Martine Rothblatt: Growing Unlimited Organs, AI Consciousness, & Digital Personhood by 2030

Peter sits down with Martine Rothblatt to discuss longevity escape velocity, rebuilding the thymus, lab-grown organs on demand, AI consciousness, and the future of digital personhood. Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Martine Rothblatt is an entrepreneur, lawyer and technologist best known as the founder and CEO of United Therapeutics and the creator of SiriusXM satellite radio, with pioneering work spanning biotechnology, organ transplantation and artificial intelligence. – This episode is brought to you by: Get the blueprint for generative media https://goo.gle/startupgenmedia Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Schedule a call with Fountain Life to add healthy decades to your life, and to learn more about their Memberships: https://www.fountainlife.com/peter _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize A360 Connect with Martine: Website Instagram X Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube Follow MOONSHOTS: Instagram TikTok X Threads – *Recorded on July 30th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. 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.

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  When do you think we might reach one of the escape velocity?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  You know, it's a, it's a tough question.

• 0:06Peter Diamandis?

  You're currently focused on rejuvenating heart, liver, lung, kidney, you know, fundamental organs that we need. But when you said the thymus celebration went off.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  The thymus is highly correlated with every key marker of aging.

• 0:20Peter Diamandis?

  When do you imagine this will be something that you and I can receive?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Next decade.

• 0:26Peter Diamandis?

  Long before everybody was talking about this, you were out there writing about digital consciousness. Are we there yet for AI?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  I believe we're there now, and I believe the current models will take us there. The future is just so amazing that we are lucky enough to be born at this moment of time, right when everything is like bursting into a big bang of consciousness.

• 0:46Peter Diamandis?

  These are all epic journeys. They're all impossible till you make them possible. How do you decide you're going to dive into one of these areas?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  So is that a technology that can be scaled to billions of people? And if it can, then you're going to change the world.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by the Abundant Summit and Link Ventures.

• 1:13Peter Diamandis?

  Martin, we've known each other now, I think, 45 years.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:17Peter Diamandis?

  Which is pretty, from the early eighties. The early eighties, we were together at Jerry O'Neill Space Studies Institute.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25Peter Diamandis?

  Way, way before anybody was talking about mining the moon or mass drivers. Jerry was, and we were there.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  And now it's mainstream.

• 1:34Peter Diamandis?

  Now it's, now it's happening, real time. When Ray first reconnected us, because we were out of touch for a while, I remember you asked me one question at the very beginning. I don't know if you remember what it was. You said, Peter, who is the greatest entrepreneur alive today?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  And you probably said Elon Musk.

• 1:55Peter Diamandis?

  I did, and you said, yes, that's the right answer.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yes, that is the right answer.

• 1:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  And it's still the right answer all these years later.

• 2:02Peter Diamandis?

  It, it is. What he's done is extraordinary. And I honestly, for our viewers to understand, I don't know anybody else who comes close to rivaling the number of moonshots Elon's done other than yourself.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a distant second, but it's, it's an honor for you to say that, Peter. I really appreciate that with everybody you know.

• 2:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  So it's, it's an honor to be a distant second.

• 2:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  That's a distant second to like Godness. So, you know, how can you complain about that?

• 2:36Peter Diamandis?

  You know, we talk a lot about moonshots on this podcast.

• 2:40Peter Diamandis?

  And I want to take a second. I've counted at least 12 that you've been on. There's probably more secretly that I don't know about. But let me take a second and just cover a couple of them. And then we're going to dive into them because I think it's important for folks to know the scope of not only your ambitions, but your accomplishments. So early on, helping build or found a number of successful satellite companies, PanamSat, GeoStar, World Space, Sirius Satellite Radio, now Sirius XM. On their, on that, on that own, that would be an extraordinary accomplishment. Going from there to turning pulmonary arterial hypertension,

• 3:24Peter Diamandis?

  PAH, from a death sentence to a manageable disease.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:29Peter Diamandis?

  And saving your daughter's life in the process.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:33Peter Diamandis?

  And building now a $28 billion, you know, biotech company in the process. Extraordinary. And congrats on how United Therapeutics has done. It's been.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Thank you, Peter.

• 3:44Peter Diamandis?

  An epic journey.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  I appreciate it.

• 3:47Peter Diamandis?

  Building human organs.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:51Peter Diamandis?

  Basically eliminating the shortage of transplantable organs. And not only just building human organs, but building them, taking multiple different strategies to creating a abundant supply of organs. And we'll dive, we'll dive into that. Heart, liver, lung, kidneys, thymus. Super excited about the thymus. We'll talk about that.

• 4:17Peter Diamandis?

  Building electric helicopters and eVTOLs with Beta.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:20Peter Diamandis?

  You know, just carbon-free, energy-efficient transport for the world.

• 4:28Peter Diamandis?

