Incentivizing the Future with Peter Diamandis

How do science competitions further innovation? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with Peter Diamandis, Founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, to discuss science innovation, incentive competitions, and the future of space, longevity, AI, and more.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, my conversation with Peter Diamandis, who's an entrepreneur extraordinaire, inventor of the X Prize. We're going to learn about what role the X Prize can play in stimulating innovation for the future of our species. Coming up.

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I have in my office Peter Diamandis, someone I met 30 years ago. He's an entrepreneur, space entrepreneur. But not only that, he's trying to transform what it is to live, to live healthy in this world and in the future. Peter, welcome back to my office, dude.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  A pleasure, buddy.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great to be here. I can't believe it's been 30 years. 30 years. Wow, so what happened back then?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  I'm not saying that we're older or anything.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was like half our life ago, in a sense.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and why, remind me why you found me and came to my Hayden Planetarium office?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  It's a wonderful story. So the year was 1995. I had just founded the X Prize, right? This, the desire was to put together a $10 million prize. It was not funded at the time for private spaceflight.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you came to me for the $10 million?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  I, and you turned me down, damn it.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a short meeting, right, right? But you had to explain to me at the time what the X Prize was.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I said, listen, throughout history, prizes were used to move, you know, technology and science forward. And let's face it, you know, since we got to the moon in 1969, not much has happened in terms of going to space. The shuttle was great.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For humans.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  For humans, yeah, a lot of great stuff on planetary surfaces. But I wanted to go. I wanted to be an astronaut, right? That's what I grew up, you know, that Apollo mission showed what we could do. And then that scientific documentary Star Trek showed exactly, showed exactly where.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It predates the going to the moon.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yes, it does, by a couple of years.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A few years.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  So I'm like looking for people that might fund a $10 million prize. And at first I'm like, let's do this grassroots. Let's get, you know, thousands of people who are going to give, you know, hundreds of dollars. And so I'm flipping through the back of one of those old paperback books. And in the back, it says, "Do you want to fly to the moon or Mars? Enter a competition to buy a ticket." And I'm like reading this and I'm going, "That's amazing."

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It wasn't a competition. I think it was a lottery.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  It was a lottery. Yes, it was. You're right. It was a lottery to win a ticket to go to the moon, go to Mars, go to... I think it offered a few other planets there, but I'm not sure. And it said, "And, you know, provide the information and mail it in to the Hayden Planetarium."

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which, and serving as director at the time, I had no idea we did this. Because that scared me when you showed this to me. Because I said, "We're gonna have to make good on these tickets." Yeah, what's our liability?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  So I'm thinking, "Okay, it must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people who want to go, you know, on this interplanetary trips."

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And send in these tickets.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  And send in these tickets. And I know there's no option for them. And the X prize we were doing, it was going to be a $10 million prize for the first person to build a spaceship and carry a pilot and two paying passengers up 100 kilometers into space. And I said, "Maybe that group of people who submitted these forms, I can reach out to them and say, 'Hey, you know, this is how you get to space.'" And so I show up on your doorstep and I said, "Neil, where are all these... There's thousands of them."

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just occupied that office at the time. And so I had to go to our library and our library archivist. And they found, they found a box of these.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  They did.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, but... We're remembering something from 30 years ago about a contest that happened 30 years before that.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the 1960s. So I'm looking at the names and the addresses. It's before zip code. So if you want to find these people, they're all dead. All right. What do you?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  It wasn't gonna work. It definitely was not gonna work.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I applaud the creativity of the idea.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  I got a chance to meet you.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, no. Thank you. Thank you.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  But you were very kind. And this was the beginning of the X Prize back then.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I got to see it in its infancy, getting born in your head.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Very, very early. You know, again, I'm born, I was born in 61. And the 60s was a formative time for me. And again, it was, it was the Apollo program and Star Trek that really sort of infected my mind and really drove me to, I.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good word, infected it, because that, you know, it's weird coming off a pandemic to use the word infected. But it carries the right sort of biological vector, right? You're there and then there's a show and it gets in you and now you, you're affected by it.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Yes, I want to become an astronaut. My parents want me to become a doctor. I want to become an astronaut and I'm like, I looked at the numbers, I remember, and I think it was like one out of 5,000 people got selected to become an astronaut. And I said, really poor odds. I have a better chance of becoming an NBA All-Star at 5'4" than I do an astronaut. And then I looked at how many astronauts actually flew. And interestingly enough, like only half the astronauts.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the program?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  In the program, fly. They're called penguins because they have wings, but they don't fly.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right? I did not know that.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  And then the killer was, okay, if I got selected, if I got a chance to fly, can I fly every weekend? Which is what I want. And it's like, you know, one or two missions.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  And so I said, there's got to be a better way. And I was given a book by dear friend Greg Marinac, The Spirit of St. Louis. And I'm reading the book. He gave it to me to encourage me to finish my pilot's license.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to remind people, that's the name of Lindbergh's plane.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Spirit of St. Louis that he flew across.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Atlantic. But before you continue.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me precisely why an X Prize concept works at all.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  So if you think about it, we are genetically bred to compete. We do it finding our spouse. So we do, we drive.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Society thrives on it.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Thrives on it. And we evolved as humans to compete for our food and all, everything. So can we in fact use what's called an incentive competition? Very different from the Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer Prize, which rewards someone for work they did 10, 20, 30 years ago, right? So it's like a cherry on top prize. Where incentive competition is the opposite. It says, I don't care who you are, where you went to school. If you.

