe it. Why? Because I have no experience or credibility in actually launching rocket ships. So there is an element of not just internal trust, which is confidence, but external trust, which is credibility,
Starting point is 00:43:32 where you almost have to earn the right to some extent. A number of people I have who will come to me with a massive moonshot and I'll go, okay, you still got to build your credibility a bit more to get there, which means go be more curious, spend more time around the people that actually can get this done. Because often we will, I still remember with my, my sister told me about curiosity mindset with my sister when we had a swimming pool, I was seven years old and she was always like coming off some really great dives and so on. I figured like, I'm going to come off a dive she's never seen before. So I was practicing, practicing, practicing while she was at like coming off some really great dives and so on. I figured like, I'm going to come up with a dive she's never seen before. So I was practicing, practicing, practicing while she was at her ballet classes.
Starting point is 00:44:08 She came back and I say, Elaine, I want to show you this dive that I've got. Right. And so, and I even put a name to the dive. So basically she'll go show me. So I get onto the swimming pool and instead of like pointing forwards, I turn around backwards and then I dive in and she goes, oh, I know how to do a back dive too. And I'm like, how did you know that's what it's called? I haven't even told you the name of it, right?
Starting point is 00:44:28 You can't know this, right? And so for many of us, we say, okay, I'm going to go out and change the world. But then we haven't already connected with the other people that already are doing that and realize, wow, it would be so much easier working with others to do that. And that's a super important point about gratitude and curiosity leads you to the right people that then makes the moonshot possible. You know, I want to echo that and expand on it, which is having the humility to ask, right? So one of the things I've started doing a lot is I'll go into the Twitterverse.
Starting point is 00:45:02 I still haven't been able to call it the X-verse. And ask people, what are your practices? Or what do you do? And when you can reach and get ideas from all corners of the universe, it's amazing what you can learn. Some people say, oh my God, I don't want to ask because I don't want to give away my idea. Ideas are free. The difference between an idea and executing an idea is infinite. And so being able to, you know, don't worry about giving away your idea. Believe me, someone else has thought of it a thousand times. It's the person that executes on it that makes the difference. Yes. Anything else on the curiosity growth mindset that you think is important? I think that exactly what you just said, this whole aspect about being interested in letting go,
Starting point is 00:45:52 because you have to let go of being right, but you also have to let go of being the center of whatever game you're playing. And what I mean by that is if we think about most opportunities or even the illusion of lack, even money, right? Like for some people, it's like, well, that's fine to say, you know, for me to go out and do lots of things if I had the resources, right? I just don't have the resources right now.
Starting point is 00:46:13 But you don't need the money if you know the people with the money, right? You don't need the resources if you know the people with the resources. So the thing is, well, how do I build the real capital that's important, which isn't financial capital, that comes afterwards. It's actually the social capital, people you know, or the intellectual capital, the things, you know, and if you take an example, like a game of football, right? Because everything's a game and games have rules. And if you, if you realize that the people with a high mindset are living in a paradigm, which frankly just operate by different rules. So let's imagine that you're looking at the
Starting point is 00:46:43 game of football. You think the whole point of the game of football is to kick the ball, right? Like no point going on and not being able to kick the ball. And football, you mean what we call soccer here in the United States. Soccer, soccer here. But actually, we could use American football as well, right? Just even being able to actually just get hold of the ball. What happens after you go chasing the ball? You never get it.
Starting point is 00:47:00 Why? Because it's always moving faster than you can get to it, right? Plus, people hate someone who's just out chasing the ball instead of actually being a team player so you get off at the end of the game and you're like that didn't work so well right i never got the ball and then you ask others around well did you get a ball yeah i got a ball how many i got 100 balls you got 100 balls right like what about you i also got 100 balls like what everyone got 100 balls how's that even possible right when we talk about someone being a millionaire it's not like that you're sitting there holding on to the million it's the fact that they've got this flow, which allows them to actually be moving through with the ball passing from person to person.
Starting point is 00:47:29 And you go, oh, okay, so you didn't get the ball by chasing it. You got the ball by being the opening or the place where it was most valuable for others to be. So that curiosity mindset is a really interesting one because it isn't just about what am I trying to solve or what thing am I trying to achieve for myself is what's the actual game that's being played here what's the way I could be of value to other people in this game you know I call it the difference of of being able to create a job instead of get a job because if you there's someone you really want to work with right like you know you and I we're now doing some things together which came from me asking what is it Peter's looking for you asking what is it Roger other people are looking for? There's always a way to fit in if the curiosity is about how to be of value to someone else. Starting with gratitude and giving. Exactly. Exactly right. I'll share another story.
Starting point is 00:48:16 I learned it early on and I've never ever forgot this. So I'm a sophomore at MIT. I'm running my first real organization ever called students for the exploration development of space it was a college-based space organization and i was looking to raise five thousand dollars to be able to uh typeset and print and mail a brochure all right this is before the internet existed, before, you know, computer, it was, it's dark ages. And so I went to a place called Draper Labs, which is on the campus at MIT. And I got a meeting with the head of Draper Labs. And I went and pitched my heart out to get a $5,000 donation. And the guy said, I love what you're doing. I'm sorry, We're a nonprofit. We're not allowed to make donations. And you have
Starting point is 00:49:07 a good cause and so forth. And I was just about to leave. I was literally opening the door and I turned around and I said, is there any chance? Now, remember, I'm trying to raise $5,000 to print the brochures and mail them out to the chapters. I said, is there any chance that you could provide the printing and the mailing in kind? He goes, oh, that's easy. And over the next few years, I got $50,000 worth of free printing and mailing. And so it's how do you ask the question in the right way, right? And so whenever I'm speaking to an entrepreneur and advising, I'm saying never walk away from a meeting without having learned something, without having asked a number of questions to understand how could I have done this differently? What could I have said differently?
Starting point is 00:49:54 Approaching from a different place. And it's that kind of curiosity which will continuously have you learn and win in different dimensions. That reminds me of a story. Exactly the same thing, especially for anyone listening who might be, I don't think I have a lot of resources right now. And then realizing it's actually the connecting of the dots that in curiosity, which makes a difference. I was, this is kind of give my age a little bit, but going back to 1995, I was just finishing this, my first publishing company that I had, and I basically was looking
Starting point is 00:50:25 to get into technology. And there was Blenheim, which is one of the biggest event companies in the UK. They were running something called Live 95, which was basically all of the electronics. So you had PlayStation launching there. You had Microsoft 95 launching there. It was all the technology. And it was a consumer fair. So you had hundreds of thousands of people coming to Earl's Court in London.
Starting point is 00:50:44 And I was like, I really want to go work with those guys to learn about all this because I don't have the technical knowledge myself. So I basically knocked on the door. I went in and met the event organizer. His name was Bob Denton. And I said, Bob, I want to come and work with you and go, sorry, I'm not hiring anyone right now.
Starting point is 00:50:58 He says, no, no, no, I'll do it for free. I just want to be of value. Let me work with your PR company and see if I can add any value at all. He goes, okay, well, you go speak with the team there. So I went to the team and I said, look, I'll share my value with you in this way. You tell me who would be the top celebrities you'd want to have come and work with you. And then I'll say that's my challenge to go get them, right? They said, well, how many? And I go, I don't know, one male, one female. They said, okay.
Starting point is 00:51:24 At that point, Joanna Lumley, who was in Absolutely Fabulous, like she was like really big in the UK. It's like, yeah, get Joanna Lumley for us because we can't get her, right? And then get Frank Bruno, who was like the heavyweight champion of the world at that point in the UK.
Starting point is 00:51:37 And I'm like, okay, all right, I'm going to figure this out. So first of all, I said, okay, I'm going to go to the different exhibitors, right? There was Sony, like I mentioned with the PlayStation. I said, would you, would you be up if we could get Frank Bruno, would you be up for basically paying for him if we brought him to your stand, right? And he's, they were like, okay, sure, we can do that. Right. So I called up the agent, that was an easier one. It's like $100,000. They said, okay to that. And so we did that deal. And then I then did the same with Joanne Munley. I contacted her team.
Starting point is 00:52:06 I said, how much does it cost? And he goes, she's not doing anything at all for money because she's got enough money. Well, what is she interested in? Well, she's working for Prince's Trust, right, for charity. So if you could find a way to actually help on the charity side and give a charity check for like $150,000, well, then we'd be interested. It was pounds because we're in the UK. So I said, okay, okay, I'll figure that out. So then I was like, well, who's going to put that money in?
Starting point is 00:52:28 And Radio One, which basically was going to be sharing from the Sage, they actually had a live booth there. I went to Radio One and I said, how many sponsors would you need to have in order for you to give 150,000 check? If we can get Joanna Lumley on here, could we have three sponsors
Starting point is 00:52:45 right uh that would cover the 150 and then you just do a shout out for them to national radio and they go sure we can do that right so then I could then I went out because I knew that I want to pay 150 but three people would pay 50 and in each and then I brought both back and we managed to get both on board and I then ended up basically being the head of the PR there but this and I was like in my early 20s at the time. But I knew I had no resources myself. But from everyone who was there, if I could connect the dots, there'd be the value there. And this is curiosity, not at the point of what can I get, but how can I help everyone get what they want and be the one that's joining those dots, right? I love that.
Starting point is 00:53:20 It's true entrepreneurial energy, right? I love that. It's true entrepreneurial energy, right? It's not accepting no. And there is an answer. There is always an answer. And then being curious about what that answer is and finding it. And it's running experiments. It's coming up with ideas and asking people and just being relentless in that regard. And it's ultimately like we began the conversation. It's committing to it, burning the ship. That's right. That's right. And then saying, I have no choice.
Starting point is 00:53:51 It's like, you know, when I announced the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE and didn't have the money, it was like, I know there's someone out there. I don't know who it is. You know, 150 no's later, I found out that was the Ansari family, but there's always an answer. And I love that story when you share it, because if you had deviated from that commitment and certainty, it wouldn't have happened. But because you always were committed and certain, it's interesting because a lot of people talk about perseverance as a quality. I personally feel perseverance is the end product of this commitment certainty.
Starting point is 00:54:24 If you know it's going to happen one way or the other of course you have to persevere right because you can't give up uh if you haven't made that commitment perseverance almost impossible right yeah and it's it's true i was absolutely clear there was no question there is somebody out there and you know everybody kept them saying no no no no no but there's a lot of wealthy people and corporations out there. There was going to be somebody. It was, you know, there's a great quote that I'm not sure I'm going to attribute it to. Maybe it's Martine Rothblatt.
Starting point is 00:54:54 You know, every no is a step closer to a yes. And so celebrate those no's. I would add to that that every no you need to take away why are they saying no and learn from that. Don't accept just the no and walk away with your tail between your legs. Learn from it. Even get a suggestion and an introduction as to who might you pitch next. All right. Let's transition to one of my favorite mindsets, a moonshot mindset.
Starting point is 00:55:23 I'm going to define it. So I've had the chance to have Astro Teller, who's the captain of moonshots at, used to be Google X, it's now X at Alphabet. And Astro is brilliant. You know, there's a lot of YouTube videos of him speaking. You've had him at Abundance 360. I've had him a number of times, right? One, I think his maternal grandfather was a Nobel laureate and his paternal grandfather was the creator of the hydrogen bomb.
Starting point is 00:55:55 I mean, really incredible lineage. And Astro defines a moonshot mindset as going 10 times bigger when the rest of the world is going 10%. Yes. So a 10% increase, you know, for most entrepreneurs is pretty good. 10% more revenue, 10% more customers, 10% lower costs. And we can go and achieve that by working harder, right? You can work harder. You can take, you know know your organization and fine-tune it and squeeze 10 more profits out of it uh but going 10 times which is a thousand percent um you don't get there incrementally it requires really clean sheet reinvention of what you're doing the example that he gives that i love is if you've got an automobile that's doing 50 miles per gallon, I'll use miles per gallon here, and you want it to go
Starting point is 00:56:51 10% bigger to get to 55, you can do that by lightweighting the vehicle, maybe changing the tires, the aerodynamic flow. But if you want to go to 500 miles per gallon, there's no way to get there incrementally. You really need to reinvent and start with a clean sheet of paper. So that's, for me, a moonshot mindset. Do you have a different definition? I totally agree. I mean, a new paradigm, think of a paradigm a little bit like a radio station, right?
Starting point is 00:57:19 If you're going to be at a whole different frequency, you can't just be going incrementally. If you're going to be at a whole different frequency, you can't just be going incrementally. Like if someone says, OK, whatever my earnings are today, salary or company, what would life look like if it was 10 times what it is today? Like in a year's time, if it was 10 times, what would I need to be doing differently? How do I need to be thinking differently? I still remember in Singapore when I started a publishing company there. I'm now in my kind of like, you know, mid or late 20s. And I was doing it very much the traditional way I knew how. I was like, you know, raising the money, kind of like, you know, doing the printing. I had a magazine called The Singapore Property Guide. I knew a lot of the real estate agents at the time. And as I was
Starting point is 00:57:56 going through how I'm going to grow this business, I was thinking very incrementally, like, okay, maybe I can increase the revenues a little bit. I can do this. I can do that. And one day, this guy comes in. His name is Patrick. He was one of our top clients. He was a real estate agent. And he goes, Roger, I'm going to be an entrepreneur just like you. And I go, what do you mean? He goes, Sim Wong Hoo, who was the founder of Creative Labs, he was giving like $10 million checks to startups in Singapore.
Starting point is 00:58:23 He goes, I'm going to get a million dollar check from Simon Hu. And I'm like, you're a real estate agent. What's the business? And he goes, I don't know. I just know I'm going to get a million dollar check. And I'm like, OK, good luck to you. And I'd never seen a million dollar check, right? Our business was getting to that size, but it was a whole bunch of people
Starting point is 00:58:37 spending $10,000 or $1,000 at a time. A month later, he comes back. He's got a million dollar check. And I'm like, what happened? And he goes, I told you, I do it. I did it. And I said, but how? Like, what business?
Starting point is 00:58:49 And he goes, oh, it's a business on cordless mice, like for the computer. And I go, what do you know about that? And he goes, nothing. I go, well, how did that happen? He goes, well, I went basically into the, I went like everyone else had to go through like the pitching and everything. And I got in front of Simong Hu and his group. And I said, I'm committed to taking your million and turn it into $10 million. Right. And I'm going to do it in something, which is what you yourself
Starting point is 00:59:14 want to have happen here in Singapore, which is through technology. And so Simong Hu says, so what's your business idea? And he says, well, before I give you my business idea, I want to know what is one of the biggest opportunities that you believe there is within the space that if someone came in with that, you would go for it. And he goes, well, right now we're trying to figure out all the accessories for the new laptops coming out. We're looking like the biggest one is the cordless mice and how someone can figure that out. He goes, how many entrepreneurs have come to you pitching that idea? And he goes, well, none so far. He goes, well, then I'm going to be the one, right? I'll pitch that idea. I will commit to doing that because I'm more interested not in
Starting point is 00:59:47 what my business idea is, but having you as my mentor. So you get behind me, I will get the team, we'll make it happen. He goes, okay, done. So he got that way. So I was like, oh my God, I'm really missing something here. And over the next three months, I said, well, if he can get a million, I can get 3 million. And so I said, all right, why can't I get that 3 million now? Because I'm thinking too small. I'm thinking about one property guide. What if I had a whole bunch of products? And I went to the VCs to basically tell them that this is what I had.