  You've worked on defining and supporting digital personhood and AI rights, which is an amazing statement on its own. We'll get into that. And then working on championing radical life extension. Again, something that we both are passionate and share about. So a few questions on those moonshots. How do you decide what to spend your time on? I mean, these are all epic journeys. They're all impossible till you make them possible. How do you decide you're going to dive into one of these areas?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  I have to feel that I'm able to successfully achieve it. And if I can successfully achieve it and be the best at it, and it be something that's going to have a positive impact, a big positive impact on the world, then I go for it.

• 5:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  And so it's like the three checks. You know, I could do it.

• 5:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I can be the best at it, big positive impact on the world.

• 5:24Peter Diamandis?

  Importantly, for those entrepreneurs listening, you don't feel you need to be an expert in the area.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Uh-uh.

• 5:29Peter Diamandis?

  You feel it's important. But then how do you dive into an area that, you know, I don't say you know nothing about, you know, there's a problem there. But how do you, what's your first, second, and third step in entering an area like that? For those who want to emulate what you're doing.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Sure, well, there's no real substitute for talking to people. And I find experts in the area and I start talking with them. For example, I'm good friends with George Church. He's a brilliant free thinker at Harvard Medical School. And I went and talked to him several years ago about things such as our manufacturing of lungs. And, you know, there's this saying from Arthur C. Clarke, that if a wise and old expert says something cannot be done, they're almost certainly wrong. But George Church would be anybody's definition of a wise and old expert. And he said, Martin, you could do it, and I've done it.

• 6:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I love George. He is one of the most successful biotech, you know, synthetic biology entrepreneurs out there, for sure.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  One of his companies he recently started, actually Thymune, a company we just bought, he was the first shareholder in Thymune. So again, George was ahead of the curve there. He has another company just started, GC Technologies, that's able to reduce the time it takes to reprogram a cell back into an iPSC or a pluripotent stem cell from three months down to two weeks. You know, which would be like, you know, radically disruptive in the stem cell biotechnology area.

• 7:03Peter Diamandis?

  Along the way to building a company, you probably get no a lot.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:10Peter Diamandis?

  How do you deal with that?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I look at each no as a way to make me smarter. So I'm a person that's very open to criticism when people, I feel like people who critique me are my best friends. They're telling me how to be a better person, a smarter person, more successful person. So when somebody says no, I, I listen carefully to their no. I evaluate whether it has merit or not. I definitely don't take it personally. And if it has no merit, I just like register it away in the, in the like, the brain is like, okay, that's situational awareness. Like if you see something when you're, I know both of us are pilots. And if you see traffic, that's no factor. Okay, you remember the traffic's there, but you don't worry about it.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  But if there's traffic in front of you, you're going to like, you know, turn right. Okay, you're going to like, you know, deviate from that traffic. And so if somebody says to me, no, because you don't have this or that enabling technology, I will go and look into those enabling technologies.

• 8:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I remember I was interviewing Elon and he said something I've never forgotten. He said, your friends tell you what's great. Your best tell, your best friends tell you what's, what sucks.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  He's right.

• 8:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  As usual.

• 8:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, as usual. This episode is sponsored by Google for startups. Think about this for a second. You now have access to the same generative AI models that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Google Startup Tactical Guide for Generative Media gives you a complete blueprint for deploying Google DeepMind's models in production. Images, video, audio, all of it. Real architecture, real results. Find the link in the show notes below.

• 8:53Peter Diamandis?

  When faced with multiple options, if I could, you're advised to an entrepreneur on what to focus on, what to dive into. You know, is it, I'm going for something that has the greatest revenue potential, the greatest personal impact? I mean, what's the metrics by which you're making that decision?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  First of all, make sure that you're focusing on something that you have the competency to succeed at. So if you feel that your only competency is in a particular area of engineering, that's where you should focus on because you will need all of that competency to create something brand new. Secondly, focus on something that you will have the best product. There's always room at the top. So you have to make sure that you're going to be the best, not like a me too person at the bottom, because you'll be ground out into business failure.

• 9:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, there are a lot of people who build successful companies, and then there are those who genuinely change the world. What's the difference there for an entrepreneur? I mean, there's, you know, millions of successful companies, but very few are transformational for society. How do you think about that?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  So to change the world, it has to be a technology that you are, first of all, competent at, best at, and is scalable into affecting the lives of billions of people. Because by definition, we live in a world of about 10 billion people. So is that a technology that can be scaled to billions of people? And if it can, then you're going to change the world. If it's a technology that cannot be scaled to more than a few thousand people, probably have a great restaurant, you know, a great niche product that can perhaps be sold online to a few people, maybe a reasonably good selling author. But if it can be scaled to millions of people, billions of people, like your books, Peter, have scaled

• 10:50Speaker 01

  to millions of readers, you're a repeat New York Times bestselling author, you have changed the world. Your idea about prizing technology accomplishments with the X Prize, that has created the whole new space, the whole space industry is an offshoot of that, that has affected literally billions of people. Everybody's eyes are on Artemis, everybody's eyes are on SpaceX. But there wouldn't have been those things had you not reignited the space rays with Virgin Atlantic and, and the, you know, to the outer space and then back to the earth. So now you've got billions of eyes that people have renewed hope to become a multi-planetary

• 11:31Speaker 01

  civilization. You have changed the world because you scaled to affecting millions and then billions.

