Episode 160: From Enhanced Games to Genetic Selection

Hey everybody, Peter Diamandis here with my extraordinary friend and coach Dan Sullivan, and this is another episode of Exponential Wisdom. So Dan, I just recently went to something called the Enhanced Games that a friend of mine threw in Las Vegas, and it was an interesting experiment. What they had was a competition of weightlifters, swimmers, and runners where you could take any performance-enhancing drugs. You could take, you know, testosterone and Ativan and any kind of peptides you wanted, Adderall, anything, right?

Yeah.

So it was an older crowd. I think the average age in the Olympics is like 26. I think most of these were post-Olympic age, in their 30s. And it was an interesting idea. I was there watching. I expected that all of the participants would set new world records. Out of all of them, there's only one world record that was set, and that was in the 50-meter freestyle swim, you know. And they did their training in Abu Dhabi, where legally they were allowed to do all of these drug enhancements, and they came to Las Vegas for this event. But it was sort of an incremental step into this future where we're going to be enhancing ourselves in a multitude of ways. One of the companies I'm looking at investing in, for example, is one where if you're going to do IVF to start your family and you harvest the eggs and you do a fertilization of them and you get 20 embryos, this company will sequence the 20 embryos and then will give you a report. And you can say, oh, this one has this hair color, this height, this IQ, and you can pre-select out of the 20 embryos, all of them are yours, but you would have guessed on which one, but you can actually choose the one that you want. You know, it's moving into interesting ethical and moral issues. I think it's an interim step between actually designing and like, let's make these edits in the embryos. It's interesting, right, because as a parent you want to give your children the very best.

How did you do without this?

Yeah, so, you know, no, I mean, you've got two great sons. I got two great kids. I'm very proud of them. I love them dearly. The thing I'm proudest about is we say I love you back and forth probably a dozen times a day, and they're 15, which is good because I was always warned like when they reach their teenage years you're going to be in trouble. But so far so good. But it's interesting, right, because you give your kids the best food, the best education, the best clothing, the best— all you can. Why wouldn't you start with the best genetics? So that's one road that's interesting. The other one is the idea of being able to upgrade yourself, right? So there are all of these gene therapies that are now coming online. A friend of mine, I won't mention her, has gone through a number of gene therapies for increasing muscle mass. Klotho is one for increasing cognitive ability.

Mhm.

And so I think once it's safe, people will choose to do these things.

Yeah.

Yeah, but society will push back. Yeah, saying, oh, you shouldn't do that.

Yeah, well, you know, Newton's laws of thermodynamics, and the one that's particularly pertinent to what we're talking about is the third law, which is for every action there's an opposite and equal reaction. So if you create a new thing, okay, well, what already exists is going to react to that.

Of course. Yeah, because people like waking up and knowing that the world hasn't changed from last night.

Well, they have to have some sense of predictability in their lives to get out of bed in the morning, you know. So it's a negotiation that's going on between change and the status. And there are certain places that's better to do this than other societies. I've lived two-thirds of my life outside of the United States. I'm 82 and A third of my life I've been in the US, but I've lived two-thirds Canada, 55 years. And what I noticed was that the US has much greater tolerance for change than Canada does.

Hmm.

And the United States has way more tolerance for change than Europe does. You know, if you look at the European thing, it's very interesting that 60% of all technology is initiated right now in the United States. Of the whole planet, 60% of new technologies are actually being initiated in the United a lot of them going nowhere, but there's this sense of experimentation that's going on. Are you allowed to experiment?

Right.

And I think that's the really thing. Can I try something? And they say, yeah, you can try something. You have the freedom to try anything, but you're not free from the law of consequences. That's why I love the states in the United States that now have the rule. I think there's about 5 of them regarding medical technologies that if you agree and the doctor agree and you hold each other harmless, then you can go ahead and try. It's sort of like the go-ahead laws. And I think Texas is one of them. I think Utah is one of them. I think Wyoming is one of them. And my sense is that that's very, very crucial that individuals— this is where agency comes in. You know, agency means taking responsibility for your experience.

Yes.

Taking ownership of your experience. I'm responsible. I own my own experience. So you're going to have a great unevenness around the world when new things come in because some system says, no, we're not going to do this. You're not allowed to do this. But my sense is that that's how the universe operates. For every action, there's an opposite and equal reaction. If you're an innovator, you got to be good at negotiation with the environment that you're actually operating in.

It is. And you have to be patient to bring society and culture along with you.

And you got to be able to measure progress on a daily basis.

The problem is the fast movers who adopt and use and change and pull away from the slow movers who are resistant. You know, we're seeing this right now in the data center wars, right?

