My highlights on "navigating business in scary times"

1. Peter and Dan discuss working-from-home (WFH) dynamics and how
they’ve simplified their daily routines as the COVID-19 pandemic
upends business-as-usual and forces us to adapt. Making longer-term
projections, they illustrate how industries will transform during this
global pause, and
https://youtu.be/cDQbI1MUtOY
http://podcast.diamandis.com/2020/04/15/episode-84-navigating-business-in-scary-times/
Transcribed by YouTube. Highlights by Serge https://www.linkedin.com/in/broadcastic/
everybody this is Peter Diamandis and welcome to exponential wisdom I'm here with my partner my
coach Dan Sullivan and dad today let's talk about how as an entrepreneur you respond during a time of
crisis or both transmitting from a new location today our homes as we've all gotten for trolling and
you've gone through a few different crises during your lifetime and so I have some advice you have
some advice let's jump in and share there's a division and I can think personal kind of scary times in my
life where I didn't respond you know the way looking back I would have wanted to respond and has
happened in my business life but I would say Peter if people are really-really shocked by what's going on
I'm 75 and I've been through a lot of crises type situations that were public not just private situation and
this is a big one I mean this is the first global one where literally every person on the planet has to think
you know I could be directly affected by what's going on health-wise I could and everybody's being
affected financially by this so I think this is in my lifetime and I was born during the Second World War
this is the biggest pure global event that affects everybody and almost in the same way so it's kind of an
interesting phenomenon that we're in right now but I've been really busy because we're doing a
switchover from live workshop presentations to virtual presentations and there was just a lot of very-
very fast thinking a very fast act your digitizing dematerializing and demonetized yeah I am or at least it's
immaterial Isaac yeah and right now we're d monetizing a little bit yeah same for me I find myself
waking up early with a fire in my belly more than ever before as an entrepreneur just looking at okay all
of these changes are occurring worldwide lots of people need help businesses you help how do I
reinvent what I'm doing what are the new products and services yet they talk about companies like uber
and Airbnb even to some degree SpaceX really being born out of 2008 or out of 2001 or out of 9/11 and
so forth it's true we get a massive sort of Darwinian evolutionary pressures that form new companies
that come out of no place yeah there's a high degree of unpredictability about it because there's great
inertia forces during normal times and there's lots and lots of new ideas but the inertia of normal keeps
these things on the back burner and all of a sudden when normal life goes away you say hey well the
normal stuff isn't working why don't we take a look at some of the more innovative stuff that we've
been talking about and nobody's gonna stop us because you know they've got their thinking on other
things so you know typically you know I've been looking at recessions and I've been looking at
pandemics so this is about the 15th one that qualifies as a pandemic and I guess the official definition is
as an epidemic that goes across national boundaries so if it starts in one place and it jumps that's called
a pandemic but you know this is not the worst one the worst one was 1360 that was the Black Death in
Europe it had killed 1/3 of all adult Europeans and changed the economic structure political structure
social structure cultural structure of the entire and I can already feel some shifts going that we're not
going to go back when normal returns it won't be the normal we left yeah it will be changes for sure in

2. both who are the primary companies out there societal interfaces you know acceptance one thinks I just
finished writing and releasing my book the future as fast when you think and I talk about what changes
are going to be occurring over the next 10 years as we start digitizing everything and VR and AI start
playing a greater role we're seeing so many of those predictions accelerated by years so this is really an
accelerant anyone one example I have some I mean for medical technology telemedicine as yeah so
that's for sure the whole medical field right in terms of your becoming the CEO of your own health
you're gonna be doing a lot more of the health care that's occurring in your home the whole working at
home obviously you know a slack and zoom any companies that were resistant to that are transforming
very rapidly and it's interesting right as a entrepreneur as a CEO my organization had been mostly a
distributed organization and you know the old-school person me understood that but had some
resistance and now on the flip side as I'm working from home I can see the advantages of that to some
significant degree anyway the whole retail space is completely transforming the disappearance of the
retail malls it's sad and healthy but we're gonna see so many companies that were hanging on go away
you know you know the bottom 20 percent will no longer be here yeah and one of the I want to hear all
