Peter Diamandis on longevity escape velocity, AI-driven scientific breakthroughs, and why he's investing more in energy than AI

meeting you. We'll talk to you soon.

Okay. Thanks. Goodbye. Byebye. Up next, we have Peter Diamandis. He is the founder and executive chairman of X-Prise. He's an entrepreneur, a futurist, and he's known for incentivizing Breakthrough Technologies. We're very excited to be joined by Peter Diamandis. How are you, Peter?

What's going on,

guys? Long time coming.

Long time coming. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Everyone's very excited.

Applause.

Lots of applause. Lots of applause. Uh I would love I would love to start with just uh your your your temperature check on on how technology is progressing, how you're feeling. Uh I I saw you in the fabulous AI doc. I think you did a great job of articulating some of your view of how technology is progressing over the next few years. But when someone comes to you and they and they, you know, they see things moving so quickly, uh they might have some anxiety. What are you uh returning to? What are the ground truths that you start with?

Really important point. I mean, first of all, it is overwhelming. I mean, I spend at least half my week consuming trying to understand what's going on. You know, basically trying to interpret it and project where things are going and teach about it, my moonshots podcast, whatever I'm doing.

And I think one of the questions is if you're in a state of fear or overwhelm, that's the worst place to be facing the future from. Um and it's really, you know, your ability to feel like AI and all this technology is happening for you instead of to you.

Yeah.

It's the difference between success and and failure today.

So, um I think one of the things I've spoken about and I've written about is the coming age of abundance

where every single human on the planet has access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education that they want. And I think we're most definitely heading that way at a rapid speed. Um and the question is we have had to reinvent society which has been very different and uh has been you know our current society is based on the industrial revolution and not the AI revolution. So there's going to be a lot of rewiring the social contract what how people you know uh get purpose in their life and uh it's going to be a bumpy road for the next you know two to six years but on the back side of that it's going to be extraordinary.

Yeah I agree. Um, I I I do enjoy your podcast. I was wondering um it feels like uh you go way back with Elon Musk. How did you first meet? What have you learned from him? I'm very interested about that relationship because you've done so many interviews with him over the times like how do you think he's changed as a leader? What have you learned from him? Uh yeah, what's that journey been like?

Yeah, so we met in 2000. I was running a top secret uh private robot mission to the moon called Blastoff and it was it was fun. It was with Idea Lab and Bill Gross the CEO. I'd hired a team out of NASA. We had bought two launch vehicles. We were building robots to go and land privately on the moon and do the first pay-per-view back then.

No way.

Okay. So, I you you I don't know if you caught earlier, but we were we were talking about this. I was saying like I I think there's a world where NASA could make certain parts of the mission pay-per-view. Of course, you can release the replay if you want to watch live.

It's so thrilling.

Hey, up.

I love that.

Yeah, it was it was funny because my biggest cost was not the rockets. We bought a a Taurus. We bought a um a Dener from Russia.

Okay. uh for these vehicles. Our biggest cost back then was accommodating the signals to all the users out anyway. It was a long it was under wraps

and then hits, you know, the sort of the dot apocalypse in April 2001.

And I'm introduced to Elon as someone who might fund our private moon mission because just sold he just sold PayPal to eBay

and uh he didn't do that. ended up joining our board at X-P Prize and was part of that adventure for our first private space flight. But I met Elon just when he was deciding what he was going to do next after after PayPal and it was you know energy in the world and rockets

and uh you know he is extraordinary one of the most brilliant people on the planet. Um and he went from basically reading college and graduate textbooks in aerospace to building now the dominant mechanism by which humanity gets into space uh uh forever. It looks like um and uh what I've seen continuously is he actually implements everything he says he's going to do. It may not be in the time frame he says he's going to do it, but ultimately he's consistently deliberate on all of his visions. Uh, and a lot of people get wrong, I think, the fact that he's um, uh, he's in it for the money or he's in it for domination.

