Big Technology Podcast - AI, Elon, Abundance, and Longevity — With Peter Diamandis

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Peter Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, a New York Times bestselling author, and host of the Moonshot Podcast. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a fun, wide-ranging conversation touching on his belief around AI, his friendship with Elon Musk, Abundance and happiness, and how we can live longer, including an incoming lifespan explosion. Tune in for a fun, thought provoking conversation that covers a lot of ground on today's crucial topics. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

One of the biggest thinkers in tech and innovation joins us to talk about AI, abundance, Elon Musk, and extending your lifespan, all that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Peter Diamandis. He's the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZ Foundation. He's a multiple-time best-selling author. He's also the host of the Great Moonshot podcast. Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you, Alex.

Great to be here. Great to have you here. I've been following your work for quite some time, and no, you recently held this Abundance Summit where you talked a lot about artificial intelligence. You had some great speakers there. And I think the main question there was whether AI is going to help us boom or AI is going to be the end of us, this boomers versus Doomers framework.

And you just wrote on X right before this. I reiterate that AI will be humanity's greatest hope or will be our gravest threat. There is no in between. So I really wanted it. We talk about the nuance here. Why is it one or the other? And if it's one or the other, and I know, of course, we have some, you know,

determination on which way we go, but which way do you think we're headed? Yeah. So it's one or the other because it is so extraordinarily powerful. It's not a little bit more powerful than an intelligent human. Claude 3 was at an IQ of 101. We just saw GPT-40 released that exceeds Claude 3. but there's no boundary level here.

There's no boundary for human level. It's going to continue to increase. And there's no reason to believe it's not going to get 100 times or a thousand times or a million or a billion times more powerful than the average human, what's typically called digital superintelligence. And once it's there, if it is in support of our society, of humanity, of homo sapiens, it's our greatest hope ever. It's a boomer opportunity, right? It's helping us cure all of our ills, explore the stars, you know, up-level our dreams. If it's used for dystopian purposes, I don't think AI on its own is going to be dystopian. I think it's the human use of AI that could be dystopian.

Then you've got a tool that is the most dangerous tool on the planet. So that's the debate. You know, I have my abundance summit every year. where I, you know, support and coach 400 CEOs. And that was the theme this year, the greatest hope or the greatest threat for humanity. Right. And so what are you leaning towards right now? I'm, you know, I'm not only the optimist. I'm the guy who says the glass isn't half full, the glass is overflowing. I truly believe that as systems become more and more intelligent,

they get more abundant-minded, more loving of life, more supportive. You know, if you look, there was a study done by a friend of mine, Alvin Grayland, in his latest book, The New Reality, and he looked at leaders around the world who were sort of the despots and the greatest leaders. And there was a direct correlation with the amount of school they had, how much learning they had, how open-minded they are. because if you've got a digital superintelligence who you tell, go and destroy these people, I mean, honestly, there are ways to get your solution without killing.

And I think we're going to see digital superintelligence potentially helps society really survive over the decades ahead. That's interesting. So your belief is that the more education we get, the more empathetic we're going to be. and as AIs get more educated, then therefore they will resemble the same qualities? I think I put it a different way as well, which is if you think about wisdom, right, we talk about our societal leaders being wise, right, our elders being wise. And, you know, you ask, what do they, why are they wise? Well, they've seen so many things in their life.

You go to them and say, you know, village elder, what do you think is going to happen here? What should we do? Well, I saw that 40 years ago, whatever. Can you imagine a digital superintelligence that is able to play out a billion simulations of every scenario and see where they lead? That is the ultimate wisdom. And, you know, people say, well, people are going to fight over things that are scarce and rare resources. I don't think there's such a thing as scarcity. Scarcity is contextual, right?

We think of energy being scarce, but we were bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun than we can consume as a species in a year, and we're about to really bring fusion online. You know, we don't have, you know, we taught food scarcity, but we're reinventing how to produce food in vertical farms or cultivated meats. So there are ways to really use technology to turn scarcity into abundance over and over again. And that's what intelligence can do. Right. But also, I mean, evil people are, you know, the most evil people have been very smart. And the thing that makes them so dangerous is that they don't have, let's say, the morals that would keep them from doing the damage. So you can have one very smart, evil person doing way more damage than a bunch of

really smart, benevolent people. So how do you square that in the equation here? So listen, there is most definitely that risk, right? I'm not worried about, you know, artificial intelligence. I'm worried about human stupidity to put that in juxtapositioning. The only way to guard against that is it's white hat, black hat in this scenario, the ability to use AI to guard us. I do, you have to ask yourself the question. In your heart, do you believe on the whole human nature is good or evil in the majority of humans? We have more and more individuals, which we can call entrepreneurs who can find and solve problems. The more people finding and solving problems, the better the world gets.

