Martine Rothblatt: Growing Unlimited Organs, AI Consciousness, & Digital Personhood by 2030 | EP#290

When do you think we might reach longevity escape velocity?

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

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

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

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

Next decade.

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

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

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

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

Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. This episode is brought to you by the Abundance Summit and Link Ventures. Martín, we've known each other now, I think, 45 years. Okay, I'll take your word for it. Which is pretty— from the early '80s. The early '80s, we were together at Gerry O'Neill Space Studies Institute.

Yes, we were.

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

And now it's mainstream.

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

And you probably said Elon Musk.

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

Yes, that is the right answer.

Yeah.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah, well.

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

You know, we talk a lot about moonshots on this podcast and I wanna take a second. I've counted at least 12 that you've been on. There's probably more secretly that I don't know about, but let me take a second and just cover a couple of them and then we're gonna dive into them. 'Cause I think it's important for folks to know the scope of not only your ambitions, but your accomplishments. So early on, helping build or found a number of successful satellite companies— PanAmSat, GeoStar, WorldSpace, Sirius Satellite Radio, now SiriusXM— on their own, that would be an extraordinary accomplishment. Going from there to Turning pulmonary arterial hypertension, PAH, from a death sentence to a manageable disease.

Yes.

And saving your daughter's life in the process.

Yes.

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

Thank you, Peter.

An epic journey.

I appreciate it.

Building human organs?

Yes.

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

Me too.

Building electric helicopters and eVTOLs with Beta.

Yes.

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

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

Yeah. And—

So it's like 3 checks, you know, I could do it.

Yeah.

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

Importantly for those entrepreneurs listening, you don't feel you need to be an expert in the area. You feel it's important. But then how do you dive into an area that, you know, I don't say you know nothing about, you know there's a problem there, but how do you, what's your first, second, and third step in entering an area like that for those who wanna like emulate what you're doing?

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

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

One of his companies he recently started, actually Thymune, a company we just bought. He was the first shareholder in Thymune. So again, George was ahead of the curve there. He has another company just started, GC Technologies, that's able to reduce the time it takes to reprogram a cell back into an iPSC or a pluripotent stem cell from 3 months down to 2 weeks.

You know, which would be like, you know, radical, Along the way to building a company, you probably get no a lot.

Yes.

How do you deal with that?

I look at each no as a way to make me smarter. So I'm a person that's very open to criticism. When people— I feel like people who critique me are my best friends. They're telling me how to be a better person, a smarter person, more successful person.

So when somebody says no, I listen carefully to the reasons why they say no.

And I try to learn from that. I evaluate whether it has merit or not. I definitely don't take it personally.

No.

And if it has no merit, I just like register it away in the, in the, like the brain is like, okay, that's situational awareness. Like if you see something when you're— I know both of us are pilots and if you see traffic that's no factor, okay, you remember the traffic's there, but you don't worry about it. But if there's traffic in front of you, you're gonna like, you know, turn right. Okay. You're gonna like, you know, deviate from that traffic. And so if somebody says to me, no, because you don't have this or that enabling technology, I will go and look into those enabling technologies.

Yeah.

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

He's right.

Yeah. Yeah.

As usual.

Yeah.

As usual.

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

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

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

Hmm.

Your idea about prizing technology accomplishments with the XPRIZE, that has created the whole new space. The whole space industry is an offshoot of that. That has affected literally billions of people. Everybody's eyes are on Artemis. Everybody's eyes are on SpaceX. But there wouldn't have been those things had you not reignited the space race with Virgin Atlantic and the, you know, to outer space and then back to the Earth. So now you've got billions of eyes that people have renewed hope to become a multi-planetary civilization. You have changed the world because you scaled to affecting millions and then billions.

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

Yes.

Ray has been a—

Member of our board of directors for 30 years.

Yes. And he's been a mentor for me, one of my closest mentors. Grateful. Uh, one of the things that the 3 of us share is his belief in reaching longevity escape velocity.

Yes.

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

I like it.

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

But any way you define it, to get past, you know, even like 100 years to, you know, 120 being a healthy lifespan, a healthspan of 120, it's an extraordinary claim. I would say that would be the most extraordinary claim in the history of medicine going all the way back to Hippocrates.

Okay.

So I believe in it. But to pin it to a specific year is— Is what Ray does. Yeah, it's what Ray does. It's beyond my risk profile. Okay. Because I don't have enough confidence that we'll achieve it by any specific year. I do believe in like our mantra here at United Therapeutics of, you know, restore, replace, you know, renew. So that I believe that like We can restore people to health. If they need something that has to be replaced, we can replace the organ. And then ultimately we can renew their life the way Lazarus Long's life was renewed in Time Enough for Life. That's one of the first Heinlein friends. Yeah, huge Heinlein friend. And you are the winner of the Heinlein Prize, Peter Diamandis.

