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Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler

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Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler

Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler are frequent collaborators and the authors of the Exponential Technology Series, a trilogy of books examining how accelerating technologies are transforming civilization. Their pairing brings together complementary intellectual strengths: Diamandis is an entrepreneur, technologist, and space industry pioneer; Kotler is a science journalist and author who specializes in human performance, neuroscience, and the future of organizations.

The Authors

Peter H. Diamandis is a physician, engineer, and entrepreneur best known as the founder of XPRIZE and co-founder of Singularity University. He is a serial entrepreneur with over twenty companies in the space, health, and technology sectors. His intellectual framework centers on abundance, exponential technology, and the belief that human civilization’s greatest problems are also its greatest entrepreneurial opportunities.

Steven Kotler is a science journalist, author, and director of the Flow Research Collective. He has written extensively on peak performance, flow states, and the neuroscience of extraordinary achievement. His contribution to the Diamandis collaboration is the scientific and psychological texture — how humans will actually experience and perform in an exponentially accelerating world.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think (2020)

Context: The Exponential Series

This is the third book in Diamandis and Kotler’s Exponential Technology Series, following Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (2012) and Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (2015). The series builds a cumulative argument: technology is improving faster than most people believe (Abundance), bold entrepreneurs can leverage exponential technology to solve large problems (Bold), and when these technologies begin converging with each other, the pace and scope of transformation becomes qualitatively different (The Future Is Faster Than You Think).

The Convergence Thesis

The book’s central argument extends beyond the familiar claim that individual technologies are improving exponentially. The novel claim:

“The new news is that formerly independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology are beginning to converge with other independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology.”

“Solitary exponentials disrupt products, services, and markets — like when Netflix ate Blockbuster for lunch — while convergent exponentials wash away products, services, and markets, as well as the structures that support them.”

The examples span every major industry: retail (AI + AR), healthcare (AI + genomics + 3D bioprinting), transportation (electric + autonomous + aerial), education (AI + VR), finance (blockchain + AI), and more.

The Smartness Economy

Diamandis and Kotler introduce the “Smartness Economy” as the current phase of technological development — an updated version of the electrification economy:

“In the late 1800s, if you wanted a good idea for a new business, all that was required was to take an existing tool, say a drill or a washboard, and add electricity to it… we’re about to see an updated version of this economy, with AI replacing electricity.”

The next iteration — the Transformation Economy — goes further: you’re not just paying for a product or an experience, but for a transformation of your life.

Industry-by-Industry Transformation

The book’s most practically useful sections walk through specific industry transformations:

Healthcare: “If the curing of one disease is a miracle of the biblical variety, what do you call the curing of sixteen thousand?” The convergence of AI diagnostics, genomics, precision medicine, and robotic surgery is not incremental improvement — it is a fundamental restructuring of what medicine is.

Retail: AI makes shopping frictionless and eventually invisible. The integration of AI personal shoppers, augmented reality try-on, and autonomous delivery collapses the distinction between “shopping” and “having what you need.”

Manufacturing: 3D printing ends the spare parts market, enables user-designed products, and eliminates supply chain complexity. “If you’re a farmer in Iowa and your tractor breaks during harvest time, waiting a few days for a spare part could jeopardize the entire season. A 3D printer solves this problem.”

Food and Water: “In a few years, humans will become the first animals that get their protein from other animals without any animals being harmed along the way.” And on water: “When it comes to energy, it’s not about scarcity, it’s about accessibility — which is the exact kind of problem that exponential technology has a history of solving.”

The Human Performance Dimension: Flow

Kotler contributes the book’s most distinctive section on flow states — the psychological theory of optimal performance:

“Flow is technically defined as ‘an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.‘”

“In over fifty years of research, the people who score off the charts for deep meaning and overall life satisfaction are the people with the most flow in their lives.”

Group flow — teams performing at peak collective intelligence — is described as “the most pleasurable state on Earth.” The practical implication: exponential technology creates new possibilities for collective intelligence when groups are able to achieve flow together.

Abundance and the Problem of Inequality

Diamandis and Kotler address the concern about inequality directly:

“While we will see a future in which the rich may be living on Mars and accessing the latest in longevity treatments, this goes hand-in-hand with a future where everyone on Earth has increasingly low-cost access to food, energy, water, education, healthcare, and entertainment.”