Starting point is 01:00:15 And what if I had someone running the business that I didn't enjoy running it? So there's a guy called Peter Watkins, who was the publisher at EMAP, which is one of the biggest publishing companies. I knew him. He was an Australian who I went out for drinks with once in a in a while and i said peter you're not happy where you are what if you came worked with us and we turned our business into a 10 million dollar business he goes your business is not a 10 million dollar business it's not but it will be after i raise the three million so he goes okay all right i'll come on board but like when can you pay me i said well
Starting point is 01:00:38 give me three months then i can pay you but come and work for a couple of months for free and then i'll pay you afterwards and he goes okay so he, like he took a leap of faith because you see, I was certain about it. I then basically went out to all the different VCs, 3i, which is one of the UK venture capital firms. They just got really behind the idea. And then three months later, I had this $3 million check. And for me, and those are days of photocopies where I did a really big photocopy. And for me, that was just a huge paradigm shift that would not have happened if Patrick hadn't come in yeah basically saying he was already thinking differently right you know I'm super passionate about longevity and health
Starting point is 01:01:14 span and how do you add 10 20 health years onto your life one of the most underappreciated elements is the quality of your sleep and there's something that changed the quality of your sleep. And there's something that changed the quality of my sleep. And this episode is brought to you by that product. It's called Eight Sleep. If you're like me, you probably didn't know that temperature plays a crucial role in the quality of your sleep. Those mornings when you wake up feeling like you barely slept. Yeah, temperature is often the culprit. Traditional mattresses trap heat, but your body needs to cool down during sleep and stay cool through the evening
Starting point is 01:01:50 and then heat up in the morning. Enter the Pod Cover by 8sleep. It's the perfect solution to the problem. It fits on any bed, adjusts the temperature on each side of the bed based upon your individual needs. You know, I've been using Pod Cover and it's a game changer. I'm a big believer in using technology to improve life and 8Sleep has done
Starting point is 01:02:10 that for me. And it's not just about temperature control. With the Pod's sleep and health tracking, I get personalized sleep reports every morning. It's like having a personal sleep coach. So you know when you eat or drink or go to sleep too late, how it impacts your sleep. So why not experience sleep like never before? Visit www.8sleep.com. That's E-I-G-H-T-S-L-E-E-P.com slash moonshots. And you'll save 150 bucks on the pod cover by 8sleep. I hope you do it. It's transformed my sleep and will for you as it. It's transformed my sleep and will for you as well. Now back to the episode. You know, sometimes seeing an example is all you need to flip a bit and say, I can do that too. Yes. Yeah. And there are countless examples right now.
Starting point is 01:03:01 So, you know, the moonshot mindset. So what it is, is thinking at a new level, and you can't get there incrementally, you have to literally commit to this new level. And who do I need to be? You know, how do I need to act? You know, one other thing, just to be clear, you don't achieve this moonshot overnight. Yes. You know, if you look at the moonshots historically, the Apollo program between, you know, for which this is named, John F. Kennedy announces the intent to go to the moon in 1961. And we get there eight years later. If you look at, you know, what the driverless car, you know, from the first DARPA Grand Challenge to the first driverless cars, you know, it's a 10-year. And I joke that these are, you know, overnight successes after 10 years of hard work. For me, the Ansari XPRIZE was an 11-year overnight success. And so one of the
Starting point is 01:04:00 elements that's super important in going after a moonshot is you truly have to care. You truly have to have an emotional energy. There has to be something that's driving it. It can't be something that if I've ever gone after something that it's just for the money, I'm going to give up before I get there. Going for something big and meaningful to make the proverbial dent in the universe is hard work. And it means failing and failing and failing over and over again, but having the emotional energy to look yourself in the mirror at 3 a.m. in the morning and say,
Starting point is 01:04:36 nope, I'm going to keep going. I refuse to give up. This is possible. I've committed to this. And so you have to look at what is the underlying emotional energy driving that moonshot. And that emotional energy can be a positive awe. You know, like, I love this. You know, one of my companies was a company called Zero Gravity Corporation. We do these weightless parabolic flights. Yeah, we went together. And, you know, my high points was flying Stephen Hawking in the zero G.
Starting point is 01:05:07 Right. And I committed to that company in May of 93. It became operational in September of 2004. It was, again, 11 years of not giving up. But I was so committed to this. And there are other people who are driven by a negative emotion, like they've been hurt, they are someone, their family's been harmed,
Starting point is 01:05:30 I refuse to let this go on, I'm going to solve this problem. And so, if you're going after a moonshot, Elon's proverbial going to Mars or transforming into an electric economy, you understand that there is deep seeded emotional energy driving that. And so this is not a get rich quick scheme. It's a massive commitment of emotional energy.
Starting point is 01:05:57 I still remember the first time I came to one of the programs at Singularity University, right? And that's where we met up. And I was in Bali, really thinking a lot about where the world is going, you know, is the Singularity coming? And I was watching some videos of yourself and Ray Kurzweil talking about Singularity and then Singularity University happening. At that point, I was at the Green School. I was focusing very much at like the education system, but not at a massive scale, right? I was, we're talking about how could we grow things. Um, but when I, when I came out and we went on a couple of different, uh, field trips and one of them was to one of the, uh, DNA, uh, printing labs. Uh, I don't remember if you remember back then, but I remember sitting
Starting point is 01:06:40 there and we were all getting in white coats and, uh, there was a guy at the front kid with jeans like giving out diet pepsis and stuff and i thought he was just working there and then he stood up and he says okay guys just to let you know why i invested in this company uh you know the reason that this could change the world i'm like so speaking to the guy who is this and goes oh that's luke novak he's one of the yes our mafia yeah and he's like a billionaire and i'm like well and everything he was talking about was all about the big goal right and what they were looking to achieve and i remember coming away from that thinking i'm thinking way too small about what's possible in education and and that's when i i set that goal of uh entrepreneur curriculum can we reach 100 million students but once you start thinking like that it's like well who else has done that?
Starting point is 01:07:25 And so I met someone calm when he'd hit a hundred million. Yeah, and you're sharing how he did it what he did It is about saying look if I'm used to going, you know Ten kilometers an hour on a bicycle and someone else is going to a thousand kilometers an hour Could they have a rocket ship or a plane? What is it? I need to learn from them because it's actually easier flying a plane than cycling a bike right once you get it going um and this is about basically understanding that these are paradigms or vehicles uh and that was that was my shifting turning point because you already were talking about moonshots at that point i was like yeah like this is what allows you to stretch your own
Starting point is 01:08:00 thinking because as that saying goes you know if you think you can't you can't if you think you can you can't either way you're right right so it's about what can you now do to shift to for sure how big is genius you now so we're now about to reach five million students uh we've been growing by about 50 a year so we're on we're on track for that 100 million number we just need to keep you know basically growing by 50 year by 2030, we'll be at that number based on that. And, and so it's like you said, it's not overnight. It's something which takes time, but, but it's a journey itself of you getting there and knowing the solutions will change because the world is changing, right? Like we're now using AI faster than we thought we would because of what's happening with AI. Similarly, what we're now using more with the metaverse,
Starting point is 01:08:42 you know, working directly in Vom, because that's now growing. So what's so interesting about a moonshot? It's a little bit like a horizon where you don't worry about changing direction and not knowing where you're going. If you know your destination, you can use the wind, even if it's going the opposite direction to you,
Starting point is 01:09:00 sometimes that makes you go faster, you attack and you'll still get yourself to where you want to go to. But if you don't have that clarity of what the bigger goal is or what the bigger why is, you're going to constantly be seasick with all of the shifts that are happening. It's so true. And the challenge is most people look at the successful entrepreneurs out there and they think it's an overnight success. and they think it's an overnight success, right? They don't know how hard people have had to work and the challenges and the failures until you dig in
Starting point is 01:09:30 and you realize this was a massive commitment and it was achieved, the success was achieved on the back of a thousand failures along the way. Yes. You know, it's interesting. One of the great stories I love is told by Bill Gross, who's the CEO of Idealab out of Pasadena. And he is a consummate entrepreneur. He runs this massive incubator venture studio, and he started hundreds of companies. And he did this, you can find it as a TED talk and a DLD Talk by Bill Gross. And he talks about what was it that allowed some companies to succeed and other companies to fail. And he looked at, I think, like 100 companies that succeeded, 100 companies that failed.
Starting point is 01:10:16 And he said, he asked questions. He was curious. He began not knowing the answer, came in with the curiosity mindset. And he said, was it the experience of the entrepreneur? Was it the amount of money they had? Was it the marketplace they were in? And when he looked at like a dozen variables, it finally came down to, I don't want to call it effectively luck, but it was how long the company was around and its timing to intercept an opportunity.
Starting point is 01:10:49 Right. So if you're a company that's a flash in the pan, you've got to raise a lot of money or you fail versus a company that is able to generate revenue and succeed day by day by day, stay in the game and intercept an opportunity. So listen, SpaceX exists because the space shuttle blew up and there was a commercial launch contract that they won in 2008, thereabouts. Airbnb and Uber exists because of the, you know, the 2008 financial crisis and people needed additional revenue. Right. Zoom exists because, you know, we had a pandemic and everybody needed to have a capability for education.
Starting point is 01:11:32 And so if you can stay in the game and have a big vision, then you're able to intercept, you know, opportunity along the way. Absolutely. I think this goes back to what we've just been going through. You've been going right back to gratitude mindset, curiosity mindset, when people go, okay, so it's all fair and good that if you're on the right wave when things take off, but how do you actually position yourself to even be where that wave is? Right?
Starting point is 01:11:57 Cause all those companies you mentioned, they already started by the time the wave came and, and the, and the truth of it is if you see people surfing wave, it's really too late to surf that wave. It's already come and gone. And too many people are holding onto the wave because they've been on the wave and now it's crashing. And they're like, oh no, my business is changing and my industry is changing. When you realize that all of these different individuals who got positioned, they didn't position for the wave. They might've thought the wave is coming,
Starting point is 01:12:23 but they were doing it much more for who they were, right? So the first couple of mindsets are very much around self-awareness. And the three elements that make up the trivia in the Renaissance learning is self-awareness, self-mastery, self-expression, which is very different from calculation and memorization and what we're taught today, which is how to be a better computer. This is how to be a better human, right? So it's a whole base of humanism. And self-awareness, you know, one of the tools we use is the ikigai, right? Which is the Japanese concept of your ikigai. Yeah, I love that. It's a combination of four things, which is what you love, your passions, what the world needs, which is your purpose, what you're great at, which is your genius,
Starting point is 01:12:58 and also what you can get paid for. So you can actually like have a self-expression, whether it's an entrepreneur, whether it's a chef, whether it's a musician, right? And link these together. But this is what we should be grateful for, like grateful for the fact we've got unique gifts. Like we're living in a world where we're being divided by our differences when we should be getting united to our uniqueness, right? That we're all actually at a place where we can honor and be grateful for what we have that other people don't have and then connect with them based on that as well. So, so we have, that's why we do all the tests on this to, to, to get to scale where people go, okay, now I know what kind of team I need. Now I know what I'm great at. Now I know what I shouldn't be doing. And that then leads into self-mastery, which is where
Starting point is 01:13:35 these consciousness show up in terms of how to live through these consciousness. And then of course, self-expression becomes easy because you're now doing it. You're living your life. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, let's talk about what it takes to have a moonshot mindset because it's not obvious to everyone. And how do you create a moonshot mindset in your organization? And should everyone in your moonshot in your organization have a moonshot mindset? So this is definitively affected, impacted by who you hang out with. So if you're hanging out with people who are constantly telling you, listen, your ideas are crazy. You're never going to get there. And they're just pounding on you for like, get a job, stop thinking you're Elon Musk, stop all of these things. It's just debilitating. On the other side, if you're Elon Musk, stop all of these things. It's just debilitating.
Starting point is 01:14:26 On the other side, if you're hanging out with people who are dreaming big and are equally looking for something, a huge moonshot. If you look at, for example, the PayPal mafia, right? So there's a great book about the PayPal mafia. So all of these guys are thinking about reinventing the financial industry. This is Peter Thiel. This is Elon Musk. This is Reid Hoffman.
Starting point is 01:14:52 And it's pretty amazing that Elon already had X.com way, way back there. I remember that. Talking about exactly this. Yeah. And he's coming back to implement that early dream. But those guys lived in a moonshot mindset ecosystem. Yes. And they played big with each other.
Starting point is 01:15:12 And then when finally PayPal got sold to eBay, they all went their separate ways, but they all then went after their own moonshots. Yes. And very much succeeded. So I think if you want to play in a moonshot, I mean, this is one of the things that I love about the Abundance360 community, everybody in there, to be part of it, you need to have defined your massive transformative purpose
Starting point is 01:15:38 and have a moonshot that you're working at, GeniusU getting to 100 million students and the multitude of other moonshots that you have, Roger. And then you realize and you share learnings, you share experiences. When you realize that your dream is achievable, you just need to be asking the right questions, really driven by that passion. Then when you hit a brick wall, you don't give up and you will hit a multitude of brick walls. And whether or not you keep going or give up is definitively your mindset. What's interesting about this is the extent to which success can lead to a moonshot or actually it's the opposite way around. This is a moonshot that leads to success. I think one of the best examples of this, frankly, is the XE, right? The fact that you start by saying, what would be a moonshot
Starting point is 01:16:27 within this particular cause or industry or challenge, framing it, and then seeing what happens when people go, okay, well, then I'm up for this challenge, right? And then you've got all these different companies competing to achieve that same moonshot
Starting point is 01:16:41 and they will learn from each other, right? Yeah, they do. Yeah, and for sure, the key to all of that is defining the moonshot in the first place right and i really love the way that when you when you set up the x-price and and how far has come from that first one which is going to space to all the ones that are now getting created uh and how much everyone who comes in is not a single person that will regret the time and effort that comes into it because of everything they learn and the fact that every one of those XPRIZES, right, with very few exceptions,
Starting point is 01:17:07 does pull the whole industry forward. I'm going to hit one last topic on moonshots, which is if you're running a company right now, one of the things that AstroTeller taught us was you don't want your entire organization being a moonshot organization. You know, if you've got a company that's successful and it's generating a good profitability, you want the core of your organization delivering your product and services and that 10% margin and just doing it really well. What you want is on the side, you want a moonshot team. That moonshot team is reporting directly into the CEO.
Starting point is 01:17:49 It's led by someone who has the attributes of a moonshot mindset. And what you want is the people in the core organization really focused on delivering the product and service. You want the people on the edge of the organization focused on 10X. And you really want to say, listen, if you're in my moonshot group and you're thinking 10%, you're fired.
Starting point is 01:18:14 I don't want you thinking 10%. That's not your mission. Your mission is 1000%. It's 10X. It's running experiments that are going to move the needle. And then ultimately, when you create something that's extraordinary inside the moonshot organization on the edge, we're then going to bring that into the open AI capabilities into Microsoft Suite, Word, and so forth, and Bing. So it's fascinating. So where the moonshot thinking exists in your organization.
Starting point is 01:18:58 And also, by the way, if you try inside of your company to have that moonshot organization resident inside the group there's going to be an immediate immune reaction that will that will squelch it so when steve jobs created the macintosh team uh he put it in a separate building with a pirate flag over it saying you know stay away and you know this is the proverbial lockheed skunk works yes right? A separate building, a separate team reporting directly to the CEO with a mission to do something impossible. Yep. Yep. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:19:32 I think there's an element to the fact that when anything matures, right? Like it's always going to go through the different seasons and it's going to get to a point where, like you say, it needs to be able to deliver at a level where you've got you know the financial uh growth of the company and what we're talking about here is really the the the pain of something which becomes a big enough challenge that it needs to be solved at a huge level i remember um a chat with i think it's terry fidel who was was the founder of Nest. Tony Fidel. Tony Fidel, sorry, Tony Fidel.
