When do you think we might reach longevity escape velocity?
You know, it's a tough question.
You're currently focused on rejuvenating heart, liver, lung, kidney, you know, fundamental organs that we need. But when you said the thymus, celebration went off.
The thymus is highly correlated with every key marker of aging.
When do you imagine this will be something that you and I can receive?
Long before everybody was talking about this, you were out there writing about digital consciousness. Are we there yet for AI?
I believe we're there now. And I believe the current models will take us there. The future is just so amazing that we are lucky enough to be born at this moment of time, right? When everything is like bursting into a big bang of consciousness.
These are all epic journeys. They're all impossible till you make them possible. How do you decide you're going to dive into one of these areas? So, is that a technology that can be scaled to billions of people? And if it can, then you're going to change the world.
Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
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Martine, we've known each other now, I think, 45 years.
Which is pretty from the early 80s. The early 80s we were together at Jerry O'Neal Space Studies Institute way before anybody was talking about mining the moon or mass drivers. Jerry was and we were there.
Now it's happening real time. When Ray first reconnected us because we were out of touch for a while. I remember you asked me one question at the very beginning. I don't know if you remember what it was. You said, 'Peter, who is the greatest entrepreneur alive today?'
And you probably said, 'Elon Musk.'
I did. And you said, 'Yes, that's the right answer.'
Yes, that is the right answer.
And it's still the right answer all these years later.
It is. What he's done is extraordinary. And I honestly, for our viewers to understand, I don't know anybody else who comes close to rivaling the number of moonshots Elon's done other than yourself.
Well, I'm a distant second, but it's an honor for you to say that, Martine. I really appreciate that with everybody, you know. Yeah.
So, it's an honor to be a distant second.
Yeah. Well, that's a distant second to like godness. So, you know, how can you complain about that?
You know, we talk a lot about moonshots on this podcast. And I want to take a second. I've counted at least 12 that you've been on. There's probably more secretly that I don't know about, but let me take a second and just cover a couple of them and then we're going to dive into them because I think it's important for folks know the scope of not only your ambitions but your accomplishments. So early on, helping build or found a number of successful satellite companies, Panamsat, Geostar, World Space, Sirius satellite radio, now Sirius XM. On their own that would be an extraordinary accomplishment. Going from there to turning pulmonary arterial hypertension, PH, from a death sentence to a manageable disease.
And saving your daughter's life in the process.
And building now a 28 billion, you know, biotech company in the process. Extraordinary. And congrats on how United Therapeutics has done. It's been an epic journey.
Basically eliminating the shortage of transplantable organs. And not only just building human organs but building them taking multiple different strategies to creating an abundant supply of organs. And we'll dive into that. Heart, liver, lung, kidneys, thymus. Super excited about the thymus. We'll talk about that too.
Building electric helicopters and eVTOLs with Beta.
You know, just carbon-free, energy-efficient transport for the world. You've worked on defining and supporting digital personhood and AI rights, which is an amazing statement on its own. We'll get into that. And then working on championing radical life extension, again, something that we both are passionate and share about. So, a few questions on those moonshots. How do you decide what to spend your time on? I mean, these are all epic journeys. They're all impossible till you make them possible. How do you decide you're going to dive into one of these areas?
I have to feel that I'm able to successfully achieve it. And if I can successfully achieve it and be the best at it and it be something that's going to have a positive impact, a big positive impact on the world, then I go for it.
Yeah. And so it's like three checks. You know, I could do it. I can be the best at it. Big positive impact on the world. Importantly for those entrepreneurs listening, you don't feel you need to be an expert in the area.
But then how do you dive into an area that you know, I don't say you know nothing about. You know there's a problem there. But how do you, what's your first, second, and third step in entering an area like that for those who want to like emulate what you're doing?
Sure. Well, there's no real substitute for talking to people and I find experts in the area and I start talking with them. For example, I'm good friends with George Church. He's a brilliant freethinker at Harvard Medical School and I went and talked to him several years ago about things such as our manufacturing of lungs. And you know, there's this saying from Arthur C. Clarke that if a wise and old expert says something cannot be done, they're almost certainly wrong. But George Church would be anybody's definition of a wise and old expert. And he said, 'Martine, you could do it.' And I've done it.
Yeah. I love George. He is one of the most successful biotech, you know, synthetic biology entrepreneurs out there for sure.
One of his companies he recently started, actually Thymune, a company we just bought. He was the first shareholder in Thymune. So again, George was ahead of the curve there. He has another company just started, GC Technologies, that's able to reduce the time it takes to reprogram a cell back into an iPSC or a pluripotent stem cell from 3 months down to two weeks, you know, which would be radically disruptive in the stem cell biotechnology area.
Along the way to building a company, you probably get no a lot.
