The Pomp Podcast - #1305 Peter Diamandis on Bitcoin, XPRIZE, Longevity, Artificial Intelligence

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

Peter Diamandis is the Founder & Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He is also the Executive Founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world’s leaders on exponentially growing technologies. In this conversation, we talk about XPRIZE, longevity, importance of health span & life span, artificial intelligence, bitcoin, and more.  ======================= This episode is brought to you by Frec — Just as easy as investing in an ETF, Frec Direct Indexing can help you earn more by unlocking tax savings, no matter the market. Done for you, automatically. Check them out at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://frec.com/⁠ ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: https://dreamstartupjob.com/ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Peter Diamandis. He is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, where they lead the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive

competitions. He's also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counseled the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies. Peter has founded a ton of different companies. He is one of the best thinkers when it comes to the future of technology, and he has written a number of books. His latest one is on longevity, and we talk a lot about it today. In this conversation, we talk about XPRIZE and this brand new $101 million XPRIZE around longevity, why healthspan and lifespan are both really, really important. And then we get into the dirty details of what he does from a longevity standpoint, what his thoughts are currently around artificial intelligence,

Bitcoin, the enhanced games, and much, much more. I love talking to Peter because it gives me a peek into the future and what is possible as long as humans remain ambitious and they continue to innovate and build towards a better world. Here is my conversation with Peter Diamandis. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. This episode is brought to you by Freck.

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and I even became an investor in the business. Freck.com. Go check them out today. Today's episode is brought to you by BASE. BASE is making it their mission to bring a billion people on-chain. What exactly is BASE? It's a layer two offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, BASE is shaping the future of the on-chain world. BASE is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, Whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time, BASE is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, BASE is your destination.

Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at BASE.org or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBASE. Again, that's at BuildOnBASE to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Peter here. Peter, you are the founder of XPRIZE. It's probably one of the coolest projects, in my opinion. You guys put a big, big dollar amount out there. And you say anyone in the world, regardless of who you are, where you come from, what your background is, if you can solve this problem, you get this prize. And it used to be a million dollars, $10 million. Now you're watching $100 million XPRIZE. Why is it so

important to have a prize that people are really driving towards to continue to drive innovation and ambition. Thanks, buddy. It's good to see you. There's a saying I love that without a target, you'll miss it every time. We are, as a species, extraordinarily good in competition. We do our best work when we're competing in the Olympics or in business. Why not do that as well in solving the world's biggest problems and so what we when we run these competitions we put a target um we say like you said i don't care where you went to school what you've ever done if you solve this problem and this is what you have to do and it aims everybody in the same direction uh and gives them a target to shoot for uh and a lot of times people are looking for an excuse they're looking

for a reason to jump in um and and these x prizes incentivize people now here's what's different today it used to be that a hundred years ago the only people who could make a difference on a big problem were the kings and the queens the industrialists the government um but now uh You know, a small team using AI, using, you know, the technologies that are at our fingertips can do something miraculous. And so we're looking to crowdsource solutions. And so that's what we're doing. We're saying, what are the world's biggest problems? How do we target people to solve them?

and we create a level playing field where a small, brilliant team can compete against a big one. There's one other important point I should make here that it's a saying I love, which is the day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. If it weren't a breakthrough, if it weren't a crazy idea, it would be an expected improvement. But if it truly is a crazy idea, and where inside organizations do try crazy ideas. Large companies are fearful of failure. Governments don't want congressional investigations. And so it becomes the young team that is willing to try a crazy idea and fail over and over and over again. Now, the latest XPRIZE is around longevity or increasing health spend. I think maybe a great way to think about this is like,

people always want to be healthy for the most part. But there's two ways that you can think about this. You can think about it as I want to live to 150. And so literally extending life, or you could think about it as improving the quality of the years that you have. And I think the Holy grail is to do both to have more years and also have a higher quality of the years. How do you thinking about longevity today? And why do we need the X prize to really drive forward some of these breakthroughs in longevity? Great question. So, you know, lifespan is how long your heart's taken health span is how long do you feel vibrant energetic uh alive um you know it's interesting i was about five six years ago was on the stage of the vatican uh at a medical

conference and in the room was you know uh cardinals and priests and physicians and scientists you know it was it was a crazy audience i was speaking about the morality of immortality And I asked an innocent question to the room, 500 people in the room there, right? All at the invitation of the Pope. And I said, how many of you want to live to 120 years old? And I expected everyone's hands to go up. And like 20% of the room raised their hands. And I'm like, what in the, what's up?