Starting point is 01:20:10 Tony, I don't know if he's still there now, but he brought his kids out to Green School and he was out in Bali for a while. So we had our entrepreneur meetings there. So he came to one of the talks and I didn't know this, but before Nest, he was also on the iPod team, right? Yes. Working with Tony and, sorry, working with Steve. And one of the questions to him was, look, you've been on $2 billion products. What's the difference of a billion dollar product compared to $100 million product? And he said, look, everything I learned about that, the big world changing
Starting point is 01:20:37 difference came from Steve Jobs. And he says that what I learned from Steve Jobs is whereas most people, they think they've got a product, they think they've got a solution and they're ready to go. Steve Jobs would spend much, much, much, much, much longer on turning that problem into a world-size problem so that it could then go out and make a much, much bigger challenge. He says, look, at the very first thought when they would think about the iPod, they said, what's the problem we're solving? It's like, well, the problem we're solving is that Sony Walkman has got one CD. It gets scratched. If that was basically digital, then that would solve the problem. And Steve's like, that's, what's the problem we're solving? It's like, well, the problem we're solving is that Sony Walkman has got one CD, it gets scratched. If that was basically digital, then that would solve the problem. And Steve's like, that's not a big enough problem, right? Like that's, that's like, that's not a painkiller that we're going to be delivering. That's like a
Starting point is 01:21:15 vitamin, right? It's like, okay, so how do we turn it into a painkiller? And he says they spent about six months just going deeper and deeper. No, the real problem is that you have more in your music library that you want to listen to at the same time. No, the real problem is that you have more in your music library that you want to listen to at the same time. No, the real problem is that there's music all over the world that your friends are listening to that you don't know about. And so it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And the end point was not just the iPod, but iTunes, the whole platform, the whole thing, where basically you're now solving something for the world. And of course, you can see that this is the genius of Steve Jobs, right? That in the core of this idea that this is an opportunity versus this is an obligation, there's something about a moonshot, which isn't just how big it is, it's the level of
Starting point is 01:21:51 commitment that other people want to put to that same thing. Because all talent today is looking for the right companies to work with where they think they're doing something meaningful. If you're not working on a moonshot, you don't get to that talent because that talent has gone off to work with someone who is. Amazing. And so I think that that, for me, was a really big eye-opener.
Starting point is 01:22:09 It's if you want to get 10 times bigger, think 10 times more, go 10 times more in the microscope, 10 times higher quality, 10 times better will make 10 times bigger, right? So quality will make quantity. And that's something which so many people miss out on because they're so busy rushing to try and get somewhere versus slowing down to speed up and getting it right.
Starting point is 01:22:29 Speaking of 10 times, let's talk next about the exponential mindset. It's the core of Singularity University. It's also a lot of what you teach at Genius U. It's the core of Abundance 360. An exponential mindset, for me, I define as someone who realizes that we're not living in a linear world, that the speed of change is exponential and it's accelerating. The primordial example I give is a conversation I've had with Ray Kurzweil that says, in the next 10 years, we're going to see as much change as we have in the past century, which is amazing.
Starting point is 01:23:13 All right. Everybody listening, you double, you know, linear mindsets, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. An exponential mindset is exponential growth. It's doubling 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. A quick reference to memorize, double something 10 times, it's a thousand times bigger. Double it 20 times, it's a million times. Double it 30 times, it's a billion fold.
Starting point is 01:23:34 And our brain, the 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections are wired for a linear world. But we're living in an exponential world. And this is where people get and companies get disrupted because they're thinking linearly uh and their competition is implementing and thinking exponentially do you have a definition that's different from that or adds to that i can give an example because i think the definition is absolutely right. The opposite of an exponential mindset is a, what you could say is a linear mindset, but that is still assuming that things are going to grow or stay the same. But some
Starting point is 01:24:13 people I think have actually got, instead of a multiply mindset, they have a division mindset, which means they think things are getting less. And as long as you think that's where things are going, you're going to hold on to what you you got and you get right back to the beginning which is which which is the fear fear of loss um there's a little exercise which which we did when we were running workshops around the world uh where we would have a group of maybe 500 people in the room and we basically would just play a little game where get someone onto the uh onto the stage and i just basically do a little grid like you know three by three grid uh take a pen, put a zero in the middle, right? So of course they're like, okay, I'm going to put an X, right?
Starting point is 01:24:49 And then zero F. They're playing awesome crosses and no one wins, right? I said, okay, all right, well, you obviously know how to play. Okay, so here's the game. Everyone, you have one minute. Choose your team, like, basically in that one minute, you can each have four of these grids maximize your score. Boom, go. And so everyone's off going and going. And at the end of the minute, okay, how did everyone do? Who ended up with zero? A lot of people are like, we got zero. We just zeroed out every time. Some people are like, we got five. Some people are like, we got 10. How did you get 10? So then it's like, okay, so play it again. So we do it a second time. And of course, some people are like, wait, hang on,
Starting point is 01:25:29 if they got 10 and I'm getting zero, what are they doing differently, right? And they say, oh, look at that. They're actually helping each other to go XXX, oh, XXX. Okay, now they've got three. It's like, oh, they're not even trying to fight each other, right? They're trying to do this together. And it will get to a point where people, okay, now how much? Okay, you got 10, you got 20, you got 100. How did you get 100? Like, how is that possible? Oh, you don't have two people in your team, you got eight people in your team, right? You're in three dimensions, so you're actually getting this way, this way. And at the end, they're getting thousands and thousands of points. And it's the same game, it's just that the rules we assume is that you're trying to stop the other person from getting three in a row and you're trying to get three versus maximizing score. And so there's an aspect of everything we just
Starting point is 01:26:08 talked about before in order to get exponential, you have to have a gratitude mindset, right? You've got to have a moonshot of some sort, which is going for something bigger. You've got to be curious enough to try it again and try it again and know that the first time you're doing it, it's just the first iteration. But if you start realizing that not only are we living in an exponential world where all the success comes from those who understand and are flowing through that, I mean, this is what Warren Buffett says, you know, the greatest magic in investing is compound interest, right? This idea that things keep on accelerating. But for so many people, because they're still stuck in a zero-sum game, they can't even think of how to get beyond that. And these
Starting point is 01:26:44 are all the unwritten assumptions that we actually had that put us in that space. And we'll talk about this when we get to an abundance mindset as well, which ties in. The challenge we have is the majority of the world lived in a linear situation that if you wanted to double revenues, you would have to double the number of people working and the number of plants. And of course, that's not the case anymore. In a digital world where you can replicate a piece of software for zero marginal cost, and you can transmit a piece of software for zero marginal cost,
Starting point is 01:27:27 things get very different very quickly. A few stories that I love is the story of Kodak. A guy named Steven Sasson in 1975 invents the digital camera and he walks into the board of Kodak with this thing about the size of a small toaster and he goes, here it is, the future of Kodak. It takes 0.01 megapixel images in black and white and records it on a tape drive. And of course the board of Kodak is going, that's insane. We're in the paper and chemicals business. And of course, one of the challenges is you have to be careful of what business are you really in versus where do you make your profits today. So Kodak did make their profits on the printing the photographs, the paper, and the chemicals for developing the film and so forth.
Starting point is 01:28:15 But when you go back and read what George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, he started the company in particular to preserve people's memories. And when this alternate technology of digital photography came along, which was much more aligned with his original intention and his own purpose, they missed it. And they were just in fear that this demonetization and this democratization would destroy the company. And a few decades later, Kodak goes bankrupt. And what's interesting is the same year that Kodak goes bankrupt, a company called Instagram is acquired by Facebook, now Meta, for a billion dollars. And they had 13 employees. And today, of course, it's $100 billion on Meta's balance sheet or more than that. And so this shift of mindset of thinking, okay, well,
Starting point is 01:29:14 if we're going exponential, and we're demonetizing things and democratizing things, our market is going to get massively bigger. And the other thing is where we make our money is going to change or the business model is going to change. So business models for me are nirvana. I'm always looking for one of the most interesting and exciting and reinventing business models. And we're going to see a lot of that in this exponential world. We're seeing so many of it right now, right? I'd love to talk that yourself and Salim Ismail did recently on the fact that we're going to see billion dollar businesses having
Starting point is 01:29:50 impacts to millions, if not billions of people, which could be three men or three women companies, right? And this is because of this ability to leverage at scale now. And I think that one thing that definitely in my experience, you know, in terms of breaking out of that thinking that things need to be the same is constantly be looking at back to the 10x that comes from the moonshot. Like, if our company was doing 10 times or 100 times more, what would that mean for the company? Like, where would the bottlenecks be? What would be things that we can't be achieving because you guys are dealing with this many queries and suddenly we're gonna have like 100 times more. How can we look at this whole thing differently
Starting point is 01:30:30 so that we actually are geared up for it? What are the ways that we could be attracting a lot more people out there that are then coming on board and being part of a bigger movement? Who could we partner up with that would already make us 100 times the size? All these different elements, these things, ways of thinking about scale are very scary or even unbelievable to someone who's still
Starting point is 01:30:49 at the point where it's like, I'm still just trying to figure out just how to make enough for my family. But when you're in the right environment with those areas where things are scaling and growing, which is where the world is going. And it's what I love about all the different areas of the singularity that you've built and the way that you've got, you know, all these different industries that themselves are huge, achieving moonshots and going exponential and the learnings that happen across different disciplines, right? That's where the real learning comes in at the moment, I believe. I've learned so much by watching what's happening within the longevity movement or what's happening within, you know, not just education, but entertainment and seeing just how much you can learn from what other people are figuring out within those areas, which did not used to be how things were, where university makes you specialize or make you specialize.
Starting point is 01:31:36 And so you miss out on the mindset you can be learning versus just the knowledge. versus just the knowledge. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians.
Starting point is 01:31:57 You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers.
Starting point is 01:32:29 We have four across the U.S. today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full-body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning. When it's solvable, you're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times
Starting point is 01:33:27 bestseller Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. So let's talk about why an exponential mindset is important. I'll throw out the first, and I'd love your thoughts. Every business, company, industry is going to be disrupted and reinvented this decade.
Starting point is 01:34:20 No company, no industry is going to survive the convergence of AI, robotics, AR, VR, blockchain. They're going to be reinvented. And there's a constant force towards massive demonetization and democratization. And so you're either disrupting yourself or someone else is. And so putting on this exponential mindset hat and saying, how will we disrupt ourselves? What will it take? How do we bring down our cost tenfold?
Starting point is 01:34:52 How do we increase our market reach tenfold and then a hundredfold and a thousandfold? And how do we make stuff free? I think is a trained inquiry that entrepreneurs need to be taking on or you're not going to survive. You agree with that? I totally agree with that. And I and I think I think the moment you you look at exponential areas of our entire society and say they're going to be inevitable. And like this is where it gets really interesting. The whole of basically or everyone trying to fight for a piece of the pie Versus realizing we're in a bakery where you can just keep on baking. Yes, right. So yeah, so because of that look at something like
Starting point is 01:35:39 Electric cars, right if you say well It's inevitable that you're actually going to have the cost of solar power continuing to come down, that you're going to have the ability for batteries to be able to continue to become more efficient. It's inevitable that eventually it's going to be far better on the economics for there to be electric cars than fossil fuel cars. You can say the same thing about cryptocurrencies, right? And the idea that if you have basically instantaneous settlements and you also have the ability to have distributed trust, it's inevitable. Take education. It's inevitable that in education, all content will eventually be free, right? Because it's already going that way. And the best teachers will be AIs. Exactly right. So when you say, well, that's inevitable, it's just a matter of when, then you can already be gearing up for being in the right place, right time, rather than later on going, well, that was a surprise because it wasn't a surprise, right?
Starting point is 01:36:28 And I think that's where your 60s are exactly about understanding and predicting where we're going to be seeing exponential growth because things actually become free of charge and they become fully decentralized. Let me take a second and explain the six Ds. Thank you for that. So I wrote about this in either Abundance or Bold. And the first D is digitization. We're digitizing everything. We're digitizing architecture, biology, manufacturing. Everything is getting digitized and everything.
Starting point is 01:37:04 And one of the things that as an entrepreneur you should be looking at is if you see something that's not getting digitized and everything. And one of the things that as an entrepreneur, you should be looking at is if you see something that's not yet digitized, mark that as a massive opportunity. And when you make things ones and zeros, in the early days, it's slow and deceptive growth. The deceptive is your second D. So that first digital camera, the first year was 0.01 megapixels. Next year was 0.02 and 0.04 and 0.08. And to the board of Kodak, it all looked like zero. It was a flat line. And you might not actually blame them for laughing at this thing that is on a tape drive and black and white images. But 30 doublings later, it's a billion times better and film is gone. And so the third D is disruption. So digitize something early days, it's deceptive. Same thing in 3D printing. I remember the early 3D printing, how slow it was
Starting point is 01:38:03 and how limited it was in the materials, the plastics that were used. And now we early 3D printing, how slow it was and how limited it was in the materials, the plastics that were used. And now we're 3D printing at extraordinary rates across all kinds of colors and materials. And it's like amazing, nirvana, 3D printing. The same thing in AI. AI is 60 years old. It was first conceived of at a conference in Dartmouth in 1956. And you had this slow, slow, slow progression.
Starting point is 01:38:25 And now all of a sudden it's here and it's disrupting everything. So you're going to see this over and over again. And the fourth D is what I call dematerialization. And dematerialization is the things that used to be atoms and are now becoming bits, right? So on your phone, the proverbial example is that we have thousands of dollars,
Starting point is 01:38:49 millions of dollars of free things that used to be a video camera, used to be a thing, a collection of books and records, two-way video conferencing equipment. It wasn't long ago that that would have cost you tens of thousands of dollars and it's now free on FaceTime or free apps out there.
Starting point is 01:39:07 So all of these things become fully dematerialized. And they are ones and zeros. And when they become ones and zeros, the cost of replication is effectively zero. And it's demonetized. And then because they can go everywhere, they're democratized. And so as an entrepreneur with an exponential mindset, you're looking at how do I digitize something to dematerialize it, demonetize it, democratize it. And if you're a linear thinker, if you're an old school thinker, it scares the shit out of you, right? Because it's, oh my God, my margin's
Starting point is 01:39:39 gone. My business is gone. It's going to be gone. It's just a matter of, are you going to inherit the next iteration or someone else? Yes. I think it's super interesting as well, because for many people, when they hear about the 60s, it can make you think, oh, does that mean everything's going to just be automated and free? And the reality is a lot will be, but it also then transforms industry. So you take something like the travel industry. And I remember like listening to you 10 years ago and thinking, Hmm, this is going to totally change the way that people are operating online because the money's going to move, right? It's not going to, it's true. No one goes and pays for a travel agent now to just basically book your flight,
Starting point is 01:40:19 right? Cause that all just happens automatically. And it's much faster, it's much cheaper to just automatically, but that doesn't mean there aren't more people in the travel industry that have just gone to the experience side. Now, there's the tour operators. Now, they're the ones that are actually creating even better hospitality and you're willing to pay more money for that than before. And education is the same thing. Like the teachers, they're not the ones who are transactional saying, I'm just going to teach you what's in a textbook. Because you can just basically get that from a video online much, much more effectively with kind of gamification. But someone that can guide you and personalize
Starting point is 01:40:48 and make it transformational for you, they're all going in that direction as well. So for sure, this is about not just saying, well, if the way I'm making money right now is going to have to change because the whole industry is changing, that doesn't mean people aren't spending money. They're just spending it more on quality instead of quantity.
