Exploring the future of healthcare and AI with Peter Diamandis
The futurist and founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University talks to Levels founder Josh Clemente about the future of health tech
When it comes to exponential technology, there is no shortage of ideas to discuss. And there’s no better person to talk about these ideas than Peter Diamandis. Peter is a futurist founder of the XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University. He’s also an author and a podcaster. He’s been predicting what is going to happen, from an exponential technology perspective, for years.
Things are developing faster than our brains can even process them. Peter predicts that we’re going to have more technological advancement in the next 10 years than we’ve had in the past 100 years combined.Â
On a recent episode of our podcast, A Whole New Level, Peter sat down with Josh Clemente, founder of Levels, and discussed where things are going, and the cross-section of healthcare as it relates to the frontiers in exponential tech, specifically AI. Below is an edited version of that conversation.
An Abundance of Information and Energy
Josh Clemente: I’m extremely excited and honored to have a chance to speak with someone I admire, and have admired for as long as I can remember thinking about technology. Peter has predicted many of the trends I got a chance to be a part of, which is quite exciting. Peter, thank you for joining us.
Peter Diamandis: Pleasure to be here. I’m a fan of what you and your team have been building at Levels. I’m a user of it, and I think the technology is important for our increasing healthspan.
Josh Clemente: Your support has been tremendous as we’re working on Levels.
This is a very interesting moment in time. Your most recent book, released in 2020, is called The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives. Here is a brief excerpt from it:
“There’s little doubt that the decade to come will be filled with radical breakthroughs and world-changing surprises. Every major industry on our planet is about to be completely re-imagined. For entrepreneurs, for innovators, for leaders, for anyone sufficiently nimble and adventurous, the opportunities will be incredible. It’ll be both a future that’s faster than you think, and arguably the greatest display of imagination rendered visible the world has yet seen. Welcome to an era of extraordinary.”
I love that, because it was from 2020, and you were predicting that we would see a repeat even more fantastic than what happened a hundred years earlier, with the Roaring Twenties, when we saw this explosion of technology and the transformation of lives—radio, automobiles, airplanes, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners. I love the idea of a new Roaring Twenties.
There are two things that have happened, and they’re relevant to this statement and this prediction. On November 30th, OpenAI, a company that produces AI tools, released a new tool called ChatGPT. It’s not general artificial intelligence, but it is absolutely the first generally useful artificial intelligence. What are your thoughts on this thing? Elon calling it scary good.
Peter Diamandis: “Scary good” is a great way to describe it. ChatGPT was built by OpenAI, a company that’s run by Sam Altman. It was funded in part by Elon Musk. Microsoft has invested a billion dollars. You may know it for GPT and DALL·E and DALL·E 2, but ChatGPT is a generative search engine. You ask it a question, and it doesn’t give you a link on the web to an answer—what we typically think of as Google. It actually goes on the web and synthesizes information and gives you an answer.
This morning I was doing a podcast (I have a podcast called “Moonshots and Mindsets”) on Bitcoin with Anthony Pompano. Just for fun, I went to ChatGPT, and said, “What are the five most recognized benefits of Bitcoin?” It wrote me this beautiful page-long list of five and why each one was a fact. Then I said, “What are the five major risks that people are concerned about with Bitcoin?” And it gave me that.
Another example involves a friend of mine. We were at an XPRIZE board meeting. It’s all about the prompt: What is the question you ask and how do you ask it? He said, “Write a poem about XPRIZE helping to uplift humanity,” or something like that. It wrote this incredible poem. You could’ve hired a poet and spent some amount of money, and waited a day or so. But here, you got something back for free in a millisecond.
People have even used it for design advice for their home. You can take the output of ChatGPT—which is words, sentences, paragraphs—and you can then put it into Stable Diffusion or DALL·E and have it create a visual representation. I saw someone who said, “I want to create a living room that’s super fanciful and open and bright. Write me a description of what that room would be like.” It wrote this long description and used Stable Diffusion to generate these photorealistic images of the rooms. That’s amazing.
I have two 11-year-old boys. This thing is going to destroy the teacher’s ability to give kids homework. If a teacher says, “Write me an essay about this,” or “Here’s the math question,” you put it in, and it’ll answer for you. It’s a fascinating future that is moving super quickly.
You can also say, “This is what I have in my refrigerator. I want to have a low-glycemic dinner. What do you recommend I cook for myself?” I mean, it’s that scary crazy.
