Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The Tech That Will Prevent and Reverse Chronic Disease w/ Naveen Jain & Guru Banavar | EP #71

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

In this episode, Peter, Naveen, and Guru discuss the importance of asking unique questions to solve massive problems, particularly in the realm of chronic diseases and healthcare. They emphasize the need to understand not just human DNA but also the expression of genes and the role of the microbiome in human health.  18:07 | Eating as Medicine for Health 28:46 | Early Detection of Oral Cancer 01:22:35 | The Dangers of Gut Imbalance Naveen is a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist driven to solve the world's biggest challenges through innovation. As the founder of Viome, Moon Express, World Innovation Institute, TalentWise, Intelius, and Infospace, Naveen is an intensely curious entrepreneur who is focused on audacious ideas that push humanity forward. He is the author of the award-winning book, Moonshots: Creating a World of Abundance, the creator of Mindvalley, Masterclass programs, and behind XPRIZE, a global future positive movement, and on the board of Singularity University. Guruduth Banavar, known as Guru, is a recognized leader in Artificial Intelligence. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Viome, where he leads AI and co-leads clinical research. Before joining Viome, Guru was leading the team that created IBM Watson, a gold standard in artificial intelligence. His work at IBM Watson was focused on augmenting the human capacity for complex thought with artificial intelligence. Learn more about Viome Learn more about Naveen Jain _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Experience the future of sleep with Eight Sleep. Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/moonshots/ to save $150 on the Pod Cover.  _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog Get my new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity My new book with Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact, is now available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3P3j54J Learn more about my executive summit, Abundance360 _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We are all connected. Discover Echo from Cirque du Soleil. Opens May 8th under the Big Top at Toronto Lakeshore Boulevard West. Tickets at Cirque du Soleil.com. Echo. Thanks for presenting Partners Sun Life. Tickets at Cirque du Soleil.com. ECHO thinks it's presenting partners Sun Life. If you want to solve a massive problem, you have to ask a different question

than anyone else has asked before. We need to go deep into the biology. And in order to go deep into the biology, we need to collect massive amounts of data from a very broad population we have collected one quadrillion biological data point just with the oral microbiome it's like going from black and white to color you basically are living in the analog world until we can digitize the human body. We as humans are walking, talking ecosystem. There's no reason we shouldn't be thinking of food as a medicine. Can we actually use food as a medicine to change

the underlying expression of both the human genes and microbial genes and bring the body back into homeostasis? Everybody, Peter here. Welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with a dear, dear friend, Naveen Jain, the CEO of Viome, and a new friend, Guru, who's the CTO and head of AI for Viome. Gentlemen, so Naveen, are you up in Seattle today? I am, Peter. I just got back last night from Germany, but this podcast is so important. I will miss it for the world. Fantastic. And Guru, how about yourself?

Where on the planet are you? Same. I've been hanging out with Naveen in Germany and then just got back here in Seattle. Well, welcome back on your global trotting. So let's dive into the subject of artificial intelligence and healthcare, because I think it's one of the most of artificial intelligence and healthcare because I think it's one of the most important topics that we're in the midst of. When people look at the US healthcare system, we rank something like 23rd in the world despite having an extraordinary budget. And I think about the fact that it's so expensive to get a medical degree and there's such a

need for doctors, nurses, health coaches. And the question is, how do we raise health care and make it actually affordable and effective because it's not right now? And I think AI is the means by which we do that. And there's without question, when I think about AI and medicine, AI and health, Viome is near the top of the stack there. I mean, this has become central to Viome. But let's begin really very quickly, Naveen, with what is Viome? And then let's jump into the AI of it all. Sure. So I think, Peter, we set out to solve one big problem. 97% of all healthcare dollars are spent on chronic diseases and they're not

spent on infectious diseases, right? And our whole healthcare system is primarily designed for acute care for infectious diseases and it manages the chronic diseases because if you think about it in the last 50-100 years people did not live that long and there were not very many chronic diseases and people just needed to take care of hey I broke my leg I have this infectious diseases and we solved that problem in 1950s when we got the antibiotics right but now we have this massive epidemic of chronic diseases. And most people who may not know what I mean by chronic diseases, these are the metabolic diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, right? These are mental

health issues, depression, anxiety, addiction, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, or even aging, because aging is just another disease. And we fundamentally start to think about and say what changes at the onset and during the progression of these diseases. If we can find exactly what changes in the human body, we will be able to solve this problem. And Peter, you and I have talked about in the past also, if you want to solve a massive problem, you have to ask a different question than anyone else has asked before. And that is the fundamentally what we see. Look, the whole world is so focused on understanding the genes and DNA. And we realize that especially in the chronic diseases, your DNA doesn't change at the onset

or during the progression of these diseases. So if you do my DNA test today and I gain 200 pounds, my DNA is still the same. I have become diabetic. My DNA is still the same. I get heart disease, depression, anxiety, and then I die. 100 years after I die, you do my DNA test again. Yet identical DNA. So if DNA can't tell you you're

dead or alive, how will it ever tell you you're healthier or sicker? I love that. I love that. And it's so true, right? You know, we get 3.2 billion letters from our mom, 3.2 billion letters from our dad, but your DNA is not your destiny. And as you've talked about before, it's which genes are on, which genes are off. It's your control of your DNA. And I think one of the things that you discovered in Viome is we have the ability to understand not just our DNA, but the expression of it in the form of RNA, which is actually what's going on in your cells, in your body. Just so that's one part is understanding RNA. The second part of the thing that was puzzled was 99% of all the genes that are expressed in our body

don't come from our mom and dad. And that's a fundamental problem, right? Where do they come from? They come from microbiome. They live in your gut. They live in your mouth. They live all over our body. They live in our nasal cavity, in the ear cavities, 99%. So think about that until we understand

how they are in a symbiotic relationship with us as human hosts. And this is the part I want people to understand. We as humans are walking talking ecosystem. We are in symbiotic relationship with these organisms. They are not parasites on us. In fact, many of the foods we eat cannot be digested by the human body. In fact, they are digested by these microbes and in turn, they release the nutrients that our body can't produce such as short-chain fatty acids. And many of the metabolites that are signal to our immune system, and our immune system is being trained by these microbiome. So much so, Peter, 70% of all of our immune cell is along our digestive lining. Think about that for a second. 70%

of immune system is along our gut lining being trained. So the fundamental problem of AI that needed to be solved, and here's why healthcare has failed. So the fundamental problem of AI that needed to be solved and here's why healthcare has failed. So Peter, first thing is that healthcare failed for many reasons. Number one was they completely ignored this idea of 99% of the genes that are expressed by microbiome. So they look at these organisms as a parasite, something to killed that came from our whole philosophy of infectious diseases every time there was an infection it was a bacteria or a virus so they basically waged the war on microbiome they waged the war on this right so it's a it's a war on you know organism that caused many of these symbiotic relationship to break down and with

this dysbiosis came the body not being at ease that we call dis ease is a disease right so the to solve the problem peter to use ai and a digital tool i just want to get to the ai part that you wanted to ask me the reason ai has not been so successful is our whole medical system, despite us talking about electronic medical record, is still is more or less an analog system, right? You basically are living in the analog world until we can digitize the human body. We can't use the digital tools that allows you to dematerialize, demonetize, and democratize all of the healthcare that we need to do. So bringing the cost down, understanding what is happening. And that was the first thing we did. So digitization was how do we get the RNA of the

human body from every place that matters. And what we did at Vine was very unique, was we didn't come up with the hypothesis. And this is where a lot of the early science was broken. People come up with the hypothesis. I think this is what causes Alzheimer's and we're going to go attack that. We say, we don't know what causes what. Why not collect the data?

Let the data tell us what is going on. So let the AI come up with an idea. Well, of course, I mean, that's brilliant. But in the old days, when we were talking about a physician or a nurse or the healthcare system, there is no way in the world that a human being could possibly process all that data. I mean, the medical exam was, you know, a reflex hammer on the knee, was listening to your heart and your lungs coughing. Maybe it was a sputum sample to see if there was something going on there. But the amount of data you can collect right now is awe inspiring. And in that data is the truth. Yes. And so we decided that they are basically your body is really has three.