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What your nationality is or anything.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Anything. How much, how old you are, nothing. It's a, it's a pure meritocracy prize. If you pull this thing off first and demonstrate it, you win. And so I had just read this book, and I'll, I'll mention a little more about it in a second, about Lindbergh in 1927 flew New York to Paris non-stop to win this $25,000 Ortega Prize. This guy, this Frenchman Raymond Ortega is born.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to give a shout out to Long Island, he left from an airfield in Long Island.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  He left from Roosevelt Field.

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. He used to go launch rockets out of there.

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He did, yeah. Yeah. And there's now a museum of, of air and space. Very, very good museum, yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  So this guy, this Frenchman Raymond Ortega comes to the US in like 1900 penniless. Works his way up from busboy to hotel manager to hotel owner, the Hotel Lafayette. World War I was the birth of the airplane, right? So he saw it for the first time. And so in 1919, at the end of the war, this guy Raymond Ortega, who's, who owns this hotel now, posts a notice that I will offer $25,000 for the first person to fly non-stop between my birthplace of Paris and my home of New York or the other direction. And if he knew about the trade winds, you'd.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to go.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Prevailing winds go west to east. Yes. Yes, on Earth. So, what happens is, he offers this $25,000 prize. People laugh at him. I mean, this is ridiculous. No one's ever gone that far since 1919. And that's a chunk of money in 1919. It was. It's, uh, you know, four, five, six, four million dollars today. Anyway, so, uh, it turns out nine different teams go after this $25,000. And they spend $400,000 to win this guy's money. And I'm making notes in the margin of the book, The Spirit of St. Louis. Again, that, uh, that Lindbergh published in 1957, won the Pulitzer Prize. And he's talking about how much money the teams are all spending. Uh, this team's spending $100,000. This is spending $50,000.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  He spent $25,000 bucks. And, uh, and Ortiz doesn't pay any of the losers. And I think three of the nine teams died trying to make the flight. So Lindbergh actually makes the flight. First one to go nonstop solo. And also the first one to go nonstop in this competition. And within 18 months of Lindbergh winning this $25,000 and making the flight, the number of airplanes in the world quadrupled. Number of pilots tripled. So there was this- It was a force of nature unto itself. It was a moment. It was the four, it was the Bannister four-minute mile. It was front page around the world. Oh, my God, humans have flown nonstop across the Atlantic. And Lindbergh became a global hero.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  So, the Ortiz Prize opened up aviation. And really, you can draw an inflection point for everything. And so, as I'm reading this book, uh, The Spirit of St. Louis, I am like, I have to do a prize like this for spaceflight. Cause I'm not gonna get, you know, a chance of me becoming a government astronaut. I'm slim. And I don't get a chance to fly every time I wanna fly. And we need to kick spaceflight, human spaceflight, in the butt. So- And the NBA was off the table. It was not gonna happen for me. And so, there's a very long story. But over the course of the next five years, I ended up raising the $10 million prize. Raising the money for the prize. Raising the money for the prize. Just to be clear, I just wanna emphasize, cause you said, you just said something,

• 10:30Speaker 01

  cause you're so accustomed to it, but I think it's worthy of-

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A pause to reflect on the fact that $25,000 was a prize for people who were spending more than $25,000 to win that prize.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, 16 times the prize money was spent cumulatively by all the teams to try and win it. And so when-

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's that competition you were talking-

• 10:52Speaker 01

  That's the competition. And I was like, in the-

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Competition transcended the money.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  It was, people wanted to do, they wanted an excuse to do it, right? And so in the back of the Spirit of St. Louis that I'm reading, that my friend Greg gave me to finish my pilot's license, which I did eventually do, at the end, I wrote the words X Prize. And you know why I wrote the word X Prize?

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  You'll love this, I think. First, X was a variable to be replaced by the name of the person who put the money up. They had no idea who it was. X for Mineral Ten for $10 million. X for experimental. It just really worked.

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Deep, deep.

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Elon Musk was early in that conversation, and he made SpaceX.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, he was.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're like Forrest Gump, right? Every, every turning point, every turning point in the history.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, Elon-

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were there with-

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Elon, Elon, I met Elon in, in, in 2000, 2001. The X Prize was ongoing. He hadn't met the Anusha Ansari yet, who funded it. And so, very famously-

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you had one funder for the $10 million?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  We had a bunch of smaller funders that kept us going. And then the Ansari family was the primary funder.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's why it became the Ansari Prize.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Ansari X Prize, right.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Filling in for the variable X.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the X stuck along, stuck around so long, we didn't get rid of it. It was the Ansari X Prize versus the Ansari Prize. And Anusha, by the way, is now the CEO of the X Prize. Amazing woman. She flew privately to the space station.

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that, yes.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  And now she's the CEO of I serv-

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, it's, you could not fly privately via NASA, because NASA didn't roll that way. So she paid money to the Russians-

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -to go to the International Space Station.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  On Soyuz flight-

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  At a biconor. Elon was an early donor-

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Biconor launch-

• 12:42Speaker 01

  A biconor in Russia.

• 12:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So the remarkable lesson here is when you combine the competition, as you duly described, when you combine what impact success would have on the motivation of others in society, there's probably no greater-

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leverage you can have on innovation than an X Prize.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have documented thirty fold return on the donation we get. So when someone gives us a dollar to fund a prize, typically, you know, and notwithstanding the amazing institution that we're in here, you typically get...

