The Rich Roll Podcast - Extend Your Life: Peter Diamandis, MD On The Future of Health & Longevity Science

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

In this episode, Rich sits down with Peter Diamandis for a conversation about the science and philosophy of lifespan extension, education, AI, space exploration, and the importance of mindset. Named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and executive founder of Singularity University. He has degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and over the course of his career, has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space travel, venture capitalism, and education. A multiple NYT bestseller, Peter’s latest book, which he co-authored with Tony Robbins, is entitled “Life Force”. To read more about Peter and to peruse the show notes, click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich

Certain species of sea life, like the bowhead whale, a large mammal, can live for 200 years. And Greenland sharks can live 400 or 500 years. Sea turtles, similar, multi-hundred year lifespan. And so the question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? And I remember thinking, it's either going to be a hardware problem or a software problem. And we're going to have the tools to fix that. And I think we're on the precipice of that. One of the things I did was I built over the last year, an AI engine that searches the global news, journals, tweets, magazines, newspapers, and it finds longevity and health tech breakthroughs. And at the end of the day, I get this news that gives me tremendous hope.

And I'm seeing what's going on in all of these different fields. And I have zero question about reaching longevity escape velocity. The Rich Roll Podcast. What is happening, people? It is I, Rich Roll, your humble host, with you here today to continue an ongoing conversation that has been transpiring on the podcast

for some time around health span extension and the emerging science of longevity. And those conversations have been at the hands of past guests like David Sinclair, Sergey Young and Matthew Walker. But at the center of the Venn diagram that unites these brilliant minds stands today's guest, Peter Diamandis. Named by fortune as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders,

Peter is best known as the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, as well as the executive founder of Singularity University. Peter has degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT, as well as an MD from Harvard Medical School. And over the course of his career has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space,

venture capital, and education. He's co-authored two New York Times bestselling books, Abundance and Bold, which are both optimistic sort of manifestos on how the exponential growth of technology actually bodes well for a positive future for all. And we had a great conversation. It's coming right up in a couple few, but first.

We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem,

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again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at Thank you. personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the

full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you, I really do. And they have treatment options for you.

Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, so Peter's got this new book out that he coauthored with Tony Robbins. It's called Life Force, which essentially documents all of these near and long-term technological breakthroughs

in longevity science, as well as disease prevention and healthspan extension. And it provides first the basis for this conversation along with a sort of corresponding discussion about the philosophical implications of life extension. In addition, and because Peter has expertise and involvement in so many other interesting pursuits, we talk about the evolutionary implications of a self-aware artificial intelligence. We discuss the future of education, the importance of mindset in solving our biggest problems.

Also his pivotal role in the growth of privatized space exploration and why he thinks bringing the woolly mammoth back to life is a good idea. I had a good time with Peter. We covered a lot of interesting ground and I enjoyed him very much. So here you go. This is me and Peter Diamandis. Peter, so nice to meet you. Thank you for doing this. I've followed your work for quite some time.

I'm excited to meet you and talk to you. There's so many threads that we can pull today. And I think just as an introductory note, the way that I think about you is as somebody who's made a name for himself, being somebody who's all about big, bold ideas, moonshot thinking, and how to kind of disrupt this disruptive approach to solving or approaching and solving the world's biggest problems

and re-imagining a better future for humanity. And you've got your tentacles in tons of stuff. I think today we're gonna focus on probably our shared favorite subject, which is health and extending health span. Before we get into anything though, I gotta know what's in your, you came here today with a big green smoothie.

You've got it in front of you there. I need to know what's in that, you came here today with a big green smoothie. Yeah. You got it in front of you there. I need to know what's in that. Athletic greens. So I do an intermittent fast every day, through till about 2, 2.30, and I'll drink some athletic greens, just to flavor the water

and give me a little bit of extra benefit. There you go. Big, big supporter of the podcast. Yeah. I'm a big fan of athletic greens. I had of the podcast. Yeah. I'm a big fan of athletic. I had mine this morning as well. So good to know. Cheers.

You've got this new book out, Life Force that you coauthored with Tony Robbins. So I wanna dig into healthcare, the future of healthcare, health span, longevity, and all of that. But I think to begin, it's probably worth just canvassing the current state of healthcare and how you think about it as a basis point for how we're going to disrupt

this broken system and reimagine a better, newer one. Yeah, it's completely ridiculous. It's a system that deserves to die under its own weight. And just like Google disrupted libraries and like when's the last time you went to a library and provided ubiquitous access to information, we're going to see the same thing happen in healthcare. And it's really going to be

not the existing healthcare companies that make the transition. It's going to be a flock of new ones. And those healthcare companies of the future may sound like Amazon and Google and Microsoft and others, Apple to add to the list. It's really gonna be the convergence of these exponential technologies,

convergence of AI and sensor technologies and synthetic biology and quantum computing. You know, one of the things I'm clear about is this decade, we're gonna see healthcare move out of the hospitals, out of the doctor's office, into your home, onto your body. Right, and it's gonna become, you know, what has historically been a reactive generic system. I mean, it's, you know the numbers as well as I do that,

you know, when you have an FDA I do that, you know, when you have an FDA approved drug that you've been given to take, you think it's going to work for you, but it works for like 10 to 20% of the people it's prescribed for. It just may not be working with you, your physiology, your genomics, your microbiome, and so forth. And the potential is a completely personalized, completely preventative and predictive model where the recommendations I'm getting from the healthcare AI, it's about making yourself the CEO of your own health.

I think about that. I think about Jarvis from Ironman, that AI that Ironman has as really continuously measuring my biology from sensors I'm wearing that are implanted, that are in my bed or the chair, that's measuring exactly what's going on all the time and giving me recommendations.

This is the future of healthcare. This is where we're going. And it's a future of healthcare, which like Google is demonetized and democratized. It's gonna be the best healthcare ever. And it's gonna be the lowest cost healthcare available to everybody. The democratization aspect of it though,

only comes in time. As most of these things go, they begin very expensive in that early stage. And that's sort of a hurdle that has to be addressed. But I mean, currently, when you look at our healthcare system, particularly in the United States, it's sort of sinking under the bloat of its, you know, bureaucratic, you know, morass.

And it's a situation in which we're dealing with human beings at the late stages of whatever's ailing them. You don't go to the doctor unless something's wrong with the exception of the occasional check-in or whatever, which is fine, but we're dealing with all of these conditions once they have progressed and matured to a certain point. And then it becomes a situation in which the doctor is diagnosing and prescribing a medical intervention

that oftentimes at least pharmaceutically is treating a symptom and not the underlying condition. And with the advent of these technologies, it seems to me a lot of this has to do with early detection at the very outset of these situations so that they can be addressed because once they've crossed a certain threshold and matured to a certain point,

they become almost impossible to untangle or reverse. Catch cancer at stage zero or stage one, you've got a 95 to 99% chance of a complete cure. Catch it at stage three or God forbid stage four, your chance of a cure is down to like 10%. And we're all developing cancers all the time. I think that's something that people don't understand. That is the normal course of what's going on in biology. But we have our immune systems that find the cancer and zap it before it gets uncontrollable. And it's when your immune system gets exhausted

or your cancer has certain tricks to hide itself from your immune system that it can get out of control. And yeah, it's about early diagnosis. And one of the things I'd love to talk with you about, if not now and a little bit later in our conversation is the incredible progress in diagnostic technologies. I just went two days ago for my annual health upload.

And this is not like, you know, listen to your lungs and your heart and tap your knee and prostate exam. No, this is, I'm digitized. 150 gigabytes of data about me, right? Full body MRI, brain MRI, brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT. So we're using a platform called Clearly

that is looking for soft plaque, not calcified plaque. If it's calcified, it's safe. It's not gonna rupture. It's like, you know, cemented into the wall. And if it's not, you know, occluding the coronary artery, that's fine. But if it's soft plaque that can rupture and block, that's where it's not, you know, occluding the coronary artery, that's fine. But if it's soft plaque that can rupture and block, that's where it's dangerous.

And the old CTs don't find that, clearly does. And so that I do every year. I did it, which is brand new technology that we've got at Fountain Life. I did it a year ago and I had a really good score. It wasn't perfect. I put some interventions in place and it's my cardiac status has significantly improved in a year, but I can measure that.

And that gives me inspiration to keep going, right? Then we do part of this upload is your genome, your microbiome, your full blood omics. We do a Grail liquid biopsy test, right? Which is amazing. Tell me about it, what is that? So Grail, a guy named Jeff Huber, who was a senior VP at Google, beautiful guy.

His wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was probably stage three, might've been stage four when it was too late. And she passed. And being the entrepreneur he was, he said, there's gotta be something better we can do. We've gotta be able to find these cancers in the body. So he partnered with a group within Illumina,

which is the major sequencing company out there and developed what's called the liquid biopsy. And so when a cancer is growing someplace in your body, you don't know where it is, it's dividing and cells rupture and the DNA from those cancer cells becomes accessible in your bloodstream. And so Grail is a blood test you take,

and it looks for 50 different cancer markers in your bloodstream. And depending on how old you are, because the frequency of cancer is increasing, it's a test you do. Today, I do it once a year. Eventually, I'll do it every six months. Who knows, maybe even a quarter. It's relatively low cost compared to the expenses. And so if you detect a cancer, you're then beginning to look and the full body MRI will show that to you as well. So, you know, for me, it's like a forest fire.

When you wanna put the forest fire out, when it's at ignition or when it's a conflagration. Right. So right now, when we think about the sort of things that we should all be doing on a daily basis, there's a lot of low hanging fruit. It's like- 100%. The basics.

Yeah, it's- It's sleep, nutrition, exercise, reduce your stress, mindfulness practices, community, sort of finding purpose in your life. Mindset, yeah. These sorts of things. And then, beyond that, we start to venture into this terrain that is in your bailiwick.

And I've had some of your colleagues on the show, Matthew Walker to talk about sleep. I've had David Sinclair on a couple of times. Brilliant guys. We've gone down the rabbit hole of the emerging science. And then Sergey Young, who, as you know, cause you work with him, his book just paints this wild picture of the future.

We're at the very early stages of this where we're wearing we're wearing aura rings and whoop and we have, like all that kind of stuff. But this is just very, nascent in terms of what's to come. So I wanna get into some of these emerging technologies in a little bit more detail. That's the fun part.

Why don't we, yeah, let's, and then I have some philosophical kind of thought experiment questions that I wanna throw your way, but let's talk about where we're at and what's to come with respect to things like genomics, AI, sensor tech, 3D printing and the like. Sure, sure. I mean, let me just say that the basics

are still critically important. Sure, I mean, diet, sleep, exercise. Of everything, like you're not gonna get away with much if you're not taking care of those things, right? A hundred percent. So, you know, I just, I feel a moral obligation to tell people a few basic things, which are the same things that you've talked about

and written about in your career. Sleep is fundamental, right? Matt Walker, UC Berkeley, brilliant thinker here. He wrote a great book called Why We Sleep. I commend it amazingly. And if evolution could have gotten rid of a single hour of sleep, the advantage of a subpopulation of humans that slept seven hours versus eight hours is huge. It hasn't. We need eight hours of sleep. And I used to brag when I was in medical school about being good on five or five and a half hours. Now I'm bragging about hitting eight hours every night

and do that with a great eye mask with taking the temperature down to 64 degrees, having a cooling mattress and really getting asleep at 9.30 and waking up at 5.30, just that consistency and not watching TV. I actually put on an audible book with a timer to go off in 15 minutes and get read a bedtime story. On diet, again, fundamental. For me, it's a whole plant diet.

I do, I've gone vegan, I've gone keto. I'm back to sort of a whole plant with some Mediterranean sort of fish and eggs and then intermittent fasting for 18 hours and then eat for six. You do that every day? Every day, yeah. Well, let me just say,

I do cheat occasionally with the kids on a Saturday morning, but I try not to. Yeah. Yeah, and it's interesting, right? When you are doing intermittent fasting, I have incredible amount of energy and people would think, well, I need the food to fuel me and so forth.

You know, when I eat food after I've been fasting, it just, it pulls the blood into your digestive system. And I just, it makes you lethargic, like on, you know, Thanksgiving day. And then of course, exercise fundamental. And again, you know more about that than I do, but I try and take almost every meeting I possibly can as a walking meeting or a walking phone call

or a walking Zoom. So I try and get my 10,000 steps in a day. And then I do a heavy weight workout twice a week and light weights the other days. Yeah, well, you look great. I feel great. You're like you're 60. I'm 60, I feel like I'm, you know,

I have a mental image of 28. And there is that, I mean, David Sinclair talks about the difference between the biological clock and the kind of, what does he call it? Chronological and biological. Yeah, so where are you on that scale? So, yeah, David, when we wrote our book, Lifeforce, you know, we say David Sinclair has two ages.

He's chronologically 53 and his biological age was 33. It was like, holy cow, that's amazing. I'm 60 and 49 and a half. Right. And so I'm gonna keep trying to get it down as far as I can. And where are you at in terms of some of the Sinclair protocol

with the NMN and the metformin and rapamycin and all of that kind of stuff? Because it seems like there's some debate. There's still controversy. Yeah, there's an ongoing debate as to the veracity of all of that. So I'm all in, actually, I'm probably a nine out of 10. I'm not a toe in person.

See, I jump and then figure out how to build a parachute. So where am I on that regard? I've got, I'm taking probably about 50 supplements a day. Wow. I do, I'm on a gram of supplements a day. Wow. I do a monogram of metformin, right? Metformin is a very cheap medicine. It is a medicine, you need a prescription for it. And it's also known by the name glucophage

and it reduces access to glucose in the bloodstream and the cells, it's thought to impact the mitochondria. It's one of the safest drugs out there. It appears there's a large study that Dr. Nir Birjali at Einstein Medical School is working on right now that metformin from the data he's looked extends your life. It reduces the prevalence of cancer and it's got very low impact.

I'm then taking a number of other supplements from quercetin to tumeric to- Antioxidants. Exactly. Anti-inflammatories. And I'm supplementing my testosterone, right? I think that's a really important thing that people need to realize.

Our bodies were never designed to live past age 30. You know, on the savannas of Africa, 100,000 years ago, you'd go into puberty at age 12 or 13, and you were pregnant by age 13 or 14. And then by the time you were 28, your kid was having a kid. Yeah, grandparents in your 20s. And the worst thing you could do to perpetuate the species

was steal food from the mouths of your grandchildren. And so you would die and you'd give your bits back to the environment. And so there was no selective pressure to keep you in homeostasis in your 40s, 50s or 60s because you had done your deed, you had reproduced already. And as a result, we go out of homeostasis, our pituitary, our hormonal levels are all decreasing

and it is possible and I think the right thing to do to bring your, to optimize your testosterone levels. And the challenge is that different kinds of physicians have different sense of what's normal, right? So you might not have your doctor suggest testosterone supplementation until your testosterone level is down below 200 or 150, where you probably want it to be in the 500 to 800

or a thousand level to really have the vitality and energy to build muscle, to have clarity of thought. So I take 0.2 mLs injection sub-Q twice a week. And I've thought about rapamycin. I have not started on that. Fountain Life, which I mentioned, which does all the diagnostics, has a regenerative medicine side as well.

And we're working with the Buck Institute on trials and an investigational new drug around rapamycin, around stem cells, around dasinib quercetin. These are the senolytic medicines out there. And there's a lot of data coming in. It's the early days still, but this decade is gonna be magical. Yeah, how long before you think we reach

what you've talked about as achieving longevity, escape velocity, maybe like describe what that is. So today science is having breakthroughs that are extending your life every year. And on the average, for every year you're alive, science extends your life for about a quarter of a year. There is a point and Ray Kurzweil talks about it extensively and Ray wrote the preface of our book.

He's one of my mentors, one of the greatest thinkers on exponential technologies. He's my co-founder at Singularity University. And I asked him, when do you think we're gonna reach longevity escape velocity, which is the point that for every year you're alive, science is extending your life for greater than a year,

right, sort of a departure point. And his answer about when we'll get there, he said is about 12 years. That's his guess. Now, if someone else said it, I wouldn't give it that much credence, but if you Google Ray Kurzweil's accuracy on his predictions, it's like 86%.

I mean, the guy is extraordinary in his predictions of the future. And then I was in a conversation with George Church, who also write about extensively in the book. And I asked George, when do you think we're gonna, George is a professor of genomics at Harvard Medical School, same as David Sinclair, they're fantastic friends and collaborators.

And George said, within the next 15 years. Wow. And so I'm like, that's kind of insane, right? Right, so assuming, let's assume for a moment that that's correct. 15 years from now, give or take, we'll be able to, every year that you live, there will be an incremental-

Addition to your life's health span. Yeah, sufficient enough such that the perpetuation of life would seem to never cease. Yeah, it's like, you know, we have a 24,000 mile diameter or circumference of the planet. And if you're in a jet going at a thousand miles an hour westward, the sun never sets, right?

And that is if you go faster, the sun will rise. Stasis. And so it's somewhat similar in that regard. And it gets you thinking, which is, you know, to use a phrase from one of Ray's books, a fantastic voyage, it's living long enough to live forever. Now let's put aside the idea of living forever as a moment, but how long can we live? When I was in medical school years ago,

Rich, I remember watching a TV show on long lived sea life. And I didn't have much time for TV. I would basically just watch Star Trek whenever I could, which was my sort of vitamin dosage. And what I learned was that certain species of sea life, like the bowhead whale, large mammal, can live for 200 years. And Greenland sharks can live four or 500 years, sea turtles, similar multi-hundred year lifespan.