I think consistently what he's done, he's just looking to solve problems.

Yeah.

And, uh, and try and accelerate humanity's potential. Yeah. Going

I was sort of grappling with that uh, his post about the mass driver on the moon and I was working backwards with a couple AI models trying to understand like what is a reasonable time frame on this. We talked to a lot of investors who are very pro Elon and and AC I mean Elon didn't give a time frame but everyone was saying like okay this is 10 20 30 years out that's really far and and I and I was processing it and I was like yeah maybe it is but I still think that there's a benefit to having a leader in technology that is actually talking about something 20 years away or 30 years away and and

yeah I mean the idea of mass drivers on the moon goes back to the 80s there was a guy named Gerard K. O'Neal at Princeton University who had the space studies institute and he actually built the first drivers on Earth, right? Demonstrating the ability to accelerate to lunar escape philosophy and it was always thought that we were going to

what was he driving at what was he driving at the time? Just

rocks basically.

Yeah. No, it was basically just a a car just a shuttle a carrier that would

accelerate in the vacuum of the moon to a lunar escape velocity. But the his original idea was we're going to mine the moon for uh nickel and iron and oxygen and silicates and build solar power satellites in Earth orbit. The idea was we build satellites in orbit that that gather the sun's energy and be it down to the earth. Not sure it made full sense because of you know solar was demonetizing at a very rapid rate. But the idea of building uh data centers on the moon or at least the components for it, launching it to Earth orbit could make sense. But of course that's that's next after doing it from from the ground.

Yeah.

So I mean Elon's, you know, terowatt in Earth orbit based upon groundbased future Starlink satellites, it's an insane number of satellites. It's like, you know, I think it's a la Starship launch every hour. uh get that capability up there, which if it's if you think about airplane operations, that's nothing. But for rocket operations today, it's 2 point, you know, it's a launch every 2.3 days on on on Falcon. So,

yeah, but that I mean, that ramp was unbelievable to watch. We've seen the the the the time lapse of Falcon launches from uh Florida and it starts with just one and then it doubles and you can see the exponential growth and so it doesn't seem that crazy especially with the new landing infrastructure where you catch it and immediately put it on another one like yeah it's going to be years. It's going to take a lot of work and a lot of effort but uh it certainly doesn't break the laws of physics as Elon likes to say. Yeah, I mean it's the fun thing is watching the entire uh evolution of human of of humanity's journey into space go from government programs to private uh companies, right? So in 1996 uh under the Arch in St. Louis, I announced a $10 million prize for private space flight. Yeah.

And this was when you know we had just had the shuttle era that was coming to an end and it was always government astronauts, government programs, but could we flip it to commercial? uh and you know I thought you know suborbital flights would be the lowest hanging fruit and of course Elon and Bezos have come along and just decimated not in a bad way but you know over way overcome suborbital flights to now getting to orbit on a regular basis and you know we're going to see commercial flights to the moon um you know Apollo you know what we just saw with Artemis 2 was going around the moon and coming back to Earth. We'll see Starship offering seats on on flights like that eventually to the lunar surface and it's the beginning of it's a it's the early 1500s of Europe coming to America. Uh and that's an exciting time.

Well, in in that future, what do you think the role of government space exploration or scientific research is? Because when I think about the the the helicopter that landed on Mars, like it's really hard to underwrite that as a investor, but I love it because now we have a new data point on how that works. And if there is some gain from that, every private space company can take whatever the learnings are and immediately start commercializing them and competing to figure out, okay, is there an economy here? Is there a business?

Yeah. Well, and that's is the role for government. It's going to be I mean there's like four epic science missions that NASA has planned over the next few years, right? With nuclearpowered uh inner solar system transporters and going to uh to Europa. Um and I think ultimately NASA is going to be funding these uh these science missions. Uh and when they say funding the science missions, they're going to be giving those missions to the money to private companies to go and do that work on behalf of that on behalf of of the government.

