The Competition to Extend Human Lifespan with Neil deGrasse Tyson & Peter Diamandis

we are at this moment in time where we are birthing Humanity into the cosmos we are the equivalent of those lung fish theing out of the oceans onto land I think we have a moral obligation to make Humanity a multiplanetary species [Music] moral this is Star Talk Neil degrass Tyson here your personal astrophysicist I have in my office Peter diamandis someone I met 30 years ago he's an entrepreneur space entrepreneur but not only that he's trying to transform what it is to live to live healthy in this world and in the future Peter welcome back to my office dude pleasure buddy great to be here I can't believe it's been 30 years 30 years I'm not saying that we're old or anything was at like half our life ago in a sense yeah and remind me why you found me and came to my Hayden planetarium office It's a Wonderful Story the year was 1995 I just founded the xprize right this uh the desire was to put together a $10 million prize it was not funded at the time for private space flight and so you came to me for the $10 million no and you turned me down damn it it was a short meeting right right but um wait you had to explain to me at the time what the X prize was yeah so I said listen throughout history prizes were used to move move you know technology and science forward and let's face it you know since we got to the moon in 1969 not much has happened in terms of going to space the shuttle was great for humans for humans yeah a lot of great stuff on on on planetary surfaces but I wanted to go I wanted to be an astronaut that Apollo Mission showed what we could do and then that scientific documentary Star Trek showed exactly showed exactly three dates they're going to the Moon yes it does by a couple years a few years uh so I'm like looking for for people that might fund a $10 million prize and at first I'm like let's do this Grassroots let's get you know thousands of people who are going to give you know hundreds of dollars and so I'm flipping through the back of one of those old paperback books this is like you know remember when P books like this kind of stuff back here books books yeah books books and in the back it says do you want to fly it's a one page last page I think it's a penguin book and it says penguin publisher yeah penguin publisher not a book about penguins do you want to fly to the moon or Mars enter a competition to buy a ticket and I'm like reading this and I'm going that's amazing it wasn't a competition I think it was a lottery it was a lottery yes it was you're right it was a lottery to win a ticket to go to the moon go to Mars I think it offered a few other planets there but I'm not sure and it said and you know provide the information and mail it in to the Hayden planetarium serving as director at the time I had no idea we did this because if that scared me when you showed this to me cuz I said we're going to have to make good on the tickets yeah what's what's our liability so I'm thinking okay it must be thousands maybe tens of thousands of people who want to go you know on these interplanetary trips and sent in these tickets and send in these tickets and I and I know there's no option for them and the X prize we were doing it was going to be a a $10 million prize for the first person to build a spaceship and can carry a pilot and two paying passengers up 100 kilometers into space and I said maybe that group of people who submitted these forms I can reach out to them and say Hey you know this is how you can get to space and so I show up in your doorstep and I said I said Neil where where are all these you must have thousands of them and I just occupied that office at the time and so I had to go to our library and our library archist and they found they found a box of these they did and we're remembering something from 30 years ago about a contest that happened 30 years before that yes in the 1960s so I'm looking at the names and the addresses it's before zip code okay so and you want to find these people they're all dead all right what do you it wasn't going to work it definitely was not going to work I applaud the creativity of the idea I got I got a chance to meet you oh no no thank you it was fun but you were very kind and this was the beginning of the xprize back then and so I got to see it in its infancy born in your head very very early you know again I'm born I was born 61 and the 60s was a formative time for me and again it was it was the Apollo program in Star Trek that really sort of uh infected my mind and really drove me into I that's a good word infected it because that you know it's weird coming off a pandemic to use the word infected but it it carries the right sort of biological Vector right you're there and then there's a show and it gets in you and now you you're affected by it yes I want to become an Astron my parent want me to become a doctor mhm I want to become an astronaut and I'm like I looked at the numbers I remember and I think it was like one out of 5,000 people got selected to become an astronaut and I said really poor odds I have a better chance of becoming an NBA Allstar at 54 than I do an astronaut and then I looked at how many astronauts actually flew and interestingly enough like only half the astronauts in the program in the program fly they're called Penguins cuz they have wings but they don't fly is that right I did not know that and then the the killer was okay if I got selected if I got a chance to fly can I fly every weekend which is what I want and it's like you know one or two missions yeah yeah okay and so I said there's got to be a better way and I was given a book by a dear friend Greg marinac the Spirit of St Louis and I'm reading the book he gave it to me to encourage me to finish my pilot's license just to remind people that's the name of limberg plain the Spirit of St Louis that he flew across Attic So in 1927 just to be clear he wasn't the first to fly across the Atlantic uh non-stop not Non-Stop and the first toly solo yes so it's very particular so this back story parameters for this for this achievement but but before you continue yeah tell me precisely why an X prise concept works at all so if you think about it um we are genetically bred to compete Society on thrives on and we evolved