your ideas but one of the pieces of advice said I keep thinking about for myself and for others is any
business that was just hanging on that was a great time to kill it and take those resources and people
and capital and apply it to something you know yeah so what are you seeing that's amazing what's the
primary advice that you as a coach would give me and everybody else listening I created two thinking
exercise out of this one um is called scary times skills that's you know a typical strategic coach kind of
matrix worksheet and what it does you just list five scary times from your life okay so I had one when I
was nine years old my family farm the barn and the greenhouse which was the center of the economy
for the fire and burned down and that was not insured and that was the end of our farm so that was an
incident I was scared you know I cried you know I actually hid in my room and my mother said Sally you
should come out and see this you probably won't see this again so I watched it and I listened right
through to you know the current strategic coach stuff and you just do it you say why was it scary second
Thanos would you learn from the scare and what lifetime skills did you develop because you learned
from and my sense is that all of life is learning some of its more comfortable but actually when you're
really put on the spot and all your senses come alive I think this is actually learning so I think my learning
curve is actually quite a bit faster and steeper however long this lasts i've been much more simple in my
approach to daily life and i'm pretty good that way but it's gotten simpler we have a thing called
simplifier multiplier and i'm a hundred percent simplifier and i've been that way but the clients i've been
talking to and it's the free zone frontier people until next Monday and then I'll start talking to ten times
clients they're uniformly positive I was really-really struck of how positive they are they took care of
their family first thing they do is take care of their family two boys you know stabilize them get your
team connected from home and then start talking to your clients and customers so that's one two three
that's sort of the checklist and talk to your customers and clients to talk to them because there's a
natural tendency while I can't sell anything right now and I said you can sell them on a better future so
you can go around to all your clients and customers you can do a giass conversation with one of the
things when we have a crises like this the future that everyone was expecting just disappeared and it's
not naturally reapplied you have to work to create a new future during this period of time so another
tool Peter that you might be interested I said we're all making shifts we're all making adjustments but
here's what you should do you should start a structure in a process in your company called the first
hundred days that you begin planning that the moment the all-clear whistle starts and you can go back
to work and you can congregate and everything what are you going to do during the first hundred days

3. that's better than any hundred day period you've ever had in your past light everybody just loves us and
they said because it allows us to be this is not going to be a waste we're not going backwards we're
actually going forward so these are some of the thoughts that I'm getting out right now yeah that's
important let me share from my standpoint the advice I'm giving my abundance community members
and I'm thinking about myself the first is from a personal perspective were likely to be at home in some
level of isolation for at least a period of 60 days it could be 90 days and that's long enough period to
begin new habits and so be actually focused on what happens you want to be creating and I'll share for
example increased exercise is one you better sleep is another changing your diet so I've done very much
to a skipping breakfast and going straight to every other day skipping lunch just having dinner going to
intermittent fasting but doing that in a way that's stronger and better than before and obviously
meditation is a third so that's one new actually traditions with your family that come out of this that
you'll maintain afterwards so on the personal front those are them and then obviously we've talked
about the 60s that whatever you digitize you can dematerialized you monetize and democratize and so
every company has got to be looking at reinventing what they're doing into a digital format and you can
actually dig deeper than ever before so how do you do that how you digitize elements your company
you never could before and then finally letting go of the old way of doing things so there are companies
that were on the edge and there are still maintaining old ways of doing things so how do you as the CEO
use this as a either psychological excuse or financial excuse to kill parts of your company and reassign
those people and that capital into new vibrant things I'll add the final thing is being a great entrepreneur
during times of crisis is extraordinary what is needed that's not being met and keep a log of all of the
problems you're having and do that judo move that says okay when I see a problem I'm going to see
solution hmm so how do you flip it from problem to solution yeah the feeling that I have there's been an
established shift in society and something that I never thought I would see again and that is that blue-