And the problem is that we have a mental image of 120 as being slobbering in a wheelchair, disabled. And that historically is true. And so no one wants that. And so we need to change that. So lifespan and healthspan is living to 120 in a vibrant way that you're enjoying life. You're hanging out with your great, great grandchildren and you're cognitively, physically there. so um this x prize you know we've done well in lifespan we doubled over the last century from 40 to 80 years old roughly but that's lifespan health span still lags by 10 years so um this prize we've launched um to get into the specifics it's a it's a 101 million dollar purse and um it's 101 million because the friend of mine chip wilson the founder of lululemon who

put up the first roughly 30 million dollars uh wanted it to be bigger than the prize we had with elon musk which was 100 million dollars for carbon removal and so um uh funny enough we ended up uh making it 101. Then he added, then Chip added another $10 million of bonus money for his particular disease, which is a muscular dystrophy called FSHD. That's $111 million of prize money. And to win this prize, a team needs to demonstrate that they have a therapy that with given for up to a year could reverse your cognitive your uh muscular and immune age by 20 years right so that uh and this is going to be done in patients and met in subjects age 65 and older so we need to show that you have the uh you know as we grow older we start to lose function

across everything our cognitive function our muscular our strength and ability to build muscle our ability to mount an immune defense against a challenge of some type what if you could turn back the clock 10 years or 20 years on those three things that's what this challenge is about we announced it in actually saudi arabia it's funded by a foundation called evolution which is out of the out of south of riyadh in the u.s and with chip wilson and a number of benefactors including myself we have over 200 teams entered so far i expect we'll get close to a thousand and this competition will run through 2030 and i hope it will source amazing new approaches to maintain our and maintain our health a decade or two longer is the goal when we see people

talking about longevity today i think there are the david sinclair's hey we're in a lab and we're doing uh what most people consider kind of academic research to try to find maybe things we can take or food we should eat or various protocols that we should follow then you can go and you can look at someone like a brian johnson who you know is doing everything from getting peptide uh injections all the way to literally i think he recently announced he got botox injected into uh his male genitalia and you know trying to figure out how does that have an impact um there's obviously the, you know, use of young people's blood that whether it's venture capitalists to, you know, many others over the years have been rumored to do. And so there's

all these kind of, again, crazy ideas or wacky ideas. When you evaluate the space today, like what are the things that are working, right? Like when you say, hey, I'm talking to a friend, they say, I want to live a longer life. Are there things that maybe are like free? And then there's things that the average person could afford that they could do? Yeah, for sure. Let me frame it as following. There's an idea called longevity escape velocity. And that concept put forward by Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil, I love it because when people say, how long do you want to live, Peter? I used to give some ridiculous multi-hundred year answer. Ridiculous only because if you hit longevity escape velocity you can live as long as you desire so what does that

mean today for every year that you're alive science is extending your year your life for a quarter to a third of a year right there are breakthroughs every year that are making you healthier and living longer there is a moment in time where that for every year that you're alive science is extending your life for more than a year right and that concept is called longevity escape velocity and say you know it it's a departure and and um so the question is when will we reach this idea of longevity escape velocity and uh i interviewed a number of individuals ray kurzweil george church david sinclair and the belief is that it is in the neighborhood of 15 years out, maybe 20 years out at most as a result of AI and quantum technologies

and maybe sooner. And so what you really want to do is how do you maintain your health for the next 10 years, the next 20 years? You don't want to be the last person to arrive the day before longevity escape velocity so um what do you do now and i ended up writing this book uh longevity practical playbook outlining everything i do and why um and it falls into a number of categories um the first is the basics that are free right and uh it is first and foremost exercise um i hate to say it people don't like to do it i do i work out at least with weights four days a week and i i'm on a techno gym bike for three or four days a week um getting my my zone two training but it's adding muscle mass i added 10 pounds of muscle last year uh aggressively to get there because

there's a direct correlation between muscle and longevity um and there are things you can do to maintain and grow your muscle mass. It gets harder as you get older and you have to work harder for it, but it is definitely worth it. Exercising just once or twice a week reduces your chance of all cause mortality by 50%, reduces the chance of cancer by threefold. It's a big deal. If exercise could be bottled in the pill, it would be a trillion dollar medical miracle, right? So people know it just got to do it um and frankly any amount of exercise is better than being a couch potato and sitting down uh the second thing is diet and um and there's no one diet for everybody but there are a few things that are true and hate to say it but sugar is a poison the body never