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The American Museum of Natural History.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yes, you typically will get like twenty cents on your dollar spent to actually move the thing forward. When we put up a large X Prize competition, you'll get as much as thirty dollars on the dollar spent by all the teams trying to win it. And the best part, you don't pay the losers, you only pay the winner who pulls it off. How would you like that to be the business model for everything, right? I'm not gonna pay you until my house is whatever.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it works and people do it willingly. The losers are not sad that they didn't get the money.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example, we have launched to date on the order of four or five hundred million dollars in prizes.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  We've launched prizes for mapping the ocean floor, for pulling water out of the atmosphere, atmospheric capture of water.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For drinking.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  For drinking.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  We had a global literacy prize for teaching children in the middle of Tanzania, reading, writing, arithmetic on a tablet without any literate adults. You'd give them a tablet, they'd turn it on and had to learn everything on their own. A couple of years ago, I got Elon Musk to fund the largest prize at the time, which was a hundred million dollar prize, to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale. Either CO2 out of the oceans, out of the atmosphere, but it was a gigaton carbon removal prize. And we had six thousand teams enter that competition, which is crazy, right? We're in the finals coming up, the next bit.

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the winner would get a hundred million dollars?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  We actually gave away fifteen million of it staged in the beginning, so the remaining amount will be...

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So starter money for people.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we had a student competition and so forth. But the idea is that we've sparked this entire industry and brang you approaches.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The idea is you wanna burn all the oil in the ground. Just fess up. You wanna burn all the oil in the ground, the only way you can do that is to pull the CO2 out. Just say it.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see. Thanks.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  We have launched a larger prize called the $101 million Longevity or Healthspan X Prize.

• 15:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. It's one thing to say, here's an innovative X Prize winning idea.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. How often does it turn into a thoroughly marketable product that then births an industry?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Well, that's our whole goal. So if you go to Xprize.org, you can check out a lot of the background and a lot of the impact we've had. We talk about when a prize gets won, it's the beginning of the work, right? Because we have now demonstrated a new capability and we want to spark an industry. So when the Ansari X Prize got won in 2004, Richard Branson came in and bought the rights to create Virgin Galactic, right? And I've known Jeff Bezos for 40 years. My first organization ever was Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS, which became a worldwide college space organization. I was the chairman and Jeff Bezos was the Princeton chapter president back in the...

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a student?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  As a student.

• 16:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  And...

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he offer you Amazon stock?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  No, no, unfortunately not. But he did tell me, I did meet him shortly after he started Amazon, and I said, like, Jeff, what are you doing with this Amazon thing? I thought you were like a space guy.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because he was just selling books at the time, right? He was a bookseller.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  And he said, "Well, I plan to make all my money in Amazon. I'll spend it on space." A very simple one-two plan, right?

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  And it worked out.

• 17:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, fair, yeah. Do you feel pressure from common folk, just everyday folk, when they see you putting all this very innovative energy of time and money, doing things that feel remote to them?

• 17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there pushback on you for this?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  You know, uh...

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a smart guy.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  The way to...

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're getting access to money and investments.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Why aren't you using it to solve the world's problems?

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I am, I am. That's what the X Prize does as well, right? We are focused on solving global grand challenges. But I do remember the conversations earlier on when I was just focused on space. And I remember...

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's when this would have come up then, yeah?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember writing a brochure, "Why Space?" Because it was the hardest question to answer. And you can talk about Tang and Teflon and all that stuff. But I'll tell you, I would say, "We are the equivalent of those lungfish..."

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That came out of the...

• 18:14Speaker 01

  "...climbing out of the oceans onto land."

• 18:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  And if they don't like it, tough.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so, so you're analogizing Earth to the ocean and space to land? Because we're coming out of the...

• 18:26Speaker 01

  I think we have a moral obligation to fly, uh, to make humanity a multi-planetary species.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moral?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  A moral obligation, a moral obligation.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, tell that to the homeless person.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  For the... On a, on a species level.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Species level, okay, okay, okay.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  So, interesting, right? So, one of the things I'm very proud of is, uh, I had started a company years ago called Zero Gravity Corporation. Zero...

• 18:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember Zero G.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You fly people up in the thing.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have, we have a 727, we fly these parabolic flights. This is another one...

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not one where the doors blow out?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  So, uh, I wanted to go on NASA's Zero G airplane. I couldn't get on, I couldn't get on, I couldn't... I said, "Screw it, if I want to go that bad, I'm gonna start a company to do Zero G flights." That's just, that's just my thing. So, it took me 11 years to get FAA approval. 11 years to get the Federal Aviation Administration to allow people to get an airplane, unbuckle yourself, and have the airplane go up at 45 degrees up, over the top, for a little bit of an arc, and then come down.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then basically fall.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  And then fall.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in free fall.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  You're in free fall as you go over the top, right? It's, it's the arc of, a small arc of that, of an, of an orbit. Anyway, I, uh, in 2007, I was connected to Stephen Hawking. And, uh, the X Prize had just been won, the unsorry X Prize for spaceflight. And on the phone, he said, "Can you fly me into space?" And I said, "I'm sorry, Professor Hawking, I can't, but I could fly you on a Zero G flight." And he said fantastic through his nurse. And we agreed to do a zero gravity flight. Long story short, I was told by everybody I was crazy, I was gonna kill this guy. And we actually did the flight.