And so the question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? And I remember thinking, it's either going to be a hardware problem or a software problem. And we're going to have the tools to fix that. And I think we're on the precipice of that. And from a philosophical point of view, like that conjures up a conversation around the appropriateness of all of it, does it not? I mean, you're somebody who's always been very optimistic. You've written a couple books where you kind of canvas these emerging technologies and you characterize them in very favorable terms.

So you're not one to be prone to dystopian, scenarios, but I can't help but think like in the event that perhaps we could live to something like 200 years, like what would that mean? Like how does that impact our psychology as a species? How does it impact how we think about risk? How does that impact overpopulation on a planet of, you know,

decreasingly limited resources, et cetera. So how are you wrapping your head around all of that? I know you've got a whole thing. Let's open the store, I love it. So first of all, a study came out six months ago out of, done by Lund School of Business, Oxford and Harvard, that looked at the impact of extending the lifespan by just one year of every human on the planet. The economic impact

is $38 trillion, the global economy of being able to keep you and me in the game a year longer. to keep you and me in the game a year longer. So it's a massive positive impact to the global economy, earning potential, being productive. Now the question about overpopulation, and I write about that in the chapter on exponential tech and longevity, and a lot of people are concerned about overpopulation of planet Earth.

Then there's a lot of people are concerned about overpopulation of planet earth. Then there's a lot of people, including myself, Elon Musk, I had this conversation with him last April, that are concerned about massive underpopulation of planet earth. So I have a hard time seeing that. Well, let me give you the numbers. So 50 years ago, the average was 5.7 children per family globally.

Today that has dropped to 2.4 children per family globally. The replacement level is 2.1. The idea being when you raise the floor on economic wellbeing and you increase access to education, the number of kids goes down. Significantly. And so the US is below the replacement level. Most of Europe is below the replacement level.

Japan, China, below the replacement level. And the concern is that rather than going out with a bang, it's gonna be a whimper that we're gonna peak, and we will peak just like peak oil and peak natural gas and all those other scarcity mindset, we're gonna peak at nine, nine and a half billion people, and then a very rapid decline. And the numbers post COVID is that the reproduction rate

has dropped precipitously post COVID. So, you know, we talked about the great resignation and having difficulty finding people, which is true. You know, I'm involved in a dozen companies and hiring people is getting harder and harder. I'm gonna want to keep people in the game. And why do people stop working? Because they're in pain or they're tired.

They don't have the energy. And so, but if you can have the vitality, the aesthetics, the cognition, the mobility at a hundred years old that you can have the vitality, the aesthetics, the cognition, the mobility at a hundred years old that you had at 50 or 60, it's an amazing time to be alive. I can't help but think if you could live to 200, the possibility certainly exists

that you would have multiple partners across that period of time. Yeah, what's marriage look like? You would have multiple partners across that period of time. Yeah, what's marriage look like? You might have multiple families. Like I had a whole family with two kids with this person and now I'm gonna have two kids with the, you could do that three or four times over. And multiple careers, three or four times over.

The reality is that our existence, our societal structure, our laws are built around a very different age. We don't have a true democracy, but representative democracy because the communications didn't exist back hundreds of years ago to be able to count everybody's vote, but they do now. And the idea of social security was designed and developed

when the average lifespan was like 55. You would retire, go on social security, 18 months later, you were dead. And so all of this is changing. And for the financial advisors listening to us or the people who are dependent upon financial advisors, making sure you have enough money if you're gonna add 20 or 30 healthy years

is an important conversation to have and it's not being had sufficiently because I think this is the direction that we're heading. It's also interesting to think about how we calibrate risk also, because if you're faced with the prospect of living that long, how do you think about like, oh, am I gonna play football in high school?

Am I gonna go skydiving? Like, why would you incur any unnecessary risk that could threaten your ability to live for another century. There's a great science fiction story called the Puppet Masters. I think it's by Larry Niven or David Brin. And it's a society that has achieved longevity, escape velocity.

And they got to a point where they're so risk averse, they have no corners on their tables. They don't wanna like bump themselves. And I think- It's hard to anticipate what that psychological makeup would be because we have no experience with something like that. I think the single most important thing

around the psychological makeup of longevity is having purpose long enough, enough of having a bigger future for yourself than your past to keep you wanting to stay in the game, right? That keeps you excited for, you know, this is probably a great French term, you know, the Zvi Day, whatever,

that keeps you excited about, like for me, Rich, as you know, my early passions in life were all space, right? It was the Apollo program, was Star Trek, it was all of that stuff. And it's just now, and I worked for 20 plus years in the commercial space industry, it's just now through the work that mostly Elon's doing,

and to some degree, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and others that we're opening the space frontier. I wanna go and walk on the moon, start a city there. I wanna go and mine the asteroids. I want to see that future, but unless I'm able to tack on an extra 30 healthy years of my life, it's gonna be just out of reach. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it is worth mentioning, in talking about private spacecraft and everything that we're seeing going on right now, which is unbelievable, that it really all tracks back to your initial XPRIZE. Like everything that we're seeing in the private space with space exploration, I don't, would it have happened had you not created that initial XPRIZE?

I mean, maybe it would have, but it was really an inflection point for this whole thing. Thank you. It was like, you know, when I grew up, my parents were both in the medical field. My dad, both born in Island of Lesbos. My dad came over, became an OB-GYN. My mom should have been a doctor.

She managed the office for him. And it was always expected I'd become a doctor. That was it. It was like that old joke around the presence being inaugurated and his mom is there and the person goes, Mrs. So-and-so, aren't you so proud of your son who's become the president? She goes, yes, but you see that guy next to him?

That's his brother and he's a doctor, right? It was like that kind of a thing. And so space captured my heart and I wanted so desperately to become an astronaut. And so I went to medical school as, if I wasn't a fighter pilot, being a medical doctor was the next highest probability of getting an astronaut car.

And I got to meet lots of astronauts. I did research on them, befriended many of them, the Apollo astronauts, the shuttle astronauts. And what I learned really boggled my mind. First of all, my chances of becoming a NASA astronaut were like one in a thousand, right? I'm five, four and a half, I'll add the half there. And my chance of becoming a NASA astronaut,

I have a more of a chance becoming an NBA all-star than I do. It's like, it's crazy. Half the astronauts selected in the core have never flown. They're called penguins because they have wings and they don't fly. And then if you do get to fly on the average, at most it's two flights during your career.

And I'm like, that's just not my vision of going to space. I want to go like every weekend if I want to go. And so I made a wholesale shift to commercial space and really began focused on how do I open it up commercially? How do I build a business? An exothermic economic reaction. Started something called International Space University, started a company I'm very fond of called Zero-G. With Ray. Yeah, with Ray, Ray Cronise, myself and Bob and Byron Lichtenberg co-founded that, the three of us. And it took us 11 years to get approval

from the FAA to do that. But our highlight was flying Stephen Hawking into zero G the world's expert in gravity into weightlessness. It was amazing. I remember that. And then I was given a copy of the spirit of St. Louis Lindbergh's biography by a dear friend, Greg Marinac. And I'm reading this book and it chronicles

something called the Orteig prize. It was a $25,000 prize offered in 1919 for the first person to fly between New York and Paris. And it was considered craziness, the idea that you can fly that distance. And nine teams went after this $25,000 prize. Four of them died in making the attempt. And Lindbergh, who was the most unlikely guy to do it,

had been flying only for two years. No one would sell him an airplane or an engine because they were so scared that he would fail and give them a bad reputation. He makes the flight 33 and a half hours from Roosevelt Field to Le Bourget, becomes one of the most famous humans on the planet, aviation skyrockets.

And it was caused with that prize. And I was like, that's what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna create a prize. And so I announced the idea of a $10 million prize for the first team who could build a private spaceship, carry three adults up to a hundred kilometers, land and do it again within two weeks. And lo and behold, we had 26 teams from seven countries,

a guy named Bert Rutan, who had built the Voyager airplane that flew nonstop around the world, backed by Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, built Spaceship One and claimed the prize in 2004. I think the legacy of that was, one, we had to change all the regulations. And that was a big deal. The regulations for commercial,

private human space flight did not exist. And we worked, we said, listen, this prize is gonna be won in Russia or Argentina. And so we got the laws changed here. And then most other countries copied as they do. The FAA is usually the leader here. Was that part of why it took that many years or was it just the technological development? No, it was the technology.

It was also, it was the capital that was required. Aggregating the capital to build these ships was, because everybody said, listen, can anyone really pull it off? Why isn't NASA doing it? And aren't you gonna die trying? And so that just made it very risk averse for everybody. And as a result of that,

it took eight years for the prize to get one. Branson came in, bought the rights from Virgin to create Virgin Galactic. And then I've known Jeff Bezos since college. My first group ever was a college space organization. I was running the MIT chapter, he was running the Princeton chapter. Cause you had this double life

through college and med school. Yeah, I was- In the space world, starting all these organizations. And then going through medical school, trying to make my parents happy. I remember I met with Bezos in Seattle after like the year after he started Amazon. And I was like, so Jeff, what up with Amazon?