I mean, if you look at your body, we start from the tube that goes through us. The top of the tube is our mouth. And by the way, most people ignore this completely so far because your mouth has two trillion microbiome. Oh, my God. I ignored it. mouth has 2 trillion microbiome. Oh my God. I ignored it. And I got into so much trouble when I had a tooth dental procedure and I ended up in a sinus infection. And I was, I was like, I'm not going to take antibiotics. I'm not going to take antibiotics. I don't want to

scrub my microbiome. You know, in the fourth night when I was literally in bed in pain and I started to get a fever, I was like, oh my God, the reason humans are living as long as we have is because we invented micro antibiotics 50 years ago. So I finally took the antibiotics and it cleared it up. But then I'm playing catch up on my microbiome to fix it for the next six months. And so Peter, what we realized was now there is so much data that we have collected. We have collected one quadrillion biological data points just with the oral microbiome. Total we have now is 52.55 quadrillion biological data points. How many zeros is that?

Just to put that in perspective, Peter, this is the largest database on humanity ever collected by humans, right? I don't know and we don't know, Peter, what aliens may or may not have done on humanity. But this is absolutely the largest database on humanity ever collected. And this is a dynamic data. So that means what are your microbes doing what how your immune system is reacting to so what we do is we analyze your saliva looking at your oral microbial gene expression and looking at the human gene expression we look at your bottom of the tube which is your gut microbiome and epithelial cells how are they

reacting to it because Because there's an immune system that is going on. And then we look at the finger prick blood, looking at your mitochondria, looking at all of your cytokines, right? And then we're looking at all of this interaction. And there we're saying, hey, what is going on when we people have diabetes? What is going on when people have heart disease? What's going on when people have IBS or IBD? Because you can imagine when you have a remission or relapse of IBD, your DNA is the same and your microbiome is the same. Something changes that have a relapse or remission. So, Guru, you were at IBM Watson, which really was the first AI system to make a splash. which really was the first AI system to make a splash.

You know, Watson winning against the top players in the game of Jeopardy was like an epic event. I remember on every stage I would speak about how well it did. And then, you know, the IBM team under your leadership started differentiating into medicine and other fields. So the question I have for you is how long has it been possible now to actually process this level of data and extract wisdom or knowledge or decisions out of this data? Has it been like the last two or three years? Has it been 10 years? And what's making it possible to process quadrillillion data points great great question Peter so I want to sort of start from that big economy picture that you were talking about and say that you have the healthcare delivery part of the system and then there's the actual biology in the medicine part of the

system okay so even when you think about the humongous amounts of data that has been generated in the medical system or the healthcare system, it's been on the healthcare delivery side of it and this is a crucial point because the healthcare delivery part of it is very shallow. It's looking at what happened, what are the symptoms, what are the treatments, what happened and so on. For example, claims data, right? There's a ton of claims data, there's a ton of medical notes and so on. Turns out in the world today, we generate something like 10 to the 23 or 10 to the 24 bytes of data today. But the majority of the healthcare data is on the delivery side, not on the biology side. So 10 years ago, when we did the Jeopardy system and all of the other AIs,

in fact, I remember making all of the big decisions we made at IBM to acquire data. We were thinking about acquiring the delivery system data, which is the claims processing. And yes, there was a ton of image processing data, but that was still one modality of data, and it wasn't going deep into the biology. So what's changed in the last maybe five years is that we've started getting into the biology. And that, I think, is a game changer because you're now getting deeper and deeper. You're looking at what the cells are doing. You're looking at what the molecules within the cells are doing.

You're looking at how the cells are doing, you're looking at what the molecules within the cells are doing, you're looking at how the molecules are interacting with each other, you're looking at how the molecules from the microbes and the molecules from the human are interacting with each other. That data is relatively new. And I'm happy to say, and in fact, that was one of the reasons I decided to join Naveen to start VIO, is that we need to go deep into the biology. And in order to go deep into the biology, we need to collect massive amounts of data from a very broad population. Can't be just, you know, one segment of the population or the other segment. It should be across the world, different demographics, different geography. And we need to get biological data, which means we need to collect multiple samples from each human being in different parts

of their body. That's what, you know, when we talk about top of the tube, bottom of the tube, around the tube, and so on, we want to collect as much biological data, and we need to make sense of the biological data. So that's what's changed. So I get, I get this, that access to, to robust data sets connected to outcomes is the very first. The second question, though, is, has there been a substantial increase in computational power per dollar that you can invest in this, right? And then the algorithms, when I think about it, I think about its data, think about it's data,

it's computational speed, and it's algorithmic improvements that are making this possible. Those are the three real elements. And I just want to make the point that in the last five years, there's been breakthroughs in all three areas, right? In the data side, we got biological data. And this is absolutely critical because even today, a lot of people don't understand that without biological data, we cannot do much in, you know, really understanding. But on the algorithmic side,

there's also been a breakthrough. There's been a breakthrough with this new transformer architecture, which has been the basis of all the generative AI. But, you know, that's one of actually multiple breakthroughs that are going on. And we can talk more about any of those things. And of course, NVIDIA's chips and its

massive computational farms that are available. I don't think people realize that the kind of data Viome is collecting is not the data you get almost any place else. I mean, just to talk about this one second, you know, you might typically go and get a genetic analysis of your stool sample. And what they're doing typically is looking at the DNA of the organisms that are there. And, you know, they'll say you have this organism, whether you have one copy or a trillion copies of that organism. And all organisms are not the same and they don't behave the same. But when you're actually looking at the RNA of the organisms, you're actually saying, well, these organisms actually have these genes turned on and are processing this kind of

food in this particular way. It's like going from black and white to color when you're looking at the situation. So it's the first time really this depth of biological data for analysis has ever been possible. You know, Naveen, in our Moonshots program, a lot of my focus here is helping entrepreneurs go big and to tackle huge problems. And I just want to take a second and define Viome's actual Moonshot. And then in a brief moment to talk about the arc of what you did here, because it's amazing, the entrepreneurial journey of where you started and where you've ended up. And then I want to come back to the AI of it all. So what is Viome's moonshot, if you were going to define that? Absolutely. One simple, our thought was what if, and that always every moonshot from what if, and that always, every moonshot from me starts with what if, right? What if we can

understand the changes in the human biology at the onset and during the progression of chronic diseases, we should be able to prevent, stop the progression, and God forbid, outright reverse these chronic diseases using potentially the nutrition as a medicine because at the end of the day there is no reason we should be thinking of food as a medicine and that is a fundamentally a moonshot was can we actually use food as a medicine to change the underlying expression of both the human genes and microbial genes and bring the body back into homeostasis and understand what needs to be changed once we understand what changes when people have these diseases right and that was

our moonshot was fundamentally preventing and reversing chronic diseases by understanding what happens at the onset and progression of these let food be thy medicine is uh is dates back to ancient Greece. And it's true. It's your fellow Greek hypocrites. And so what, you know, it's interesting, the origin story of a moonshot is always fascinating. And I love your origin story in the labs of New Mexico. Do you mind just very briefly summarizing that? Because as people are listening to this, I want you to hear about the brilliance of what a moonshot entrepreneur does

when they see something and go, fascinating, I could build something from this. So take me back. As I started, once we realized that it's not the DNA, it will have to be the RNA for us to solve this problem. And the question was, how do we do the RNA analysis? As an entrepreneur, once we realized we have to do the RNA. And, you know, I first thing was I went to NASA trying to figure out since they're going to the Mars, they must have obviously figured out what these organisms are doing. Turns out, no. So went to all NASA headquarters in Houston, went to Kennedy Space Center, went to Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore,

and finally found the technology. And as most people who watch the movie Oppenheimer, we realize that Los Alamos National Lab is really where the atomic bomb was developed. Even though it was called Manhattan Project, it was never done in Manhattan. It was done in the Los Alamos, right? And to me, when we were there, we found that they were working on a next generation of technology to actually understand the biodefense, that what would we do if there was a bioterror in our great country? How would we actually protect ourselves? We didn't care what organisms were there. We cared about what they are producing so we can create an antidote for it. And that fundamental technology was RNA technology. So just to slow this down a second. So you're shopping for technologies. And one of the things

most people don't know is a number of our national labs and our government institutes are developing, they're doing lots of R&D, they're creating things, and they sit on the shelf. They don't get commercialized. That's not their job. They aren't entrepreneurs. They aren't businessmen. They're researchers.