as humans to compete for our food and all everything so can we in fact use an what's called an incentive competition very different from the Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer Prize which rewards someone for work they did 10 20 30 years ago right so it's like a cherry on top prize for incentive competition is the opposite it says I don't care who you are where you went to school if you what your nationality is or anything anything how much how old you are nothing it's it's a it's a pure meritocracy prize if you pull this thing off first and demonstrate it you win and so I had just read this book and I'll I'll mention a little B more about in a second about that Lindberg in 1927 flew New York to Paris non-stop to win this $25,000 orag prize uh this Frenchman Raymond orte is born just to give a shout out to Long Island he left from Airfield in Long Island you left from Rosel field yeah yeah yeah I used to go launch rockets out of there oh you did yeah and there's now a a museum of of air and space very good Museum yeah so um this guy FR this Frenchman Raymond orte comes to the US in like 1900 penus um works his way up from bus boy to Hotel manager to Hotel owner of the hotel Lafayette World War I was the birth of the airplane right so you saw it for the first time and so in 1919 at the end of the war this guy Raymond orte who's who owns his hotel now uh posts a notice that I will offer $25,000 for the first person to fly non-stop between my birthplace of Paris and my home of New York or the other direction and if you knew about the trade winds you'd had you want to go prevailing winds go west to east yes yes on Earth so what happens is he offers this $25,000 prize people laugh at him I mean this is ridiculous no one's ever gone that far since 1919 and that's a chunk of money in 1919 it was it's uh you know four five six four million dollars today anyway so uh it turns out nine different teams go after this $25,000 and they spend $400,000 to win this guy's money and I'm making notes in the margin of the book The Spirit of St Louis again that that uh that Lindberg published in 1957 won the pul Sur prize and he's talking about how much money the teams are all spending uh this team is spending 100,000 this spend is is spending 50,000 he spent 25,000 bucks and and ortigue doesn't pay any of the losers and I think three of the nine teams died trying to make the flight so Lindberg actually makes the flight first one to go non-stop solo and also the first one to go non-stop in this competition and within 18 months of lyberg winning this 25,000 bucks and making the flight the number of airplanes in the world quadrupled number of Pilots tripled so there was this it was a force of nature it a moment it was the for it was the bister 4minute mile it was front page around the world oh my God humans have flown non-stop across Atlantic and Lindberg became a global hero so the ortique prize opened up Aviation and really you can draw an inflection point for everything and so as I'm reading this book uh the Spirit of St Louis uh I am like I have to do a prize like this for space flight because I'm not going to get you know a chance of me becoming a government astronaut or slim and I don't get a chance to fly every time I want to fly and we need to kick space flight human space flight in the butt so and the NBA was off the table just what's not going to happen for me and so there's a very long story but over the course of the next five years I ended up raising the $10 million prize raising the money for raising the money for the prize just to be clear I just want to emphasize because you said something you just said something because you're so accustomed to it but I think it's worthy of of a pause to reflect on the fact that $225,000 was a prize for people who were spending more than $25,000 to win that prize yeah 16 times the prize money was spent cumulatively by all the teams uh to try and win it and and so so that's that competition you were talking about that's a competition and I was like in the competition transcended the money it was people wanted to do they wanted an excuse to do it right and so in the back of the Spirit of St Louis that I'm reading that my friend Greg gave me to finish my Pilots license which I did eventually do at the end I wrote the words x prize and you know why I wrote the word X prize you'll love this I think first X was a variable to be replaced by the name of the person who put the money up I had no idea who it was x r numeral 10 for $10 million x for experimental it just really worked wow huh okay deep deep um so and Elon Musk was early in that conversation he made Space X yeah well was you're like fars Gump right every every turning point every turning point in the history I mean El you were there Elon Elon I met Elon in in uh in 20201 uh the xprize was ongoing he hadn't met the an anari yet who funded it and so the very fam very famously you had one fun 10 Milli one we had a bunch of smaller funders that kept us going and then the Ansari family was the primary fun and that's why it became the Ansari prize X prize right filling in for the variable X exactly but the X stuck along stuck around so long we didn't get rid of it was the Ansari X prize versus the anari prize and um anua by the way is now the CEO of the xprize amazing woman she flew privately to the space station I remember that yes and uh now she's the CEO service it's you could not fly privately via NASA because NASA didn't roll that way so she paid money to the Russians to go to the international on so's flight a bikon or Elon was an early bik in Russia um so by the way so I happen to have here a matrioska doll and right on the front is the International Space Station nice and as you go into the smaller and smaller dolls well I got this in Russia by the way okay at uh Star City yes where they train their it's like our Houston is their Star City and each Nesta doll has a smaller space vessel than the previous one and it goes down to the littlest one which is take a guess what it is Russia Sputnik Sputnik there it is it's a cute little Sputnik in the in the littlest one so um yeah we we forget As Americans that Russia was totally into this stuff yeah no Russia I me 1957 when what's the date October 4th thank you very much I mean people