I like to say in the work I do in my Abundance Summit, you know, the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. And so we're going to have more and more people trying to solve big problems. Are we going to have people using these technologies for selfish, you know, reasons for, you know, reasons that could injure society?

100%. Do we have the ability to detect? it and fight it, we do. And let's talk about governance quickly, because we've been talking right now with this kind of amorphous, like what will AI do? And I think that's so many conversations about AI tend to sort of, and I think we've kind of already touched on it, remove the humans from the equation. But you at the very beginning started talking about we have Anthropic, we have Google,

now Elon is trying to build superintelligence. Who do you think is going to control it? And should we, let's say one organization, let's say, for instance, Google is able to achieve some form of superintelligence, right? For instance, let's say they create AI that can improve AI and it just continues to accelerate and we have lift off. What are the risks of having a single entity control this superintelligence, whether it's a company or a government? Alex, there's good news here in that we have seen not a single company, but we've seen five, six, seven, eight companies all in parallel delivering similar generative AI capabilities, and they're all priced

either free or like 20 bucks a month, right? No one was so far ahead that it's like, this is a million bucks if you get a chance to use it, right? So the fact that there are multiple players and they're all starting at or near zero is a super positive indication of the future. I don't think you're going to have people all of a sudden, you know, all eight of them getting into a cabal and saying, okay, let's all charge a thousand bucks a month because we can. You also have great business models like Google that is and by due, which has, you know, been available for free around the world. And these companies are making money on secondary and tertiary implications of that free business model.

And I think you're going to see that here with AI as well. I think AI will become ultimately the best educator on the planet and the best diagnostician on the planet available on your mobile phone. And I think that educator, again, the best on the planet will be available for free to the poorest child and the wealthiest child. And it won't be like it's a little bit better for the person who's wealthy. Just like Google for Larry Page's kids is not different than Google. for a kid in a favela using it.

Yeah, I mean, it is amazing. So my wife and I were just talking about like how much time it takes to tutor kids and like help them do their homework. And now you can, I guess you can ostensibly just turn over a lot of this to a world class tutor that's going to be able to look at their homework, work with them on their homework, even attend PTA meetings and get the notes. So you can be better, better parents. And that is, that is pretty interesting to me. Yeah, it is. And you've got, you know, Saul Khan with Khan Academy, with Khan Amigo, which is a GPT4-powered version of it. And, you know, this year at Abundance 360, I showed a video of Steve Jobs years ago saying, you know, I'm so jealous that Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor. And so I saw, you know, I'm so jealous that Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor. and so I said to the audience, let me introduce you to Aristotle, and Steve Brown, my chief A officer, had created a digital avatar of Aristotle based on all of his works, and I had

conversations, and I used Aristotle as a co-host. And that is now true which all the great educators of all time, and their works and their knowledge and their philosophies are available to you and your kids to have a conversation or debate with. Be taught about Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer directly. I mean, this is the world we're heading, and it's free. Right. Okay, one last question about AI. Then we're going to move on to Elon. I want to ask you where you think the economic benefit is going to be here, because you brought up a very interesting point that, you know, you think about the open AIs and the clods. It's 20 bucks a month or it's free. And opening, I recently said, all right, your, our latest model,

GPT40, free for everyone. So who's going to make money here, Peter? I think it's going to be based on up-leveling the values and services. So I have a company called Fountain Life, for example, which is what I consider the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics company. And we employ the best functional medicine doctors and put you through a, full-day diagnostic, and then take all of the data, analyze it, and deliver it back to you. And we can do it without AI in the loop. It's just more difficult and more complicated and is not as good as having AI in the loop. So we will make money by delivering a better service that is made more accurate, faster,