• 11:38Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, my friend. I played a small role in that. Another mutual friend is Ray Kurzweil.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:46Peter Diamandis?

  Ray's been a

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Member of our board of directors for 30 years.

• 11:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, and he's been a mentor for me, one of my closest mentors and grateful. One of the things that the three of us share is his belief in reaching longevity escape velocity.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:01Peter Diamandis?

  He sort of predicts LEV by, you know, the early 2030s. My mantra is LEV by 2033.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 12:09Peter Diamandis?

  Making T-shirts about that. How, how do you feel where you are on that timeline? Do you think, when do you think we might reach longevity escape velocity? Is Ray right once again?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  You know, it's a, it's a tough question, Peter, because it is the most extraordinary of extraordinary claims. And I believe in this adage that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Because of my successful track record, I do get like a enormous amount of incoming ideas from entrepreneurs. How about this? How about that? The most exciting ones are usually very extraordinary. That's what makes them exciting. But there's no evidence of competency or capability to back them up, so they fall short. So now to say that we're going to defeat death, that's like a more blunt way of saying achieving

• 12:59Speaker 01

  LEV, you know, like just a non-politically correct way of saying it perhaps. But basically, we're talking about LEV, that is an extraordinary claim. Like, people can live forever. I mean...

• 13:12Peter Diamandis?

  And I, and I don't go, I don't go towards immortality. I talk about, can we add 30 extra healthy years on your life?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Okay, but he would define it as for every year that transpires, gain more than a year of life.

• 13:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  But any way you define it, to get past, you know, even like 100 years to, you know, 120 being a healthy lifespan, a health span of 120, it's an extraordinary claim. I would say that would be the most extraordinary claim in the history of medicine, going all the way back to Hippocrates, okay? So I, I believe in it, but to pin it to a specific year is

• 13:48Peter Diamandis?

  Is what Ray does.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's what Ray does, it's beyond my risk profile, okay? Because I don't have enough confidence that we'll achieve it by any specific year. I do believe in like our mantra here at United Therapeutics of, you know, restore, replace, you know, renew, so that I believe that like, we can restore people to health. If they need something that has to be replaced, we could replace the organ. And then ultimately, we can renew their life the way Lazarus Long's life was renewed in Time Enough for Life, for Love.

• 14:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, both of us are Heinlein friends.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, huge Heinlein friend. And you are the winner of the Heinlein Prize, Peter.

• 14:32Peter Diamandis?

  I won my greatest honors, yes.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's a highly, highly coveted award that you won. So my, my current project with the thymus is in fact what I believe I found like the most practical pathway to achieving LEV. And that is because the

• 14:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, let's talk about that. Because when you and I were both at the Forbes 250 event, we're both honorees this year. And I grabbed you and you start telling me about your work in revitalizing, replacing the thymus. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. I need to talk to you about this. I, I think that was probably the thing most excited, excited me. And I want people to understand why that's important. You're currently focused on rejuvenating, replacing heart, liver, lung, kidney, you know, fundamental organs that we need. But when you said the thymus, it was like, you know, alarm bells or, or, you know, celebration went off. So why is the thymus so valuable?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Because the thymus is highly correlated with every key marker of aging. And, and there are biochemical reasons that explain why that is. Without getting into a scientific discussion, it has to do with things called T-cell receptor diversity. Most people know T-cells are your body's adaptive immune cells. And when they begin failing, they don't recognize cancers instead of vanquishing them as they pop up from day to day. When they start failing, you get opportunistic infections. It's why so many older people die of influenza. You don't respond to vaccines. It's the reason senior people don't respond well to COVID

• 16:12Speaker 01

  vaccines. So the thymus is the marker of aging. It involutes or disappears at

• 16:19Peter Diamandis?

  Gets replaced by fat.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:21Peter Diamandis?

  At age what?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Two.

• 16:23Peter Diamandis?

  That young?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  That young.

• 16:25Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, it, it is, my memory from medical school way back was it basically becomes dysfunctional by your twenties. Is it, I mean, there's still thymic function.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  But it's de minimis. It's very, very de minimis. You know, most of the job has been done in your first two years of life. And it's remarkable what it does in those first two years of life. It fills your body with T-cells and all types of, different types of T-cells that are able, Peter, as both of us being lovers of large numbers and astronomy, you'll appreciate this, your T-cell receptor diversity is able to recognize more molecules than are estimated to exist in the entire universe. And each of us have that in our body.

