SDS 092: Exponential Thinking

Hello and welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast. Today we’ve got an interesting episode about exponential thinking. This is something that’s been driving my life, or my business decisions, and just general career decisions for the past couple of years, and I wanted to share this with you because it might be helpful as a perspective to look at the world. So there is this futurist in the US, you might have heard of him, his name is Peter Diamandis. And this is an incredible person who has started 17 different companies. I think I may have mentioned him already on the podcast. But he’s started companies like Human Longevity Inc, he started Interplanetary Resources, what else has he started? Then he’s done the Zero G, and so on. So just those companies. They’re huge.

So Human Longevity Inc, huge in terms of their goals, not in terms of the number of people working there or anything. He’s also started the Singularity University, you may have heard of that. So, for instance, Human Longevity Inc, their goal is to add another 20 years of human life, longevity, to the average lifespan in the next 10 years. Or something along those lines. So, basically, they’re trying to keep adding more and more years to our average life faster than the years go by.

Then Interplanetary Resources, they’re building equipment, and also plans and strategies on how to mine asteroids that fly by near earth for precious materials, or minerals, and then bring them back to earth and then use them here in production, or sell them, and so on. And then, what was the other one? Zero G, you’ve probably heard of this one. This is the parabolic flights, when you get on a plane, and then you can experience zero gravity for a couple of seconds several times, and this happens somewhere in California. And then Singularity University is one of the leading universities about exponential technologies. And that’s just 4 out of the 17 companies he’s started.

He’s a very inspirational person. I actually met him in person one time at the airport, it was La Guardia Airport in New York, just bumped into him. It was really interesting. Anyway, Peter Diamandis has this whole thought on exponential technologies. He’s got a book called “Bold”. If you haven’t read it, it’s a great book to pick up. I think it came out in 2014, as far as I remember. And it talks about these exponential technologies.

So what is exponential thinking? Not just technology, he talks about exponential thinking. So what is exponential thinking? I’ll give you an example that Peter Diamandis gives very, very often, even in his book. Just think about this for a second. So wherever you are in the world, sitting, standing, whatever you’re doing, just imagine you take 30 steps, 30 normal linear steps, from where you are into one direction. How far do you think you’ll get? Probably to the door, if there’s a door there, or a tree, or something. So just look at something, or just imagine something that’s 30 steps away.

Now imagine that instead of taking 30 linear steps, you take 30 exponential steps. Meaning that, the first step is a metre, the second step is 2 metres, the next steps is 4 metres, next step is 8 metres. So every following step is double the previous step. How far do you think you’ll get? Just imagine, from where you are, just imagine a place, a location, a mark, or something that’s familiar to you that you think you might reach if you just take simply 30 exponential steps. So it’s probably going to be a bit further than the original marker that you thought of, 30 linear steps, but how much further is it going to be? What’s the first thing that pops into your mind, without getting a calculator out and measuring this, just think about it. What do you think it’ll be?

Well, you got it? Ok, so the answer is that you will go all the way to the moon, you’ll come back, and then you’ll go halfway to the moon. That’s how far you’ll get. That’s what 30, not 300,000, only 30, the same amount of steps as we had in linear, but 30 exponential steps, does. And that’s what exponential thinking is all about. The reason why it’s so hard to think of that, like the first intuition that you had was probably like, you know, maybe you’ll get to the nearest grocery store. Or maybe you’ll get to the border of your country. Or to Africa. Or, if you’re in Africa, to Asia. Or something, where you’ll go around the world one time. But it’s actually so much further than that.

The reason why it’s so hard to think that way is because the way we evolved, and Peter explains this, that we evolved as very linear thinkers. Very linear and local thinkers. Throughout our generations and generations and generations of evolution, all our parents, and their parents, and their parents and so on, all they had to think about was linear stuff. How far away is that lion? How far is the food? Once something happens, what’s the next thing that’s going to happen? Everything was happening linearly around them. And also, equally importantly, they were only used to local things. They lived in an area, and only the things in that area would affect them. If something happened on the other side of the world, they would never know about it. Or as of a hundred or two hundred years ago, they would know about it within a few days, when that gets into the newspapers, and so on.

Now, we live in a completely different world, where nothing is linear any more. Things are exponential. Things are happening exponentially. Every year we have a new iPhone which is 50% faster than the previous iPhone. Every year we have a new MacBook. Every year we have a new type of car. Things are changing exponentially. That’s what it means. And things are happening so quickly, our brains are not used to it. Our brains expect linear change and improvement and so on, and they always mistakenly see the linear pattern. But it’s actually happening exponentially. And at the same time, we live in a global world, a hyper connected world. We don’t live in a very local world any more, it’s a globally connected world. Something happens on the other side of the planet, you know about it within seconds, within split seconds. Through Twitter, through news, through video, through everything. Through all these social and other media channels, we find out very, very quickly.

