Incentivizing the Future with Peter Diamandis

Coming up on StarTalk, my conversation with Peter Diamandis, who’s an entrepreneur extraordinaire, inventor of the XPRIZE.

We’re going to learn about what role the XPRIZE can play in stimulating innovation for the future of our species.

Coming up.

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.

Pleasure, buddy.

Great to be here.

I can’t believe it’s been 30 years.

30 years.

So what happened back then?

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

Remind me why you found me and came to my Hayden Planetarium office.

It’s a wonderful story.

So the year was 1995.

I had just founded the XPRIZE, right?

The desire was to put together a $10 million prize.

It was not funded at the time for private spaceflight.

And you came to me for the $10 million?

I had to turn me down, damn it.

It was a short meeting, right?

But you had to explain to me at the time what the XPRIZE was.

So I said, listen, throughout history, prizes were used to move technology and science forward.

And let’s face it, since we got to the moon in 1969, not much has happened in terms of going to space.

The shuttle was great.

For humans.

Yeah, a lot of great stuff on planetary surfaces.

But I wanted to go.

I wanted to be an astronaut.

That’s what I grew up.

That Apollo mission showed what we could do.

And then that scientific documentary Star Trek showed exactly where…

Which predates the going to the moon.

Yes, it does by a couple of years.

So I’m looking for people that might fund a $10 million prize.

And at first, I’m like, let’s do this grassroots.

Let’s get thousands of people who are going to give 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.

It wasn’t a competition.

I think it was a lottery.

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, provide the information and mail it in to the Hayden Planetarium.

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 going to have to make good on these tickets.

What’s our liability?

So I’m thinking, OK, it must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people who want to go on these interplanetary trips.

And send in these tickets.

And send in these tickets.

And I know there’s no option for them, and the XPRIZE 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 in your doorstep, and I said, Neil, where are all these?

There must have been thousands of them.

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 a box of these.

They did.

But we’re remembering something from 30 years ago about a contest that happened 30 years before that 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.

It wasn’t going to work.

I applaud the creativity of the idea.

I got a chance to meet you.

Oh, no, no, thank you.

But you were very kind.

And this was the beginning of the XPRIZE back then.

So I got to see it in its infancy.

Very early.

And born in your head.

Very, very early.

You know, again, I was born in 1961, and the 60s was a formative time for me.

And again, it was the Apollo program and Star Trek that really sort of infected my mind and really drove me.

That’s a good word, infected it, because 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’re affected by it.

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, only half the astronauts in the program fly.

They’re called penguins because they have wings, but they don’t fly.

Is that right?

I did not know that.

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.

And so I said, there’s got to be a better way.

And I was given a book by a dear friend, Greg Marinak, 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.

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

The Spirit of St.

Louis, that he flew across the Atlantic.

But before you continue, tell me precisely why an XPRIZE concept works at all.

So, if you think about it, we are genetically bred to compete.

We do it finding our spouse.

So we drive…

Society thrives on it.

And we evolved as humans to compete for food and 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.

So it’s like a cherry on top prize.

For incentive competition, it’s the opposite.

It says, I don’t care who you are or where you went to school.

What would your nationality be or anything?

How old you are?

Nothing.

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 mention a little bit more about it in a second, about that Lindbergh in 1927 flew New York to Paris nonstop to win this $25,000 Ortega prize.

This guy, this Frenchman Raymond Ortega is born…

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

He left from Roosevelt Field.

He used to go launch rockets out of there.

Yeah, and there’s now a museum of air and space.

Very good museum.

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.

So he swatted for the first time.

So in 1919, at the end of the war, this guy, Raymond Ortega, who owns his hotel now, posts a notice that I will offer $25,000 for the first person to fly nonstop between my birthplace of Paris and my home of New York or the other direction.

And if you knew about the trade winds, you’d…

Prevailing winds go west to east.

Yes.

So what happens is he offers his $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, you know, $4, $5, $6 million today.

Anyway, so 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 Lindbergh published in 1957, one of the Pulitzer Prize.

And he’s talking about how much money the teams are all spending.

This team is spending $100,000.

This is spending $50,000.

He spent $25,000.

