AI, Elon, Abundance, and Longevity — With Peter Diamandis

Peter Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, a New York Times bestselling author, and host of the Moonshot Podcast. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a fun, wide-ranging conversation touching on his belief around AI, his friendship with Elon Musk, Abundance and happiness, and how we can live longer, including an incoming lifespan explosion. Tune in for a fun, thought provoking conversation that covers a lot of ground on today's crucial topics. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  One of the biggest thinkers in tech and innovation joins us to talk about AI abundance, Elon Musk, and extending your lifespan. All that and more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience, and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then, I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

• 0:46Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Peter Diamandis. He's the founder and executive chairman of the X Prize Foundation. He's a multiple-time bestselling author. He's also the host of the Great Moonshot Podcast. Peter, welcome to the show.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Thank you, Alex. Great to be here.

• 1:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great to have you here. I've been following your work for quite some time and know you recently held this abundance summit where you talked a lot about artificial intelligence. You had some great speakers there. And I think the main question there was whether AI is going to help us boom, or AI is going to be the end of us, this boomers versus doomers framework. And you just wrote on X right before this, "I reiterate that AI will be humanity's greatest hope, or will be our gravest threat. There is no in-between." So, I really wanted to, we talk about the nuance here. Why is it one or the other? And if it's one or the other, and I know, of course, we have some determination on which way we go, but which way do you think we're headed?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's one or the other because it is so extraordinarily powerful. It's not a little bit more powerful than an intelligent human. Claude 3 was at an IQ of 101. We just saw GPT-

• 2:27Speaker 01

  For oh released that exceeds Claude three. But there's no boundary level here. There's no boundary for human level. It's going to continue to increase and there's no reason to believe it's not going to get a hundred times or a thousand times or a million or a billion times more powerful than the average human, what's typically called digital superintelligence. And once it's there, if it is in support of our society, of humanity, of Homo sapiens, it's our greatest hope ever. It's a boomer opportunity, right? It's helping us cure all of our ills, explore the stars, you know, up level our dreams. If it's used for dystopian

• 3:11Speaker 01

  purposes, I don't think AI on its own is going to be dystopian. I think it's the human use of AI that could be dystopian. Then you've got a tool that is the most dangerous tool on the planet. So that's the, that's the debate, you know, I had my, I have my abundance summit every year where I, you know, support and, and coach 400 CEOs. And that was the theme this year, the greatest hope or, or the, the greatest threat for humanity.

• 3:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so what are you leaning towards right now?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm, you know, I'm not only the optimist, I'm the guy who says the glass isn't half full, the glass is overflowing. I truly believe that as systems become more and more intelligent, they get more abundant minded, more loving of life, more supportive. You know, a, if you look, there was a study done by a friend of mine, Alvin Graylin, in his latest, latest book, The New Reality, and he looked at leaders around the world who were sort of the despots and the greatest leaders. And there was a direct correlation with the amount of school they had, how much learning they had, how open minded they are. Because if you've got

• 4:25Speaker 01

  A digital superintelligence who you tell go and destroy these people. I mean, honestly, there are ways to get your solution without killing. And I think we're going to see digital superintelligence potentially helps society really survive over the decades ahead.

• 4:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's interesting. So your belief is that the more education we get, the more empathetic we're going to be and as AIs get more educated, then therefore they will resemble the same qualities?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  I think I put it a different way as well, which is if you think about wisdom, right? We talk about our societal leaders being wise, right? Our elders being wise. And, you know, you ask, what do they, why are they wise? Well, they've seen so many things in their life. You go to them and say, you know, village elder, what do you think's going to happen here? What should we do? Well, I saw that 40 years ago, whatever. Can you imagine a digital superintelligence that is able to play out a billion simulations of every scenario and see where they lead? That is the ultimate wisdom. And, you know, people say, well, people are going to fight over things that are scarce and rare resources.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I don't think there's such a thing as scarcity. Scarcity is contextual, right? We think of energy being scarce, but we were bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species in a year. And we're about to really bring fusion online. You know, we don't have, you know, food scarcity, but we're reinventing how to produce food in vertical farms or cultivated meats. So there are ways to really use technology to turn scarcity into abundance over and over again. And that's what intelligence can do.

