← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Shocking Truth About AI, Immortality, Civil War, Elon Musk & Simulation Theory | Peter Diamandis PT 1
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
You're living through an inflection point in human evolution between tech like AI, quantum computing, and biotech. The next decade will bring about more dramatic change than the last 100 or even 200 years combined. Virtually every aspect of our lives is about to be disrupted. For the unprepared, this will be devastating. But for those that take the time to understand the most likely path forward, there will be huge opportunities to help you better navigate what's coming. I bring you futurist Peter Diamandis. Given the state of AI and quantum computing, do you think that we're on the brink of human immortality?
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Peter Diamandis
I think we're on the brink of a healthspan revolution. I think immortality comes when we can scan the brain and upload you into the cloud.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
That's the only way we have to transcend biology.
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Peter Diamandis
People have to realize we're constantly replenishing all of the cells of our body anyway, right? Like the oldest cells in your body are your fat cells that are an average of 8 years old. Given AI, given quantum technology, we're going to start to understand why we age, how to slow it, stop it, maybe reverse it. And I think those things will get us north of a hundred years. The bowhead whale, the largest mammal, can live 200 years. Greenland shark can live 500 years and have pups at 200 years old. And the question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? And for me, it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. And we're getting the tools to be able to deal with and edit our software, edit our hardware. And for people who are saying, well, am I going to be part of that? Am I going to live for hundreds of years? Am I going to have the chance to be immortal. I'm going to put aside the immortal part again. I think your mission should be how do I live long enough, healthfully enough, to intercept the breakthroughs that are coming. Right. So it's interesting, someone asked me a question like, how long do you want to live? Right. And I remember when I was in medical school, I set a like a 700 year lifespan, which is a ridiculous number. It's ridiculous because if I can live, I think another 30 years from now, the breakthroughs we're going to see are going to buy you the next 30 or 100 years. So your goal is to live long enough to intercept what's called longevity escape velocity.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yeah. That to me feels very plausible. When I think about the magic trick that is AI. Walk me through what you think is the rough timeline. And I fully acknowledge that looking into the future, when you're talking about something as revolution, evolutionary as AI becomes a little bit comical. But I think that it helps to map how you think about how this is going to work, like what the problems are that we're going to solve. Where's the intersection of AI and quantum computing? You're the only one I really hear talking about that and its importance in this revolution. What is it about quantum computing you think is going to help? Are there qualities of AI that are only going to be possible with quantum computing? What, what are the next steps?
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Peter Diamandis
Let me define first of all, lifespan and health span. So lifespan is how long you live, how long your heart is beating, how long your brain is processing. Healthspan is how long you've got the vital energy to enjoy life. You know, get up in the morning, play with your kids, your grandkids, go for a hike, enjoy yourself, have the mental, physical vitality. Right? That's healthspan and that's really what we want. You know, if someone says, I don't want to live to 120 years old, it's because they have a mental image of being in a wheelchair, drooling. Right? That's not we're speaking about here. If I said to you at 120, your mind was as sharp as that ever was, you could, you know, hit the ground and do 40 push ups and you know, would you want to live to 120? And I think anybody who is, who is loving life would say yes. So that's our goal. It's, it's that level of vitality. So AI, AI is going to play in this by helping us understand such a complicated situation. So why do some people live to 100 or 115 or 120 and smoke, you know, and still get that far out, Right? Why some people, other people die at 50 or 60. And I think aging is in human biology is so complicated that we're still deciphering it, we're still untangling this process, and there's so much data we can now get. And we've talked about one of my companies. Fountain Life is sort of like the most advanced diagnostics you can do. So when I go to Fountain Life, and we've got centers around the U.S. um, I will be digitally uploaded. So in the course of a day, I will have a full body mri, an MRI of my brain, brain vasculature, brain blood flow, a coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, 120 blood biomarkers, metabolome microbiome, your genetics, everything, right? So it's 150 gigabytes of data. And that data, over the course of thousands of individuals can only be analyzed by AI. But then we can start to say, look, the people who were the healthiest and didn't have disease, or we can look at presymptomatic disease and the people who developed this over time had this genetic sequence or had these blood biomarkers. It's the incorporation of massive data aggregation and AI that's going to help us understand why some people survive and thrive and others don't. And then what are the therapeutics? Look at everybody who took rapamycin or metformin or, you know, was on, you know, whatever drug combinations. It's so complicated. But we're running this massive experiment and AI is going to help us to untangle that and get some insight and say yes. For your genetics, for your age, for your objectives. These meds, these supplements are the best for you, right? That's one of the things I'm really working to build out for myself and our members at Fountain Life. Is that kind of a correlation? Like what you want to do in life, your upload, your genetics, number of pills will intake per day. This is the right combination for you? Yeah.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
I think n of 1 is going to be a big part of this. Okay. I'm going to lay out my thesis.
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Peter Diamandis
Okay.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Tell me where I go wrong with, uh, so one. I want to say that I come at this the way that a sci fi writer would come at it. So I understand enough of it to get the gist and to be able to prognosticate. The specifics will be filled in by people that really know the science. Um, but the way I See this playing out? Is that, okay, we need. This is a game of pattern recognition. There is a reason pattern recognition, right? There is a reason why we age. So step one is going to be by, I think by getting into synthetic data very, very quickly. So we'll upload whatever the first ten thousand, hundred thousand people that go through something like fountain life and we begin to speak the language of DNA, let's say. And we'll probably need to feed into the AI, not just human DNA, but across all kinds of species, feed it as much DNA as we can. It goes in, it learns the language of DNA, it begins to feed itself data and begin to try to predict different outcomes based on, okay, this environment, with this genetic code, this drug interaction, whatever. Again, looking for the massive amount of data, but trying to parse out the different patterns in it so that it can isolate what the problem is. Now, with my very sort of layman understanding of all of this, my again, just guess at this point is that what's really going on is the epigenome is where all this breaks down. You know, David Sinclair study as well as I do, which showed that even if you breed a mouse to just get massive amount of breaks in its DNA over time, the DNA still looks the same. Like we are able to repair the DNA. It isn't what we used to think it was, which is you're getting these mutations in the DNA over time and the DNA is effectively getting corrupted. But something is happening. And so if that something is the epigenome where we're just, we're mistagging it again, this is my layman's explanation of how this works. But they're going in and putting in the wrong book bookmarks. For people that don't know how this works. Your DNA is basically really tightly wound and a little bit of it gets exposed to say, I'm an eye cell, I'm a skin cell, I'm a heart cell, whatever. And as you age, you're de differentiating. And so your eye cell maybe now isn't purely an eye cell because parts of the DNA are unraveling. So it's a little bit of a skin cell, a little bit of a heart cell, a little bit of an eye cell. And so now this is where the function begins to degrade over time. If the AI can figure out, okay, cool, that really is the problem. This is exactly what's going on here are the Yamanaka factors or whatever that you need to put to work to rewind the cell so that it resets and so now we're getting the bookmarks in all the right places. That part, once that's figured out again, I, my gut instinct is that's going to be handled through the, the AI using quantum computing to be able to crunch just an unbelievable amount of synthetic data. So we don't have. Because if you have to feed in millions or billions of people, like, I just worry that that's going to take way too long for somebody of my age. But if we can do this via synthetic data, then the odds that it goes faster go way up. Yeah, where's, where's the flaw in that thinking?