And Ortigue 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.

It was a force of nature unto itself.

It was a moment.

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.

So the Ortigue Prize opened up aviation, and really you can draw an inflection point for everything.

And so as I’m reading this book, The Spirit of St.

Louis, I have to do a prize like this for space flight, because I’m not going to get a chance of me becoming a government astronaut or slim, and I don’t get a chance to fly every time I want to fly, and we need to kick human space flight in the butt.

And the NBA was off the table.

It’s not going to 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.

Just to be clear, I just want to emphasize, because you just said something, because you’re so accustomed to it, but I think it’s worthy of 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.

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

So that’s the competition you were talking about.

That’s the competition.

And the competition transcended the money.

People wanted an excuse to do it.

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 XPRIZE.

And you know why I wrote the word XPRIZE?

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 a numeral 10 for $10 million.

X for experimental.

It just really worked.

Deep.

And Elon Musk was early in that conversation that you made SpaceX.

Well, he was.

You’re like Forrest Gump, right?

Every turning point in the history.

You were there.

Elon, I met Elon in 2001.

The XPRIZE was ongoing.

He hadn’t met the Anusha Ansari yet who funded it.

And so, very famously…

You had one funder for the $10 million.

We had a bunch of smaller funders that kept us going.

And then the Ansari family was the primary funder.

And that’s why it became the Ansari prize.

The Ansari XPRIZE.

Filling in for the variable X.

Exactly.

But the X stuck around so long, we didn’t get rid of it.

It was the Ansari XPRIZE versus the Ansari prize.

And Anusha, by the way, is now the CEO of the XPRIZE.

Amazing woman.

She flew privately to the space station.

I remember that, yes.

And now she’s the CEO.

Let’s be clear.

You could not fly privately via NASA because NASA didn’t roll that way.

So she paid money to the Russians to go to the International Space Station.

Soyuz flight at Baikonur.

Elon was an early donor.

Baikonur launch site in Russia.

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 leverage you could have on innovation than an X Prime.

Yeah, we have documented 30-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, the American Museum of Natural History, you typically will get like 20 cents on your dollar spent to actually move the thing forward.

When we put up a large XPRIZE competition, you’ll get as much as $30 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 going to pay you until my house is whatever.

But it works and people do it willingly.

The losers are not sad that they didn’t get the money.

I’ll give you an example.

We have launched to date on the order of $400 or $500 million in prizes.

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

For drinking.

For drinking.

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 years ago, I got Elon Musk to fund the largest prize at the time, which was a $100 million prize to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale, either out of CO2 out of the oceans, out of the atmosphere, but it was a gigaton carbon removal prize.

And we had 6,000 teams enter that competition, which is crazy, right?

We’re in the finals coming up the next bit.

So the winner would get $100 million.

We actually gave away $15 million of it staged in the beginning, so the remaining amount will be…

So starter money for people.

Yeah, we had a student competition and so forth.

But the idea is that we’ve sparked this entire industry and brand new approaches.

The idea is you want to burn all the oil in the ground.

Just fess up.

You want to burn all the oil in the ground.

The only way you can do that is to pull the CO2 out.

Hello, I’m Alexander Harvey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

This is StarTalk with Dr.

Neil deGrasse Tyson.

It’s one thing to say, here’s an innovative XPRIZE-winning idea, okay?

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

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 XPRIZE 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…

As a student?

As a student.

Did he offer you Amazon stock?

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.

Right, because he was just selling books at the time, right?

He was a book seller.

And he said, well, I plan to make all my money in Amazon, I’ll spend it on space.

A very simple one to plan, right?

And he’s went to work.

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

Is there pushback on you for this?

You’re a smart guy, you’re getting access to money and investments.

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

Exactly.

Well, I am, I am.

That’s what the XPRIZE 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-

So that’s when this would have come up then, 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 that came out of the oceans onto land.

And if they don’t like it, tough.

Oh, so you’re analogizing earth to the ocean and space to land.

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

Moral?

A moral obligation.

A moral obligation.

Okay, tell that to the homeless person.

For the, on a species level.

Species level, okay, okay, okay.

So interesting, right?