evolved to eat as much sugar as we do it's a inflammatory um factor uh cardiovascular and neuroinflammatory it is just it's bad uh and so it's addictive and so minimizing high glycemic index foods and and sugar and breaking that sugar addiction is one of the most important things maximizing um uh vegetables uh colored vegetables um i sleep eight hours of sleep fundamental the body could have evolved away it didn't eat out you know sleep is part i used to like in medical school i would be so proud when i do like i can do this in four and a half or five hours of sleep right um mindset is incredibly important um there's a great study i quote in the book of 69 744 women and 1429 guys and it was done by the national academy of sciences

are published in national climate science proceedings and optimists lived 15 longer than pessimists amazing um and then uh the final thing for me um you know i talk about the meds and supplements and i'm on rapamycin and i take berberine instead of metformin and i don't want to go into that because everybody's different but i outline everything i do and i say see your doctor. But the last thing that I think is so important and is not dying from something stupid, you know, if I were to ask you, Pomp, you know, do you know what's going on inside your body right now? Are you sure that there's nothing going on inside your body you need to worry about? How do you answer it? No, of course not. You want to think that you do, but you 100% don't.

And I'll even give you a step further. I have friends who say, hey, I go see a doctor, you know every six months and i try to stay on top of what the recommended thing is um you know my wife and i had a second child and we went to go see the doctor the day before the baby was born and she said oh you guys have at least two more weeks before the baby's going to be born and 12 15 hours later she shows up to uh the hospital and realizes that we're there and she's like i wasn't expecting to see you for two weeks but we're like you know hey you're the doctor right aren't you supposed to know you know two weeks to you know 12 hours later that's a pretty big difference and part of it is even if you have the medical professional it's really hard right

that the human body is so unique and things can get missed or misinterpreted as well so yeah a hundred percent so we know more about what's going on inside our car or refrigerator than we do our body and that's the problem let me give you some of the facts so first of all you have to realize that the body is incredibly good at hiding disease the body compensates um which is amazing right so you don't feel cancer at stage one or stage two only when it reaches stage three or stage four do you feel something at which point sometimes you know it's too late you don't feel an aneurysm that's developing um 70 of all heart attacks have no precedent no shortness of breath no pain no anything and half of the heart attacks end up in death so it's like boom like we've all

had friends i had a fraternity brother of mine who was going to go down to fountain life a month he He had made an appointment a month out. He died in his sleep. Another friend of mine went through Fountain Life in our Orlando facility because we were going to do business together. I said, go through it. Experience it. And we found two brain aneurysms. He was in surgery a week later and then back at work a week after that.

So in our first 5,000 members who go through, what Fountain Life is, it's a full body upload. It's everything knowable about your body that's knowable. um it's you know full body mri brain brain vasculature an ai enabled coronary ct looking for soft plaque dexascan full genome metabolome microbiome 120 blood biomarkers everything and out of the first 5 000 members two percent two out of 100 people have a cancer they don't know about uh two and a half percent have an aneurysm they don't know about 14.4 percent have a significant life-saving finding metabolic disease cardiovascular disease neurodegenerative disease cancer outs um aneurysms and so you know listen the body was never evolved

to live past age 30 um and it's downhill from there and so stuff starts going on you just don't know about it and so people say i don't want to know i was like bullshit of course you want to know well you're going to find out you want to find out about now or when it's too late so i write about that in this book on the chapter of i call don't die from something stupid and i think not looking is is kind of silly um so you know sleep diet exercise understand what's going inside your body and then there's a whole slew of new therapeutics coming out and this health span x prize is going to drive a lot of those breakthroughs as well. What about, I'm going to call it consumer wearables as kind of a category. If I think of my own personal life, the Apple

watch, it's not the most stylish watch. Actually, some people would say, hey, why are you wearing that stupid watch? But I noticed that it tells me how many steps I take, or did I close my rings in terms of exercise? And for whatever reason, it makes me want to make sure that I close the rings. and so it has this like great feedback loop i know people who wear the aura ring where they sleep on an eight sleep mattress or you know name your device and it feels like maybe the tech sector uh and where it intersects with health is driving better behaviors to some degree and then on the other hand you know you also have people who just sit at their desk all day and doom scroll on their favorite social media app and maybe that's actually contributing to negative