And so here the Lawrence Livermore lab is saying, you know, if we ever have a biodefense warfare, we need to understand what the weapon is and how it's impacting us and uh you know dna isn't going to cut it we actually need because there's a lot of biodefense uh viral viruses which are rna viruses and also how is it going to affect you so what they had in their developed in their lab, what a way of actually looking at the RNA expression in human cells, wasn't it? That's right. Both the biological, both the microbial cells, viral cells, fungi, anything, they didn't care. They needed to see what organisms were expressing and how it is impacting the human, a human host, because that's how they needed to know what, what terror was being caused here, right?

And that's literally, but Peter, I want to emphasize just one more thing. Every single one of these labs and every NASA, you can go to NASA website, they literally list down all the inventions that they have done that you as an entrepreneur can license it today. Amazing, amazing. And so what was the moment where you said, whoa, there is something valuable here that I could build a business on? So the minute we found that they were working on this technology that could analyze RNA, suddenly everything made sense. Now, if I can get access to this technology, we can create a great company. Right. I can get access to this technology, we can create a great company, right? So point was, the person who was a, you know, PI, who was a primary investigator, we actually convinced him that

this is the way to change the humanity. And once he got on board, we able to get the license of this technology from Los Alamos to Vion. And that was a fundamental change. Once we did, our job as an entrepreneur was how do we build this technology to be automated? How do we scale it? How do we create a massive amount of data set? And to do that, we realized, you know, most other entrepreneurs would say, oh, let's do a research on a colorectal cancer or pick a disease you want. And we will spend collecting a million samples and cost a billion dollars. And we'll go out and do that.

We said, no, that is not how entrepreneurship is done. What if you can build a consumer product that is so good that every single person would want it? Oh my God, you're going is into a B2C business. Going direct to consumer is epic. It is so hard. And I you know, just talking to some friends here who said you built one of the most extraordinary direct to consumer brands and congrats. It is one of the hardest things to do, especially in the health space to go at scale.

So you've invested, I think it's like almost $200 million of capital that you've raised to build Viome. Let's talk a little about what were the elements of the business that had to be built in order to get to where you're going. And now, of course, the most important part where guru is your guru is the AI of it all. guru is your guru is the ai of it all yeah so the first part was uh is make making sure that we collect massive amount of phenotype data and massive what is what is phenotype what is phenotype basically so every time you do a test so it's called a full body intelligence test you give us a spit of your saliva touch of your stool four drops of your finger prick blood. And now we do a complete RNA analysis. But we also ask you because we are making a recommendation for you. So the way it works is you give us the sample, we analyze the sample, we tell you what's happening in your body

from your biological age. And I think Guru will explain to me this is the best biological age tool ever created. And we can go back and tell you why right biologically is it is it the best tool because it makes you to be really young nabin no so because it does not use one simple point of data so people measure biological age by looking at the telomere length they look at some of the epigenetic markers instead of looking at 5 10 50 epigenetic marker what if you look at all epigenetic marker, which is gene expression? So we literally look at everything, not just one thing. Everything that's happening in your saliva, everything that's happening in your stool, everything that's happening in your blood.

And how old are you, Naveen? How old are you, Naveen, on this epigenetic marker? I am chronologically 64 and biologically 52. Okay. All right. Well, I know you're also a teenager in many other respects too. There you go. So continue on that part. Idea was once you build this consumer tool that gives you biological ease, your cognitive health, your heart health, right? Your gut health, your oral health.

Then we say, this is what you need to do. Don't eat broccoli because your sulfide production is too high causing inflammation. Or you are trying to eat too much protein, it's not being digested, it's being fermented by the microbes releasing ammonia causing you inflammation. So you need to take digestive enzyme with this protein if you're going to be eating it. Don't eat spinach or kale because they are not being digested by your microbes because your oxalates are not being metabolized. Don't eat avocado because your uric acid production is too high. So now by doing that we ask consumers this is where phenotype comes in is every single symptom you have every single disease

you have every single drug you are taking and instead of asking you do you have a depression we ask we have you run through all the phq-9 questionnaire so we have a clinical gold data about your depression similarly we have you run through the questionnaire on IBD so Crohn colitis where IBS and we have these hundreds of these what I would call clinical questionnaire so we know exactly what is happening in your body and the reason you tell us is because this is what we use to make the recommendation so we are not interfering with your drugs we are not interfering with your any of the diseases you have so we are

able to collect this massive amount of clinical data now we have all biological data and Now we have all biological data. And then we now tell you, hey, you also need 22 milligrams of amylase every day. You need 19 milligrams of lycopene every day. You need 17 milligrams of elderberry every day. So we tell you every vitamin, mineral, herbs, digestive enzyme, amino acid, probiotic, prebiotic. And Peter, the first time, this is another thing I learned from you. And Peter, the first time, this is another thing I learned from you. Once you build AI and robotics, the robots don't care if you make the same thing million times or you make million times something totally different. And we actually implemented that and said, what if we can custom make the capsules for each individual every single month? Because we're going to have a robotic compounding pharmacy it says this is coming for peter diamandis go to bin number seven get 22 milligram

get to bin number eight get 18 milligram and then we make the powder shake the powder up put them in a capsule put them in a sachet and literally peter just like here. This is made just for me. And look at the date. It's made 10 days ago. So it's literally just what you need, nothing that you don't. So what I love about what you've done, and I mean, full disclosure, my venture fund, Bold Capital, is an investor at every stage. We're on the board of IOM. And it's because I care about the company. I care about you as an incredible moonshot entrepreneur and someone who I care about

deeply. But I want those listening to realize the journey you've been on in building the components one at a time, building the brand, building the adjacencies, right? Because in asking that what if question over and over and over again. And so understanding RNA and understanding first in the stool, but saying that's not enough. We now need to look at the oral microbiome and look at the blood and get a full picture. And once we have that full picture, when we start to understand what it is that is in dysbiosis or

dis-ease, as you said, what can we provide to you and what you get on the app? And I've been a user. I probably, it's time for me to do my next quarterly checkup in the total body intelligence here. But it's like, these are the foods you should eat. You know, the green in the, uh, total, uh, body intelligence here, but it's like, these are the foods you should eat. Uh, you know, the green light foods, this is yellow, this is red. This is what you should not eat. And then here's the supplements. And so, and I think one of the things that's important in health, and I talk about this in, in fountain and, uh, in other companies is the, is you're constantly fine tuning your body's always adopting and changing. And so this iterative cycle of fine-tuning it

and making sure you understand. You know, I think the AI element of this has really taken off. It's phenomenal. Peter, I was just about to get... I just want to tell you one more thing here about as an entrepreneur, the brilliance of what we did was we were moving towards our goal, but to get there, we couldn't have gotten there on day one. So this is really setting up the underlying framework and the data, right?

Now, ultimate goal was to be able to diagnose the disease early, to be able to cure them by having the intervention so we did supplements and then we said look we don't know how to adjust oral microbiome so now we launch guess what the oral biotics peter right so we just got now look at the name vrx ym prescription for your oral microbiome personalized toothpaste to adjust your oral microbiome the reason we are doing it is to understand what is working and what is not working and when we make a particular change does it change the disease or not so now i i don't want to say this but you understand now we are able to do the human clinical trial understanding the changes that are happening so we say look

these people have this thing and if we change this we believe the disease should go away and we change it and god when they do the test and we say look the symptoms are gone now we're not preventing any disease we're not curing any disease we are not making any claims of doing it, but now we have a path of what changes using these nutrition elements. Now, based on all this data we collected, then we utilize AI, and then I want Guru to explain the brilliance of what he did, is he's able to now look at all this data and say, no, you know what, Naveen, we are able to detect stage one cancer in your mouth or throat. This is so good. We should take it to FDA. And when we took to FDA, FDA said, this is such a breakthrough. We received a breakthrough device designation from FDA for detecting the

