Peter Diamandis: AI Will Cure All Disease, Reverse Aging, and You Have to Prepare

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0:41Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. And every time our world goes through a technological transformation, there is some worker and employment anxiety. We want humans to retain agency, but how do we retain the agency where we have machines doing most of the cognitive work? White-collar jobs are going to go first. What do we say to that 45-year-old middle manager at the regional bank after he reads your book this summer? The world's going to split the two. There's going to be a group of consumers who are sitting on their couch, drinking a beer brought by their Optimist robot, you know, watching Netflix that's been created, starring their family members, fully AI virtualized.

1:22And it'd be those of the creators using AI to go and build Star Trek. That's the question. What do we do with this technology? Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today, a dear friend, brother, although you're taking so many supplements now at this point in your life, You're my younger brother. I used to be able to say you were my older brother, but now you're probably a lot younger than me. Peter Diamandis, New York Times bestselling author and founder of over 25 companies in the area of AI health, tech, space, venture capital, and education. But he's the chief optimist of the United States of America.

2:04Title of his new book is We Are As Gods, a survival guide for the age of abundance. And of course, he wrote a book a while back called The Age of Abundance, which I loved and often referenced. Now, I see you as our optimist in chief, Peter. So it's great to have you here. And you and I have a 20 plus year relationship. We both grew up on Long Island. We're both the tallest people in our families. Let's put it that way, Peter. How's that? Okay. We're not necessarily tall as it relates to the universe, but at least in our families, we're very large, Peter. But anyway, tell me a little bit about how you got into all of this and welcome to the show.

2:45Dr. Scaramucci, a pleasure. I've got two universities. I'm giving a doctorate degrees. I'm going to give you two because you're that good. Trust me. It wouldn't help me at home. No one would care. But anyway, I appreciate the thought. I understand. I know my kids still make fun of the fact that I barely graduated medical school. You know, this is probably the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. You know, you wake up and there's a there's a dozen miracles every morning. And it's hard to keep pace with the speed of change. And at the same time, I think one of the things that my co-author Stephen Kotler and I wrote about in Abundance, that there is nothing truly scarce, that we are heading towards a world where we're giving access to food, water, energy, health, education to every man, woman, child on the planet has become even more and more true.

3:43You know, we wrote Abundance in 2012, and that was not a buzzword. Today, it's a buzzword by, I think, every technologist out there. and it is technology making this all happen. It's not better politicians. We haven't gotten smarter. It's technology making stuff that was not available to everybody. I want to say something to you. I'm going to make a stipulation and see if you agree with me or disagree with me. So I feel like we've gone haywire with our politics. I feel like we've lost our way. We've racked up a tremendous amount of debt not held on U.S. balance sheet, 31 trillion. If you add what's held by the Federal Reserve, it's$37 trillion of debt.

4:27We've racked it up in a very short period of time. And we're in a tribal war, but yet 5 ,000 years of human progress and 5 ,000 years of technology were about to go exponential on a number of different things that could lead us to this wild wave of abundance. We've heard Elon Musk talk about it. We've heard you talk about it. And so I guess the question is, one, will the technology, will human innovation and entrepreneurship bail us all out of our dysfunctional politics? And then number two, Peter, related to that question, how do we make this fair for the human population so we don't just have a group of trillionaires and then our fellow travelers on this little planet suffering at the same time?

5:19Yeah, I mean, important questions. We address those questions in part in our book, We Are As Gods. I avoid politics, pal. You dive in. I avoid politics. I focus on technology as the mechanism for us to deal with most of the issues out there. um i we do have uh 200 000 years of primal brain structure right we became homo sapiens 200 000 years ago and our brains evolved for dealing with that world where things were local and linear and things did not affect you um you know more than a day's walk and nothing changed over the course of thousands of years, let alone hour to hour, day to day. And so our brain evolved for that.