I thought you wanted to do space. And he goes, well, I'm gonna make my money in Amazon. Then I'll go spend it in space. Like a simple, you know, two-step plan. Right, that clarity all the way back then. Yeah, and then, and he and Elon, who I've known through since 2000, I was trying to get Elon to fund the Ansari X Prize

before I had the money. And then the Ansari family funded it. But this idea that you can inspire small teams to do crazy things is huge. And bringing this back to health and longevity, working with David Sinclair and George Church, we've designed and developed and initially funded by Sergey Young to give him credit. We've got an age reversal XPRIZE that we're very close to launching. And when Sergey first wanted to do a longevity prize,

I've been the biggest longevity fan and involved in this industry for a decade now. I was like, man, I just don't see how we're gonna make an XPRIZE out of it. And the more I started studying it and kudos to Sergey, I was like, oh, interesting. And it was, okay, we're not gonna do a longevity prize. We're gonna do an age reversal prize.

And it's, can we, and to win this prize, you need to demonstrateably through a number of very specific mechanisms, demonstrate the age reversal of three independent tissues or organ systems in the human by 20 years or more in a repeatable fashion. Yeah, it's a pretty high bar, especially when all of the, it seems like all of the science right now

is in mice and rats and the like. Yeah, it is, you know, that work is going from mice and rats into dogs. And, you know, when I asked David and George, again, my two sort of superstars, and in the book, Life Force, we have these heroes and David and George are definitive heroes in the book. Ask them, when do you think we're gonna be seeing

the gene therapies that were used to reverse the age in mice? The answer is we'll likely see it being tested in humans in five years time, which sounds insane. Is that due once again to kind of regulatory hurdles or more about the progress of the science itself? I think it's both. It's, you know, the FDA is a governor,

like limiting the speed by virtue of wanting to make sure it's done well and doing it safely. When I was in medical school and graduate school, I was in a lab, Richard Mulligan's lab at the Whitehead Institute at MIT and Harvard. And it was the earliest days of gene therapy and this incredibly brilliant man and vision of being able to use a virus,

in this case, an adeno-associated virus, that you've stripped out the virus's DNA and put in the DNA that you want, and using this virus to go and infect the specific cells in the human body and inject this piece of programming into it was a massively brilliant idea. And unfortunately, when it was first tested,

it killed the young patient. And it really set back the field like, you know, five to 10 years, I don't know the exact number. And then it was eventually successfully trialed in what's called bubble boys disease when you have no immune system. And it was successful. And now it's an extraordinary tool in the toolkit, but you don't want to make that mistake. You don't want to have something set back the field. So there's caution in doing it in mice and rats and Guinea pigs and dogs and primates

and then eventually humans. Well, there's certainly a qualitative difference between extending the life of cells, human cells, or decreasing the rate at which they decline. And it's another thing altogether to, quote unquote, reverse their aging. So how do you demarcate the difference between those two? So here's the question.

And it's one that when I first thought about it, and I'm not sure if I heard it posed or just my mind came up with it, which is when we're born, we have 3.2 billion letters from our mother and 3.2 from our father. And that same genome is there when we're 20, we have 3.2 billion letters from our mother and 3.2 from our father. And that same genome is there when we're 20 and 40 and 60 and 80 and 100.

And the question is, if it's the same genome and it is basically the same genome, why do you look different? What, why? And it turns out it's not your genome, it's your epigenome. Epi from the Greek word for above, it's the controls of which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off. So as you well know, every cell in our body

has the genes to become any other kind of cell in our body. And when we begin life, we are a pluripotent stem cell. Stemness means the ability to differentiate into bone, muscle, ligament, whatever it might be. But once it's differentiated, that cell is only expressing the proteins for a muscle cell or only expressing the proteins for a muscle cell or only expressing the proteins for a skin cell. The other proteins that are used in the eye

or the brain or the liver are wrapped up and tightly bound in this system called our histones that limit it from being expressed. And so it's why your cells don't all of a sudden start becoming other types of cells. You don't want, you know, sort of your muscle becoming skin cells. And that's your epigenome.

And what David Sinclair does a beautiful job in his book, Lifespan, which I commend to everybody, in discussing that our epigenome changes over time. And you can measure your epigenome looking at methylation patterns, the methyl groups of CH3 attached to different parts of your DNA that control whether it can be red or not red or whether it's wrapped in tightly or not.

And he then goes on and talk about what are a system called the sirtuin systems, right? There are seven sirtuin genes and seven sirtuin proteins that are controlling two different functions that are critical to your existence. One function that the sirtuins control is your epigenome. The sirtuins are controlling keeping your muscle cell a muscle cell,

keeping your skin cell a skin cell. The other thing that sirtuins are controlling is DNA repair. So just living life, being hit by cosmic rays, by chemicals in the environment, by secondhand smoke, whatever it might be, we're constantly being hit by these mutagens

that are causing double strand breaks and single strand breaks and other kinds of DNA damage. The number I just read the other day is a thousand to a million DNA hits per day per cell. I mean, it's insane. But luckily our cells have evolved these DNA repair mechanisms. And our sirtuins are overseeing that

and supporting a DNA repair. And as we get older, the DNA repair is getting more and more burdensome and it's distracting the sirtuins from their other function of epigenetic regulation. But it's even worse than that because the fuel that sirtuins are using is something called NAD, right?

And we can talk about NMN, which is a precursor. And as you age, your NAD levels in your cells plummet to under 50%, again, in our 40s, 50s, and 60s, because our body was never designed to live that long. There was no homostasis at that point. And so the way I visualize it in my mind is your genome is like the keys of a piano. Your epigenome is the piano player. And if you're playing the right keys at the right time, you're expressing yourself properly. Now imagine that the piano player at the same time they're playing the concerto need to go and repair this thing over here. And the amount of time they're

having to repair is they're being distracted over and over and more and more frequently. And then imagine that the food that they're being fed to energize them is getting less and less. They're becoming weaker and weaker and more and more distracted. And so your epigenome gets dysregulated and we then see skin changes, we see more cancer, we see a whole slew of different age-related situations.

Right, so the idea being that by ingesting this exogenous NAD precursor in the form of NMN, you're alleviating some of that burden and allowing a better regulation. Yeah, you're giving your sirtuins more energy to fight their good fight. Right, and what is the relationship between all of that and this conversation around declining telomere lengths

and how that impacts our aging? So I won't dive into areas that I'm not fully sure about, but I mean, telomeres are the end caps of our cells that get shorter and shorter as we age. So there's something called the Hayflick limit, which is your cells are able to replicate about 50 times. And then they do one of three things. After they've reached about 50 replications,

they should have the decency to die. Or if they don't, they could become cancer cells and the regulatory brakes are taken off and it can grow out of control. And the third thing that happens is they become senile cells, also called zombie cells. And they just sit there and they produce inflammatory factors. And I think the number is like 3% of our cells in our body are senile cells in our skin, in our liver, in our lungs and our kidneys. And so there's a whole new set of medications called senolytic medicines,

which are looking to identify and zap those senile cells, kill them. And the reason for that is if you're able to do that, it reduces inflammation in the body, which is one of the big cause of aging as well. Right, that's senescence. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's go back to the pluripotent cells, the stem cells. I think what you're doing with cellularity by capturing these cells in the form of the placenta is pretty interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating. So one of our partners in the book is Dr. Bob Hariri, who's my older brother from another mother. He's a pilot, he was a neuro trauma surgeon

and early in his career, when his wife was pregnant with his daughter, Alex, Bob found something curious that normally when I was in medical school and he was in medical school, you're taught that the placenta is sort of the support mechanism for the fetus. And when he looked at his wife's echoes, it was clear the placenta was huge

compared to the fetus and like why, it was a support mechanism that should be growing at the same time. Long story short, he was the first person who really recognized the placenta is the source of, I think of it as a 3D printer that manufactures the baby, generates all of the cells, all the stem cells. And when you have a baby, typically the labor and delivery will charge you to incinerate and get rid of the

placenta. And he said, instead of doing that, we should be collecting this incredible organ and collecting from it, stem cells, exosomes, natural killer cells, and T cells, each for a different reason. And he started doing this work as an entrepreneur, got bought by a company called Celgene, which is now part of Bristol-Miles Squibb. But Celgene was a $100 billion company. And Bob was running cellular medicine at Celgene. About four or five years ago,

I helped him spin what is now cellularity out of Celgene, take the or five years ago, I helped him spin what is now Cellularity out of Celgene, take the whole cellular medicine division out. And we started this and Bob's chairman CEO, and I'm very proud to be his vice chairman of the company. And what Cellularity does is a number of things. Number one, we're the largest bank of placentas on the planet. So when my wife and I had our two boys, we banked their placentas. There's a company called Life Bank USA, which is a division. Anybody listening who is pregnant or knows someone who's pregnant,

I think it's a moral imperative to save the placenta. It's an insurance policy on your children's future. Yeah, it's like, you know, that's the placental cells are the, like the original boot disc, the original software. And from that, you'll be able to have so many benefits of regrowing organs, or there's a whole series of cancer diseases where you're gonna want to have access to that original clean,

you know, zero day genome. So Bob realized this and what cellularity is doing is it's mining the placenta for products. So first thing is natural killer cells. And natural killer cells are the part of your innate immune system that can detect cancer and zap it, can detect cells infected by viruses and zap them. And it turns out that in a mother who's pregnant, who has cancer, the probability of a cancer metastasizing

to the child is like near zero. And it turns out that the natural killer cells from the placenta find any cancer cells and zap them. But when you're older as a human and you have immune exhaustion, which occurs, your immune system starts declining. You don't have the ability to detect the cancer.