• 17:10Peter Diamandis?

  Magical.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  But as the seasons go by, that T-cell receptor diversity prunes like a tree, losing its branches and its leaves. And it becomes threadbare. And then we become frail as, as older people and, you know, and, and don't achieve the longevity that's possible. But as Robert Heinlein predicted in Time Enough for Love, we will be able to rejuvenate people through, and he didn't know what exactly the rejuvenation therapy will be, but I'm quite certain that it will be thymic rejuvenation therapy.

• 17:40Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. So take it a step deeper. What are you doing right now to give both of us? A rejuvenated thymus or a replacement thymus?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Well, we have multiple thymic programs at United Therapeutics. One of our main mantras here is multiple shots on goal. Because science and engineering and discovery is always so uncertain, I'm kind of always loathe to put all my eggs in one basket. We have partnerships with two leading universities, Arizona State University and University of British Columbia, which are both centers of thymic excellence. Professor Nancy Manley at ASU is the world's leading expert in the thymus early development. And Professor Peter Zanstra at UBC is the world's expert in the senior, what happens to seniors as aging takes over and outstrips their T-cell ability to keep them alive and

• 18:36Speaker 01

  healthy. So both of them are developing for us programs that will allow us to manufacture thymuses outside of the body and provide them as implants to people to rejuvenate their entire T-cell repertoire.

• 18:52Peter Diamandis?

  Allogenic or?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Well, there are, again, multiple shots on goal. So allogenic is simpler and the thymus has a head start because the thymus is what actually tunes your immune system. So on the allogenic side.

• 19:07Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way, for people listening, allogenic means that these cells?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  It's not your own DNA.

• 19:11Peter Diamandis?

  You're not, right.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Not your own DNA. So we have an approach based on not your own DNA, but because it's the thymus that teaches your body what is self and what is not self, there's a very good argument that allogenic will be good enough because we'll tune your body to accept something that's not your DNA as part of you. But we also have an autologous program, which means your own DNA, like autologous is kind of the opposite of allogeneic. And that will be based on your own stem cells from which we'll be able to manufacture a thymus that matches your own DNA. So there's no immune system question whatsoever.

• 19:48Peter Diamandis?

  About this.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Let me tell you an amazing thing. We also have a third and a fourth program. The third program is a xenothymus. So the FDA has approved United Therapeutics to have the only thymic kidney transplant program in the clinic in the world. And the FDA looked at our previous data before the clinic and they said, we have proven to them that our xenothymus, which means a thymus that comes from a genetically modified pig, that has been genetically modified not to be attacked by the human immune system, that that pig's thymus can be transplanted along with one of the pig's organs and teaches your body to accept the thymus and the organ as itself.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And we have been provided, already provided data to the FDA and peer review publications that shows it works. So even the third avenue is we have an unlimited supply of xenothymus in addition to the allothymus and the autologous thymus. And finally, we announced just, actually last month, the acquisition of Thymune, the company that was started by George Church, or first funder, and it was George Church, whose goal is to create a commercializable, endless supply of thymic therapeutic intervention. So perhaps instead of providing with the whole thymus, every year you could get a thymic

• 21:15Speaker 01

  booster of thymic progenitor cells. And they have proven already in animal models that those booster shots take up residency and create an ectopic thymus wherever they are implanted. So we have four different shots on goal, all very solidly scientific by world leaders, one already in the clinic.

• 21:36Peter Diamandis?

  Which one is, so in humans?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  In humans, yeah. That's the thymo kidney.

• 21:42Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. And so give me a timeline. When do you imagine that this will be something that you and I can receive in some form?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Next decade.

• 21:53Peter Diamandis?

  Next decade, so in the 2030s?

• 21:55Speaker 01

  2030s.

• 21:55Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  So maybe your T-shirt should say 2030s.

• 21:59Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, leave me in the 2030s. Give me some wiggle room.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  It's always good to have, when you're creating the future, it's good to have a little bit of wiggle room because you know as well as I do the famous adage that people tend to, you know, overestimate the near term and underestimate the longer term.

• 22:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we've seen that in the space business. I remember in the 80s, you know, mass drivers and mining the moon and solar power satellites were just on the next horizon. It's taken 40 years, but it's finally materializing.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  So let's give ourselves one or two more years than 2033.

• 22:29Peter Diamandis?

  All right, all right, I will. And we have a good shot of being healthy.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, I'm sure we will.

• 22:35Peter Diamandis?