• 20:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zero G never killed anyone. It's gravity that kills.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  But he was very frail, right? He could break a rib. So he was asked onstage at the press conference before he flew. It was amazingly successful.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If he dies.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  I wasn't gonna sue me now. The question was, why are you doing this? It's risky. And he said something a little dystopian. He said, I don't think humanity has a future unless we open up the space frontier. And so that's one way of looking at it.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, I recommend anyone who hasn't seen it, go to YouTube. There are videos of him floating in the zero G moment.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Proudest moment. I had to fight, you know, I had two people, we announced it, we were gonna do a fundraiser for ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, the disease that gave him his inability to move any muscles. And after I announced the press conference, announced the press, we're gonna do this flight, I got two phone calls. One from my airplane operator, who said, you're insane, you're gonna kill the most famous physicist on the planet. And a second one from a government agency, I won't mention who they are, but their initials are FAA, who said, you're not allowed to do it. You're not allowed to fly Stephen Hawking into zero G. And I said, why? He says, in your operating specifications, it says that your passengers have to be able-bodied.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  And he's clearly not able-bodied.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Able-minded.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  And so I asked, I had the presence of mind to ask, who determines whether he's able-bodied? And said, well, probably an aviation physician or his doctor. I bought malpractice insurance, got three physicians to write letters to the FAA that he was able-bodied for a zero G flight. And they said, it's your ass, man.

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so you fulfill the bureaucratic requirements with producing the letters? Yeah, it's delightful to watch him float around in there. So, okay, so getting back to the pushback you might have gotten by putting money in space versus earth.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  This is human destiny, and we need to spread the risk.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So... Tell me now about, it's the subject of your latest of a half a dozen books. Longevity, AI, how does X Prize fit into that? So where you going now?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my focus over the last 10 years has been the field of longevity. How do I add 10, 20, 30 healthy years on your life? Part of this group-

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But why not just say live forever? Why, why, why are you so restricted? Come on dude.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I think-

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who am I talking to here? You're X-Man.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  When I, listen, there's a concept called longevity escape velocity. That's my goal.

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that. Describe that. I'd love that phrase.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Alright, so-

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's so perfect.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  It is perfect.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, go.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  So today, for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for about a third of a year. By breakthroughs and so forth. As we're in this incredible era of AI and soon quantum chemistry and quantum tech and so forth, science, there will be a point in the future-

• 23:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, this is AI as applied to our understanding of our physiology and our genetics.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Of, of all aspects of ourselves.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just AI in the abstract. It's AI in the very specific.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  It's applied to health and medicine and medicine and-

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Solving problems we couldn't otherwise solve.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Because there's, it's, it is so complex.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  That the-

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just give it to AI.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and it can-

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll go to the Bahamas, give that to the AI.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  So, so there is a moment in time, so given the speed at which technology is progressing, and this includes genome sequencing and CRISPR and gene therapy and all of the, and stem cells, all of these technologies are moving at the speed of exponential growth. There is going to, this is the decade in which we're going to make a dent in the length of the human life. And so there is a moment in time, Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil speak about this concept called longevity escape velocity. What it means is, is going to be a moment in time that for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for more than a year.

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, the moment that happens, we've reached escape philosophy.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  So you're able to keep living longer and longer and longer. Now, whenever I talk about immortality and living forever, people shut it off. Because it is, we have so much, so many institutions that are built around death, from religions to government to all. It's a bridge too far. But what I do want to say, I'm very assured about, is can we, so we have extended...

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, when you say religion, you mean that so much of what so many religions care about is your afterlife.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you never die, what are they offering you?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you spend eternity on Earth.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  The business model breaks.

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the business...

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To put it, to put it another way, yes, okay.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  So, but with all respect to religions, how, so we have extended the healthy human, we've extended longevity to 100.

• 25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, basically.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Right? A number of people all around us, you know, are living into the late 80s, 90s up to 100. The problem is, we have not extended our health span that far. Longevity, like your life...

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lifespan, health span.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so your lifespan is how long you're alive, how long your heart is going and your, you know, ticking. Your health span is how long are you healthy? How long are you able to do the things that you enjoy, that you will move around, that you're cognitively present? And lifespans have extended, health spans have not caught up. So the first thing is, can we in fact extend the health span so that you're healthy till you're 90, till you're 100? And then, you know...

• 25:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In body and mind.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  In body and mind, right? So when I, I was at the Vatican, and I was on a panel with a, it sounds like a joke, with an alderman, a rabbi, a cardinal, and the head of the NSF and myself.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you in the Vatican bar when that happened?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  There should be a good joke about this. I was at a panel, the Vatican conference was on regenerative medicine. And the title of this panel was the morality of immortality. And I wanted to flip it to the immorality of mortality, but they

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, nice, nice, okay.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  But so at one point, I'm giving my presentation and I, and it's, the audience is filled with physicians, and clergymen, and scientists. I say, how many of here would like to live to 120? Expecting everyone's hands to go up, and like a quarter of the room goes up, and the rest are like crickets. I'm going, what up with that? And

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't have any confidence that they'll have a quality of life.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone's view of 120 is in a wheelchair slobbering.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  And, and it doesn't need to be that way. So, a lot of the work that I do today is focused on extending the healthy human lifespan. And, uh, part of this is my desire to see us get back to the moon, get onto Mars. I want those extra 30 years to enjoy what I am sure is coming. The other side is it's, you know, there's no greater wealth than your health. There's no greater gift you can give anybody than their health.