Yeah. Um where what where else are you seeing promise? We're in this weird moment where we're seeing incredible growth in the power of artificial intelligence. Uh but it's not curing cancer yet. It's uh you know the the best case scenario is that it's going to make all of our cyber security systems way more safe because we're going to go and find all the bugs, patch every hole, and we're going to navigate that system so that the white hat hackers have the tools longer than the black hat hackers before they get to them. And and and that is good. That's a positive externality, but that's not the same as as curing cancer or abundant food. What is the next domino? We cured obesity and John's like,

I guess,

I'm moving the goalpost. I'm moving the goalpost.

But yeah,

isn't it amazing because we always forget how far we've come and we just sort of like say, uh, okay, show me some other miracle, please, because yesterday I I think what people don't realize and I I wrote a paper with my moonshot mate Alexer Gross, who's our resident genius, called Solve Everything. And I think what's really exciting of what's coming in the very near future is the fact that these AGI soon ASI systems are going to solve math. They've already effectively solved math, but comes next. It's physics and chemistry and biology, material sciences. And so we're about to see this extraordinary, you know, uh, golden era of of scientific discoveries that are going to occur at a rate far beyond anything else, right? scientific breakthroughs, Nobel prizes came at rate of the number of geniuses on the planet. But we've now number of genius individual equivalents by billionfold.

And so we're going to end up with a situation where uh you know we get room temperature superconducting and we've got you know substrates that allow us to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or salinate at a rate like never before or you know allow us to reach much escape velocity. So I had Kevin Will from OpenAI on stage with me at my abundance summit this year and Kevin used to be the chief product officer at OpenAI. He's now head of science at Open AAI and what an incredible position to have.

Yeah.

Where you're using these models to solve physics and then all the breakthroughs that come out of there. So people talk about

the revenues that are going to come from large language modelic systems that the Frontier Labs are creating. I think what they're not talking about is the massive revenue that comes out of the breakthroughs

that these that these companies are able to create. Well, if you've solved longevity, what's that worth?

Yeah, I I want to talk about longevity, but first you mentioned desalination. I've always been extremely interested in in uh water desalination uh because I live in California and there's always been this debate over where the Colorado River goes and and what and uh you know what the opportunity in Arizona and Nevada is if California could desalinate the ocean and wouldn't need to pull so much water from the more central parts of America. you could wind up with uh more green areas and more farmland potentially in uh desert areas. Uh but I'm wondering uh is is desalination uh is it a is it a material science problem, a a physics problem, a science problem or is it permitting or marshalling the resources or just economics? Like what what do you think is interesting? Because that that feels like such a such an amazing technology if we can unlock it in any reasonable amount of time. I think it's all of those in some degree. You know, I run I don't run I'm now executive chairman of the X-P prize and amazing Morgan Anushari runs X-Prize and we've launched about $600 million in large scale incentive prizes driven about 30 billion in R&D

and the largest prize uh we have going on right now is a desalination XP prize. It's funded out of Abu Dhabi by the president of Abu Dhabi.

Yeah. Um, and it's asking basically to increase the energy efficiency of desalination. It's also asking one of the challenges with desalination is when you pull water out and put the saline back, it's got impact on the environment. Yeah. So, you have to be able to, you know, to humiliate that impact. Um, and so we're going to see additional breakthroughs. It's going to be material science. It's going to be energy and physics that are driving that.

Yeah. But the other thing that's going on is the idea of atmospheric capture of water. Right? There's quadrillions of liters of water in the atmosphere. We call it rain when it falls on us. Yeah.

But uh there's technologies now coming online at scale that for the majority of all countries on the planet you can extract water from the atmosphere. So I I think the water issue um be solved by del by atmospheric capture and by actually AI uh looking at efficiency of water utilization because we overuse in some places and not others and then it's going to be recycling of of water. So, you know, as I wrote in my first book, Abundance, the future is better than you think, back in 2012, technology takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant.