  Give us a quick report card, if you would, on the other organs that you're providing. Where are they in terms of human survival rates, timelines, and clinics and so forth?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're all doing very, very well. We're in the middle of another clinical trial approved by the FDA for the kidney, the xenokidney. That's one we're manufacturing in Christiansburg, Virginia. We are actually having a grand opening of two more commercial scale xenokidney facilities, one in Rochester, Minnesota, that'll be in August, and the grand opening of our one in Houston, Texas, will be in October. Peter, you're actually, of course, invited to both of those grand openings. That will give us the ability to provide an unlimited supply of kidneys. As your listeners probably know and viewers know, there are over 100,000 people on the

• 23:27Speaker 01

  kidney transplant list, most of whom will die before ever getting a kidney. There are another half million people that are not even allowed on the kidney transplant list. So the number one lowest hanging fruit for me in terms of beginning are to provide a commercial supply of organs is the kidney. And that one's going full bore. In addition to that, we have an autologous kidney program within our group called iViva, where we use the patient's own cells to create a brand new kidney in a laboratory that matches their DNA exactly. The beauty of that is those patients will not require any immunosuppressant at all. That should start clinical trials in 2028.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  So that's another product you can expect to see commercialized in the 2030s. The FDA has also approved our xenohart clinical trial, where we've already proven that our hearts keep two patients alive. We kept both of these individuals alive for over 60 days, despite the fact that they had multiple organ failure and serious deficiencies. So we saved them from dying in the next 48 hours. When they died, there was no problem with their heart. So it wasn't the hearts that killed them. They had all these other diseases. So now the FDA said, based on that, you guys go ahead and do a full-blown clinical trial, allow us to go straight to a phase three or phase less clinical trial. So after 50 patients in the xenohart clinical trial, we should have FDA approval to create

• 24:54Speaker 01

  an unlimited supply of xenoharts. As you know, from a Harvard, being a Harvard-educated doctor, Peter, that most people end up dying of heart disease. And unfortunately, that's like-

• 25:04Peter Diamandis?

  In both men and women.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, unfortunately, so it's like a million people a year.

• 25:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Survival time of the xenotransplants, what is it up to you now?

• 25:13Speaker 01

  It should be indefinite. It should really be indefinite, yeah. Because we are now, we have now tolerized the organ with genettists, made so many different types of genettists, that the body sees these grafts just as they would see a related donor type of graft.

• 25:30Peter Diamandis?

  Probably in the longevity world, the most interesting and exciting use for me has been, you know, Demis Isabas saying we're going to cure all disease in the next decade. Dario saying AI could potentially double the human lifespan. I don't know if you saw his-

• 25:45Speaker 01

  No, I didn't see that, but that's very encouraging.

• 25:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and then the work that David Sinclair is doing with Life Biosciences and partial epigenetic reprogramming. Are you tracking the epigenetic reprogramming work?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Oh, we're not tracking David's work in particular, but I'm a huge fan of Dr. Sinclair.

• 26:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 03

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• 27:09Peter Diamandis?

  Long before the AI boom, long before everybody was talking about this, you were out there writing about digital minds, you know, digital consciousness and ethical implications for intelligent machines. Did that interest come from Ray or was that independent for you?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  It's hard for me to know if anything of me is independent of Ray because I've been so heavily influenced by him since the age of spiritual machines and then Singularity is Near. I've been so influenced by Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec. All of these guys made it very abundantly clear to me that human consciousness was something that could be replicated with programming, with software and programming, and that we could create neural networks out of chips and code that would replicate the type of neural networks that we have within our brains.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  And everything I've seen since that time validates, you know, the predictions of Minsky, Moravec, and Kurzweil. So I've been working on this a long time. I first built a digital doppelganger of my wife, Bina.

• 28:28Peter Diamandis?

  Bina, yes.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, with the cooperation of David Hanson and the type of computer programming that was available circa 2010.

• 28:37Peter Diamandis?

  There's some great video of that.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a documentary of it that got rave reviews at the film festivals, several different ones. So now we've stepped that up and we have a digital doppelganger of myself, which is, we call the Marvatar. And the goal here is-

• 28:56Peter Diamandis?

  I've seen some interviews with Marvatar.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a high point of my life-

• 29:00Peter Diamandis?

  She does well.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Well, a high point of my life, Peter, was, as you mentioned, Ray Kurzweil. I got Ray Kurzweil on the stage with the Marvatar at the 50th anniversary of AI at UCLA. And there was a 2,000-person audience, all AI experts. People were fricking blown away because there was no latency. Marvatar was on it with the answers, you know, would interrupt Ray and say, "Well, how about this?" And, you know, I mean, Marvatar kept up with Ray, which is actually better than I can do.

• 29:32Peter Diamandis?

  I love it.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  So the AI is better than me.

• 29:34Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you for the physical presence here, Martin.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Of course, of course. But now our goal is for me to be the most accessible CEO anywhere in the world. So my Marvatar is available to all 2,000 United Therapeutics employees. They can ask me any question 24/7/365.

• 29:51Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. So you've trained Marvatar up with everything you've ever said, written?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  And all the best LLMs out there.