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Peter Diamandis
Listen, you know, when I was in medical school, I don't know, 35 years ago, I went arguably to the best medical, you know, university and engineering schools on the planet. And none of this was being talked about. Right. All of this is really, this entire conversation is the last five, six years and it's moving very fast. It was heresy. Before I talk about longevity or age reversal, and now it's one of the hottest subjects on the planet because it's the biggest marketplace. I mean, what would you not pay for an extra 20 or 30 healthy years of life? So, yes, we are. To echo what you said, if you think about it, each of us get 3.2 billion nucleotides our, our genome, 3.2 billion letters from our mom and from our dad. And you've got that same genome when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 50, when you're 100, maybe when you're 150. But why don't you look the same if you've got the exact same instruction set, why don't you have a, you know, a 12 pack, if that's a thing, or six pack, whatever, when you're 80 like you had when you were 20.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
That one I can answer. But the face, I think is because the six pack has everything to do with your lifestyle. If you're just.
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Peter Diamandis
But, but if you were. Okay, I mean, my point simply being is why don't you have the physique or the ability to build muscle or everything of your youth when you're 100? Why is there a difference? And it isn't your genome, it isn't your, your 3.2 billion letter instruction set. It is what you just said a minute ago, your epigenome. EPI for the Greek word for above. And it's the control system. And, and you're right. When you're, when you're just born or when you're 10, or when you're 20 when you're 80, different genes are on and different genes are off, and the epigenome is the control of which genes are on and which genes are off. At the highest level, it is the control of the genes for skin are on in your skin cells and the gene for your hepatocytes are on in your liver. And so there are different cells, they've differentiated, turning certain, silencing certain genes and saying, you're not, your genes aren't needed here in the skin cell. You don't need to be, you know, purifying out urine. Right. And so as you age, what apparently is going on is that the control of which genes are on and which genes are off are beginning to blur. And as you're getting older, the genes that should be off or turned on or the genes that should be on or turned off. I'll give you an example. Skin, you know, the supple skin of a child, of a newborn. Right. Part of what's going on is we have something like 23 collagen genes, and we express multiple collagen molecules that make your skin give it the texture and so forth. But as you grow older, we begin to silence some of those genes. And so the collagen molecules of the 23, maybe only eight or nine are expressed. And so you start to get wrinkles and your skin starts to look that of an old person. But can you turn them back on? So one of the companies, my venture fund, Bold Capital, is an investor in his marble Biome, and it's using genetic engineering, epigenetic reprogramming to turn back on those genes. Right. To give, you know, to take back the, the look and feel of your skin 30 years. So can we do that across multiple parts of the body? Can we rejuvenate you in that regard? And that is one of the, definitely one of the hottest topics out there right now. Can we turn back the clock? And. And in December 2020, David Sinclair wrote a very famous paper in which he demonstrated turning back the clock in the retinal visual systems of mice, basically reprogramming the epigenome to go back to where it was earlier and giving mice that had lost their vision renewed vision. And one of his companies, Life Biosciences, is now doing that in primates. Right. And once they've already done it, they're already, they're doing it in primates right now.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
And have they shown that it has the same retinal impact or.
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Peter Diamandis
I believe they have. And, you know, we're then a fraction of a step away from humans. Right. So this is the hot conversation of epigenic reprogramming on one element, AI on the other. And I, and I really fundamentally believe that we're within striking distance to making a dentist in human aging. And I mean, you know, that's why you and I are here in this moment. We just announced our $101 million Healthspan X prize, challenging teams around the world. It's the largest prize ever in human history, challenging teams to restore function in muscle, immune and cognition. Hopefully, this is a age reversal therapeutic that teams will deliver. We're just looking at three systems. If the teams going after this healthspan X Prize are doing something that at the root cause is hitting aging, then they're likely to hit aging throughout the body. We're only going to measure immune, muscle and cognition because those are easy to measure. And for me, as I get older, I want to have the immunity to fight infectious disease and cancer. I want to have the muscular vitality to hike and play with my great grandchildren and the cognition to be sharp for decades to come.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Okay, so one of the things that I care deeply about is the timing of all of this.
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Peter Diamandis
Yeah, me too, buddy.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
With the prize, they have seven years, right?
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Peter Diamandis
So we announced this now in one month that we had November, December of 23, and it's a seven year time frame.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Seven years. Do you think that.
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Peter Diamandis
I think I. I set seven years originally. Because if an X Prize, you know, the original X Prize, the first one I launched back in 1996, was a $10 million prize for spaceflight. And again, these X prizes are not for a paper study. They're not for an idea. A team has to actually demonstrate the thing and then they get the money and they keep their ip. The world gets the benefit. And the first x Prize took eight years. It was launched in 1996. It was won in 2004 when Burt Rutan, backed by Paul Allen, built Spaceship One that Richard Branson then bought the rights to and create Virgin Galactic. And since then, our prizes have typically taken anywhere from, you know, two to eight years. We had one prize, a $30 million race to the moon that Google funded. It was at a 10 year horizon. It did not get one. It got shut down, though. Two of the teams actually made it to the moon shortly thereafter, but crashed on landing.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Interesting.
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Peter Diamandis
But they still, you know, got to lunar orbit and still made there, which is a big, big deal. A Japanese team and an Israeli team. So by setting a deadline on a prize, you force teams to actually do something versus sit back. If it's there forever, they'll take, you know, the race element does help them accelerate. But a deadline, when you're facing a deadline, you're going to. You're going to take even more aggressive action. So seven years for me felt the right length. The second thing is one of our largest donor in this prize is a group called Hevolution, which is based. It's a global nonprofit based out of Riyadh and out of the US and Saudi Arabia. Has a 2030 vision of really, they have a lot of projects culminating in the year 2030. And it just so happened that that is the culmination of this prize as well. So 2030 works from that perspective as well.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
When I think about AI and the rate of advancement, so I come at things from a entertainment perspective and when I look at what's happened in the last 11 months, quite frankly, it hasn't been a full year that I've been paying attention to text, to video. The, the leaps are pure insanity.