Josh Clemente: It can give you those personalized recipes. I did the exact same thing: “Here are my ingredients. I have 30 minutes. Give me something personalized.” It can do that. It can teach you calculus at whatever pace works best for you. It can debug and write code. This thing shook me when I tried it for the first time and spent some time with it. I really want to dive into some of the implications there, but I also want to tee up the second of the two big changes that have happened.
It’s safe to say that anyone I know who cares a little bit about technology has been surprised by ChatGPT. The US Department of Energy has announced that researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have demonstrated net energy in a fusion experiment. This is nuclear fusion energy. This is something that you have been talking about forever, but that scientists have been chasing for decades. What’s about to happen?
Peter Diamandis: I’ve read the articles and I’ve been tracking fusion now. The joke about fusion is that it’s the technology of tomorrow and it’s always been 50 years away. What is fusion? It’s the combination of hydrogen atoms to form helium. It’s the reaction that goes into the sun. When you put two protons and two hydrogen atoms together to form a helium nucleus, there is a small amount of mass that is converted into energy, according to Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc^2.
But since c, the speed of light, is so big, a little bit of m makes a lot of E. Our sun is a fusion reactor that’s 93 million miles away, and all solar energy is based upon the fusion reaction in the sun.
For decades, people have said, “I don’t want nuclear power.” It’s a shame that nuclear has gotten such a bad name from Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl—the three most famous failures. But those were old-style nuclear reactors. They were fission-based reactors, taking uranium and splitting it to make atoms with smaller atomic numbers. In that process of splitting it, some mass goes into energy, but it’s radioactive. The containment of that is radioactive. The products are radioactive. The uranium’s radioactive. You have a lot of waste.
The new generation of vision reactors are fail safe. When they fail, they’re still safe. We’ve been decommissioning reactors and stopping them, which is a problem. But the good news is that fusion is not radioactive. You don’t get a radioactive byproduct, you just get energy.
I talk about an abundance of energy; we have the potential to squander an abundance of energy. We know there’s a direct correlation between the amount of energy a community, a nation, or the world has, and its economic prosperity.
Energy used to be muscle—human muscle, and then oxen and horses. Then we went to water wheels powering our grain mills. Then we went to coal and then oil and natural gas and now solar. The prediction has been that we would see net-positive fusion reaction. We’ve had fusion for a while now, but it had a very short duration, and it was not putting out as much energy as you put in. It was net energy negative.
The holy grail has been getting to net-energy positive. And now it’s been achieved. With that in hand, the potential is to provide energy anywhere and everywhere in the world. With these fusion reactors, the cost of the energy production is de minimis, and they can safely operate 24/7. That’s a big, big deal.
Josh Clemente: Thank you for summarizing that history. Fusion has been in the background for so long now. It was the hot thing for decades. But in my life, it’s kind of dismissed as cold fusion, which is where you don’t even need to manage incredible heat and temperatures.
But you just described the abundance concept. It breaks our brains to imagine having enough energy that you can ethically and morally waste it.
Peter Diamandis: When I was a kid, my parents were always turning off the lights. They always tried to get the energy bill down. There are still going to be energy costs. There’s still going to be the cost of transmitting and managing the reactors. But the potential is to generate energy anywhere on the planet on what’s called base load. And not just peak energy. It’s incredibly powerful.
Josh Clemente: And with minimal byproducts. The confluence of these two things—ChatGPT and fusion—at this moment in time represents the potential for abundance of information in an immediately useful format.
You don’t have to take a Google link and read a reference formatted for an entirely different audience and then try to contextualize it for yourself. It is distributed to you in exactly the format you asked for. It’s that abundance of information combined with the potential, in the next few years, of an abundance of energy.
Josh Clemente:Â These are exponential technology predictions you made a long time ago. Is this something you see actually happening? Are we about to see this revolution over the next few years?
Peter Diamandis: We have many more revolutions coming. There’s a moment in time where something becomes possible, and then a moment in time when it becomes distributed. The old William Gibson says the future is already here, it’s just not equally distributed.
ChatGPT has gone from zero to a million users in five days, and that is the fastest growth of any product out there, ever. Facebook went from zero to one million users in like a year or two years. The speed at which this stuff is accelerating is incredible. But AI is coming, and we’ve only peeked under the covers. We’re going to have some version of Jarvis. We’re going to have an AI that you give permission to watch what you eat, to listen to your conversations, to monitor your blood chemistry.