I won one of the greatest honors, yes.

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

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

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

It gets replaced by fat.

Yep.

At age what?

2.

That young?

That young.

I mean, it is— my memory from medical school way back was it basically becomes dysfunctional by your 20s, is it? I mean, there's still thymic function.

But it's de minimis. It's very, very de minimis. You know, most of the job has been done in your first 2 years of life. And it's remarkable what it does in those first 2 years of life. It fills your body with T cells and all types of different types of T cells that are able, Peter, as both of us being lovers of large numbers in astronomy, you'll appreciate this. Your T cell receptor diversity is able to recognize more molecules than are estimated to exist in the entire universe. And each of us have that in our body.

Magical.

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

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

Well, we have multiple thymic programs at United Therapeutics. One of our main mantras here is multiple shots on goal because science and engineering and discovery is always so uncertain. I'm kind of always loath to put all my eggs in one basket. We have partnerships with 2 leading universities, and University of British Columbia, which are both centers of thymic excellence. Professor Nancy Manley at ASU is the world's leading expert in the thymus early development. And Professor Peter Zandstra at UBC is the world's expert in the senior— what happens to seniors as aging takes over and outstrips their T-cell ability to keep them alive and healthy. So both of them are developing for us programs that will allow us to manufacture thymuses outside of the body and provide them as implants to people to rejuvenate their entire T-cell repertoire.

Allogeneic or—

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

And by the way, for people listening, allogeneic means that these cells—

It's not your own DNA.

You're not— you're right.

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

I do not get more excited about this.

Let me tell you an amazing thing. We also have a 3rd and a 4th program. The 3rd program is a xenothymus. So the FDA has approved United Therapeutics to have the only thymic kidney transplant program in the clinic in the world. And the FDA looked at our previous data before the clinic, and they said we have proven to them that our xenothymus, which means a thymus that comes from a genetically modified pig that has been genetically modified not to be attacked by the human immune system, that that That pig's thymus can be transplanted along with one of the pig's organs and teaches your body to accept the thymus and the organ as itself. And we have been provided— already provided data to the FDA and peer-reviewed publications that shows it works. So even the third avenue is we have an unlimited supply of xenothymi or xenothymuses in addition to the allothymus and the autologous And finally, we announced just actually last month the acquisition of Thymune, the company that was started by George Church, our first funder, and it was George Church, whose goal is to create a commercializable endless supply of thymic therapeutic interventions. So perhaps instead of providing with the whole thymus every year, you could get a thymic booster of thymic progenitor cells. And they have proven already in animal models that those booster shots take up residency and create an ectopic thymus wherever they are implanted. So we have 4 different shots on goal, all very solidly scientific by world leaders, one already in the clinic.

Which one is— so in humans?

In humans, yeah. That's the thymic— the Thymokidney.

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

Next decade.

Next decade. So in the 2030s?

2030s.

All right.

So maybe your t-shirt should say 2030s.

Okay, I'll leave you in the 2030s.

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

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

So let's give ourselves 1 or 2 more years than 2033.

All right.

All right.

I will. And we have a good shot of Oh, yes, I'm sure we will. Give us a quick report card, if you would, on the other organs that you're providing. Where are they in terms of human survival rates, timelines, clinics, and so forth?

Yeah, they're all doing very, very well. We're in the middle of another clinical trial approved by the FDA for the kidney, the xenokidney. That one we're manufacturing in Christiansburg, Virginia. We are actually having a grand opening of 2 more commercial-scale xenokidney facilities, one in Rochester, Minnesota. That'll be in August. And the grand opening of our one in Houston, Texas will be in October. Peter, you're actually, of course, invited to both of those grand openings.

Thank you.

That will give us the ability to provide an unlimited supply of kidneys. As your listeners probably know and viewers know, There are over 100,000 people on the kidney transplant list, most of whom will die before ever getting a kidney. There are another half million people that are not even allowed on the kidney transplant list.

Mm-hmm.

So the number one lowest-hanging fruit for me in terms of beginning our— to provide a commercial supply of organs is the kidney. And that one's going full bore. In addition to that, we have an autologous kidney program within our group called IVIVA, where we use the patient's own cells to create a brand new kidney in a laboratory that matches their DNA exactly. The beauty of that is those patients will not require any immunosuppressant at all.

Right.