You've seen all of these cultural pushback on, you know, not all the NIMBY laws.

Yes, not in my backyard. I don't want that happening here. Yeah. And there's a lot of evidence now looking that it's actually China, the CCP, that's inciting false data.

Yeah.

And getting people pushing back on this. You know, it's an interesting strategy. You know, we don't need to actually develop the technology faster. We just need to get the US more sand in the gears so they develop the technology slower.

Yeah. Well, if that's their most creative strategy, they're in trouble.

Yeah, Elon will let sit for that and we'll just take the data centers to orbit or not in my backyard. Okay. You don't get the financial benefits of having the data centers in your backyard. Too bad for you, but we'll move them to the orbital plane. I think there's an interesting challenge that is gonna occur, you know, going back to the enhanced games that we opened up with. I think a great experiment that they did and it'll get better. I do think in the future versions of these enhanced games, there will be athletes who are using advanced gene therapies and are re-engineering themselves. There was a lot of haters who were like, oh, this is terrible. Oh, this is, you know— well, actually, this is an area of experimentation, and the culture will push back on it, like you said. But then there will be results and breakthroughs, and science and medicine will wrap around this, and we'll have the benefit to, you know, maintain muscle as we age and maintain or increase our cognitive abilities while we age. I think those are all important.

And then, by the way, are you experiencing that?

For sure. But, you know, listen, I'm still doing the basics. I'm still doing, you know, sleep, diet, exercise, mindset. But I am using advanced therapies that I get access to through Fountain Life I have an army of physicians that make sure I'm safe. And I think right now you go down to Argentina, and we're going to start to pull these things into the U.S. The FDA is becoming more permissive about this, but, you know, we're living during this period of very rapid discovery in biohacking and in advanced longevity therapeutics. Yeah, and you know, reminding people the body was never meant to live past age 30. We were in peak performance in our late 20s, and then the best thing you're supposed to do was die.

Yeah, that was a food problem.

It was a food problem, yes. It was a food problem.

And now the problem is too much food. For sure. So we've passed that. There's two things here, you know, what is the species as a whole doing, and what is a particular individual doing? My sense is that One of the abilities of the speed of change since we've known each other, you know, 15 years we've known each other. And my sense is that so much change is happening that if you don't make a big deal about it, you can get away with almost anything. Who's watching? I mean, they're too busy. I'm the fifth child in a family. You don't know how much you can get away with as a fifth child that you can't as a first child.

Dan, let's talk about one implication of all of this technology, which is I find myself so enamored by how much I can do. You know, people talk about 3 and 4 day work weeks. I'm working a 9 and 10 day work week right now. I find myself so excited at this point in my life by all of the things I have wanted to do, didn't have the time, didn't have the employees, and now I can use my various AI agents and constructs to do them and dream bigger than I've ever dreamed before. And that's intoxicating.

It is. But it starts with the fact we mentioned that on another podcast. The fact is that you're one of the few people I've encountered in my life that's not afraid of the future. Yeah. And I think it's that fundamental mindset that you can open any door and feel interested. You can feel engaged with it where most people can't. Yeah, it all comes back to mindset, the same thing. It does. What is the mindset that is appropriate for taking continual accelerating advantage of AI?

Yeah, we've spoken about this where, you know, from my standpoint, a purpose-driven mindset and a curiosity mindset are the two key mindsets for this next decade. A purpose-driven mindset gives you direction on like what excites you, right? Like passion is what you love doing. Purpose is what you love doing that helps other people as well, that adds value to society. And that's important to know, like what's the guiding star you're aiming at that wakes you up excited in the morning, keeps you going through the day and the night. And then curiosity mindset is how do I use the latest and greatest tools to implement my purpose?

Yeah, I'll bring in Palmer Luckey's great thing. He says, "You don't follow your passion, you follow your capabilities." My sense is that what you're capable of gives you the instant positive feedback that you're exploring new territory, you're mapping out a new area. And there's a lot of people who have passion, but they don't have the capability to go along with the passion.

Listen, Palmer and I are friends. We working together on a number of projects. I agree that capability is important, but having the capability to do something that you don't love doing —can be disheartening.

That's unique ability.

Then you get into unique ability, for sure. Yeah, for sure.

Unique ability, you get all the rewards. Yeah. Yeah.

So one question for you is, obviously there are tools that you have and you use, but what's your advice to people out there to find their unique ability?