So one of the things I’m very proud of is, I had started a company years ago called Zero Gravity Corporation, Zero G.

I remember Zero G, you fly people up in the thing.

We have a 727, we fly these parabolic flights.

This is another one.

That’s not one where the doors blow out.

No.

Right, okay.

So 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 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.

Basically fall.

And then fall.

You’re at free fall.

You’re at free fall as you go over the top, right?

It’s the arc of, a small arc of an orbit.

Anyway, in 2007, I was connected to Stephen Hawking, and the XPRIZE had just been won, the Unsorry XPRIZE for space flight, and on a 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, threw his nurse, and we agreed to do a zero gravity flight.

Long story short, I was told by everybody, I was crazy, I was going to kill this guy, and we actually did the flight.

Zero G never killed anyone.

It’s gravity that kills you.

But he was very frail, right?

He could break a rib.

So he was asked on stage at the press conference before he flew.

It was an amazingly successful flight.

If he dies, what, okay.

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.

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.

Proudest moment.

I had to fight, I had two people, we announced it.

We were going to do a fundraiser for ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, the disease that gave him his, his inability to move any muscles.

And after I announced the press conference, announced the press we’re going to do this flight, I got two phone calls, one from my airplane operator, who said, you’re insane.

You’re going to kill the most famous physicists on the planet.

And the 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 surgery.

And I said, why?

He says, in your operating specifications, it says that your passengers have to be able-bodied.

And he’s clearly not able-bodied.

He’s able-minded.

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.

All right, so you’ve fulfilled the bureaucratic requirements with producing the letters.

Yeah, it’s delightful to watch them float around in there.

So, okay, so getting back to the pushback you might have gotten by putting money in space versus Earth.

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

Okay, so tell me now about, it’s at the subject of your latest of a half dozen books.

Longevity, AI, how does XPRIZE fit into that?

So where are you going now?

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.

Why not just say live forever?

Why are you so restricted?

Who am I talking to here?

You’re X-Man.

When I, listen, there’s a concept called Longevity Escape Velocity.

That’s my goal.

I love that.

Describe that.

I love that phrase.

It’s so perfect.

It is perfect.

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.

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

Everything.

Yes.

Of all aspects of ourselves.

It’s not just AI in the abstract.

It’s AI in the very specific.

It’s applied to health and medicine and marketing.

Solving problems we couldn’t otherwise solve.

Because it is so complex.

Yeah.

I’ll go to the Bahamas.

Give that to the AI.

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 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 deGray and Ray Kurzweil speak about this concept called longevity escape velocity.

What it means is, it’s 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.

Okay, the moment that happens, we’ve reached escape velocity.

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 we have 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…

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

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

If you’re going to spend eternity on earth.

The business model breaks.

To put it another way, yes, okay.

So, but with all respect to religions, how…

So, we have extended the healthy human…

We have extended longevity to 100.

Yeah, basically.

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 healthspan that far.

Longevity…

I like that.

Healthspan, lifespan, healthspan.

Yeah, so your lifespan is how long you’re alive, how long your heart is going and you’re, you know, ticking.

Your healthspan 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, healthspans have not caught up.

So, the first thing is can we in fact extend the healthspan so that you’re healthy till you’re 90, till you’re 100.

And then, you know.

In body and mind.

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 elder man, a rabbi, a cardinal and the head of the NSF and myself.

Were you in the Vatican bar when that happened?

No, there should be a good joke about this.

I was on 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.

Oh, nice, nice, okay.

But so, at one point, I’m giving my presentation and 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?

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

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

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 part of this is my desire to see us get back to the moon, get on to Mars.

I want those extra 30 years to enjoy what I’m sure is coming.

The other side is there’s no greater wealth than your health.

There’s no greater gift you can give anybody than their health.

So, anyone dying will spend all their money to live longer.

Typically.

Absolutely.

So, in this area, I’ve done a few different things.

But you have a book.

I just came out.

Tell me the name.

It’s called Longevity, Your Practical Playbook.

Okay.

So, it’s longevity that you can…

It’s not just pie in the sky.

It’s things you can do, maybe, to help it.

So, if you go to diamandis.com backslash Longevity, there’s a free distillation of the book.