How do you deal with that?
I look at each no as a way to make me smarter. So, I'm a person that's very open to criticism. I feel like people who critique me are my best friends. They're telling me how to be a better person, a smarter person, more successful person. So, when somebody says no, I listen carefully to their no. I evaluate whether it has merit or not. I definitely don't take it personally. And if it has no merit, I just register it away in the brain as situational awareness. Like if you see something when you're, I know both of us are pilots, and if you see traffic that's no factor, okay, you remember the traffic's there, but you don't worry about it. But if there's traffic in front of you, you're going to turn right, okay? You're going to deviate from that traffic. And so if somebody says to me no because you don't have this or that enabling technology, I will go and look into those enabling technologies.
Yeah. I remember I was interviewing Elon and he said something I've never forgotten. He said your friends tell you what's great, your best friends tell you what sucks.
Yeah. As usual.
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When faced with multiple options, if I could, your advice to an entrepreneur on what to focus on, what to dive into, you know, is it I'm going for something that has the greatest revenue potential, the greatest personal impact? I mean, what's the metrics by which you're making that decision?
First of all, make sure that you're focusing on something that you have the competency to succeed at. So if you feel that your only competency is in a particular area of engineering, that's where you should focus on because you will need all of that competency to create something brand new.
Secondly, focus on something that you will have the best product. There's always room at the top. So you have to make sure that you're going to be the best, not like a me-too person at the bottom because you'll be ground out into business failure.
Yeah. Yeah. You know there are a lot of people who build successful companies and then there are those who genuinely change the world. What's the difference there for an entrepreneur? I mean there's millions of successful companies but very few are transformational for society. How do you think about that?
So to change the world it has to be a technology that you are first of all competent at, best at, and is scalable into affecting the lives of billions of people because by definition we live in a world of about 10 billion people. So is that a technology that can be scaled to billions of people and if it can then you're going to change the world. If it's a technology that cannot be scaled to more than a few thousand people, probably have a great restaurant. A great niche product that can perhaps be sold online to a few people. Maybe a reasonably good selling author, but if it can be scaled to millions of people, billions of people, like your books, Peter, have scaled to millions of readers, you're a repeat New York Times best-selling author. You have changed the world. Your idea about prizing technology accomplishments with the XPRIZE that has created the whole new space, the whole space industry is an offshoot of that that has affected literally billions of people. Everybody's eyes are on Artemis. Everybody's eyes are on SpaceX. But there wouldn't have been those things had you not reignited the space race with Virgin Galactic and the, you know, to the outer space and then back to the Earth. So now you've got billions of eyes that people have renewed hope to become a multi-planetary civilization. You have changed the world because you scaled to affecting millions and then billions.
Thank you my friend. I played a small role in that. Another mutual friend is Ray Kurzweil.
Ray has been a member of our board of directors for 30 years.
Yes. And he's been a mentor for me, one of my closest mentors and grateful. One of the things that the three of us share is his belief in reaching longevity escape velocity.
He sort of predicts LEV by, you know, the early 2030s. My mantra is LEV by 2033.
Making t-shirts about that.
How do you feel we are on that timeline? Do you think, when do you think we might reach longevity escape velocity? Is Ray right?
You know, it's a tough question, Peter, because it is the most extraordinary of extraordinary claims. And I believe in this adage that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Because of my successful track record, I do get an enormous amount of incoming ideas from entrepreneurs. How about this? How about that? The most exciting ones are usually very extraordinary. That's what makes them exciting. But there's no evidence of competency or capability to back them up. So they fall short. So now to say that we're going to defeat death, that's like a more blunt way of saying achieving LEV, you know, like just a non-politically correct way of saying it perhaps, but basically we're talking about LEV that is an extraordinary claim like people can live forever. I mean, and I don't go towards immortality. I talk about can we add 30 extra healthy years on your life. Can we...
Okay. But he would define it as for every year that transpires gain more than a year of life. Yeah.
But any way you define it, to get past, you know, even like a hundred years to, you know, 120 being a healthy lifespan, a healthspan of 120, it's an extraordinary claim. I would say that would be the most extraordinary claim in the history of medicine going all the way back to Hippocrates. Okay. So I believe in it but to pin it to a specific year is beyond my, yeah, it's what Ray does. It's beyond my risk profile. Okay. Because I don't have enough confidence that we'll achieve it by any specific year. I do believe in like our mantra here at United Therapeutics of, you know, restore, replace, renew. So that I believe that like we can restore people to health. If they need something that has to be replaced, we could replace the organ and then ultimately we can renew their life the way Lazarus Long's life was renewed in Time Enough for Love. Heinlein, right.
Yeah. Huge Heinlein fan. And you are the winner of the Heinlein Prize, Peter.
