Alternatively Speaking Podcast - Dr. Peter Diamandis (XPRIZE)

Great question. So there's a number of motivations. One, I think it's the greatest gift you can give humanity. I don't think there's anything that is more valuable to an individual than their health, right? I love the old saying, the man or woman who has their health has a thousand dreams, the ones who do not have but one. Second is it's probably the biggest business opportunity on the planet. Maybe it's tied up there with AI. But when I'm in front of a group of Tiger 21 or YPO or A360 members and I ask them, you know, how much of your net wealth would you spend to add 30 healthy years and make it 100 years old instead of 50 for you, the honest answer is the majority of their wealth. All right, you can't take it with you. You can leave it and ruin your kids' lives, or leave it for someone else to give away, or you can spend it. You're going to spend a lot of money on your health. The question is, when do you want to spend it? When it can actually help you, versus at the end of life where it's basically a real challenge.

And then there's a third reason, which is I'm a space cadet kid at heart. I was born in the '60s, grew up on Apollo and that documentary, Star Trek. What I've always dreamed about was going to the moon and starting a city there, going to Mars, going to the asteroid belts and mining them. And the reality is I'm going to need an extra 50 years on my lifespan and my healthspan to make that stuff happen. So, I mean, those are the reasons, and I love a good challenge.

Good question. And you have to remember that that same question could have been asked 100 years ago when the average life expectancy was in your mid to late 30s, and you would say, what would life be like if you got to live till 80? Wow, you know, double the human lifespan, that's amazing. What would you do with all that time? And I think the answer is not too dissimilar. You would learn, you would travel, you would start your fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth career. And we're heading towards this universe of abundance where the things that used to cost a lot of money are rapidly demonetizing, right? So the best education in the world is effectively free. The best healthcare in the world will be effectively free. You know, you'll be able to create incredible things using AI and robotics, and AI as your interface to 3D printing and AR and VR and synthetic biology and such. So it's an exciting world ahead. And you know, if you're bored and you say, well, I don't know what to do with my life, go hang around people who are less boring than you. There's a lot of amazing things to do.

I don't think it'll change anything I do right now. I'm always living full out. You know, I am on this grand adventure. I am loving it. The conversations I have every day just blow my mind because every day there's more and more exciting things that my friends are doing. Like, oh my God, that's amazing. How'd you do that? Or where is that going to go? That's incredible, right? So maybe I'll be more patient. Maybe I'd slow down, you know, but I don't know. I think that's just my nature right now. So I remember when I was in MIT as an undergrad, Eric Drexler, who's people who know his name, he's a very famous technologist. He wrote Engines of Creation. He was one of the leaders in the nanotech field. He and his then wife, Christine Peterson, took me aside one day and they said, you know, Peter, listen, you got to slow down, dude. You're going to burn out. And I was like, huh? And I haven't slowed down at all. So, you know, listen, one of the things with longevity is there is a sense of not living in constant cortisol and stress. And I think I'm having fun. There's always some level of stress whenever you're trying to do multiple things. You know, not everything goes your way all the time, and sometimes, you know, shit can hit the fan on multiple fronts, and then yeah, the stress levels go up. But that's why God created meditation and, you know, being in the moment. So those are skills I'm hoping to learn.