collar workers have very-very high status today people who can actually do things manually have a very
high status I mean truck drivers have never been higher on the socio scales and it's kind of a the Nirvana
situation for truck drivers because they have clear highways and delivering things amazon's hired a
hundred thousand more I mean evil related to just the whole process of getting more deliveries out
there you know and Toronto well I mean the streets are empty I actually went into the city I've had to
do some shopping last Saturday and I went in and you could park anywhere and Toronto is not a
epicenter status like New York City it's not like ground zero the Canadians went through Toronto did the
SARS epidemic and was the center outside of Hong Kong or China which ever was the first person who
had it came from China and then just milled about for about five or six days and so they have a lot of
people it was much more contagious you know and it was faster acting I mean you went fast with SARS
so I think in the aftermath of that our workshops who were down to about 20% and Americans had
heard that thousands of people were dying in Toronto you know the panic news in Toronto there is
about a dozen people who died but the city kind of learned from that you know I mean there's Norma's
learning going on right now but the one thing that I do I switch to a 24-hour future the moment I go in
200 time and that is I'm only going to be concerned about things that I can actually get done today and
then use who's you know and some of what I'm doing is I'm just doing very-very quick fast filters kind of
communication where I say I'd like you think about this project and this is good project and we don't do
it this is not a good result and these are the five things that are really great and I just spread them out
and I ask people don't try to write anything in a letter put it into a fast filter if you can't write a fast filter
I don't want to read it and you don't want to send it I've noticed Peter is I love what we can do is some
like we're doing right now I really love the zoom but people take for granted a lot of context from

4. person to person communication is body language its facial expression and everything else and it
doesn't translate a hundred percent for zoom so a lot of content heavy communications that don't have
a context they're kind of jarring you say I don't even know what this is about where if they're in person
you say can you back up a little bit and kind of tell me what this is all about and so the biggest thing I've
noticed that we pick up all sorts of cues we pick up a lot of cues and we pick up setting we pick up all
sorts of things and when that's not present you have to over contextualize so that people get the reason
why you know let me share something I've been doing that I'm super excited about so during times of
crisis like this a lot of people tend to put on CNN or Fox News and just leave it running 24/7 you don't I
don't but a lot of people have it running in the background mode and it all of a sudden is just all of this is
seeping into your mind and the crisis news network is constantly making you negative and that's a
problem because your mindset is the most valuable thing that you had we've talked about this a
thousand times and everybody listening hopefully knows that and so first of all a piece of advice shut off
the news you know if you want to get five minutes of news on Google News Alerts or read some the end
of the day that's fine but you don't need to be the constant disaster information flowing into your brain
making you feel negative is eating up bandwidth and mindset that should be used in the positives right
and your cortisol levels - yeah which is causing your immune system to weaken and all of that so I've
been working on a secret project and that I've told you a little bit but it's called future loop with eben
again yeah so evident I have co-funded for three years now and it's been in development and we have
an amazing machine learning scientists or get McDermott who's brilliant he's a global asset you know a
cognitive asset and so this searches the world's news all the science journals news journals social media
and it scans it and it rates every article on the semantic positive and future forward semantic language
and then exponential technologies that are converging and we had developed it to apply to every
industry like Futura coaching transportation health care and so forth we focused it on Koba 19 so it
generates a daily email newsletter of here all of the articles around the world that are about how kovat
19 is being solved by AI and big data CRISPR and gene therapy all of these different things and so that
was great the next thing we did that you've heard about a concept called wisdom of the crowds that a
large enough population can make fairly accurate predictions and so we've built that engine on top of
future loop where when you go we're running a different prediction engine every week we just finished
without to announce results in fact today about when will the first fda-approved kovin 19 vaccine come
out and interestingly enough the prediction came out for December 18th or 19th so just by the end of
the year just in time for the Christmas holidays we'll see if that pans out but now we're gonna be writing