Starting point is 01:41:03 And that's a really important thing. How are business models changing as a result of these so that you don't end up basically just being bad? Again, going back to business models, in Exponential Organizations 2.0 that Salim and I released earlier this year, we talk about the concept of better than free. And it's the concepts that come from this. It's personalization, right, to a large degree. And there's a whole slew of elements that, yes, it's free, but I'm going to pay for added elements to it that take this freemium opportunity
Starting point is 01:41:41 and make it even more valuable to me. Just a quick story about this whole thing about shifting mindset and how all these mindsets link with each other. I was in South Africa. This would have been about 2016, so a while back. And we were at a conference there. And at that point, South Africa, a lot of the entrepreneurs, business people were super negative about the country.
Starting point is 01:42:03 You know, it's fine for you to come from overseas, talk about opportunities elsewhere. But here in South Africa, a lot of the entrepreneurs, business people were super negative about the country. They're like, you know, it's fine for you to come from overseas, talk about like, you know, opportunities elsewhere. But here in South Africa, not so easy. Politics makes it difficult. Economy makes it difficult. Our RAND exchange rate makes it difficult. And I'm like, guys, this is all mindset. Like this is, if you think this way, it's going to be true, right? But you also happen to be on the seat of the fastest growing continent in the world and has the highest density of entrepreneurs in the world. And you're talking in this way, right? And we had just gone on a safari like the weekend before in Kruger. And it was just incredible. And the experience we had, and we're talking about just the elements of like how nature works and how you can
Starting point is 01:42:38 fit that into the idea of business. So I said on stage, I said, I'm going to be investing into South Africa. And it just came to me in my head. It's like, we're going to get a safari here, right? And everyone just gave a standing ovation, like we're going to bring money into the country and everything like this. But I got off the stage and my team were like, Roger, you know, you just said we're going to buy a safari. And I'm like, yeah, we are. Like, I'm just committed to this place.
Starting point is 01:42:57 We're going to make it happen. They're like, how? I go, I have no idea how. We'll see. And then someone came up from the audience and said, are you serious about getting a safari? And I'm like, sure I am. And he goes, well, because like and said, are you serious about getting a safari? And I'm like, sure I am. And he goes, well, because like my friend is one of the best real estate agents for safaris. I said, well, then let's book up a call where we can go and
Starting point is 01:43:13 go through the whole thing. So we did. He goes, you do realize you can't get a mortgage for safaris. You're going to pay full cash for this thing, right? It's going to cost you a lot of money. And I'm like, okay, well, we'll figure out a way, right? But like, just book up where we can go see them. So the next trip I came back, we had a number of different ones we went to have a look at. And there was one absolutely beautiful one in a place called Midikwi Game Lodge. And I met up with the owners there
Starting point is 01:43:32 and I was looking at the price tag. And I'm like, I don't know, like this thing was what? 5 million. And I'm like, that means putting down 5 million cash. I said, but actually, I'm going to basically make a commitment that we're going to buy it. It's going to give enough time
Starting point is 01:43:43 for uncertainty becomes certainty, right? So I said, okay, so two years, we'll do it. And we'll do some vendor financing. And then from there, I then, on the next event we had, just said, hey, guys, who wants to be one of the investors here? We had some people who said, we could be interested, but we've got to see the numbers. We brought them all out to have a look at the place. And I said, hey, I'll tell you what, we're going to run some conferences and events at a Safari just like this to show that we can actually bring in the business. And if we do that, would you be willing to invest? And they said, well, yeah, prove you can do it first. So we did it. We could see that
Starting point is 01:44:12 we could make it work. They then basically said the problem is that, you know, this whole thing could be taken away by the government if they want to. I'm like, all right, what's the way around this? And one of them said, well, have you thought of basically bringing all of your different resort ideas together into one? And on that weekend, they came up have you thought of basically bringing all of your different resort ideas together into one? And on that weekend, they came up with the idea of us bringing it all together in one. I went back to Johannesburg and someone says, hey, we can list the company and actually get us started to raise the money that you need to do this. So by 2017, we did an IPO of the whole company. We raised the funds.
Starting point is 01:44:40 It allowed us to get the whole thing started. And then we saw what the real value is, is the fact that we're bringing entrepreneurs from different parts of the world. That entrepreneur resource company now is part of our new stock exchange company. We're now spitting it off into a separate company. And we've got licenses of people who currently run resorts and cafes that are now willing to pay to have a license for entrepreneur resource to be building. And it's become this multimillion dollar business
Starting point is 01:45:05 that all came from basically just this absolute commitment. We want to help South Africa, right? I absolutely love that. And by the way, I fully agree that Africa is a rising star, massive rising star. The youth, the entrepreneurial energy there, the resources, India. I think China's waning, India is rising, and Africa is right behind it.
Starting point is 01:45:32 There's this hungry energy, which is really a core part of entrepreneurship, largely because for a lot of them, like, hey, I've got nothing to lose. And that is one of the biggest challenges of mindset. the biggest challenges of mindset. If you think that you have something to lose, then you're never going to take the steps, which don't even have to be risks, actually, but they're more about what you're willing to give up on in order to go on to the next step. And it's also just the getting your mind into that creative space. It is possible. I don't know how yet, but I know I'm going to solve it. Yeah. Now, Africa, just another example is, you know, it was not 20 years ago, 20, 25 years ago, where, you know, it was like a seven-year waiting time to get a landline from the PTT, of course. And then, boom, mobile explodes. That's right, yeah.
Starting point is 01:46:20 Huge opportunity. And we're going to see, you know, these greenfield reinventions of industries. I'm waiting for eVTOL. You know, one of the biggest challenges with Africa is the road system, you know, from the, from the rains and so forth are awful, but let's skip building roads and, and fly through the air, right? That's coming not too far down. So on the exponential mindset, um, uh, you know, how do we cultivate it? Let's talk about that. I think one of the ways to cultivate it again is by who you hang out with. Yes. Um, so, you know, one of the things I'm really focused on at abundance 360 and you are a genius. You is, uh, is pulling people together and showing example after example after example of how an exponential mindset reinvents this company, reinvents this industry and get people to start to think about it.
Starting point is 01:47:17 I think it's it's really forcing people to think about how would I digitize every aspect of my business and what does that mean? Do you have other means by which you might cultivate an exponential mindset? I think what's super interesting is this whole idea of how what you think might be big to someone else is small. That whole conversation. Oh, and also, you know, what you were saying about Steve Jobs earlier. Yeah. But also recently, like at the Abundance abundance 360 when you had tony robinson stage and he was talking about his moonshot about 100 billion meals right and where it started with a billion meals in fact it's not 100 million meals and then and then a billion and when when they were getting together
Starting point is 01:47:59 say well we've now achieved a billion meals what's next 10? 10 billion? And he said, well, what would it look like if it had to be 100 billion? Because you know how big an issue this is. And when they started thinking that way and thinking, well, we can't solve this the same way we've been solving it. So we're talking about a much, much bigger moonshot. But at the same time, if we're going to go down this route, who out there would be willing to sponsor 100 million meals, right? Like there's people giving away in the givingledge billions of dollars. And so, you know, connecting up with the Forbes Summit, like, you know, connecting up with the people that had the money
Starting point is 01:48:31 and then bringing together the solutions, right? And working together with the guys out in India that figured out smarter ways to actually go to scale, right? Working together with Feeding America, working together with UNICEF, and where they already had models that they were already working at scale on as well. No question that scale is all relative. So if you really care enough about something and you can see things going exponential,
Starting point is 01:48:55 there already are people there who are thinking about the consequences of that. And it's usually not the government, right? It's usually the entrepreneurs at that level. Probably the most impressive exponential thinker I've met besides Ray Kurzweil is Elon. And he uses something called first principle thinking. So remember, I was at a lunch with him and the head of Fiat. And Elon was talking about the early days of of tesla and when they went after the roadster um they assumed that the lotus body would work and that the batteries would get better and better um and it turned out the
Starting point is 01:49:38 lotus body didn't work and the batteries that he planned had to be changed. And he was in so deep at that point financially that he couldn't go backwards. He had to go forwards. And so they had to reinvent everything as he's done over and over again. But the element of zero of a first principle thinking is he went and calculated what is the spot price of the cobalt and the lithium and the nickel that you would need to create these batteries if you were to buy those those materials in bulk off of a particular exchange uh and then what is the price today for the battery you realize it was a massive reduction that was possible and so that gave him the the faith that they could do that. The same thing in SpaceX,
Starting point is 01:50:28 when he went to Russia to go and buy a rocket and realized these guys were selling 50-year-old ICBMs, they took the warhead off and they put your payload on, they were charging a ridiculous amount of money, and you throw the whole thing away. If we look back at first principle thinking, what if we could make a reusable engine that could be fired hundreds of times and reuse this thing, how low could we make the price? And that gives you the confidence to look at the exponential curves that will get you to the price point and the market size, the nirvana that you want. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think, I mean, you're absolutely right.
Starting point is 01:51:10 Like the way he explains it and the way he thinks of everything from scratch, not just in terms of what the pricing is now, but what it could be in a year or two based on technology and how that's changing as well. And really what that's all about is, again, challenging current mindsets or current worldviews that people have had based on old structures and old systems. And I think that probably that's one of the biggest things in all of these mindsets is like we said, like we really got a mindset, but if you've got a mindset that's been taught
Starting point is 01:51:37 to you or that's been drilled into you, which isn't serving you, you've got a question and saying, what am I actually believing? A belief is simply a thought which comes with certainty, right? It's like so am I really certain about that belief or is there an actual different way to do this and we see all the biggest breakthroughs Happen when someone has questioned something shifted it and then people go why didn't I think of that? Right like that that that's something that anyone could have thought of But it comes down to basically quality like you say not of the answers but of the questions that we're asking
Starting point is 01:52:03 Yeah, no, agreed. An exponential mindset isn't easy. Our brains are wired for linear thinking, right? We evolved on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago, and the world was very local and linear. It was local because nothing affected you that was not within a day's walk unless it was an asteroid strike on the planet. And nothing changed generation to generation, millennium to millennium. So our brains are wired in a linear fashion. Our brains are wired of I'm here and there's a lion here. Can I get to the tree before the lion gets to me? I mean, fundamentally. And today we are continually surprised, disrupted, blown away by this exponential change. So even I tell people, listen,
Starting point is 01:52:53 we're going to see a hundred years, a century worth of change in the next 10 years. What does that look like? And despite the fact that we'll talk about that, people have typically an inability to think beyond a linear extrapolation of today. Yes. Yes. And it's really tough.
Starting point is 01:53:13 I think, I mean, I love the whole story of the rice and the chessboard, right? Yes. And that whole idea for anyone who hasn't heard it, that the inventor of the game of chess, so the power goes, basically he went to the king of India and says, here's this great game I've made on chess. And the king goes, well, this is an amazing game. Like, how much do you want for this?
Starting point is 01:53:38 Like, you know, you name your price. And he goes, well, just give me a grain of rice on the first square and then just double it on the second square. Once we're up to six, four squares, I'm good. And he's like, perfect, no problem, right? We'll give it to you, right? And then when you actually work out exactly how much that is, and the first half of the chess board, as it doubles up, you end up with maybe a field full of rice. It's 10,000 kilograms of rice. That's right. That's right. But by the time you get to the second half of the chess board and you
Starting point is 01:53:59 keep on multiplying it, you end with basically a mountain of rice bigger than Mount Everest and more than ever rice has ever been created in all humankind. And so of course, when the emperor hears this, then he chops off the guy's head, right? But that whole story that there's someone who understands multiplying. And we do this as an exercise with entrepreneurs we're working with, if they really are in that exponential mindset where they're saying, I want to go for something much bigger. Let's say someone says, okay, I want to make an impact to a million people, or I want to make a million dollars. We'll see where they're at right now. Maybe they're at 10, maybe they're at a hundred.
Starting point is 01:54:30 Let's say, okay, well, how many more zeros do you need to add to this, right? And it's super interesting because even the word zero, because like if you are at a hundred or a thousand, let's say, and you wanted to get, you know, how many more zeros you need, you only need four more zeros and you're at a million, right? Like, so it's like, okay, so each of these is a paradigm shift, right? Okay. What does it look like when you're 10 times more zeros you need you only need four more zeros and you're at a million right like so it's like okay so each of these is a paradigm shift right okay what does it look like when you're 10 times more what's it look like when you're 10 times more okay how long is it going to take you to take four steps it's only four steps right okay maybe one year for each of those steps um and the word zero comes from zafiro which is basically a placeholder in uh in in the sufi system and it was uh the it was the um the Earl of Pibonacci, right?
Starting point is 01:55:07 Earl of Pisa, who basically brought this into the numbering system in the West. And Zephyro broke up into two things. It broke up into the placeholder zero because before that, it wasn't in the numbering system. And it also broke into Cypher, which is basically code. So for example, if I go to Japan and I don't speak Japanese, I haven't decoded it, then all of it means nothing to me.
Starting point is 01:55:29 But if I learn that language, suddenly it opens up a whole new world. And so each of these paradigms or mindsets shift you to a different level where that allows you to then go up, you know, another zero. It's nothing. Now it's everything. Next one, nothing. Now it's everything. And once you do that, it's like, wow, I've just got four steps to take and I can get to that exponential growth. So if you're thinking I've got to add, you're going to constantly add complexity,
Starting point is 01:55:52 you're never going to get there. But if you're just simplifying and then multiplying simplicity, it's like, oh, we do this, that can multiply very quickly. Then you can get much bigger, much faster, right? And that to me is what exponential thinking is all about. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology,
Starting point is 01:56:30 how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandus.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. All right. One of my favorite mindsets. Let's go to our next one, the abundance mindset.
Starting point is 01:57:15 Um, you know, I was, I came across the abundance idea that led me to then go write my first book with Steven Kotler and then launch the abundance conference. I was at Singularity University. I remember I was with Ray Kurzweil and Neil Jacob Stein, who was heading our AI group, and we're having a conversation and the conversation went something like this. Everything is becoming more abundant. Great. Okay. Interesting idea, but show it to me. And the realization was that technology was a force that turned scarcity into abundance.
Starting point is 01:57:57 And we started talking about this over this lunch. And it was like, my favorite example is, you know, we used to go and kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights then we ravaged mountains to get coal then we drilled kilometers under the ground and now we're you know living on a planet with 8 000 times more energy uh from that hits the surface of the sun than we consume as a species and now we're about to unlock fusion energy right so there's this massive abundance of energy. And you said it slightly earlier, I give two examples of an abundance mindset and how technology can unlock abundance. So I'm 5'4", if I have an orange tree in the backyard and I go and I reach for all the
Starting point is 01:58:43 oranges I can reach. At some point I reached everything I can and oranges are now scarce until I invent a ladder that gives me higher reach. Now oranges are abundant again. The other example I give is if you have a pie that you've baked and you've got, you know, you had expected four people over for dinner, but eight showed up. All of a sudden you got to slice the pie into thinner and thinner slices and abundance mindset is no screw that we're just going to bake more pies. And so this is what technology enables us to do, right? Go from film photography, which is expensive, expensive. Remember the days you used to like,
Starting point is 01:59:20 hope you got that photograph and you'd pay for all of the photos to get printed. And now you just take a thousand photographs and, you know, hopefully you got, you know, the one you can see it right then and there. So I believe there is nothing truly, truly scarce that you can flip everything into an abundance mindset. I'll give one last piece, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. And it's the notion that the core wiring of our brain,
Starting point is 01:59:53 our default thinking, right, that evolved again 100,000 years ago on the savannas of Africa, was a scarcity mindset and a fear mindset, because that's what saved our lives. Scarcity, you would hoard because you never knew where your next meal was coming from. Fear because there was clear and present danger everywhere. And so that mindset is we're always battling against that as our default mindset.