need to know that you're the wrong place to be tested well listen I'm sorry I'm going to try I'm I'm going to try for the master this I know you do uh so the remarkable lesson here yeah is when you combine the competition as you duly described when you combine what impact success would have on the motivation of others in society there's probably no greater leverage you can have on Innovation we have doed yeah we have documented uh 30 fold return on the donation we get so when someone gives us a dollar to fund a prize um typically you know and not withstanding the amazing institution that we're in here um you typically American Museum of Natural History yes you you typically will get like 20 cents on your dollar spent to actually move the thing forward when we put up a large x-prize competition uh you'll get as much as $30 on the dollar spent by all the teams trying to win it and the best part you don't pay the losers you only pay the winner who pulls it off how would you like that to be the the business model for everything right not going to pay you until my house is whatever but it works and and people do it willingly yeah the losers are not sad that they didn't get the money I'll give you an example we have launched uh to date uh on the order of4 or500 million in prizes okay uh We've launched prizes for mapping the ocean floor for pulling water out of the atmosphere atmospheric capture of water uh for drinking for drinking yes uh we had a global literacy prize for teaching children in the middle of Tanzania Reading Writing arithmetic on a tablet without any literate adults you'd give them a tablet they turn it on and had to learn everything on their own uh two so this this requires Innovative educational pedagogy a couple years ago I got Elon Musk to fund the largest prize at the time which was a $100 million prize to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale uh either out of CO2 out of the oceans out of the atmosphere but it was a gigaton carbon removal prize and we had 6,000 teams enter that competition which is crazy right we're in the finals coming up the next um next bit so the winner would get $100 million we actually gave away 15 million of it stage in the beginning so the remaining amount um will be starter money for people yeah and we had a student competition and so forth but the idea is that we've sparked this entire industry and brand new approaches the idea is you want to burn all the oil in the ground just Fest up you want to burn all the oil in the ground the only way you can do that is to pull the C2 out yeah just say it okay I said no so uh we have launched a my a larger prize uh called the $101 million longevity or health span X prise oh okay before before we go there let me ask um it's one thing to say here's an Innovative xprize win idea yeah okay how often does it turn into a thoroughly marketable product that then births an industry well that's our whole goal so you know if you go to express.org you can check out a lot of the background and a lot of the impact we've had we talk about when a prize gets won it's the beginning of the work right because we have now demonstrated a new capability and we want to spark an industry so so uh when the Ansari ex prize got won in 2004 Richard Branson came in and bought the rights to create Virgin Galactic right and uh and I've known Jeff Bezos for 40 years my first organization ever was students for the exploration and development of space SDS which became a uh worldwide College space organization I was the chairman and Jeff Bezos was the Princeton chapter president back in the as a student as a student right okay and uh did he offer you Amazon on stock no no unfortunately not but he did tell me I did meet him uh shortly after he started Amazon and I said like Jeff what are you doing with this Amazon thing I thought you were like a space guy right because he was just selling books at the time right a book seller and he said well I plan to make all my money in Amazon I'll spend it on Space a very simple one two plan right and he's it's worked for yeah app yeah do you feel pressure from common folk just everyday folk when they see you you putting all this very Innovative energy of time and money doing things that feel remote to them you're a smart guy you're getting access to money and Investments why aren't you using it to solve The World's problem exactly yeah well I am I am that's what the exerprise does as well right we are focused on solving Global Grand challenges but I do remember the conversations earlier on when I was just focused on space and I remember so that's when this would have come up I remember writing a brochure why space cuz it was the hardest question to answer and you can talk about tang and Teflon and all that stuff but I'll tell you I would say um do you enjoy living in the United States are you glad that we are living here in the United States and I think it's the same way that we are at this moment in time where we are birthing Humanity into the cosmos we are the equivalent of those lungfish out of the oceans onto landh and if they don't like it tough oh so so you're analogizing Earth to the ocean and space to land coming out of the I think we have a moral obligation to fly uh to make Humanity a multiplanetary species a moral obligation a moral obligation okay tell that to the homeless person for the for on a on a species level species level okay a species level so interesting right so one of the things I'm very proud of is uh I had started a company years ago called zerogravity Corporation zero g i remember zero g fly people up in the thing yeah we have we have a 727 we fly these parabolic flights this is another one that's not one where the doors blow out no right okay so uh I wanted to go on NASA zero g airplane I couldn't get on I couldn't get on I couldn't I said screw it if I want to go that bad I'm G to start a company to do zerog G flights that's just that's just my thing so it took me 11 years to get fa approval 11 years to get the Federal Aviation Administration to allow people to get an airplane unbuckle yourself and have the airplane go up at 44 45° up over the top for a little bit of an arc and then come down basically fall and then fall but free fall you're in free fall as you go over the top right it's it's the Arc of a