6:10And one of the things we talk about in the book is the importance of choosing your mindset. Mindsets, I think, are the most important things we have. We're not going to change our physiology or biology in the moment, but we can change where we see the world. And I talk about the importance, especially during this period of hyper AI growth that you need, I talk about five key mindsets, two of them right now, a purpose-driven mindset, like why are you on this planet? What is your purpose? Unless you've got that North Star and you have this incredible power coming from AI, you're not going to harness it to go in a particular direction.

6:50We like fulfillment. We like knowing that we've made progress towards a goal. And having a purpose-driven mindset is an important part of that. The second mindset I talk about is a curiosity mindset. And the number of questions we ask as a child, like our 100 per hour, it drops off to like zero per day as we become adults. So having a curiosity mindset, especially in this time when AI is your ultimate teacher, You can learn anything on your own for free any time of the day, anywhere you are. Having a curiosity mindset so that you're constantly learning is critical. Then I talk about moonshot mindsets, an abundance mindset.

7:34There's nothing truly scarce. So shaping our mindsets, actively shaping our mindsets is the only tool we have right now during this period of rapid growth. To the other parts of the question, I think that AI has the potential to help humanity survive over the course of the next decade and decades. I think the more intelligent AI is, the more wisdom it has. You go and talk to a wisdom counselor or a wise elder because they have a lot of experience. I think AI is going to be able to create such incredible simulations of what's going on that's going to be able to say, listen, go down this way, you're screwed.

8:22Go down this way, we have a real chance of success. And that's wisdom. I forgot the second question you had. Just about how do we make it fair? I mean, you don't have to answer the political question. You know what I mean? Because I'm worried. We've got it. And by the way, I'm all about unequal outcomes, Peter. You know, people that make Elon Musk is a hero of mine, as is Jeff Bezos. I'm all about unequal outcomes. I would like there to be a platform of equal opportunity. I think AI, educational services that can be provided by AI and other things may be able to help us equalize the playing field, depending on what family you grow up in.

9:05But I'm just wondering how we make it fair so that we don't just have a group of people that are worth a couple trillion dollars and the other people are not doing well. That's all. It's a really important question. And again, something we deal with in the book. And it's the realization that, you know, you go back 10, 20 ,000 years, go back to 3000 years. It was the emperor on the hilltop, right? The Pharaoh, the king, whatever you want, and everyone else an abject squalor. You know, it was just one or a single family, and then everybody else was working, toiling to survive and to provide for that pharaoh.

9:45Over the last, you know, hundreds and thousands of years, we've moved people from extreme poverty into poverty into middle class. And the numbers are very important. In the back of the book, we've got 100 charts that I've tracked in terms of increasing abundance in the world. The data is there. And the problem is that all the news media around the world is only feeding us negative news all the time. And so that's all you ever see. I call CNN the crisis news network or the constantly negative news network, what do you want to call it? So what we've seen is that the floor has been moving up. Now, I think where we're going is, yes, there are going to be trillionaires living on Mars forever, right?

10:33And that's okay if, at the same time, we've moved every man, woman, and child on the planet up to a point where they have access to all the food, water, energy, health care, education that they want. And I think we have the ability to do that. We have been doing that. The numbers and the charts in the back of the book, you know, definitively demonstrate that in terms of access to literacy, access to food, you know, dropping in malnutrition, dropping in childhood deaths, increase in energy, increase in communication. Heck, the most powerful technology on the planet, right, is AI. It's intelligence and it's available for free with anyone with a smartphone.

11:12And guess what? There are more smartphones on the planet than there are humans. So we're moving in this direction. We just don't realize that, yes, the wealth gap is increasing, but at the same time that it's increasing, the floor is moving up above that key threshold. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. Okay, it's very well said, and it's actually very comforting. So in the 1968, Dr. Diamandis, Stuart Brand wrote, we are as gods and we might as well get good at it.

11:56He wrote this in 1968, but you and Stephen are arguing that this prophecy is actually arriving. Okay, I'm gonna mention a couple of things that you mentioned in the book, gene editing, synthetic minds, life extension, terraforming. Okay, so what was the moment, the headline, the lab visit, where you said to yourself, okay, we've crossed the line, and I now have to write this book. I have to pull us from 1968 to today. So it's a great—Stuart Brand's an amazing human being, and he wrote this back then before we'd landed on the moon. And, you know, this concept of what is God like, and I'm not using that religiously.