The future versions of Levels technology will not only monitor blood glucose, but 30 other parameters. All that data’s constantly uploaded to your AI, and your AI is advising you on what to eat. Maybe eventually your robot chef is making things it knows you enjoy, but is optimized for what your blood chemistry is at the moment: You need more vitamin D, you need more of certain proteins. That’s an exciting future that is coming.
In 2022 Tesla Bot was introduced. This is a humanoid robot that was unveiled and is supposedly going to be less than the cost of a car—under $20,000. But imagine a humanlike robot powered by AI that can do the things you need—rake the leaves, fix the leaky sink, go shopping, grab me food. It’s a future of robotic labor.
I’m the founder executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation. We announced the winner of our Avatar XPRIZE. These robotic avatars are not autonomous. There’s a human driver with a VR helmet and a haptic suit operating from a distance. There’s massive growth in biotech: gene editing, writing, reading. It’s amazing.
The Age of Exponential Growth
Josh Clemente: Let’s say this next decade plays out the way we hope and we see exponential technologies go vertical. We have this long linear growth pattern and exponential technology, and then all of a sudden it seems to go crazy overnight. We might be at that inflection point with a few things.
What do you think about the last decade? Many people I’ve spoken to say it’s known for the rise of social media, for software-as-a-service companies—where you’re solving an increasingly niche problem for an increasingly niche subset of an industry—eCommerce.
We also saw some impressive stuff. We saw DNA sequencing go exponential. We saw AI technology, crack-protein folding. We saw reusable rockets, electronics, and photonics—the iPhone and the miniaturization of things. How do you think about the last decade? How will you talk about it? Was this the success you expected?
Peter Diamandis: The last decade was super exciting. I run a yearlong CEO entrepreneur program called Abundance Digital. It’s the highest tier of Singularity University, and I’ve been running it for 11 years. Every year for the last 11 years, I go into the program and contextualize it by asking, “What was the world like 100 years ago?”
And by the way, 100 years ago, the speed of technological progress was like molasses. If you look at the breakthroughs in the year 1915, 1916 through 1922, it’s hilarious. Vegemite was invented. It was a breakthrough in 1921. The water ski was invented. It had a board and some rope. That was a breakthrough. That’s the kind of stuff that happened. I searched high and low, and during this period only five, six, seven things occurred over the course of the year— things you don’t even think of as breakthroughs.
That’s one thing I’ve been doing for the last decade. I would look a year back and then look three or four years forward. Every year was exciting. Every year, some amazing things occurred, whether it was getting a drone on Mars or Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launching—amazing things over the last decade.
I have looked at the top 20 megatrends for 2023 through 2033. Folks can go to diamandis.com, where you’ll have a chance to read my blog and discover the megatrends there. We’re going to make as much progress in the next 10 years as we have in the entire past century. That’s the speed of the acceleration of the curve. It’s hard to think about how fast things are getting. It’s going to be AI and biotech, and to some degree robotics, leading the pack. Quantum technologies, quantum compute, and quantum chemistry are going to make medicine and biotech today look as though they are standing still.
Josh Clemente: This is the nature of big numbers and exponential functions. Our brains can’t do that. We weren’t designed to do this. It’s that one over-predicts what one can do in a short time and under-predicts what one can do in a long time. That’s essentially what we’re talking about here.
We get frustrated with paying bills and antiquated systems and the DMV and all this stuff. But if you can zoom out and look at what you just said—more progress in the next 10 years than in the past 100—and think about what life was like in 1922, that’s a big statement.
Peter Diamandis: Our brains evolved 100,000 to a million years ago, back when the world was local and linear. Everything that affected us was within a day’s walk. And the world didn’t change year to year, or decade to decade, or century to century. It was pretty much constant.
The life of your great, great, great, great grandparents was pretty much the same back then. Our brains—100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections—evolved to understand that world. We’re linear thinkers. If we were crossing a prairie and saw a lion, the question was, Can I get to that tree before the lion gets to me? That’s linear physics.
Today is not linear. If you take 30 linear steps, you’re 30 meters away. If you do 30 exponential steps, where an exponential is simply doubling—1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32—in 30 doublings, you’re not 30 meters away, you’re a billion meters away. You’ve gone around the planet 26 times. It’s that disconnect between us as linear thinkers and this exponential world that really catches people by surprise.
I have to give credit where credit’s due. One of my mentors is Ray Kurzweil, one of the great thinkers of this world. He’s written numerous books, including The Singularity Is Near. He’s my co-founder of Singularity University. I’ve really learned from him, and he’s been an extraordinary friend, co-conspirator, co-founder, and mentor.