So we live in a very different world. And this has only been happening for the past, if you think about it, only the past 60 years, or less than that. And therefore, our brains, we’ve only had 1 or 2 or 3 generations of people who have experienced this. And so, therefore, our brains have not adapted to that. Our brains are very settled, they’re linear and local. It’s going to take ages. Without something like Neuralink, which Elon Musk is proposing, it’s going to be impossible for us as a species to adapt to that.

But this is where we finally come to the exponential thinking part. There is good news in that. That means that if you can train yourself not to just intuitively think like that, because it’s near to impossible to train to yourself to just think in exponential terms all the time. But if you train yourself to recognise exponential patterns, to recognise exponential technologies, exponential opportunities, exponential things that are happening around you, if you train yourself to recognise that, you will be at a huge advantage over other people. You will be at a huge advantage over your peers, your competitors, over everybody.

So businesses that don’t recognise this are going to lose to businesses that recognise it. Same thing for people. People who recognise exponential things, they’re going to have many more opportunities in life. And it doesn’t matter if you are an entrepreneur or not an entrepreneur, it really doesn’t matter. In your career, in your life, in the things that you do in life, if you recognise exponential, you will always be at an advantage.

A good place to start is, of course, Peter Diamandis’s book, “Bold”, or he’s got some online videos, he’s got an online course as well. But I’ll give you a couple of examples. First of all, you’re in the right profession already. So this is what I want to say. A good way to check these things is just go onto Google Trends. So if you have never used Google Trends, just in Google, type in “Google Trends” and you will find this website, trends.google.com. So if you go there, and you type in a word, so something that you’re interested in, and you want to check if it’s an exponential thing, you just look at the trend. But just also change the year. Usually it does, by default, I think it does for the past year, or something, past 12 months. Change it to not even the past 5 years. Change it from 2004 to present. And see how this word has been searched for in the past 13 years. If it’s just something that’s spiked, something that’s fashion, or trendy, for a period of time, it will just be like a spike on the Google Trends chart, and then it will die off, and then you’ll never hear about it again.

But if it’s an actual exponential technology, or an exponential trend in something, you will actually see the exponent. And so if you just go there right now, and you type in “data science”, you will see that data science is an exponential trend. That it is going exponentially. And you will see that we are actually at that point in time when data science is exploding. So that’s the good news, you’re already in a place, you’re already in a profession, you’re already looking at a profession, which is exploding exponentially. And you can see how you can drive value from exponential thinking even if you’re not an entrepreneur.

You’re building a career, you want a successful career in a space, well data science is a great space to be in because it’s exponential. More and more opportunities are going to come up, more and more applications are going to be derived, more and more technologies, tools, methodologies, and so on. It’s going to be more fun. You always want to be in an exponential place, or trend, rather than a linear trend, let alone a trend that’s falling off. So data science, right?

I’ll give you an example of how we apply this in our business. So if you look at the courses that we produce, that we publish, especially the recent ones, and you Google the names of the courses, the A-Z series, you Google their names, you’ll see that most of them, almost all of them, are exponential trends. And we focus our business on exponential trends. So if you Google “machine learning” on Google Trends, and you set the period from 2004 until now, you’ll see the exponential trend right in front of you. If you Google “deep learning” for our Deep Learning A-Z course, you’ll see the exponential trend. If you Google “artificial intelligence”, you’ll see the exponential trend.

Interesting fact, I just checked, if you Google “computer vision” though, you won’t see an exponential trend. And I was actually very surprised to see this. We didn’t check this beforehand, we just checked it for this podcast, and maybe that’s the reason why the Kickstarter for the computer vision isn’t going as well as the artificial intelligence Kickstarter, for instance, or deep learning. And I’m recording this before the Kickstarter ends. At this stage it’s not going as well, maybe it will change, but maybe that’s an example of where we didn’t look out far enough. But we would have still done this course because it’s something important, people need it. But it shows you the difference between being on an exponential trend and a linear trend.

And the other thing is they don’t have to be just data science focused, or software focused. For instance, here’s a couple of other examples. These are still technologies, but from a different space. So if you Google “bitcoin”, you’ll see an exponential trend. If you Google “blockchain”, you’ll see an exponential trend. Again, it doesn’t have to be all technologies. There’s other things that are exponential. Technology is very easy to find now because everybody is talking about technology, it’s changing the world, and so on. So there’s lots of exponential technologies. So if you want to be in the space of technologies, I think it’s easier to find these exponential trends. So whatever industry you’re in, whatever field you’re in, whatever you’re interested in, always look out for exponential thinking, and finding these exponential trends will open up huge opportunities. What you do with them after you find them, that’s totally up to you. That’s totally your call, how you take advantage of them, and what you do.

For instance, we created a course, or you start a restaurant, or whatever you do in that space, or how you leverage it for yourself. But at the same time, knowing about these exponential trends will put you not one step, but many, many steps ahead of the game, ahead of your competition. Many, many exponential steps, I should probably say, ahead of your competition, and ahead of those people who are not looking out for those exponential trends.

So there we go, that was exponential thinking. Can’t wait to see you guys here next time. And until then, happy analyzing.