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The World is Moving Fast. Futureproof Yourself Weekly.
Your front-row seat to the Future of Business, Tech, Life, and Human Potential.
On Futurecaster with Kimberly Bates, learn through thought-provoking conversations with world-leading founders, AI experts, scientists, engineers, doctors, business leaders, technologists, investors, and everyday builders. Each episode unpacks the real opportunities shaping what’s to come and the blind spots along the way.
Kimberly Bates is a world-renowned futurist and executive brand leader. For over 20 years, she has advised some of the world’s most valuable global companies and iconic brands, from Fortune 100s to fast-moving startups, helping them anticipate change and shape the direction of their industries, customers, and culture. Her work has driven future-ready brand and business transformations, breakthrough products and services, and entirely new business models and revenue streams.
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our biohacking lab.
So was during that time
in Silicon Valley where a lot of this happened there was a group of five other people
And we ended up starting BioCurious
we started kind of meeting in different garages and then said, you know, there's something
going on here.
And there was this whole garage biotech movement.
companies that started at bio curious have gotten follow on funding of something around
$57 billion.
And a few of them are, are on the stock market now.
A few of them are still private.
There are still companies coming up through BioCurious now and it's been a real
eye-opening movement
In I've got a student who's working on a startup And I'm already wanting the prototype,
you know, yesterday!
Welcome to the FutureCaster Podcast where we give you a front row seat into the future of
business, life, and human potential.
Raymond McCauley is a biohacker, futurist, advisor, board member, investor, and founder of
Exponential Biosciences.
As the former chair of digital biology at Singularity University, he's been on the front
lines of the biotech revolution, decoding how exponential technologies like AI, gene
editing, and computational biology are transforming healthcare, aging, and human
performance.
And he isn't just observing this revolution.
He's been quietly shaping it.
and helping teach the world how to think exponentially and practically about human
potential for decades.
This episode is a deep dive into what it means to outperform your limits and what happens
when longevity BECOMES PROGRAMMABLE!
Hi Raymond, it's so great to see you again.
Thank you for joining FutureCaster today.
Thank you so much for having me, Kimberly.
It's fantastic to be here and I'm really looking forward to our talk today.
Well, we've known each other for almost more than a decade and we've been futuring
together for a really long time.
So I'm very personally excited to have this conversation.
And, you know, you've really been a pioneer in biotech and digital biology.
I think you were one of the first people to actually open a biohacking space for the
community for biotech a really long time ago, And so you've always been at the forefront
of things.
I'm really interested to see how your opinions and visions have changed over time.
And what I'd love to share with the audience is just first and foremost, how you got
interested in longevity and how you got into this space.
It's been a long weird journey and I'm looking forward to telling you more about that.
I've got twins now who just turned 19.
They're both in their first year of higher ed and we've been having some of those
discussions about inspiration
I'm a kid from Texas who got wanted to be an astronaut like a lot of kids do when they're
six, but that stayed with me into my thirties.
really worked hard at a lot of different things and became an engineer and a computer
scientist doing that.
NASA was in the astronaut programs office doing fun things, uh seeing then the funding
kind of deplete and having to find other things to do.
And I worked for a long time just as this computer guy, but I was always fascinated by the
biology and had in fact
tried really hard to triple major in school when I did electrical engineering, computer
science, and tried to do genetics.
And I remember ah my advisor at the time wrote on my degree plan, what the hell is this?
Why would anybody ever do these three things?
And it was really funny, like 20 years later after he had retired, I got a chance to write
him back whenever we had made this breakthrough that had required
computer science, electrical engineering and genetics and uh say, you know, this is why
you have to do that.
Anyway, I ended up going back to school and getting a
bunch more degrees in things like biophysics and bioinformatics and molecular biology and
just kind of continuing on not so much as a professional student but as someone who really
wanted to explore the frontiers of each of these and then was working in industry was
putting myself through school the whole time
Two companies that I worked for as a younger man, uh Ingenuity Systems, which was about
systems biology and networks of biology, how things influence each other, and Illumina,
which I was on the team there where we invented next generation DNA sequencing.