oral cancer and throat cancer for stage one cancer at 95% specificity and 90% sensitivity. And Peter, here's what I'm going to ask you. That's amazing. Yeah. Here's the thing. In 21st century, Peter, we can land on Mars and you know how we detect our cancer? Your dentist rubs the finger on your gum, says,'t feel anything so you're feeling the cancer in the 21st century is a standard of care yeah no it's it's pretty sad uh so so guru talk about um uh how this data and the analysis and the feedback loop to actually know that what you're reporting, what you're finding is validated. Talk about that. Yeah. So I have a concept in my head, which I'd like to convey to your listeners, which is the concept of a digital twin. So imagine that every single person on the planet

has a digital representation, which is kind of like a model of their biology. And it's not just, you know, one model. It's actually a collection of many models. You know, there's a model of what is going on in your mouth. There's a model of what's going on in your gut. In fact, there's many models, many algorithms that together forms a twin of you, Peter. Guru, before you go too far, Peter did that 15 years ago and he started a company that whole idea was to create a digital twin. Is this a biological

digital twin and if yes I would like to know how far you've come so far because I'm going to make the point that we've come the farthest. I'm actually presenting next week in a conference of the digital twin community in the US. And I would make the point that you cannot do a digital twin unless you get to the dynamic part of the biology, which is what you can get with RNA, right? So now I believe we have a digital twin and without the digital twin, we would not be able to predict, right? now we I believe we have a digital twin and without the digital twin we would not be able to predict like I can ask the question what is the glycemic response of Peter's digital twin to a piece of bread bless you thank you to a you know to to a banana to a you know a a rice pudding right so I can ask all of these questions of the digital twin and I get back answers because I know what your digital RNA expression is, not only of the human cells, but also of the microbial cells.

Number one. Number two, I can then create these risk profiles. I can say, what is the risk of Peter to get diabetes down the road? What is the risk for Peter to end up with, you know, let's say colon polyps or whatever, whatever else. I can ask all of these questions of the digital twin because I know what the dynamic biology is doing today. I can fast forward that, or I can look at very large populations. I can ask these questions that's number two number three we can say what might happen to the digital twin if we were inter you know if you're providing an intervention and adding supplement a b or c you know what if i add more butyrate what if i add you know more anti more anti inflammatory or anti, you know, you name it, right. So anti, you know,

insulin type of, you know, type of, you know, ingredients, then I can see what's going on. So this is the point about experimentation. So when you have a digital twin that is true to the to the real person, then you can run these experiments digitally, figure out what's likely to work, and then you can feed that back into the actual person. So those are the kinds of concepts that we've built. I get it. But there's another part, which is super, super important that I really want to make sure is understood. It's the fact that when you have someone on the Viome system, providing this phenotypic data, asking these questionnaires, and then taking the full body intelligence, and then modifying their diet, and then wash, rinse, repeat, you're getting a lot of closed loop data here. That's what I mean by experiments, yes.

And that longitudinal data is so fundamental. So how many members have gone through this so far, Naveen? And how much longitudinal data do you have? Because that's got to be fine-tuning the system. Massive. So we have analyzed over 600,000 samples, collecting at only 52.55 quadrillion. And there is a massive amount of longitudinal data from these people. And we have, in fact, shown that when we tell you this is what your biological score is, in fact, it is true. So, in fact, we do, every time we do,

we reverse, we do two things. If we if we tell you for example your butyrate pathway is this and next time you say hey now this has gotten better or worse then we should be able to say what other symptoms would have changed if it got better and we prove it so we have proven that when we say your butyrate score is high that means a lot of these symptoms should go down that would actually be impacted with a high butyrate. And if they don't match, we say, look, our algorithm is wrong, right? Same thing we do in terms of longitudinal data. Then we say, hey, do these scores actually improve when we give them these nutrition? And Guru, I don't know if it's okay to show slides or not,

but unbelievable that in three to six months. Let me hit on a couple of points first. And that is someone who's used Viome two years ago, right? And got data and said, okay, it did or didn't work for me. The food recommended didn't change or whatever. The system is, is brand new right now, right? In other words, the system is constantly updating. The more data you get, the more accurate it is. And so, and so like,

how long has the whole body intelligence element been there? How long has that been? Two years. And, and then your, how, you know, are, been there? How long has that been? Two years. And then how often are the algorithms being updated? What do you say to somebody who was like, well, I tried a couple years ago. Why should they try it again now? For two reasons, Peter. Number one thing is, remember, why should they try it again now? For two reasons, Peter. Number one thing is, remember, we start with the N of millions to apply that to your biology based on the ecosystem, what we know that based on other patterns, what should work for you. And then we go N of one. So you see what's

working and what's not working, keep fine tuning it for you. So the point is, even if it did not work for you two years ago, remember, first of all, we now have 10x more data points, so it may work. And secondly, by constantly allowing us to fine tune, we are able to make it work just for you. So we say, oh, you know, our algorithms say that your butyrate should have been high and your amine polyamine production was this and your production for putrescent was this. You should have, this should have been high and your amine polyamine production was this and your production for putrescent was this you should have this should have worked but something about you did not work oh because we were not taking into account the lps or the flagellar assembly great

now we figured it out now we apply that to everyone so every so yes we're constantly yeah so we're constantly learning and we are also constantly running clinical studies. We are doing studies with external populations. We are clinically validating it. We are incorporating the results back into our system, and we are retraining our algorithms based on the learning from the clinical studies. So it's happening multiple times every year. You know, I'm super passionate about longevity and healthspan, and how do you add 10, 20 health years

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Visit www.8sleep.com. That's E-I-G-H-T-S-l-e-e-p.com slash moonshots and you'll save 150 bucks on the pod cover by eight sleep i hope you do it it's transformed my sleep and will for you as well now back to the episode so i one of the things i was so i've been so impressed by is the science the science the science the publications, the work that you've done beyond just, you know, proving it to yourself, but going into peer reviewed journals and getting FDA approval. Can you talk a little bit about the areas that you've been publishing in and the work that you've achieved and where you're going after FDA approvals? Let me take that. So the very first foundation was in the glycemic response area, Peter.

And so all of the sugar response stuff, starting with just for foods and for supplements, but also for diabetic and pre-diabetic situations, right? And then we went into a number of microbiome pathways. So we looked at, you know, the oxalate, the butyrate and the, you know, putrescine pathways and so on. So we have a bunch of science around that. Then we went into diagnostic biomarkers. So we talked about the cancer biomarker, but we also have other biomarkers for IBD, we have it for every disease in the spectrum of the mouth, like dysplasias, periodontitis, and so on. For the gut, we have IBS.

We have the precursors of colorectal cancer, all of the full spectrum of all the things that happen to the gut. And now we're getting into metabolic disease. We're getting into non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. We're getting into autoimmune-type diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and so on. So we have these biomarkers and we are one by one, we are publishing those. And then finally, we are doing this big systems biology view of biological aging, right? Knowing everything we know about you top to bottom in this dynamic biology digital twin of yours, we can ask the question, what is the correct way of thinking

about this biological human being? Which is, what is the age of this person? And we've developed these models. We've just published that in iScience. And we'll continue to do this across the board. Naveen, where are you going next with Viome? What is the next element of your moonshot here? Or is it cancer detection throughout the GI tract? Is it age reversal? Is it handling of all chronic diseases? Can you give me a sense of what you think is possible as you gather this data? So first of all, Peter, as you know, to us, a consumer business is, first of all, is our

way of getting to a person who has suffered so much from our current medical industrial complex. Because, you know, again, I'm not saying that our people in the medical industrial complex are bad people, but the incentives are not aligned with us. It's insane. It is. I think my mission has been, I want to crush and reinvent healthcare and education. Both systems have misaligned incentives. Absolutely. And I think, Peter, one of the things is that imagine no other industry benefits from making you suffer suffer right so in medical industrial complex they only make money

when you and i are sick so your doctor makes money when you and i are sick the hospital makes money when you and i are sick pharmaceutical company and no one makes money when we are healthy right and the person who really wants to be healthy is the person who is suffering so our thinking was why not go to the consumer and And this is why the Clinton Christians said the same thing. You do not want to go head on with the system. You want to go around the system to the people. So we did the D2C to show people that they can actually become the CEO of their own health and empowering them. And they go to the doctor and say, hey, doctor, can you explain to me this? Why aren't you doing something about this? So really creating that consumer push, ask your doctor, right? So then doctor calls us

and say, what the hell is going on? How do I, how can I be part of this? Right? So our goal really is to do, and then using food as a medicine, both nutritional and otherwise, and continue to personalize the product for you. So we did that thing for gut, we did that thing now for oral microbiome, so your oral lozenge is personalized toothpaste. Skin microbiome, we are able to personalize skin cream for each individual. Scalp microbiome, we can personalize a shampoo and conditioner for each individual. So really looking at personalization is one. But our ultimate goal really is to find hard to detect diseases in the early stages while they are still extremely curable. And so we are really looking after the diseases that really have not been detected early.