If you can’t afford it on Amazon, the stuff I do and why it’s important is there for free.

So, my goal is get the news out.

So, the fact of the matter is that there are things that we all can do 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.

So, I’m always shooting for seven or eight hours of sleep, and there are lots of different approaches to maximize your sleep, and I talk about them, and then undie it.

You went to MIT, surely people bragged how many all-nighters?

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

That was my objective.

That was the macho thing to do.

It was like, I had…

It was the Marines of education.

I had an island of stability at five and a half hours.

Five hours I was groggy, six hours I was groggy.

Five and a half I got up then, I was okay.

And then, the medical world is crazy because interns and residents are sleepless constantly.

It’s the worst thing.

And they’re the ones responsible for keeping you healthy when you’re in, that’s something wrong.

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

Okay, so it’s a playbook for you.

It’s very practical.

Based on what’s available today, but you also have visions of tomorrow.

Yes, and so one of the chapters in the book is called Don’t Die From Something Stupid.

Good one, I love it.

Or something you could have avoided.

So it talks about one of my companies called Fountain Life.

We have centers in the United States.

Maybe by the end of this podcast, we’ll have lists of all the companies that are your company.

But maybe not.

Probably not.

I’ve got 26 or 27 I’ve started.

But this one is important.

If I were to ask you right now, In the time he’s been sitting here, he started three companies.

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?

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

And no one should.

The body is incredibly good at hiding disease.

So 70% of all heart attacks have no precedence, no shortness of breath, nothing.

It just happened.

It happened.

And in almost half the cases, you’re dead.

Stroke comes on pretty…

Stroke as well.

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

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 say, I’m sorry to tell you this, but…

So, and there’s lots of examples.

The body is great at compensating and hiding the disease.

I had a dear friend of mine…

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

It would.

Or if you could feel the early stages of cardiac disease or any of these diseases.

But the body compensates, and I say, you have to look, and people say, I don’t want to know.

I’m saying…

I’m not that person.

I want to know everything.

Okay, well, I should rope you in and you should come down.

Here’s the fact, you’re going to know.

You want to know at the beginning when you can do something about it?

And so, Fountain Life is…

We have four centers, one here in New York.

Fountain Life is the name of the company.

fountainlife.com.

We have one in New York.

That’s a cool name, by the way.

I love it.

Fountain Life, yeah.

It’s very Ponce de Leon of youth.

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.

2.5% had an aneurysm they didn’t know about.

14.4% had either cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, neurocognitive disease, and you can do something like…

Neurocognitive, that would be like Alzheimer’s or something?

Earlier 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 XPRIZE world with Longevity is we launched a $101 million HealthSpan XPRIZE.

So offering $101 million to the team that can reverse loss in cognition, immune, and muscle by 10 to 20 years, there’s $101 million up for grabs.

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

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

Got it.

But what I can do, and we had like 200 teams in the first couple of months and growing, I hope we’ll get close to 1,000 teams here competing.

A team is going to have different approaches, lots of different approaches.

Stem cells, epigenetic reprogramming, whatever it might be.

So epigenetics is altering your genes after they’re already in play.

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

After the fact.

After the fact.

So a quick one on that, you get 3.2 billion nucleotides, letters from your mom and from your dad, and that’s your genes.

The letters are amino acid letters.

They’re nucleotides, ATCs and genes.

Those aren’t amino acids?

No, those amino acids make up the proteins.

So the A-C, the adenosine, cytosine, tryptosine.

Di-guanine.

So those are called nucleotides.

Nucleotides, okay.

And the movie Gattaca.

Those letters are the nucleotides.

They spell out Gattaca.

A fascinating film.

Lower budget than the movie The Island with similar themes where you have control over your genetic destiny.

But 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 0, 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?

I have a six pack.

It’s just beneath three inches of fat.

But there’s a six pack in there somewhere, yeah?

And it’s not what genes you have.

It’s which genes are on and which genes are off.

And that’s your epigenome.

I got it.

And so this…

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

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.

I remember cards.

I remember punch cards.

Punch cards, 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.

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

Like the epicenter of an earthquake is the point on the ground above the earthquake which occurred, of course, below the ground.