Right? We talk about water wars and water scarcity. There's plenty of water on the planet. The challenge is, you know, 97% is salt, 2% is ice, and we fight over, you know, less than 1% of the water in the in the fresh water.

Wow. Uh, what do you think needs to change around the narrative of of energy? Does does it do different new energy projects have a narrative problem? Because it feels like nuclear we're the technology has been around for so long. We're we're close to breakthroughs here. We talk to founders all the time that are building in nuclear. Uh but it feels like there's still some nervousness and anxiety about actually rolling that out. Solar is a whole different uh a whole different question. But how have you grappled with the uh the the trade-offs between the the technology, the government, and uh and just popular responses to the idea of a nuclear renaissance?

Yeah. So new so energy first is the single innermost loop. It's the most important thing we've got going on. You know, we've seen chips as the gating factor for a lot of AI.

It's no longer chips. Yeah. It's now strictly energy which is why you know Elon's looking at

space

data centers in orbit.

Yeah.

Uh but in the near term I think you know this is not investment advice but I'm investing more in energy companies than I am in AI companies these days because how fundamental it is. nuclear um you know the challenges were stuck in the nuclear paradigm from 30 years ago with gen one and gen two fusion fision plants sure

which were not safe and we saw Fukushima we saw three mile island we saw all these these disasters

um but the new generation plants are in fact safe

uh and uh you know they're coming uh small modular reactors are coming fusion is coming and we need everything we need all of them but at this point you So, I'm fond of saying I would put a nuclear power source in my backyard.

I love it.

They're safe enough, right? And so, um, I mean, there's also communities need to understand this that there's a direct correlation between the amount of energy you have in your community and the GDP of your community, the health of your community, the intelligence and education levels of your community. Energy scales all of these things. And so you should want access to the most energy you possibly have in your country, in your city, in your

How do you think about the aesthetics of of technology and the impact of aesthetics? Because uh it feels like Elon has been very uh very deliberate in the way he designs the cyber cab and the way he announces these and the future should look by the should look like the future. It certainly looks futuristic. Maybe there's a little cyberpunk edge there sometimes. But uh we were talking about this with data centers that uh you know there's a lot of things around power, but that's solvable. But the aesthetics is another piece. You know, people are more likely to you know drive by a uh cell phone tower that's dressed up like a tree and not think about it as opposed to if they just see something that's, you know, uh very machinic. And I'm wondering uh how you process that as does that need to be more of a first class consideration for technologists if they're working on mega projects.

So first off I think what one of the things that's interesting is we're going to start to repurpose the energy plants already there. Right. So the coal plant

the coal plant already has got you know permitting to some degree. It's got all of the um uh supply chain coming into it. Has the power lines coming out of it. What you're going to probably see is the the coal plant was, you know, used to have a coal fired boiler. You're now going to pull out coal segment of it and put in a fusion device to boil the water there instead. So, you're going to maintain the same footprints. You're just going to actually replace the engine with something that's more powerful and is cleaner, which I think is an important thing to realize. Um, that's one of the transitions that's going to occur. And yeah, I I think making things beautiful um needs a little more attention and you can get there. And I think one of the things that AI can do if you ask it is how do you beautify something that might otherwise look, you know, just hideous?

Yeah. Let's talk about longevity. Uh do you how big of a deal do you see GLP1s? It feels like we've been dealing with an obesity crisis for so long. It's still really early to see a a jump in life expectancy, but if there was one horse I had to bet on as a new technology that enabled life extension, it would probably be GLP1s. But how have you been processing that boom relative to other nextgen solutions that might be coming down the pipe in five or 10 years?