Starting point is 02:00:19 How do you define abundance in your mind? How do you define abundance in your mind? I'm totally with you that abundance and lack. And lack is one of the most debilitating sense because then you're always feeling you have to hold on, right? Like, I got to keep my piece of this pie. We have one of the docu-series that I'm working on with Jeff Hayes and the docu-series company that's now part of Genius Group is about the wealth gap. Because I think a lot of people think of the wealth gap and the idea that some people are getting richer, like, as you say, a pie, right?
Starting point is 02:00:53 Because if it's a pie and that person's getting richer, it means I must be getting poorer, right? Like their money is coming from somewhere. And if instead of thinking about it like the pie where you've got this fixed thing and we realize just how much new money has been printed, we realize how much new creativity has come into the marketplace like this is not a zero-sum game and you think about it a little bit more like an actual race where you've got two people and they're running and one person figures out you know what i could actually
Starting point is 02:01:16 build a bike right and then now they're cycling and then and then because they figured out they didn't have to run and now they've built a bike they go well actually i could build a car actually i could build a rocket ship and so now they're going so far ahead by the end of the race the wealth gap is so high now you don't have to kick this person off his rocket ship for this person to go faster you're not gonna go faster right but there's nothing stopping you from also having a bike or also having a rocket ship right and and you can learn from that and do that and that i think is exactly like baking more pies it's like it's like knowing that no one's necessarily taking something away unless it seriously is zero sum that's that the government or someone has made it or the education system makes only x number of people get an a so
Starting point is 02:01:53 then the only way you get one is someone doesn't get one but those are manufactured games right i love this such an important so this this wealth poor gap again i gap, again, I want to double down on this because I think it's an important conversation for everybody to understand because I do believe we're heading towards a world where we can meet the needs of every man, woman, and child and create abundance, not a world of luxury for everybody, but a world of possibility, a really important distinction. For most of human history, it was the king and the queen on the hill, the pharaoh, the emperor, whatever you want, and everyone else in squalor.
Starting point is 02:02:32 And it was very little at the top and mass majority. Now we've moved people into middle class and so forth. And yes, we're also spreading the wealth gap, meaning people are getting wealthier at the top faster than the majority. But there's going to be a point where there will be billionaires living on Mars and everybody has access to all the food, water, energy, you know, education that they want and need. And the wealth gap will be huge. But does it really matter if everybody's, if the base of this pyramid has been raised to a point of abundance for everybody? That's what I'm working for, right? It's very interesting this, because everything you're sharing and even this whole idea of
Starting point is 02:03:25 of this wealth gap you know being erased like there'll be people listening to this who'll be like look that's that's fine to talk about but the game is rigged and i can't even get to pay even with my business my job for what's needed based on the cost of living right and uh it's super interesting because there has to be a systemic change, or at least in small groups, if not the whole nation. I was speaking, this was probably about 2009, 2010, with a group in London. And this was at the time when there was these London riots that were taking place.
Starting point is 02:03:55 And it was for very much the same reason that there's a lot of civil unrest in the US right now. Just this sense of unfairness that the system is rigged. And they were all fighting, They were looting the stores. And they were saying, this is what's going to happen with the singularity. When AI comes in and the super rich get even richer, we're going to have a meltdown of society. And I said, well, it's kind of interesting because coming from Bali, where I was living
Starting point is 02:04:19 at that time, and in Bali, there really is no poverty. Even though if you took the theory that if someone's under $2 a day, then they're in poverty. In Bali, because everyone lives in banjars, which are groups of 100 families, and they all look after each other. No one goes wanting. Everyone gets their eat, right? If someone doesn't have a job, they'll look after no problem until they find a job. In fact, the work job is basically the second job they have. The first job is the village job.
Starting point is 02:04:44 And the village job is the fact they have festivals every week or second week. Some are dancers, some are singers, some are musicians. And everyone has a role to play, which is meaningful. And then the fact that they might make some money and that's part of it, that's not the biggest reason of why they're actually living in the society. And when people from outside come in and you realize, wow, like I can't spend money in luxuries because no one's driving a Ferrari and no one's got a big house. Everyone's just loving the fact that they've got sunshine, they've got sea, they've got
Starting point is 02:05:11 paradise. And if you've got extra time, because why are you going to make all that extra money? The real key thing is what's your job going to be? Not a job in terms of paid production, because that means you're always going to be out of a job, but paid self-expression. Like, what is it that I want to do? I want to work with my child at school. I want to learn a new musical instrument. I want to work in the fields. I want to start a business.
Starting point is 02:05:35 Like, whatever it is you want to do, you can do it, but it's because it's what's most meaningful for you, not because it's what you need to do to make money and then retire. And I think that that's a whole reshaping where we're seeing this in groups in the US, right, where groups are getting together and saying, let's just rethink what we're even trying to achieve here. And I think that's an absolutely necessary part of abundance. Coming to terms with the fact that everything already is abundant. I'll share one extra piece on this that is really important, which is there's a huge difference of peddling in lack lack resources versus sharing abundant resources.
Starting point is 02:06:08 So money. If I have $100 and I want to share $100 with you, I'm left with $50, right? So that's a scarce resource. If I have an idea and I share an idea with you, it doesn't become half an idea, right? It grows in size. If I have a connection and I make that connection and I share it with you, hey, Peter, go speak with this guy, right? That doesn't mean I have half a connection, right? It's become a stronger connection both ways.
Starting point is 02:06:29 Trust has grown, right? If I share responsibility, if I share power, all these things allow you to grow. And the people I see who have abundance mindset, they choose to share abundant resources, which means the more they share them, the more they grow. Whereas those who have a zero-sum mindset, they won't share anything because they think that anything they're sharing is going to make them have less. And then they're focusing at scarce resources versus focusing on abundant resources. Beautiful. Absolutely true. And I think about the friends of mine who I'm the closest with. they are entering every conversation giving first.
Starting point is 02:07:06 Yes. Right? They are sharing, they're supporting, what can I do for you? And they're coming with an abundance mindset. You know, the realization is exponential technology. I was tweeting and texting with Elon and talking about abundance, which is a concept he talks about and he loves. And I said, when are we going to have abundance?
Starting point is 02:07:32 He goes after AGI, right? So artificial general intelligence. And it's true. You know, the things we spend money on right now, the best physicians and the best teachers in the world will be AI, which is going to be effectively free, right? When you have an autonomous electric car, the cost of transportation is a quarter of what it is if you own a car. You know, the things that we want, I mean, the ultimate, and there's a book called Zero Marginal Society by Jeremy Rifkin that talks about where are we going eventually in a post-capitalist society
Starting point is 02:08:06 when I've got nanotechnology, right? And I can take a nanobot and make you one, and you can drop it in the soil and say, make me an electric Ferrari. And what does it need? It needs energy, and we're going to have a massive, squanderable abundance of energy. It needs information design. Well, lots of open source design available. You know, information is becoming more and more free and needs the raw materials.
Starting point is 02:08:30 And you might pay for some raw materials, but it's in tens of dollars, not tens of millions of dollars. Yeah. So this is a future coming our way. It's hard for people to see that. It's extremely hard yeah we we forget uh how we are creating abundance in our lives that we then take for granted right um the ability to turn on the faucet and get water versus go down to the creek for an hour to get water is buying you back an hour of time the ability to you, you know, it used to be
Starting point is 02:09:05 if you wanted to do a research project, you'd drive to the library, hope they had the book, then go find the book. Now you just Google and a few seconds later you have. So we're buying back time. We'll talk about a longevity mindset, which is for me adding decades onto your life. And typically, you know,
Starting point is 02:09:23 so I don't think there's anything truly scarce, right? Time is the most precious of them, but there are ways to buy back that time or to make time more efficient because no matter who you are on the planet, the wealthiest person or the poorest person, we all only have 24 hours in a day. That's right.
Starting point is 02:09:44 It's how you use your time that differentiates the wealthy and the less wealthy. Yeah. So how do you get an abundance mindset? It's a tough one. It's a super tough one. And the metaphor that I like to use because then people really get to see
Starting point is 02:10:00 where they sit in this spectrum is the metaphor of the candle, right? Because this candle has two parts. It has the wax and it has the flame and and really abundance mindset is realizing it costs a candle nothing to light another candle right like it's like nothing and it can just keep on growing but there's a zero sum part of the candle which is the wax right so if you've only got this much wax and okay can i share my candle with anyone else if you're in that wax well first of all you can't see clearly right because it's wax but secondly um you're not going to want to give any of the wax to anyone else because you're going to end up with less but if you realize that
Starting point is 02:10:32 as you say the whole turning from material to immaterial right this whole idea that the whole point of the wax is to turn into flame uh and this is why we talk about igniting your genius right that we've all got a genius inside that most of us aren't even aware of we're taking for granted right but if we actually were to ignite it, and for what reason? To light others, right? And then you realize, oh, that was the whole point of the candle in the first place. The abundance is in the ability to be able to pass on the light to others. The lack or the idea that I don't have enough is the idea that I need to hold on to the wax, even at the expense of turning off the candle, right? Turning off the light so that I can actually hold on to more wax. at the expense of turning off the candle right turning off the light so that i can actually hold on to more wax and then of course you never
Starting point is 02:11:07 get anywhere in life there's a there's a story which um for me really brings us home to the heart because i think abundance is all about the heart as well um and it's a story which came out in our library we have a library at our resort in bali and it's kind of one of these magic libraries where people come in they donate their books and so i always finding new books in Bali and it's kind of one of these magic libraries where people come in, they donate their books. So I was always finding new books in there and there was one that someone had come from India and I only ever saw this book once and then someone must have taken it. But there was a chapter in the book which was a story of a raindrop. And the way the story goes is that, you know, one day it's raining and this raindrop for the first time is a raindrop and it's kind of like falling out of the sky and it plops
Starting point is 02:11:43 down onto a jetty going out to sea. And it's like, wow, this is cool. I'm a raindrop. This is amazing, right? And it's looking around all these other raindrops. And then as it looks around, it sees that there are other drops that never get to be a raindrop because they go past the jetty right into the sea, right? So suddenly, it's like, this is terrible, right? Like, I may not be here forever, right? And so there's an aspect of this whole idea of abundance, which also comes with the fear of mortality, right? It's like, I've got to hold on to what I have, because everything's transient. And so as it's like worried about this, it notices that the wind is picking up. And there are there are drops which are blowing off the jetty into the sea. And it's like, Oh, my God, if I don't hold on tight, I'm going to end up disappearing totally. And so it's now trying to hold on and trying to be small, which lots of us do. And as it's like oh my god if i don't hold on tight i'm gonna end up disappearing totally and
Starting point is 02:12:25 so it's now trying to hold on and trying to be small which lots of us do and as it's doing that just trying to hold on it notices that the sun's coming out and even the ones that are holding on are evaporating so now it's like oh my god like now what do i do i either go to choose to actually jump and take the leap of faith or i've got to basically just stay here and i'm just going to evaporate anyway and so then it's, now I've got a big choice. What do I do? And it's thinking about it and thinks, well, like, I know for sure I'm going to evaporate here, but I don't actually know what happens if I go in the sea.
Starting point is 02:12:52 Like, I think I'm going to disappear, but maybe I'm still a drop. I don't know. So it decides at the end, it's going to take the courage to just jump and go for it. So it lifts itself up. The wind comes, picks it up. It flies off. It braces itself. itself up the wind comes picks it up it flies off it braces itself and then the moment it hits the sea it realizes it hasn't disappeared and in fact has become the whole ocean yes right and and and
Starting point is 02:13:13 this this like pretty much every religion every spiritual experience has got within this this sense of true abundance right that that that we're that we're not a drop in the ocean, we're the whole ocean in a drop. Every leader I know, everyone who's ever shaped this world has come in with that level of energy. And it's that energy of always having more to give, right? Because there's always more, which then makes the universe work through, right? Because that is the key to all of this, is the consciousness of being aware that the mindset which allows us to be able to really have an impact on others is only when we expand ourselves to the size that they are as well. That's beautiful. You know, I think a mission for entrepreneurs, I define an entrepreneur as
Starting point is 02:13:59 someone who finds a problem and solves it, right, ultimately. And so the more entrepreneurs, the more problems that are solved. I also think entrepreneurs are ultimately today, exponential entrepreneurs are about creating massive abundance in the world, right? If you look at the greatest entrepreneurs, you know, whoever you might think of, Steve Jobs, you know, when you have millions of dollars of free apps on your phone. It's a massive amount of abundance. And so the question is, where is there scarcity in your life? Where is there scarcity in your company, in your industry
Starting point is 02:14:39 that you can turn into abundance? Someone is going to do it. And if you can, there is massive opportunity. And it isn't about the idea of charging for that, but it's the business models that are wrapped around it. And so, you know, for me, I'm working a lot of my energy right now, Roger, is in the healthcare space, building fountain life. And how do I constantly demonetize and democratize? So it's super expensive to have all of your upload, 150 gigabytes of data and imaging and so forth. But my job is to leap ahead and figure out how do we eventually provide that
Starting point is 02:15:27 to everybody for free, right? And what are the steps in the decadal decrease in price and increasing capability? And it's a challenge. It's going to take 10 years, but we're going to get there. And so I encourage entrepreneurs to be thinking about how do you take something that's scarce? The typical consulting business is one where you put your arms and barricades around a group of individuals and you meter them out a little bit at a time. Yeah. By the hour, expensive, or a law firm, whatever the case might be. And of course, here comes AI that is going to disrupt that entire business. It's going to become effectively the best legal advice, the best consulting advice is going to be your AI engine that you've built. So scarcity to abundance, it's really overcoming this core mindset that we have of fear and scarcity. And this,
Starting point is 02:16:26 you know, we're heading towards a world in a world of abundance. It's a world for me, that's more peaceful, more loving, where every mother knows that her children have access to all the food, water and health care education that they need. And that's really a world that I want to help create. Absolutely. I think, you know, there's no better truth than the one that says, you know, a man, you get to see the true measure of man when they have everything or when they have nothing. You know, and this whole aspect about like, what does abundance look like? Sometimes it's
Starting point is 02:17:03 almost the opposite. There's this kind of thought exercise, which is very interesting one, which is what would happen given that, you know, we're all kind of like in this rat race of one form or another, unless we somehow transcend it, what would happen if tomorrow we woke up and the entire monetary system of the world
Starting point is 02:17:17 had collapsed and you couldn't use a dollar, you couldn't use a pound, you couldn't use anything, what would then happen, right? And it's super interesting because every time I've ever had that conversation with people, for some people, there's actually a level of relief, right? It's like, okay, that's good.