12:41I'm using that metaphorically. You know, omniscience, you can know anything. Omnipotence, you can do anything. Omnipresence, you can be anywhere. And these tools right now are called, you know, Google or ChatGPT or Zoom. The fact of the matter is we have these godlike powers. And now the question is, what are you going to do with it? You know, the world's going to split into two. There's going to be a group of consumers who are sitting on their couch, drink in a beer brought by their Optimus robot, you know, watching Netflix that's been created, starring their family members, fully AI virtualized.

13:20And it'd be those are the creators using AI to go and build Star Trek. And so, I mean, I think that's the question. What do we do with this technology? And I think this book came together as like, let's do it two years ago. and part of it was we had written abundance the future is better than you think back in 2012 when no one was talking about abundance and now everyone is and the fact of the matter is abundance has become the norm we've seen this and we we speak about what's happened over the last 14 years the other thing we speak about in the book is the negative elements of abundance you know there's too much abundance of carbon or microplastics or depression or obesity These are the negative externalities coming off of this.

14:09And, you know, it's happening at not a constant rate. It's an accelerating rate. And I think people don't realize how fast it's moving. This podcast is all about books. And while we're on that subject, I have a new book coming out this September called All the Wrong Moves. It's a personal look at how we got to this moment in America through big decisions, bad bets and a lot of political misfires. I've had a front row seat for plenty of it. And I wrote All the Wrong Moves to try to make sense of where we are and more importantly, how we can move forward. It's available for pre-order now. We'll drop some links in the description below, and I'm excited for you to read it.

14:50I hope you'll consider buying it. I want to tell you something that you've done for me, which I'm very grateful for. I attended Singularity University in 2015. I have a notebook from that time there, and you laid out the decade ahead. And so it's now 2026. It's 12 years later, and everything you said in there happened. Okay. You talked about AI. We didn't really have AI in 2014. You talked about the emergence of Bitcoin is becoming a digital currency that would eventually be perceived as a store of value. You talked about product design. You talked about the aesthetic. Autonomous cars, you know, energy.

15:32autonomous cars all of this stuff you talked about um at that moment and now you're talking about something else that is coming okay and that is and i'm going to say it this way because i took it out of the book old miracles omnipresence even resurrection becoming standard operating procedure so are we talking about digital twins cryonics mind uploading so what are we talking And are you personally, Peter Diamandis, planning for it? Yeah. So resurrection comes in two parts. And that's such a loaded term from the Bible, isn't it? Resurrection. Well, I mean, when I read it in the book, I was like, all right, this I got to add, this could be one of my questions.

16:17You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, resurrection comes. We talk about. Let me ask a different question before you answer that. Are you still religious? Do you still practice? I am. I know you grew up in Dox Creek. I'm a practitioner. I did. I was head altar boy. I was very much. I am spiritual. I believe there is a force that we call God in the universe that is deeply connected to love. And that comes really from the journeys I've done with DMT that just connected me in a way that was extraordinary. When we talk about resurrection in the book, we're talking about bringing back extinct animals. This is a dear friend, Ben Lamb, the CEO of Colossal, was one of the earliest advisors and investors.

17:01And what he's done is he's brought back the dire wolves. He's got 15 different species. He's working on bringing back from extinction in this regard, taking ancient DNA that we find in dig sites and then reconstructing it and giving birth. So bringing back the woolly mammoth, the dire wolf, the dodo bird. So that's one part. There is a lot of work going on right now in cryopreservation. Like at the moment of death, do you freeze your body and put it into a state of effectively suspension until the technology exists to cure whatever killed you and bring you back? But the place I rather focus on in half my work, as you know, Anthony, is not in that area, but it's in longevity.