able to service more members by using AI. Yeah. The application. So it's going to be the application. When I tell people, entrepreneurs, I say, listen, do you want to start an AI company? You need two things. Unique data and a relationship with a marketplace that you can offer to. So the AI is becoming democratized and demonetized. The data and the market and the AI together create new businesses. Yeah. All right. Let's go to Elon. it's always interesting speaking about Elon on this podcast when we bring out the critics like we had some Elon critics uh on a couple weeks ago and the inbox flooded with uh negative comments because people love Elon and then we bring on people that support Elon and then the inbox floods with negative comments because there are people who hate him you've been friends with him for 20 years so basically this is sort of the way that we're approaching Elon on the show is we're going to talk with

the people who love him and the people who have critics who critique him and hopefully over time listeners will get a nuanced picture of him because that's sort of what we're and and basically come to their own conclusions right like we're not going to tell you how to think on this show and peter you've been friends with him for 20 years 24 years yeah you're there at the very beginning of of SpaceX so i'm curious i'd love to hear a like your reflection of of what makes Elon different than others as an entrepreneur and then also why you think it's difficult to have these nuanced conversations about him? I think he's extraordinarily brilliant.

He is genius level IQ, and he's got incredible conviction. So Elon's what he would call a first principles thinker. You know, he will evaluate a situation to first principles, like the physics of what's going on, reach a conclusion. And then what he does that very few. others have done is he puts it all on black, right? Or all on red. He bets everything, including his reputation, including his health, including his time. And he goes all in. And I find that extraordinary. You know, we have so many billionaires out there that are just sitting on

their wealth. You know, they built a company. They made money and all of that. But they're not reinvesting it in other moonshots, right? They're sitting on $100 billion of wealth and using that to buy more houses or more yachts or to make more money with their wealth. It's like, you know, what are you going to do with it? You're going to give it to your kids and ruin their lives. You're going to give it to your lawyers to give away or why don't you use both your wealth and your intelligence to go and pick problems and solve them? And Elon's done that over and over again. So kudos to him. You know, on I remember January 7th of he became the wealthiest person on the planet, I think that was the date.

And he was getting a lot of criticism about not being philanthropic. Now, he had funded a few years earlier a $15 million global learning XPRIZE, to teach kids in Africa reading and writing arithmetic without any adults just on an app on a tablet. And it was a great success. And so I texted him and I said, Elon, a lot of critique on philanthropy. How about funding another XPRIZE. And he said, what do you have in mind? And I said, we have a $100 million gigaton carbon removal prize that we need someone to underwrite.

And he wrote back, sure, that was it. Two months later, we were launching this $100 million prize. You know, he donated like, I don't know what it was, $130 million for the purse and for the operations. And again, he's, when he's clear about what he wants to do, the decision, process of making it happen is amazing. You know, and if you remember, he is a consummate engineer, all right, Starship, Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship, amazing engineers that follow him, and he is able to get the best, including Gwen Shotwell, who really, as president operates, SpaceX, but he also has got a clear

fundamental vision. And I just salute the guy. The world is a much, much better place because of him. And then what do you think about this, about how polarizing he is? I just think that I'll just give you like one perspective here. I think he so often just kind of steps in it unnecessarily. And you think about some of like the tweets he's done, you know, the Paul Pelosi tweet or this Fauci prison tweet that he did, which was, you know.

Unnecessary. with you. Yeah. I mean, as a friend you want to protect him and say, don't do that. He's a lot of friends you do, but he's, what you see is what you get. He speaks his mind always. Most of the times that's brilliant, some of the times he gets him in trouble. Do you think that, I mean, people, I'm curious if you have context on this. People, it seems from the outside that he's like pretty impulsive in terms of the things that he does. It seems like Twitter was an impulse by, even though the most recent where he fired a good chunk of the, or I think the entire Supercharger team. Now he's trying to hire some of them back. And people were like, okay, is this the

end of Superchargers? But maybe he just needed, it seems like when he wants to just redo something, he just kind of clears the deck and tries to start over. Yeah. Is he a little bit too impulsive? He's very impulsive, but there's always a fundamental underneath that. I mean, the Twitter purchase, while it was an impulse, I think he had a clear vision of what Twitter could be. Right. He had a clear vision of X when he had built PayPal. He wanted the ultimate banking institution. And X now, X.com, will become not only a platform for communications and for conversations

like this, it'll become a bank, it'll become, you know, wallets, they'll become crypto, become all of those things, one layer at a time. And he'll turn, you know, Elon will be the first trillionaire out there. He'll turn X into an extraordinary platform, SpaceX, and, you know, and Starlink, which I got to admit, Starlink is brilliant, right? It's been tried so many times before with Global Star and Eridium and Telodesic, and they all failed. Yeah, well, I mean, he's definitely, he realized, I think, with Starlink that he had the rocket. When you got the rockets, it's not that the notion of building a global internet based on satellite is trivial, but it's much more feasible than if you're trying to ride somebody else's. It had been tried before by companies that own rockets like orbital sciences with Orbcom.