Starting point is 02:17:29 I'm not chasing. But the second thing is no one thinks, oh, we might as well just pack our bags and die, right? It's like, no, we'd figure it out, right? We'd actually find ways that we can trade value with each other. We'd look after each other. We'd bring everyone along on the ride. And we realized how much we're kind of in a game at the moment, which is the musical chairs game where we think they're going to get taken away, where what we would actually do if we actually were to be in a world where we were actually
Starting point is 02:17:54 having to figure it out from scratch, like first principles, we would think differently about what we do today, right? Like, let's imagine that, like tomorrow that this would be the case. And you knew that, you know, someone had some, you know, some fruits that people go pick up to eat, right? Someone's got a truck, which basically could go pick up the fruit. Okay, someone who's done really badly by people has got a truck
Starting point is 02:18:16 and someone who's like everyone likes has got a truck. Who are you going to go send for the fruit, right? It's the one that you trust more. Okay, well, if today there's things you can do to be more trusted tomorrow, what would you do? I call this person I speak with. And you realize the behaviors that we ourselves would have to be better human beings. If we actually were living in a world of abundance, where we're not having to chase each other for things, it would be a different world. And the
Starting point is 02:18:37 people already living in abundance, exactly as you said, they're already thinking in that way. They're not waiting for it to happen, but they're creating it through constantly giving, but giving the things that are of highest value. And I'll just share one thing about effective giving, because I think this is where a lot of people get it wrong. It's like I gave and it didn't come back. Well, it's like if I went to a baseball game in San Francisco, and everyone behind the pitcher were all having a glove, because they knew if the ball came back, they weren't throwing the back of the pitch, right? Like if they get the ball, that's it, it's out. So being very aware that if you're playing the game and you're on the pitch and
Starting point is 02:19:14 there's other people playing, even your opposition, they're going to keep the ball in play, right? Because that's how you play the game. You hit it to someone off the pitch, someone outside the line of trust, right? You're never going to see that ball again, right? So it's really important to know there's a whole bunch more spectators than players in any game. And what's going on in the world today is very similar. There's a lot of people who will grab and not want to give back, but that's no reason not to play. That's no reason not to find out who is living this world of abundance and play with them, right? Because they're there and then you're going to be able to win the game together. You get to choose your community. Yes. Choose it wisely.
Starting point is 02:19:50 Mindset number six, purpose-driven mindset. One of my favorites, I think one of yours as well. And I speak about a massive transformative purpose. It's the thing that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going through the day, keeps you going through the night. It's giving your energy to your life. It's at the end of your life looking back, did I live a purpose-driven life? And it's one of the things for me when I think about what I want for my kids most, it is one of the most important things. I want them to be good people, good men. I want them to live a life of purpose where they're self-driven to go and create and uplift humanity.
Starting point is 02:20:39 How do you think about a purpose-driven mindset? I find purpose-driven super interesting because it's the whole basis of everything I've done in my life is what's the bigger purpose and the biggest benefit. Because when you're thinking about, okay, it's very clear, I think to a lot of people that the opposite of abundance is lack, but what is the opposite of a purpose-driven mindset? I personally feel it's an anxiety-driven mindset, right? Because if you don't have a purpose or something you're driving for, then everything's going to feel like it could be better or everything's going to feel like it's not quite right.
Starting point is 02:21:12 And anxiety comes from, it's kind of like, when should I start? How should I start? Bang, if the gun goes for the 100-meter race, you're running, right? Like you're just going, because you know why you're there and you're heading for it. And you don't let yourself get anxious about what could be or how. You don't sweat the small stuff, right? Because you've got something much, much bigger that you're focusing on.
Starting point is 02:21:31 And everything is just either an obstacle or a lesson. That's all, right? So everything gets contextualized. You don't compare to other people because you think I'd like to be more than that because that's not your purpose, right? Your purpose is this. So without having that purpose, which is that really clear direction of why you're here, you're constantly going to, not just yourself, but your whole team is going to get caught up
Starting point is 02:21:50 in all the wrong stuff because you don't have that true north. So I think that has been the, now that isn't how I myself got that purpose-driven mindset. And I got attracted to what you do and how you do because you have such a strong purpose-driven mindset. And then you attract all those people also that have the same thing as well um but for me the the the
Starting point is 02:22:08 kind of like the siren call that stopped me from doing what i was going to do because i was studying to be an architect i was at cambridge university i was thinking at that point this is my life i got to get a profession i'm gonna go get a job i wanted to build buildings so i i love designing so i thought that's what i was going to do. But then I came across Buckminster Fuller. And I remember the first time I met you, I talked about this as well. He created the geodesic dome. So he is an architect, but he's also a futurist. I didn't never heard of a futurist before. And he was talking at that point about the final exam. And he was like saying, like all the world's challenges can be solved with technology because they're all distribution challenges, right?
Starting point is 02:22:46 When we say we have poverty, it isn't that we don't have lots of money. We've got plenty of money. It's just not distributed. Or plenty of food or plenty of energy. All of them, right? So technology can solve these problems. And he was saying even in the 70s, there was already enough technology to solve all the problems, but we weren't solving them. In fact, a lot of them were getting worse.
Starting point is 02:23:00 And he said that wasn't because of technology. That was because of human consciousness. It's our inability to work together to use this power. And he says, and this is not just an exam for humanity. It's the final exam because technology will keep on accelerating. And without using the word singularity, he was pretty much saying there will come a point where judgment day will happen. And at that point, we either have accelerated our consciousness enough to harness technology and we'll know that because we would have solved all those problems. But if we fail the exam, it's because we didn't raise our consciousness, and technology will destroy us. Yes. And I remember
Starting point is 02:23:32 that when I heard that, I was like, holy cow, like, I can't be building business, building buildings, I need to build consciousness, right? And businesses is one of the best ways today to do that. But that shift and me choosing that path was sparked by someone who's very purpose-driven, right? Like his whole life was about that purpose. And I think all of us get impacted in some way where it becomes infectious if you decide on something that becomes your must. Yeah. Let's talk about why a purpose-driven mindset is so important. I'm going to give a couple of examples. First, in this world of increasing abundance,
Starting point is 02:24:08 where, I mean, literally the amount of deals, the amount of opportunities, the amount of amazing things, the amount of mental candy available, if you're not clear about your purpose, your time, your attention is split everywhere. If you're clear about your purpose, your time, your attention is split everywhere. If you're clear about your purpose, you're then able to grab a piece of information, an opportunity, an individual, and if it aligns with your purpose, work together. And if not, you can say it's amazing, but put it aside, right?
Starting point is 02:24:41 So your purpose-driven mindset allows you to properly select and focus in on the opportunities and challenges coming your way. Really important because the number of opportunities and challenges is just skyrocketing. Without a purpose, you'll squander your attention, your time, your capabilities. So that's one important thing for me. your attention, your time, your capabilities. So that's one important thing for me. The second major reason for a purpose-driven mindset is, my experience is I hire for purpose.
Starting point is 02:25:16 You know, if I'm looking at two individuals and I can detect someone who's really driven by a purpose, I don't care where they went to school, I don't care what their experience is, if that's their mindset by a purpose. I don't care where they went to school. I don't care what their experience is. If that's their mindset, their purpose, they're going to excel and exceed against everybody else. And so you can detect that. I love what Jeff Bezos says, that there's two types of entrepreneurs.
Starting point is 02:25:40 There are the missionaries and there's the mercenaries, right? And it's like, you know, the missionaries are doing it for the purpose. The mercenaries are doing it just for the money. And he says, I only ever support the missionaries and there's the mercenaries, right? And it's like, you know, the missionaries are doing it for the purpose. The mercenaries are doing it just for the money. And he says, I only ever support the missionaries, not only because working with purpose-driven people is far more inspiring, but they're actually the ones that end up becoming more successful anyway. They're attracting others that are also more purpose-driven. Yeah, for sure. Other reasons for a purpose-driven mindset in your mind?
Starting point is 02:26:03 Um, other reasons for a purpose-driven mindset in your mind? I, I, I'd like to go back to, um, you know, the thinking that I've been going through cause I, I love your mindset model so much and, and having models, like you say, where there's business models, where there's role models, just gives so much context to where you're going. And I think one of the most important things is coming back to the idea of, uh, uh, Pavlov's hierarchy of needs, where, where, when we started talking about the first couple of mindsets, it was very much about, okay, how do you just make sure the foundational things are happening? So you're not living in fear, living with no foundation, right? Because you've got
Starting point is 02:26:32 gratitude, etc. The next level up from that, which is actually saying, okay, now that I've actually got the kind of like, you know, physical things that I need, I need the safety, right? And that whole thing about knowing, okay, I don't have to worry about if I lose my job because I'm curious I'm always going to find a way to add value right and then after that you then have the whole connection side which is the third aspect up and the whole key there around okay well if you actually have moonshots are going to bring the right people in if you've got you know exponential thinking you're going to attract all the right people through with you and and that leads to the recognition part or the self-esteem part. This final part is self-actualization, right?
Starting point is 02:27:06 And this whole thing about purpose where you realize, okay, well, you can get to a certain level of success outwardly, but inwardly is the real key at the end. Like passion can push you, but purpose will pull you, right? And at times when you look at people go, well, they're clearly not doing for the money.
Starting point is 02:27:22 They've got plenty of money, right? But they keep on going. And that's when you want them to keep on going because that's when they have the greatest impact in the world. It's because of the higher value of what it does to your own spirit by actually being driven by something greater that you can leave a legacy with. You know, doing anything big and bold in the world is hard. And unless you've got that emotional why driving you, you're going to give up. I'm absolutely clear. I mean, I've always been a very purpose-driven. My purpose-driven mindset was around opening up
Starting point is 02:27:50 space and around solving grand challenges, around supporting entrepreneurs, and now around healthspan and longevity. There were a few times in my life where I went after what I considered the equivalent of a get rich quick scheme, you know, and as I got into it and I realized it isn't quick, uh, and it's hard and they don't give a shit about it. Right. And then I was like, okay, just drop that right here and right now. And often those, whatever those schemes are, whatever those projects are, they will attract the wrong people. Yeah. And so as a result, they become zero sum. So even if you think you're going to make the money, you end up losing even faster. Right. And this is so, and your time is your precious. So one of the things as well is when you're working on something that's purpose-driven,
Starting point is 02:28:34 um, and you love it and it's calling to you, even at the end, if it doesn't succeed, you have learned so much, you've grown so much. You've fed your heart and your mind, and you have met amazing people on that same journey in life so that it's been a win, even if the business doesn't succeed in that regard. Really critically important. So I talk about a massive transformative purpose, And I define it, my massive transformative purpose today is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity. So when I, you know, I teach at Abundance360 to define your MTP. And I like to think about it as having someone you're serving.
Starting point is 02:29:27 It comes very much back to Ikigai that you mentioned earlier. So who are you going to serve? For me, it's primarily serving entrepreneurs. How are you going to serve them? What is it that calls to you that you're good at? I love inspiring and guiding them, right? So the work with the XPRIZE is around saying, you know, inspiring them, this is the end goal, guide them, you know, this is the direction to go.
Starting point is 02:29:50 And then what is your end goal? What do you want to achieve? And for me, it's about, you know, creating a hopeful, abundant, and compelling future for humanity. So I define that, I say that every day, once or twice a day, sometimes more than that in the shower. And that clearly gives me the ability to select who I spend time with, what I spend time
Starting point is 02:30:13 with. And what do you say no to, right? What do you say no to? Martine Rothblatt has an incredible quote that she shared. She said, the successful people in life say no to almost everything the most successful people in life say no to everything right and it's like really hard yes um it's got to align with that mtp yeah absolutely and you know it's really interesting the if i if you don't mind i wanted to just share this because we were talking about this we'll put this If you don't mind, I wanted to just share this because we were talking about this here. And we'll put this, if you don't know, Roger is an incredible artist and his notebook is a work of art. You've heard of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. There's Roger Hamilton's notebooks too. And we'll put this image in the show notes.
Starting point is 02:31:00 Actually, I've got the abundance when I've been at abundance. This goes all the way back a decade, right? I've got the ones from a've been at Abundance. This goes all the way back over a decade. Oh my God. Right? I've got the ones from a decade ago. Oh my God. Amazing. Which is hilarious.
Starting point is 02:31:11 In fact, this is kind of making the notes we were talking about for Genius U. Just hold it up to the camera for one second so people can see. This is one of the human longevity ones that we did at Abundance. This was another one. This was the one at 360, I think, 10 years ago when you talked about the 60s. Right? So that was one here as well. Wow. But to share this because um i'm i'm honored yeah so you you you made this win on the flight yeah i was on the fight over and i was thinking you know there's something around uh
Starting point is 02:31:36 how mindsets and if we link mindsets to consciousness because it is it is about just shifting where you think it's totally it's actually the opposite of knowledge right because as they say you know the more he knows what he thinks he knows versus the amount of wisdom the more he knows the more you know he knows how much he doesn't know so there's an aspect to all of this which is like we say it's not it's not what you're thinking about it's what not to think about right and it's like this is the right like i'm going to delete those those are old habits old beliefs compared to where we are now what's super interesting i think a lot of people don't know this when they look at a rainbow um is the colors of the rainbow were actually defined by isaac newton right like before he wrote principia he wrote a book called optics and uh of course you
Starting point is 02:32:17 look at a rainbow it's got infinity numbers of colors in it but uh he knew enough about kind of like the the levels of consciousness from e, from India, that he said, okay, I'm going to use basically the seven chakra colors as basically the seven colors in a rainbow. Now, what's really interesting is that like a lot of people don't realize this, and I'm half Chinese, my mom's side, and I'm half Scottish. So I always link the Eastern philosophies with the West. Beautiful. But one thing super interesting that I think a lot of people don't realize when they're doing yoga or they're thinking about chakra energies is that we're talking about consciousness levels that they
Starting point is 02:32:46 basically went and said there's a hierarchy to understanding consciousness, which links to Pavlov, which links to basically the way we think. And just to go through it very briefly so that we can see how this fits together. When we go to school, we're actually learning some of the lowest levels of consciousness. So we've created, and I wrote a book about this called The Million Miles Plan, that there's seven levels starting from red to violet. But below red is infrared and above violet is ultraviolet. So we've really got nine levels. And the very beginning bit, which is the victim mindset, which is basically like the one that's infrared, is the one where it's like the whole world is happening to me and I have no power over anything.
Starting point is 02:33:21 And that's the mindset. And a lot of people get that mindset. In fact, when we're kids, we're kind of taught that's what we need to be like, which is why we need our parents. To move from that mindset to the next one, which is red level, which is survivor, having just enough to have nothing, right? Like a lot of people go for the whole life, even big paying jobs, where their self-worth is such that they'll just spend everything they've got and they'll basically just lose everything they've got. And they'll always end up back in the same place. And the number of entrepreneurs I work with who are trying to grow big businesses,
Starting point is 02:33:45 but they haven't solved their own issues yet, which are about their own mindset, about self-worth, and about how money and resources are flowing through themselves. This is where basically, if they don't turn on gratitude mindset, they can never grow
Starting point is 02:33:56 because they're always going to think they're not good enough, right? This is just the reality of it. So that's why- And they'll self-sabotage along the way. That's right. And I see so many people self-sabotaging themselves and they're like holy cow if if i just got more grateful i would actually keep more and attract more than what i'm doing right now yes and it wouldn't be such a bind
Starting point is 02:34:13 right um the one above that which is the orange level which is the worker is the one that goes you know what i can be positive but not by just going out playing i gotta actually earn the right by being in the team and showing i can show up and like being in the football team without having to be the one holding the ball the whole time. And that worker mindset, like my dad, he got his self-worth when he was in the police force in Hong Kong by basically working hard. Like we'd get to a weekend, like, and I'd come back from school and he'd be like, I had such a good week. He'd be sitting on the balcony with his beer and I go what happened dad and he'd be like I just worked so hard yeah yeah but what happened he's like I just worked so hard and someone at that level by the way if their self-worth is linked to hard work they'll hate the fact that the government is paying someone
Starting point is 02:34:57 you know social security for not working right right yeah so it's like that's not fair so and they'll also look at the people above who aren't working so hard they've got their own business to go they must be cheating. They're doing something wrong. So this is orange level. And the reason this is important is orange level basically is like, you know, you're going from root chakra, you're going to, and I put it all in here so you can look at it here.