small Arc of that of of an orbit anyway in 2007 I was connected to Steven Hawking and uh the X prize had just been won the unari X prize for space flight and on a phone he said uh can you fly me into space and I said I'm sorry professor H I can't but I could fly you on a zerog g flight and he said fantastic through his nurse and we agreed to do a zerogravity flight long story short uh I was told by everybody I was crazy I was going to kill this guy and we actually did the fight never killed anyone it's gravity that kills but he was very frail right he could break a break a rib so he was asked on stage at the press conference before he flew and it was an amazingly successful if he dies no no okay was he going to assume me no the the question was why are you doing this it's risky and he said something a little dystopian he said I don't think Humanity has a future unless we open up the space Frontier and so that's one way of looking at it and by the way I recommend anyone who hasn't seen it go to YouTube there videos of him floating yeah in the zero G Moment proudest moment I had to fight you know I had two people we announced it we're going to do a fundraiser for ALS uh Lou Garrick's disease the disease that gave him his uh his IND AB ility to move any any muscles and uh after I announced the Press we were going to do this flight I got two phone calls one from my airplane operator who said you're insane you're going to kill the most famous physicist on the planet and a second one from a government agency I would mention who they are but their initials are FAA um who said you're not allowed to do it you're not allowed to fly stepen Hawking into zero g and I said why it says in your operating specifications it says that your passengers have to be able-bodied and he's clearly not able-bodied abl minded and so I asked I had the presence of mind to ask who determines whether he's able-bodied and said well probably an a Aviation physician or his doctor I bought malpractice insurance got three Physicians to write letters to the fa that he's able-bodied for a Zer G flight and they said it's your ass man all right so you you fulfilled the the bureaucratic yes requirements with producing the letters yeah it's delightful to watch them float around in there tell me is it the subject of your latest of a half a dozen books longevity AI how does X prise fit into that so where you going now yeah so my focus over the last 10 years has been the field of longevity how do I add uh 10 20 30 healthy years on your life part of this group but why not just say live forever why why why are you so restricted because I dude who am I talking to here your X-Men when I listen I there's there's a concept called Longevity escape velocity that's my goal describe that i' love that phrase It's So Perfect it is perfect it is perfect so today uh for every year that you're alive science is extending your life for about a third of a year by breakthroughs and so forth as we're in this incredible era of AI and soon quantum chemistry and Quantum Tech and so forth science there will be a point in the fut just be clear this is AI as applied to our understanding of our physiology and our genetics everything of of all aspects of ourselves AI in the abstract it's AI in the very specific is applied to health and medicine and Medicine solving problems we couldn't otherwise solve because there's it's it is so complex yeah oh yeah that the just give it to AI yeah well and it can I'll go to Bahamas give that to the AI so so there's a moment in time so given the speed at which technolog is progressing and this includes includes genome sequencing and crisper and gene therapy and all of the stem cells all of these Technologies are moving at the speed of exponential growth there is going to this is the decade in which we're going to make a dent in the length of the human life and so there is a moment in time uh Aubrey de gry and Ray kwell speak about this concept called Longevity escape velocity what it means is there's going to be a moment in time that for every year that you're alive science is extending your life for more than a year okay the moment that happens we've reached escap philos we reach so you're able to keep living longer and longer and longer now whenever I talk about immortality and living forever people shut it off because it is we have so much so many institutions that are built around death from religions to government to all it's a bridge too far but what I do want to say I'm very assured about is can we so we have to be clear um when you say religion you mean the so much of what so many religions care about is your afterlife and if you never die what are they offering you yeah if you're buiness model breaks yeah the business to put it to put it another way yes okay so but with all respect to religions uh We've extended longevity uh to 100 yeah basically right a number of people all around us uh you know are living into the late 80s '90s up to 100 the problem is we have not extended our health span that far longevity your life your life Lifan Health span yeah your lifespan is how long your heart's beating basically how long are you alive Health span is how long are you healthy and able to do the things that you want to do play with your kids and lifespans have extended Health spans have not caught up so the first thing is can we in fact extend the health span so that you're healthy till you're 90 till you're 100 you know in body and mind in body and mind right so when I I was at the Vatican and I was on a panel um with a it sounds like a joke with an elderman a a rabbi uh a cardinal and the head of the NSF and myself were you in the Vatican bar when they there should be a good joke about this I was at a paddle the Vatican conference was on reg on regenerative medicine and I the ti of this panel was the uh mortality the morality morality of immortality MH and I wanted to flip it to the immorality IM mortality but they would let me do nice nice okay uh but so at one point I'm I'm giving my presentation and I and it's the audience is filled with Physicians and clergymen and scientists I say how many of here would like to live to 120 expecting everyone's hands to go up and like a quarter of the room goes up and the rest are like crickets and I'm going what up with that and