Peter Diamandis: “Stay Healthy, Anti-Aging Tech is Coming”

By Arkadi Mazin | 20 August 2024
Lifespan Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF)

(Photo: Dreamstime.com)

To many people, Peter Diamandis needs no introduction, and to the rest, it’s going to be a long one. To put it as concisely as possible, Peter is a serial entrepreneur and investor in several fields, from commercial space flight to longevity biotech; a visionary speaker and author of several best-selling books, including Abundance, The Future is Faster Than You Think, and Life Force; creator of the world-famous XPRIZEs, including the recently announced massive XPRIZE Healthspan; founder of the Singularity University… I could go on and on, but I’d rather let Peter do most of the talking.

You have a very interesting biography, and your “first love” was space travel. How did you get involved in longevity?

Yes, I grew up passionate about space flight, on the heels of Apollo and Star Trek. But my dad was a physician, and my parents expected me to go into medicine as well. At some point, I said, okay, I’ll do it, because it’s a way of becoming an astronaut.

Long story short, I went to medical school, and by the end of it I was already running a few companies, mostly in the space business. I remember watching a TV show on long-lived sea life – bowhead whales, Greenland sharks. Then I had this thought: if they can live that long, why can’t we?

I was an engineer and a medical student, and I said to myself that it was either a hardware or a software problem. Anyway, we’re going to be able to solve it in the future. That was the first time I really started thinking about that.

The second time I started thinking about longevity was when I realized that the commercialization of space flight was moving a lot slower than I wanted it to be. And I thought that if I wanted to make my dream of going to the stars come true, I would have to live a lot longer for the technology to get there.

Sounds like, initially, longevity was a means to an end for you, but today, your involvement in this field is deep and sprawling, correct?

I consider myself mostly an entrepreneur. At this point, I’ve started 26-27 companies. About 12 years ago, I reengaged with longevity by starting Human Longevity with Craig Venter and Dr. Bob Hariri. About at the same time, I started to realize that technologies required to reengineer the human body, its hardware and software, were coming online.

I’d become enamored with the notion that exponential technologies are going to give us the tools to fundamentally understand why we age, and how to slow, stop, perhaps even reverse aging. And there’s nothing of greater value.

I think if you’re healthy and love life, you will want to see as much of it as you can. People who are in pain or have disabilities or chronic disease towards the end of their lives don’t have a desire to live an extra 50 years. But if we can rid them of that pain, lack of energy, chronic diseases, cognitive decline, who would not want to continue that vibrant life?

So, I became more and more interested in the longevity field, and I started building companies in it, and as I did in the space industry 30 years ago, I approached this from multiple directions. I started a venture fund, BOLD Capital, and we’ve steered it towards longevity. BOLD Capital III, our third fund is, probably, two thirds biotech investments. We’ll be announcing shortly the first close of Bold Longevity Growth, which is a growth venture fund in partnership with Sergei Young.

The second thing I did was the educational push. I run something called Platinum Longevity Trips. I’m scanning about 500 companies a year through my venture fund, through XPRIZE, through other means. We choose the top 50 companies, and we run an adventure trip to go and visit those, meet with the CEOs. I bring about 80 family offices, venture capitalists and CEOs. It’s a five-day deep dive. Basically, I learn as much as I can, and I teach as much as I can. There’s also my Abundance Summit every year, and longevity is a very important part of that.

The third part is the books I’ve written on the subject. The fourth is the 101-million-dollar XPRIZE Healthspan. I’m a contributor towards it. Money came from Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon, from Hevolution, and from several people from my abundance community.

Finally, the last part is starting companies, such as Fountain Life, Celularity, and Vaxxinity.

We’ll talk about it all, but first, it’s interesting that you moved out of the space field because it was moving too slowly. Do you ever get the feeling that the longevity field is moving even more slowly? How optimistic are you about it?

The longevity field has a lot of parallels to commercial space flight. In the early days, a lot of it was based on faith. There was this huge dream, big potential, but it was in the realm of science fiction. And there were all those crazy entrepreneurs trying to do things.

In the space business, it was either government funding or this unique class of commercial – comm satellites and military, but it wasn’t the entrepreneurial approach.

In the longevity field, it’s been similar – government-funded research and the pharma industry focused on chronic diseases. But conversations specifically about longevity and slowing or reversing aging were always viewed as fanciful and crazy.

But now we’re seeing this transition, just like it was with space, where the entrepreneurs are coming in. These are small, agile teams, backed by venture capital and these exponential technologies, and they are beginning to really accelerate the field.

This makes me extremely hopeful. For me, the two biggest businesses in the world, the two biggest opportunities are AI and longevity.

One of your principles is “if you want to become a billionaire, you should help a billion people”. With longevity, we’re talking about eight billion people.

Yes, and I think, what an amazing beneficial coincidence this is – all eight billion of us have the same disease of aging, so anything that helps a wealthy billionaire will help the poorest individual as well.

People ask me all the time whether we’re talking about therapeutics for just the wealthiest, the top 1%. But I don’t think that will be the case.

Maybe for the first few years. But just like mRNA vaccines, which essentially are gene therapies, became mass-produced and dropped to a cost of a couple of dollars per dose, it’s likely that we’ll see the same happening with longevity therapeutics – they will be mass-produced, and the price will drop precipitously.

But to be honest, your current flagship longevity company, Fountain Life, just like Human Longevity before, and your ultra-exclusive trips – all of them sort of reinforce this stereotype of longevity treatments for the rich only. How important is democratizing longevity to you?

Very important. And those businesses have to be viable on their own to succeed. So, yes, the longevity trips are expensive, they’re 70 thousand dollars a head, but the point of those trips is to connect these high-net-worth investors to the longevity space.