So what we do is we use the natural killer cells from the placenta intravenously against a number of cancers. We're now going into glioblastoma, which is that terrible fatal brain disease. And I can't discuss the results yet, but we're super excited about this. So natural killer cells and T cells from the

placenta as a supercharged, very vital, youthful cancer mechanism. And then stem cells as the means to augment your stem cells. When you're born compared to age 80, your stem cell populations are down like a hundred fold or a thousand fold in different compartments. And your stem cells are the regenerative engine of the body. You can think of the body as a mansion with a army of workers that support everything being right. But as you age, the workers become senile, they die, and the mansion starts falling apart. Same thing for stem cells in your body.

So can you revitalize it? In fact, this book, Life Force began. Yeah, it's cause Tony had this stenosis issue. Yeah, he's chasing a 22 year old snowboarder and trying to keep up and he takes a bad fall. Body broke his neck, had actually basically done a really bad rotator cuff. And all of the surgeons were like, you need surgery, you need surgery, you need surgery.

And Tony is the guy that gets the fifth, sixth and 10th opinion. And he reached out to me one day and said, what do you think? And I said, you should talk to Bob Hariri about stem cells. And talking to Bob is like asking someone to give you advice on basketball.. And talking to Bob is like, you know, asking someone to give you advice on basketball and talking to LeBron James, you know, it's like, he's like the top of the game. And so Bob advises him where to go get stem cell treatments. And after three days, one shot in the shoulder and three days of IVs just for 30 minutes a day, his pain is gone. His pain in his back is gone. And a couple months later, his MRI is normal.

And he's like, this regenerative medicine stuff is amazing. And results will vary. And Tony is definitely a mind over matter kind of guy. So if it's gonna work for anybody, it'll work for him. And we began a journey. So I, as part of the XPRIZE, I run an adventure trip every year for our benefactors. And we were piggybacking at the Vatican and running a longevity adventure trip. And I invited Tony to come and he came on this trip. In fact, we opened the book with that story.

And he met all of these incredible physicians and researchers, you know, George Church was there, Martin Rothblatt, a multitude. And he goes all in, he studies. And so he said, this is my next book. He invited me to co-author it with him, which has been a joy. And that's how we got to where we are now.

And here we are, and you're doing podcasts. Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about some of the other interesting developments in this space. Where are we in terms of AI and machine learning and sensor tech and 3D printing? Like how is that going to, like at what point can we start to see that being introduced

into our kind of diagnostic regimen? So AI is here now. AI is out competing physicians almost everywhere in terms of diagnostics. So AI is diagnosing lung cancer, prostate cancer, Alzheimer's. You know, the idea that a human doctor, as good as we are at pattern recognition, can outdo an AI is getting less and less likely.

In fact, I think it's gonna become malpractice to diagnose somebody without AI in the loop very soon. Yeah, when the data sets, you know, as they get larger and larger and larger, the ability for an AI to detect something is gonna far exceed the human capacity. By a massive margin. And every hour of the day, there are probably dozens, if not hundreds of journal articles written. And an AI can consume all of them, but no physician

can keep up with the volume of accelerating, exponentially growing research. And so AI is here right now. There's another place it's being used. One of my companies, my venture fund, Bold's invested in is called Insilico Medicine. A brilliant Russian AI scientist, Alex Ziverankov, has built this out of Hong Kong. And it's using something called generative adversarial networks to design, which is a type of AI machine learning,

to design customized drugs for specific targets. But it's doing it like a hundredfold faster and a hundredfold lower cost. And the eventual, where this is eventually going to go in combining even quantum computing, because quantum chemistry, looking at predicting how molecules are interacting with each other is where I think quantum computing is going to have the biggest impact, is we're going to be able to simulate drugs for you, specifically for you,

for the surface antigens on your cells and create drugs N of one. And so there's just, you know, AI is, it's biotech, gene therapies, CRISPR, all of those areas and AI and then sensors. So today we talked, we opened with this conversation that I think we're going to move healthcare out of the house, out of the office, out of the hospital, into the home, right? And you're going to be, have injected sensors subdermally. You're going

to have sensors you've swallowed, sensors on your clothing, on your bed, on your hands, whatever it might be in your toilet that is measuring the parameters all the time. And passively uploading it to your AI that is constantly, you hop in your autonomous car and your AI says, listen, I'm not taking you to the office. Office can be gone, but I'm not taking you to where you're going. We're going to this center because I've detected small mRNAs in your bloodstream that indicates you've got an impending

cardiac event. You have this very optimistic perspective on AI. Your friend, Elon, doesn't necessarily share that optimism. I mean, it is, I find myself, when you were describing that, I find myself equal parts fascinated, but also terrified of some kind of, you know, weaponized dystopian version of artificial intelligence and how, you know, humanity isn't always so great about contemplating the unexpected downstream consequences of some of these technological advances.

Yes. That we're hell bent on. I mean, we're going to do it no matter what. Yeah, there's no on off switch. There's no volume switch. But we're not very good about taking a beat and saying, what are we really doing here? And how can we enact measures now in this premature phase

to prevent some of the predictable negative consequences. We're actually better than you might think. When I was in medical school, I remember recombinant DNA, the first restriction enzymes for being able to accurately cut DNA at different locations came in. And it was predicted to be this disastrous implications for terrorism and Hitler youth and clone babies. And it was just like, you know, front covers of magazines were predicting doom and gloom. And what happened was that the science community got together at a place called Asilomar,

north of here. And they had the Asilomar conferences and they created their self-regulatory structures to preventing these things from happening. And we haven't had any issues in 40 years. And the fact of the matter is, our brains are wired to give much more credence to negative news than positive news. Because as we were evolving on the savannas of Africa, you missed a piece of good news, like some food, too bad.

You missed a piece of bad news, like a rustle in the leaves is a lion and not the wind. You're dead. You're dead. Your genes are out of the gene pool. And so we have an ancient piece of our temporal lobe called the amygdala that scans everything we see and everything we hear for negative news. And you're glued to it. And so, you know, I call CNN, the crisis news network, or the constantly negative news network. I don't have a good, I don't have a good version for Fox, but we're bombarded by all this negative news,

but it hasn't actually, so another thing that we do is we see a potential piece of bad news out there and we project it all the way to here. And we're like, we're screwed. But what we forget is that we have increasing technologies that are giving us the resources to solve those problems. So the environmental disaster of the 1890s, do you know what it was? No. Massive environmental disaster.

Horseshit in the streets. Yes, horse shit. Yeah, exactly right. We were, people were moving out of the rural area into the downtown urban. They were bringing their emotive force, the horse with them and horse shit was piling up every place. And they redesigned the stoops to have little runways so that when it rained, the shit would flow downhill literally,

but it was causing disease and the predictions were disastrous. And what happened? The car came in and the car displaced the horses and got rid of that issue. But it created a bigger problem. Well, and we're gonna solve that bigger problem. And I truly believe we are, right?

We're on the verge of fusion. If you've been tracking what's going on, it's pretty extraordinary. We're seeing this year, we're gonna create more photovoltaic electric capacity in the United States than any other form of over half of the US electric, new electricity production is gonna be photovoltaic.

And we're seeing amazing progress on batteries. And I just had an incredible conversation with a team out of Google on zero point energy, but I won't go there, it's another conversation. Well, there was that news item the other day. I didn't read past the headlines, but that nuclear fission machine that creates infinite energy.

What is that about? So I think it's really the fusion work that's going on right now. So there's about, I would have never thunk this, but there's like a dozen VC backed fusion companies. And this is harnessing the power of the sun, which creates no radioactive waste, but is able to provide a massive abundance of energy.