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Peter Diamandis
It is. It's insane. I was just looking at IMOD's latest stability, AI, which is fast as you're typing.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yeah.
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Peter Diamandis
You know, there's an ape with an orange on its head hanging from a, you know, bouncing on a trampoline. And as soon as you add words, the images are changing. It's insane.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
It's crazy.
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Peter Diamandis
It's. We're a micro step away from. From Hollywood, you know, movies being produced by describing them in words. Yeah.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Given the rate of change on. In the last 11 months, I'm going to guess in the next five years you will see commercials and things done entirely just text to video. Like it.
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Peter Diamandis
I think it's the next two years, five years.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
I mean, it certainly could be in the next three, just given the amount of UI changes they'll have to do. My gut instinct is that you're. You're looking at at least three years, but.
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Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
So when I think about the advancements in longevity, when I look at what humans have been able to do just in the last 10 years, it's already incredible. When you slap AI onto that, then it gets nuts. What do you think is going to be the contribution of quantum computers? How real is that right now?
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Peter Diamandis
Yeah. So it's. We're in the early days of quantum computing, to be clear. Right. Quantum computing is a complicated subject which I'm not going to do service to, to be very clear. Right. So classical computing is basically computing that uses ones and zeros on integrated circuit and a typical, you know, Typical binary language, quantum computing uses qubits that are basically, can be anything, a zero or one or every. Anything between a zero and a one. And what we find is it, it really represents the real world. We're living in a quantum world. We're not living in a binary digital world. We, we model the world using very advanced binary systems. We model on a molecular level. So, for example, DeepMind, which is part of Alphabet now, right. Which created a program called AlphaFold. And AlphaFold, I remember when I was in medical school, or when I was maybe was at. I was an undergrad at MIT at the time. The big grand challenge of the time is could you predict how a protein would fold? So a protein is the basic building structure of the body. It's a structural material. It's an enzyme. It's muscle tissue. It's. It is a sequence of amino acids. There are 23 essential amino acids here. These amino acids, when they're assembled in a ribosome, read from DNA to RNA to a protein. The sequence of amino acids that are like Lego blocks strung together begin to fold into a very predictable 3D structure. And that 3D structure is everything. That 3D structure determines what that protein does, how it functions, how it interacts in a, you know, in a antibody. And it was always considered if you could go from an amino acid sequence, like I can tell you the sequence of the amino acids in this, in this thousand amino acid sequence, and if you could tell me how it would fold, that would be the most incredibly powerful predictive engine on the planet. And it was a supercomputing problem. And it was a couple years ago now that AlphaFold, an algorithm out of DeepMind, cracked that problem. And it was able to go from an amino acid sequence to predicting a protein within a single atomic diameter. Accuracy.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Whoa.
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Peter Diamandis
And then it went on to predict every protein and how it folds in the human body. And then meta created their own version of that and was able to predict every protein in the biological ecosystem. Like, it's gone insanely fast, right? So now we can start to design proteins versus just find out what nature. We want a protein that is a certain shape that interacts with a certain, like, you know, key and lock on the surface of a cell. But that's all being done in binary. That's all being done with AI algorithms operating on GPUs at a atomic molecular level. We are quantum systems, and the belief is that quantum computers will be able to enable us to model what's going on at a much higher level of fidelity. Much Faster and so that we can start to understand the fundamental elements of how life itself works in a much deeper way and start to model things. You know, I don't know what, what factor to use trillions of times faster than a classical computer because it takes a lot of energy and a lot of time to model things. But Quantum is going to be able to model chemistry and model biology at lightning speeds. So I believe we're going to see, you know, 2023, 2024. We're seeing the inflection point of AI.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
What does that mean?
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Peter Diamandis
It mean, it means we're, we're seeing AI growing at, unbelievable speeds. What you said, Earl, a few minutes ago, that it's like, it's, it's awesome. It's, it's, it's unbelievable how fast it's moving. And typically an inflection point is like, it's a slow, slow, you know, like AI. So AI began. The first conversations in AI were in 1956 at Dartmouth University. A group of a dozen people came together to talk about this idea of can we model intelligence in like a
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
summer trying to do it right.
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Peter Diamandis
They, to try and get the theories and think through it. Right. And then neural networks were proposed not very long after that. But we didn't have the computational power until this past decade to actually start to put these algorithms into play. And so while AI is what, 56, you know, 60, 70 years old, it's only now that we're seeing this massive inflection. It's the knee of the curve. It's the point where it's speed is so fast, right. And now we're going to start to see AI programming AI and it becomes self referential and accelerates even faster. So quantum is still slow. It meaning we're getting systems, we're beginning to learn how to utilize it. We have there's like two or three public quantum compute companies. A friend, I don't know if you know, Jack H. Jack is my board of trustees at xprize. He spun out of Google a company called Sandbox aq.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yes, Right.
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Peter Diamandis
Eric Schmidt's the chairman and Jack is the CEO. And A stands for AI and Q stands for quantum. And it's a company that's really bringing together AI and quantum computing. And his belief is it's going to be most impactful in a few key areas. And biology and chemistry is one of those key areas.
- [28:38]
Commercial Announcer
When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery, so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [29:08]
Peter Diamandis
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
That, to me, is really fascinating. The fact that we're going to be able to manipulate the building blocks of biology is pretty crazy. Where do you think that our ability to predict the folding of proteins goes? How do we use that?
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Peter Diamandis
What kinds of it? So now the question becomes, what drug do you want in order to handle certain situations? So we're going, you know, drug discovery up until now has been you go in the Amazon forest and you forage for different leaves and stuff and you take it back to the lab and you see what you got, right, like rapamycin, which is one of the longevity medications out there. Not going to detail about it, but it was discovered in a soil sample from Easter island, which is known as Rapanui, and that rapamycin got its name from that. So this random process of like just finding stuff and, and trying to purify it and see if it has an effect on anything is going to go. We're going to flip the model to saying, okay, what exactly do we want to interact with this receptor on this cell or block this chemical process inside of the mitochondria? And we're going to design it and then we'll see does it interact with anything else. We're going to start to create in silico models, computer models of cells in high fidelity to understand what's going on and how you want to tweak it.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Do we already have the ability to manufacture this stuff or.