• 6:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But also, aren't, I mean, evil people are, you know, the most evil people have been very smart. And the thing that makes them so dangerous is that they don't have, let's say, the morals that would keep them from doing the damage. So you can have one very smart evil person doing way more damage than a bunch of really smart benevolent people. So how do you square that in the equation here?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  So listen, there is most definitely that risk, right? I'm not worried about. Uh, you know, artificial intelligence, I'm worried about human stupidity. To put they put that in juxtapositioning. The only way to guard against that is it's white hat, black hat in this scenario. The ability to use AI to guard us. I do, you have to ask yourself the question in your heart. Do you believe on the whole, human nature is good or evil? In the majority of of humans, right? We have more and more individuals, which we can call entrepreneurs, who can find and solve problems. The more people finding and solving problems, the better the world gets.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  I I like to say in the work I do in my abundance summit. You know, the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. And so we're going to have more and more people trying to solve big problems. Are we going to have people using these technologies for for selfish? You know, reasons for, you know, reasons that could injure society 100%. Do we have the ability to detect it and fight it? We do.

• 7:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  And let's talk about governance quickly because we've been talking right now with this kind of amorphous. Like what will AI do? And I think that so many conversations about AI tend to sort of, and I think we've kind of already touched on it. Remove the humans from the equation. But you at the very beginning started talking about we have anthropic, we have Google. Now Elon is trying to build superintelligence. Who do you think is going to control it? And should we, let's say, one organization, let's say, for instance, Google is able to achieve some form of superintelligence. Right? For instance, let's say they create AI that can improve AI and it just continues to accelerate. And we have lift off. What are the risks of having a single entity control this superintelligence? Whether it's a company or a government?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Alex, there's good news here. In that we have seen not a single company, but we've seen five, six, seven, eight companies all in parallel. Delivering similar generative AI capabilities. And they're all priced either free or like 20 bucks a month. Right? No one was so far ahead that's like, this is a million bucks if you get a chance to use it. Right? So the fact that there are multiple players.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  And they're all starting at or near zero is a super positive. Indication of the future. I don't think you're gonna have.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  People all of a sudden, you know, all eight of them getting into a cabal and saying, okay, let's all charge a thousand bucks a month because we can.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  You also have great business models like Google that is and Baidu, which is, you know, been available for free around the world. And there, these companies are making money on secondary and tertiary implications of that free business model. And I think you're gonna see that here with AI as well. I think AI will become ultimately the best educator on the planet and the best diagnostician on the planet available on your mobile phone. And I think that educator, again, the best on the planet will be available for free. To the poorest child and the wealthiest child. And it won't be like it's a little bit better for the person who's wealthy.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Just like Google for Larry Page's kids is not different than Google for a kid in a favela using it.

• 10:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. So my wife and I were just talking about like how much time it takes to tutor kids and like help them do their homework. And now you can, I guess you can ostensibly just turn over a lot of this to a world-class tutor. That's gonna be able to look at their homework, work with them on their homework, even attend PTA meetings and get the notes. So you can be better, better parents. And that is, that is pretty interesting to me.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. And you've got, you know, Sol Khan with Khan Academy with Khan Amigo, which is a GPT-4 powered version of it. And, you know.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  This year at Abundance 360, I showed a video of Steve Jobs years ago saying, you know, I'm so jealous that Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor. And so I said to the audience, let me introduce you to Aristotle. And Steve Brown, my chief AI officer, had created a digital avatar of Aristotle based on all of his works. And I had conversations and I used Aristotle as a co-host. And that is now true, which all the great educators of all time, and their works and their knowledge and their philosophies are available to you and your kids to have a conversation or debate with.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Be taught about Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer directly. I mean, this is the world we're heading, and it's free.

• 11:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay, one last question about AI, then we're going to move on to Elon. I want to ask you where you think the economic benefit is going to be here, because you brought up a very interesting point, that, you know, you think about the OpenAI's and the Claude's, it's 20 bucks a month or it's free. And OpenAI recently said, all right, your, our latest model, GPT-4O, free for everyone. So who's going to make money here, Peter?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it's going to be based on up-leveling the values and services. So I have a company called Fountain Life, for example, which is what I consider the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics company. And we employ the best functional medicine doctors and put you through a full-day diagnostic and then take all of the data, analyze it, and deliver it back to you. And we can do it without AI in the loop. It's just more difficult and more complicated and is not as good as having AI in the loop. So we will make money by delivering a better service that is made more accurate, faster,

• 12:52Speaker 01

  able to service. More members by using AI.

• 12:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, the application.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  So it's going to be the application. When I tell people entrepreneurs, I say, listen, do you want to start an AI company? You need two things, unique data and a relationship with a marketplace that you can offer to. So the AI is becoming democratized and demonetized. The data and the market and the AI together create new businesses.