You mentioned our biohacking lab.
So was during that time that where I was just kind of finishing up some of my work with
Illumina and
in Silicon Valley where a lot of this happened and there was a group of five other people
that we were talking about you know all of these interesting
new technologies, And so we ended up starting BioCurious
And there were a bunch of people that I met who were doing the same thing where we
literally would have equipment in our garage that someone had, you know, donated from a
school that was upgrading or we bought off of eBay and fixed.
And we met a bunch of us because one person would have one particular fancy, expensive, uh
complicated piece of equipment.
and we all needed to use each other's equipment.
So we started kind of meeting in different garages and then said, you know, there's
something going on here.
And there was this whole garage biotech movement.
Everybody was trying to make, you know, good things for humanity.
We finally ended up doing a Kickstarter and getting money and getting a space and putting
all this equipment in one place
a huge number of people showed up and said, and me included, my kids were five at the
time, we want to bring our kids.
I'm working on this evenings after working during the day.
I want to at least have a waiting room where I can park my kids and go back and forth and
do things and keep them with me.
sometimes it was like, and I want them to see what I'm working on.
want them to understand what's going on.
And so the educational mission became like a big part of this early on and was fantastic.
we had a uh huge number of companies, successful and otherwise, come through there.
We did a calculation the other day.
think companies that started at bio curious have gotten follow on funding of something
around $57 billion.
And a few of them are, are on the stock market now.
A few of them are still private.
There are still companies coming up through BioCurious now as well as about 50 other
biohacker spaces I know of around the world and it's been a real eye-opening movement
And that's been kind of the last 20 years of my life now.
I do a huge amount of advising to small companies, especially consulting for large
companies.
uh A lot of my time is now spent on investment.
we can kind of come together and I can say this is what technically works in this
particular field.
ah it's really fun.
Singularity University?
How did you get involved with them?
Such a great organization.
I was at Illumina,
And the call had gone out at NASA uh over in Mountain View.
The first group of people were talking about what are we going to do with singularity.
oh And uh Ray Kurzweil has always had this idea about accelerating information uptake and
production and what that means.
the woman who had worked on his famous Moore's law graph where she actually accumulated
all the particular data dots, brilliant, brilliant person, been one of the people to
suggest if only we could get people together to harness this.
And he was talking with different people and started to accumulate uh some folks around
him.
The call went out for students at Singularity and I was like,
man, if I weren't working 80 hour weeks, I would so want to do this.
And in fact, I put in an application and then quickly realized I couldn't even think about
spending the time on it.
And then, uh, ended up whenever I saw what they were doing for, for biotech, was like,
man, they're getting it all wrong.
so I kind of wrote a long letter, like criticizing, like guys don't do it this way.
Look at it this way.
And one of the co-founders wrote me back and said, why don't you come out and talk to us
about it?
And I ended up coming out.
and teaching a couple of classes the very first iteration of Singularity U.
I immediately walked in, had the guy who was hosting me, who was an astronaut at NASA, and
he started challenging some of the work we were doing about genes and how
quickly genes change And I was like having to answer all these questions and think about
first principles.
The next year, it was kind of up in there.
Were they going to do it again or not?
And they got a huge amount of funding from Google to do it.
And I got this call back
and they said we would like you to run the biotech track and so for about the next three
or four or five years I was showing up and we were working really intensively over summers
with groups and doing that and it
very nicely dovetailed with the work we were doing at BioCurious.
And I brought groups out to BioCurious where we taught them hands-on things.
and
all the startups that came out of Singularity and the brilliant people who came in to just
learn and then sometimes left working on these hardest problems humanity has ever seen
were kind of going through this interesting curriculum that came together that way.
I've had so many people from the corporate side call me up and say, you know, why did you
show me this?
And then be like, but I'm really glad you did.
Or, you know, maybe it's a couple of years later.