I take the data from those trips, and I put it out for free through my Moonshots podcast, through my books, and my blogs. I can’t afford having ten thousand people visiting these labs, but the information I get from them isn’t locked up forever, it’s disseminated.

With Fountain Life, we’re getting ready to launch a lower-tier product, and the technology is demonetizing. Believe me, we want to run that demonetization curve. The cost of imaging technologies, AI as your diagnostician, all these things are rapidly demonetizing.

As with every technology, like the cellphone, at first, it’s expensive and paid for by millionaires and billionaires. Eventually, it starts working really well and being available to all. So, now, we have a 40-dollar smartphone with massive amounts of free content on it, and it works a thousand times better than the first cell phones did thirty years ago.

That will also be true in all these areas, especially in diagnostics. It’s just not there yet, but it will be, probably in the next five years.

I understand the idea of drawing private capital in with those expensive, bespoke, concierge-style solutions, which brings me to another question. You’re a sort of a “billionaire whisperer”.

Billionaires sit on vast resources, but they don’t seem to be ready to massively invest in longevity yet, even though that would be a very natural thing for them to do, many of them not being that young. What’s your experience discussing longevity with them?

I’ve had very blunt conversations with many of them. When I was working to raise the 141 million dollars for our healthspan prize, we eventually got two billionaires to commit to the prize.

But the situation I want to tell you about is when we set up several virtual meetings, where I sometimes had a dozen billionaires on Zoom with me, most of them in their fifties to eighties. In one year, I met with probably 30 of 40 billionaires in that fashion. In total, I pitched well over 50 or 60 during the course of the competition.

My message to them was: “Here’s the deal – you don’t pay the money until it’s won. You do pay a small amount that runs the prize, but the majority is pledged. And when it gets won, you will have early access to these benefits.”

I would have imagined that all of them would have been fighting to be in a position to donate. I donated a significant amount of my wealth. It’s my largest philanthropic donation ever. And it was crickets. The vast majority of them said “no”.

This made me realize that many of these individuals got there by looking at money as a mechanism to make more money. And they don’t give the longevity business the credibility it deserves as an investment opportunity yet.

Today, people are pouring money into SpaceX, which was a crazy idea 15 years ago. So, it’s a challenge. At some point, maybe in two years, maybe in five, but no longer than ten years, the bit will flip, and people will be clamoring to invest. But it’s not there yet.

But it shouldn’t be just about the money. This is literally about life and death.

You’re absolutely right, but that’s just not the way they’re viewing it. You could say that all of us put our money in three different buckets.

There’s a bucket for money that will be used to make more money. Another one is for money that will be used for family, enjoyment, vacations, and so on.

And the last one is for helping people. Unfortunately, for most people, that last bucket is the smallest by orders of magnitude.

I think it’s not just about philanthropy. It should also be driven by egoistic considerations. Maybe there’s a place for a fourth bucket, where you help humanity, but you also help yourself. After all, today, death is pretty inescapable whether you’re a billionaire or a construction worker. Even more so than, say, climate change.

It seems obvious to me. Why aren’t people acting in their own self-interest? This thing should hit every bucket. I’m going to invest in longevity because it’s going to help me, my family, and humanity, and it will also allow me to feel better, to have a happier life.

And it’s also a huge business opportunity, right?

The only reason that’s not hitting is that people don’t believe it yet. We have been so indoctrinated about the inevitability of death!

I try to change it, by writing books about this. My mission is to help the public create a longevity mindset, which is based on the realization that the technology to enable us to extend the healthy human lifespan is coming online now, in the decade ahead.

And if you believe that in the next ten years, we’re going to significantly extend the human healthspan, and you can have access to it if you’re in good health, then, logically, you’d want to do everything you can to remain in the best health possible.

I want people to change the way they think about healthspan and longevity and what’s possible for them. Because your mindset is the most powerful tool that you have. If you believe it, you’re going to change your behavior.

As a serial investor in various fields, how do you see longevity biotech today? What is your investment philosophy, favorite subfields?

I have an investment team that does due diligence on companies. I make some seed investments, and I’ve taken advisory positions in a few companies.

I do feel that cellular medicine and epigenetic reprogramming are critical. I’m working in “a bridge to a bridge to a bridge” paradigm, something that Ray Kurzweil talks about, which is making sure I’m tackling the near-term things that will buy me the next 10, 20, 30 years, which then buys me the next 50 years. This is why immune health, cognitive function, and musculoskeletal function are things I’m always focused on.

Also, companies that create a revolutionary change are going to be powered by AI systems in one shape or another. This is why I’m very excited about what AlphaFold3 has done, and where DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis and his team want to take it in the future, which is AI modeling of an entire human cell, and then AI modeling of you and me.

I’m also always looking at the entrepreneur, this is crucial: am I excited about them? How passionate and dedicated are they? How are they leveraging exponential tech? What is their primary near-term focus?

Importantly, most companies have the potential to go after 30 or 40 things, but it’s narrow focus that determines the winner early on. So, I make sure that the entrepreneur knows what the first thing they’re going to do is, what’s going to drive revenue.

We’ve had this incredibly decimating biotech winter over the last two-three years, which has been crushing, and that’s because so many companies went public before they had consistent revenues or any profits. I think revenue is king. How do you build something that has near-term revenue?

Continue reading.

Reprinted with permission.

The Hallmarks of Aging | LifeXtenShow

The Science of Slowing Down Aging | WIRED

Is Aging Reversible? A Scientific Look with David Sinclair | David Sinclair | TEDxBoston

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