It's just not only did he have the rockets, he had the engineering brilliance to create something that has dominated the field. And I know of many people who have tried to do this and just failed. So it's the combination of, what's the Greek word, chutzpah, johannis, and brilliance and capital. And also, you know, he has the ability to do something which is biblical, which is speak a vision, right, and literally create it by being able to aggregate the capital and the talent and the marketing. and birth it, right? The same hero, X.A.I. I mean, from zero to a huge valuation

by virtue of his involvement. I want to talk to you about that, about Neurrelink, but I just want to ask one more follow-up here, which is, do you think that saying, like, Elon is who he is, is that letting him off the hook a little too easily? I think he has got responsibility given the platform, he has and the people who follow him and worship him to have some clear thinking before he makes some of the statements he makes.

I do agree with that. And he is who he is. Meaning I have seen I have I've been in conversations or seen him in conversations where when a person said the wrong trigger. a different Elon comes out. Yeah. And again, on the whole, it's not like he's a little bit better for humanity. I think he's a thousand X better for humanity and the things that he's taking on. The world's a better place because he's here investing his brilliance and his mind. One thing I'll say is I think that he doesn't operate from fear, which is, and I think we're

going to talk about that a little later, but just it is, it is interesting how so many people say this can't be done and and he's like basically when he gets an idea he will try it he's like the bullshit i'll just make it happen if he's if he's done the mental physics uh from a first principle thinking standpoint he will take it on and a lot of times he'll see things that others don't see other times he will just brute force it into existence so on neuralink it seems interesting because we've obviously seen like the first Neurlink device implanted. It looks like it's had some pretty impressive results already. One thing I think you brought up to him is that is there going to be this moment where

Neurrelink is going to connect our brains with AI and effectively couple us with it. So I'd love to hear your thoughts about like whether that's the direction it's going to go. And, you know, should be excited about something like that? The answer is without question we're going that way, right? So here I've got my cell phone. It does a lot of capabilities on board, but when it wants to do something difficult, it uses the 5G network to go to the edge of the cloud, do the calculations there, and send the answer back. Our brains are limited in their abilities, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. And there's going to be a time. in the not too distant future, Ray Kurzweil's prediction is 2033, right, for a high bandwidth brain computer interface where I think it and that thought goes through Neurrelink or whatever company to the edge of the cloud where the processing gets done and then the answer comes back to my brain. You know, we can't make our brains any bigger. Our neocortex, this folded

layer on the brain was an attempt by evolution to increase that outer layer of the brain. It folded onto itself to get increased surface area. But our brains can't get any bigger because we would not be able to be given birth through mom's birth canal. So the only way to expand it is what we do with our cell phones. Ray predicted high bandwidth brain computer interface in 233. We have neuralink. We have, you know, a half dozen of.

other companies out there that are up and operational. And, you know, this year, for example, on stage at my Abundance Summit this, in March of 25, I've an amazing woman from MIT who has a brand new approach with these microscopic circulatronic chips that are less than the size of red blood cell that will be introduced into your, you know, your arterial system and go and flow into the brachronauts. brain and give you millions of connection points. So these sorts of technologies are coming. It's fantastic voyage from the movie and the book. They're companies like paradromics. They're doing amazing work right now and BlackRock and others. If you think about what is the most

what is the most valuable thing you could do to increase the capability of your employees or your country? It would be to increase the intelligence of your people. And so AI is part of that, but also, you know, BCI is part of that. And ultimately, the merger of humans and AI coupling, as we talked about it, is likely where we're going. Are you going to be an early adopter on that stuff? I, listen, I cannot, I can't go any place without this thing, right? It's my augmented, I'm on stage in front of, you know, 5,000 people.