17:55How do we understand why we age, how to slow it, stop it, even reverse it? And the data is amazing. And again, we dive into this in the book that we're on the verge of what's called longevity escape velocity, being able to add decades onto your life that for every year that you're alive, science extends your life for more than a year. and that's an extraordinary time now when is that going to happen ray kerswile who's been my mentor predicts 2033 um just saw dario speak eloquently about his belief that we could double the human lifespan inside of the next decade so you and i just need to stay healthy and hang on i'm going to interrupt you for a second so so dario of course is the founder of anthropic yes who has the incredible AI system known as Quad.

18:45But yeah, no, I'm with you. But there's tension in the book. When I think about the book, I think about all of this opportunity. And then every time our world goes through a technological transformation, there is some worker and employment anxiety. Yeah, sure. We want humans to retain agency, which you write about. But how do we retain the agency where we We have machines doing most of the cognitive work. Lloyd Blankfein and I were on Bill Maher's show a few weeks back talking about the anxiety of white-collar jobs, Peter. White-collar jobs are going to go first. What do we say to that 45-year-old middle manager at the regional bank after he reads your book this summer?

19:30And even more for me, what do you say to that 22-year-old college graduate who can't get a job? Well, that too. That's a big issue too. I mean, yeah, and it's and it's true. I mean, my my greatest concern right now is, in fact, the loss of jobs. It's it's the loss of the social contract we've always had. Do well in high school, get a good college, get a degree, get a job. And that's vaporizing. That's going away. And I think what's going to need to happen. And so I talk about this. I think we have a and I write about this in the book. we're going to have a rough patch for the next two to eight years.

20:10I think on the backside of that, you know, eight, 10 years out, we're going to be reaching this period of increasing abundance. I had Elon on my Moonshots podcast twice and once during the Abundance Summit last March, and he talked about we're going to reach a point where AI and robots, call it for him, Grok and Optimus will be able to produce anything you want in such supply that you could not want enough stuff to fill the production pipelines, right? That's what he calls his, you know, his version of abundance. But we're going to have a challenge when people can't get a job and people are losing their job.

20:52And I get it. I get it. I relate. There are a couple of things that are important. Number one, I think that the idea of working to go and work for somebody else is going to quickly become the past. I think what we really need to focus on is people utilizing AI to go solve a problem and start a business. I think we're going to start to see companies going from 100 % employment down to 20 % because that 20 % enables them to do everything they're doing before and that's going to cut down the number of jobs significantly. Again, we've seen a lot of folks like Dari Amadei and Sam Altman and others say this, but I think we're also going to create five times as many companies.

21:43I think the ability to create a company is easier than ever before. In fact, I'm getting ready, can't announce it here on the show yet, but getting ready to run a massive XPRIZE with some of the top tech companies to encourage and show people how easy it is for them to start a revenue-generating company in plain English. You can write up what's your idea, what you think the company should do, how it should operate, and give it to Gemini and have it code up a company for you. This is where we're heading. So people need to be observant. What are the problems? What do I want to solve? What am I inspired?

22:24What's my purpose? And then go build in that regard. The other side, though, pal, is I think we're going to head towards some version of UBI. I think the government's going to start writing checks again like they did in COVID because I don't think they have another choice, at least in the short term. What do you think? Where are they going to get the money from, though? Are we going to tax the robots, Peter? Yeah, I think we're going to do a couple of things. Number one, we're going to run up the debt because that's been what's been going on. I think we're going to tax the robots and the AI systems.

22:54And then I think the other thing that's going on is that companies are going to become much more profitable. You know, you saw what Jack Dorsey did with, you know, with Square, cut, you know, a significant number of employees and the stock price and the profitability went through the roof. uh and so those those companies uh you know elon projected you know get this triple digit gdp growth inside the next five years you know kathy wood i i end of ours yeah yeah kathy kathy's saying we're going to reach seven percent in the next couple years right listen if you looked at my business which you and i have talked about you know i moved my business into crypto like you.