Now I'm really glad you did, but
people get obsessed with this uh pace of progress and some of the new technologies and how
we've kind of been in this uh emergent age where these things are coming together.
Now there are so many things laying around.
where you can kind of pick up three of them and bolt them together and end up with a
breakthrough in a new area because of finding the overlap.
We've been talking about it for 20 years and now it's finally come true, is AI, right?
I always think of you as the bricolage guy because you take so many different pieces and
you geniusly put things together that other people don't think about across all the
different industries.
you see everything in the horizon and then you come up with totally new use cases for
things.
So that's what I've always admired about you.
So the bricolage guy.
So moving on into longevity and what we want to talk about today.
many experts now describe aging as a disease or even a line of biological code that we can
hack or program.
Do you agree with that?
And how do you think AI is helping us decode model and potentially reprogramming aging
today?
There's been so much argument about what aging really is.
There's a great paper that came out that has...
then become this part of thinking and now not just researchers but medical thinking, the
hallmarks of aging.
And one of the interesting parts about that is they brought up like, you well, some of
it's DNA and DNA repair.
And some of it is this part called uh genomic instability where, you know, beyond even
just like genes getting broken that sort of things run down, the longer things go on with
complex systems, you get mismatches and...
Bad stuff builds up, good stuff trickles away, some of the communication misses, and it's
more and more, it looks like some version or maybe several different versions of that are
exactly what's going on with aging.
If you look at bodies and tissues and cells and networks of chemicals as these complex
systems.
At some point they kind of stop working the way you want them to.
And accumulating errors over time is one of the great explanations for that.
But it apparently occurs at several levels.
In about probably the 90s, research into this and medicine around this got to such a point
where
one person could no longer keep up with obviously the breakthroughs, but even just the
information in their field about a particular mechanism of disease and what was going on
and in genetics especially.
But more and more with these huge amounts of data, like being able to track every
metabolite in your body, you need a big data system to handle it.
You need some kind of AI to keep up with it.
help you tease out meaning
you know, as human beings, we have like these data exhaust trails.
but people always worry about like, I've got all this data and people track me and want to
do things and it's very big brother.
people are sometimes justifiably paranoid about that but instead of big brother watching
you for some of this health stuff if you are making some nice choices it's not big brother
it's big sister big sister is not trying to sell you anything or trying to figure out
where you're going to be next big sister
is programmed like a team of longevity experts that are all they're interested in is can
we maximize whatever it is you want to maximize?
Your health span or your weight loss or you know uh watching out for this chronic disease
or making good choices about the things you're buying in your shopping cart that are going
to get loaded into your fridge
Big Sisters kind of nag wear and Big Sisters probably owned by you and not by somebody
who's trying to sell you stuff.
It's okay.
Here's a habit you have.
And here's a thing I can do as a lever to help you with that.
Which things can I do are most effective in helping you change what you do?
Some of the, the machine learning around that, some of the interface design around that
even goes beyond what we are thinking of as AI now.
Well, as AI moves to become physical AI, and voice becomes more important.
this whole model of big sister becomes physical in the future.
like one of the simple things that I talk to people about and is a company, I work with it
has this really interesting thing where basically they just stuck video cameras inside a
fridge.
And the idea was let's keep up with things for you.
And the first thing is going to be, you know, we're going to know whenever you put the
milk in there so we know when it expires so you can.
buy more milk.
And then it was like, ah, we can also keep up with how many times you open the fridge and,
uh, we, we know how much more quickly things are going to expire because it got left open
or whatever.
But then it was like, ah, no, we actually have a pretty good inventory of what's going on.
We can tell you if you stack things up in the fridge a certain way, like if you, at some
point you're not even ordering these things, it's all automated and you're not even
putting it in the fridge yourself.
You're not taking it out of the
good reusable grocery sack and sticking it in, but it's going to get in there for you.
And here's almost like the planogram for putting your things in the fridge where we can
put, you can still have the indulgent unhealthy things, but they're going to be in the
back on the second shelf.
If you want it, you got to go for it.