side effects so how do you kind of think about tech um you know and its evolution here yeah i have a uh an appendix at the back of this book that lists all the stuff available and the stuff that i use and by the way you can get uh a free digest it's not the full book it's it's a summary of 30 page summary of all the book and includes that list uh if if someone goes to diamandus.com longevity you can get it i just want to get this information out there um i wear i'm always wearing continuous glucose monitor right uh either by levels or by free libre and monitoring my glucose levels not because i don't i just want to be it keeps me cognizant of what i'm eating right i don't want to eat something and watch it spike um i wear my aura ring not because it puts

me to sleep but because it reminds me in the morning um to that i'm going to be looking to get a sleep score above 90. I have an eight-sleep mattress as well. Actually, it's charging my Apple Watch. My venture fund, Bold Capital, about two-thirds of our investments are in biotech, and there's a whole slew of new wearables. One of the places that Fountain Life is going, we have these centers. We're building out centers around the world. But the ultimate goal is Fountain at Home, where your wearables, and as a Fountain member, you get a number of wearables integrated into our digital app that your physician is watching with you, for you. Ultimately, all of these wearables are also in your room, in your mattress of your bed, in your chair, listening to your typing, your voice, what your cough is like. All of this data is going to your AI, which is your ultimate diagnostician, and it's catching things even earlier.

So health monitoring will be 24-7 eventually. If you want it to be, you can turn it on or turn it off. When you see that health monitoring, how much of it is personalized foods, right? And these things that, you know, lab grown meats and we're starting to see innovation where I think people are saying, OK, today it looks just like, can we change the cost structure? Maybe there's a animal and humanity, you know, type of approach to this. But is it really that far off from us to say, OK, I'm monitoring my glucose and these other markers on a continuous basis. I'm not getting enough of a certain, you know, vitamin, mineral, protein, whatever. And so therefore, I'm going to start to cater my diet, but not just order from a certain place or cook a certain food.

actually going to have the food specially made in a personalized way to my exact needs or is that a little bit too sci-fi no no no not at all um uh i think that is definitively coming uh we've talked about that specifically at fountain life um as a an adjacency with our our residential partners but so for example i don't eat gluten i don't eat dairy um i don't i only gluten because that's what my lab results tell me right um and if you're being monitored 24 7 by what's going on your vitamin levels your hormone levels your all of that it is possible for your ai to know exactly what foods you should or should not eat, and to be transmitting that to the right agents that are producing your foods. So I do think in the final result, and I don't think it's, you know,

more than two to five years max out, but your health biomarkers will determine the food you end up eating um in a in an automagical way um if you want to turn that function on when i think of the furthest out of all of this um recently there was an announcement around the enhanced games which is the olympics but uh you basically can take whatever steroids do whatever you want the idea by the way i do love it yeah i know the team built uh who's proposed it yes And is that where kind of sports culture society in general, like should we expect to have a leaner, fitter, you know, society of people because the science gets infused in a way or things like maybe Ozempic where, yeah, it can help you lose weight. but there's concerns around, you know, muscle mass or bone density and kind of some of the downsides. Like, how do you think about just like the augmentation of humans, both for culture and

society, but also for sport, like in the enhanced games? Yeah. You know, it used to be that where we were born, what gender we're born into, what religion we're born into, all of that determined the rest of our life forever your cat the cast system and so forth today that is no longer the case you can you can reinvent yourself uh i think that the most interesting reinvention is going to be coming from crispr and gene therapies right so for example um to take it in a slightly different direction. There are 130 trials going on right now for CRISPR treatments.

So again, we learned how to sequence the human genome. The price went from 3 billion to 100 million. It's down to 200 bucks now for your genome, the 3 billion letters from your mom and your dad. And your genome, your software determines a lot, not everything. turns out that your genome only is responsible for at maximum 20 of your longevity lifestyle changes are are the vast majority but if you have a genetic disease genetic blindness hearing loss

sickle cell anemia beta thalassemia a whole slew of diseases because a particular nucleotide in your 3.2 billion letters is off you can now use CRISPR right two amazing women will win the Nobel Prize in chemistry for CRISPR in 2020 the ability to go in and and edit your genome in your body and that's biblical right so you can now go and edit yourself there are other gene hacks which will allow you to eventually build more muscle or be able to change the color of your skin or your hair. I mean, there's all kinds of things that are coming. And designer babies may be a thing in the future.

