Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, authors of "The Future is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries And Our Lives" join Bobbi with a preview of their latest book, and specific ways money-related changes will impact us in the coming years.
8 Ways Money Will Change the Future
1. We’re going to live longer—we’ll need to approach retirement very differently
2. Demonetization is going to radically alter education, travel etc.
3. Convergence means that future financial investment opportunities can lie between industries and in mash-up markets
4. New players in Finance (Google, for example, just went into banking)
5. Insurance is going to radically change and whole categories will vanish
6. Your AI is going to be making a lot of your buying decisions for you.
7 You also say we are moving to a cashless future
8 -Blockchain will continue to disrupt traditional banking, spreading widely into the developed world much like it’s already transformed financial systems in developing countries.
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Transcription
Bobbi Rebell:
Tell us a little bit about the book, just quickly before we get into some really cool stuff you're going to share with us.
Steven Kotler:
The future we talk about in the book, for some people is scary, because people are not used to this rapid rate of change. The best solution for that fear is really having an understanding of where the world is going. Part of the mission of the book is to give people a clear vision of the future that these converging technologies are enabling. For most of the case, this is an incredible win for consumers, an uplifting of abundance in the world, where ultimately these exponential converging technologies are helping to meet the need of every man, woman, and child on the planet. That makes for a world that is, in my ... in our mind, I would say safer and better for humanity, so this is a hopeful book that builds the case for creating a better world for tomorrow.
Bobbi Rebell:
It's really a roadmap into how money is going to change in the future and, most importantly, how we can and frankly need to be ready. A lot of this is not just you guys talking. There's a lot of scientific research here and a lot tying in technology to money and how it's going to specifically impact our lives. You're going to give us a preview, and you brought with you a list of different ways that all these things are going to affect money and our lives. Let's start with the first thing on your list. This is about our approach to retirement and longevity.
Peter Diamandis:
Sure, let me jump in there, because it's an area that I spend a lot of time investing in and time building companies around, and it's the notion that we're going to be heading to a world in which we're not dying at age 70 or 80, that we're living a healthy lifespan to 90, to 100, to 110, eventually 120. In our book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, we have an entire chapter on healthcare and a chapter on longevity that tracks these different technologies, billions of dollars flowing into them. If you think about it, there's no larger business opportunity than extending the healthy human lifespan. So, I think this is a reality and I think people need to start thinking about, "Do I have to save enough money to live to be 100 years old or 110 years old?" Because if you can have the aesthetics, the cognition and mobility at 100 that you had at 60, why wouldn't you want to? It's not about living in a wheelchair, it's about living a vibrant life. So, that's the first thing. We're going to live longer. We're going to live healthier, and we have to prepare for that.
Bobbi Rebell:
Such a great point. Let's move onto the second point. This is fascinating, demonetization, because this goes into things that we love, like travel, right, Steven?
Steven Kotler:
Yeah, so demonetization is essentially the removal of money from the equation. The simple example that we're all familiar with is the smartphone. So when Peter and I wrote the first book in the trilogy, [inaudible 00:05:30], we're calling the Exponential Mindset trilogy, with our latest book, The Future is Faster Than You Think is the third installment in. In Abundance, back when we started, we looked at all the technology that shows up for free, demonetized completely, in your smartphone. In 1980s prices, it was over a million dollars-
Bobbi Rebell:
Oh my gosh.
Steven Kotler:
In music players, in Encyclopedias, in GPS, and on and on and on. So, this is a million dollars worth of stuff that has been dematerialized. It doesn't exist anymore. It comes for free in your phone. This is ... Whenever technologies go exponential, one of the things that starts to happen almost automatically is they begin to demonetize, and this is going into every industry. Travel is a really radical example, both because we're seeing ... over the next 10 years, we're going to see technology such as the Hyperloop, which is high speed trains, maglev trains, 750 miles an hour, so suddenly San Francisco to LA is a 20-minute commute or Las Vegas to San Francisco is a 20-minute commute, which, by the way, totally changes the real estate picture and your local school metric and your dating pool and all that stuff, besides the point, but you've got five or six other technologies, autonomous cars, flying cars, rockets, et cetera.
Steven Kotler:
Then, you have avatars and virtual reality, which completely demonetizes travel. Now we already have avatars and virtual worlds, but if you can put on VR goggles and have an avatar attend a meeting that you need to attend and you've got haptic technology so you can shake hands with other people and be there, or you can have telepresence robots waiting for you that you sort of rent by the hour in your destination city and you can port your senses using VR into the robot and then send the robot onto stage to give a speech for you or whatnot. This sounds crazy far future, but Peter's company, the X Prize, it's [nepon 00:07:29], right, Peter?
Peter Diamandis:
It's all Nepon Airways, ANA Airlines, has basically said, "How do we displace the need for airplanes? How do you not put yourself in an aluminum tube and fly someplace?" They launched a $10 million dollar avatar X Prize. Can we build the avatars, like Steven was saying, then I can transport my consciousness, my senses, and my actions hundreds or thousands of miles away instead of flying in an airplane.
Bobbi Rebell:
Wow, so cool. Let's talk about the investment opportunities angle here, because you say convergence means that future of financial investment opportunities can lie between industries and mashup markets. What does that mean?