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyone dying will spend all their money to live longer.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  It, absolutely. So, uh, I've, in this area, I've done a few different things.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you have a book.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  I have a book that just came out.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me the name.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  It's called Longevity, Your Practical Playbook.

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's, it's longevity that you can, it's not just pie in the sky, it's things you can do maybe to help it.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  So, the, and you can, if you go to dmandis.com backslash longevity, there's a free, uh, distillation of the book. Like, if you can't afford it on Amazon, the stuff I do and why it's important is there for free. So I just, my goal is like, get the news out. So, the fact of the matter is that there are things that we all can do to, and we know what they are. We know what they are. It is, you need eight hours of sleep. If we didn't need eight hours of sleep, believe me, evolution would have gotten rid of it, right? We need, you know, so I'm always shooting for seven or eight hours of sleep. And there are lots of different

• 28:30Speaker 01

  approaches to maximize your sleep, and I talk about them, and then on diet.

• 28:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You went to MIT. Surely people bragged how many all-nighters they had.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Oh, when I was in medical school, it was like, I was like, as little sleep as possible.

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was the...

• 28:44Speaker 01

  That was the macho thing to do. It was like, I had...

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was the Marines of education.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  I had an island of stability at five and a half hours. If I, you know, five hours, I was groggy. Six hours, I was groggy. Five and a half, I got up then, I was okay. And then, you know, the medical world is crazy because interns and residents are sleepless constantly. It's the worst thing.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're the ones responsible for keeping you healthy when you're in, got something wrong.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  I would unionize and revolt if I were back in medical school right now.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this is, so it's a playbook for you.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  It's a play, it's very, it's very practical.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But based on what's available today, but you also have visions of tomorrow.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yes. And so, one of the chapters in the book is called, "Don't Die From Something Stupid."

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good one. I love it.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And...

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or something you could have avoided.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  So, it talks about one of my companies called Fountain Life. We have centers in the...

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe by the end of this podcast, we'll have list all the companies that are your company, but maybe not.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Probably not. I've got 26 or 27 I've started.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  So, but this one is important. If I were to ask you right now, Neil...

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just, in the time he's been sitting here, he's started three companies.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  If I were to ask you right now, Neil, do you know that you're perfectly healthy, there's nothing going on inside your body you don't know about?

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I wouldn't have confidence in making that statement.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  And no one should. The body is incredibly good at hiding disease. So, 70%, 70% of all heart attacks have no precedent, a shortness of breath, nothing.

• 30:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just happened.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  It happened. And in almost half the cases, you're dead. Um, I don't know if you're morose here.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stroke comes on pretty.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Stroke as well.

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  High blood pressure, you don't know you have high blood pressure.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Uh, cancer, you don't feel a cancer when it's stage one or stage two. It's only when it's stage three or stage four that you start, you go in to see the doctor and they say, I'm sorry to tell you this, but, so, uh, and there's lots of examples. Like, the body is great at compensating and hiding the disease. I had a dear friend of mine.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So ideally, if we could feel stage one, we'd go to get medical support and that would save so many lives.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  It would. Uh, or if you could feel the early stages of cardiac, you know, disease, um, or any of these diseases, but the body compensates. And, uh, I say, you have to look. And people say, I don't want to know. And I, I'm saying.

• 31:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not that person.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to know everything I can know.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I should, I should rope you in and you should come down. Um, here's the, here's the fact, you're going to know. You want to know at the beginning, well, you can do something about it. And so we have Fountain Life is, uh, we have four centers, one here in New York.

• 31:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fountain Life.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Fountain Life is the name of the company. FountainLife.com. Uh, we have one in New York.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a cool name, by the way. I love it.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fountain Life, yeah. It's very Ponce de Leon of youth. Yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Uh, a couple in Florida and Texas, and we're growing. But of the first 5,000 people coming through, 2% had a cancer they didn't know about. 2 and a half percent had an aneurysm they didn't know about. 14.4% had either cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, neurocognitive disease, and you can do something.

• 31:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neurocognitive, that would be like Alzheimer's or something.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Early Alzheimer's or other forms of early dementia, and you can slow these things down. And it's really about intercepting the cures coming that way. And then the last thing, which I merged my X Prize world with longevity, is we launched a $101 million, uh, health span X Prize. So offering $101 million to the team that can reverse loss in cognition, immune, and muscle by 10 to 20 years. It's $101 million up for grabs.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is not just to have you live longer, but to actually reverse it.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yes, because I don't, I don't want to wait 20 years to pay out a prize.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  But what I can do, and we have, you know, we had like 200 teams in the first couple of months and growing. I hope we'll get, you know, close to 1,000 teams here competing. I want to, a team is gonna have different approaches, lots of different approaches. You know, stem cells, epigenetic reprogramming, whatever it might be. And what we're gonna-

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Epigenics is altering your genes after they're already in play.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's altering which genes are on and which genes are off.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After the fact.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  After the fact, right, so a quick one on that. You know, you get 3.2 billion nucleotides, letters from your mom and from your dad, and that's your genes.

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The letters are amino acid letters.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  They're nucleotides, ATCs in genes.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, those aren't amino acids?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  No, those amino acids make up the proteins.