That should start clinical trials in 2028. So that's another product you can expect to see commercialized in the 2030s. The FDA has also approved our xenoheart clinical trial trial where we've already proven that our hearts keep 2 patients alive. We kept both of these individuals alive for over 60 days despite the fact that they had multiple organ failure and serious deficiencies. So we saved them from dying in the next 48 hours. When they died, there was no problem with their hearts. So it wasn't the hearts that killed them. They had all these other diseases. So now the FDA said, based on that, you guys go ahead and do a full-blown clinical trial allowed us to go straight to a phase 3 or phaseless clinical trial. So after 50 patients in the XenoHeart clinical trial, we should have FDA approval to create an unlimited supply of XenoHearts. As you know from being a Harvard-educated doctor, Peter, that most people end up dying of heart disease. And unfortunately, that's like—

In both men and women.

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

Yeah. The survival time of the xenotransplants, what is it up to now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's hard for me to know if anything of me is independent of Ray because I've been so heavily influenced by him since The Age of Spiritual Machines and then Singularity is Near. I've been so influenced by Marvin Minsky Hans Moravec, all of these guys made it very abundantly clear to me that human consciousness was something that could be replicated with programming, with software and programming, and that we could create neural networks out of chips and code that would replicate the type of neural networks that we have within our brains. And everything I've seen since that time validates, you know, the predictions of Minsky, Moravec, and Kurzweil. So I've been working on this a long time. I first built a digital doppelganger of my wife, Bina.

Bina, yes.

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

There's some great video of that.

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

I've seen some interviews with Marvitar.

Yeah. And a high point of my life— She looks good as well. Well, a high point of my life, Peter, was, as you mentioned, Ray Kurzweil. I got Ray Kurzweil on the stage with the Marvitar. I actually saw Marvitar at the 50th anniversary of AI at UCLA. And there was a 2,000-person audience, all AI experts. People were frickin blown away because there was no latency. Marvitar was on it with the answers, you know, would interrupt Ray and say, well, how about this? And, you know, I mean, Marvitar kept up with Ray, which is actually better than I can do. I love it. So the AI is better than me. Of course, of course. But now our goal is for me to be the most accessible CEO anywhere in the world. So my Marvitar is available to all 2,000 United Therapeutics employees. They can ask me any question 24/7, 365.

Amazing. So you've trained Marvitar up with everything you've ever said, written, and all the best LLMs out there. Yeah. Awesome. Consciousness. Are we there yet for AI? Will— do you think the current models will get to that point, or is there another breakthrough required to get to AI consciousness?

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

Spectrum.

And we are gaining ever More consciousness with each month.

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

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

AI personhood. We just saw President Milei in Argentina come out with some extraordinary statements and invitations to AI companies come here. You'll be basically unregulated. AI is able to have bank accounts and have— where do you come out on AI personhood?

I think it's inevitable. That was a big theme of Virtually Human, and it's going to take some lawyers. And, but we got— You're a lawyer. We got, we got plenty of other better lawyers than me. And so you may recall from the film I did with Ray Kurzweil, we had Alan Dershowitz arguing for the legal rights of Pollyanna. Perrette, who was still my friend. We just saw concerts at the Hollywood Bowl together, and she starred as Ramona, you know, the digital avatar of Ray.

Yeah.

So I think it's just a matter of a court case that says that if you have like medical documentation that this purportedly cyberconscious individual actually is cyberconscious and values their life then that counts as legal personhood. And it will happen within the— it'll happen also not later than the 2030s for sure, 100%. And at that point in time, then the population, instead of being limited to what we can biologically produce, we will have hundreds of billions. We will have trillions of sentient individuals.

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

Absolutely.

And off the planet.

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

Is it— is that just luck or is it something else?

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

We are.

Yeah.

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

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

A simulacrum.

A simulacrum that will be indistinguishable from us or from them. And that you don't need every single neuron. In fact, we know people have hemispherectomies they remove half the person's brain and they're the same person. So it's overkill to actually, you know, put a neural nanobot on every single neuron. You don't need it. And as an entrepreneur, what I always do in my companies is I find like a simpler, faster way to get to the same goal. And if at the end of the day somebody says, well, you've only got like 95% of the goal achieved, I'll say, I'll take it.

Yeah.

'Cause I want 95% now.

Versus 100%.

It's vastly better than 100% and some missing piece.

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

Well, I don't consider myself a wise and old expert, but I will say it is possible. And I put my money where my mouth is. Because I've made, you know, multimillion-dollar donations to Alcor. Both Bina and I, you know— Are you an Alcor? Oh yes, I've been an Alcor member for 20 years. And both of us are signed up to be fully cryonicized.

Full body or just—

Full body. Full body.

Why?