everyone they don't have any confidence that they'll have a quality of life yeah everyone's view of 120 is in a wheelchair slobbering right and and it doesn't need to be that way so a lot of the work that I do today is focused on extending the healthy human lifespan and uh part of this is my desire to see us get back to the Moon get on to Mars I want those extra 30 years to enjoy what I'm sure is coming the other side is it's you know there's no greater wealth than your health there's no greater gift you can give anybody than their health right so anyone dying will spend all their money to live longer it typically absolutely Ty um wait but you have a book that I have a book that just came out tell me the name it's called Longevity your practical Playbook okay so it's it's a it's longevity that you can it's not just Pie in the Sky it's things you can do maybe to help it so the and you can go if you go to DM andis.com longevity uh there's a free distillation of the book like if you can't afford it on Amazon the stuff I do and why it's important is there for free so I just my goal is like get the news out so the fact of the matter is that there are things that we all can do to and we know what they are we know what they are it is you need eight hours of sleep if we didn't need 8 hours of sleep believe me Evolution would have gotten rid of it all right need you know so I'm always shooting for seven or eight hours of sleep and there are lots of different uh approaches to maximize your sleep and I talk about them and then on diet I you went to MIT surely people bragged how many all nighters there oh when I was in medical school it was like I was like as little sleep as possible that was my OB that was the Macho thing to do it was like I I had was the Marines of of Education I had an island of stability at 5 and a half hours if I you know five hours I was groggy six hours I was groggy 5 and a half I got up then I was okay and then you know the medical world is crazy because interns and residents are Sleepless constantly it's the worst thing and they're the ones responsible for keeping you healthy when you're in got something wrong I I would unionize and Revolt if I were back in medical school right now okay so so this is so it's a playbook for you it's a play it's very it's very prac based on what's available today but you also have visions of tomorrow yes and so uh one of the chapters in the book is called don't die from something stupid good one I love it yeah um and or something you could have avoided so it talks about one of my companies called Fountain life uh we have centers uh in the maybe by the end of this podcast we'll have list all the companies that here coming but maybe not maybe not probably not I've got 26 or 27 I've started over years okay but just in the time he's been sitting here he started three companies if I were ask you right now Neil do you know that you're perfectly healthy there's nothing going on inside your body you don't know about no I wouldn't have confidence in making that statement and no one should um the body is incredibly good at hiding disease so uh 70% 70% of all heart attacks have no preceding no shortness of breath nothing they just happen they happen and in almost half the cases you're dead um I pretty stroke as well high blood pressure you don't know you have high blood pressure uh cancer you don't feel a cancer when it's stage one or stage two it's only when it's stage three or stage four that you start you go in to see the doctor and say I'm sorry to tell you this but so uh and there's lots of examples like the body is great at compensating and hiding the disease ideally if we could feel stage one we'd go to get medical support and that would save so many lives it would uh or if you could feel the early stages of cardiac you know disease um or any of these diseases but the body compensates and uh I say you have to look and people say I don't want to know and I'm saying I'm not that person I want to know everything okay well I should I should rope you in you should come down here's the fact you're going to know you want to know at the beginning when you can do something about it and so we have Fountain life is a we have four centers one here in New York Fountain life is the name of the company Fountain life.com uh we have one in New York that's a cool name by I love it life yeah it's very P of day lay on of Youth yeah a couple in Florida and Texas and we're growing but of the first 5,000 people coming through 2% had a cancer they didn't know about 2 and a half% had an aneurysm didn't know about 14.4% had either cardiovascular disease metabolic disease neurocognitive disease and you can do netive that would be like Alzheimer's or early Alzheimer's or other forms of early dementia and you can slow these things down and it's really about intercepting the cures coming that way and then the last thing which I merge my ex prize world with longevity is we launched a $101 million uh Health span xprize so offering $101 million to the team that can reverse loss in cognition immune and muscle by 10 to 20 years there $101 million up for grabs this is not just to have you live longer but to actually reverse it yes because I don't I don't want to wait 20 years to pay out a prize got it but what I can do and we have we had like 200 teams in the first couple months and growing I hope we'll get you know close to a thousand teams here competing I want to a team is going to have different approaches lots of different approaches uh you know stem cells epigenic reprogramming whatever it might be and what we're going to epics is altering your genes after they're already in play yeah it's it's altering which genes are on and which genes are off after the fact after the fact right so a quick one on that you know you get 3.2 billion nucleotides letters from your mom and from your dad and that's your genes the letters are are amino acid letters they're nucleotides atc's and G's yeah those aren't amino acids no those amino acids make up the proteins so the act the adenosine cyto crypto guine guine right those those are called nucleotides nucleotides okay and the movie GAA yes uh those letters are the nucleotides that spell out G fascinating film lower budget than the movie the island with similar themes where you have it good