Josh Clemente: I highly recommend reading anything he puts out. It’s really interesting stuff. He, like you, is very prescient in terms of what we’re seeing roll out.
On Training Your Mindset, and Building a Healthy Information Diet
Josh Clemente: You’ve been making these predictions, and have been deep in the future of technology for a long time. That inherently attracts skeptics, people who don’t view the world with an abundance mindset and don’t see the world in an optimistic way.
How do you see yourself? Do you see yourself as a sort of missionary who should change the minds of people who don’t believe these things? Or are you seeking to primarily inspire and motivate people who do see things similarly but feel demotivated by the pressure?
Peter Diamandis: That’s a great question. I see myself as someone who is passionate about getting entrepreneurs to think bigger. Entrepreneurs are the means by which we solve the world’s grand challenges. I like to say that the world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities. If you want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. It’s that kind of alignment.
We have the ability, given the tools we’re inheriting, to up our dreams. My mission is to incentivize entrepreneurs to take bigger moonshots. To take on solving the world’s biggest problem is to do something that scares you and inspires you and has the ability to make a dent in the universe, because that leaves the world a better place.
My responsibility is inspiring and guiding entrepreneurs. I do that through Abundance 360. I do that through my venture fund, BOLD Capital. I do that through my podcast. I do that through all of my companies, through Singularity University, through the XPRIZES we launch. It’s all about giving entrepreneurs a big target and saying, “I don’t care where you went to school, or what you’ve ever done before. If you can solve this problem, you win the money and the world gets that benefit.”
Part of what I’m looking to do is also change people’s mindsets. I say this all the time, and it is deeply true for me: Your mindset is the most important thing you have. If you look at the greatest leaders and entrepreneurs, what did they have that made a difference for them? Was it their cash, their technology, their relationships with their mindset? I hope most people would agree: It’s their mindset. If you take away everything else and keep their mindset, they’ll probably regain a good part of it. If you believe your mindset is the most important thing you have, then my question for you is simple: What mindset do you have and where did you get it? What mindset do you want to have and how do you shape it?
We started this conversation by talking about ChatGPT and AI and neural nets. You train a neural net by showing it, example after example, image after image. ChatGPT is a large language model based on GPT3 and GPT3.5. Those large language models were trained on data from the internet. Our brains are neural nets, and are shaped by what we show it every day.
I ask entrepreneurs and folks that are in my conversations, “What are you training your neural net with?” If it’s like most people, it’s with CNN, the Crisis News Network, and you’re watching every murderer, every despot, every crooked politician in your living room over and over again every 10 minutes. It’s like, stop. I don’t want to see this stuff. It’s not to say it’s not true, but it’s not balanced for what’s going on in the world.
The business model of a newspaper or a television news show is to deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers. We pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. As a result, we are bombarded by negative news. We don’t turn off our TV, and they can sell us stuff. It’s crazy. I choose to not do that. I carefully choose what I read. I choose what conversations I have, like the one we’re having now.
I built an AI engine that scans the world’s news and generates custom newsletters for folks to get information that is highly validated and positive. I train one around longevity, and call it longevityinsider.org. Folks can go there for free. Every day I get the top 10 to 15 articles on breakthroughs around longevity. The AI gives you a paragraph summary of the article, a link to the article, and an image. I’m training my neural net with amazing breakthroughs. It gives you a much different perspective on life.
Josh Clemente: I love that perspective. We have a lot of idioms around, like “You are what you eat,” and we have all these one-liners to describe how what we ingest is important. I don’t even know that we take those that seriously. But the information diet conversation, which is increasingly being had, is such an important one.
Look at what we do when we train a neural net with information. It can be an incredibly capable tool, but we can also bias it very quickly by just having it ingest information from a certain source.We’ve biased ourselves toward stress and pessimism, and unfortunately, it’s a hard one to get out of.
But the tools that work best for me are conversations like this. I see the most inspiration in my own mindset when I am around people who are a few steps further along the route toward a mindset of optimism, especially around technology.
What else is there? What do you recommend for people who feel they don’t have the mindset it would take to be positive about the future?
Peter Diamandis: The things that train your mindset are what you watch, what’s on your walls, what you listen to, whom you hang out with. So choose your podcast carefully. What you read is important, too. There are incredible books in the longevity world. David Sinclair wrote a book called Lifespan, which was excellent. Tony Robbins and I wrote a book last year called Life Force. And Mark Hyman recently released a book called Young Forever. There are a bunch of great books out there.