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the ACT, the adenosine, cytosine, tryptosine-

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Guanine.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guanine, right.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  So those are called nucleotides.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nucleotides, okay. And the movie Gattaca.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those letters are the nucleotides that spell out Gattaca. Fascinating film, lower budget than the movie The Island with similar themes where you-

• 33:45Speaker 01

  But it was a good, it was a good film.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, control over your genetic destiny.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  But you get those, you get those genes, about 20,000 genes in these 3.2 billion letters, at birth. It's the software you're running throughout your entire life. So the question is, you have the same genes at zero, at 20, at 40, at 60, at 80, at 100, why do you look different? Why don't you have a six-pack at 80 that you had when you were at 20?

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have a six-pack, it's just beneath three inches of fat. But there's a six-pack in there somewhere, yeah?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  And it's, it's not what genes you have, it's which genes are on and which genes are off, and that's your epigenome.

• 34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got it.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  And so-

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, there's an obscure reference to early days of computing with dipstick, dip switches on computers.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in order to have a computer behave in one way versus another, you have to go behind it and check your list of what, that's how old I am.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  I remember cards, I remember punch cards.

• 34:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Punch card, yeah, so you flick these switches and that would put the computer in a mode that would then serve your needs. And they're called dip switches, but-

• 34:49Speaker 01

  So epi for the Greek word for above, above the genome, controlling it.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like the epicenter of an earthquake is the point on the ground above-

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The earthquake which occurred, of course, below the ground.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  So we're gonna have lots of different approaches to going after this prize. And it, we hope will be won by, by 2030. That's the current end of the prize. We'll extend it if we need to. Uh, but if you're interested, if you're listening to this and you have a company that wants to compete for this X Prize, go to Xprize.org, uh, registration will be open. And we're, you know, we don't pre-guess what the solution is. It could be-

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't wanna do that ever. Right, because somebody is, could be more clever than you.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be a med- in a meditative state, it could be, you know, eating popcorn all day long. I don't know. But there's a hundred and one million dollars. Oh, by the way, ask me why it's a hundred and one.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eating Cheetos or whatever, something, something you would have never expected, yeah. Oh, why is it a hundred and one?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so-

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other than a hundred and one Dalmatians, other than that.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  So, uh, the prize we'd, we'd gotten, uh-

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Disney was funding it, no.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Uh, the prize we got funded from Elon was a hundred million dollars for a gigaton carbon removal. And the first sponsor of this prize, a guy named Chip Wilson, the founder of Lemon, and, uh, he put in the first, uh, roughly thirty million into this prize. And he wanted it to be bigger than Elon's prize.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so, that's the competition you're talking about?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yes, so I said, okay, could you add another million?

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He did.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me now about what role AI can or should play going forward. I know you've thought a lot about it. And, and you founded Singul- co-founded-

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Singularity University.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With, with, uh-

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Ray Kurzweil.

• 36:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Ray Kurzweil, who's been on StarTalk a couple of times.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Ray is amazing.

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  He's a mentor for me.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a friend of StarTalk.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, um, I'm still angry with you all for taking our word, Singularity.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  It is a physicist's word.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a black hole word, it's our word. You should pay us royalty on that, I think. But, um, this idea that there's some portal waiting to arrive through which we will pass and will, and never return back. Because everything will be different. The neuro-computing interface, AI controlling everything. You, given the fear factor that it represents in culture today, you come across quite comfortable with it.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have any concerns?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  I remember a friend of mine, uh- Dan Sullivan said to me, Peter, you don't fear the future, do you? I said, not at all. I'm excited about the future. The future is, we're empowered to do more and more and solve bigger and bigger problems.

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  I'll remember that for next time. Sounds like a movie line to me.

• 37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's a song. It's a lyric in a song. Yeah, from the 1980s. Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  I was conscious then. So, I was, I was trekking through Chile. Long story. I was carrying Ray's book, The Singularity is Near, which is an interesting title.

• 37:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it just came out with a new book, The Singularity is Near.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's not very imaginative, but...

• 38:06Speaker 01

  But, it works.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we get the point, right?

• 38:09Speaker 01

  But we talk about it.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  And the meme is, the meme is spreading. So, I said, there is no place on the planet you can go as an executive, a college kid, a graduate student, entrepreneur, whatever it is, and really get an overview of what's going on in all the exponentially growing technologies, which I count as computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. All those things are rising up into the right at the same time that compute is going up. And they're converging, and they're changing everything, and they're empowering everything.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're changing everything under our noses.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Yes, and we're the frog in the boiling water, not noticing it. But it's happening at an extraordinary rate, and accelerating, by the way.

• 38:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is the water boiling? That's a bad thing.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  I know.

• 39:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought you had a positive outlook here. I feel great about the future. We're frog in a boiling pot of water. That is not...

• 39:08Speaker 01

  All right, I will change that. I will change that. Okay. All right. So, the fact of the matter is, the speed at which it's accelerating is accelerating. And there are more...

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a term for that, I forgot.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  It's jerk.

• 39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the acceleration of acceleration is the jerk. Yeah.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  The first time I heard that, I was like, really? The jerk?

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know what the acceleration of the acceleration of acceleration is?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 39:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a snap.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 39:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And the acceleration of acceleration of acceleration is it? The next two are crackle and pop. It's true.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  I think there was some, like, drug use in the 60s.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoever came up with that was...