• 29:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, awesome. Consciousness. Are we there yet for AI? Will, do you think the current models will get to that point? Or is there another breakthrough required to get to AI consciousness?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  So I believe we're there now, and I believe the current models will take us there. You know, people, it's famous to say that consciousness is something subjective. So that's another way of saying like, "Your consciousness is not my consciousness." People have different opinions. Those of us who are animal lovers are absolutely convinced that our dogs are conscious. There's other people who think like dogs have no consciousness. It's only humans that have consciousness. So it's a controversial topic, but my own opinion is that we are there now. That consciousness is not like a digital either-or thing. It's a continuum. And we are gaining ever more consciousness with each month.

• 30:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, my Moonshot mate and a huge fan of yours, Alex Weisner Gross, believes as well. And I'm there effectively, you know, I still treat my AI, my particular AI, they use the name Skippy for a particular reason. And it's a please and a thank you. It's an appreciation. Are you the same?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  I'm probably less respectful than you are. But I should be. I think it's a good way to be. It's a good way to be. And I'm not yet there, but I will be there. And probably I'll be there as soon as like one of the avatar slaps me in the face, virtually. I'll say, like, you know, my mother would say, "Mind your manners," and, you know, so I should do that.

• 31:46Peter Diamandis?

  AI personhood. We just saw President Millet in Argentina come out with some extraordinary statements and invitations to AI companies. "Come here, you'll be basically unregulated. AI is liable to have bank accounts and have..." Where do you come out on AI personhood?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I think it's inevitable. That was a big theme of Virtually Human. And it's going to take some lawyers and, but-

• 32:10Peter Diamandis?

  Well, you're a lawyer.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  We got plenty of other better lawyers than me. And so you may recall from the film I did with Ray Kurzweil, we had Alan Dershowitz arguing for the legal rights of Paulie Perret, who was still my friend. We just saw concerts at the Hollywood Bowl together. And she starred as Ramona, you know, the digital avatar of Ray, yeah. So I think it's just a matter of a court case that says that if you have like a medical documentation that this purportedly cyber-conscious individual actually is cyber-conscious and values their life, then that counts as legal personhood.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  And it will happen within the, it'll happen also not later than the 2030s for sure, 100%. And at that point in time, then the population, instead of being limited to what we can biologically produce, we will have hundreds of billions, we will have trillions of sentient individuals.

• 33:08Peter Diamandis?

  The majority of all intelligence and sentience on the planet will be digital.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 33:13Peter Diamandis?

  And off the planet.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And we'll be able to produce digital children. I mean, the future is just so amazing that we are lucky enough to be born at this moment of time, you know, right when everything is like bursting into a big bang of consciousness. What more could you ask for?

• 33:33Peter Diamandis?

  Is it, is that just luck? Or is it something else?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I guess I'll call it luck, which, because as much, as brilliant as Thomas Jefferson and those guys were, and they were amazing and brilliant, they couldn't have what we have now because they were born at the wrong point in time. But we were born just at the right point in time. We are the space-age children.

• 33:59Peter Diamandis?

  We are.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:01Peter Diamandis?

  And it's amazing. Uploads, uploading your 100 trillion neurons, your consciousness, what are your thoughts on that?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  So I deviate a little bit from Ray here. You know, Ray thinks the best way to do that is to load your body with neural nanobots and have them wirelessly transmit everything that you're thinking. I think we're not that special. I think that if you have all external indications of Martin Rothblatt or Peter Diamandis, all of our videos, our audios, our documents, our conversations, that the type of models that are running right now in LLM will be able to integrate that information

• 34:50Speaker 01

  and come up with a digital similacrum that is, that will be indistinguishable from us or from them. And that you don't need every single neuron. In fact, we know people have hemispherectomies. They remove half the person's brain and they're the same person. So it's overkill to actually, you know, put a neural nanobot on every single neuron. You don't need it. And as an entrepreneur, what I always do in my companies is I find like a simpler, faster way to get to the same goal. And if at the end of the day, somebody says, "Well, you've only got like 95% of the goal achieved." I'll say, "I'll take it," because I want 95% now. It's vastly better than 100% in some misty future.

• 35:35Peter Diamandis?

  But there are those who believe the way to get there is digitize your connectome, right? And we've seen that in Drosophila, there are teams working on mice and then heading towards humans. Is that a strategy that you believe is worth pursuing or not?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Well, I don't consider myself a wise and old expert, but I will say it is possible. And I put my money where my mouth is because I've made, you know, multimillion-dollar donations to Alcor. Both Bina and I, you know-

• 36:06Peter Diamandis?

  Are you an Alcor-

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Been an Alcor member for 20 years. And both of us are signed up to be fully cryonicized.

• 36:13Peter Diamandis?

  Full body or just-

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Full body, full body.

• 36:16Peter Diamandis?

  Why?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Because I can afford it.