And so the prediction, and I talk about this in my books, that we're heading towards a squanderable abundance of energy. And so the prediction, and I talk about this in my books, that we're heading towards a squanderable abundance of energy, right? And interestingly enough, we're moving very rapidly in solar and solar and wind, incredible progress. The poorest countries in the world are the sunniest countries in the world. They may become net energy exporters, and then we may see fusion coming in and displacing all of that. So not, I'm not sure how we got onto this conversation, but. Well, the idea of being optimistic about the future, I was sort of challenging you with a, you know, a dystopian

counterpoint, but I think, yeah, it's, it's this Steven Pinker idea of, you know, life is actually a lot better than you think. And we have this tendency to look in the past and think that it was a lot rosier. We romanticize the past and it was short and brutish and you died at 40 from TB. Honestly, the poorest people amongst us today are living better than the Kings and Queens did. It just, we compare ourselves against our neighbors

and we compare ourselves against people we don't even know. And we forget, you know, it's like, we don't look at how far we've come. We look at sort of this potential perfection. But it's amazing what we have access to. Well, certainly to, you know, ponder the viability of, you know, printing organs or just the rudimentary implications of VR headsets on medical students who could, you know, printing organs or just the rudimentary implications of VR headsets on medical students

who could, you know, put themselves in the position of performing cutting edge surgeries, you know, that they wouldn't be able to bear witness to. Like all of the learning tools that are now available, certainly in the sensory tech that would allow us to have interventions at a very early phase. Like these are all fantastic things. But then I read like this idea

about bringing the woolly mammoth back to help. I love it. I love it. And I'm like, all right, well, this is, you know, right out of the script of any, you know, bad sci-fi movie idea of, you know, humans gone wrong. Or is it? So, you know, we have caused huge extinction events of our own. And,

you know, is it bad to bring back an extinct species? Not all, you know, we can stop short of the T-Rexes and the Velociraptors, but the woolly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger, the dodo, whatever it is. Interestingly enough, the, Interestingly enough, I'm an investor and an advisor to Colossal, the company, full disclosure, that's doing that. Ben Lamb's a brilliant CEO. It's backed by George Church. It's been one of his pet projects.

And also bringing back extinct plants that are important for our environment. So I think the tech isn't bad. It's the use of the tech that can go wrong. And so do we have the wisdom to be able to do that? Yeah, it's a broader conversation around the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Yes.

And I think historically humanity has told us that we're pretty good at knowledge and maybe not so good at wisdom all the time. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, I had an interesting thought recently I'll share with you. If you asked, what is the definition of wisdom? I think I would pause it and tell me what you think

that wisdom is having enough experience, having seen things enough to be able to see unintended consequences and to make a decision based upon better judgment. Would you, is that fair? Yeah, I think that's fair. So if that's true, I think one of the biggest opportunities

for increasing wisdom is gonna be be AI simulations. Because you can imagine building out AI systems that can try millions or billions of variants of a situation because simulations are getting so much better. We can talk about living in a simulation if you want, but the idea that an AI can give us a view towards unintended consequences that we might not be able to fathom in our own minds. What's your take on AI reaching its own escape velocity and becoming self-aware and self-improving? You're extending beyond the controllable black box.

Yeah, so I think I don't have any question that it will happen. Our brains are neural nets, right? Our brains, and we are understanding more and more and more and we're building chipsets that look and feel like the neural nets of a brain. And we're seeing all the progress. This last five years has been this massive increase in AI. And that's a result of more brain. And we're seeing all the progress. This last five years has been this massive

increase in AI. And that's a result of more computation and more data. And we've got companies like OpenAI that's produced GPT-3 and now GPT-4 and DeepMind, which is part of Alphabet. And they're moving at a prodigious rate. Ray Kurzweil's prediction, to go back to his predictions, are that we'll see human-level AI by 2029, and he's still sticking with it. And that means the next year it'll be superhuman. So the question is, what do you do at that point? And one of the ideas that I'm enamored with

and Elon is funding is we're gonna merge humanity with it. And this is the whole realm of brain computer interface that we're gonna, you know, our brains have a hundred billion neurons, a hundred trillion synaptic connections that are shape everything you hear. And, but our brains are limited in their capacity. You can't grow the brain any bigger,

otherwise you can get through the birth canal. And in fact, what our brain ended up doing to increase the neocortex, the upper layers, it started creating these folds that you see to increase the surface area. So when we use our phones and we wanna do a complicated image analysis or voice analysis,

that computation doesn't happen on the phone. The phone gathers the data from the camera, the speakers and so forth, and it sends the data to the edge of the cloud on a 4G or 5G network. And the processing gets done there and then the answer comes back to your phone. So what does that look like?

For a human brain, imagine if you could think, like ask the question, what's the GDP of Ghana, right? And have the data from that question transmitted to the cloud and Google by thinking and get the answer back. to the cloud and Google by thinking and get the answer back. So that technology is, we're there. It's the next few years.

You know, there's Neuralink, which is Elon's company. I'm an advisor in a company called Paradromics and an investor and advisor in another company called Open Water. All of these are brain computer interface companies. And Ray's prediction again, because there are a few things that he's put out there is that by the early to mid 2030s, we're gonna have high bandwidth brain computer interface. Again, can't slow it down.

Right. What do you do with it? And where's the, you know, the wisdom based star chamber for all of this? Yeah. Like that's my concern. I get it, I understand. It is, I mean, it's fascinating to think about. It's certainly maturing to the point of becoming

a conceptual reality. And it makes you wonder whether or not humanity exists like on this, this, you know, evolutionary path to give birth to this greater life form. I fundamentally believe that. In the sort of chrysalis of caterpillar to butterfly. Yeah, I think about-

How does, what does that mean for humanity? Right, and where does humanity's hubris sit in all of this in thinking that this is beneficial at best and at worst innocuous? Do you want to go there? My last chapter of my last book was on that topic. I know. And again, ever the optimist. Yeah. So I think that this notion of brain computer interface is going to be the transition point for our metamorphosis, our transformation. If you look back at the history of life on this planet,

you know, our planet was formed four and a half billion years ago, about half a billion years after that, the earliest life forms on this planet came into existence are called prokaryotic cells. They were very simple bags of cytoplasm with free floating DNA in them. About a half a billion to a billion years after that,

give or take, those single cell prokaryotic life forms evolved into eukaryotic life forms. And what- All seeded, of course, by aliens. No, I'm not gonna go there. No, I know. But these eukaryotic life forms effectively were these early life forms with incorporated technology into them. So the eukaryotic life forms had ingested

what we call now mitochondria, which were energy plants. They were other bacteria that had been able to, which were energy plants. They were other bacteria that had been able to do oxidative energy production. And so they ingested that as a power plant inside of the cell. Then endoplasmic reticulum for creating proteins and Golgi apparatus, and more importantly,

a nuclear membrane and chromosomal structures. And so we went from a simple life form to a more complicated single cell life form with technology as part of it. The next phase, a billion years later, was to go from single cell to multicellular life forms where these cells would come together collaboratively and work together, eventually forming you and me. We have 40 trillion cells in our body, give or take.

We're not a single life form. We're a collaboration of 40 trillion cells. And so when I think about that, I think about the analogies today that we as humans are the prokaryotic life, the very simple individual. And we're in the midst of incorporating technology into ourselves, right?

Like going from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life where these mobile phones are part of us. It's my memory bank is here and such. And as we start to connect, and if Rich, I have a BCI connection and you do as well, and I can share thoughts with you, right? It's a level of connection and intimacy, like watching, I can watch the sun rising in Tokyo through the eyes of somebody. There's a level of connectedness that I think is extraordinary. And just like you wouldn't take a knife and stab your arm because it's you.

Imagine a world in which we're so connected that I want you to succeed as much as you possibly can because your success is my success, right? That level of a transformation. So I call that a meta intelligence level. Again, this is best done with a glass of wine or a scotch. But I mean, there's some interesting directions ahead. Yeah, I mean, I hope it would move in that direction.

I mean, my sense is that the early days of the internet, there was a similar conversation around how connectivity would breed empathy and bring us closer together. But I don't have to tell you, all you gotta do is scroll on Twitter and realize that sort of semi-utopian notion has not really been delivered upon. But it has delivered on a multitude of other benefits,

right, of education. Of course, I would concede that, yeah. And I wanna talk, so let's talk about education because I think you have some really interesting thoughts around that. And that's an area where, you know, I think most people agree we're in dire need of a re-imagination.

And we now have at our behest, these incredibly powerful technological tools that I think really have so many beneficial applications. There are two industries I want to help topple, healthcare and education. Both of them are just in extremis. Both of them are doing us a disservice and both can be reinvented. AI is gonna be at the core of both.

When you think about that Google for the wealthiest child on the planet and the poorest child on the core of both. When you think about that Google for the wealthiest child on the planet and the poorest child on the planet is identical, right? Larry Page's son has access to the same Google that my son has. If everybody has a tablet, then they can tap into what's available.