So the things that we went after oral cancer and throat cancer was because these are detected in stage 3, stage four. And I say to say that a lot of these pan cancer tests that are out there, and it's a great first step. But the problem is when you're looking for cell-free DNA, like whether it is free normal, whether you're looking at the grail, in stage one, they are just not enough cell-free DNA in stage one. So they get really, really good in stage three, stage four. But even for Grail, that stage one sensitivity is, by the way, stage one sensitivity is 24.1% on average, right? That tells you something, that when you get the negative result,

it doesn't really mean much, right? And that's a fundamental problem we set out to solve because your RNA changes, even before you develop a cancer, you can see in dysplasia, you can, or lycoplasia, something is changing in RNA that is going to become a stage one cancer, right? So our goal is to look at cancer is obviously detecting them early. And Peter, I hate to say that this was driven, I lost my own dad to pancreatic cancer. And today's nothing.

Brutal disease. Brutal disease. And it's not detected in early stage. And we are absolutely committed to solving this problem for everyone else. Nash nephrol is never detected in early stage, right? Alzheimer's is rarely detected in early stage. Can we develop an early stage molecular biomarkers, not someone's feeling, but early stage molecular biomarkers. And that's really where we're going. And then using both the food intervention or working with our partners in the pharmaceutical companies to develop a vaccine or a drug to actually solve

and cure the disease, not maintain or simply suppress the symptom and maintain the disease. I am curious, you're a strict, are you vegan or vegetarian? Mostly vegan, I would say. Mostly vegan. And there's a debate constantly about whether I should be on a keto diet or a vegetarian or a vegan diet and so forth. If anybody's got enough data to talk about the impacts of one extreme or the other, it would be biome. So what are you seeing? First of all, Peter, what we see is not what you want to hear. I'm not sure I want to hear anything. Tell me.

None of the extreme diets are good for you. So in fact, a keto diet ages you faster than anything else. Right. Paleo diet does the same thing. And just because you're on a vegan diet doesn't mean you are having healthy food. Almost all the poison comes from plant. All the drugs come from plant. The spinach may or may not be good for you. So fundamentally, the goal is to personalize to you

just because it worked for your wife or your neighbor doesn't mean it's going to work for you i can't i can't stress that enough right it's like these all these diet books i mean i probably there's more diet books printed than any other category of book out there and it's it's one to many they generalize this but there's i mean there there are a few things that we know right whole plants are are important minimizing sugar is important but uh you know i sort of stick to a mediterranean diet as best as i can and i think peter it's not just mediterranean so there are some foods that are bad for everyone so processed foods are bad for everyone there is sugar that's bad for everyone but there processed foods are bad for everyone. There is sugar that's bad for

everyone. But there is no such thing as universal healthy food. There is a universal unhealthy food. But guess what? Some people, spinach is going to cause problems if they're not able to digest oxalate. If they're going to have a, you know, turmeric can harm them if they have a high bile acid, right? So point is you have to now, you can hyper personalize for each individual. And it's not just, I mean, if you don't mind, I want to also say that it's the same food can be bad for you one day and good for you six months later and so on. So even for the same individual, you need to know when it's okay for you or good for you and it's actually desirable for you. So you want to keep, you know, just like you're exercising and you know how you can handle,

you know, various kinds of physical stress. You want to be able to test yourself and know what you can eat on any given day. You know, I can't wait for Jarvis. You know, I'm an Ironman fan and Jarvis is my favorite vision of a co-pilot where it's through the day it's been measuring everything on my body in my body and it's saying no stay away from that food eat that food over there and it bring it closes the loop uh from a quarterly uh you know testing to constant testing and we'll get there we'll get there so actually did you see the last movie that was his artificial womb movie? In fact, they talked about why I made that movie. They literally say, good morning, Peter. Everything is fine. We just did your gut intelligence test. All of your food that you're eating are good. That's great. I love it. I do love that.

So here's another question for you. One know, one of the challenges, of course, of measuring your full GI intelligence here is that you're measuring your stool sample mostly from the large intestine and not from the upper intestine or stomach and so forth. So what do you, you know, is there an issue there of not being able to get the, you know, samples from the duodenum and so forth? And answer to Peter is if we could do everything we should, but the point is we're trying to see if you can look at the top of the tube by looking at the oral microbiome. And in general, we swallow about one and a half liter of saliva in our stomach every day. Most of the time, these things will die in the stomach because of acidity.

Unfortunately, too many of us are taking the anti-acid drug like Nexium. Or as you age, your hydrochloric acid level goes down. And you're not killing your oral microbiome. What happens when that happens? So, Peter, some of these oral microbiome end up settling in your gut where they don't belong. And, for example, it's very, a Fusobacterium nucleatum is an oral microbiome. When it settles in the gut, it's some of the time, when its activity becomes high, when it starts to express some of the toxins like FAP2 or FDA2,

then suddenly it starts to cause inflammation in the gut. And that is IBS, IBD, and colorectal cancer. Number one cause for colorectal cancer is a fusobactive nucleotide. You know, I just want to point out that Naveen does not have a medical degree, but he probably knows more about medicine than I do at this point. You know, I keep on saying, Naveen, you know, I've got International Space University and Singularity University, and if I could issue a medical degree, I would give one to you. But I'm just blown away by what you learned. I want to just turn the subject slightly for a moment because listening to this, obviously, are a lot of individuals interested in their health and their longevity,

but a lot of entrepreneurs looking to build successful B2C companies, consumer-facing companies. What's your advice for an entrepreneur looking to build a consumer-facing company? What did you learn through this process? So I think, Peter, one of the things that a lot of entrepreneurs go wrong is they start to focus on what would generate the most amount of revenue. And I think what I realized was if you focus on what would make the person better, that means making money is a byproduct of doing things that actually improve people's life. That means focus on what will improve your customer's life every single day. And if you stay focused on that, rather than trying to make a quick bucks, you can create an amazingly great company. So we constantly focus on would it actually improve people's lives? Would it actually

improve their symptoms? Would they actually feel better? We do more survey on our customers than anyone else. Are they actually getting better? In fact, we published them on our webpage. 84% of the people tell us that more than one of their symptoms actually got better, which is to me is mind boggling is that people come to us and say, this is what I came to YM for and they got better if not we want to understand what is it that we did not do right to make it better right so to me in the health care especially you have only one shot at making sure people trust you so in any business you can get away with a lot more things in health care business you have to

build the trust that you're doing the right things by them right and and you're going to still make mistakes as you said the things that we knew two years ago are different than we know today so we can only make the decision based on based on the data we have at that point as the new science is coming along we ingest peter 20 000 latest research into our things right so as a new research comes out we integrate that into our algorithm no human being no doctor would ever do that our ai i like to joke and say listen there were 5 000 medical articles printed or published in journals this morning how many is your doctor read today and that's literally the point is that

so to me building get your ai assistant yeah that's literally the point is that so to me building get your ai assistant yes that's right and i really think peter what i think you and i want to acknowledge this this company would not exist but for you peter i mean watching learning from you learning what hli the human longevity actually this would have been their mission they set out to solve this problem and not going to go and you know saying but this is when I became the customer and you know and when I paid $50,000 we were super excited about solving this problem around longevity and we realized that it wasn't actually

living up to it is potential we say you know what this problem is worth solving and we're going to go out and solve this problem, right? And to me, your encouragement, I mean, as I said, Peter, we have been friends for two decades now. I think you have had more influence on my life or more influence on our children's life than any living individual, right? Thank you, buddy. Ankur is doing unbelievable things. Thanks to you. Priyanka is running a women's health company. Thanks to you. I mean, Neil, I mean,

you took all three of them under your wings and I want to acknowledge you, how much you have contributed. I think you and Anu, your DNA and your home and your tutelage had a lot to do with it. I was blessed to be able to mentor your three kids. And I really, you know, one of the things I find a blessing is to share your thinking with the entrepreneurs here who are listening. Because you go deep and you're a passion-driven individual. Um, and one of the, you're, you're a passion driven individual.