• 13:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. All right. Let's, let's go to Elon. You know, we, we, it's always interesting speaking about Elon on this podcast. When we bring out the critics, like we had some Elon critics on a couple of weeks ago, and the inbox flooded with negative comments because people love Elon. And then we bring on people that support Elon, and then the inbox floods with negative comments because there are people who hate him. You've been friends with him for 20 years. So I basically, this is the sort of the way that we're approaching Elon on the show is we're going to talk with the people who love him and the people who have critics, who critique him. And hopefully over time, listeners will get a nuanced picture of him because that's sort of what we're and basically come to their own conclusions.

• 14:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right? Like, we're not going to tell you how to think on this show. And Peter, you've been friends with him for 20 years.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  24 years, yeah.

• 14:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  You were there at the very beginning of SpaceX. So I'm curious, I'd love to hear a, like your reflection of, of what makes Elon different than others as an entrepreneur? And then also why you think it's so difficult to have these nuanced conversations about him?

• 14:29Speaker 01

  I think he's extraordinarily brilliant. He is genius level IQ and he's, he's got incredible conviction. Right? So Elon's what he would call a first principles thinker. You know, he will evaluate a situation to first principles, like the physics of what's going on, reach a conclusion. And then what he does that very few others have done is he puts it all on black, right? Or all on red. He bets everything. Including his reputation, including his health, including his time. And he goes all in. And I find that extraordinary.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  You know, we have so many billionaires out there that are just sitting on their wealth. You know, they built a company, they made money and all of that, but they're not reinvesting it in other moonshots, right? They're sitting on a hundred billion dollars of wealth and using that to buy more houses or more yachts or to make more money with their wealth. It's like, you know, what are you going to do with it? You're going to give it to your kids and ruin their lives? You're going to give it to your lawyers to give away? Or why don't you use both your wealth and your intelligence to go and pick problems and solve them? And Elon's done that over and over again. So kudos to him. You know, on, I remember January 7th of 2021, he became the wealthiest person on the planet.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  I think that was the date. And he was getting a lot of criticism about not being philanthropic. Now, he had funded a few years earlier, a $15 million Global Learning X Prize to teach kids in Africa, reading, writing, arithmetic without any adults, just on an app on a tablet. And it was a great success. And so I texted him and I said, Elon, a lot of critique on philanthropy, how about funding another X Prize? And he said, what do you have in mind? And I said, we have a $100 million Gigaton Carbon Removal Prize that we need someone to underwrite. And he wrote back, sure. That was it.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Two months later, we were launching this $100 million prize. You know, he donated like, I don't know what it was, $130 million for the purse and for the operations. And again, he's, when he's clear about what he wants to do, the decision process of making it happen is, is amazing, you know? And if you remember, he is a consummate engineer, right? Starship, Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship. Amazing engineers that follow him and he is able to get the best, including Gwen Shotwell, who really, as president, operates SpaceX. But he also has got a clear fundamental vision.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  And I just salute the guy. The world is a much, much better place because of him.

• 17:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then what do you think about this, about how polarizing he is? I just think that, I'll just give you like, one perspective here. I think he, he so often just kind of steps in it unnecessarily. And you think about some of like the, the tweets he's done, um, you know, the Paul Pelosi tweet, or this Fauci prison tweet that he did, which was, you know,

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Unnecessary. I agree with you.

• 17:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, as a friend, you want to protect him. Um, and say, don't do that. There's a lot of friends you do, but he's, what you see is what you get. He speaks his mind always. Most of the times that's brilliant. Some of the times he gets in trouble.

• 18:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think that, um, I mean, people, I'm curious if you have context on this. People, it seems from the outside that he's like pretty impulsive in terms of the things that he does. It seems like Twitter wasn't impulsed by, even the most recent where he fired a good chunk of the, or I think the entire supercharger team. Uh, now he's trying to hire some of them back and, uh, people were like, okay, is this the end of superchargers? But maybe he just needed, seems like he, when he wants to just redo something, he just kind of clears the deck and tries to start over.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is he a little bit too impulsive?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  He's very impulsive, but there's always a fundamental underneath that. I mean, the Twitter purchase, while it was an impulse, I think he, he was, he had a clear vision of what Twitter could be, right? He had a clear vision of X when he had built PayPal. He wanted the ultimate, uh, banking institution and, and X, now X.com will become not only a platform for communications and for conversations like this, it'll become a bank, it'll become, you know, wallets, it'll become crypto, it'll become all of those things. One layer at a time and he'll turn it, you know, Elon will be the first trillionaire out there. He'll turn, uh, X into an extraordinary platform, uh, SpaceX and, you know, and Starlink,

• 19:27Speaker 01

  uh, which I gotta admit, Starlink is brilliant, right? It's been tried so many times before with Globalstar and Iridium and Teledesic and they all failed.