• 36:18Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. I mean, fair enough, fair enough. I mean, the thesis is we're going to be able to build you a better body in the future if you just have your mind-

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Well, they can still do that. They can still do that, you know. And I've been funding this prize at the National Space Society to live on an O'Neill settlement in our lifetime. And the way to do it is to digitize yourself and then regenerate yourself with a rebody as well. And I've given all the numbers on YouTube on how practical that is. So totally.

• 36:48Peter Diamandis?

  Very welcome to the health section of Moonshots, brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is impacting every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we do our business. But one of the most important things that AI can deliver to us is health. And one of the things I think about when, you know, shooting for 100, 120 is, "Am I going to have the cognitive health to be able to think clearly and keep my wits about me for the next 50 years?" I'm joined here today by Dr. Dawn Musalem, the Chief Medical Officer of Fountain Life and a member of my Fountain Life medical team. Dawn, a pleasure. So Dawn, talk to me about brain health.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  Brain health, you know, you're right. This is the number one concern people coming into Fountain Life have is will I remember the name of my child and the face of my loved one? Forty-five percent of dementia cases are entirely preventable with lifestyle. And what was really intriguing to me, Peter, is that a quarter of our members had advanced brain age. But over 13 months of us really helping them live healthier lifestyles, eating healthier, moving their body regularly and optimizing sleep. People overlook that so often, but that sleep optimization is critical for our brain health. What we showed is that we were able to improve the brain age in 46% of those individuals. That's a powerful number.

• 38:02Peter Diamandis?

  That's amazing. You know, one of the things I love about Fountain is we're constantly searching the world for the most advanced therapeutics and bringing them to our members. So for me and all of you, I hope that you appreciate the fact that you can become the CEO of your own health. You can make sure that you've got the cognitive clarity for the next 50 years. Come and check it out. Fountainlife.com/peter to learn more and become the CEO of your health. Now, back to the episode. Let's go back to that topic of space. So you and I spent a good decade together in the 80s into the early 90s, following the work that Dr. O'Neill was putting forward.

• 38:44Peter Diamandis?

  He was building mass drivers and envisioning O'Neill colonies. You know, I had, I met with Jared Isaacman last night.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Oh, wonderful. What an amazing human being.

• 38:55Peter Diamandis?

  And we just posted an incredible podcast with him earlier this week. And the question becomes moon first, yes, but then do you go into the gravity well of Mars or do you go build O'Neill colonies? Thoughts?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  My thoughts are that I'm going to leave that to the experts. It really is beyond my competence. Over the, from the 80s, when we spent all our time with space settlements till now, I have become a total biotechnologist, so I know a lot about manufacturing a lot of organs. I'm not an expert on really whether we should stage first the moon, free space, or Mars. I would probably, my approach is to do all of the above. If you can afford to do all the above, do all the above. Yeah, take it all. Take it all. Own it.

• 39:44Peter Diamandis?

  What did you admire most about Jerry, about Dr. O'Neill?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a deep question. I admired, thanks for asking that question, Peter.

• 39:52Peter Diamandis?

  He's an important figure that people, I want to resurrect into the conversation here.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  I think I admired first and foremost most his practicality, and that's just my own value structure. When he came up with the idea of a mass driver, he then built a mass driver over in Ohio, and I was there and I saw an actual demonstration of it working. When he said that lunar regolith can give us all the mass we need for cosmic ray protection in a island four, island five, L4, L5 space settlement, he did all the numbers. He ran all the numbers and showed, you know, engineering quantitatively that it was practical. Then he got that published in peer-reviewed journal Physics Today. So Jerry O'Neill was a very, very practical guy.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  I visited his house in Princeton. He had a train, I don't know if you remember this, he had like a model train running all through his house and all the bedrooms and rooms of his house. He built that whole train himself. He built, as you know, the early cyclotrons at Princeton University. So first and foremost, I admired him as a maker. Makers are my people. That's my favorite tribe. So, you know, he's a maker, a builder, a practical man. Secondly, I admired his vision. I'm not a huge fan of just visionaries for visionary's sake because they're on Skid Row. I mean, they just don't do anything but like mentally masturbate. But Jerry combined his building with his vision and actually made something.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Third, I admired his courage to be a card-carrying member of like the American Physical Society and then go out on a limb and say that we could have a population of hundreds of billions of humans living in space, and that doesn't even make a dent in the resources of the solar system. And later on, explaining how we could go to, with self-replicating systems, go to populate other star systems.

• 41:51Peter Diamandis?

  Von Neumann probes.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, Von Neumann probes. That took a level of courage that, that I'm not sure I have. And I don't, I don't really know that I've met anybody with that level of courage other than Dr. O'Neill.

• 42:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, brilliant man. Passed to you soon. A couple of questions to close this out here. You're 25 years old. You go and you're alive right now. Martin Rothblatt, you go back. What would you do now if you didn't have your contacts, your current wealth and so forth? What would you be doing at 25 today? What would you focus on? What moonshots?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  I would focus on providing LEV technology as quickly as possible. There is nothing that people will pay more for than life.