Yes, and the cost of tablets have dropped below 40 bucks using Android devices and such. So it is, and there'll be a point at which, I can imagine Amazon or Facebook giving every kid a tablet to have access to eventual buying power from that child. So we're getting to global bandwidth connectivity and devices are eventually demonetizing to zero. The overall structure of education

being what it is right now, which is really a legacy of the outset of the industrial revolution. And we really have not iterated upon that in any meaningful way since. Agreed, agreed. What I was saying was Google is the same, it's complete democratization and demonetization.

And I think we're gonna reach a point, I'm sure we'd reach a point where the best healthcare is gonna be AI enabled, which will be accessible to the poorest and the wealthiest. And it will be the same education will be AI enabled where an AI knows your child's favorite sports star, movie star, are they an auditory learner or a visual learner? And be able to create a personalized level of education for that

individual. Now, we're going to need to differentiate between cognitive learning and social learning, right? But where we're going with Web3 and the ability for AI to deliver. I mean, I have two 10 and a half year old boys and they love Roblox. It's like their religion and they would play Roblox almost all the time if given permission. And it's sad that education isn't like that.

Why don't we have educational games, right? And when you're in school, you start with a score of 100% and every time you get something wrong, your score goes down. In the gaming world, you start with zero and every time you get something right, your score goes up. Why doesn't that exist?

Why can't we connect to the game mechanics of the human brain to do that? And I think we can. Well, it's also architectured around rote memorization of facts and testing, which is ludicrous. Yes, I mean, as you said, it's all supporting the creation of workers from the industrial revolution.

And that's what we needed. We needed people who followed instructions. The bell would ring in the classroom. You're on your production line. You go to the next place to stuff your brain with something. And I think we need to reinvent. For me, it's reinventing education around passion-driven. It's like, what is your passion and your purpose?

I love the Mark Twain quote, "'There are two important days in your life, "'the day that you're born "'and the day that you find out why.'" Right, so helping kids first find out why, and then how to structure an argument, how to provide a compelling point of view and how to lead, how to have grit, right?

I mean- Perseverance, grit, curiosity. Curiosity, fundamental, asking great questions. All of these things, I think, like, you know, you look at a young person and when they're self-directed, enthusiastic, curious, and already have a sense of, you know, what lights them up, like that kid's gonna be fine. Yes, exactly.

But not all kids are wired that way or are not in environments or circumstances you know, what lights them up, like that kid's gonna be fine. Yes, exactly. But not all kids are wired that way or are not in environments or circumstances that lend themselves towards the development of those soft skills, right? I mean, you're somebody who at a very early age, you have this complete obsession with space. I was lucky Apollo.

That is on some level that is luck, right? It is luck. Not everybody gets struck with something that they can carry through their entire life. Yes, yeah, no, I agree with you. It was luck. It was Apollo showed me what was possible. And then as I like to say that scientific documentary,

Star Trek showed me where things were going. You and me both, I love that. Yeah, and it lit me up. I went to Star Trek conventions when I was. I love it. And yeah, so how do you help kids experience enough to find their true passion that becomes a purpose? And then they learn to fulfill those desires. So in the case of your own kids and being a dad, a parent,

I mean, are your kids in traditional school? Are they homeschooled? Like, how are you injecting, you know, their lives with all of these ideas that you're passionate about? Yeah, so they're in a traditional private school. And it was interesting. We only found one school that we liked and I was like,

okay, if they don't get in because it's twin white Caucasian boys. And the probability of getting in was relatively low. It was like, I'm gonna start a school if I can't get them in. And they did get in. And I still am thinking about starting a school. Doesn't Elon have, does he still have that Ad Astra school?

So I went to go and visit his school and it was a sort of like a third through eighth grade. And then when his kids ended up graduating, he stopped it. It was on the campus of SpaceX. And it was fantastic. And I love what they were doing. So for example, one of the things that the head of the school, who was a brilliant guy, did is he created these interesting experiments. He said, okay, here's a town and it's on the edge of a lake and the town has a factory and all of the employees are either employed by the factory

or they're fishermen in the lake and the fish feed the town. And we're gonna create representation in our school of the factory, the government and the public. And all of a sudden one day it's found out that the factory is polluting and killing the fish in the lake. Play different roles and play it out, right? So it's that kind of thinking,

that kind of debate and discussion, critical thinking that I think is so important. Yeah, my sense is, and this is just my own and of one experience is that at least in Los Angeles, there's plenty of kind of interesting experiments in education for kids at the earlier stages, like in the younger grades. But at some point, these things all kind of fall apart

once the kids are 12, 14, 15 year old. And there aren't any schools that carry it through the conclusion of high school. And maybe that's because parents get scared or they wanna make sure, well, everyone else is doing it this way. Like this is too radical and they freak out. While at the same time,

we are seeing an explosion in homeschooling. Yep, I agreed. And COVID definitely was an interesting situation. Well, I mean, everybody on Zoom is a disaster. Yeah, total disaster, right? You know, one of the big questions then is college gonna be a thing in a decade? A disaster. Yeah, total disaster, right? You know, one of the big questions then is, is college gonna be a thing in a decade?

You know, I think I grew up a lot in college socially, right, you know, had my sufficient amount of being picked on and such, and I learned how to defend myself mentally and got onto my own when you're outside. So that's really important that those years of 18 to 24 thereabouts. But I think beyond that,

the freedom to go and learn, but I don't use anything I learned in college. Do you? No. Yeah, I mean, everything- We grew up in a time where if you wanted to be successful in the world, you had to go to college and possibly grad school.

I don't think that that is the case today. Certainly for the reasons you stated, I think it's a wonderful experience to have, but it's not necessarily for everybody now and nor should it be. I think ultimately college is a shorthand, oh, that person went to Princeton or that person went to Stanford.

Oh, they're smart because of that. It's a social validation stamp. But there are other ways. I mean, some of the stuff that Peter Thiel was doing, like I'll pay you to drop out of college. I remember Elon having a hackathon and tweeting out that I don't care if you graduated high school or not, if you're a great programmer, I'll hire you.

And I think that's gonna be an interesting direction of can you find your passion and then can you partner with the technology that helps you develop your passion, right? And then do what you love to do. Because a lot of people get a job not because it's their passion, it's because that's how they get food on the table

or get their clothing for their family. Yeah, I mean, passion is an indulgence for most people. But with respect to your own kids, like how are you outside of the formal schooling construct, trying to help them discover their passion, cultivate curiosity, develop grit and perseverance and all of these qualities. I mean, I say publicly, and I've written, you know, a few blogs on the subject that there are three things

I want for them that are, it's not about AI robotics or any of those things. It's I want them to find their passion. I want them to learn to ask great questions. And I want them to develop grit, perseverance. I think those are the three most, and then to be great friends since they're fraternal twins. And passion is a matter of just exposing them

to as much stuff as possible. And I had kids when I was 50. And so I'm lucky in that I can like, nope, not going there to work today, I'm gonna go and do this. It's not possible for everybody, but I have an unlimited budget for books for the kids. It's like whatever book you wanna buy,

100% just ask me, Amazon will deliver it tomorrow. Asking great questions has become sort of a joke cause every day I would drop them off at school. I would say, ask great questions today. What questions did you ask today? And it became sort of an annoyance. And then perseverance and grit, we've sort of created a family motto

that the kids have developed that we don't give up. Right. And with the advent of AI and machine learning and all of that, obviously we're ushering in this era of automation where so many jobs are gonna become obsolete. Like how do you think about their future and where you would direct your kids to not be a victim

of this new world order that is soon to be? It's a fascinating question. So one realization is technology is constantly changing, but a lot of the problems are not. And so can you become an expert in a problem and really understand it and then be in a position to apply whatever the technology du jour is to that problem? I think there's some real truth in that element.

Folks who have kids in high school today or college, biotech and AI are the two fields that for the time being are gonna be employing people and it's like, get that degree and you've got a job instantly. And then ultimately we are demonetizing living. And the question is, are we going to separate working for income and working for fun, right?

So there's in the Web3 world, there's a platform called Axie Infinity. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. So it's a game that's called a play to earn. So people who play the game are making money. And in parts of Asia and Vietnam, Thailand, and so forth, people are earning their living playing this game Axie Infinity.

And I'm not gonna say I understand it or I fully believe it. You have to buy into it. And then as you're playing the game, you're developing your characters and you're selling them to other people who are wanna enter the game and so forth. So there's, whether it's a Ponzi scheme or not,

but there is the tokenization of our world is going to change how and where we earn our living. It's so strange. I mean, that's a larger conversation about the hearkening of the metaverse. And when I look at what's happening with the tokenization and the NFT world, like this is just an initial baby step into us,

this economy that will exist in the virtual space and our relationship between our real lives and the lives that will transpire there. And like, maybe I'm just too old, but like you're again, the optimist here. And I've tried so hard to learn about, you know, aspects of that. And I really struggle.

Yeah. And I think it's the only way to learn is by doing and playing and experiencing. And so I'm trying to do that as much as I can. And it is fascinating. I can see enough promise over the horizon. I'm in Bitcoin and Ethereum. I've not bought a single NFT.