• 19:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, I mean, he's definitely, he realized, I think, with Starlink that he had the rockets. When you got the rockets, the, it's not that the notion of building a global internet based on satellite is trivial, but it's much more feasible than if you're trying to ride somebody else's.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  It had been tried before by companies that own rockets, like Orbital Sciences with Orbcom. It's just, not only did he have the rockets, he had the engineering brilliance to create something that has dominated the field. And I know of many people who have tried to do this and just failed. So it's the combination of, what's the Greek word? Chutzpah?

• 20:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Kohonos, and brilliance, and capital. And also, you know, he has the ability to do something which is biblical, which is speak a vision, right? And literally create it by being able to aggregate the capital and the talent and the marketing and birth it, right? The same here at X.ai. I mean, from zero to a huge valuation by virtue of his involvement.

• 20:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to talk to you about that, about Neuralink, but I just want to ask one more follow-up here, which is, do you think that saying like Elon is who he is, is that letting him off the hook a little too easily?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  I think he has got responsibility, given the platform he has and the people who follow him and worship him, to have some clear thinking before he makes some of the statements he makes. I do agree with that. And... And he is who he is. Uh, meaning I have, I have, I've been in conversations or seen him in conversations where when a person said the wrong trigger, a different Elon comes out.

• 21:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  And again, on the whole, it's not like he's a little bit better for humanity. I think he's a thousand X better for humanity and the things that he's taking on. The world's a better place because he's here investing his brilliance and his mind.

• 22:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  One thing I'll say is, um, I think that he does not operate from fear, which is, and I think we're going to talk about that a little later, but just it is, it is interesting how so many people say this can't be done and, and he's like, basically when he gets an idea, he will try it.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  He's like, the bullshit, I'll just make it happen. If he's, if he's done the mental physics, uh, from a first principle thinking standpoint, he will take it on and a lot of times he'll see things that others don't see. Other times he will just brute force it into existence.

• 22:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  So on Neuralink, it seems interesting because we, we've obviously seen like the first Neuralink device implanted. It looks like it's had some pretty impressive results already. One thing I think you brought up to him is that, is there, is there going to be this moment where Neuralink is going to connect our brains with AI and effectively couple us with it. So I'd love to hear your thoughts about like whether that's the direction it's going to go and, you know, should be excited about something like that.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Uh, the answer is without question, we're going that way. Right? So here I've got my, my cell phone.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  It does a lot of capabilities onboard, but when it wants to do something difficult, it uses the 5G network to go to the edge of the cloud, do the calculations there and send the answer back. Our brains are limited in their abilities, a hundred billion neurons, a hundred trillion synaptic connections. And there's going to be a time in the not too distant future, Ray Kurzweil's prediction is 2033, right? For a high bandwidth brain computer interface where I think it. And that thought goes through Neuralink or whatever company to the edge of the cloud, where the processing gets done, and then the answer comes back to my brain. You know, we can't make our brains any bigger.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Our neocortex, this folded layer on the brain, was an attempt by evolution to increase that outer layer of the brain. It folded onto itself to get increased surface area. But our brains can't get any bigger because we would not be able to be given birth through mom's birth canal. So the only way to expand it is what we do with our cell phones. Ray predicted high bandwidth brain-computer interface in 2033. We have Neuralink. We have, you know, a half dozen other companies out there that are up in operational.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  And, you know, this year, for example, on stage at my abundance summit this in March of 25, I have an amazing woman from MIT who has a brand-new approach with these microscopic circulatronic chips that are less than the size of a red blood cell that will be introduced into your, you know, your arterial system and go and flow into the brain and give you millions of connection points. Right? So these sorts of technologies are coming. It's fantastic voyage from the movie and the book. You know, there are companies like Paradromics, they're doing amazing work right now, and BlackRock and others. If you think about what is the most valuable thing you could do to increase the capability

• 25:29Speaker 01

  of your employees or your country, it would be to increase the intelligence of your people.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  And so AI is part of that, but also, you know, BCI is part of that. And ultimately, the merger of humans and AI coupling, as we talked about it, is likely where we're going.