So we’re going to have lots of different approaches to going after this prize.

And we hope we’ll be one by 2030.

That’s the current end of the prize.

We’ll extend it if we need to.

But if you’re interested, if you’re listening to this and you have a company that wants to compete for this XPRIZE, go to xprize.org, registration will be open.

And we don’t pre-guess what the solution is.

You don’t want to do that ever.

Because somebody could be more clever than you.

Yeah, it could be a new meditative state.

It could be eating popcorn all day long.

But there’s 101 million dollars.

Oh, by the way, ask me why it’s 101.

Eating Cheetos or whatever.

Something you would have never expected.

Why is it 101?

It’s older than 101 Dalmatians.

So the prize we had gotten…

Because Disney was funding it, no.

The prize we got from Elon was 100 million dollars for gigaton carbon removal.

And the first sponsor of this prize, a guy named Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon, and he put in the first roughly 30 million into this prize.

And he wanted it to be bigger than Elon’s prize.

That’s the competition you’re talking about?

Yes.

So I said, OK, would you add another million?

So, tell me now about what role AI can or should play going forward.

I know you’ve thought a lot about it.

And you founded, co-founded…

Singularity University.

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

Ray is amazing.

He’s a mentor for me.

He’s a friend of StarTalk.

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

It is a physicist’s word.

It’s a black hole word, it’s our word.

You should pay us royalty on that, I think.

But this idea that there’s some portal waiting to arrive through which we will pass and will never return back, because everything will be different.

The neuro-computing interface, AI controlling everything.

Given the fear factor that it represents in culture today, you come across quite comfortable with it.

Do you have any concerns?

I remember a friend of mine, 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.

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

Sounds like a movie line to me.

It’s a song, it’s a lyric in a song, yeah, from the 1980s.

I was conscious then.

So I was trekking through Chile, log story, I was carrying Ray’s book, The Singularity is Nearer, which is an interesting title.

And he just came out with a new book, The Singularity is Nearer.

Yes.

So it’s not very imaginative, but.

But it works.

But we get the point, right.

But we talk about it.

Yeah, yeah.

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, an 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.

And they’re changing everything under our noses.

Yes, and we’re the frog in the boiling water not noticing it, but it’s happening in an extraordinary rate.

And accelerating, by the way.

It’s the rate this-

Why is the water boiling?

This-

That’s a bad thing.

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 the-

All right, I will change that.

Take another-

I will change that.

Okay.

All right.

So, the fact of the matter is, the speed at which it’s accelerating is accelerating.

Mm-hmm.

And there are more-

There’s a term for that, I forgot.

It’s jerk.

Oh, the acceleration of the acceleration is the jerk.

Yeah.

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

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

No.

It’s a snap.

Yeah, and the acceleration of the acceleration of the acceleration is it?

The next two are Crackle and Pop.

It’s true.

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

Whoever came up with that.

But go on, yes.

So if you have, it’s basically a hyper exponential at that point.

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

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

Bathe in it.

Bathe in it, bathe in it.

And then I created sort of the highest level of Singularity called Abundance 360.

And what is Abundance?

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-

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

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, 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 black and white.

Yeah, I agree with that.

In my field, astrophysics, we’ve been AI-ing for decades.

You don’t call those graduate students.

Okay, that’s an aspect of it.

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.

So get back to the word abundance.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so 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 a hundred 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.

And fusion, hopefully, do you believe it’s around the corner as much as I’m hearing?

I mean, based on other things that were once imagined to never come, and now we take for granted, I have no hesitation about the future of nuclear fusion.

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 the planet 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.

The breakthrough that’s coming in reinventing how we feed ourselves is cultivated meats.

Yeah, I’m first in line for that.

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

And even if they can’t get the protein fibers right, you can make sort of the equivalent of ground beef.

Sure.

And you could transform burgers.

I’ll eat more burgers.

Nobody doesn’t love a burger.

I mean, there’s a company called O-Meat in LA.

It’s called O-Meat?

O-Meat.

And they’re doing that now.

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?

It’s disgusting.

Right?

You’re going to see it’s disgusting.

Do you know how many chickens are on Planetarium?