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Peter Diamandis
Absolutely. 100 and it's. And, and there's a company called in Silico Medicine, Alex Z. Who is a CEO, there is a friend, my venture fund's an investor. Full disclosure. And they have in Silico Medicine is, as the name says, we're going to create medicines in simulation on Computers and then manufacture it and then show that it works and they have drugs in phase two or phase three. Right. Now that we're designing a computer for a particular medical condition and it's working out, how does drug discovery work exactly?
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Using AI,
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Peter Diamandis
you're going to understand a molecular process inside a cell that is causing a disease. And you're going to say this particular molecule is, is a waste product that's accumulating that is causing this disease. And can we create a, a protein that might go bind that molecule in a highly accurate fashion that when it's bound, blocks the disease from occurring and allows your immune system to clear it? Right, so we're going to start to, to tinker with and the question then becomes is, does that molecule you've designed to block particular reaction or waste product, does it have a secondary negative effect that you don't want? Right, so you're still going to go through clinical trials to determine that there's no downside of that.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Will that be more of a we have to do it, but in reality, we've already run the simulation six ways a Sunday inside.
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Peter Diamandis
There will be a point in the future. So for example, when SpaceX launched the Dragon capsule to the space station for the first time, it worked. It worked perfectly. They're great engineers, but the reason it worked fantastic is they had a highly accurate computer model of the entire system. And so they modeled it in high fidelity and it performed like the model said. And so, for example, more recently we see Starship making serial advances as it's going towards orbit. Of course the crisis news network and all the media say, oh, starship fails like bullshit. It was an amazing incremental success. You know, the first ship got to a certain point, the second ship got further. The third one will probably work perfectly because those ships are highly instrumented and all the data is coming back and the data is being used to advance the models and saying, aha, this is actually what was going on. And so let's change this engine or this structural entity and we're going to start to do the same thing in biology, which we're going to start to gather enough data and instrument and understand what's going on, where we can eventually get to a point where we have a highly accurate model of the human cell. And not just a cell, but maybe it's an organ, maybe it's a thousand cells or a billion cells. And we're going to know that this particular designed protein or medicine, whatever it might be, works perfectly. And we'll get to a Point where you don't need to go through a massive clinical trial. How far is that away? It's probably not the next five or 10 years, but it is probably 20 to 30 years out. But the cost of these. Right. And then by the way, this drug works for me, not for you, by the way. Do you know, I don't know the exact number, but it's pathetic. When a drug is approved by the FDA and you take your, you're prescribed that drug, what percentage of time the drug actually works for you?
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
I've heard this before. It's either 40% of the time it works or 60% of the time it works.
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Peter Diamandis
It's like under 20% away. Yeah, it's, it's. And I, I'll, I want to check that number. So I have it. But it's the. When a drug goes through the drug discovery process, you know, the first goal is do no harm.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yes.
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Peter Diamandis
And by the way, most of the drug discovery process for the last century has been done in or safety trials have been done in men only.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yeah. There's a good reason for that, though.
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Peter Diamandis
Well, the reason was that drug companies didn't want to deal with menses and menopause and so forth. Right. It was inconvenient.
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Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
There's just so much, so many more complications.
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Peter Diamandis
But what happened was when drugs were taken off the market because they failed, it was because they hadn't tested them in women. Because you, I mean, why assume that this drug that we developed for a particular condition that was safe in men is also safe in women anyway? So first is do no harm and then does it work? And when the FDA approves a drug, it worked in enough people that it was worth approving, but it doesn't work in 100%, the current circumstances. And it's a, it's a minority number. And I'll have to check on that.
- [37:14]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
That, yeah, the. I'm shocked if the punchline is that the number is that low. That would certainly speak to the placebo effect. Because I've never taken an over the counter drug. It's not true. It's not that I've never taken one that I didn't notice anything, but the ones that I take with frequency, I'm like, whoa, these really work. My allergy tablets.
- [37:32]
Peter Diamandis
And by the way, it may well be for a narrow course of drugs, but it doesn't have to work for everybody. Yeah.
- [37:44]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
So, all right, let's look at all of this through the lens of where this goes and why it's going to work. So when I think about the problems that AI has to solve in terms of understanding human biology. What's happening? That really becomes the. The goal of AI is to ascertain what are the set of rules of physics effectively. How do I then map that onto a cell? How do I map that onto all the cells that make up an organ? How do I map that onto all the cells that make up a human body?
- [38:21]
Peter Diamandis
So that's eventually right now, I mean, so, for example, when you go through fountain life, and I hope you will, I would love to take you and Lisa through it. We're opening up in LA in Q3 of this year. Super excited about that.
- [38:36]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
It's amazing.
- [38:39]
Peter Diamandis
You know, we're gonna. We're going to download 150 gigabytes of data about you. And we have like, when we do your coronary CCTA for people listening, listen, if you've heard about a calcium score, it really is kind of irrelevant. People have a heart attack with a zero calcium score. People with a thousand don't get a heart attack it. Unless if your artery is blocked or you have blockage in an artery that you see from calcified plaque, that's an issue. You had to make sure that your coronary arteries that feed oxygen and blood to the heart muscle are patent and open and feeding it. But if the plaque on the side of your arteries isn't blocking the artery and it's calcified, meaning it's like you have cement on the walls, but the blood's getting through, that's fine. What causes the heart attack is soft plaque that isn't calcified that can in the middle of the night, break off and evulse. And all of a sudden you got a widowmaker, right? It is blocked your.
- [39:48]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Because it goes downstream, it blocks the
- [39:50]
Peter Diamandis
artery and your heart muscle doesn't get blood flow and it dies. And then you have enough of a heart tissue dies, you have a heart attack, you die. And so it's just now using AI to go back to this that you can take a coronary CT of your heart and put it through a set of AI algorithms that can find soft plaque, not the calcified plaque. And so we do that. We have an AI overlay on that
- [40:24]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
to determine meaning it's just getting better at reading the images, getting.
- [40:27]
Peter Diamandis
It's looking at the data differently than before. Before, all we looked at was calcified. And we've discovered that isn't the issue. It is the issue. If it's. If it's blocking like a 50% occlusion of your, you know, left, you know, descending artery. So we get Data coming in, 150GB of data about you. And this data all needs to be looked at by humans. But that so much data, there's no way that any human physician can understand all of that data. It's way too much to, to, to grok to understand and hold in mind. But AIs can. So the first use of use of AIs are going to be to look at the data coming off of your coronary ct, look at the data coming off of your full body MRI, to look at the data coming out of your 120 blood biomarkers and then looking at those individually and then aggregating them all. Looking at the population level, that's where we are today. With AI down the line, being able to look at on a physics level, subcellular, cellular level, all of that stuff, sure, that's coming, but we don't need that to be make a huge difference right now.