You’re the average of the people you spend the most time with. Who in your community is super positive and has a mindset you want to emulate, and how do you spend more time with them? That’s basically it, at the end of the day.
I tell people, “Don’t watch the news. You don’t need to.” I will look at Google News for 10 minutes to figure out if there is something going on in the world I need to know about. My mom calls me when there’s something I need to know about, as well. Otherwise, they could never pay me enough to watch the evening news or read these papers. If you pick up tomorrow’s newspaper and count the number of positive stories and negative stories. It’s 10 to one, negative to positive, if not worse.
Josh Clemente: I’ve been on a no-news diet myself, really since starting the company. It started off with not having the time and realizing where my attention was going. Then it translated into a recognition that the quality of information is proportional to the amount of time it takes to produce.
This is something that my co-founder Sam talks about. A book takes a lot of time. Somebody invested thousands of hours to pull that information together and synthesize it. Podcasts take many hours, and movies do, too. It’s things like this. But breaking news doesn’t take a lot of time. It’s intended to generate clicks for advertising.
The Lindy effect holds that the longer something is around, the more likely it is to stay around. Well, our news cycle is less than 24 hours. We need to keep your guard up and our filter strong for the information we’re bringing in. I don’t need any news platforms on my phone, because I have conversations, and people filter out the information that’s the most relevant or important. I will know about things, like a fusion energy net demonstration, without needing the News app.
Surround Yourself with the Right People
Josh Clemente: There are information sources you can get without any human sort of interaction, but then there are the people you’re surrounded by, and choose to interact with. Elon Musk used to talk about people as vectors. Everyone has a vector, basically a line with direction. You’re moving in a specific direction, and if a vector isn’t aligned—if a person is not aligned with the direction that you’re trying to move in—they’re moving you in a non-parallel direction. That’s kind of a complicated way to describe it, but essentially, Elon would select for people whose vectors were pointed in the same direction. He didn’t spend a lot of time trying to change people’s minds. It was either you understand why we’re here, and what we’re trying to accomplish and the inherent value in what we’re describing, or I’m going to find someone who does.
How do you select the people you work with? Does that resonate with you?
Peter Diamandis: 100%—especially the people in my organization. I’m clear that we have a massive transformative purpose. One of the things I teach at Abundance 360 is that the most successful companies on the planet have a clear MTP, a massive transformative purpose. It’s set early on by the founder or founders. The goal is to hire people who are on board in that vector, that MTP. It’s clear what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and where we’re going. If you disagree with what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, where we’re going, then this is probably not the right place for you to work, because you’re unlikely to change it.
When you’re in the organization and you’re helping make that future happen, new data comes along and the organization can move its vector slightly. But I’ve never seen a company where the vector moves 90 degrees. A few degrees, yes. If it’s moving that dramatically, then it’s probably falling apart.
Josh Clemente: When people are trying to figure out where to look for inspiration, whom to work with or bring on a team you’re building, it’s tricky because there are so many people who have credentials and obvious capability and who are super intelligent. But I like what you said, you like to change mindsets, not minds.
Peter Diamandis: Yes. An organization has a mindset and a team has a mindset, and if you’re counter to that mindset, you’re going to be a lot of wasted energy. When I hire a new member on my team, I typically have a 90-day rule, which is, come in, do the best you can, I’ll do the best I can for you, and in 90 days, if it’s not working, you leave. At the end of the day, what I’m looking for during that 90-day period is, when this person is in the room and they’re talking, do I wish they’d shut up? That’s not a good sign.
On the other hand, if they’re in the room and I’m not hearing their opinion and I want it, that can be trained. I want to hear their opinion. It’s always been true for me, because mindsets align and those vectors align in that way. Some of the rules are: Don’t jump in someplace expecting to change it, and, if you know your strengths and weaknesses are, focus on doubling down on your strengths, not trying to improve your weaknesses.
Josh Clemente: I like that—the focus. The same goes for companies and organizations: Stay focused on the things you’re good at. Of course, you need to get better at the things you’re not, but it’s that doubling down that’s important.
Peter Diamandis: Or you partner on the things you’re not good at. You can’t do everything. If you’re the world’s best machine coder but you’re lousy at writing, I’d rather you be even better at machine coding, and I’ll hire a writer to complement you, or I’ll hire ChatGPT to complement you.
Josh Clemente: That’s awesome advice. I agree with the 90-day rule. People need to feel more ownership over where they are, whom they’re surrounded by, what teams they join. There’s no benefit to languishing somewhere. If you don’t feel like you’re being heard and no one wants to hear you, there are places that do.