Well, I spend about half of my time in AI and half my time in longevity, right? I've written a few books there. I have a large venture fund investing in the tech. right

um building companies in the space and you're right GLP-1 by the by the longevity health community is considered really the very first longevity drug

um and part of it is we know that if you are metabolically unhealthy if you're carrying too much visceral fat if you're carrying too much fat on your body that um that that shortens your life and so GLP1s enable you hopefully to change your diets your your habits but what's coming so yes it's the first and we're seeing generation 2, generation 3, generation 4 GLP1 drugs coming online right now,

which will enable you to keep the weight off and and also maintain muscle, which is the downside of the original earlier versions of the GLP1 drugs. But what's coming uh on the back of that are a whole set of new longevity therapeutics. So, one of my friends, David Sinclair, not sure if you've had him on on the show,

I'd love to.

Yeah, he's amazing and you definitely must. That'd be amazing.

Um, David's one of the most, you know, one of the great geniuses in the longevity space as is, uh, is George Church.

Yeah.

And, and David has, for the first time ever, uh, we see a age reversal technology going into human trials. It's his OSK trial that's being done by Life Biosciences. Full disclosure, I'm an investor adviser to the company. But uh they demonstrated uh that three of the four Yamanaka factors I won't go into detail there are able to reverse the age of cells and they did this work first in in mice um then they evolved it to primates uh which were very similar to humans and demonstrating that in the your your eyes in particular for a couple of different conditions macular degeneration and nion disease that you can reverse the age of uh of your visual system. And now this month they're going into humans.

So it's the first time and because it's an age reversal technology while it's being tested in the eye, the concept is that it will work on all organs in the body

and we're heading towards a world in which hopefully we'll be able to take a therapy and knock back your functional age by 20 30 years. And another X-P prize uh you know the the uh DESAL was the largest at 119 million. The next largest is uh we call the Healthspan XP prize. It's a $101 million XP prize.

Um it's $101 million because Elon had funded a hund00 million prize for for carbon capture.

Yeah.

And sponsor of this one wanted to be bigger than Elon.

That's great. I love I love a competition like that. That's

I know. It's funny. I said, "Okay, you you toss in the extra million bucks and we'll do that." And we did.

So, this is a prize asking teams to come up with a a longevity therapy.

Yeah.

That I can give to you in less than a year. It reverses your functional age by 20 years in cognition, muscle, and immune. Which means you've got the cognitive function you had 20 years earlier. You've got the muscular function, ability to build muscle, maintain muscles. You had 20 years younger and immune function you had 20 years. 's attention. Now

we got we have

imagine Imagine if you had the mind of a 9-year-old.

Many people have said I have the mind of a

Tyler over there could be living the life of a 2-year-old with you. Take him back 20 years. But yeah, of course, like this is more relevant.

Yeah. But but so it's um it's exciting. We have over 700 teams competing for this.

Yeah.

And we'll have a winner uh by 2030. So there's this idea that uh you know Rick Kerszswwell has been a dear friend, my mentor. I started Singularity University with him

and he talks about something called longevity escape velocity. Um and he says we're going to reach long longevity escape velocity by 2033. What is that?

Well, it's the idea that at some point for every year that you're alive, science extends your life for greater than a year. And at that point, you know, where's the limitation? So David's doing amazing work in that in that area. There are others um that are backed by like Retro that's backed by Sam Alman uh and uh uh another one backed by by Brian Armstrong and all these are working towards reversing aging. Not slowing and stopping but reversing aging.

Yeah. uh thing that stands out to me about about where you're spending time is the the the revenue ramps in AI have been unbelievable, but they also have been unbelievable in the GLP1 space when you look at Novo's revenue scaling to tens of billions of dollars, Eli Liy, tens of billions of dollars, right? And so, um, yeah, it almost feels like there's there's there could be quite a quite a lot more people going after opportunities. Um,

all of these things are I mean, the greatest wealth is your health. And when I'm in communities of, you know, ultra highealth individuals, I say, what would you pay for an extra 30 years of health? And it's like everything.

Everything,

right? So, if I could just do a quick plug, my book comes out tomorrow. Um, it's called We Are Gods. I love it.