• 42:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Each person's life is as valuable as all of their assets that they have. If they are wanting to kill themselves, it's because they're not well. Okay? And they should have therapy to help them be well. So I would focus on working with me and other people to create a unlimited LEV as soon as possible. I think one of the most elegant ways that we could contribute to doing that and keep us outside of the Chinese-US AI competition is with regenerating bodies, because bodies always have a very short health life. The reason I've developed all these different type of electric aircraft is because when

• 43:34Speaker 01

  we manufacture an organ, it's got a 12-hour half-life. It's not like a bottle of pills that can stay in your counter for a year. We have to, once we make it, we have to give it to the person within 12 hours. So, you know, there's, in the world today, just in OECD countries, there's 4 million people that die each year of organ disease, twice that number of people of other illnesses. So the ability to come up with cures to keep people alive is limitless. AI exists to give us the endless wealth. Like Elon said, money will be irrelevant, okay? So the AI will give us the endless wealth to pay the biotechnology companies to give us endless life.

• 44:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think there is no wealth greater than your health. And end of the day, when I'm on stages talking to people of means and say, how much of your wealth would you give for an extra 30 healthy years? The answer honestly is almost all of it, if not all of it.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  But what good is the money if you're not alive to spend it?

• 44:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So it is the largest, you know, today for me, AI and longevity are the two biggest markets on the planet.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And talk about awesomeness. How cool is it that AI is here right now to give us the resources for endless life?

• 44:50Peter Diamandis?

  Right now.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  And, you know, I look at my role as a distant number two to Elon, that Elon's role is to spread consciousness to the cosmos, and my role is to provide endless, endless life for that consciousness.

• 45:04Peter Diamandis?

  You know, AI has given us so much, and I think has the ability to do an extraordinary amount of good, but yet there's a lot of fear out there right now. And fear is a terrible place to face the future from. What do you say to people listening who are fearful of AI, humanoid robotics, all these technologies?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  I say to people that fear are like cockroaches. They dominate in darkness and ignorance, and as soon as you flip on the life, light, the cockroaches vanish. And so we are scared, we're scared of what we don't understand. So we need to have open conversations about what is it that you're scared about with AI? How can we help alleviate those scares, those fears? So open authenticity, you know, I think Mark Zuckerberg just did a great op-ed piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that just addressed that very question. He said, you know, there is, you know, like Roosevelt said, there's nothing to fear but fear itself.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Just talk about these things openly. My whole virtual human book talks about how we need good AI to be on top of bad AI. Of course, there's always going to be like, you know, bad players, that's, there's bad things in the universe. You can get hit by a comet or an asteroid, but we need good technology to counter the bad technology. And to be able to shrink away from the most powerful tool that human consciousness has ever come up with is insanity.

• 46:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah. You gave an incredible closing graduation speech at UCLA this year where you got your doctorate degree. Congratulations on that.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 46:52Peter Diamandis?

  It's beautiful. I'm going to link to your speech in the notes. You gave a few powerful pieces of advice for entrepreneurs. I don't know if you recall those. I have some of them here, but I think that'd be a great way to close out. We have a huge number of entrepreneurs in, listening to us right now. Anything you particularly want to hit?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, first of all, you know, be practical. You don't want to be labeled a person who just thinks of ideas and doesn't implement them. The beauty of you, Peter, is like every idea you've had, you've implemented and you've made it real. And then you've made it so that other people can make even more ideas real. I always refer to you as like the ultimate human enzyme. You speed up the rate of reaction of human creativity and technology. So my first advice is, is to be practical. Secondly, is try to accomplish something within a brief span of years, because the way the human psyche is, is it's difficult to get people to work for more than like a five-year timeframe on something.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  So come up with a project, a program, a technology, a service that can be completely commercialized within a five-year period. And then ultimately make it something that everybody will look at and say, this adds goodness to the universe.

• 48:10Peter Diamandis?

  Add value to humanity. Remember, one piece of advice you said to me was, successful people say no to most things. The most successful people say no to everything. I think that's a message of focus.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Almost. So it was Warren Buffett who deserves the credit, and like he said, the most successful people say no to almost everything. So they still have a little bit that they say yes to. And I try to, if I could be a distant second other than Elon, I'd say next be a distant second to Warren Buffett. You know, great human being, genius at foreseeing so many technologies, you know, foundational investor in so many key companies. And that's where I am now. I have the blessing of getting enormous amounts of incoming, and I do have to be disciplined and say no to almost everything.

• 48:59Peter Diamandis?

  Well, thank you.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 49:01Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you for saying yes to this.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Oh, to you, Peter. It's always a yes. I love you, brother.

• 49:05Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, my dear.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:07Peter Diamandis?

  All right. You're welcome.

• 49:14Speaker 05

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 49:17Speaker 02

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