And I will ask the question, is there anybody here who does? does not have their cell phone. And there's not a hand that goes up. The last time a hand went up, I said, do you not own one? He goes, no, no, I lost it in my Uber on the Y here. So it's like, we all are dependent on this. This is, this is an extension of our, of our brain. So I think that's reality. So that's a yes to the early adopter question. Yeah, early adopter. Okay. We've talked so much, we've used the word abundance so much today. And you have this abundant summit. You've talked about getting to abundance. It's one of the things you talk about a lot. But for those who haven't heard about it before, what is abundance? Like, what is your definition of it? Do we have it?

We have it to an extraordinary amount compared to humanity 50 years ago, 100 years ago, a thousand years ago. Abundance is access to the fundamentals of life. It's not about a world of luxury. it's about a world of opportunity. I define technology as a force that takes whatever is scarce and makes it abundant. Let me give you some examples. So we used to kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights. That's how we got energy, right? Then technology allowed us to ravage mountainsides and get coal.

Then we drilled kilometers under the ground for oil and natural gas. Now we can use photovoltaics and soon perovskite to convert, sunlight into electricity. And there's 8,000 times more energy that hits the surface of the earth than we consume as a species in a year. So this energy is there. It's just not in a usable form yet. And so technology takes what's there and not usable and makes it usable. Another example is water, right? We talk about water wars, a water scarcity, but we live on a water planet. We have two-thirds of our planets covered by water. We've, but unfortunately, you know, It's 97.5% salt, you know, 2% is ice, and we fight over a half a percent.

We just launched an X-Prize. I'm very proud to be chairman of the X-Prize. We have launched 30 X-Prizes in 30 years, about $600 million in competitions. And we just launched $120 million prize, our largest ever, out of Abu Dhabi, for large-scale desalination. can we improve the process of giving everybody access to clean water? So abundance is access to food, water, energy, health care, education, you know, ultimately more time even. Can we get time abundance, right?

Well, working on that through longevity, we get time abundance by, I don't know if you remember the old days, I used to go to library to research a report. I would spend, you know, our getting there. looking at the card catalogs, trying to find the book, not finding the book, going to another library. Now Google gives us back those two or three hours. There's more time abundance that way. So all of the charts are up into the right. Unfortunately, we have an abundance of empty calories too, leading to obesity. We've an abundance of carbon in the atmosphere. So it's not all positive, but we majority, vast majority of this abundance is giving every man, woman, and child access

to the fundamentals that we need. And if we have so much abundance, why do you think people are so unhappy? Or are they not unhappy? Yeah, you know, it's fascinating. One of the primary reasons is we judge ourselves against our neighbor. There is a, there's a constant. which all of us have in our minds 150 people that we consider our peers. And they are your friends, there are people you see on TV all the time.

They are people that you have a relationship with and you judge yourself not based upon how far you've come or how far you've come from your great-grandparents. or how far you've come since the middle ages, you base yourself on how you compare yourself to the Cardassians, you know, or how you compare yourself to this billionaire or that billionaire. And that's a way for, you know, a path for a disaster. So instead of realizing amazing, I have a cell phone with free music and entertainment and education. and I have air conditioning and heating and light and I can talk to anybody on the other side of the planet for free, we don't value those things because we don't have a private jet or whatever

it might be. What do you think it says about the human condition that we're so quick to take these things for granted? I mean, I'm thinking in particular, we talked about AI models where like Chad GPT came out and everyone's like, this is the most incredible thing ever developed. And then a year later, they're like, this is a piece of shit. When is GPT-5 coming out? Yeah, it's a fickle part of human nature.

We tend to accept everything as baseline, and we're always looking for change. We're always looking for how do we improve ourselves. The other side, though, equally interesting, Alex, is that everybody likes, I mean, no one really likes dramatic change, right? you like waking up in the morning knowing the world is the same way it was as when you went to sleep the night before um and when when there is dramatic change um people resist it and there's a lot of dramatic change coming yeah well that is for sure i mean i guess it's already upon us so and accelerating and we're going to now shift a little bit into health and medicine the world of

medicine, but just to bridge those two worlds, talking about things that are changing. So in preparation for this conversation, I went back and watched your 2012 TED Talk. Do you remember how you ended that talk? My abundance TED talk in 2012? Protein folding. Oh, yes. And you mentioned that there's a human who humans are the best protein folders and that it used to be the work of supercomputers. Yes. But now it's the work of AI. Yes. Things like Alpha So talk a little bit about the significance of that, right? Because I had written in my notes here that like AI is, you know, the path to abundance where we, we're in 2012, you're already talking. And I think you mentioned a little bit about AI, but you're already talking about how we have more energy, more water, more communication. But now we're going to have that effectively, you know, in multiple. And, and that is also going to be more medical breakthroughs. So I'm curious if you can give your thoughts on that. I mean, it's interesting. I remember now it, I, I remember now it, I, I I talked about the ability for the crowd to help predict protein folding. It was a supercomputing problem for the last 50 years.