Uh, a survival guide to the age of abundance. So, I wrote abundance in 2012. This is a follow-on book.

Yeah.

And talks about how we've seen abundance across the board in everything. Uh, we've also seen some negative elements of abundance, too much carbon, too much microplastics, too much depression, all those things. But the single thing that people need more than anything else is the mindset to to um intercept what's coming. Yeah.

Right. Feeling like AI is happening for you, not to you. Yeah.

Having the agency and agility to utilize these technologies

because uh we're, you know, as Elon says, about to hit a hypersonic tsunami that's going to change everything.

Yeah. Uh

uh what uh I would love to know like you know looking back through the last few decades there's been so much sci-fi and like futurism that just turned out to be pretty pretty accurate. And that makes me um wonder uh who should we be paying most attention to today? f you know futurists uh authors that are writing sci-fi uh you know on a on a on a go forward basis.

So let me let me riff off that one second. One of my biggest concerns is that most of Hollywood's content has been so negative about the future,

right? We've got Xmachina, Terminator, Black Mirror, and they're just painting this, you know, negative future of killer robots and insane AIs. And if that's the future that you see, why would you ever want to live there, right? And it's causing fear. Fear about job loss is one part, but fear about, you know, these technologies that we can't control because that's what we see in the movies. And so, uh, a month ago, uh, I teamed with Mark Venoff at Salesforce, Google, uh, Kathy Wood at Arc Invest, uh, Rod Rodenberry, the son of the creator of Star Trek, and we launched something called the Future Vision X-P Prize. If you'll go to futurevisionexprize.com,

you got an X- prize for everything.

I do. I do. And so, and so what is it? We're asking teams uh, to deliver a threeminute trailer.

Yeah. uh that shows a hopeful, compelling vision of the future.

Uh and we're going to make the winners's movie. So, we're going to create an engine of positive storytelling because when I was growing up, way before you guys were born, Star Trek was basically what inspired me to do everything I've ever done. You know, I'm 28 companies in inspired by Star Trek. Yeah.

And it showed this hopeful vision of the future. And so, we're lacking those. Having said that, Hail Mary was pretty damn good.

It was great. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I know. I thought it nailed that perfectly. Uh, last question for me. Uh, reflecting on, uh, the work of Ray Kerszswall,

what do you think? It it feels like his predictions have held up incredibly well. Incredibly well. I mean, to nail the touring test date within a year if not exactly to the day basically. Uh, you can quibble on all these things, but it feels remarkably accurate. uh what do you think enabled him to predict and project the future so accurately?

I mean he did it by the math. He was looking at doubling rates. He actually looked back in time to look at what was happening and what were the doubling rates. He calls it you know Moore's law is a certain part of it. It's basically integrated circuits but he has something called the law of accelerating returns and he applies it to everything. And so what's interesting is what is he predicting next, right? So longevity escape velocity by 2033

and high bandwidth brain computer interface uh BCI you know being able to connect your neoortex your uh 100 billion neurons of your brain to the cloud um you know by 2035. I mean these are extraordinary futures coming our way. It's like we're we're speedrunning every science fiction movie ever made.

It's wild. This is why we need more positive science fiction today.

We do. Absolutely do.

Well, yeah. I mean, I I've always had this this uh this take that like even in the dystopian sci-fi movies, they usually wind up having good endings where the humans overcome the negative potential ending and wind up victorious. And I think that's something that's really important to remember is that even if you wind up temporarily threatened by some negative sci-fi scenario, you can in fact use human agency to overcome it and be inspired not by the Terminator but Sarah Connor maybe narrowly uh and and and fight back against whatever negativity, whatever negative outcomes are happening because we've been through this time and time again with climate change and so many other uh you know you know car accidents. And we fought through that and we invented new seat belts and new cars and new lane, you know, things. We're still here.

Still here. We're coming.

Well,