I'm still not a believer, even though my friends have made millions of dollars in the world. It's like, nah, just not there. I believe NFTs are gonna be important for a number of business reasons, just not there on the board apes yet. But the web three, where web two was a web

of information exchange and web three is gonna be a value exchange where I can be transmitting money to you or transmitting ownership of things to you instantly is massive. You know, we, it's a hundred times, maybe a thousand fold more massive than the current web is today.

Well, the idea of smart contracts and just the ease with which, you know, we're gonna be able to kind of conduct business and create incentives, et cetera, all the way down the line with that, I think is really interesting. It's an amazing time. And then you start to realize the kinds of things you can monetize.

So a few companies I know about, if you sequence your genome and if you give them access to your genome to be used in different product developments and so forth, you can earn money from it and such if that company, if your genome is used for creating a discovery and so forth. My head's going to explode. Yeah. I mean, honestly, the only constant is change and the speed of change is increasing. It's the only constant is change and the speed of change is increasing.

Now I am the optimist and I feel like optimism is warranted over and over and over again over the last 50 years. Yeah. And our tools, you know, I define an entrepreneur as someone who finds a juicy problem and fixes it, right? That's what, you know what real entrepreneurs are doing well.

And I also believe that the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities, right? And what I teach at Singularity University and Abundance 360 is, when I become a billionaire, help a billion people, right? It's those kinds of mantras and mindsets that are like, where can I go solve this problem? What problem can I go solve there?

Yeah, on the mindset piece, I think that's really important. And maybe this is the last thing that we can cover here. You know, when I look at the breadth of your work, you're somebody who has never been afraid to tackle big problems and really set, you know, what most would assume to be just, you know, outlandish, audacious goals. So it's that relationship.

There's a certain kind of like relationship to reality that you have and possibility. Like why advocate for incremental change when you can say we're gonna do X, Y, or Z that nobody had ever thought of. So talk to me a little bit about your thinking around that. So I think mindset is the single most important thing

that anyone can take out of this conversation today in addition to health. I got religion on mindset over the course of the last decade and I've made it the focus. So I mentor thousands of entrepreneurs through an abundance digital and I run a CEO executive program year round called Abundance 360, which is part of Singularity University. And I've focused the entire program around mindset.

And there are four mindsets that I focus on. An abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, and a longevity mindset. There's gratitude mindsets and curiosity mindsets that I focus on. An abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, and a longevity mindset. There's gratitude mindsets and curiosity mindsets. We'll come back to the primaries. If I were to ask you what made Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mahatma Gandhi, whoever it might be successful, was it the money they had? Was it the relationships they had? Was it the tech they had? Or was it their mindset? I would posit that mindset is the most important

out of those things. If you took away everything from them, but they maintained their mindset, they would regain some portion of it. And so if that's true, if mindset is that important, then where are we proactively developing and honing our mindsets? Because most of us, including me until this last decade

have been getting our mindsets from our parents or schools, God forbid the stuff we watch on TV. And instead of like proactively honing it. And if you don't mind, let me hit on those four mindsets. Absolutely. So abundance mindset is something I got that out of Singularity University and it got me to write my first book,

Abundance, The Future Is Better Than You Think. And it was the realization that, oh my God, we are moving from scarcity, which is we're genetically dialed into scarcity. We are, we have in our brains, in our genome, we have a scarcity mindset because it was where we evolved. But technology is a force that turns whatever used to be scarce into abundance

over and over and over again. Case in point, we used to go and kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights, right? Then we ravaged mountainsides for coal. Then we drilled kilometers in the ocean floor. And now photovoltaics, we talked about fusion. There's a squanderable abundance of energy coming. So tech moved it from scarcity to abundance.

We have more capital year on year on year than any time ever. So we're gonna hit $100 trillion in our global economy this year. We've hit the most number of unicorns ever. The amount of venture capital invested in 2017 beat 2016, in 2018 beat 2017, even in on and on and on,

even through the pandemic. This 2021, we doubled the amount of venture capital done in 2020, which doubled 2019 amount of venture capital than in 2020, which doubled 2019. Okay, let's go on. This past year, what would you think of as more scarce than a perfect diamond, a four carat, five carat, 10 carat diamond, right?

Pandora, the largest jeweler on the planet, this past year said, we're gonna stop selling conflict diamonds or mine diamonds that have social issues. And we're only gonna produce manufactured diamonds. And so all of a sudden diamonds went from being scarce to perfect diamonds, eight, 10, 20 carat diamonds becoming abundant.

It's the cost of electricity, methane and water. And a friend of mine at the company called the Diamond Foundry manufactures whatever gem you want. Do you want flaws, imperfections? You can do that. And so this is an abundance mindset, which I'll cap that one off in the following way. If you got a pie

and all of a sudden, twice as many people show up for dinner, in a scarcity mindset, you're like, ah, damn, I got to slice the slices thinner and thinner and thinner. And an abundance mindset, so it's bullshit. We're going to bake more pies, right? That's an abundance mindset.

Every year is giving us more and more opportunities, which has been fundamentally the case. Your competition, forget about them. There's more opportunities. Let's go and go in that direction. An exponential mindset is just the notion that we're linear thinkers, take 30 linear steps, you're 30 meters away,

but our tech world is growing exponentially, 30 doublings, one, two, four, eight, 16, 32, and 30 doublings, you're a billion meters away. You've gone around the planet 26 times. And so in an exponential mindset, it's important to be able to see where the technologies are going and how they're converging.

And so at A360, that I work people through the abundance mindset, give the examples of increasing abundance across almost every single area, exponential mindsets and what the implications are. A moonshot mindset is the notion that most of the world would love a 10%, would really love a 10% improvement in revenues,

10% more customers. And that's a great stretch goal. In a moonshot mindset, you're saying, no, no, no, I don't want 10%, I wanna go 10 times bigger, a thousand percent bigger. And when you do that, you've gotta let go of all your preconceived notions. The Astro Teller, who's the captain of moonshot set,

Alphabet, a brilliant guy, a friend who I care about greatly gives an example that says, if you're a car company and your car is doing 50 miles per gallon and you wanna get to 55, you can do that. You can lightweight the car, get better aerodynamics. But if you wanna go from 50 to 500,

you've gotta start with a clean sheet of paper and reinvent the car. And so the ability to take these moonshots are here because of these exponential technologies. And when I'm teaching the CEOs that I coach, it's like, you wanna keep 95% of your company doing 10%. They're generating the engine, right? That keeps you alive.

And you don't want them taking moonshots, but you want to find those, that small team, that moonshot team and take them away from the main company. And you want to say to them, listen, I don't want you taking 10%. If I see you doing 10% activities, you're fired. I want you trying crazy ideas that have the potential to reinvent our business, right?

The day before something is really a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. And most companies aren't trying crazy ideas and then they're stuck in incrementalism. Yeah, the idea of creating a skunk works. Yes, it's a skunk works. Because every company, when it reaches a certain scale, falls prey to its own bureaucracy

and soon becomes a dinosaur short of having that level of innovation within. Absolutely, very few hundred year old companies. Yeah. The final mindset that I'm enamored with and it's what gave birth to this book, Life Force, to bring it back is the longevity mindset. And if you can will yourself to death

and you can will yourself to live longer, if you have something to live for, and if you believe you have the ability to live out of pain and have the cognition, the aesthetics, the mobility. And so a longevity mindset for me is helping people see where this field is going.

One of the things I did, Rich, was I built over the last year an AI engine that searches the global news, journals, tweets, magazines, newspapers, and it finds longevity and health tech breakthroughs, and it scans it for any dystopian and it rates it on a quality article. And I get a digest every day.

It uses GPT-3, uses the OpenAI's AI engine to give me a summary paragraph about 15 different breakthroughs per day. And so it's my longevity mindset. I'm seeing what's going on in all of these different fields. And I have zero question about reaching longevity escape velocity. And you can try it as can everyone else, it's free.

It's longevityinsider.org. And at the end of the day, I get this news that gives me tremendous hope. And because of that, I'm willing to change my diet, sleep longer, do intermittent fasting. Right, it's almost, we're the last generation, right? Who are like butting right up against the edge of whether we're gonna make it across the transom or not.

Yeah. Right. Which is interesting. Well, it was a pleasure talking to you. A lot of fun conversations. Thank you, Rich. I really appreciate it. I hope that the utopian version

of all the things that you are speaking about comes to fruition. And if Skynet should befall us, I'm gonna call you up. All right. I'll be watching for it. And I'd love to have you back whenever you want to talk about space and all these other things that you're into, because it's super fascinating.

But I appreciate you coming here today. The book is Life Force, available wherever you buy books. A great primer to read in conjunction with David Sinclair's fantastic book, Lifespan. And there's a lot of stuff in there that'll blow your mind. So thank you. Thank you, Rich.

Appreciate you. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today,

visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show

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which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis

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