- [41:43]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
It's interesting. Okay, so I'm certainly compelled by where the science is today. But the thing that I am obsessed with is where's it going. It goes. And do you think we live in a determined universe?
- [41:58]
Peter Diamandis
I sure hope not. That make it kind of boring though.
- [42:01]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Really?
- [42:01]
Peter Diamandis
How do you. Well, it wouldn't change.
- [42:03]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Seem avoidable to me.
- [42:04]
Peter Diamandis
It wouldn't, it wouldn't change anything I do if I were a determined universe. So the question becomes if, if we were, you know, the question for me is, does quantum mechanics make it deterministic
- [42:19]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
or not because of probability?
- [42:22]
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
- [42:23]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Okay, so I'll give you my. Again, coming at it like a sci fi writer and not like a scientist. But the way that I think about quantum is okay, even if the universe that we live in is simply the most probable universe, it is still predictably probable. And this is exactly why we can create gps, which is a great example. So with Newtonian physics you can't do gps. With Einsteinian physics you can do GPS because it takes into account relativity and it becomes specific enough that you can really nail something down. I'm perfectly willing to accept that it's possible that all the dice get rolled at exactly the right way and I fall through the chair because just every gap in the chair lines up, you know, with. Exactly. So could that happen?
- [43:13]
Peter Diamandis
Sure.
- [43:13]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
But that's probably not likely. And so given that we're in the most probable of all outcomes, this stuff gets predictable. Now I don't understand quantum physics well
- [43:27]
Peter Diamandis
enough, but so you know, Bell's theorem.
- [43:28]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
I don't Know Bells.
- [43:30]
Peter Diamandis
So at least not by that Bell's theorem is every time a decision is made, A or B, the universe splits.
- [43:37]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Okay, so that. I certainly have heard that.
- [43:40]
Peter Diamandis
And so we're living in a. A branch of the universe that was determined because I said the letter B instead letter A, Right?
- [43:52]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yeah. What do you take away from that, though?
- [43:54]
Peter Diamandis
Well, it's deterministic in an infinite number of ways.
- [43:58]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yes, but that wouldn't change your experience.
- [44:00]
Peter Diamandis
It wouldn't change my experience of it, no.
- [44:02]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yeah. So just without it sort of devolving into the many fractal branches, which from a theoretical standpoint or a philosophical standpoint, it's fun to think about. But from an experiential standpoint, the reason I asked this question, by the way, for those listening, I promise you this is going somewhere, is that when I look at AI and what AI has to do, the reason I think AI becomes the most transformational thing we will ever experience is because it will finally be able to map out a deterministic universe. And once you know the setup, then you can predict the outcome. Which is why I was asking about how understanding the folding of a protein, like what powers is that going to give us? So as a game developer, one of the things that I think a lot about is how you can create a very simple set of rules that has tremendous complexity.
- [44:54]
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
- [44:54]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
And so I have a feeling that Einstein was right, that there ultimately will be a very simple equation that will be self evident in its elegance that, oh, this is what the universe is born out of, because ultimately it is going to boil down to a set of rules. And it is the set of rules that give rise to the complexity. But this is why, and this is one thing that always fascinated me, that people without going to space could predict what space was going to be like. And therefore, say, you have to build a spaceship this way. You have to account for the way the gravity is going to change. And Einstein called his most beautiful thought, I think is how he referred to it, that a. Oh God, I forget how it's actually explained, but what weightlessness is like, fundamentally that somebody that was falling but had no reference point would simply experience it as being weightless. Oh, that's a horrible explanation. But anyway gets you close enough. So the fact that he could just think about the rules of the universe and be like, this must be true for this to be true. This is, is the necessary consequence. And that he struggled with his own theories and the predictions that they made in terms of quantum mechanics.
- [46:01]
Peter Diamandis
So did you see recently both DeepMind and Open AI released weather prediction models that were accurate 11 days out.
- [46:12]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Whoa.
- [46:14]
Peter Diamandis
So this is fascinating. And I saw this morning a prediction model on bitcoin.
- [46:20]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
So tell me more, Peter.
- [46:21]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, well, it was trending up through the end of the year. Not a huge amount, but it was trending up. I'm a bitcoin believer. But anyway, so anyway, the point being. Interesting, right? Can AI make accurate predictions in seemingly massively complex systems like weather? I mean, I can't think of anything more complex than weather or the financial markets. I mean, now it becomes fascinating if you're actually able to predict. And then the question becomes, well, if you can predict that, and I know, is that change my behavior in weather?
- [47:00]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
No. In financial markets, yes.
- [47:02]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. I mean, this goes back to, you know, I. I'll ask you the question. My thesis is we're living in a simulation, and it's an nth generation simulation. We're living within the simulation, within a simulation, within a simulation. Because I think we're going to have the technology to be able to do that. And we will because we can. And if that's in fact the case, I would do nothing different than I'm doing right now. We're in a game. How do you feel about that?
- [47:35]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
It's interesting. So the. I'm actually wearing the shirt right now. So I'm wearing a shirt for the video game that I'm building called Project Kaizen, which takes that as its hypothesis, which is everything you've ever known is a simulation. You have no body anywhere. There is no biological you. This is a simulation. And then once you know it's a simulation, then you can begin to manipulate it effectively. And that is me again as a sci fi writer, trying to explore what it will mean to understand the rules by which all of this apparent complexity is born out of. So I. For a long time. And look, honestly, it's only been in the last like month or two that I've started thinking maybe this really is a simulation. Just because the more I do thought exercises, probing at the edges of what would it mean for this to be built on a set of rules and why would it be built on a set of rules? And what built it on a set of rules, you just start asking things back recursively. And look, I map to what I understand. And since I understand simulations and video games, I map it to that. And so there could just be a fundamental flaw in my thinking, and I'm perfectly happy with that. But it does get harder and harder for me to exempt myself from the likelihood that this actually is a simulation,
- [48:58]
Peter Diamandis
I believe it inherently and I can't prove it. And again, even though I believe doesn't change anything, I remember I had a. I was at years ago, I was at a birthday party that Elon had Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Elon and I are having the conversation before the falling out, having a conversation about whether we're living in a simulation. And I think, I don't know if it was Larry or Elon said, yeah. The only way we're going to find out is if you try and tamper with it and the system resets. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. I wonder if this has been a subject conversation in ancient philosophical times as well. Have you ever seen any references to that? Plato's cave?