control yeah control over your genetic Destiny but you get those genes about 20,000 genes in these 3.2 billion Letters At Birth it's the software you're running throughout your entire life so the question is you have the same genes at zero at 20 at 40 at 60 at 80 at 100 why do do you look different why don't you have a six-pack at 80 that you had when you were at 20 I have sixpack it's just beneath three three in of fat but there's a six-pack in there somewhere yeah and it's it's not what genes you have it's which genes are on which genes are off and that's your epig genome I got it and so uh this by the way there's an obscure reference to early days of computing with you had dip stick uh dip switches on computers yes and in order to have a computer behave in one way versus another you have to go behind it and check list of what that's how old I am I I remember uh uh cards I remember Punch Cards punch card yeah so you flick these switches and that would put the computer in a mode that would then serve your needs yeah and they're called dip switches but so Epi for the from the Greek word for above above the genome controlling it like the epicenter of a of an earthquake is the point on the ground above right the earthquake which occurred of course below the ground yeah so we're going to have lots of different approaches to going after this prize and uh it we hope it be one by by 2030 that's the current end of the prize we'll extend it if we need to uh but if you're interested if you're listening to this and you have a company that wants to compete for this xprize go to x pri.org uh registration will be open and we you know we don't pregu what the solution is it could be you don't want to do that ever right somebody is could be more clever than you yeah it could be a med you meditative State could be you know eating popcorn all day long I don't know but there's $1 101 million oh by the way ask me why it's 101 eating Cheetos or whatever something something you would have never expected yeah why is it 101 yeah other than 101 Dalmations other than that so uh the prize we we had gotten uh Disney was funding it no right uh the prize we got funded from Elon was $100 million for gigaton carbon removal and the first sponsor of this prize a guy named chip Wilson the founder Lulu Lemon and uh he put in the first uh roughly 30 million into this prize and he wanted it to be bigger than elon's priz oh that's the competition you're talking about yes so I said okay would you add another million he did so tell me now about what role AI can or should play going forward I know you've thought a lot about it and and you founded singular co-founded Singularity University with with uh Ray Kur with Ray Kura who's been on Star Talk a couple of times Ray is amazing he's a mentor for me he's a friend of Star Talk yeah and um I'm still angry with you all for taking our word Singularity it is a it's a black hole word it's our word you should pay us royalty on that I think but um this idea that there's some portal waiting to arrive through which we will pass and will and never return back because everything will be different the neuro Computing interface AI controlling everything given the Fear Factor that it represents in culture today you come across quite comfortable with it yeah do you have any concerns I remember a friend of mine uh uh Dan Sullivan said to me Peter you don't feel the future do you I said not at all I'm excited about the future the the future is we're impowered to do more and more and solve bigger and bigger problems the future's so bright I got to wear shades I'll remember that for next time yeah sounds like a movie line to me yeah it's a song a lyric and a song yeah so from 1980s yeah I was conscious then I was trekking through Chile long story I was carrying Ray's book The Singularity is near um which is an interesting title and it just came out with a new book The Singularity Singularity is nearer yes so yes it's not very imaginative but but but it works but we get the point right but we talk about it yeah yeah the meme is the meme is spreading um so I said there is no place on the planet you can go as a an executive a college kid graduate student entrepreneur whatever it is and really get a overview of what's going on in all the exponentially growing Technologies which I count as computation sensors networks AI robotics 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain all those things are rising up and to the right at the same time that compute is going up and they're converging and they're changing everything and they're empowering everything and they're changing everything under our noses yes and we're the we're the frog in the boiling water not noticing it but it's happening in extraordinary rate and accelerating by the way it's the water boiling the that's a bad thing I know positive outlook here I I feel great about the future we're frog in a Boiling Pot of water that is not the at all right I will change that another I will change that all right so um the the the fact of the matter is the speed at which it's accelerating is accelerating MH and uh there more there's a term for that I forgot uh it's jerk oh the the the the acceleration of the acceleration is the jerk yeah MH first time I heard that I was like really The Jerk do you know what the acceleration of the acceleration of the acceleration is no it's a snap oh yeah and the acceleration acceleration acceleration the next two are crackle and pop it's true I think there was some like uh drug use in the 60s that's whoever came up with that but go on yes so if you have uh it's basically hyper exponential at that point all right and it's happening around us and by surprise yeah so we formed uh singular University as a place where folks can go and and uh and and learn about that and bathe in it bathe in it bathe in it and then I created sort of the highest level of Singularity called abundance 360 and what's abundance it's so I mentor about 500 CEOs that uh are with me through the year we spend 4 days in four and a half days in La together and then quarterly on zoom and my my job is to show them what just happened and where things are going so they can have an understanding of this because the speed is they can make better strategic decisions in the interest of the financial