So there are lots of different directions that we're going to go. uh and society the problem is that society is ill prepared to deal with these things at the speed at which they're developing yeah the enhanced games is is cool and i sure i'd love to see you know what what the long jump looks like for someone who's been you know hacked you know in a way i mean it's more out of morbid curiosity than anything else uh i i think the olympics will always be the gold standard but i think just like we went from you know wrestling to uh what's it called when you're when you're in a in a cage like cage fights where you can do anything you want right you know it's like people like the extreme um but it's also nice to know what you know what

the unaltered natural human can do but there's a place for both now you said the society is ill-prepared why are they ill-prepared or what can we do to become more rapidly prepared human beings don't like change fundamentally we like waking up in the morning and knowing that the world is the same world we want to sleep in uh we have institutions governments religious institutions and such which are stabilizing forces um i learned long ago that people to a large degree fear the future because they don't understand it and the faster things are moving um the more concerned they get because they are they understand the game they're playing and you know i just gave a talk to a middle school out here uh in in la to a 150 teachers

about where things are going and rather than being excited i think i scared the shit out of them which was concerning to me but nonetheless it is what it is and the only constant is change and the speed of change is increasing especially with what we're seeing in in generative ai these days and humanoid robots that are coming um and so because the change is so fast. And we deal with the reaction through culture, through government laws, through institutions that don't change, don't like to change. It's just going to be, there is going to be a departure, a diversion where we linear humans are constantly causing or being disrupted or causing disruption on institutions. So we're seeing it. It's just going to continue to accelerate.

When we see the augmentation of society and of the human, I recently tweeted and I said that there's an increasing correlation between fake lips, fake news, and fake money, right? And it seems like society, fake is a negative connotation, but there are some benefits to some of these things um and obviously huge detrimental uh impact to others how do you think about sifting through some of these evolutions as good or bad you know fake lips is kind of like well maybe it makes someone happy also maybe it screws up their body maybe doesn't neither one like how do you kind of use as a framework to evaluate these developments yeah um we have to remember you know listen i'm 62 years old i feel like i'm my best shape ever and i'm working hard on that it's important to me i

prioritize it second only to my kids um but i'm i've gotten here and i'm the best shape i'm in because of all the things i do in my own biohacks um uh is it natural no natural is dead by 30. i mean just to remember right a hundred thousand years ago you would have a baby at age 12 when you went into puberty you'd be pregnant by 13 by the time you were 26 27 28 you were a grandparent and before we had mcdonald's and whole foods and food was abundant your purpose was to perpetuate the species pass on the genes and you didn't want to compete against your grandchildren for food. And society would have you die. So the body was never built to live past age 30. Just to be hyper clear for anybody here over 30, you're on borrowed time,

buddy. But we enhance that. We solve these things. We create antibiotics. We pasteurize milk. We get better sanitation we we learn how to catch disease early we learn which foods do and do not interest anyway um the point being we're always modifying the game um you know fake is a term we apply like uh you know uh it was like i was on cnbc talking about the uh taylor swift deep fakes um and you know and trump using you know claiming deep fakes and all of that and yeah those are issues uh when they're negative we call them deep fakes when they're positive things we call them avatars we give them different names right and digital avatars are extremely valuable on a multitude of of ways for education for business for sales for marketing for bringing back loved

ones eventually. So I don't know that it's anything different than it's ever been. It's just a lot more moving a lot faster. And our institutions are evolving at the speed of humans, not at the speed of AI. When you see other technologies that are pushing us forward through innovation, we have Bitcoin, we have artificial intelligence. These are things that and i've talked about uh before where do you see those now is this something where everything gets pushed forward together kind of in a techno optimist view of the world and it's you know uh they all uh benefit if ai gets pushed forward then these other technologies benefit uh or are they somewhat siloed and progress on bitcoin doesn't necessarily indicate progress on

you know longevity or ai or something like that i think they're all moving in some unison For example, Bitcoin is predicated on on blockchain and blockchain may be the most important technology to prevent deep fakes on the negative side. Right. Having some mechanism of a authentication in the metadata of a image or a video that's on the blockchain that allows you to verify it. And of course, AI enables you to do the research and do that better and computational speed and the ability for someone in the middle of India using YouTube to educate themselves and being able to communicate with people in Thailand and in California for free on, you know, on WhatsApp. I mean, all these things are just making the world faster and faster. The question ultimately is, do you believe that human nature is, on the whole, good or bad? If you believe, on the whole, human nature is bad and that all of these technologies, as they become more and more prevalent and available and cheaper and faster, are going to be used for nefarious purposes, then we're screwed. um i happen to believe that on the whole human nature is good and that i define an entrepreneur