- [49:52]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yeah, yeah, very much the same idea again, mapping to what he knew. He knew campfires and shadows.
- [50:00]
Peter Diamandis
Two dimensions and three. Yes, exactly.
- [50:02]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
So that becomes the way that you think about it. But I. I think as people really begin to investigate the human mind, it is inevitable that you start going, hold on a second, you're seeing the world differently than me. And so then you go, wait a second, are either of us seeing the world the way that it actually is? And then once you understand that we're not, that we necessarily couldn't be, that my umvelt is different than a bat's umvelt, and therefore we are going to perceive everything very differently. And then you start going, wait a second. We're perceiving the world instead of just encountering it as it actually is.
- [50:40]
Peter Diamandis
So the technology that's going to come to make a dent in that is going to be BCI brain computer interface. Right. So if I'm able to connect my mind to your mind, I think there's going to be an interesting set of correlates. You know, can I. So there are dozens of companies right now working on. So you had 100 billion neurons in your brain, 100 trillion synaptic connections, and the neocortex, the top layer is your sensorium and your. Your homunculus of action and all your visual cortex, auditory cortex and such. And one can connect the digital signals in your brain or the electrical signals in your brain to electrodes and connect them to a computer. And those things are happening right now. You know, Elon's got his neural link. There's a company actually here called Paradromics which is doing that as well. There's a lot of amazing companies. And so we're going to start to be able to understand visually One of my favorite recent AI blow your mind examples was a group took subjects and put them inside of a functional MRI machine, which is looking at blood flow going through different parts of the tissue in your brain. And the more the blood flow, the more the neurons are active because they're using more glucose and oxygen and so forth. And they took the output of the MRI and they fed it into stable diffusion, and they gave the subjects in the functional MRI machine an image to look at. Look at an image of an airplane. Look at it and think about that. And then they took the signals out of the FMRI and were able to see the person was looking at an airplane.
- [52:28]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
That's crazy, right? And they could interpret the brain. Say, this is what you're looking at.
- [52:33]
Peter Diamandis
Yes. Yo. Awesome.
- [52:35]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
That's mind reading.
- [52:36]
Peter Diamandis
It's mind reading. Yes, it is mind reading. And so we're heading in that direction. And so one of the things I think about is you and I both are not a single living organism. All right? You have to think about that. We're a collection of 40 trillion human cells. 30 trillion if you're smaller, 50 trillion if you're bigger. And those human cells are each individual living organisms working together and also competing for resources. But the competing, or. Yes, and supporting each other in that. In the, you know, distribution of resources. You also have more than those 40 trillion life forms in the form of bacteria and virus and fungi as an ecosystem in your body. But you're not. You know, we think of ourselves as Tom or Peter, but we're far more. I think we're heading towards a point where if I can connect my brain to the cloud and you can connect your brain to the cloud, and all of a sudden, I've got godlike powers with a small G. I'm omniscient, omnipotent. I'm omnipresent. I can know anything. I can think in Google. I can look through your eyes, you know, or through the eyes of someone watching a sunrise in Tokyo. It is. We're now a meta intelligence. We're at a new level of. Of. Of empathy and connection between humans. You know, I love Star Trek, as you. As you well know. Are you Trekkie or Star Wars?
- [54:16]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Star Wars.
- [54:16]
Peter Diamandis
I'm so sorry for that. You're wrong. You picked the wrong. Pick the wrong part, but it's okay. You know, the only thing. And I, you know, the only thing that Roddenberry got wrong was the Borg. You know, the Borg are the, you know, the evil, you know, networked minds. But I think. I think we're going to head towards a level of consciousness on the planet. As we start to connect millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of individuals, I think we become conscious at yet another level. I call that a meta intelligence. And I think that's coming as well. Enabled by AI, enabled by this brain computer interface. You can imagine if I gave you the ability to connect your brain to the cloud and you plugged in for that moment and all of a sudden you could understand what you want, you knew anything you wanted. You were connected to this new vault of, you know, of infinite knowledge. And then I unplugged you. How would you feel? I think you'd feel so lonely and disconnected. So I think once you plug in, you know, this is more the Matrix than not. So we can get it to you. One of your favorite genres. But I think that's coming enabled by AI. You know, let me go one other slight subject and then we can, you can take it back where you want. We just had visioneering at xprize. Xprize we hold an annual event called Visioneering, where we brainstorm ideas. And that would become great X prizes. And this past visioneering, we had a couple of good AI X prizes. One is AI for truth. When someone makes a statement, can you have an AI algorithm that's able very rapidly to say factual truth? Here's the roots of that. This is opinion or this is disinformation. I think that'd be very useful in our coming world. The other one, which was AI mediated communication between any two species. Whoa. Right? Can I talk to whales or dolphins in a. In a consistent, accurate two way fashion?
- [56:47]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
That'd be nuts.
- [56:47]
Peter Diamandis
That would be amazing.
- [56:49]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yeah, I'd love that for my dog. That would be a trip.
- [56:53]
Peter Diamandis
I know.
- [56:53]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Be a trip.
- [56:54]
Peter Diamandis
It would be take me out food. But you know, on a consistent basis. I mean, you can imagine, like if you could talk to whales and dolphins, they would help you explore the oceans or talk to birds. There's a kid that's missing in the forest here, help me find them, dude.
- [57:10]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
So that's very interesting. And I know the way your brain works. And you take a very beautiful, optimistic look at that. It would be utterly fascinating. So killer whales are vicious. Vicious. And they will go eat a great white's liver just because they can. And they will toy with dolphins. There are dolphins that will kill other dolphins and they'll mess with them. Dolphins that try to have sex with humans. I mean, just, just on and on.
- [57:38]
Peter Diamandis
Like it's crazy stories.
- [57:40]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
And I have a feeling that were we to actually be able to communicate with animals. It may be a little more distressing than we want to believe. I read a story a long time ago and I did find this very interesting. This speaks to your interpretation of the Borg as being a misread. And it was these creatures that had these tails that had like these almost fiber optic tendrils. And when they would connect them.
- [58:04]
Peter Diamandis
Sounds like Avatar.
- [58:05]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yes. I would be shocked if he hadn't read this story because it is very similar to that. But this was years ago. I read this probably 30 years ago, 35 years ago. And they would connect their tales and they would instantly know the entire history, emotional milieu of the person they were connecting. And what was interesting was how once you could no longer lie or hide anything from anybody, there was. There was a relaxed sort of acceptance.
- [58:37]
Peter Diamandis
This is who I am, like it or not. Yeah. This is who I am. You got your own bullshit, I've got mine.