But you know, here's the healthy stuff.
you can actually start to change what's going on with your little home stocking robot.
And that seems like one of these applications that's going to come true.
The athletic companions, as we see more more folks aging and wanting to be able to age in
place, having something that can help you around the house, whether it's reach things on
the shelf or make sure you haven't fallen down,
one of the really viable home robotics things have been kids buying for their parents, one
these little video robots where they can just check on them whenever somebody's not
answering the phone.
It's like, mom and dad, are you okay if I have this thing?
yeah, of course.
And everything from little flying cameras to things that look like Roombas with a video on
them.
you were one of the first people to introduce me to the idea of big sister versus big
brother, which I always loved and also nudge wear.
And you were calling it nudge wear like 10 years before the industry was calling it nudge
wear.
have any of your ideas around those two things changed over time?
great question and, and these are all great questions.
love talking to you about these things.
We are, you know, sort of guilelessly surrendering our data to some of these systems.
Right now, I think it's mostly people trying to sell you stuff, but that's bad enough and
it's already pervasive.
Trying to opt out of that is so hard and just it's a constant battle.
Having AI that does that for you, why don't we have an AI already that will go ahead and
just hit which cookies you want on which websites, you know?
That's one of the things in
In I've got a student who's working on a startup to do exactly that.
And I'm already wanting the prototype, you know, yesterday!
I think it's going to be like kind of one of the culture wars of the next 10 years.
The single biggest...
tool that you can have in your toolkit to make sure that that works for you is being able
to pick and choose things and look at things in a very evidence-based way,
being the person who has great resources for evaluating what's going on, their AI is set
up to be a good defender of their attention, right?
That's really interesting to me.
I love that you flipped AI around to being your first line of defense and maybe starting
to use it that way versus just your companion or the recommender.
Very interesting.
I do think AI is gonna kind of switch and become IA, intelligence augmentation, in
sometimes very profound ways and very simple ways.
And that's what you wanna do.
You don't want something that's gonna make your decisions for you.
You want something that is going to act on things in a way which you would approve and
help you figure things out.
and use the best of your talents and the best of its talents.
AI is right now in a really interesting part of the hype cycle, which I think it's super
impressive to the point where people are rightly questioning like, this sentient or not?
But whenever you really drill down, in some ways you just have a next best word guesser
that can do profound things.
and being able to play to the strengths and know the weaknesses and integrate our
strengths and weaknesses, we're going to be able to do great things.
But again, that's a little techno optimism, but I think we get there, you know, not
getting fooled along the way is kind of the takeaway.
many years ago, as you mentioned before, you started the first out of the garage
biohacking group.
Can you imagine in the future that our AI agents now form their own group where they meet
up and share information?
I kind of wonder how quickly, you know, are we there already?
we're going to see these things moving from advisors to actors, right?
and you see people talking about a genetic based systems.
Some of the pharmaceutical companies are working where they've got these highly automated
workflows already.
And they're just like, yeah, turn it over to the system and let it go through and do
20,000 experiments, pick the best 200 and we'll go from there.
This is what's gonna happen.
agentic AI, the problem with it is they have a hard time working together.
But once they do start working together, then you have a multi-agent system and that's
going to change the game.
AI will play in extending health span through early detection em or prediction to help
with interventions before they're needed?
think that that's like one of the huge undervalued parts of medicine now is the preventive
part because most medicine as we practice it is reactive.
Everybody's heard these ah
about someone goes skiing and twists an ankle and they get a full-body MRI right and they
could have just scanned the ankle but they're like you're here we'll just do the thing and
then they find oh here's a funny spot could this be lung cancer could this be something
and they get it checked out and it's like that saved my life
It's like, instead of doing that, could we find a way to have a really good, say AI tied
in with this scan so you don't get those
false positives and then you know can we find ways to do this with a minimally invasive
super cheap set of hardware using AI so that everybody can afford in fact the system can
afford to do this as just part of preventive care and that becomes a uh real theme for a
lot of these things.
what about like technoceuticals N of one personalization, nano or ingestible sensors, AI
twins for ourselves, are any of those things, could they help with early detection that's
not a full blown MRI?