Uh, I mean, you wake up with this in the morning and it carries you through the night and you're monomaniacal on this, which is, which is extraordinary. Which is what it takes me. This is literally what it takes. And if someday, if I could give you one advice, that would be that. Focus. Focus on one thing that you're willing to dedicate your life to for the next 10, 15 years, dedicate your life to solving that one single problem that you wake up in the morning, thinking about it, you know, go to sleep, thinking about it. And you jump out of the bed every

morning. I do jump out of bed. I do jump out of bed. What time do you get up in the morning i i was up at 5 4 a.m i was up at 5 30 i was i was slacking um uh in that and what time do you go to sleep pal and latest by nine nine yeah and it will you know we've talked about sleep on and all of the elements people don't realize that sleep is all about getting the quality of sleep and i think it may have few minutes here i will tell you that for me the longevity so just like the hierarchy of needs i have come up with this hierarchy of needs for longevity and there are five parts to it right one is nutrition without proper nutrition nothing matter this is the base you you can You can have a Ferrari and you don't put the right fuel on your Ferrari, it is just not going to drive well.

Once you get the nutrition right, the second thing you have to do is reduce the stress in your body. And here is what people don't understand. When you have a stress, your body is into fight or flight response. And then your body in the fight or flight response, all the non-essential system that body thinks are non-essential shut down. So your digestive system shuts down, your immune system shuts down.

And that's the reason people who are stressed get sick more often. So what we do, some of us will say, let's do the prayer before we eat. Let's go do the gratitude before we eat. And the reason is, so your body moves away from a sympathetic mode to parasympathetic mode so you can digest your food right but point is you have to fundamentally get

rid of the stress stress was only when we evolved was only when we're being chased by a tiger and at that point body says look you don't need to worry about digesting your food because you're going to be lunch for someone else. And that's the reason it does that. So to me, now we live in a society where there is constant stress. At work, your boss stresses you out. Sometimes when you go home, your spouse stresses you out, right? So we got to find a way to reduce that stress in your life.

The third really is exercise. And I cannot emphasize, I'm not talking about you and I becoming a gym rat and pumping iron. But what I'm talking about is taking 60 minutes every single day to do both fast walking and building muscles. There is just no alternative. You've got to do some strength training and you've got to do do some movement whether it is walking fast for 30 minutes 45 minutes and getting it 20 minutes off even a body weight muscle training but you got to do that at least four five times a day if you cannot get all seven days in a week right the fourth part is sleep and again the quantity of sleep is important, but not as important as the quality of sleep.

So even though I sometimes I get six hours of sleep, but I have managed to get two hours of REM sleep and two hours of deep sleep and I wake up really, really fresh. So it's really that is what you need to focus on is how much of REM sleep and deep sleep can you get? And what I found, Peter, even if I take two sips of alcohol in the evening, my sleep is toasted. If I eat after 6 p.m., my sleep is toasted. And so I tend to at least get three hours before eat, no eating, but three hours before I go to sleep. And these are the things.

And you need to figure out for yourself by measuring, you know what is going on in your sleep so i have peter i use eight sleep i use ordering i use also have everything's thing underneath me but i want to measure my sleep every possible ways the fifth one is purpose finding the purpose in your life people who live a life of purpose tend to live 10 to 15 years longer than the people who have no purpose. And finding your MTP, as Peter would say, if you have not done that, that's the first thing, because that will allow you to live longer, healthier, and actually push the humanity forward. That will bring the joy in you that will reduce your stress and if you can't find your mtp peter if i may say so there is no better place than go to abundance

and join peter's abundance thing and come on back peter i have benefited more from that and a platinum trip taking your children not just yourself you take your spouse and take your family, having those conversations at dinner. So you don't sound like an alien when you have those conversations that you collect with. So you are able to have intellectual discussion, even with Neil, Peter, I sit down with Neil and I explain what I'm doing. And he would send me, but dad, you forgot to look at this peptide. That is the conversation you want to have. It's a beautiful conversation. I would like everyone who's listening to it to take themselves, their spouse and children

to Abundance and Platinum Trip. There is no better way to actually educate yourself, find your purpose and do something about it. Thank you, buddy. I do appreciate it. Abundance 360 comes from my heart and uh it's an amazing amazing community it's uh it's the highest level for singularity university um i'd like to spend a little bit more about the platinum trip as well because i know i'm going to

be speaking there in the next few days in a couple of weeks that is another unbelievable program yeah well it's it's it's not for everybody, but it's amazing. Every year I take 80 people, 40 in September and 40 in October. We go to the West Coast one year, to the East Coast the next year. We visit the top 50 life scientist, entrepreneur, CEOs who focused on extending the human lifespan. This year we're in Cambridge and Boston, New Hampshire with Dean Kamen and New York. Next September and October, we'll be doing the trip in San Diego and San Francisco. Yeah, and that's the Platinum Longevity Trip. I mean, I tell you, Peter, anyone who can actually do that, I would say highly recommend they go

there with their children and spouse. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's

been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the U.S. today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease

at the very beginning. When it's solvable, you're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you,

please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans.

Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Pal and Guru, I want to dive into the future five to 10 years from now. I'd like to shift the conversation because I'm in the middle of writing my next book, Scaling Abundance. It's the follow-on from my first book, Abundance, 10 years ago. What a great book, Peter.

What a great book. Thank you. I loved it. And the story has gotten so much stronger. And I'm in the midst right now of writing the chapter about AI-human collaboration in different areas, and in particular, medicine. And I mean, CHAT-GPT passing the US medical licensing exam last February was like amazing and it's gotten even more amazing. But I'd like to dive five to 10 years from now. Let's talk a little bit about

what you imagine is going to be possible. What is medicine and health care going to look like? You know, it's nonlinear. It's not just doing more of what we got right now. There's going to be some reinventions. Guru, do you want to take a second? What's a vision? Are we going to have doctors? I'm guessing your AI is going to be your diagnostician. AI-driven robotics will become your surgeon. We're going to be constantly updating you on, you know, Peter, you've got 30 minutes in your schedule, you know, drop and give me 50 pushups or stay away from that, you know, that apple pie in front of you. Give me some concrete examples of what you see coming and possibly when? Yeah, you know, my dream is that

we are going to have an angel on our shoulder, who is always sort of whispering in your ear and saying, what is the right thing to do at every point in time where you have to make a decision, you know, what you want to eat, where you know how much you want to walk or not walk, how much, how you're sleeping, etc. All of those five things that Naveed is talking about, you know, don't get stressed, you know, because of that conversation, do this, you know, in order to de-stress, right? So imagine a, an angel on your shoulder, or, you know, since we have so much integration, you know, somebody speaking through your headphones, or maybe, you know, a neural chip or some kind of... Actually, I want to go a step further here.

I really think it will change your brain, Peter, so you won't even want it. I mean, the fundamental thing is what we are learning that even, I mean, what surprised me, Peter, I don't know if you saw the latest research that came out on GLP-1. It is actually reducing the people's desire to drink alcohol, the addiction, right? So think about it. They are able to fundamentally change the addiction. So what if that thing is constantly not only reminding you, changing your brain to say i don't want sugar it makes me sick i'm not going to eat this because it's making me sick and every part everything around you is going to be collecting data your mirror is going to be collecting data your toilet

your tiles you wake up it knows what time you woke up it analyzing your sweat it knowing exactly the way you are walking you say peter looks to sweat. It's knowing exactly the way you are walking. You say, Peter, looks to me you're not feeling well. The way you speak, your voicing being analyzed everywhere. Literally all this data is being collected. It will automatically order the food for you in your refrigerator based on what is good for you. Let me just make sure that, again, we don't get stuck with the external factors, right? I want to go deep into the biology, right? I think we need to be measuring what's going on in the biological processes within our body, which means that we are going to have a variety of, you know, think of it as nanobots, if you will, right?