Peter Diamandis:
It means that we have pure play investments before in a computer company or communications company or a healthcare company, but all of these things are beginning to blur, right? We're seeing Amazon all of a sudden going from a bookseller to a food company when it buys Whole Foods and it's now moving into healthcare and into finance. So, we're going to start to see companies that are blurring the lines between what have been traditional areas. A lot of the companies that are going to be crushing it are data-driven companies. Google and Amazon and Apple are in our home and they're going to start to play increasingly different roles. It was interesting that Tim Cook, we talk about this in The Future is Faster Than You Think. Tim Cook makes a statement like, "In the future, Apple is going to be best known for its impact on healthcare." Wow. So, we're going to start to see a lot of these blurred lines. So, when you are excited about investing in a particular industry or particular area, it's not going to be the traditional players. It's going to be a new set of players coming in from unpredictable adjacencies.
Bobbi Rebell:
Which dovetails to your point that there's going to be a lot of new players in finance.
Steven Kotler:
There are going to be a lot of new players in finance and finance as a whole is going to radically change. We've seen this already. We've seen what AI did to finance. At this point, when there's height rating volume, for example, 90% of the trades on Wall Street are being made by computers at this point. That's just today and where we are, but to Peter's point, the advantage you get is data, right? The more data you have, the bigger understanding you have of markets. We'll see this in traditional finance. We're going to see this playing huge roles in insurance. We're going to see this show up in real estate. It's really going to transform the financial landscape. The first inklings of it, companies like IBM, lots in doing wealth management services, right? It's going to mean that people working in the finance space, creativity is going to become the most important skill going forward. This was not a skill 20 years ago you would have really associated with finance and now it's the key skill because everything else that can be automatized will probably be automatized.
Bobbi Rebell:
Insurance, it is going to radically change.
Peter Diamandis:
Insurance is going to change dramatically and we are going to go away from what was the old actuarial tables of, statistically, over a population of 100,000 people, here's the probability. That's not going to be the case. Now it's like, okay, this is specifically the probability for you, given the technology you're enabling, given the way you eat, exercise, and so forth, your genetics and such. We're going to insure you personally and we're going to work to keep you healthier longer, alive longer, fire free, theft free, and that's our job now. So, interesting change, which makes the world a better place, and people will want that kind of insurance over the "We'll pay you after the disaster occurred."
Steven Kotler:
The other thing I want to add to that is, of course with autonomous cars, car insurance as a category goes away. Right? If the cars are driving themselves and they don't crash, car insurance goes away or at least the risk, it shifts from the consumer, right? Google, with Waymo, [inaudible 00:11:33] with Waymo, they provide ... everybody who gets in the car automatically gets insurance because they're the one who controls the autonomous car, so that's another category that's going to disappear.
Bobbi Rebell:
Let's talk about artificial intelligence. How will this affect, for example, the everyday consumer, people buying stuff?
Peter Diamandis:
So, interestingly enough, we're all going to have a version of Jarvis from Iron Man. If you remember Jarvis, Tony Stark had this AI that was in his suit and in his home. He would talk to it and Jarvis would be like a personal, intelligent butler or assistant in this regard. We have the early versions of this with Amazon Echo. We have the early versions of that with Google Home and such, but one thing that's going to happen in the consumer world is that your AI's going to do your buying for you. If your AI is doing your buying for you of foods or consumer products in general, what's that do to advertising, right? If I'm not making the decisions anymore, you can throw all the ads at me you want, but my AI is actually looking at my genetics and the molecular makeup of the toothpaste and saying, "This toothpaste is better for you than this one. Everyone in your peer group, Peter, is buying this and enjoying it and it's cheaper, so I'm buying that for you." You get a new toothpaste and go, "Oh, I like this one better." Right? So the world becomes auto-magical.
Bobbi Rebell:
I love it, because it can save a lot of money for consumers, and time and energy, to not have that decision making stress, because every decision is stress.
Steven Kotler:
Absolutely. These are parts of where the world is going, and not in 30 years or 20 years, this next decade, which is what we outlined in the book.
Bobbi Rebell:
Last thing I want to go through is you say we're moving to a cashless future, to the surprise of, really, no one, I think. I think everyone kind of sees the writing on the wall with this one.
Steven Kotler:
Where it starts to get really interesting is, for example, Amazon Go. This is a cashierless checkout where you scan a QR code on your way into the store on your phone, you take the items off the shelf, sensors in the items notice that you've taken it, the AI cameras pick it up, and it's automatically deducted from your account, which is linked, too, in your cellphone and there's no more cash in the equation. This is ... Those stores are here. They're rolling out at scale over the next couple of years. I'm sure there are probably always going to be craft retail stores, like throwback stores. We still have [inaudible 00:13:50] and the chain here, but at convenience stores, at gas stations, at grocery stores, places we're already seeing automated checkout anyways, right? We're checking ourselves out and it's a pain in the butt, but now the hassle is gone. Obviously the savings for retail is enormous. There's no way to compete.
Bobbi Rebell:
What can the average person be doing to get ready for this future?
Peter Diamandis:
We put out something called Abundance Insider, which is a weekly email of how the world is getting more abundant and how to see this positive news. There are amazing books that Steven have written. Please read Abundance and Bold, which are the first two books in the Exponential Mindset series.
Steven Kotler:
Yeah, the only other thing I would add is, there's a human performance side of this, which I tend to work on the Flow Research Collective, so if you want to know what you can do in your own life to keep up in an accelerating world, the website for the flowresearchcollective.com will give you tons and tons of information there.