Absolutely.
All these things that produce data become fodder for good data analysis, which in this day
and age means AI.
And we're going to see that happen.
And we're going to see these really interesting correlations.
We're on the verge of being able to perform like a million Framingham studies continually
for everybody who wants to participate and then bring that down more and more to an N of
one.
Like say for you,
We're not just comparing you to other people in the population who you may or may not
really compare with.
We're going to compare you to you an hour ago, yesterday, 20 years ago, and we're going to
know exactly what your trajectory is.
And if you keep doing things the way you're doing it, you're going to be fat and
hypertense.
And so now we're going to help you not do that, but whenever we project.
So it's all of those things together, the AI prediction correlation,
This is why that sharing of data is going to be not just to people who want to sell you
stuff.
It's going to be to people whose lives you're going to help save
from CRISPR, gene editing, and senolytics to cellular reprogramming which of these
interventions do you believe will realistically become mainstream in the next 10 years?
So at least two of these passed to me, just the credit card test, but the investability
test.
And there are things that we recommend to some of our clients, whether they are big
private investors or some of these public funds like ARK Invest.
um I love right now a lot of these genetic editing companies.
And we've seen in the last couple of years sort of this
overnight success story that's been 20 or 30 years in the making.
So what they are doing is they are harvesting the long term success of the human genome
project saying we can now read the genome, see the parts list for all the cells in your
body and tell which parts and what versions of what parts put you more or less at risk for
different things.
And in fact, not just look at risk and prediction, but we can go in and tinker and make
some changes.
We know this version good, that version bad, and sometimes it's that clear cut.
companies like uh Intelia, some of the base editing companies, I'm trying to think, uh
Editas, one of them, Beam, CRISPR therapeutics, They have things that they're not just
talking about or just trying in lab rats, they are actually working on now.
Epigenetic reprogramming.
Oh man, that if it works looks like a fountain of youth and there are several companies
that are
ambitious, but seem to be very, grounded at the same time.
full disclosure, I'm working on a startup now about epigenetic diagnostics, being able to
read your epigenome and figure out your biological age and how it relates to your calendar
age.
And even more than that, like go in to different silos and say, oh, all your heart
expression looks great, but you've got some things that are troubling that looks like it
could be your, your cancer needle is a little high.
And so
you could actually go and look.
then if you have that data, there's a lot of things you can do.
these guys who are saying, well, we're going to reprogram it, man, that is the one that's
probably got me the most excited.
I don't know that it's going to work, but I'm watching it so avidly.
it's interesting navigating that as a person who's trying to do things myself to age
gracefully, helping my family future proof, and then trying to advise people who ask me
questions and
I think it's in some ways the answers are somewhat the same, right?
uh Being skeptical, looking for things that are actually being used and you can see a path
to success.
we've heard of startups like RetroBioSciences, which is working on age reversal, New Limit
working on cellular reboots, Halia working on inflammation shutdown, which I think is very
interesting, and GenFlow working on longevity gene therapy.
But are there like one or two under the radar startups that are going to be game changing
uh for the future in terms of longevity and aging well?
I'm glad you mentioned New Limit in particular.
I would put them right up there with the guys at turn Biotech
Here's a new one and I'm when I say new I mean like new as of like three days ago Aurora
therapeutics and Jennifer Doudna who just who was the person who?
got the Nobel Prize for inventing CRISPR, has just announced she's doing a startup on gene
editing, but personalized gene editing.
for the ideas like if we're going to advance this and do it quickly, we can go ahead and
work on a person at a time for a rare disease, see how that works, and then expand the
treatment out.
So I would assume, and I don't know everything about their business model
except she is brilliant and on top of that field like no one else.
CES just happened and there was a few innovations coming out of CES.
So I want to hear what you think of some of these innovations BodyScan 2 their next smart
scale that can give you now longevity assessment in 90 seconds.
and it's going to measure 60 health biomarkers.