- [58:42]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yeah.
- [58:42]
Peter Diamandis
I mean, honestly. And when I think about it on, on a relationship side, and this is something that, you know, talk to Lisa more about. The ability to be absolutely brutally honest about your feelings, about your desires, about everything you've ever done. I mean, how many people actually have people in their lives that know everything about you, where there's zero to hide? I mean, it's like, like in a relationship and you look at a woman and go, wow, she's gorgeous. And you're willing to say that and, and, or, you know, something that you were ashamed of having done, but everything is fully disclosed. I think that level of intimacy would be amazing. Amazing.
- [59:28]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
It would be you. You. Oh, man. The, the symmetry that would have to be there though, because if there's even slight imbalance of.
- [59:36]
Peter Diamandis
Sure. And. And therefore a lot of relationships would not work. But when they do click and there's full disclosure and your deepest likes, deepest fears are fully known to both sides. It is a level of complete honesty. And I mean, someone who knows you as well as you know yourself. I mean that. I mean, we're going on a very different conversational subject, but I think that is. That was something I would desperately love. And I have a few friends in my life where it's like they know almost everything possible. And it's not that I wouldn't disclose things to them, it's just we've never had those conversations. And those are people closest to me. Right.
- [60:25]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
For whatever dysfunction I have, only my wife knows me like that. I don't know why I. I don't
- [60:32]
Peter Diamandis
just share them with. Share it with me now. Right. Now.
- [60:34]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yeah, there you go. Live, live on camera.
- [60:36]
Peter Diamandis
And then you have a billion people know about it.
- [60:38]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
The funny thing is that I don't actively hold things back. Like I'm a pretty open book. But it is like there's something about sharing your life with somebody where they see all the, like, what do you like when you're sick? What do you like when something goes really well, when something goes really poorly? And there's, there's just too much intimacy for there to be any posturing whatsoever because they just see you too often. Yeah, it's interesting.
- [61:05]
Peter Diamandis
So these are the things that I are going to enable. You know, imagine with this level of BCI where you can't lie. I mean, interesting, right? Because you could probably make up simulated truths that you honestly believe. And people do do that. Anyway, going back, where do you want to take this back to? Let's rewind the tape here.
- [61:30]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Well, so the thing that I want to know. So this is all very interesting to me in terms of where this goes and how far out it gets. And it really does become quite fascinating. But right now there are tremendous opportunities for people that really understand what's going on. Obviously, bold capital, this is a big part of where you place your bets is do I understand a little bit more than other people where this is all going? So what, what is the right now, today bridge? What are the opportunities that somebody listening to this should understand? Whether it's AI, quantum computing, longevity, where are the big opportunities?
- [62:07]
Peter Diamandis
So I, I believe without question, the two biggest business markets on the planet are AI and longevity. Right. If you think about, from a national standpoint, a national leader of a country should care about the health and the, the integral of intelligence over their country. If you could increase the intelligence of your nation by 20%. Right. Or the health of your nation by 20%. Massive. Right. Or in a company, increase the intelligence of your, of your, your workforce or the health of your workforce. These are huge levers to move. You know, I'm often keynoting inside of companies or YPO events or other, you know, about those two subjects. I mean, that's my typical, like that's all that matters right now. AI and longevity. And, and I'll ask people in a, in a, you know, a wealthy group, individuals. I mean, honestly, how much of your capital would you give up for an extra 20 healthy years? And if they're honest about it, it's well over 50% of, of their. Of you're going to spend it anyway at the end of your life. Yeah, right. Trying to like, deal with.
- [63:23]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Wouldn't you give a hundred percent?
- [63:25]
Peter Diamandis
I think people would, but then they say, well, I'm gonna leave it to my kids or going to leave it to my philanthropy or whatever the case might be.
- [63:31]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Hold on, hold on, hold on. I want to paint a scenario. You. You are before.
- [63:37]
Peter Diamandis
I. I am. I am with you. I'm, you know, listen, I don't want to.
- [63:40]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
But then leave the money to my kids, their behalf. I want to understand this mindset because this.
- [63:45]
Peter Diamandis
Me.
- [63:46]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
You were before a credible source. Let's call this credible source God, just to make it easy. And God is like, hey, bro, button on the left. You get 20 extra years, but you're going to give me every dime. All of your assets, everything.
- [64:00]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
- [64:01]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Button on the right. You die tomorrow, but you get to give your family all your assets.
- [64:07]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
- [64:08]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
You're telling me that there are people that hit the button.
- [64:10]
Peter Diamandis
100%. Whoa. Because people want to leave a legacy. Why the hell do you give a billion dollars to Harvard? Do they really need another billion dollars? You know, you want a legacy there. People want to know that they're going to live their. Their legacy is going to live after them, whether it's in the form of their kids or the form of their name. And so, yeah, there's a balancing act. Maybe it's 20% that they would hold back.
- [64:41]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Like, those are not the buttons before you. There is no 20. There's all or nothing.
- [64:45]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. But you.
- [64:46]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Wow, okay. That's crazy to me. And.
- [64:50]
Peter Diamandis
But going back to your question, I think longevity is one of the largest business opportunities that's going to materialize over the decade.
- [64:58]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Take advantage of it.
- [64:58]
Peter Diamandis
What.
- [64:59]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
What are you doing to be ahead of the curve?
- [65:03]
Peter Diamandis
Well, building companies there in that. So Fountain Life is my. My biggest company. I'm building for a global footprint for enabling everyone to have access to the best therapeutics and the best diagnostics. Right. The diagnostics are. Is there anything going on inside your body right now you need to know about? If there is, you want to know because you can take action. We find 2% of the people who go through Fountain Life have a cancer they don't know about. Two and a half percent have an aneurysm they don't know about 14.4% have either metabolic disease, neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease, something you need to take action on right away.
- [65:44]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
And so the thesis there is your body no longer needs to be a black box.
- [65:49]
Peter Diamandis
Yes. The. The thesis is your body's amazingly good at hiding disease. Incredibly good.
- [65:54]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
And you're better off confronting.
- [65:56]
Peter Diamandis
You're better off knowing as early as you can because you can do something about all of these things.
- [66:02]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
And why now? What. What is because.