Because I can afford it.

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

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

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

Brain health. You know, you're right. This is the number one concern People coming into Fountain Life have is, will I remember the name of my child and the face of my loved one? 45% of dementia cases are entirely preventable with lifestyle. And what was really intriguing to me, Peter, is that a quarter of our members had advanced brain age, but over 13 months of us really helping them live healthier lifestyles, eating healthier, moving their body regularly, and optimizing sleep, People overlook that so often, but that sleep optimization is critical for our brain health. What we showed is that we were able to improve the brain age in 46% of those individuals. That's a powerful number.

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

Oh, wonderful. Yeah, what an amazing human being.

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

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

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

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

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

I think I admired first and foremost most his practicality. And that's just my own value structure. When he came up with the idea of a mass driver, he then built a mass driver over in Ohio.

Yes.

And I was there and I saw an actual demonstration of it working. When he said that the lunar regolith can give us all the mass we need for cosmic ray protection in an Island 4, Island 5, L4, L5, space settlement. He did all the numbers. He ran all the numbers and showed engineering quantitatively that it was practical. Then he got that published in peer-reviewed journal Physics Today.

Yeah.

So Gerry O'Neill was a very, very practical guy. I visited his house in Princeton. He had a train. I don't know if you remember this. He had like a model train running all through his house and all the bedrooms and rooms of his house. He built that whole train himself. He built, as you know, the early cyclotrons at Princeton University.

Yes.

So first and foremost, I admired him as a maker. Makers are my people. That's my favorite tribe. So, you know, he's a maker, a builder, a practical man. Secondly, I admired his vision. I'm not a huge fan of just visionaries for visionaries' sake because they're on Skid Row. I mean, they just don't do anything but like mentally masturbate. But Gerry combined his building with his vision and actually made something. Third, I admired his courage to be a card-carrying member of like the American Physical Society and then go out on a limb and say that we could have a population of hundreds of billions of humans living in space. And that doesn't even make a dent in the resources of the solar system.

Right.

And later on explaining how we could go to with self-replicating systems, go to populate other star systems.

Von Neumann probes.

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

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

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

Yes.

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it, it is the largest, you know, today for me, AI and longevity are the 2 biggest markets on the planet.

And talk about awesomeness. How cool is it that AI is here right now?

Right now.

To give us the resources for endless life.

Right now.

And, you know, I look at my role as a distant number 2 to Elon, that Elon's role is to spread consciousness to the cosmos, and my role is to provide endless, endless life for that consciousness.

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

I say to people that fear are like cockroaches. They dominate in darkness and ignorance. And as soon as you flip on the light, the cockroaches vanish. And so we are scared. We're scared of what we don't understand. So we need to have open conversations about what is it that you're scared about with AI? How can we help alleviate those fears? So open authenticity. You know, I think Mark Zuckerberg just did a great op-ed piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that just addressed that very question. He said, you know, there is, you know, like Roosevelt said, there's nothing to fear but fear itself. Just talk about these things openly. My whole Virtual Human book talks about how we need good AI to be on top of bad AI. Of course, there's always going to be like, you know, bad players. That's— there's bad things in the universe. You can get hit by a comet or an asteroid, but we need good technology to counter the bad technology and to be able to shrink away from the most powerful tool that human consciousness has ever come up with is insanity.

Yeah. Yeah. You gave an incredible closing graduation speech at UCLA this year where you got your doctorate degree.

Yes.

Congratulations on that.

Thank you.

It's beautiful. I'm gonna link to your speech in the notes.

Thank you.

You gave a few powerful pieces of advice for entrepreneurs. I don't know if you recall those. I have some of them here, but I think that'd be a great way to close out. We have a huge number of entrepreneurs in listening to us right now. Anything in particular you wanna hit?

Yeah, I think, you know, first of all, you know, be practical. You don't want to be labeled a person who just thinks of ideas and, and doesn't implement them. The beauty of you, Peter, is like every idea you've had, you've implemented and you've made it real. And then you've made it so that other people can make even more ideas real. I always refer to you as like the ultimate human enzyme. You speed up the rate of reaction of human creativity and technology.

Your creativity.

So my first advice is, is to be practical. Secondly is try to accomplish something within a brief span of years because the way the human psyche is, is it's difficult to get people to work for more than like a 5-year timeframe on something. So come up with a project, a program, a technology, a service that can be completely commercialized within a 5-year period. And then ultimately make it something that everybody will look at and say, this adds goodness to the universe.

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

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

Well, thank you.

My pleasure.

Thank you for saying yes to this conversation.

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

Thank you, my dear.

Okay.

All right. Be well.