Starting point is 02:35:15 Love it. You're going to sacral. And this is where basically someone who's like, if I don't have a growth mindset, gratitude mindset to growth, I can never go beyond that. So people who are working hard their whole life who go, there's no way I can learn anything new to go start my own business or go do my own thing. They'll listen to some of what we're talking about here and go, fine for them to talk about moonshot mindset.
Starting point is 02:35:32 But I'm just trying to get to the end of the month and get my pay. But when you go, oh, if I was curious, how does someone who is younger than me, who is not as hardworking, who's not as lucky, who's not as skilled, and they're making 10 times more than me, how are they doing that, right? And there's always a way, right? And then going from those three, which we call the foundation prism, because they're all about your own personal self-awareness on yourself, you then go to the next three we call the enterprise prism, which is frankly, the entire way that the $11 trillion a day that changes hands all operate in the economic system. And that's the player who is the one who is one person doing more things, which we've all had experiences of in a startup, the green level, which is now hot. So Will is like, I will do things, they'll have a big to-do
Starting point is 02:36:13 list. So when you say something like, look, at the end, success is what you say no to, they don't have a not to-do list, right? They just got a to-do list. So it's like, I've got to do all these things and it's bearing down on me. Well, that changes if you have a moonshot mindset because once the moonshot mindset, other people are going to come and help you do that moonshot. Like that's the whole kind of like learn the competence side. And then above that green level, which is heart now, and these, by the way, all show up across any knowledge that you look at in terms of true wisdom. There's a great book by Stephen Covey.
Starting point is 02:36:44 Most people have heard of The Seven Habits. Sure. And The Seven Habits are all about how you go from yellow level, one person doing more things, to green level, all people doing one thing. It's like, how do I become part of an orchestra as now a performer, not a player?
Starting point is 02:36:56 So player goes worker, player, performer. And going from yellow to green is where then you can now go exponential, right? Because you've got the abundance mindset. Other people are coming in to connect with you. You can grow exponential because you have a team where you've earned the right to be available. And exactly, you're sharing, you're working,
Starting point is 02:37:12 you're not hoarding. Exactly right, exactly right. And after that book, Stephen Covey and his son, we've worked with a lot, also called Stephen Covey. And he wrote a book called The Speed of Trust, which is really the currency we're all operating on now. And he talked about the eighth discipline, right, which is your voice. And this is where the abundance side comes in.
Starting point is 02:37:30 The leaders of tomorrow are the ones that are coming from abundance. But those three, if you do that right, then you've mastered the enterprise prism where you can start a business, you can build trust, you can add value. But the final three we call the alchemy prism is where like asking question, why is purpose driven so important? These final three are not the people in the audience watching. They're not like the spectators. They're not the players, the performers or the conductors. The conductors are the ones that basically are at the blue level that don't have to pick up an instrument, but they make all the music. Once you understand that, and that's where investors sit, right? An investor, if they see
Starting point is 02:38:07 you're not doing a good job as CEO, they're not going to come in and basically try and be the CEO, right? They're going to find another CEO. Just like a conductor who sees a violin is off key, isn't going to come in and try and basically play the violin. They'll just get another violinist or a different violin. But the key thing above that is you then have the three that made the music possible. You have the trustee. So we're seeing in the world today all these different people who can move mountains just through their trust, right? Like Warren Buffett, people will pay millions just to have lunch with him.
Starting point is 02:38:36 Richard Branson, people pay millions to use the Virgin brand. People now, you have trust within the exponential community. Oh, if Peter's behind that, he's supporting that, right? Then I want to be a part of that as well because people trust him and this is where the trust is so important. Trustee in a theater is the one who actually allows the theater to happen.
Starting point is 02:38:54 And the problem is too many of the trustees have been our politicians or people who basically are saying, trust me and we don't trust them anymore. And this is why it's so important because if you're not purpose-driven, you're never going to build the trust at that level. And then one above that,
Starting point is 02:39:07 which is basically where we get to the third eye, this is basically now where we're getting to, where we're about to get to with longevity. This is where you're going to the composer level. And composer is the one that makes the music. So when we talk about something like poverty, poverty is just a bad composition, right? Like I said, like in Bali,
Starting point is 02:39:27 it's a different composition so people don't feel poor. Whereas we are all living in music that's gone off key and we're wondering why it sounds so bad when we're trying to play it, right? But that's what's happening right now today. And the notes just happen to be banknotes, right? But it's the same thing. It's the fact that we basically are all trying to make music which isn't in harmony. And everything we're talking about in mindset allows us to reharmonize. And then the final one, legend, is ultraviolet. That's basically where a legend on the map is a symbol, right? When Steve Jobs leaves us, he leaves behind a symbol on the map, which is one about quality and technology, right? When Nelson Mandela leaves, he leaves
Starting point is 02:39:58 a symbol, which means something quite different. And that's when this energy can really go way beyond ourselves in our lifetime as well. So I think one thing really important is that these mindsets are more important now than ever, but they're all linked to ancient truths. And they're all linked to basically the man's search for meaning and man's search for wisdom that goes back thousands of years. And so I wanted to share that because I think it's so important that people realize this is not just a nice to have, but it's like a must have if someone wants to be raising their consciousness. I love this so much. And I want to remind everybody listening,
Starting point is 02:40:33 the mindset that you have was inherited someplace. Where did you get it? What mindset do you have? What mindset do you need? And how do you shift your mindset? These mindsets can be honed. They can be created. They can be amplified. They can be shaped. It's not overnight. It takes time.
Starting point is 02:40:56 Our mission here is to give you the hints to start to think about this. It's a little bit every day. Our brains are neural nets, just like Google's machine learning deep neural nets are, you know, and it's example after example after example. It's living and breathing with the right people. It's reading things that amplify that mindset. It's seeing examples over and over again. And it is really the most fundamental, you know fundamental thing that we can learn. I criticize our educational system today. My son in fifth grade was learning the state capitals.
Starting point is 02:41:35 And I'm like, you don't need to know the state capitals. That's why God created Google. Right. But understanding mindsets and how to hone them and which mindsets to choose is far, far, far more important. Even I think so many of us, because when you're when you're the boiling frog, you don't even realize the damage that the wrong mindset is doing. I didn't realize this with the education system when, when at green school, which was set up by John and Cynthia Hardy, when they wanted to homeschool their kids, uh, they basically thought, you know, there's no better place than Bali for like a beautiful place that you could be learning about changing the world, right. Through the environment. So they created the green school. If you look it up online, you'll see the most beautiful like cathedral of bamboo for, for school. And, and to give you an example of just the shift of going
Starting point is 02:42:26 from a scarcity or a dependency mindset to an abundance or resourceful mindset, take something like art, right? When we set up the art class there, we said, you know what? Art actually already is teaching dependency. Because why? When you start the art class, you start with the kids going, okay, kids, here's some paper. Here's some paints. Now let's paint something. Well, of course, they're going to think they can't paint anything if they don't have the paper and the paints, which is like going out and saying, I can't get money unless I have a job. As opposed to what happened at green school where we said, okay, paper. Let's talk about paper.
Starting point is 02:42:59 Where can you make paper from? Well, did you know that cows actually, you can use the cow dung to make paper? Let's go make it, right? Paints. Okay, purple. Did you know you can make thatung to make paper. Let's go make it, right? Paints, okay, purple. Did you know you can make that from eggplant? Well, let's go make it. And so the kids- All of a sudden, it's all abundant. It's everywhere.
Starting point is 02:43:12 And they don't start the art by basically just having equipment that someone paid for. They start the art by creating the equipment, creating the palette. Of course, that's what entrepreneurs do as well. And you think, my gosh, that's not taught at school at all, right? Or even worse, like everything we've been talking about, which is get with the right people, copy from them. We know at school that's called cheating, right? So it's just understanding how much that we are all being coded often by absolutely the right, the wrong values and wrong beliefs. And then we then wonder why it takes so long when we get out there to have to unlearn these things.
Starting point is 02:43:51 I'll close out our purpose-driven mindset with the realization that, again, I'll say this, doing anything big and bold in the world as an entrepreneur, taking a moonshot is going to take a decade. It's not easy. You need to have that emotional juice. We're emotional beings. I think of your massive transformative purpose as a canvas, talking about art. And this is what I care about. This is what emotionally drives me, opening up space or reinventing education or reinventing
Starting point is 02:44:21 health care. or reinventing healthcare. And then a moonshot is a target on that canvas that I'm going to achieve A, B, and C by X, Y, and Z. This is what I'm going for. This is the shot I'm calling, right? Without a target, you'll miss it every time. But it's got to come back to that emotional driver that is fulfilling, that gives you a purpose in life, and that attracts amazing people to you.
Starting point is 02:44:47 When you have a strong MTP and you're proud of sharing it, if you develop your massive transformative purpose, and I have blogs on this, and you can go to mymoonshotplanner.com, which is an AI engine that will help you develop your MTP and develop your moonshot for free. When you have your, your massive transformative purpose, um, if you're not sharing it with the world, uh, then there's something wrong. Either you need to have something that you're willing to share. And when you do share your MTP at cocktail parties, on stage, in what you write, and
Starting point is 02:45:27 people know who you are, what you stand for, where you're focusing, the universe is then going to bring those people to you, right? My friend Roger is going to say, oh, you've got to meet this person over here, right? Or have you seen this business over here? It's incredibly powerful as a magnet to bring amazing opportunities and people into your life. Yeah. I'm going for my own realizations as well, how easy it is as you go through the hero's journey, right? Where basically you go through the road of trials and things get thrown in your way. Talking about like MTP and just constantly reminding yourself of it.
Starting point is 02:46:05 When I mentioned earlier about the final exam and Bucky, right back then, long before I knew you and long before I'd heard about the concept of singularity, he was already talking about not just here's the problem, which is we've got to increase consciousness, but here's a solution, right? And he said the solution is that we need to play what he called the world game, right? And what is the world game? Well, in theory, it's something where everyone can have fun. Everyone can basically make an impact together. But he died before he created it.
Starting point is 02:46:33 And it was just earlier this year after we did our IPO in New York Stock Exchange last year. And for the whole last year, all I've been doing is trying to kind of basically battle with Wall Street traders and trying to, you know, solve all the challenges of having a public company, as I've been mentioning to you. I've been saying I've been suffering from PISS, post IPO stress syndrome. But then as it was happening, I was like, oh my God, we could be 24 months, probably not more than 48 months away from the Singularity right now. Like, 24 months, probably not more than 48 months away from Singularity right now. Like, we're only talking two to four years. And everything that I set up of my life to basically be able to help raise consciousness in whatever small way I can with our group, like, time's going to be up.
Starting point is 02:47:16 Like, this is it now, right? Yeah, we're in the 99th level of the game. Absolutely right. So then it's like, holy, like, now's the time. So I'm going to get on this now. So we had a session last week where we launched a world game. And this is our way of playing with all of our 5 million students around the world and what will be 10 million fairly soon. And where basically everyone who's coming on board, we've got cities, we've got countries, we've got leaders in these cities and countries.
Starting point is 02:47:39 We've got a goal of 100 million in income and 100 million in impact to show that it's possible to, you know, do good and do well at the same time. And working together with Tony and his 100, and we're going to be doing 100 million meals as impacts as part of this too. And I can tell you the shift in two things. Number one, my energy of actually going, okay, everything else is small stuff, right? Because it is about like basically reminding yourself why you're here. And number two, the amount of attraction, like this next week, I've just got full of all these different meetings with different people who go i'm gonna come play yes right and so i would definitely say this for everyone as well like you say not just what mindset you have but what game are you playing like because absolutely what game are you playing yeah now for sure uh let's let's's wrap up here with the game of longevity. So we are all on this planet, born at an incredible time to be alive. And for me, I want to see as much of it as I can.
Starting point is 02:48:40 And I'm out there building businesses, proselytizing and speaking about a longevity mindset. And I define a longevity mindset as someone who understands that we're in the midst of a health care revolution, that we are going to be extending the healthy human lifespan by decades. going to be extending the healthy human lifespan by decades. Why? Because of AI, quantum technologies, biotechnology, capital flowing in. I remember when I was in medical school, I remember reading about and then seeing a TV show on long-lived sea life that certain species of whales, bowhead whales, could live 200 years, and then Greenland sharks could live 500 years and could have babies at 200 years old. And I'm like, wow, if they can do that, why can't I? And I said, it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. And this is the decade where we start to solve those problems. And the question is, if you believe that these breakthroughs are coming, this idea that Ray
Starting point is 02:49:48 Kurzweil talks about longevity, escape velocity, there's going to be a moment in time where that for every year you're alive, science is extending your life for more than a year. If that's coming, like Ray believes in 10 to 12 years or George Church or David Sinclair in the next 15 years, then if you believe that, then your mission should be, if you love life and you want to see more of it, should be to stay in the greatest health you can for the next 15 years to intercept those technologies coming our way. And for me, that's a longevity mindset. It's this level of belief that we can create longevity.
Starting point is 02:50:28 We can extend a healthy human lifespan. You may have a different definition of longevity mindset. How do you define it? Well, I'll tell a story, first of all, which really impacted me when it comes to those who think about time on larger timescales, right? Because that is a large part of what this is. And I've seen this again and again, when you look, I remember seeing a quote, if you go to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, there's a quote, which is on the wall from Nelson Mandela from, I believe it's like the 1950s or
Starting point is 02:51:00 maybe early 60s, where he says, I the first uh south african black president right like this is when apartheid was at is by far worse that he actually had that vision to know that he had to do this because and this was before he got basically put in jail it's basically all that right and he was just like no i'm in this for the long term right so there's something about that long term we know this with elon where he's talking about you know basically how how little time we have in the, you know, tens of millions of years, right? And even like someone like Masayoshi's son, when he talks about singularity and basically,
Starting point is 02:51:32 look, this is, you know, he's got a 300-year plan. I was in Japan, and we heard from a mentor who was working quite a few of the wealthiest people in Japan there. And he had this whole presentation where he says, look, you guys in the West are totally obsessed with size, how big you can can get how quick you can get there here in japan we think about something quite different which is how long you can last staying back we got thousand year companies here he says did you know that japan is one of the few countries if not the country in the world that has preserved its monuments the most like you go to most european cities and all the monuments are in stone and they're all basically eroding uh you won't find that in Japan. Why? Because we wanted our monuments to
Starting point is 02:52:10 last the longest, so we built them from wood. Because if they're built from wood, we will keep replacing the pieces and it will always be brand new, but it will still be there a thousand years in the future. So there's something about longevity and the way you think about, not do I get a thousand times bigger, but how do I last a thousand times longer? He showed us actual slides of the number of, um, uh, Japanese, uh, um, companies that were a thousand year old companies as well. And we, we did an exercise with our group to say, okay, guys, whatever your goals are in terms of how big you want to be, let's have a conversation about how long you want to last and how that changes your thinking about your business. and it was super interesting because people started by thinking about the
Starting point is 02:52:48 business but they ended up thinking about their family right they started thinking about next generation the multi-generational yeah like what example are you leaving to those that might come 100 years in the future and see that we were here at this pivotal time and that we had an opportunity to do something and And did we do something? Did we do the right thing together at the right level of consciousness or not? And it became a very philosophical discussion later on. But to me, that's a huge part of longevity.