• 39:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But go on, yes. So if you have, it's basically a hyper exponential at that point.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  It is.

• 39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's happening around us and taking us by surprise.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yes, we formed Singular University as a place where folks can go and learn about that.

• 40:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bathe in it.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Bathe in it, bathe in it. And then I created sort of the highest level of singularity called Abundance 360.

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's abundance?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  It's, so I mentor about 500 CEOs that are with me through the year. We spend four days in, four and a half days in LA together, and then quarterly on Zoom. And my job is to show them what just happened and where things are going, so they can have an understanding of this. Because the speed is-

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They can make better strategic decisions in the interest of the financial stability of whatever they oversee.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Of their companies, or if they are trying to make the world a better place, how do they use better tools, right? The saying that I use is, you know, there are two kinds of companies at the end of this decade. Companies that are fully utilizing AI, and those are out of business. And I think it's that, you know, that black and white.

• 40:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I agree with that. In my field, astrophysics, we've been AI-ing for decades.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  You don't call those graduate students.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, that's an aspect of, that's the biological side of the AI that we're invoking. So you see the positive side of it all, because you know what it can be.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so-

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So get back to the word abundance. What do you mean by that?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, the reason Joe's Abundance 360 is the name of this program and the summit was because I'm seeing these technologies are turning scarcity into abundance over and over again. My favorite example is, 100 years ago, we used to kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights. Then we ravaged mountainsides, then we drilled kilometers under the ground. Now we're bathed with 8,000 times more energy from the sun. From solar than we use as a species.

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the planet is.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  The planet is, Earth is, yes. And fusion, hopefully, do you believe it's around the corner as much as I'm hearing?

• 41:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, based on other things that were once imagined to never come. And now we take for granted, I have no hesitation.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  And the same is true.

• 42:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of nuclear fusion.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And the same is true across all areas, right? We have an abundance of compute and bandwidth and memory and knowledge. And now even AI is free and available to anyone on planet.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Essentially, yeah, yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  With a connection. And it doesn't stop there, we're reinventing food, right? So for all of human history, food was photons 93 million miles away hitting a chloroplast, turning into hydrocarbon that a cow would eat, then you eat the cow. There's the breakthrough that's coming in reinventing how we feed ourselves is cultivated meats.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm first in line for that.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am, a friend of mine, Josh Tetrick.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But and even if they can't get the protein fibers, right?

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can make sort of the equivalent of ground beef.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you could transform burger, I'll eat more burgers.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If that, no, nobody doesn't love a burger.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a company called.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carnivorous.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Omeat in LA.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called Omeat?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Omeat, and they're doing that now, there's, there's good meat, there's a number of different companies. They've gotten approval from the FDA to sell this stuff. And people go, that's disgusting. And I say, my response is, have you ever gone to a slaughterhouse? What, disgusting?

• 43:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh!

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Right?

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to see disgusting?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Do you know how many chickens are iron plenter?

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, well, I know how, I got, here's my number.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not my number, it's a number. And I post this every Super Bowl, okay? I said, while you're dining on your chicken wings.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Consider that in America alone, we eat a million chickens per hour. And that's not even the weird part, you have to complete the sentence. If we eat a million chickens per hour, it means we. Hatch a million eggs, grow them, cultivate them, feed them, bring them to slaughter, distribute them to marketplaces, they're purchased, cooked, and then eaten. A million times an hour. So I think it's, what is it, it's tens of billions, billions.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Thirty eight billion chickens on the planet.

• 44:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the most slaughtered animal in the world.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Which blows me away. So these companies are now able to, instead of slicing the neck off, pluck out a piece of muscle stem cell.

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they cultivate that.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And they grow them to billions, hundreds of billions, and they form them into a Chick-fil-A.

• 44:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I bet that tastes like chicken.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  That's a good one.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  But, you know, they will be healthier for you, cheaper for you. It's like, I have given up.

• 44:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuff to look forward to. Is there an X Prize to do this now?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  There is. And it's being, it's gonna be one very shortly. Tony Robbins.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the self-help guru.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yes, he's a dear friend. And we are, I mean, what I find fascinating is I've given up eating tuna

• 45:05Speaker 01

  because of, number, we're destroying all the large fish in the oceans. And two, the mercury levels are so high. But imagine in the future, you know, cultivated tuna.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Suppose I like mercury.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Then it's been good knowing you.

• 45:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like tuna, but I don't eat it as often as I used to.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like moderation, but only in moderation.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what about deep fakes and AI? That's a little scary there. You don't worry about that?

• 45:35Speaker 01

  I do. And deep fakes, I don't think we've seen anything yet. I think that deep fakes are.

• 45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just the beginning.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  A friend of mine, Imad Mustakas, the CEO of Stability AI, I was talking to him. He said, you know, a year ago, it took us thirty seconds to generate a single image. Now we can generate a hundred images per second. Which is, you know.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Through an AI.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Through an AI generator, right? And so we're now about to create real-time video on the fly. You know, goodbye Hollywood.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In what way might deep fakes cause the most damage in society?