as someone who finds a problem and solves a problem and that the more entrepreneurs using these technologies to solve problems the world is a better and healthier place you know it used to be that the only people who could solve significant big problems on the planet were the kings and the Queens, the robber barons, the industrialists, you know, very small number of individuals. And even the best that they could do was deploy their troops or change monetary policies. Today, a single individual, you know, powered with the world's knowledge on Google, with, with, you know, generative AI on Gemini or GPT-4 can do something extraordinary. uh and so yes they can do evil but i just uh we're still here and we're still fighting the

good fight we see uh rise of robotics in healthcare um we see the rise of ai agents in software and it feels like uh at some point someone's going to try to put things like that together uh maybe the like most absurd and advanced um combination are the humanoid robots where like just take the human completely out of the out of the equation and have a robot do everything that the human could do now and i've been studying them right um uh teslavod also known as optimus uh out of tesla is amazing uh there's another um another company called figure full disclosure i'm an investor in figure also doing humanoid robots and then amica out of engineered art set of the uk an amazing emotive uh humanoid robot right um this year at the

abundance summit which i hold every march uh we're going to spend two days on ai we're calling it the great ai debate um and i'm going to be bringing uh mustafa saliman who is co-founder of deep mine, the CEO of Inflection, and Jeffrey Hinton, and Ray Kurzweil, and Eric Schmidt, and Mo Gadot, and Tristan Harris. And we're having a debate about, is AI positive? Is AI negative? Where is it going? How do you think about it? And ultimately, how do you use it to improve your business and make the world a better place? But just on the other side of that are humanoid robots so um we will we are seeing them now and you know the prediction is millions by 2030 and billions by 2040 right and so elon's projection projection and i love elon

uh trying to hold him to a schedule and a price is tough uh but let's say he's off by a factor of two and an Optimus costs $40,000 or $50,000 instead of $20,000. What can you lease a car for that costs $50,000? I don't know, $400 a month, $500 a month. So imagine having a fully capable Optimus robot in your closet that while you're at work is cutting the grass, cleaning the house, preparing your meals, doing whatever you want. That's pretty amazing. And that's coming. Now, when you see the rise of that, if you, again, go to the extreme of what humans do, warfare is a huge part of, I think, where technology gets tested, gets innovated on. And we have seen the rise of drones, the rise of various weapon systems. There are now, even in certain proxy wars being fought globally, drones with explosives on them that are being flown into things.

Again, it's kind of like you're mashing the robotics and technology with what should be a human, but the progress is being accomplished by just taking the human out of it and going full on robotics and tech. and maybe a human might control it remotely or, you know, be involved tangentially, but it's actually getting the humans out of the way as a limiting factor for progress. Yeah. Listen, there's no question that AI and robotics of all form is core in the 21st century defense department.

I had Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus on my stage at Abundance Summit last year, and he's the CEO of Anduril. And Anduril is like one of the most advanced high-tech defense companies that people have ever heard of, and it's crazy what he's been able to design. But it is an AI architecture on top of physical drones and subs and trucks. And yeah, that's all concerning. It's concerning from how dehumanizing it is.

I think what Palmer would say is it would be much more concerning if we didn't have this ability. Warfare for the longest time has been very inaccurate. And you would drop bombs and hope you got the person. And there was lots of collateral. And his vision is what if your bombs and your drones and your robots are smart and they can get the individual you want without the collateral damage around it? um there is a star trek episode and i love gene roddenberry for all he explored in in star trek i think it's called the forever war and there's just two cultures that um got into a war and they made it so neat and clean um that that uh that the war you know wars are are are dirty and painful

and filled with catastrophes, and you want to stop them because of the ancillary impact. And in this episode, the war had become so neat and clean that people, it was run in a simulation. And if your home got bombed in a simulation, you'd walk into this chamber that would kill you. And it was so neat and clean that the war continued for millennia. And it just went on and on and on and on.