We already today have, you know, CRISPR-based machines that are doing, making changes within your body. But I mean, maybe not 10 years, maybe in 20 years, I definitely think that we will be able to have molecular machines. Actually, on this upcoming platinum trip, we're going to see out of the Media Lab, an amazing entrepreneur has built these, they're subcellular machines they're smaller than the red blood cell that can go and implant themselves along the arterial system the brain and can polarize and depolarize can go to different tissues and so they're here they're just not evenly distributed yet i agree agreed and you know in Viome, we are just measuring

the, you know, let's call them the non-invasive samples. But, you know, in some way, if we can demonstrate the safety of these molecular machines, I think we can get the deepest possible insight into the biology internally. And of course, all the external factors that we all know, we can gather data. And that's the only way that you can get the systems biology picture of the world, right. And one last thing I want to also mention is Peter, one of your recent emails talked about experimentation. I just want to, you know, shout out that the reason experimentation is so important is because we need to get to the causality, right. AI has for very, very long, including the latest generation, generative AI and so on, right? They're mostly statistical

machines which are looking at correlation, but we need to get past that. We need to get to causation. The only way we can do that is by experimenting with biology and with experimenting with behavior and so on and so forth. So the next generation of AI has to focus on causality. That's really the transformation that has to happen within the field, so to speak. Well, Guru, since we're there, what's your opinion about when we will reach or exceed human level AI? I'm taking a poll these days on all the AI experts I'm speaking to. Do you have an opinion on that? I definitely do.

And, you know, I give this talk about, you know, called the, you know, 100 years of vicissitude, which is I trace the path from 1950 to 2050. And I decided to start in 1950 because that was when Turing first put out the Turing test, right? And I picked 2050 because I think there is a 50% chance of getting to human level AI by 2050. That's my current position. Okay, so he's an expert. I think he's too pessimistic as an expert. I define an expert as someone who can tell you exactly how something can't be done.

Naveen, are you in the Ray Kurzweil camp of 2029 or the Elon camp of 2027? So I think, honestly, it may be too soon there, but by 2035, I really believe we get there. So the next 10 to 12 years, we really, really get to the human level AI. And maybe in 2045, we get to the, you know, a much... So what happens to... So right now, I did this, I looked at this the other day, I said, how many years does it take to become a specialist? It's about 16 years to become a medical specialist between college, medical school, internship, residency, fellowship, and it can cost you, you know, anywhere between a half a million to a million dollars in educational

fees. It's a lot. What's going to happen to medical professionals and nurses and healthcare coaches a decade from now when we've got human level AI and it's a better, is it a better doctor than your doctor? What do you think? The answer is from a technically, there's no doubt in my mind because no humans has a processing power to address, you know, to read 52 quadrillion biological data points. They just can't. They can't read 5,000 research papers every day and AI can't. So technically it is going to be there. The question you still have to ask yourself is in terms of human evolution, can technology be there? Yes, but would humans evolve to actually trust that and be able to have a same feeling of trust

and empathy that they would have from other human beings. So I think the evolution of humanity, which is our wet body, I don't think is going to keep up with the technology. And the nurses and the doctors and the health coaches are going to become that person who are going to be able to give you that comfort, touch you on your back and say, Peter, you're going to be okay. I have the right plan for you. But are we going to invest a million dollars and 15 years to be coached by AI? They become health coaches. They become primarily health coaches driven by AI.

So they're going to take the AI and they're going to actually become that 3D hologram that our biological body trusts, right? So in some sense, we need another person because we as humans are not going to evolve fast enough to trust something that we can't see or know and not look into their eyes in the same way that we do in a person's eyes. So I think it's really a question of biological evolution rather than technological evolution, if you know what I mean. I think it's societal evolution and psychological evolution, right? I mean, there is a point at which, you know, I joke about this, that if you need a surgeon today,

there's one question you ask when you're interviewing surgeons. You know what it is, Naveen, don't you? How many times did you do the surgery this morning? So the frequency with which a surgeon has done a particular kind of surgery, an appendectomy, a mitral heart development, because they've seen so many different variations of that. But there will be a point in the future where AI-driven robots are doing those surgeries. And of course, if there's a million robots out there doing surgeries, if one robot sees a particular case that has all the robots learn from it. And so there will be a point when if you need a surgery and you're in the hospital and you see that human surgeon walking towards you, you're going to go, oh, no, no, no, I do not want that

human touching me. I want the robot that's done it a million times this morning, right? But you may want that person to walk in and say, hey, that robot is updated as of the last nanosecond with all the latest information, right? That may be something you may want to hear. Sure, sure. So I do believe that medicine is going to become massively transformed. I also think just like Google for the poorest child and the wealthiest child on the planet is identical. It's not a little bit better for Larry Page's kids, right? It's the same. And I do think we have the ability to massively demonetize and democratize healthcare, where healthcare for the poorest child and the wealthiest child is the same. Do you agree with that?

I think it's going to, I mean, once it moves into preventative, right, then, you know, health care as, you know, as we think of it today, it's just not going to exist in most ways. You know, we want people to be in the, you know, you'd not be going to the surgeon's operating room, you know, as often as we would go today, right? Go to lesser and lesser to the point of going to zero if you do because people do stupid things and I think we as humans will continue to do stupid things like

driving our own cars and get or getting hit ourselves right the point is that you know you want to keep people in the wellness sphere not you know never never you know get them into the sickness sphere. Yeah. I'm just trying to understand, do you tell your kids who are in high school right now to go become a doctor? Go become a... No, no. So, Peter, I have told all of our kids, as you know, that I believe even the safest thing used to be computer programming. And as you know, now that is going to be gone. So the computer science is totally toasted, right?

So to me, the best thing you can do is to be an entrepreneur who takes the latest technology and finds what can you do to make human life better with this technology. So every one of the humans is actually going to become an entrepreneur and that is going to be the safest skill that is applying the technology to a specific problem. And they're going to be horizontal players and they're going to be the deep vertical players who are going to just constantly slice and dice it in different ways. Well, I would respectfully argue that entrepreneurs by themselves are not going to be enough.

And I would say that you need the scientists and technologists who are developing new, I mean, asking the kinds of questions about whether the world, whether it's biology or the universe, right? There are too many questions that I don't believe

that AI would be asking all the right questions all the time. It would be based on the kinds of questions that human ask that goes deeper and deeper, as well as broader and broader. So I think you need the two types of people. And the broad entrepreneurs are taking the innovations that come from the deep thinkers and putting them together to solve problems. Well, you know, I define an entrepreneur as a person who finds a juicy problem and solves it.

And so the more entrepreneurs, the more problems get solved, the better the world gets. And we do need scientists. And we do need scientists. You know, Elon's X.AI, when he's looking at building aligned AI with humanity, his number one sort of metric for alignment is curiosity, creating AIs that are super curious. And I love that. I love that description. So Peter, the three types of people in the world, people who find problems, they are human beings.

People who solve the problem, they are the scientists and the inventors. And people who solve the problem are entrepreneurs. So to me inventors and people who solve the problem are entrepreneurs so to me that's how i define the world yeah that's uh that's good let me bring it back full circle uh to uh to biome um you know the the reality is the more we are understanding the human body the more we're realizing how massively complex it is. And I think I have gotten such an extraordinary respect for the microbiome, oral, nasal, your whole GI system here. It is an interplay that most people don't realize. I mean, there have been a lot of papers out recently that say, oh, you know, if you Google, you know, Alzheimer's and microbiome, Parkinson's and microbiome, depression and microbiome, you're getting incredible published

science in these areas. Yeah. Was there anything that shocked you? You know, Peter, seven years ago, people were thinking, we were crazy thinking, talking about microbiome. Not only every day, there are 10 to 20 research papers

showing every single disease from addiction. Pick a name you want. Cancer and microbiome, cancer therapy and microbiome is literally paper now lady gaga is talking about gut microbiome that's where you know you have singing lady gaga is singing about the gut microbiome maybe oh my god that's that's like that just tilted me all right so um uh i am curious one of the things that that i am working on right now and i i do need to do my whole body intelligence test again so i need to literally order it right now

because i am you know working on trying to get my my gut back in order with the appropriate prebiotics. What's that? After the antibiotics you took. Yeah, after the antibiotics I took, right. To get, and it's prebiotics and probiotics and so forth. So, you know, if someone feels like they have some dysbiosis, if there's like their gut isn't what it should be, because you've got all kinds of things like leaky gut you've got your food allergies that develop as a result of that you've got the

wrong kind of flora in the wrong part of your it's like it's it's not just taking x-lax anymore right it's like it's a complicated field um one of the things is people are doing these things and hurting themselves. I mean, did you see the research, Peter? This really shocked me. There is a shortage of laxatives in the market. You cannot buy laxatives in drugstores anymore. Why? You know why?