Their argument is essentially about demonetization: exponential technology tends to make previously expensive goods and services progressively cheaper, eventually making them accessible even to people without significant financial resources. The phone you carry today has more computing power than a room-sized supercomputer of a generation ago.

The Opportunity Inversion

Perhaps the book’s most strategically important claim:

“The world’s biggest problems are also the world’s biggest business opportunities.”

This is not merely rhetorical — it is a consequence of the abundance thesis. When the technologies to solve large-scale problems (clean energy, water purification, disease, food security) exist and are improving exponentially, the economic opportunity in solving those problems is also growing exponentially.

Intellectual Style

Diamandis and Kotler write with enthusiasm and optimism that some critics find credulous. Their predictions are specific and sometimes wrong in detail (the exact timing of flying cars, the precise date of longevity escape velocity). But their directional claims about convergent technology transformation have generally proven more accurate than skeptical counter-predictions.

Their work is primarily aimed at entrepreneurs, investors, and executives seeking to position for exponential change — not at academic audiences or policy makers. This shapes the framing: the emphasis is on opportunity and strategic positioning, not on governance, equity, or precautionary principles.

Note on Steven Kotler’s Extended Work

Steven Kotler also wrote The Rise of Superman (2014) and co-authored Stealing Fire (2017) with Jamie Wheal. These books focus specifically on flow states and altered consciousness — see steven-kotler-jamie-wheal for the detailed treatment of that work. The flow framework introduced in those books informs the human performance dimension Kotler contributes to the Diamandis collaborations.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (2015)

Bold is the second book in the Exponential Technology Series, and focuses on the entrepreneurial opportunity created by exponential technologies. Where The Future Is Faster Than You Think describes what is coming, Bold describes how to act on it.

The Six Ds

The most important framework in Bold is the Six Ds of Exponentials — the sequential stages through which any technology travels once it enters an exponential growth curve: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization. Understanding where a given technology sits in this sequence is the fundamental entrepreneurial diagnostic.

“the world’s biggest problems are now the world’s biggest business opportunities.”

See six-ds-of-exponentials for the full treatment.

Moonshot Thinking

The entrepreneurial philosophy of Bold is built around 10x thinking — the counterintuitive claim that aiming for 10x improvement is often easier than aiming for 10%:

“if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.”

See moonshot-thinking for the full treatment.

Flow as Competitive Strategy

Kotler’s contribution to Bold — the flow state research — is positioned not just as a personal performance tool but as an organizational strategy:

“If you’re not incentivizing risk, you’re denying access to flow—which is the only way to keep pace in a breakneck world.”

The argument: exponential environments require continuous creativity and adaptation. Flow states — where performance is highest and creativity most potent — require risk-taking and challenge-skill balance. Organizations that eliminate risk eliminate the conditions for flow. In fast-changing markets, that is a competitive liability.

Crowdsourcing and Incentive Prizes

Bold provides detailed guidance on two exponential organizational tools:

Crowdsourcing: Tapping the intelligence and labor of distributed networks — “an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.” The key insight: for certain types of problems, aggregated crowd intelligence outperforms expert teams.

Incentive Competitions: The XPRIZE model applied broadly. Set a clear goal, offer a large prize to the first team to achieve it, and watch small, passionate teams with nothing to lose innovate faster than large organizations with everything to protect.

“When you tell someone that they have only a tenth the budget… most people give up… A few venturesome entrepreneurs may decide to give it a shot… The only option left to them is to throw out past experiences and preconditions and start with a clean sheet of paper. And this is exactly where serious innovation begins.”

Billionaire Thinking Patterns

Diamandis conducted in-depth research with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Richard Branson, and others to identify common decision-making patterns. Eight were identified:

“1. Risk taking and risk mitigation 2. Rapid iteration and ceaseless experimentation 3. Passion and purpose 4. Long-term thinking 5. Customer-centric thinking 6. Probabilistic thinking 7. Rationally optimistic thinking 8. Reliance on first principles, aka fundamental truths”

Musk’s articulation of the first-principles approach:

“Physics training is a good framework for reasoning. It forces you to boil things down to their most fundamental truths and then connect those truths in a way that lets you understand reality.”

Bezos on the missionary-mercenary distinction:

“Is this person who leads this company a missionary or a mercenary? The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money. One of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries end up making more money than the mercenaries anyway.”

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