Well, I know how…

Here’s my number.

Not my number.

It’s a number.

And I post this every Super Bowl.

I say, while you’re dining on your chicken wings, 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?

I mean, it’s tens of billions…

It’s billions.

38 billion chickens on the planet.

It’s the most slaughtered animal in the world.

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.

And they cultivate that.

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

Now I bet that tastes like chicken.

That’s a good one.

But, you know, they will be healthier for you, cheaper for you.

It’s like I have given up…

Stuff to look forward to.

Is there an XPRIZE to do this now?

There is.

And it’s going to be one very shortly.

Tony Robbins…

This is the self-help guru.

Yeah.

Tony Robbins.

And we are…

I mean, what I find fascinating is I’ve given up eating tuna because of no more…

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…

But suppose I like mercury.

Well, I mean…

Then it’s been good knowing you.

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

I like moderation, but only in moderation.

Yeah.

So, what about deepfakes and AI?

That’s a little scary there.

You don’t worry about that?

And deepfakes, I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet.

I think that deepfakes are…

It’s just the beginning.

A friend of mine, Imad Mustaqs, the CEO of Stability AI, I was talking to him.

He said, you know, a year ago, it took us 30 seconds to generate a single image.

Now we can generate 100 images per second.

Which is, you know…

Through an AI.

Through an AI generator, right?

And so, we’re now about to create real-time video on the fly, you know, by Hollywood.

In what way might deepfakes cause the most damage in society?

I mean, we’ve seen deepfakes being used to mimic celebrities’ hocking 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.

You know, 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-

I think that’s evolutionary, where if something happens repeatedly, your brain says it must be true.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t have happened continuously.

We have to find ways to combat this, right?

And so the ways we’re going to combat this, 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-

Legally.

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-

Are you real?

I am.

I am.

Well, at least as far as you can tell.

Which is always necessary.

That’s all I can know.

I can’t know.

So here’s the, you know, it turns out that we’ve dealt with this in a couple of different ways.

Back early on in the color Xeroxers came out, color copying machines, people started replicating money.

And there was an outcry in 30 banks-

Well, it wasn’t just color.

They had to have a high enough resolution to get the detail.

There was a lot of-

But there was a point at which you could replicate money on these machines.

And a conglomeration of 30 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-

Broadcast networks.

All digital media platforms are going to have to create the mechanisms for checking on meta tags.

Maybe it’s going to be blockchain that’s going to 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 you’re 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.

So it’s tank-anti-tank warfare, right?

Something rises and you then combat it.

The single biggest tool we’re going to have to fight deepfakes is going to be AI.

It’s going to be a white hat, black hat competition.

And it’s going to be not moving at the speed of conferences or regulatory.

It’s going to be entrepreneurs using AI.

And I tell you, the world’s biggest problem is the world’s biggest…

There’s nothing less nimble than the US Congress.

For sure.

Voting on a technology that none of them knows.

For sure.

100%.

Let me give you a pro tip for the listening audience.

One of the areas where deepfakes 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, be cautious.

Ask for them their code word.

Want to hear my code word?

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, even people who believed news that had been faked will not believe the fake.

So the people who thought there was Pizza Gate and were like eating babies at the basement of the pizza, they will see that announcement on the Internet and say the Internet is so rife with false information that that’s probably false.

So think about that.

So far, it would reach such a level that people who believe fake stuff will no longer believe the fake stuff.

It will default to disbelief.

Everything.

And that will be the end of the Internet.

And we have to go back to reading books and having personal conversations.

So, Peter.

Yes, sir.

I know you get around, and you very smoothly name dropped this entire interview.

That was very cool.

Very smooth of you.

Thank you.

I am a salesman after all.

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.

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

I can give an educated yes.

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?

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

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, the solar system, is only just under five billion years old and the universe is 14.8, it means there could be life out there that’s five billion years older than we are.

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.

Let’s not happen to be 30 years again.

I’ll see you when we’re 90, all right?

You catch me up on.

Well, 90, we’ll have another 50 years to live, if you’re successful.

I hope so.

All right.

A real pleasure, pal.

This has been StarTalk.

Your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

See you later.