Starting point is 02:53:14 And I'm interested for you to share how you were very focused at the whole getting to space and then how your MTP and your moonshots have evolved into longevity space and what were the key things that made that happen? Interesting. Yeah, I grew up in the 60s and it was the Apollo program and Star Trek that really captured my attention. And I was enamored with going to space. And as I got to meet astronauts and learn about the government space program, I gave up on the government as a means of getting there. And the idea of becoming a government astronaut
Starting point is 02:53:49 where I might get a chance to fly, half the astronauts who are selected never fly. They're called penguins because they have wings, but they don't fly. And then my vision of flying was I go up every weekend if I wanted to. And that just was not going to happen that way. And I spent 30 years. I built the International Space Universities, the Gravity Corporation. Our first XPRIZE was for spaceflight, space adventures that sent eight clients to the International Space Station.
Starting point is 02:54:18 And it was great. And then I met Ray Kurzweil, and I realized that opening up space was going to really happen from the convergence of exponential technologies. We're seeing that with now Starship, material sciences and AI and manufacturing and computer simulation and so forth. And that's amazing. And so I needed to focus really on exponential tech, on solving big world problems. X Prize went from just a SpaceX PRIZE to Grand Challenges, Singularity University came in. And then I realized that, wow, okay, this was about
Starting point is 02:54:55 a decade ago in my early 50s, 51, 52, and space is moving slow and tech is going fast. And I want to see the next hundred years. And it's like, selfishly, there's a lot I want to do, a lot I want to see. And I don't, I, you know, rebel against the idea of an 80, 90 or 100 year lifespan. And I start remembering, oh, bowhead whales can live 200 years and Greenland sharks live 500 years. Why can't we? And then all of a sudden, we start to see these technologies
Starting point is 02:55:34 coming into existence. Again, AI, quantum technologies, biotech, and so forth. And it's like, huh, here's the tools. And we actually may have the ability to extend the healthy human lifespan. And I don't need to extend my healthy human lifespan by 50 years or 30 years. I happy to add an extra 10 and then, and then intercept all the breakthroughs during that 10 that add 20 and then intercept the next ones that add additional. And so it's out of a love of life and a massive curiosity and wanting more time to see my moonshots fulfilled. And that's been
Starting point is 02:56:17 driving this. I also think health is a new wealth. And I think there's no greater gift you can give anybody. Where I invest my personal funds, my venture funds are in health tech, biotech, and in AI. I think they're the two biggest wealth creation engines out there. I think ultimately, we're going to see the six D's hitting this health. I think we're going to completely demonetize and democratize, and it's not going to be just for the wealthy. It's going to be for everybody. And, um, and it's going to transform society.
Starting point is 02:56:57 I think a world in which you are, you care about the world more because you're going to be around longer is one that i want to help create it's super interesting because you know biology kind of comes after after chemistry like when we when we digitize physics right like you know starting with basically like you know modern physics is fundamental yeah then chemistry then biology now biology right so and the fact that at the core of our biology is is the most digital uh machine which is dna right like so the fact that we are going down this route where when as we digitize this everything becomes personalized everything becomes something
Starting point is 02:57:34 which becomes predictive um and what's super interesting uh as a as a as an extra payoff because i think the thing about these mindsets is each of them comes with a payoff. So I'm 55 years old right now. I recently met up with one of my school friends from school, right? Like way back when I was like, you know, nine years old. He's retired. And I went to see him and we went for a walk. And I swear he could be like double my age in terms of his physique and everything and it's like he's like just given up on life right that's where he's at and I was like wow and and you think at
Starting point is 02:58:10 the turn of the century like 1900 the average age was 40 years old right so I'm like 55 years old now I wouldn't even be here 100 years ago but then at the same time I go out and see Richard Branson Necker Island he's windsurfing at like, you know, 70 plus. And I'm like, look, this is all basically about where you're pulling your energy from. Right. And there's something about longevity itself and this whole idea that I at 55, I'm like, well, I may be getting halfway there because I intend to live a long time. But the biggest thing that I feel keeps me feeling young is the fact that I'm drawing my energy from, I believe, a different source, right? Like I feel there's three different sources. And again, this is more metaphor, but the three sources that we tend to generate energy from, if we're at the bottom prism that
Starting point is 02:58:53 we talked about in consciousness, the only energy you can get is pretty much like elected power, right? Meaning you're going to wind up the radio to hear the radio. And the problem with that power, and we call that motivation, right? So if I'm going to motivate myself every day, well, the problem is you forget to motivate yourself, then you've got no motivation, you've got no energy. And people at that level, especially if you're full of toxic foods, especially if you're full of toxic relationships, environments, like it's just going to be so difficult to even get through each day. And you see people aging way too early because they're trying to tap into that power. If you take some of these mindsets
Starting point is 02:59:22 we talked about, and you're here for a bigger reason with a bigger group at some point you go from elected power to connected power that's when you like go oh i don't need to buy another radio i can plug it in right and this connected power usually comes with community it comes with like people yes where you just know when you show up like knowing i was going to come and have podcasts with you i knew it's going to be more energized at the end of the podcast than even when we start because it's energizing at this different level. And of course, that's great. But if you disconnect, then it also goes down, right? This is why some people are unhappy with their spouse or their partner because they had such a great energy.
Starting point is 02:59:54 And then when they left, then they're like, oh, now I'm down here. And when you realize that when you leave this planet, that's also a disconnection, right? Then it's like, well, then what, right? Like, there are people that some who are watching this podcast have had more of an impact on them, even though they lived thousands of years ago, and they never met, versus their next door neighbor who might have died five years ago, and they've forgotten already, right? And so it's like, what is that lasting power? And above connected power, there's another one, which is reflected power, right? That's like solar power, right? That's like, as long as the sun shines, shines right you don't even need to plug in uh that's what you run on right that's what we see the top it's a purpose-driven energy right there's a greek there's uh i love the word
Starting point is 03:00:34 enthusiasm which comes from the greek word uh for entheos which is in god right where you're there's this energy source you're enthusiastic but you're not just enjoying something. There's a level of enthusiasm. You love what you're doing. Like I was, I've been so excited about this conversation with you today because there are very few people I play pitch and catch with in these mindsets. And I think it's one of the most important things. I want to get to the top of the mountain and shout to everybody, listen, your mindset, it matters, choose it, develop it, hang out with the right people what's on your walls what are you reading what are you watching you know mindsets matter please it is one of the greatest things that you've got and the payoffs you don't you can't really explain it until you get to it
Starting point is 03:01:17 and then you give it a shot and then it's like oh now i've got this energy i'll give you an example right the numbers are pretty extraordinary that purpose individuals who are purpose-driven and who are optimistic uh have you know a significantly longer lifespan right and it's measurable i've written about it i think it's a 17 increase in lifespan if you're defined as an optimistic individual um and at the end of the day uh you know who do you want to hang out with? People who are optimistic and purpose-driven or people who are depressed and trying to just make their way through the day? A huge amount. Longevity of your phone has everything to do with basically how many apps are sapping the battery and basically the level the level to which, you know, you're able to charge it as you go. And, and,
Starting point is 03:02:07 and we're exactly the same. We're like energetic beings where it's not simply about what you eat or what you know or don't know about your body or putting yourself at risk by just not understanding that there are tools out there that allow you to get predictive on what might happen to you, but also toxic relationships. Like we said, toxic media, like all of these things are all affecting your energy. And that means also affecting your longevity, right? So when you realize, wow, like, you know, getting surrounded by the right energy, getting in with the right purpose, isn't just good for the world is good for my own lifetime and who I become and having an interest in longevity mindset totally changes the outlook you have. And it stops you sweating the small stuff happening today
Starting point is 03:02:46 because it's nothing like, like what was the small stuff that you're worrying about in 2003? Most people can't remember what that was, right? Because that wasn't as important anymore. But, and so why worry about it today? There's this story I'd love to share on it. I know I shared it with you when we were last speaking,
Starting point is 03:03:02 but for those listening to the podcast, it's the biggest piece on longevity. I believe when I heard it myself, and this was, again, on my trip to Japan, and it was when we were doing a tea ceremony where everything is just so deliberate and just for the reason that there is this concept in Japan of every moment being precious for itself, right?
Starting point is 03:03:22 So we're only here having this podcast at this moment with people listening, this one moment. And while it's recorded, the actual experience itself, basically is one moment in time, right? And, and we were like, wow, this is incredible seeing this sense of presence by thinking about time. And we were in this big garden, which was actually a museum for banyan trees and we went outside and heard that these were worth millions of dollars because some of them were thousands of years old and we saw this old man and he was in there kind of like actually tying the tree and so we went up to speak to him and said hey you're the gardener here and he goes no I'm the owner. You're the owner of this whole place? He goes yeah and he goes well how much is all this
Starting point is 03:04:02 worth and he goes I don't know 100 million and we're like where did you get the owner of this whole place? He goes, yeah. And he goes, well, how much is all this worth? And he goes, I don't know, a hundred million. And we're like, where'd you get the money for that? And he goes, well, he made his money in ramen noodles, right? And then sold his company. Now he had this thing. So we're like, well, why are you doing this instead of having gardeners do it? And he pointed to this tree he had there and he says, look, this tree is over a thousand years old. Now, I don't know what your ancestors were like a thousand years ago, but I know I had great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents. Like we're talking about over 12 to 15 different generations and every generation looked after this tree and every generation relied their whole life on the next generation to keep up their work. And here I am after 12 generations,
Starting point is 03:04:39 how can I not look after the tree? Right. I let all of them down, all of my ancestors and we're like, wow. And he goes, but that's not all. After tree, right? I let all of them down, all of my ancestors. And we're like, wow. And he goes, but that's not all. After me, this tree will last for another thousand years. And so that means that my children and my children's children or whoever is a generation who decides to look after this tree, if I don't look after this tree now, then they can't look after the tree. So this is an obligation that I have in my lifetime to carry on this chain.
Starting point is 03:05:05 And this is why I do this every day, because I must. And that really impacted me when I'm like, well, I'm also here not just for my life and the people I meet every day. I'm here for all those that made it possible for me to be here and for all the people afterwards as well. And longevity, that changes everything. And for all the people afterwards as well. And longevity, that changes everything. It ties together the purpose-driven mindset, a gratitude mindset, a moonshot mindset. And these are all intertwined.
Starting point is 03:05:33 That's a beautiful story. Roger, this has been an epic conversation. And we could probably keep going forever. Talk to me about GeniusU. Where do people find you? Tell them what they can learn on GeniusU. Who have you built GeniusU for? Great. It's called Genius because there's this great saying, everyone's born a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will go for its whole life believing
Starting point is 03:06:00 it's stupid, right? So it's pretty much basically a whole new way of thinking about education lifelong from like, we've got like, you know, preschoolers with their parents learning how to like think about discovery through their primary high school, through the university. We have a university just outside of Los Angeles here, all the way through basically to entrepreneurs, investors, learning exactly these things, like how do you shift mindset? And more importantly, how do you do it in a way? That's right for you So when someone comes on the first thing that they do is they take our genius test you find out am I more of a? Dynamo genius like you and me where we're great at starting things not so great at finishing it So we've better get the team all right
Starting point is 03:06:35 I'll be better at like some people are more like you know tempo genius and the only food wall and right here But but we all have got natural geniuses that work for us and what is happening now Very, very different from what was happening a couple of years ago, is the next step is you meet your genie AI. So we have actually hooked in GPT-4 to each individual. So if I go to GPT-4 and I go, do you know who I am? It says, I'm an NLM. I don't know. But like with our genie, it goes, yeah, you're Roger Hamilton. And so the whole way that it actually allows me to then say, well, if I'm going to, I actually asked some questions, I'm going to be on this podcast with Peter, what kind of things should we talk about? And it knows who you are, it knows who I am, it knows what we're trying to achieve. It then basically says, based on your passions and purpose, here's some thoughts.
Starting point is 03:07:15 So the whole idea is exactly as we say, there should be someone looking after and guiding you. That's your personal Aristotle, right? And that is, yes, I love that. And then from there, it then goes through basically choosing what path you want to follow. You want to be an entrepreneur, investor, and then what community you go into. And we've got this clear philosophy, which is exactly what we're talking about, learning through doing. Connect, learn, earn, act, review. And instead of student debt, we have student credits. You earn credits every single time you do a step.
Starting point is 03:07:41 And then you can redeem those credits on the actual platform as well. So we've gamified the idea of education. And right now there are teachers, because they used to say teachers didn't get paid what they should be getting paid. There are teachers making millions of dollars, but you'll find them on YouTube or you'll find them as bestselling authors. They don't necessarily have got programs that are endorsed by the Department of Education. Sure. But our goal is to basically take what is the peripheral side, which is entrepreneur education, which is basically unlearning what we learned at school to learn again, and bring it into the full education system so that you can get your high school diploma or your
Starting point is 03:08:16 degree program funded off the back of it as well. And that's really the ambition. Like, is it possible that 100 years from now, when we saw that there was a need for a new education system, we could have been a part of the solution and that that's what amazing so where do people go to learn more very simple genius you.com so genius and then you just the letter you.com and then they can just start the journey straight away amazing uh how do i say this dude i'm grateful thank you for a beautiful conversation um i truly hope people took a lot away from this. Please, as you're reflecting on the conversation that Roger Hamilton and I just had, ask yourself,
Starting point is 03:08:53 what mindset do you have and what mindset do you desire to have to navigate the decade ahead? Hang out with people who support those mindsets. Read the books, the podcasts that support those mindsets. Take the time to train on those mindsets. It's like going to the gym a little bit every day, a little bit of meditation, gratitude, curiosity, moonshots, abundance, exponential, purpose-driven longevity. It makes life a lot more fun, doesn't it? It does.
Starting point is 03:09:29 And I'll say this as well, Peter, and for everyone who's listened to this, this is a moment in time, like we said, but it's been a decade where at the time when I first met you, yes, I was in Bali. Yes, there'd been some levels of success and things I'd done. Yes, I was in Bali. Yes, there'd been some levels of success and things I'd done. But the way you opened up my thinking to a much, much bigger game, which does like mean, okay, I'm going to give up some comforts because I'm going to have to basically put myself on the line and grow something much bigger. But that's the hero's journey, right? That's the part where it's like, are you up for the call? And so much of what you were sharing back then, you know, what I'm
Starting point is 03:10:03 doing now and everything that I'm part of is kind of like living proof that once you follow and apply the things you talk about, they really do end up being something that can change not just the world, but also change yourself. There's a huge difference between someone showing up every day saying, this is my work versus this is my life's work, right?
Starting point is 03:10:23 And I think that's a huge part of what you're sharing. Amazing, amazing difference. And thank you for being a member of the Abundance360 community because you shine a light and people get inspired by you. Anyway. Thank you, Peter.
Starting point is 03:10:35 Thank you, buddy. Awesome. Grateful.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.