Yeah, well, first of all, there's some good tests. You know, the big problem is that people do many different kinds of activities, and a lot of them they're incompetent at, a lot of them they're merely competent, there's some they're excellent, and then there's the ones that really are nourishing. They're really great at it, they have excellent capabilities, but they're nourished at it. So the big thing is we have the Kolbe test, we have Strength Finder, we have PRINT, we have Working Genius. These are all tests that you can take and they make the circle smaller and smaller and smaller. You know, and then we say 10 people whose opinion and judgment you really respect, tell them I'm going through a process and I'm discovering my unique ability. What would you say it is? And it's an amazing Venn diagram that emerges that's right in the center of the people outside of you who don't have your emotions actually have a better sense of what you can do superbly than they do themselves. One value I had, you know, in your life, right at the beginning, is I read the book. I said, I totally get where he's going with this book. But then when I met you and I had several months of interaction with you, I said, he has no fear of the future. That's your unique ability is you have no fear of the future.

Yes. And optimism that comes along with that.

Yeah.

I tell people, listen, you get a double dividend from being optimistic. People like hanging out with you. 'Cause who wants to be with someone who's a doomer all the time? And the second thing is a study published in the National Academy of Sciences that say optimistic people live as much as 15% longer than pessimists. I'm going, yo, yo, what's wrong with this? You should do both of these things.

Yeah. Yeah. Remember your talk at the Vatican where they said the Bible says that 120 is the limit and you said, yeah, well, right now 80 is the limit. Why don't we get the extra 40 years?

Yeah. I'll take 120 and then I'll renegotiate when we get there.

Yeah. Yeah. Mine's 150. $126, as you know. And people said, well, do you think you would ever change that? And I said, if I get to $150, I'm sure I can renegotiate. Yes, exactly. Exactly. That's the Hayflick barrier. Where do you think that is right now? I mean, for the listeners of this, the Hayflick barrier, he was— I forget what specialty he had, but he's the one who identified that the cells reproduce 50 times.

Yeah, so your cells typically will go through 50 cell divisions, and then at the end of that, they have 3 options. They can do what they should typically do, which is, you know, die, and they make room for new stem cells to replace them. Or sometimes they become cancer cells, they continue living without any controls. Or they become senescent cells and they pump out inflammatory factors. And so one of the Longevity therapies is killing the senescent cells. You never want cancer cells. And so that's part of the hallmarks of aging. And so the question is how long we can live. You know, Ray Kurzweil predicted getting to longevity escape velocity by 2033. So I have a t-shirt that says LEV by 2033. Sort of, that's the mantra out there I'm pushing. And there are scientists out there— I just spent time with Demis Hassabis from DeepMind who has a new company called Isomorphic Labs. His mission is curing all disease within— he said that a year ago, 10 years, so now it's 9 years. And then Dario Ahmed, you know, the head of Anthropic, who said he thinks we could double the human lifespan in 5 to 10 years. The thing that people don't realize is we're in such a period of hyper-exponential growth that you don't have to have the changes to live an extra 50 years right now. You need to stay in good health the next 5 years, 10 years, and during that period of time, the breakthroughs that are occurring are adding decades onto your life that give you the next layer of breakthroughs and the next layer of breakthroughs. It's a magical time. I'm sorry for people who are fearful about the future because fear is the worst place to encounter the future from. Yeah. Yeah.

We had a discussion before about entrepreneurs and I said, you know, it's a very, very small portion of the working population that are actually entrepreneurial. And we know that from tax records, how they file their tax records. And people say, well, why aren't there more entrepreneurs? And I says, maybe because we don't need them. Maybe society only needs a certain number of entrepreneurs to introduce new stuff. So my sense is that nothing is total. There's a certain number of people who play different roles. I mean, you play a particular role in relationship to all the communities that you're in because you're by far the person who's pushing the boundaries out. My specialty is creating thinking tools for entrepreneurs so that they think better and everything like that. Well, you don't need everybody like me. You need one, you need 20, you need 30 and everything else. So I think the secret of human civilization is specialization. Maybe we need a certain number of pessimists just to keep things reasonably stable.

Maybe we need structure for sure. Yeah, I'm not sure we need structure.

Yeah. You have to keep certain things the same for a while. You can't have everything changing all at once.

You know, some interesting data, and I'll, I'll show it to you here one second on these charts. There's been a recent uptick in the number of AI solo founders. Yes. It's doubled in the last quarter. Mm-hmm. Which is interesting, but we've also seen an uptick in the number of non-AI solo founders. And it's gone up by about 30% in the last quarter. And I think the reason is that, you know, 5 or 10 years ago to start a company, you needed a lawyer, you needed an accountant, you needed a marketing person, a sales team, you know, all of these things. And now you on your own, if you have a passion, a problem you wanna solve, you don't need that. And the cost of starting a business has like plummeted like a hundredfold. In that period of time.