• 25:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are you gonna be an early adopter on that stuff?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  I, listen, I cannot, I can't go anyplace without this thing, right? It's my augmented, I'm on stage in front of, you know, 5,000 people and I will ask the question, is there anybody here who does not have their cellphone? And there's not a hand that goes up. The last time a hand went up, I said, "Do you not own one?" He goes, "No, no, I, I lost it in my Uber on the Y here." So it's like, we all are dependent on this. This is, this is an extension of our, of our brain. So I think that's reality.

• 26:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  So that's a yes to the early adopter question?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yeah, early adopter.

• 26:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. You, we've talked so much, we've used the word abundance so much today. And you have this abundance summit, you've talked about getting to abundance. It's one of the things you talk about a lot. But I, for those who haven't heard about it before, what, what do you, what is abundance? Like, what is your definition of it? Do we have it?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  We have it to an extraordinary amount compared to humanity 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago. Abundance is access to the fundamentals of life. It's not about a world of luxury, it's about a world of opportunity. I define technology as a force that takes whatever is scarce and makes it abundant. Let me give you some examples. So we used to kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights. That's how we got energy, right? Then technology allowed us to ravage mountainsides and get coal. Then we drilled kilometers under the ground for oil and natural gas.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Now we can use photovoltaics and soon perovskite to convert sunlight into electricity. And there's 8,000 times more energy that hits the surface of the earth than we consume as a species in a year. So this energy is there, it's just not in a usable form yet. And so technology takes what's there and not usable and makes it usable. Another example's water, right? We talked about water wars, water scarcity, but we live on a, on a water planet, right? We have two thirds of our planet's covered by water. We've, but unfortunately, it's 97.5% salt, you know, 2% is ice and we fight over half a percent. We just launched an X Prize. I'm very proud to be chairman of the X Prize.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  We have launched 30 X Prizes in 30 years.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  About $600 million in competitions. And we just launched a $120 million prize, our largest ever, out of Abu Dhabi for large-scale desalination. Can we improve the process of giving everybody access to clean water? So abundance is access to food, water, energy, healthcare, education, you know, ultimately more time even? Can we get time abundance? Right? Well, working on that through longevity. We get time abundance by, I don't know if you remember the old days, I used to go to the library to research a report. I would spend, you know, hour getting there, looking through card catalogs, trying to

• 28:59Speaker 01

  find the book, not finding the book, going to another library. Now, Google gives us back those two or three hours. There's more time abundance that way. So all of the charts are up and to the right. Unfortunately, we have an abundance of empty calories, too, leading to obesity. We have an abundance of carbon in the atmosphere. So it's not all positive, but we, majority, vast majority of this abundance is giving every man, woman, and child access to the fundamentals of, that we need.

• 29:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And if we have so much abundance, why do you think people are so unhappy? Or are they not unhappy?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's fascinating. One of the primary reasons is we judge ourselves against our neighbor. There is a, there's a concept which all of us have in our minds, 150 people that we consider our peers. And

• 30:08Speaker 01

  They are your friends. They're people you see on TV all the time. They are people that that you have a relationship with and you judge yourself not based upon how far you've come or how far you've come from your great grandparents or how far you've come since the Middle Ages. You base yourself on how you compare yourself to the Cardassians, you know, or how you compare yourself to this billionaire or that billionaire. And that's a, that's a way for, you know, a path for disaster. So, um, instead of realizing, amazing, I have a cellphone with free music and entertainment

• 30:50Speaker 01

  and education and I have air conditioning and heating and light and, and I can talk to anybody on the other side of the planet for free. We don't value those things because we don't have a private jet or whatever it might be.

• 31:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you think it says about the human condition that we're so quick to take these things for granted? I mean, I'm thinking in particular, we talked about AI models where like ChatGPT came out and everyone's like, this is the most incredible thing ever developed. And then a year later, they're like, this is a piece of shit. When is GPT five coming out?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a fickle part of human nature. We tend to accept everything as baseline and we're always looking for change. We're always looking for how do we improve ourselves? The other side though, equally interesting, Alex, is that everybody likes, I mean, no one really likes dramatic change, right? You like waking up in the morning, knowing the world is the same way it was as when you went to sleep the night before. And when, when there is dramatic change, people resist it. And there's a lot of dramatic change coming.

• 32:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, that is for sure. I mean, I guess it's already upon us. So

• 32:09Speaker 01

  And accelerating.

• 32:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're going to now shift a little bit into health and medicine, the world of medicine. Uh, but just to bridge those two worlds, talking about things that are changing. So in preparation for this uh, conversation, I went back and watched your 2012 TED Talk. Do you remember how you ended that talk?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Um, my abundance TED Talk in 2012?

• 32:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Protein folding.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Pro- haha, yes.