And, of course, AlphaFold by Google's Deep Mind solved protein folding. And just recently, something called AlphaFold 3 was just announced by Demis. And it's revolutionary. I was talking about this morning. it's the ability not only to predict the folding of a protein but the interaction of all molecules of life like how this protein and this lipid

and this sugar will interact and where they're going next what's that it's crazy it's crazy and what we're going next is the ability to model your cell in AI and then your tissue and then your organ and then you and know this drug works for you

and this drug does not work for you and to really understand And I just, I've written two books in the longevity space, one with Tony Robbins called Lifeforce and one behind my shoulder here, call longevity, your practical playbook. And, you know, I talk about the notion that this decade is different and that we're about to have a health span revolution. And it's, you know, for me, AI and longevity are the two biggest business opportunities on the planet.

there's nothing of greater opportunity, right? What wouldn't someone pay in their 70s or 80s for an extra 30 years of healthy life that gives them the energy, the aesthetics, mobility they had when they're in their 30s or 40s, right? I mean, you give it all at some point. So it's massive marketplace. And what's making this health span revolution occur is AI, is the coming quantum technologies, is gene therapy? epigenetic reprogramming, capital flowing in, smartest people in the world, you're either working on AI or extending health span. And it's coming. And I talk about you need to be in a longevity mindset, ready to intercept these technologies when they come your way. Absolutely.

And I want to talk about that and plenty more when we come back from the breaks. Let's do that right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes

or less and explain why you should care about them. So search for the Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology podcast with Peter Diamandis. He is the founder and CEO. of the XPRIZE Foundation. He is multiple times best-selling author. We've talked about some of the books already and also the host of the Moonshot podcast. Peter, how many years do you want to live?

You know, that's a great question. I used to have a canned answer. It was more of a joke, and I'll tell you that and then answer it. When I was in medical school, I was in a joint MIT, Harvard, MD, Ph.D. program. I never finished a PhD, but I just barely finished my medical degree.

I watched a television show one day on long-lived sea life and learned that bowhead whales could live 200 years and Greenland sharks could live four or 500 years. And I remember saying if they can live that long, why can't I? And so I set this multi-hundred-year lifespan objective. But really my objective is to live long enough to intercept what's called longevity escape velocity, which I think is a term I'd love everybody to hear about.

So today, for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for about a third of a year. These breakthroughs are helping add additional vibrancy and length to your health span. Not necessarily a life span, health span as well. There's going to be a point at which for every year that you're alive, science extends your life for more than a year. and that's called longevity escape velocity. I heard that first from Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, and I speak to a lot of the top longevity researchers and ask their opinion, when do you think we're going to hit this longevity escape velocity?

Ray Kurzweil's prediction is 2030, which is insanely close, right? Why? It's because AI is going to help us understand why we age, how to slow. it, how to stop it, how to reverse it. George Church puts it at some 15 years out. David Sinclair is in that same area. So, you know, let's call it 20 years. Your goal over the next 20 years is to stay as healthy as you can and to not die from something stupid in the endrum. And to be there to intercept these breakthroughs that are going to add vitality and health. My honest answer is to live long enough to intercept longevity, escape velocity.

And then, you know, to see my great-grandkids, to go step foot on the moon, to go and, you know, mine asteroids and the asteroid belt, whatever the nine-year-old kidney wants to do. And the natural question that comes up after this is, who is this going to be available to? Like, who are these treatments? Like, I've heard recently about this treatment of cancer that kind of breaks down exactly like what your body will respond to. and then for like a million dollars a pill or some crazy number like that will help cure yourself. But it's only available to people

that can afford that. So are we going to end up having, yeah, are we going to have a class of people that can live, effectively escape that, you know, longevity curve and a bunch of people that will continue to die at a normal rate? Is that fair?