- [66:04]
Peter Diamandis
Because the tech is there to image at high fidelity without the false negatives, and the tech is there to understand what the data means. Right? So a friend of mine, super successful individual who I'm doing business with in, in Fountain Life, and, and, and he wanted to go through the experience, goes through the experience, and we discover two aneurysms and in his brain. Wow. Serious aneurysms. He is in surgery a week later. They're. They're clipped and blocked. And he's fine in that threat. But had he not, it was a ticking time bomb for him. Right. We all know people who have, oh my God, they died in their sleep or they go to the hospital and the doctor says, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you got stage three or stage four, whatever is. It didn't happen that morning. It's been going on for some time. You just don't know how. So the stats are the following. 70% of people who have a heart attack had no previous symptoms. Right. You don't detect cancer until it's stage three or four from a pain or something going on. It is a slow. Your body's amazingly good at hiding it. You don't develop a, a Parkinsonian tremor until 70% of the substantia nigra neurons are gone. And so you need to look. And people say, I don't want to know. I say, of course you want to know as early as you can fully
- [67:36]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
know because there's now things you can
- [67:39]
Peter Diamandis
do about it for sure. Medicine has progressed incredibly well and it's moving. And if you're wealthy, you want to know because I'm going to fund the research to solve that thing. Right. So in Fountain, the two questions is, is something going on you need to know about today? And if there isn't, fantastic. I go every year for my upload, and then I'm tested throughout the year on stuff that I'm incrementally improving. The second thing is, what are you likely to develop and how do we push that off? How do we solve that? How do we reduce your chance of heart neurovascular, you know, whatever it might be. So that's what I'm building. I built a couple of companies, one in stem cells with Bob Hariri, who's a CEO there, called Cellularity, another one called Vaccinity that's developing vaccines. So vaccines are amazing things. Your brain is the most complicated machine in the universe that we know of. Your immune system is the next. Your immune system is protecting you against infectious disease, against cancers. Right? We're all developing cancers all the time. And your immune system, your natural killer cells, find those cancer cells because cells replicate a certain number called the hayflick limit, 50, 60 replications, and then they should have the decency to die. If they don't, they can become senile cells putting out inflammatory factors, or they can become cancer cells, immortal cells, and they grow. And your natural killer cells detect those cancer cells and zap them. But as you grow older, you have something called immuno exhaustion, your immune system starts to slow down and you don't detect it and they can start to grow. And so if you can find cancers on mri, there are things called the grail tests, which take a liquid biopsy, blood biopsy, and looking for cancer DNA in your bloodstream. And so you can do something about these now. So vaccines, that's where I was, I was talking about vaccines. So vaccines, we know about it from MRNA vaccines for Covid and such. But we can now develop vaccines to activate your immune system to fight cancer,
- [69:56]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
like go attack that you can vaccinate against cancer.
- [70:01]
Peter Diamandis
There are cancer vaccines now being developed. The first one that was approved by the FDA was for melanoma, which is one of the most deadliest cancers. One of my companies, Vaccinity, has a vaccine in phase two for Parkinson's, going to phase three for Alzheimer's. We have a phase one asset in hypercholesteremia. So going a vaccine which goes, you vaccinate yourself, it activates your immune system to go and go after a particular enzyme in the liver called PCSK9 which creates the bad cholesterol, LDL, low density lipoproteins. And that vaccine, which you'd vaccinate yourself twice a year for two injections a year. Injections might be 20 bucks, 50 bucks basically drops your cholesterol level down. So I have hypercholesteremia in my family. My dad had very high cholesterol, whole slew of medical stuff. So I'm very sensitive to it. I don't want to do statins. I take a very small amount of statin for an anti inflammatory effect, that's a different story. But I take something called a. I take something called Repatha, which is a, a antibody that's manufactured in a vat and I get a few mls of this and I have to inject it every two weeks. That antibody goes to that PCSK9 enzyme in my liver and blocks it from producing LDL. Now it cost me $10,000 a year and I have to do it every two weeks. But it drops my LDL level down into a beautiful green zone. I'm using these antibodies produced in a manufacturing plant and shipped to me. What we built in vaccinity was a vaccine that I inject and it causes my own immune system to manufacture that same antibody for free to block that PCSK9 enzyme. That makes sense.
- [72:19]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Yes. And you're doing that now?
- [72:21]
Peter Diamandis
Yes, I'm not. Well, we're developing the vaccine right now. The first results were amazing. We're, you know, going from phase one into phase two. Long story short, the ability there are these monoclonal antibodies which are like the top selling drugs. And it's using these antibodies, which are proteins, to go and block a certain process. We talked about that a little bit earlier, but they're expensive. But the idea now is instead of manufacturing these monoclonal antibodies in a vat, in a pharma manufacturing plant, can you just teach your own immune system to produce that same antibody? And that's the future of vaccines. The vaccine is playing your immune system like an app.
- [73:16]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Okay, let me see if I can boil that down to a thesis. So for somebody that is trying to figure out where the opportunities are right now because we're living in this hyper disruptive time, I want people to be aware of the ways in which things are being disrupted so that they can go in and take advantage.
- [73:34]
Peter Diamandis
There's so. Yeah, okay, so I'm going, we're going back to the investment side here. So listen, we're in the middle of a biotech winter right now. Just to be clear, there was. If you look at all the biotech companies out there, they're significantly depressed. So if you're playing the public markets and you find companies that have good cash position and have strong potential drug candidates, it's a great time to buy because the stocks are all like 10 or 100 fold depressed. So I just put that out there one second. I think health, I think the medical system, the healthcare system is so broken, it's pathetic. I think we're gonna, I think it's gonna crumble under its own weight. And so we're going to reinvent how we deliver healthcare. I think at home. You're going to all be, we're all going to be monitored. So I'm wearing a continuous glucose monitor right now. I've got my OURA ring, I've got my Apple watch. There's going to be a whole slew of wearables. All of that wearable data is going to monitor me 24 7. So one of the things we do at Fountain as well is we bring in all your wearable data. So in between your annual uploads, which are deep dives into you, we're monitoring what's going on. So we're going to see.
- [74:50]
Interviewer / Sci-Fi Writer
Are you making recommendations based on what you see?
- [74:53]
Peter Diamandis
Absolutely. Absolutely. So for supporting your sleep, for supporting your diet. So my, my continuous glucose monitor, right. And there's companies like Levels or there's Free Libre, there's others that measure how your body reacts to eating those peanuts or that Snickers bar and how quickly your blood sugar elevates and how quickly it goes back down. And based upon that, you know, going into pre diabetic or becoming a diabetic, your glucose is, is a poison in the body. I don't know if people realize that our bodies were never designed to eat as much sugar as we do. And glucose sticks to proteins and then your immune system sees that glycosylated protein as a foreign and attacks it and causes inflammation. So a lot of cardiovascular disease and neuroinflammatory disease is a result of people's diet, but you don't talk about that. No one talks about that.