So they have the first version out now.
You can't get the two.
You have to join a wait list, I believe, And then Neurologic invented a longevity mirror
that uses facial imaging to estimate your physiological age.
and gives you personalized wellness tips.
wow, imagine waking up in the morning and being like, mirror, mirror, on the wall.
uh And then the next one is Y-Brush, Halo Sonic toothbrush that can analyze your breath
for hundreds of health conditions.
do you think any of these legitimately will catch fire with people?
I like all of them, at least as experiments.
Like I think their hearts are in the right place and they have real possibilities of
adding to that information virtuous cycle.
that's, think those are kind of my two touchstone tests.
Is it uh a reputable company that's doing good science and handling people's data
decently?
And
Are they kind of creating or tapping into an ecosystem where you have data, you can own
it, you can share it, you can use it to improve.
At the same time, like uh I love withings I've got one of those scales in my bathroom, but
my trick is like, I try to stand on it every day and not look at the number every day.
And man, can you imagine it's like, you already have to dodge your weight if you have to
dodge your longevity assessment.
But I like having like once a week.
just looking at my trend line.
It's like, that's where I had the pizza or whatever it is.
But having that data and collecting it is invaluable because it shows you what's working
and what's not.
doing it and being able to utilize it right.
We did a study in the just real quick digression where we were looking at people
collecting data and we found we could predict whether their weight was going to go up and
down based on how long they waited between weigh-ins.
So basically, you kind of know if you're doing good things or not.
And the longer you wait, if you're trying to lose weight, the more likely you are going to
have a weight gain.
uh sometimes you're delightfully surprised, but often not.
But if somebody's weighing every day, even though they might be discouraged because
they're like, I'm not losing much, it turns out they are on a great trend line and they're
losing stuff over time.
But I love those.
I think they're very real and they have got great potential.
smart mirrors could become smart walls in the future in our homes as they become more
ambient So we can think of any surface in our home, if we can make it smarter, it can help
really become this bio ecosystem that reads us and can sense us and can help us
potentially in the future.
Absolutely.
And like doing simple video of someone and doing gait analysis, looking how they're
walking that, know, man, we do that now on livestock.
Doing it on people becomes sort of a no brainer, especially as you're, you're aging and
you want to prevent athletic injuries.
You want to prevent somebody who's having degradation.
um there's a startup I work with.
that is doing fantastic work on Alzheimer's early diagnosis by just peering inside the
eye.
And it turns out by looking at the back of the eyeball that you can, that's one of the
places, you know, to really do Alzheimer's diagnostics, you need a brain sample.
Nobody wants to go to that appointment.
But if you look at where the brain is actually exposed, which is the back of the eyeballs,
here's your nerve tissue.
It's a way to look for early plaques and other abnormalities.
And so, yeah, we're finding that there's all these multimodal ways of gathering data,
often with an AI interpretation that really, really do the job.
And it's amazing.
Think about a diagnostic toilet, know, something you don't want to have to do that
diagnosis or sample collection.
But if it just runs in the background all the time and then speaks up when there's a
problem.
Yeah, I just had the back of my eye test.
So now I really appreciate it.
I'm like, why are we doing this test?
But now I understand it better from you.
So thank you.
All was good.
Always good to get the boring, we have no interesting results.
what's the potential role of regenerative medicine and organ bioprinting in extending
health span and lifespan?
How close do you think we are scalable real world breakthroughs in that space?
think some of it's here now and we're seeing people be able to print skin for, you know,
like burn victim replacement.
And uh we're seeing a couple of weird little edgy breakthroughs in some of the cosmetic
stuff.
That's always interesting to look at, especially from an investment perspective, because
sometimes huge amounts of funding go into things that are cosmetic because it'll be
There's a big market and people are not unaware of this.
um The part that has kind of been promised and sold to us is, you you get the 3D printed
hearts.
And um that seems further off.
and this is kind of one of my...
test for this, if it was that easy to print a heart or a liver or a kidney, way before
that we're going to have a 3D printed steak,
I think we're also going to see some places where people are doing
tourist medicine.