The other thing is the number of people over 70 who are doing this.

Yes. Amazing. For sure.

Of all the decades of entrepreneurship, 70s are the fastest growing, not in total numbers, just percentage where they were 10 years ago and where they are now. And I think the reason is you have people with skills who have good health and they still have ambition. They may have been an employee all their life, but now they can use all their skill. They can find their customers, they can get paid for value. They can solve problems. But it goes back to a previous podcast that we did. And my sense is that AI is making everybody more useful. Yes. I mean, if they're useful already, they're going to become more useful. Yes. If they have the mindset of being useful, AI is going to make them more useful.

You know, I just launched a new XPRIZE a week ago, 10 days ago. I was at Google I/O, which is Google's big event of the year. One of my concerns is that the group out of work the longest is age 22 to 26, I think 22 to 28, recent graduates. And they're all dependent on the old social construct of high school, college, get a diploma, go get a job. And I'm like, no, that's broken. So now I think the new social norm needs to be find a purpose, find a unique ability find a problem you care about, and then build the solution, like create your own employment. And we launched this X Prize. It's a $2 million hackathon. It's the largest hackathon ever in history. And it's not a 2 or 3-day hackathon, it's a 3-month hackathon. And so we've said to anybody around the world, find a problem that impacts 100,000 people or more. It should be a real problem, you choose it. Describe in writing, English language, the problem and how you wanna solve it, how you want your company to run, like write it out in detail like you were explaining it to a amazing business team. And then have agents code that up. And the person who can write it out, build it in public, market it, the group that gets the most revenue in 3 months wins this X Prize. It's a $500,000 first place prize and then a few hundred thousand dollar prizes and 15 $50,000 prizes. And the goal here is to demonstrate to people that anyone anywhere who can become a problem miner— when you see something, instead of thinking, oh my God, that's terrible, think about, oh, that's a great problem to solve, right? The more entrepreneurs, the more problems being solved, the better the world is. Yeah, yeah. So if people are interested in that, you can go to geminixprize.com and register. We have like 5,000 registrants after the first 2 weeks. And I hope it gets to 50,000 registrants. And again, it's getting people to realize that you're entering a new age.

Well, I think you're creating a solution to the problem. You know, I remember once I had a conversation with non-entrepreneurs. We were in a social setting. It was about Mike Trout, who plays for one of the Los Angeles teams, and he signed the biggest lifetime contract. I think it was $480 million for 13 years. Which would not be the largest contract today. Somebody said to me, well, that's immoral that anybody should make that amount of money. And I said, well, he makes that amount of money because he's hired by a billionaire who owns the ballclub. And I would say that he wouldn't have given the baseball player that contract if he didn't realize that he was going to get a much bigger return. And I said, you know, I don't know if you know this, But if you take the ratio between player salaries and the market value of a baseball team in 1950, it's exactly the same today. Hmm. There's no difference. I said there's a formula for how much you're willing to pay for players, and home run hitters tend to be the highest paid because people come to see home runs. So he's creating enormous value for the audience, for the other players and everything else. And he says, but school teachers aren't paid enough. And I says, well, let's use the same model for school teachers. And I said, let's say 12 years, you got 1st grade to 12th grade. And I said, at 6 years old, you got this sort of dynamic, creative, energized, positive individual, and you run them through your system for 12 years. And at 18, they've totally lost their enthusiasm. They don't play anymore. They don't invent. So actually, we should be reducing their salaries because they're taking a resource and making it less valuable over an 18-year period. Yes, you should pay them a lot less because they're reducing the value of a resource. And they said, well, that's absurd. And I said, well, no, I said, I'm saying that a lot more humans were a lot more interesting at 6 than they were at 18. You've made them lesser human beings. So I think that your prize, the XPRIZE that you're creating with Gemini, is actually reversing the thing that when does that talent show up? It would be interesting if you get some 13-year-olds or 14-year-olds who are in the contest, because if you can light up that problem-solving enthusiasm at the youngest age, you've solved the problem.

I'm working on this in the education space that teachers should help students find their unique ability find their purpose, their passion, should help them become entrepreneurs. And that— imagine if you had an ecosystem where, as these young students start companies, the teachers that helped them got shares in the companies that were started. And so the teachers would be like, I want to help you create a great company. And yes, exactly, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Teachers should be the best paid. We trust our kids with them. Teachers spend much more time than parents do educating, unfortunately. And wouldn't it be great if they were both aligned on the same side of the equation?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that AI is creating the conditions for that world to exist.

Yes, I agree. All right, buddy. A fun conversation as always. Thank you. Thank you.