• 32:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you mentioned that there's a human who, uh, humans are the best protein folders. And that it used to be the work of supercomputers.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  But now it's the work of AI, where you're things like AlphaFold. So talk a little bit about the significance of that, right? Because I, I had written in, in my notes here that like AI is, you know, the path to abundance where we, in 2012, you're already talking, and I think you mentioned a little bit about AI, but you're already talking about how we have more energy, more water, more communication. But now we're going to have that effectively, you know, in, in multiple. Uh, and, and that is also going to be more medical breakthroughs. So I'm curious if you can

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting. I, I remember now it, I talked about um, a, the ability for the crowd to, uh, to help, uh, predict protein folding. It was a supercomputing problem for the last 50 years. And of course, AlphaFold by Google's DeepMind, uh, solved protein folding. And just recently, something called AlphaFold 3 was just announced by, by Demis. And, and it's revolutionary. I was talking about this morning. It's the ability not only to, to predict the folding of a, of a protein, but the interaction of all molecules of life, like how this protein and this lipid and this sugar will interact. And where they're going next. What's that?

• 33:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's crazy.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  It's crazy. And where we're going next is the ability to model your cell in AI and then your tissue and then your organ and then you. And know this drug works for you and this drug does not work for you. And to really understand, right? So what I, I just, I've written two books in the longevity space. Um, one with Tony Robbins called Life Force. And one, um, behind my shoulder here, called Longevity, your, uh, your practical playbook.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  And you know, I talk about the notion that this decade is different. And that we're about to have a health span revolution. And it's, you know, for me, AI and longevity are the two biggest business opportunities on the planet. There's nothing of greater opportunity, right? What wouldn't someone pay in their seventies or eighties for an extra 30 years of healthy life that gives them the energy, the aesthetics, mobility they had when they're in their thirties or forties, right? I mean, you'd give it all at some point. So it's massive marketplace. And, and what's making this health span revolution occur is AI, is the coming quantum technologies,

• 35:07Speaker 01

  is gene therapies, epigenetic reprogramming, capital flowing in, smartest people in the world are either working on AI or extending health span. And it's coming. And I talk about you need to be in a longevity mindset, ready to intercept these technologies when they come your way.

• 35:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. And I want to talk about that and plenty more when we come back from the break. So let's do that right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence.

• 36:10Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 36:32Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 37:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Peter Diamandis. He is the founder and CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation. He is multiple times bestselling author. We've talked about some of the books already. And also the host of the Moonshot Podcast. Peter, how many years do you want to live?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  You know, that's a great question. I used to have a canned answer. It was more of a joke, and I'll tell you that and then answer it. When I was in medical school, I was in a joint MIT Harvard MD PhD program. I never finished a PhD, but I just barely finished my medical degree. I watched a television show one day on long-lived sea life and learned that bowhead whales could live 200 years and Greenland sharks could live 400 or 500 years. And I remember saying, if they can live that long, why can't I? And so I set this multi-hundred-year lifespan objective.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  But really, my objective is to live long enough to intercept what's called longevity escape velocity, which I think is a term I'd love everybody to hear about. So today, for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for about a third of a year. These breakthroughs are helping add additional vibrancy and length to your health span, not necessarily lifespan, health span as well. There's going to be a point at which for every year that you're alive, science extends your life for more than a year. And that's called longevity escape velocity. I heard that first from Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey

• 39:11Speaker 01

  de Grey, and I speak to a lot of the top longevity researchers and ask their opinion, when do you think we're going to hit this longevity escape velocity? Ray Kurzweil's prediction is 2030, which is insanely close, right? Why? It's because AI is going to help us understand why we age, how to slow it, how to stop it, how to reverse it. George Church puts it at some 15 years out. David Sinclair is in that same area. So, you know, let's call it 20 years. Your goal over the next 20 years is to stay as healthy as you

• 39:53Speaker 01

  can and to not die from something stupid in the interim. And to be there to intercept these breakthroughs that are going to add vitality and health. So my honest answer is to live long enough to intercept longevity escape velocity and then, you know, to see my great grandkids, to go step foot on the moon, to go and, you know, mine asteroids in the asteroid belt, whatever the nine-year-old kid in me wants to do.