some predictions on peak death rate we're gonna look at the Dow Industrial averages and so forth but
it's an interesting business to look at can you predict the future with a large enough group of people
where you combine crowd intelligence and machine learning intelligence so we'll see but it's been so
much fun to know this and by the way anyone and when listening if you're interested just go to future
loop comm slash forward slash c19 and you can register to if it's free and I just having a blast with it
that's great Peter well you know I've always believed there's a difference between our brain and what
we call mind and the way that I've approached it personally as you know you're born with certain
capability and you hope it's good enough and I think I've had a good enough brain but I'm not sure I'm
really that much more intelligent at 75 than I was 15 years old as far as my brain working but my ability
to access the thinking of others and that's what I call our mind hmm is that my mind is just a thousand
times bigger than it was even 25 years ago just my ability to get value out of other people's thinking and
I think that this future loop that you're doing you're just accessing thinking from around the world and
you can direct it to your purposes you know it's fun there'll be a version eventually when things you can

5. do is you can sort the results by profession by level of expertise by gender by nationality and so you can
look and see how does the world look at this problem and make this prediction based upon all these
different elements so Emily it's fun in to the point we made earlier that during this kind of a crisis mode
there gonna be incredible new companies and strategies emerging and reinvented companies that are
come out stronger and so it's like coach will have new kinds of capabilities as will my abundance
community so here's a question will we ever go back to having large-scale events of hundreds of people
coming together or even 50 people coming together when will we feel safe enough will there be an all-
clear sign I guess after there's we have a vaccine of some time when will that happen so these are
important questions that well obviously to be thinking about yeah I mean think about where we were in
Beverly Hills three months ago you know yeah what's happened in three months well I'm telling our
team they're a bit nervous because of the virtual thing you know you know and I'm just doing the two
hour sprints okay you know we schedule people in dates that are convenient for them and we ask
people if you want to be in any session just let us know but you know we're not being tight about this
virtual is really convenient for us so it might as well be convenient for them but there's a thinking
process that you can get beforehand I have a little video I have a thinking process writable PDF and I'll
show you how I thought about it but when you come in and then zoom you know you can come in you
can have like a two minute general address and you hit a button and they're in groups of four and
they're talking to each other groups of four and nobody's in the bathroom nobody's taking a smoke
break nobody's joining it they're you know just there so we're gonna do it but there's talked and said
you know will we ever have live workshops again and I said sure we will and they said well what if they
love the virtual so much they won't think about I says here's what's going to be true they're gonna come
back and they're gonna want both mm-hmm so whatever new we create during the crisis and downturn
they're going to love that but they're going to love the other thing too but they'll want boats they won't
want one or the other they'll want both and you know the history of popular entertainment movies
were going to wipe out theatres didn't happen television was gonna wipe out movies didn't happen
people want more they don't want they don't want especially so I think one thing and this probably
deserves a whole podcast Peter but my sense is that supply chains are gonna get more national again
they'll get more robust for sure and they're gonna get rather than national they'll get more micro so
we'll start to see for example how do you manufacture internal to your organization yep right so one of
the things that's interesting and we've talked about this on exponential wisdom before you looked at a
company like SpaceX that unlike other aerospace companies which source their parts from everywhere
and what you had is military suppliers sourcing this part and then put a margin on it and then to this
part and put a margin on it to cut their cost down and I knew Ilan very closely at the early days of
formation of SpaceX he said no we're gonna manufacture everything internally so they ended up really
vertical icing the company and that allowed them to own cognitively and have their own destiny but
then you have a company that is now 3d printing their entire rocket and all they need is like you know
just inconel as a metal coming in so yeah we're gonna start to see reinventing the supply-chain yeah
nationalizing it but localizing it to our chigur there's a great book out it just came out it's called dis
United Nations by Peter Zion I met him I recommended to Joe polish that he had Peter one of the genius
Network meetings and he came in and his thing is that a lot of people don't realize this but deepwater