Let's knock that one down first. So there are eight billion people, and the growth rate of humanity is rapidly slowing. The problem is not overpopulation, it's underpopulation of planet Earth. And the data is very clear. If you look back 50 years ago, in the 1950s or so, post-World War II, there were, I think, the growth rate, the number of average children per family was like 5.5, and today it's dropped from 5.5 to just, I think, around 2.4. But the majority of countries on the planet, the United States, most of Europe, China, Japan, all of the major nations are below the replacement level. Japan is disappearing, as is Italy. And the only location on the planet that's got a higher growth rate is Africa and some parts of India. And those will drop down below replacement, replacement is 2.1, as those populations get greater abundance and better education and access to health and so forth. So, you know, a lot of the concern is that we're going to peak the global population at nine and a half billion, and then there's going to be a rapid decrease. And so who does the work? Who takes care of, you know, the parents and the grandparents? And I think the answer is it's going to be AI and robotics. But I'm not by any means worried about resource depletion. We are a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. So, you know, let's take it a resource at a time for a moment just to dismiss it and get people the logical constructs here. You know, do we have enough energy? Well, we are living on a planet that is bathed in 8,000 times more energy hitting the surface of the Earth from the Sun than we consume as a species in a year. So there's plenty of energy, and we're on the verge of fusion, which will give us endless energy. And then there's a new generation of micro-fission plants, micro-nukes that are amazing. And so I don't think energy is the issue. And well, is water an issue? Well, no, we live on a water planet. Two-thirds of our planet is covered by water. Yes, 97.5% is salt, 2% is ice. We fight over half a percent. And guess what? You know, we have new breakthrough technologies. We just launched a $120 million desalination XPRIZE. We had an XPRIZE years ago for pulling water out of the atmosphere, atmospheric capture XPRIZE. There's plenty of water on the planet. Well, is there enough food? Well, there isn't enough food if we continue to grow it the way we've always grown it. And so the question is, why would we do that? We are living in a time where we can reinvent how we can grow that food. And so this is going to be vertical farms. This is going to be stem cell, cellular cultivation of chicken and pork and beef. You know, as people become more abundant, they want higher, more, you know, elevated sources of protein. And the only way you're going to grow... Do you know how many chickens there are on planet Earth, Louis? I don't know, but I'm going to guess tens of billions. Actually, it's like in the, like 34 billion chickens on the planet, right? There's a billion pigs, a billion cows on that order. And the only way that you produce more of them for a population that is going out of poverty into middle class and wants that is you chop down more forest and you clear more land and you plant more grain to feed these animals, or you reinvent how you make protein, which is the way we're going to do it. So, you know, we just found off the coast of California the largest supply of lithium ever. So lithium is not a scarce resource. Every time we hit a boundary of a scarce resource, there is a tech breakthrough. And that's what technology is. It takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant over and over again.

Well, so I think that we're on the verge of a breakthrough, and I believe that that is coming from AI. You know, one of the things when I talk to people about longevity, I say, listen, number one, you have to remember compared to our ancestors 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago, it's amazing what's happened. And why do you think we're not going to extend it any further? Do you have any particular proof that we can't? Let me give you proof that we can. Right, yes, the eldest person on the planet so far that we have good records for is 122, and I think the eldest person alive today is 114. But there are species of bowhead whales, a species of whale called bowhead whales that can live 200 years. Greenland sharks can live 400 and 500 years. If they can live that long, why can't we? And when I learned about that, I said it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. And that's what we do with engineering. We re-engineer this. And so I think AI is going to enable us to understand why we age at a fundamental level and how to slow it, stop it, and reverse it. There's very good reasons why we die. Evolutionarily, when we were evolving on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago, if you went, you go into puberty at age 13, by 26 you're a grandparent. And if you kept living older, all of the older adults would be stealing food from the grandchildren's mouths or their great-grandchildren's mouths. And when food was scarce, before we had McDonald's and Whole Foods around, there was a reason for dying. It preserved the up-and-coming species. It perpetuated your genome. End of the story. We have to overcome these evolutionary forces, and we do that with intelligence and human creativity. So do I think we can live older yet? The technologies that are on the table today are epigenetic reprogramming, cellular medicines, regrowing your organs for a backup set of organs. And these are just a few of them, right? So as you well know, Louis, we just launched a $101 million Healthspan XPRIZE. So XPRIZE, which I started 30 years ago this year, we've launched 30 prizes in 30 years. We've launched over $600 million in competitions that have driven tens of billions in R&D. We have $300 million prizes: one funded by Elon for gigaton carbon removal, one funded by the president of UAE for desalination, and one that's funded by a group of individuals including out of Saudi and Chip Wilson, myself, and other donors, which is, can we reverse the loss of function as we age? And as we age, there's predictable things that happen. Our immunity gets weaker, our muscles get weaker, our cognitive function gets weaker. And again, they would never select against it because you had babies in your teens. And then, you know, evolution, Darwin, didn't care about you after that. So we're asking teams to actually reverse by 10 years or 20 years your cognitive function, your immune function, and your muscle function. And we have about 300 teams that have entered the competition. I think we'll get to a thousand. And it's a global call, not for ideas, but for teams that are going to actually build and demo the technology.