stability of whatever they other companies or if they are trying to make the world a better place how do they get use better tools right the saying that I I use is uh you know there are two kinds of companies at the end of this decade companies that are fully utilizing Ai and those are out of business and I think it's that you know that black and white yeah I agree with that yeah I mean my in my field astrophysics we've been aiing for decades uh you don't call those graduate students yeah okay that's an aspect of that's the that's the the the biological side of the AI that we we're invoking so get back to the word abundance what do you mean by that yeah so you know the reason I chose abundance 360 is the name of this program in the summit was because I'm seeing these Technologies are turning scarcity into abundance over and over again my favorite example is 100 years ago we used to kill whales to get whale oil to light our nights then we ravaged mountainsides then we drilled kilometers under the ground and now we're bathed with 8,000 times more energy from the Sun uh from solar than we use as a species and the planet is the planet is Earth is yes and and fusion hopefully do you believe it's around the corner as much as I'm hearing yeah I mean based on other things that were once imagined to never come and now we take for granted I have no hesitation about the future of nuclear fusion and the same is true across all areas right we have an abundance of compute and bandwidth and memory and knowledge and now even AI is free and available to anyone on the planet with a with a connection and it doesn't stop there we're Reinventing food right so for all of human history food was photons 93 Million Miles Away hitting a chloroplast turning into hydrocarbon that a cow would eat then you eat the cow the Breakthrough that's coming in Reinventing how we feed ourselves is cultivated Meats yeah right I'm first in line for that yeah I am a friend of mine Josh tetric but and even if they can't get the protein fibers right you can make sort of the equivalent of ground beef sure sure and if you could transform Burger I'll eat more Burgers yeah if that nobody doesn't love a burger if I mean there's a company called o meat and La it's called o meat oh meat and uh they're doing that now there's good meet there's a number of different companies they've gotten approval from the FDA to sell this stuff and people go that's disgusting and I say my response is have you ever gone to a slaughter house what disgusting right you want to see disgusting do you know how many chickens there are in planet Earth here's my number ready not my number it's a number and I post this every Super Bowl I said while you're dining on your chicken wings yes consider that in America alone we eat a million chickens per hour and that's not even the weird part you have to complete the sentence if we eat a million chickens per hour it means we hatch a million eggs grow them cultivate them feed them bring them to slaughter distribute them to marketplaces they are purchased cooked and then eaten a million times an hour it's billions 38 billion on the planet the most slaughtered animal in the world which blows me away so these companies are now able to instead of slicing the neck off pluck out a piece of a muscle stem cell and they cultivate that and they grow them to billions hundreds of billions and they form them into a Chick-fil-A now and I bet that tastes like [Laughter] chicken that's a good one um uh but you know they will be healthier for you cheaper for you it's like I have given up stuff to look forward to is there an X prize to do this now there is and it's being uh it's going to be one very shortly Tony Robbins um was one of the maor this is the self-help Guru yeah he's a dear friend um and I mean what I find fascinating is I've given up eating tuna because of number we're destroying all the large fish in the oceans and two the mercury levels are so high but imagine in the future you know cultivated tun suppose I like Mercury and well then it's been good knowing you okay I I like tuna but I don't eat it as often as I used to it's it's I I like moderation but only in moderation yeah so what about deep fakes and AI That's a little scary there you don't worry about that I do um and deep fakes I don't think we've seen anything yet I think that deep fakes are it's just it's just the beginning a friend of mine Imad mustach the CEO of stability AI I was talking to him he said you know a year ago it took us 30 seconds to generate a single image now we can generate 100 images per second mhm which is you know through an AI through an AI generator right and so they we're now about to create real time video on the Fly you know goodbye Hollywood okay so in what way might deep fakes cause the most damage in society yeah I mean we're we've we've seen deep fakes being used uh to mimic celebrities Hawking wees that they have no relationship with but the real damage is during election years right where you've got one side using it and the other side not using it I don't think so I think it's one of these weapons that um is going to be Unleashed secretly by both sides now here's the problem you know seeing used to be believing and it is no longer and if you tell somebody the same thing falsehood over and over and over again it doesn't matter that you've been told it's false it's still eating away in your subconscious mhm so we're going to see I think that's evolutionary where where if something happens repeatedly your brain says it must be true why would otherwise it wouldn't have happened continuously but we have to find ways to combat this right and so the ways we're going to combat this are first of all there are regulations in play uh and there should be a very high price to pay uh if you're creating a deep fake Legally Legally yes I mean I create deep fakes of myself and I create deep fakes of mythical individuals for podcast and for other things but if I create a deep fake of you are you real I am I am I'm well at least as far as you can tell which is always necessary that's why as long as I can know can't know so it turns out that we've dealt with this in a couple different ways uh back early on in the color Xerox came out color coping machines people started replicating money and uh