navigation is 80% of local trade it happens by deepwater navigation but a lot of people don't realize his
river system so the US has greatest river system in the world it's about 12,500 miles and that's the
Mississippi the Ohio the Missouri and a lot of other rivers but water transportation is about 1/12 the
cost of any kind of land transportation and 1/20 of the cost of air transportation what he's predicting is

6. you'll get supply chains up and down a river or it'll be local it's your ability to get your products to water
where there's not an urgency it's not needed in 24 hours you would use air for that or you know really
rapid transportation but most trade is a week two weeks three weeks and so I think that the period of
having your supply chains in 20 different countries we won't see that again yeah I think there's a lot of
now this globalization is been advantageous in many ways in the following sense right China went
through this experience first of the pandemic because of their ability to mandate certain changes they
went through it in 60 days and they have been extraordinarily open and sharing and I think maybe in our
next podcast let's talk about the actual pandemic talk about what's coming on in terms of new detection
capabilities and vaccines and therapies but one of the most incredible things that's gone on is the entire
world has never seen a singular enemy right we've never had that before during any World War there
was always enemies on both sides or neutral parties we had people who said well the environmental
collapse or species die office and enemy but some countries want the environment to change some
countries or groups don't care about species die-off but for the first time ever every nation on the planet
has got their sights trained on this specific coronavirus meaning and the level of collaboration and the
amount of cognitive focus is like none other before and we're seeing amazing across the board of
sharing of science and knowledge a possibility of it going back there yeah yeah the efficiencies that are
probably being created in billions of processes today that you wouldn't even know how to detect them
you know the improvements are going down so quickly so I think that's the thing that I you know
regarding the topic of this particular podcast is that I mean you've got to be good for cash you know
we're talking every day to 2600 entrepreneurs who are active ding coach you know some people are
closer to the edge than others but we say the biggest thing is you don't want to become isolated I think
that when you become isolated and feel cut off from other people you start to hallucinate and you make
up all sorts of bad things which aren't true but your cortisol levels don't care whether they're true or not
you're still going to go crazy so what I try to do is to prevent anyone from being isolated you know just is
the leader with babs of strategic coach I said sure we contact everybody every day that we're in touch
with them and we're sending them things and everything else so I think it's just not having the feeling of
being alone I don't think humans do real well alone for a long period of time yeah well pal I appreciate
you I'll just mention one last thing that I'm doing for my community and also for your community I think
now more than ever software-as-a-service and AI as a service is gonna be more important it's gonna be
huge so I am going heads down on creating the curriculum around AI is renew whoo and making that
available to my abundance community and we're going to be doing a series of webinars and curriculum
creation not around that because we're gonna get massive amounts of efficiency coming out of this and
there's always you know after the meltdown in 2001 after the meltdown 2008 or back in 19 anyway 87
87 then you get these booms as the dead weight is lost and people have reinvent efficiencies yeah I'll
give you a grim one which actually turned out to be a fundamental breakthrough was the black deaths
13 60 is the biggest year and one third of all the adults and Europe died but what happened was that
there was just an incredible amount of spare clothing afterwards hmm so the enterprising paper makers
started to collect this and they boil it and packet and warehouses and Gutenberg happens 95 years later
14:55 and without all that spare clothing from the people who died during the plague the Gutenberg
Revolution wouldn't have gotten off the ground so what seems to be terrible in one context can be an
extraordinary crucial breakthrough and another one and fertilizer I think as an individual you have to be
alert curious response been resourceful to not get caught up in the past and not get too dreamy about
the future but just take advantage of opportunities that are available next 24 hours with the people you
know putting capabilities together in more efficient ways yeah 100% well listen this has been a good

7. podcast on our next one why don't we dive into a little bit about how exponential technologies are
impacting this mm-hmm again more about as a exponential entrepreneur or as an entrepreneur or how
you're thinking about this maybe I can share what I'm seeing as solutions coming down the pike and
how we prevent this from happening at the scale in the future you bet all right see you soon thank you
thank you Dan