So let me break it down in two parts. Number one, it's, if I had to guess what the treatment would be for, extended health span. It's what's called epigenetic reprogramming. I'll just mention you have the same genes, 3.2 billion letters from your mom and your dad when you're born, when you're 50, when you're 100, same genetics, same software. Nothing's changed. So why do you look different? Why don't you have a six-pack when you're 100 that you had when you were 18? And it's not your genes. It's what genes are

on and what genes are off, which is referred to as your epigenome. from the Greek word for above, and the ability to control which genes are on and off, that varies during as we age. And there's been a lot of work right now, and it's one of the hottest areas, of reversing your epigenetic programming to a earlier state. And that's likely to be a gene therapy. And those treatments you just spoke about for orphan diseases, rare diseases, rare cancers, and so forth. You can get a gene therapy. It might cost a half a million bucks. It might cost

two million bucks. It's expensive. And the reason it's expensive is the number of cases are so small. However, it turns out all humans have the same disease called aging. It's all of us, eight billion of us. And so if you are developing a treatment that's affecting hundreds of millions or billions of people, the cost plummetes to near zero. We saw this with the COVID vaccines. So our MRI vaccines from Moderna or Pfizer were gene therapies. And they cost two bucks each. All right. They were sold for 20 bucks or whatever the case might be. So we know that you can mass produce gene therapies extraordinarily cheaply. So that's the first thing. Just to give an example of, yes, in the beginning, when it doesn't work so,

well, it'll be paid for by the wealthiest, and it'll be expensive. And then as it goes into production, it will be available for everybody. It will work extraordinarily well and it'll be cheap. And same thing that happened with cell phones, right? The first cell phones were $100,000 and they dropped a call every two blocks. Now, you know, the cell phones and favelas are amazing and they cost, you know, 20, 40 bucks. But there's another point. And I make it in my longevity book, which is the majority of the stuff that you can do today is effectively free. And the stuff you should be doing today to keep yourself in the highest level of health to intercept these breakthroughs are exercising every day. So I'm in the gym at least five days a

week. You can't afford a gym membership, then at least get down and do some pull-ups and push-ups and get your exercise. It's the number one thing you can do. Number two, eight hours asleep. Number three, minimize sugars in your body. Sugar is a neuroplosion. Talk about sugar. Because that's a big thing for you. Talk about sugar. Because I'll be honest, like, I'm like, I'm definitely addicted there. And there's like even proven scientific stuff that like it helps with writing. So talk a little bit about the harms there. It was a study done years ago where they tested a whole bunch of chemicals on grad students, the ultimate research lab animal. And they said, what chemicals increase a person's IQ and their abilities?

And it was glucose and caffeine, right? Crazy, right? Very familiar with both of those, right? Yeah. So here's the reality. You have to remember, we evolved on the savannas of Africa 100,000, 200,000 years ago as hominids. And a lot of our physiology, like we were never designed to live past age 30. We would go into puberty at age 13, you'd have a baby, you'd be a grandparent by 27,

and then you didn't want to steal food from your grandchildren's mouths, and you would die, and the species would continue. And so it's all downhill after age 30. What we know is there was not an abundance of sugar as we were evolving tens of thousands of years ago. And sugar is a neuroinflammatory agent, a cardiac inflammatory, agent it glycosylates proteins it hits your immune system and it just you know I wear a a levels continuous glucose monitor all the time and I'm measuring what I eat what my glucose is doing I try I'm not perfect but I will when I'm sitting down I will always eat my veggies first

right which slows my metabolism down I'll then eat my protein and then finally well I don't eat carbohydrates, but that's the third dosing should be that. So it doesn't turn into glucose instantly in your bloodstream. By the way, before you go on, that's something I've gotten from you listening to your podcast is attack those vegetables. Attack the greens first. Yeah. And I'm doing that at every meal. And it actually kind of changes the way that your body processes if you eat the greens before the bread or the carbs as opposed to the other way around. So if you're out for a restaurant and the wine and the bread and the butter comes first, ask them to bring it back with your main meal.

You know, they're going to manipulate you because if you eat that, you know, it just spikes your blood sugar, makes you hungrier, makes you order more. I mean, that's why they're doing it. It's not for your help. It's for their checkbooks. Yep, absolutely.