• 46:08Speaker 01

  I mean, we've seen deep fakes being used to mimic celebrities' hawking wares that they have no relationship with. But the real damage is during election years, right? Where you've got one side using it and the other side not using it? I don't think so. I think it's one of these weapons that is going to be unleashed secretly by both sides. Now, here's the problem. Seeing used to be believing, and it is no longer. And if you tell somebody the same thing, falsehood, over and over and over again, it doesn't matter that you've been told it's false. It's still eating away in your subconscious. So we're going to see deep-

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that's evolutionary, where if something happens repeatedly, your brain says it must be true. Otherwise, it wouldn't have happened continuously.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  But we have to find ways to combat this, right? And so the ways we're going to combat this are, first of all, there are regulations in play. And there should be a very high price to pay if you're creating a deep fake. Number two-

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Legally.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Legally, yes. I mean, I create deep fakes of myself, and I create deep fakes of mythical individuals for my podcast and for other things. But if I create a deep fake of you-

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you real?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  I am, I am. Well, at least as far as you can tell.

• 47:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is all that's necessary. That's all I can know, can't know.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  So here's the, you know, it turns out that we've dealt with this a couple of different ways. Back early on in the color Xerox's came out, color copying machines, people started replicating money. And there was a, you know, an outcry and thirty banks-

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it wasn't just color. They had to have a high enough resolution to get the detail. There's a lot of-

• 47:53Speaker 01

  But there was a point at which you could replicate money on these machines. And a conglomeration of thirty central banks got together and created a protocol that were then implemented by all the copiers like Xerox, so that you cannot use your machine to copy money. And so the networks are going to need to create-

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Broadcast networks.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  All digital transmission networks are gonna have to create the mechanisms for checking on meta tags. Maybe it's gonna be blockchain that's gonna enable me to authenticate whether a video or image is right. You know, we've talked about blockchain forever. This might be the single most important use case for blockchain ever, to authenticate video and images. And then, do you remember when credit cards were first being used on the internet? And your caution about, is it safe to put my credit card in here? And I think we now feel safe about that. And we'll get there.

• 48:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's tank anti-tank warfare, right? Something rises and then combat it.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  The single biggest tool we're gonna have to fight deep fakes is gonna be AI. It's gonna be a white hat, black hat competition. And it's gonna be not moving at the speed of conferences or regulatory. It's gonna be entrepreneurs using AI. And I tell you, the world's biggest problem is the world's biggest business.

• 49:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's nothing less nimble than the US Congress.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 49:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Voting on a technology that none of them knows.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  For sure. 100%. Let me give you a pro tip for the listening audience. One of the areas where deep fakes is causing problems is moms and dads, grandmothers and grandfathers who get a call and say, hey grandma, I'm in jail, I need bail money. Can you please, can you send me some money, please? And people I know have been ripped off by that. So the pro tip here is in your family, get a code word. Agree on a code word over dinner tonight that if anybody should ever call you from within your ecosystem asking you for money,

• 50:01Speaker 01

  be cautious. Ask for them their code word. Wanna hear my code word? Just kidding.

• 50:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how I think this will all play out, not that you ask, but it is my podcast, so I get to say this. It's, once deep fakes become basically perfect.

• 50:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even people who believed news that had been faked will not believe

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Will flip.

• 50:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fake.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So the people who thought there was pizza gate and were like eating babies at the basement of the pizza thing, they will see that and they'll see that announcement on the internet and say, "Internet is so rife with false information that that's probably false." So, so think about that. Because so far, it would, it would reach such a level that people who believe fake stuff will no longer believe the fake stuff.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it will default to disbelief.

• 50:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that will be the end of the internet. And we have to go back to reading books and having personal conversations. So, Peter.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 51:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, I know you get around and you, you very smoothly name dropped this entire interview. That was very cool, very, very smooth of you.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Thank you. I am a salesman after all.

• 51:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've probably been in the company of other astrophysicists, but right now we know you're in my company. So I bet you might have some question that you have about the universe that you can ask me right now and I can answer it.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  When during the 13.8 billion years of this universe might life have begun?

• 51:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can give a educated guess.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 51:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Life as we know it requires more than hydrogen and helium. It requires much more complex atoms to make molecules. The universe was birthed out of the big bang by all evidence as a soup of hydrogen and helium and trace amounts of lithium. You're not getting life there unless the life is somehow magically made of just hydrogen. So what happens? Star, you have to wait till stars are formed. So the universe has to cool so that matter can coalesce into objects that we call stars. Some of those stars are so hot in their core, they will fuse not only hydrogen to helium,

• 52:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  but helium to carbon, to nitrogen, to oxygen, to silicon, and all the, all the chemical elements that we see, know and love on the periodic table, the elements that comprise the human body.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That takes time. To build that corpus of chemical identity for everything that we know of and love as life. So, I would put it at, I would say you needed a few billion years out of that 13.8 to build up enough chemical reserves. So you can have a planet which is made of these chemical reserves and on that planet have the organic chemistry that would then give you life. Which means, since Earth is only, the solar system is only just under 5 billion years old, and the universe is 14.8, it means there could be life out there. And there's a gap.

• 53:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's 5 billion years older than we are. That's the point. And more advanced. Where the heck are they? More advanced. We're latecomers in this, okay? And we like to think we've come far, but if we had another billion years of complex life, such as what we are, oh my gosh, they'd look at us like we were worms, still evolving. We are not. So Peter, really great to see you again, man. Thanks for coming by. It's not gonna have to be 30 years ago. I'll see you when we're 90, alright? You catch me up on, well, 90, we'll have another 50 years to live, if you're successful. I hope so. Alright. A real pleasure, pal. This has been StarTalk.

• 54:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking out.