there was a uh you know an outcry in 30 B wasn't just color they had to have a high enough resolution there's a lot of but there was a point at which you could replicate money on these machines and a conglomeration of 30 central banks got together and created a protocol that were then implemented by all the copiers like Xerox so that you cannot use your machine to copy money and so the networks are going to need to create uh broadcast networks platform all all digital transmission networks are going to have to create the mechanisms for for checking on metatags maybe it's could to be blockchain that's going to enable me to authenticate whether a video or image is right you know we've talked about blockchain forever and cryptocurrencies were the only use case this might be the single most important use case for blockchain ever to authenticate um uh video and images and then do you remember when credit cards were first being used on the internet and your caution about can I is it safe to put my credit card in here and I think um we we now feel safe about that uh and we'll get there so it's tank anti-tank Warfare right something Rises and then combat it the single biggest tool we're going to have to fight deep fakes is going to be AI it's going to be a white hat black hat comp competition there it is and it's going to be not moving at the speed of conferences or regulatory it's going to be entrepreneurs using Ai and I tell the world's biggest problems the world's biggest bus less Nimble than the US Congress for sure let me voting on a technology that none of them knows for sure 100% let me give you a pro tip uh for the listening audience one of the areas where deep fakes is causing problems is um moms and dads grandmothers and grandfathers who get a call and say hey Grandma I'm in I'm in jail I need bail money can you please can you send me some money please and people I know have been ripped off by that so the pro tip here is is in your family get a code word agree on a code word over dinner tonight that if anybody should ever call you from within your ecosystem asking you for money be cautious ask for them their code word want to hear my code word just kidding so what how I think this will all play out not that you ask please I am but it is my podcast so I have to say this it's once deep fakes become basically perfect even people who believed news that had been faked will not believe will flip the fake yeah okay so the people who thought there was pizza gate and we're like eating babies at the basement of the pizza they will see that and they'll see that announcement on the internet and say the internet is so Rife with false information that that's probably false so so think about that because it's so far it would it would reach such a level that people who believe fake stuff will no longer believe the fake stuff yeah it will default to disbelief everything yes and that will be the end of the internet and we have to go back to reading books and having personal conversations so Peter yes sir I know you get around and you you very smoothly name dropped this entire interview that was very cool very very smooth of you thank you yeah I am a Salesman um so you've probably been in the company of other astrophysicists but right now we know you're in my company so I bet you might have some question that you have about the universe that you can ask me right now and I can answer it so when during the 14.6 billion years of the universe 13.8 13.8 when during the 13.8 billion years of this universe might life have begun I can give a educated gu okay Life as we know it requires more than hydrogen and helium it requires much more complex atoms to make molecules the universe was birthed out of the big bang by all evidence as a soup of hydrogen and helium and Trace Amounts of lithium you're not getting life there unless the life is somehow magically made of just hydrogen which is not any of our modern understanding of life makes that an untenable thought so what happens we have to wait till stars are formed so the universe has to cool so that matter can coales into objects that we call Stars some of those stars are so hot in their core they will fuse not only hydrogen to helium but helium to carbon to nitrogen to oxygen to silicon and all the all the chemical elements that we see know and love on the periodic table the elements that comprise the human body yes that takes time to build that that that that Corpus of chemical identity for everything that we know of and love as life so I would put it at I would say you needed a few billion years out of that 13.8 to build up enough chemical reserves so you can have a planet which is made of these chemical reserves and on that planet have the organic chemistry that would then give you life which means Earth is the solar system is only just under 5 billion years old MH and the universe is 14.8 it's means there could be life out there yeah there's a gap that's 5 billion years older than we are that's the point and more advanced where the heck are they more advanced we we're latecomers in this okay and and we like to think we've come far but if we had another billion years of complex life such as what we are oh my gosh they'd look at us like we were worms still evolving we are not so Peter really great to see you again man thanks for coming by let's not happy be 30 years again see when we're 90 all right you catch me up on 90 will have another 50 years to live if you're successful I hope so all right a real pleasure pal this has been our talk your host Neil degrass Tyson your a personal astrophysicist uh check out Peter's books this latest one available on Amazon just look up his just search on his name and you'll be flooded with this man's achievements in life now and in the future we'll see keep looking [Music] up

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 145,503

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, aymond Orteig, The Orteig Prize, Charles Lindbergh, spaceflight, Anousheh Ansari, innovation, longevity, Jeff Bezos, zero g, parabolic flights, longevity escape velocity, health span, lifespan, immortality, epigenetics, ai, artificial intelligence, singularity, Abundance 360, deepfakes

Id: JteKi5vWjJo

Length: 53min 47sec (3227 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2024