And then, you know, while we talk about longevity, we also have to think about overpopulation. So, like, I'll just give you my uninformed take about overpopulation. I mean, it seems bad, right? Like, we have limited resources on the planet, and if we continue to fill the planet with people, we're going to consume those resources.

And we do have declining birth rates, but if those go back up or if we end up with longer lifespans, especially when you have the older people who are going to need to be cared for, and it just seems like we're going to deplete the planet. But you also care about the planet. Obviously, you've done this carbon challenge.

So how do we deal with the fact that we could have overpopulation but also a sustainable, yeah, massive increases in population but also a sustainable planet? So the first thing is to look at the data. And the data shows us that we are about to have not an overpopulation, but a massive underpopulation of planet Earth. So if you look at the growth curves, 50 years ago, I'll call it the 1950s, It was about an average of 5.7 children per family around the world. And we were in massive growth.

And books like the population bomb were written and so forth. But the reality is we are now, we've dropped from 5.7 children per family down to below 2.4 globally. In the U.S., we're below the replenishment level, which is 2.1. And China's way below. Japan's way below, most of Asia. most of Europe. Italy is dissipating going away in like 0.7. The only only region in growth is Africa. And as Africa becomes more affluent, as better comms and AI and technology comes there, we'll expect to see that growth level drop as well. And if you've got a massive underpopulation,

right, we peak at nine, nine and a half billion and have a very rapid drop off. our population is tied directly to GDP towards the ability to maintain our world. I think the only countervailing force there is going to be humanoid robotics and AI that's going to allow us to support that aging population. So I think, you know, Elon goes on and says, listen, have more kids. He's got 10 or 11. I forget how many exactly. He's doing his part.

He's doing his part. I've got two, at least in replication or balance mode right now. But I think people need to be re-educated about overpopulation. If you're flying in an airplane, look out the window. Most of the world is barren, except for our cities. And we used to move into cities because that's where we had education, that's where entertainment, that's where the jobs were. But that's not the case anymore.

You can have jobs sitting on a beach in, you know, in Thailand right now. You can have a, you know, you can have entertainment and education anywhere on the planet. So I think, I think we're going to, we're going to see a new population distribution on Earth. Right. Okay, let me ask you one more question and then we can wrap. I just want to talk about fear. We brought it up earlier. Yeah.

You know, I was looking through your bio. You've founded so many things. You know, X-Prize, you know, tackling problems that a lot of people would find impossible to solve, thinking through abundance, the rioting, relationships with people like Elon Musk, Tony Robbins. So many people are governed by fear. You don't seem to have it. Talk a little bit about, like, what you think our relationship with fear is and what it should be. If there's one important thing I need to teach my abundance, CEOs and entrepreneurs that I support is your mindset is the single most important thing you have.

And, you know, if you asked what made the greatest leaders on this planet, you know, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Elon, Steve Jobs, was it their wealth, the tech they had, the friends they had, or was it their mindset? I think most everybody would say it's their mindset. And if you believe that, then you have to ask yourself the question, what mindset do you have? where'd you get it? And what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? And so I teach five different mindsets that I focus on. I focus on an abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a longevity mindset, a moonshot mindset, and a curiosity mindset. And the realization is that our normal

mindsets are fear and scarcity, right? That is the mindset that evolved on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago that saved our lives. But that mindset doesn't serve you anymore. And so how do you change your mindset? The same way that a large language model or a neural net trains itself by giving it example after example after example of a cat, if you want to have it, notice a cat. Or if you want to be in an abundance mindset

or an optimistic mindset versus a scarcity and fear mindset, read books, listen to podcasts like yours and moonshots, and be in this positive mindset. Give yourself examples to flip it. Because if you're watching, you know, CNN every night, which I call the Crisis News Network with a negative, you know, constantly negative news network, you're being bombarded by negative news over and over and over again. you're going to live in a state of fear. And the news media does that because that's what gets them clicks. It's what gets, you know, they have a business model. Deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers.

And you pay 10 times more attention to negative news and positive news. So you're being manipulated in that way. Train your neural net, your brain by the people you hang out with, what's on your walls, what you read, what you listen to in the way that's going to serve you in this decade ahead. Peter D. Amandais, thanks so much for joining. A pleasure. Thank you. All right. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll be back on Friday breaking down the week's news.

Until then, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.