No, I mean, so listen, there are... I run a longevity Platinum trip every year, all right? So every year I bring... it's the most expensive, most exclusive longevity conference on the planet. I take 40 people in September and then repeat the trip with 40 people in October. And I take them to go and visit the top scientists and technologists in the fields of longevity. And a number of the companies that we're meeting and so forth are teams competing. And there's a variety of different ways. Some are using cellular medicine, natural killer cells, T cells, stem cells. Others are using vaccines. Others are using CRISPR edits. Others are using gene therapies. Others are using senolytic medicines. There are something like, you know, 20 hallmarks of aging, 20 different reasons why we age, and the different teams attack different ones. Now, do I know who is going to work and which ones are going to work for which parts of aging? Well, that's where this becomes fun. Teams will merge. Teams will reinvent themselves. But the tools with which teams can attack this age-old problem of death and functional loss are a thousandfold, a millionfold more powerful than when I was in medical school back in the '80s. And that's as a result of AI. That's a result of computation and soon quantum computers and quantum chemistry. So the next seven years is the ball game. I'm happy I'm alive now to have a chance to play with this stuff.

So I remember when I was in medical school, one of my best friends in the world, Todd Holly, who had been a co-founder of International Space University with me, contracted AIDS and he died. And it was six months later that the antivirals came out, right? I was like, God damn it, could you have hung on a little bit longer, right? And so I feel that way about what we're going to have coming our way now. Is there going to be a single magic pill or injection that's going to move the needle and add 100 years? Probably not. But what we are going to see is therapeutics that are going to buy you more time, and that time buys you more time, right? The concept is called longevity escape velocity. And the notion is that today, for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for a third of a year. And there's going to be a point where for every year that you're alive, science extends your life for more than a year. And that departure is called longevity escape velocity. So when are we going to see that? Well, Ray Kurzweil's prediction is we'll see it by 2030. George Church, David Sinclair, their prediction is a little bit longer, you know, maybe 2035, 2040, but it's not 50 years from now. And so as I like to say to people, your job is to make it through to that point and not die from something stupid in the interim. And that means wearing your seatbelt, wearing your helmet when you ski. And, you know, this brings us to a conversation on one of my companies, Fountain Life, which is all about preventative diagnostics. And so Fountain Life is a company I built with Tony Robbins and Bill Kapp. I serve as the co-founder and executive chairman. And we have four centers right now. We'll be adding another 30 to 40 centers around the world. The centers are profitable and doing well. People come as a member and we upload them over the course of a day. We digitize them. We find out everything that's knowable about them: full-body MRI, brain, brain vasculature, coronary CT with AI, DEXA scan, metabolomics, blood chemistry, everything, genomics. And our goal is to answer two questions: Is there anything going on inside you that you need to know about right now? Unfortunately, for a significant number of people, the answer is yes. I'll come back in a moment. And the second question is, what's likely to happen to you, and how do we optimize your body to prevent it from happening? So the results are pretty staggering. 2% of people who think they're healthy have a cancer they don't know about. 2.5% have an aneurysm they don't know about. 14.4% have either metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease, a cancer, or an aneurysm. And so, you know, that's 14 out of 100 people walk in thinking they're healthy, and then we discover something that they need to take action on immediately. And that's a good thing because we all know people who have died in the middle of the night or went to the doctor and the doctor says, sorry to tell you this, but you've got stage three or stage four this or that. And here's the reality: our bodies are incredibly good at hiding disease. 70% of people who have a heart attack have no preceding symptoms, right? And then a significant portion, almost half of the people who get that heart attack don't make it. You don't feel a cancer until it's a stage three or stage four, but it's there, right? In fact, 70% of the cancers that kill you are cancers never tested for, like a glioblastoma or a pancreatic cancer. We do catch the prostate and breast and colon because we check for those, but we don't check for everything else. But you can know. And people say, well, I don't want to know. And I say, of course you want to know. You're going to find out eventually. You want to know now, you can do something about it, or when it's too late. So that's the don't die from something stupid. It's advances in diagnostics.

Yeah, it's $20,000, $20,000 a year. We do have a digital membership we're rolling out right now for $3,000 a year, which does a significant amount of testing, gives you a Fountain Life functional medicine doctor that you meet with on a quarterly basis over video. And if any of the blood tests that you are taking on a quarterly basis indicate something, then, and this is where our AI systems will come in, then it's worth to spend the extra money for a full-body MRI for a few thousand dollars or do this additional testing. But having said that, all of these things will come down in price.