• 40:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the natural question that comes up after this is, who's this going to be available to? Like, who are these treatments? Like, I was, I've heard recently about this treatment of cancer that kind of breaks down exactly like what your, your body will respond to, and then for like a million dollars a pill or some crazy number like that will help cure yourself. But it's only available to people that can afford that. So are we going to end up having, yeah, are we going to have a class of people that can live, you know, effectively escape that, you know, longevity curve and a bunch of people that will continue to die at a normal, normal rate? Is that fair?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  So let me break it down in two parts. Number one,

• 40:58Speaker 01

  It's if I had to guess what the treatment would be for extended health span. It's what's called epigenetic reprogramming. Um, I'll just mention you have the same genes. 3.2 billion letters from your mom and your dad when you're born. When you're 50, when you're 100, same genetics, same software, nothing's changed. So why do you look different? Why don't you have a six pack when you're 100 that you had when you were 18? And it's not your genes. It's what genes are on and what genes are off. Which is referred to as your epigenome. From the Greek word for above. And the ability to control what genes are on and off. That varies during as we age.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  And there's been a lot of work right now, and it's one of the hottest areas. Of reversing your epigenetic programming to a earlier state. And that's likely to be a gene therapy. And those treatments you just spoke about. For orphan diseases, rare diseases, rare cancers and so forth. You can get a gene therapy, it might cost a half a million bucks, might cost 2 million bucks. It's expensive. And the reason it's expensive is the number of cases are so small. However, it turns out all humans have the same disease called aging. It's all of us, 8 billion of us.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  And so if you are developing a treatment that's affecting hundreds of millions or billions of people. Um, the cost plummets to near zero. We saw this with the COVID vaccines. So our mRNA vaccines from Moderna or Pfizer were gene therapies. And they cost 2 bucks each, right? They were sold for 20 bucks or whatever the case might be. So we know that you can mass produce gene therapies extraordinarily cheaply. So that's the first thing, just to give a, an example of, yes, in the beginning. When it doesn't work so well, it'll be paid for by the wealthiest and it'll be expensive. And then as it goes into production, it'll be available for everybody. It will work extraordinarily well and it'll be cheap.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  And same thing that happened with cell phones, right? The first cell phones were $100,000 and they dropped a call every two blocks. And now, you know, the cell phones and favelas are amazing and they cost, you know, 20, 40 bucks. But there's another point, and I make it in my longevity book, which is the majority of the stuff that you can do today is effectively free. And the stuff you should be doing today to keep yourself in the highest level of health to intercept these breakthroughs are exercising every day. So I'm in the gym at least five days a week, right? If you can't afford a gym membership, then at least get down and do some pull-ups and push-ups and get your exercise. It's the number one thing you can

• 43:50Speaker 01

  do. Number two, eight hours of sleep. Number three, minimize sugars in your body. Sugars and neural poison.

• 43:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Talk about sugar, because that's a big thing for you. Talk about sugar, because I'll be honest, like, I'm like, I'm definitely addicted there. And there's like even proven scientific stuff that like it helps with writing. So talk a little bit about the harms there.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  It was a study done years ago where they tested a whole bunch of chemicals on grad students, the ultimate research lab animal. And they said what chemicals increase a person's IQ and their abilities? And it was glucose and caffeine, right?

• 44:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Crazy, right?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Coca-Cola.

• 44:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Very familiar with both of those, right?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here's the reality. You have to remember, we evolved on the savannas of Africa 100,000, 200,000 years ago as hominids. And a lot of our physiology, like, we were never designed to live past age 30. We would go into puberty at age 13, you'd have a baby, you'd be a grandparent by 27, and then you didn't want to steal food from your grandchildren's mouths, and you would die, and the species would continue. And so it's all downhill after age 30. What we know is there was not an abundance of sugar as we were evolving tens of thousands of years ago.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  And sugar is a neuroinflammatory agent, a cardiac inflammatory agent. It glycosulates proteins, it hits your immune system. And it's just, you know, I wear a levels continuous glucose monitor all the time and I'm measuring what I eat, what my glucose is doing. I try, I'm not perfect, but I will, when I'm sitting down, I will always eat my veggies first. All right, which slows my metabolism down. I'll then eat my protein. And then finally, well, I don't eat carbohydrates, but that's the third dosing should be that. So it doesn't turn into, you know, glucose instantly in your bloodstream.

• 45:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  By the way, before you go on, that's something I've gotten from you, listening to your podcast is attack those vegetables, attack the greens first.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I'm doing that at every meal and it actually kind of changes the way that your body processes if you eat the greens before the bread or the carbs as opposed to the other way around.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  So if you're out for a restaurant and the wine and the bread and the butter comes first, ask them to bring it back with your main meal. You know, they just, they're going to manipulate you because if you, if you eat that, you know, it just spikes your blood sugar, makes you hungrier, makes you order more. I mean, that's why they're doing it. It's not for your health, it's for their, for their checkbooks.