23:33I have an investment in Anthropic and SpaceX like you. I bought into some of these later stage tech companies. We've owned Astero Labs, things like that. So I have embraced the future. But you look young, you little bastard, but let me just say this to you. you're 64 i'm 62 we're the demographic that has to decide right now whether we're betting on the next 20 years of normal aging peter diamandas yeah or are we going to go through something genuinely new what is that why you're saying that why you're saying for those of you that can't see us are making muscles right now. Making muscles, Diamandis.

24:22You're looking good there. You got a nice little pop on that bison. Yes, I do. What's going to happen, Peter? What's going to happen to old folks like you and me that are young? We're not going to get older. Here's the deal. We are on the verge, and I had this conversation with Demis Asabas, the CEO of DeepMind, last Saturday. And by the way, we had Sebastian Malibion a week ago talking about Demis and the whole book. And so we are on the verge right now, next few years, five years, six years, the outmost of curing cancer. We're seeing breakthroughs every day with CAR-T therapies and personal mRNA cancer vaccines.

25:06Cancer's days are numbered. And top of that then comes heart disease and immunological issues. So, you know, Demis went on 60 Minutes and he said it very, very bluntly. We're going to cure all disease, not some disease, all disease within the next 10 years. At the same time, we've got a number of companies backed by some of the billionaires out there, folks like George Church and David Suclair, both at Harvard Medical School, working on reversing aging, not just slowing and stopping aging, but reversing aging called epigenetic reprogramming. and those trials which worked in animal models, mice, rats, monkeys, are now in humans.

25:52Right now, we're seeing the first humans undergoing what's called partial epigenetic reprogramming where we're turning back the clock. Here's the deal. When you're born, you got 3.2 billion letters from your mom and your dad. When you're 20, you have the same program. When you're 50, you got the same software. When you're 100, the same software. Why do you look different. It isn't the software you're running in your body. It turns out that software codes for 22 ,000 genes, roughly. And it's the question, you age when certain genes get turned off, and certain genes that should be off get turned on, right?

26:29This is your epigenetic drift. And the technology being worked on right now is how do we reverse this, bring you back from where you are today to an earlier state of youthfulness, where you have the correct genes on and the correct genes off. And, you know, the promise here is the potential to bring you and I back to where we are at an age of 40, but still keep our cognitive abilities, our mindset, right? I mean, I think I'm in better shape now than I was much earlier because I focus on it, you know, sleep, diet, exercise, mindset. All these things I care about more now than ever before. But we're going to have help from the technology that's coming.

27:12You've helped me in so many different ways. There was one morning I had breakfast with you. We were downtown at a hotel and you had a packet of supplements. Yeah. And you were like, Anthony, you got to get it. And you gave me a whole thing to do. And then I did a blood test. And now I, now I too have a packet of supplements. You know, who the hell knows? All right. But I'm feeling, I'm feeling, I feel good. Thank God. Knock on wood. Who the hell knows? We'll, we'll, we'll pray for all of this to happen in our lifetimes. Okay, so we've got a few minutes left. Yeah. And what we've done is my producers and I, we took five words out of your book.

27:44And I'm going to say the word or the subject. And then I need a sentence from you, like the first thing that comes to your head. Okay, you got it. You ready? Rapid fire, do it. Let's do it. AI. The most powerful technology on the planet that we're giving birth to right now. Dystopian or utopian AI? Ultimately utopian. Dystopian use by humans, ultimately utopian on its own. Okay, so we're going to figure it out, right? Okay, so longevity. Something I desire deeply and I'm focusing on for 20, 30 hours per week. Coming though. Longevity is coming, right? Yes, it's coming. Expect, if you're in decent health and you're in your 50s and 60s, expect to make it well over 100.

28:31Power. Energy. ubiquitous, from the sun, fusion, multiple resources, moving to earth orbit, all that you need. Humanity. The most important thing we need to preserve. Abundance. Here and growing exponentially. Okay. Well, listen, Peter Diamandis, it's always a pleasure to have you on with me. I miss you, buddy. I love you as a person. I've learned so much from you over the years. The title of the book is We Are as Gods, A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance by Peter Diamandis and Stephen Kotler. Other books that they have written as well are also equally fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today on Open Book.