This is a YouTube video titled "Is Longevity Only For The Rich? | Peter Diamandis x Dave Asprey" featuring a discussion between Dave Asprey and Peter Diamandis recorded in May 2024. The conversation focuses on the accessibility and future affordability of longevity technologies such as gene therapies and mRNA treatments, addressing concerns about their initial high costs and eventual democratization.
I see a lot of people, including some listeners of the show, who get a little bit angry and they say, well, longevity is only for rich people. And I have an answer for that. But I want to know your answer for that.
I think that everything, all technology begins with the wealthy using it when it doesn't work so well. Yes. And then by the time it works extremely well, it's cheap and available to everybody. Now, there are a class of medicines like gene therapies that for very narrow orphan diseases are very expensive. They're a million bucks an injection, 2 million bucks an injection and so forth, because they're a narrow. You know, there's a population of hundreds of people out of the world, but the nice thing is there are 8 billion people with the disease of aging. And, you know, George Church gives the best example. He goes, you know, it's likely to be a gene therapy. And we have an example of a gene therapy that despite the politics and all the ramifications of, of MRNA vaccines, they were gene therapies. And when you manufacture them in the hundreds of millions or billions, they cost 10 bucks.
Yep. In fact, Lou Reese came on this show two years before the pandemic talking about how MRNA could be used for longevity. And I. It totally could be. It's all about the payload. It's not about the technology being evil or not evil. The technology is never evil. It's how you use it. So if I could have an MRNA therapy and I knew what was in it for sure and it was properly tested and it didn't have to be rushed for any reason, I would consider that if the clinical trials showed improvements in health. Right now, in fact, I've done gene therapy on myself. I am now an adviser to Mini Circle, and I've had the F statin injection. I'm about to be in the first trial for the next one in two weeks. And so I, I think there's different pathways to do it. But that is a $25,000 cost today, just like it was 25 grand for a cell phone in 1989. Right. It's going to come down know dropped.
A call every block when you were on that.
That's true.
You know, so I do think that these therapeutics are going to massively demonetize and democratize.
Okay, so we're in agreement there. It. It's coming and we're doing it as fast as we can. Because honestly, if you're running one of these companies, do you want to sell $100,000, $5,000 treatments or 1,5 million dollars treatment. You make more money with the bigger customer, even if the cost has to come down. So the financial incentives are aligned and the humanitarian incentives are aligned, right?
For sure.