Peter Diamandis: That is true in any kind of relationship. Fire fast and higher slowly.
The Future of Healthcare
Josh Clemente:Â Several years ago, there was an XPRIZE announced for a tricorder competition. The tricorder is a device from Star Trek, which is capable of doing the most magical things with interpreting disease state and understanding the health of an individual.
I remember the announcement vividly. It was intended to create innovation, a new device capable of detecting, diagnosing, and understanding some biomarkers in an individual. At that time, it was surprising to me that this device didn’t exist already, that you didn’t have a handheld thing that could take biomarkers and diagnose. Having had no exposure to healthcare, I would have hoped that that sort of thing was already in the hands of doctors.
Flash forward to now. I’d love to get an update from you on how you see health monitoring. You’ve talked a lot about nanotechnology that is ingestible, measuring analytes through devices like tricorders and wearables. Where do you see us right now on the monitoring side?
Peter Diamandis: I published a blogpost on one of the meta trends on the trillion-sensor economy that’s coming. We’re basically entering a world where everything is knowable 24/7, and if everything is knowable, then it’s the quality of the questions you ask, not what you know, that’s important. This is going to be true for medicine to a large degree.
The metatrend that is coming in the field is moving medicine out of the hospital and out of the doctor’s office, and into the home, into the body. I’ve got my Apple Watch, I have my Oura Ring. I’m wearing my Levels CGM. I have an RFID chip—radio frequency ID chip—embedded. It has my business card on it. Eventually, this subcutaneous device will be measuring different micro-RNAs or vitamins in my bloodstream.
We’re going to head toward a world where these sensors on our body—and in our body, in our clothing, in the chair of our desk, in our beds—are monitoring everything 24/7. All of it will be fed into an AI that is looking for slight clues.
For example, when I got COVID, I detected my temperature rise on my Oura Ring before I detected it anywhere else. It was a fascinating bit of data, and we’re going to get there. The ultimate tricorder is a myriad of sensors in our environment. The audio assistants like Alexa or Google Now and Siri are able to listen to the quality of your voice, or what your cough sounds like. All of this is massive data that’s going to be plowing into our 24/7 diagnostics.
This is the decade that we completely reinvent healthcare. It’s ready for massive disruption. It’s about what I call the six Ds of exponentials: When you digitize something in the slow days, it’s deceptive, then it becomes disruptive, and it dematerializes, demonetizes, and democratizes products and services. We’re going to be doing that with healthcare. It’s going to make healthcare a hell of a lot cheaper. It’s going to make it available to everyone, and it’s going to be a lot more efficient as all the data is aggregated and we begin to learn from it. It’s going to accelerate how quickly things are moving.
Josh Clemente: I couldn’t agree more. I want to see the individual become responsible for and empowered by their own healthcare. I’m really excited about the trillion-sensor future and about moving from the hospital into the home.
How do we make sure we end up with a world where we’re not being sold more targeted advertisements based on our biomarkers?
Peter Diamandis: We’ll have that in our future; we’re going to have pros and cons. We’re going to have an AI you can use to filter through that and shield things for you. In the interim, we have humans who do that. If you’re able to have a great executive assistant who filters your emails and shows you which ones are important, eventually your AI will cross-correlate, know what you want, know who’s in your database, know who’s a spammer, and can filter that stuff for you.
It’s going to be the combination of AI and a massive increase in sensors that transform all of this, and it’s coming fast. They’re going to be a lot more wow moments in the years ahead. The idea of the singularity, which Ray talked about, is the moment in time when the speed of change is so fast that it’s impossible to predict what comes next. His date is the early 2040s, which isn’t too far away. That’s 20 years from now. But it’s going to be faster and faster and faster.
Josh Clemente: Who else is out there that people should be paying attention to, whether they’re particularly prescient or knowledgeable, especially the people most don’t know about, but who are doing amazing things?
Peter Diamandis: My dear friend Salim Ismail, the head of Exponential Organizations, was the first president of Singular University. His group is called ExO Works. ExO is Exponential Organizations. Mark Hyman is doing a lot of incredible work in the biomedical space, too. There are a multitude of folks. I don’t know where to start, honestly.
Josh Clemente: Start with Peter’s RSS feed of the optimistic longevity articles of the future.
Peter Diamandis: For sure. I hope folks will check out longevityinsider.org. I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s free. It’s a public service to get people to understand what’s coming—it’s an extraordinary future ahead.