There are three reasons, Peter, why it's happening, which is mind-boggling to me that why people are doing it. Number one is obviously people are eating really processed foods and all the shitty food that causing constipation number two is people are taking these drugs like ozempic and manzaro and the way they work is obviously they slow down the food your digestive system yeah i try to make you feel full right so that causes constipation and people are using the laxatives now like another food disorder. Instead of throwing up from the front door, they're throwing up from the back door.

So literally they're eating the shitty food and taking laxatives, right? But the point I'm going to make is, Peter, coming back to what you're saying, is that we have, don't wait until you see the symptom to see if your gut microbiome is okay. Because by the time you see the symptom, this has been around for 10 years. So by the time you develop diabetes, you have had diabetes, high insulin for the last 10, 15 years. By the time you see the first symptom of Parkinson's, it's been in your gut for 15 years. I do think if you're listening and you haven't tested your microbiome, if you haven't gone through to look at what's going on there, there definitively is good and bad gut flora, 100%. And you might find things that are really problematic that have a high correlation with cancer or various

neurological cardiovascular diseases, right? I mean, one of the things is your mouth flora can get very quickly to your brain. It's like right there. It's a two problem. They are just like a leaky gut. If you have leaky gums, guess what happens? Identically, your oral microbiome is going into your blood. And a lot of people... So only one thing, Peter, I want to correct you. It is not a good microbiome is going into your blood and you know a lot of people so only one thing Peter I want to correct you it is not a good microbiome or a bad microbiome it is a good behavior or a bad behavior so same organism like P.gingervirus 88% of us have a P.gingervirus in our mouth only about 15% of the people when it starts to produce ginger pain is when it becomes virulent and toxic,

right? So you want to look at is it actually commensal or is it become pathogenic, right? And by looking at RNA, we can say this P. gingiva is totally fine, leave it alone, or it has turned toxic, we need to do something about it. And same thing in the gut. So it's really the behavior, as Gandhi says, punish the sin, not the sinner. Yeah, I love that. So once you get your results, let's talk about how you're empowered, what levers you can move to try and bring things back. And how long does it take to really move the needle on getting your gut flora, your oral flora back? So we have seen, Peter, it takes four to six months to get your basically back into the order. Again, depends on where you start. If your starting point is really, really bad, it may take you a year.

But generally, four to six months is a good place. Actually, Naveen, our latest study shows that, you know, even at three months, beyond three months, you start seeing an impact in the effect, not less than three months, but more than three months, yes. And typically, if you're on the Viome plan right now, you're testing every quarter? We recommend every four to six months.

If you can afford every three months, that's what we should do. If you can't, at least do every four to six months. Twice a year. Okay, got it. And so you get the results back. And what are the levers you can move? We said, number one, food, right? You can stop eating this and start eating that

that's right and but even the quantity so we can say hey eat more of this less of this or don't eat this at all right and the second liver is really about nutrients because they go hand in hand when you have a a serious issue with your gut lining you cannot just simply say it's going to take too long let's need to put the band-aid first before we can stop the bleeding, right? So we say here's the butyrate you need, here is, you know, actual nutrients you need to at least get your body into the place. So getting the right supplements which are personalized to you, getting the right probiotics and prebiotics. One of the bad thing people do, Peter, is right after antibiotics, they take probiotics and take a lot of probiotics. And that is actually, despite what experts tell you, that's a bad advice.

And here's why. So because when you have taken antibiotics, you basically wiped out most of your microbiome. And when you take probiotics, you're basically taking four, five, six strains and they literally take over your gut and nothing else will settle down because now they have too much of that. And now they become any point of time when there's too many of them, they start to basically there's no more diversity that can be done. So the best thing to do after antibiotics to eat very different types of fermented food, take kombucha, take pickles, take, you know, kimchi, take kaffir, take yogurt, take as many different types of fermented food to build the diversity of that and then start taking probiotics

and prebiotics to make sure that you continue to build the diversity or else you lose the complete diversity there. Yeah, and another thing I would add here is that we have built this sort of a virtuous cycle, so to speak. So like experimentation cycle that in fact accelerates this process. As more people do longitudinal analysis, we can see what is working and adjust all of these things better and better to individual biology. And we are constantly doing that, both with external clinical studies, as well as our own internal studies that are improving these randomized, you know, controlled trials. So, Guru, you want to talk about the latest study we just published on

depression on how that, you know, people who had high depression, 74% of the people, their high PHQ-9 came down to low or no depression compared to the control for 14.9 percent peter think about that no drug would ever do that what we did was simply with food and supplements amazing uh let's talk about let's talk about timeline one second so uh if you go to viome.com you order a kit um uh you get it a couple of days later i assume when you and you're going to provide a you're going to spit into a tube you're going to do a finger blood prick you collect a little bit of blood and stool and you send that in how long does it take to process that information

10 days so 10 days later you get in your app a complete insights into the thing and each person peter we analyze not 20 biomarkers like from your blood test you'll get the lipids and this we are analyzing 20 million biomarkers to tell you what is happening in your body right 20 million that's amazing yeah that's it's crazy all right all right um and then you get to get your probiotics prebiotics for your gut which looks just like this uh and then you get your supplements and then you get your oral lozenges and very soon you'll be able to get your personalized toothpaste oral lozenges are what what's in there so they are basically our probiotics prebiotic post biotics and uh all of this uh herbs i need that i i am i need to i need to get a hold of that and i and i will um where do

uh naveen uh you're on uh on twitter on instagram uh what are your handles instagram and linkedin find me on instagram find me on linkedin what's your i don't'm really good at Instagram and LinkedIn. Find me on Instagram. Find me on LinkedIn. What's your handle there? I don't know what Twitter is, but X. Okay. I'm X now. All right. Is it just at Naveen?

Or Y. X, Y, or Z. At Naveen Jain? You can find me at Naveen Jain, CEO on Instagram or LinkedIn or, you know, Okay. And for Viome,

just Viome.com. Here's the deal, guys. At the end of the day, do you really know what's going on inside your body? And, and my guess is that you don't and you can. And if you can, why would you not want to? Why would you not want to know if you should be choosing peppers or broccoli? You may think you're eating healthy and you're not. At the end of the day as well, understanding what's going on inside your body, we are a massive 40 trillion human cells and on the order of 100 trillion microorganisms. and on the order of 100 trillion microorganisms. It's a dance that we're just now, just now able to understand using AI and massive data. So my recommendation is, listen, if you're in great shape, if you feel great,

if you've done something else, fantastic. If you're curious, check it out. If you're curious, check it out. One of the things that I'm so pumped about, Naveen and Guru, is the science and tech you're bringing to the table at lightning speed. Thank you for all of your hard work. So, so grateful. So, so grateful. Peter, I'm so thankful to you and grateful to you for continuing to guide us.

More importantly, continue to guide the humanity your education your purpose brings uh joy to my life that you do this out of sincerity to help millions of people live a better life your podcast i mean it brings people together gives them information they won't get anywhere so all i can say is peter please keep doing what you're doing you're making a real impact on people's lives. Thank you, buddy. Thank you so much. Yes, Peter, I got to tell you that you've changed my life as well. A lot of your articles, blogs, everything else you do has just made a tremendous difference in my life and in my family's overall trajectory, I would say. So it's been tremendous. Thank you, gentlemen. A real pleasure. Excited to have you. We'll come back together in a year and see what the data is telling us. And Naveen, I'll give you a call once I get my gut intelligence,

my full body intelligence back. And I happen to know the CEO, so I'm going to get a quick detailed rundown with you Dr. Jane alright, my pleasure, love to your family take care