um and you know captain kirk shows up and destroys this and says war is supposed to be ugly and dirty so you don't want to do it ever again so i don't know um ai and humanoid robotics in war you know uh it's coming um and and you know is our our treaties our politicians uh smart enough to handle it i don't know do you think that there will be a day where the president of united states is ai or robotics or you know some version of not the natural human that we have today so i think that there is going to be a day very soon that every company is uh is basing its leadership and its decisions on ai i like to say by 2030 there are two kinds of companies those that are fully utilizing ai and those that are out of business right i'm super clear about that

uh there have as you know stunts to some degree been ai board members and ai ceos installed you know when i have a board meeting when i have a leadership meeting for my companies um i have you know bard or chat gpt open and i'm asking it the same questions i'm asking people or i might ask hey what would elon musk think about this problem we're having or what would albert einstein think about this problem so one of the problems we have as humans we don't know how to think other than the way we know how to think but in using journey of ai you can get different approaches to your problem so it's we're there in part um i would hope that The leadership at all levels of our nation are going to be using generative AI for their future decisions.

What is the thing that you are most excited about when it comes to longevity over the next 20 years? We've talked about technology. We've talked about AI. We talked about Bitcoin, robotics, all this stuff that's going on. When it's in the longevity field, what is the thing that you're most looking forward to? I think, well, first of all, getting the XPRIZE won. It's changing people's vision of what 120 looks like. There was a study done at Harvard London School of Business, Oxford, that said for every year that people remain healthy, every additional year,

it's worth $38 billion to the global economy. um which is massive and so at the end of the day um i want i think it's one of the most important tipping point society can have um you know i have two 12 year old boys i had at 50 you know um i'm looking forward to seeing them when when they turn 50 and i'm 100 you know that is a a beautiful thing to think about that i i think about you know my heart as a child was always in space i'm excited to see humans walking on mars starting colonies on the moon i'm excited to see the fulfillment of the science fiction future that will be 10 20 30 years out and i'm excited to participate in that so all of that you know i love life and i want to live as much of it as i possibly

can. So, I mean, that's the way I think about it. You know, we are going to make cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease, a thing of the past. It will be washed away in the wake of these longevity treatments. We will learn how to reprogram our epigenomes, right? So, i'll ask you a question that uh i asked people to ponder this so you have 3.2 billion letters from your mom and 3.2 billion letters from your dad you had it at birth you have the same exact software you're running at 20 at 40 at 60 at 80 at 100. if you have the same software running at 100 years old why don't you look like you were when you're 20. right it's same software Well, it's not what genes you have.

It's what genes are on and what genes are off. It's your epigenome, in the Greek word for above. And as we age, what happens is the right genes get turned on, but sometimes they don't. Or sometimes the genes supposed to be off are not off. And that blurring of the lines causes aging to a large degree. And so some of the work done by David Sinclair and George Church and others has said, we should be able to control our epigenome, control what genes are on or off, and reverse, take your epigenetic control system back to a younger state. So that's longevity escape velocity for sure. So I'm looking forward to that. And I'm going to do everything I can to, you know, including my breakfast that just got served up, which is some eggs and some olive oil and some avocado, which is staring at me over here.

uh but i'll hold off uh you know do everything i can to to uh to get there and part of it means making choices not to have that bowl of ice cream not to sit on your butt all day where can we send people to uh to get the book or learn more about the x prize yeah so um the book if you want to buy the hardcover uh it's on amazon uh just look up Diamandis and Longevity, your practical playbook. If you, if you go to diamandis.com backslash longevity, um, uh, you can link to the book there, but you also get a, a 30 page digest, which includes everything I'm doing and taking. It's, it's a distillation of the book. Uh, and I just want to get this stuff out there. Um, XPRIZE, X-P-R-I-Z-E.org, um, uh, is, uh, is where

can learn about the x prize we have launched 500 million dollars in prizes prizes to map the ocean floor pull water out of the atmosphere uh we have a hundred million dollar prize for a gigaton carbon removal that elon funded 6 000 teams entered that competition and of course our 101 million dollar health span x prize going on now uh so you know uh that's that's it i uh if you're interested in in what i do for coaching ceos uh abundance 360 is my ceo program that i run uh year round it's part of singularity university and then fountain life we have saved hundreds of lives at fountain life um there's no better investment honestly um anyway i'll leave it at that i um i'm inspired every time i talk with you the future is going to be absolutely insane

and awesome at the same time and we'll do this again in the future to talk about uh so thank you thank you for sharing um your time with me uh grateful for you and you know it's um it is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive and i like to say you know life is short until you extend it so enjoy a pleasure Thank you.