• 46:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep, absolutely. And then, you know, while we talk about longevity, we also have to think about overpopulation. So like, I'll just give you my uninformed take about overpopulation. I mean, it seems bad, right? Like we have limited resources on the planet and if we continue to fill the planet with people, we're going to consume those resources. And we do have declining birth rates, but if those go back up or if we end up with longer lifespans, especially when you have the older, older people who are going to need, need to be cared for and it just seems like we're going to deplete the planet. But you also care about the planet. Obviously you've done this carbon challenge. So how do we, how do we deal with the fact that we could have overpopulation, but also

• 47:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  a sustainable, or yeah, massive increases in population, but also sustainable planet?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  So the first thing is to look at the data. And the data shows us that we are about to have not an overpopulation, but a massive underpopulation of planet Earth. So if you look at the growth curves, fifty years ago, or call it the nineteen fifty's, it was about an average of five point seven children per family around the world. And we were in massive growth and books like The Population Bomb were written and so forth. But the reality is, we are now, we've dropped from five point seven children per family down to below two point four globally. In the US, we're below the replenishment level, which is two point one.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  And China's way below, Japan's way below, most of Asia, most of Europe. Italy is dissipating, going away, and like it's like point seven. The only, only region in growth is Africa. And as Africa becomes more affluent, as better comms and AI and technology comes there, we'll expect to see that growth level drop as well. And if you've got a massive underpopulation, right? We peak at nine, nine and a half billion and have a very rapid drop off. Our population is tied directly to GDP towards the ability to maintain our, our world.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  I think the only countervailing force there is going to be humanoid robotics and AI that's going to allow us to support that aging population. So I think, you know, Elon goes on and says, listen, have more kids. He's got ten or eleven, I forget how many exactly.

• 49:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's doing his part.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  He's doing his part. I've got two, at least in replication or balance mode right now. But I, I think people need to be reeducated about overpopulation. If you're flying an airplane, look out the window.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Most of of the world is barren, except for our cities. And we used to move into cities because that's where we had education. That's where entertainment, that's where the jobs were. But that's not the case anymore. You can have jobs sitting on a beach in, you know, in Thailand right now. You can have a, you know, you can have entertainment and education anywhere on the planet. So I think, I think we're gonna, we're gonna see a new population distribution on earth.

• 50:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay, let me ask you one more question and then we can wrap. I just want to talk about fear. We brought it up earlier.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, I was looking through your bio. You've founded so many things, you know, X Prize, you know, tackling problems that a lot of people would find impossible to solve, thinking through abundance, the writing, relationships with people like, like Elon Musk, Tony Robbins. So many people are governed by fear. You don't seem to have it. Talk a little bit about like what you think our relationship with fear is and what it should be.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  If there's one important thing I need to teach my abundance CEOs and entrepreneurs that I support is your mindset is the single most important thing you have. And, you know, if you asked what made the greatest leaders on this planet, you know, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Elon, Steve Jobs, was it their wealth? The tech they had, the friends they had, or was it their mindset? I think most everybody would say it's their mindset. And if you believe that, then you have to ask yourself the question, what mindset do you have? Where'd you get it? And what mindset do you need for the decade ahead? And so I teach five different mindsets that I focus on.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  I focus on an abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a longevity mindset, a moonshot mindset, and a curiosity mindset. And the realization is that our normal mindsets are fear and scarcity. Right? That is the mindset that evolved on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago that saved our lives. But that mindset doesn't serve you anymore. And so how do you change your mindset? The same way that a large language model or neural net

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Trains itself by giving it example after example after example of a cat. If you want to have it known as a cat, or if you want to be in an abundance mindset, or an optimistic mindset versus a scarcity and fear mindset. Read books, listen to podcasts like like yours and Moonshots and be in this positive mindset. Give yourself examples to flip it. Because if you're watching CNN every night, which I call the crisis news network with a negative, constantly negative news network, you're being bombarded by negative news over and over and over again. You're going to live in a state of fear.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  And the news media does that because that's what gets them clicks. It's what gets, they have a business model. Deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers and you pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. So you're being manipulated in that way. Train your neural net, your brain by the people you hang out with, what's on your walls, what you read, what you listen to, in the way that's going to serve you in this decade ahead.

• 53:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Peter Diamandis, thanks so much for joining.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  A pleasure. Thank you.

• 53:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We'll be back on Friday, breaking down the week's news. Until then, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 53:14Speaker 02

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• 53:57Alex Kantrowitz?

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