Yeah. So that's a highly, highly coveted award that you won. So my current project with the thymus is in fact what I believe I found like the most practical pathway to achieving LEV.
And that is because the...
Yeah, let's talk about that because when you and I were both at the Forbes 250 event, we're both honorees this year, and I grabbed you and you start telling me about your work in revitalizing, replacing the thymus. I was like, oh my god, this is amazing, I need to talk to you about this. I think that was probably the thing most excited that excited me and I want people to understand why that's important. You're currently focused on rejuvenating, replacing heart, liver, lung, kidney, you know, fundamental organs that we need. But when you said the thymus, it was like, you know, alarm bells or celebration went off. So why is the thymus so valuable?
Because the thymus is highly correlated with every key marker of aging and there are biochemical reasons that explain why that is without getting into a scientific discursion. It has to do with things called T-cell receptor diversity. Most people know T-cells are your body's adaptive immune cells. And when they begin failing, they don't recognize cancers instead of vanquishing them as they pop up from day-to-day. When they start failing, you get opportunistic infections. It's why so many older people die of influenza. You don't respond to vaccines. It's the reason senior people don't respond well to COVID vaccines. So the thymus is the marker of aging. It involutes or disappears at age...
I mean, it is my memory from medical school way back was it basically becomes dysfunctional by your 20s. Is it, I mean there's still thymic function...
But it's diminimous. It's very, very diminimous. You know most of the job has been done in your first two years of life. And it's remarkable what it does in those first two years of life. It fills your body with T-cells and all types of different types of T-cells that are able, Peter, as both of us being lovers of large numbers and astronomy you'll appreciate this. Your T-cell receptor diversity is able to recognize more molecules than are estimated to exist in the entire universe. And each of us have that in our body.
Magical. But as the seasons go by, that T-cell receptor diversity prunes like a tree losing its branches and its leaves and it becomes threadbare and then we become frail as older people and don't achieve the longevity that's possible. But as Robert Heinlein predicted in Time Enough for Love, we will be able to rejuvenate people through, and he didn't know what exactly the rejuvenation therapy will be but I'm quite certain that it will be thymic rejuvenation therapy.
Amazing. So take it a step deeper. What are you doing right now to give both of us a rejuvenated thymus or replacement thymus?
Well, we have multiple thymic programs at United Therapeutics. One of our main mantras here is multiple shots on goal. Because science and engineering and discovery is always so uncertain, I'm kind of always loath to put all my eggs in one basket. We have partnerships with two leading universities, Arizona State University and University of British Columbia, which are both centers of thymic excellence. Professor Nancy Manley at ASU is the world's leading expert in the thymus early development and Professor Peter Zantra at UBC is the world's expert in the senior, what happens to seniors as aging takes over and outstrips their T-cell ability to keep them alive and healthy. So both of them are developing for us programs that will allow us to manufacture thymuses outside of the body and provide them as implants to people to rejuvenate their entire T-cell repertoire.
Or, well, there again multiple shots on goal. So allogeneic is simpler and the thymus has a head start because the thymus is what actually tunes your immune system. So on the allogeneic side to...
And by the way for people listening allogeneic means that these cells...
Not your own DNA. So we have an approach based on not your own DNA but because it's the thymus that teaches your body what is self and what is not self. There's a very good argument that allogeneic will be good enough because it will tune your body to accept something that's not your DNA as part of you. But we also have an autologous program which means your own DNA. Like autologous is kind of the opposite of allogeneic and that will be based on your own stem cells from which we'll be able to manufacture a thymus that matches your own DNA. So there's no immune system questions about this.
Let me tell you an amazing thing. We also have a third and a fourth program. The third program is a xenothymus. So the FDA has approved United Therapeutics to have the only thymic kidney transplant program in the clinic in the world. And the FDA looked at our previous data before the clinic and they said, we have proven to them that our xenothymus, which means a thymus that comes from a genetically modified pig that has been genetically modified not to be attacked by the human immune system, that that pig's thymus can be transplanted along with one of the pig's organs and teaches your body to accept the thymus and the organ as itself. And we have been provided already data to the FDA and peer-reviewed publications that shows it works. So even the third avenue is we have an unlimited supply of xenothymi or xenothymuses in addition to the allogeneic and the autologous thymus. And finally, we announced just actually last month the acquisition of Thymune, the company that was started by George Church, our first funder, and it was George Church whose goal is to create a commercializable endless supply of thymic therapeutic intervention. So perhaps instead of providing with the whole thymus every year you could get a thymic booster of thymic progenitor cells and they have proven already in animal models that those booster shots take up residency and create an ectopic thymus wherever they are implanted. So we have four different shots on goal all very solidly scientific by world leaders one already in the clinic.