And you go to some of these places and you can already find in Mexico and the Caribbean in
Abu Dhabi, things like that.
uh Some of these places where they'll do that.
Finding one that is good and reputable.
And the quick thumbnail for that is, are they sharing results and especially are they
publishing results?
But if they're not, and it's just like, like
second cousin got a thing done, stay away.
Are they talking exactly about where they get all their materials from and are they human
derived materials?
Then that's a big deal, but there's a lot of ways for that to go wrong too.
one of the areas that I'm really excited about is cognition and maintaining that as we
age,
as we push physical longevity, how do you see advances in neuro longevity playing out over
time from brain computer interfaces to AI driven cognitive enhancement, So
We can work longer and we can live longer.
super important, I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things that seems to be
kind of clear as we are making real progress and we are on cardiovascular disease and
cancer, what happens is people are still dying and more and more people are showing uh
propensity for dementia
But more and more, we're even finding there are nutraceuticals that lower risk.
ah We're finding there are these cognitive exercises and you brought up the AI directed uh
therapies and exercises where some of these things are people get prescribed an app and
some of it like just as simple as brain teasers and puzzles and things that people work on
where it does help you.
one of the things that I thought was pure crap.
whenever I first heard about it, but it turns out is real.
Like these red light therapies, the flashing light and the red light uh really do have a
measurable effect on either preventing or slowing down dementia.
And so that's a huge deal.
And it's possible to do some of that, you know, very cheaply.
Like there are light bulbs you can buy on Amazon that work as well as the clinical devices
that are out there.
People have called Alzheimer's uh type three diabetes, and there does seem to be a link.
what's going on, you know, with your your sugar metabolism and other things.
So just good preventive health, but the new possibilities for therapeutics coming down.
And then, yeah, later on the whole idea of brain-computer interface and being able to
control, augment, diagnose, the whole thing.
That field is one of those big, like unexpected breakthroughs.
In the future, they will solve for the cost.
They'll solve for the invasiveness.
are already companies working on that.
And once those things get solved for and safety, I can see that becoming a reality.
And it's also going to really help people with
mobility issues in the future, but it's also going to be used by people to make themselves
super intelligent and learn in real time.
And that seems like one of those bootstrap technologies that just takes off.
how do you live and compete without taking advantage of that in a world where that becomes
pervasive?
eh That's one of the reasons I want to watch it.
For a long time, I thought that's comfortably 20 years off, which is never the right thing
to think when you're a futurist, because you get surprised.
A couple of people say recently, they're like, yeah, I'm waiting to have kids until we
have good BCI.
And I was like, okay, I hadn't thought of it that way.
And so now I'm watching it even more closely.
Yeah, are we going to chip our children in the future so that they're constantly learning
and that's the new school?
Yeah, or even, you know, sort of the organic version of that, you wear the helmet and it's
just kind of watching to see, are you paying good attention?
And that doesn't have to be a big brother thing.
That can be a big sister thing.
It's like, you know, hey, maybe we ought to go out and play catch instead of work on
quadratic equations right now.
And then whenever it's time to work on quadratic equations, it's
you can really sink in and get more bang for your buck.
And there's some biohackers out there who do transcranial magnetic or transcranial
electrical signals, different kinds of entrainment.
And like I say, half of that stuff, pardon the language, is bullshit.
And the other half has enough to it where it looks like it might actually be a big deal.
flipping back now to the physical side, what about exoskeletons?
How will they help us become faster, stronger, more mobile in the future, especially now
that exoskeleton companies are putting AI into them?
it's very, powerful innovation.
And so those two things cross over and you don't have to make, you know, the cargo lifter
from aliens to make this a real thing.
Just something that gives somebody a little bit of a boost of being able to walk a little
further or, you know, uh, have, have the back support, you know, an exoskeleton is
everything from a back strap to something that's doing some muscle and trainment and, um,
stimulation to a little bit of a mechanical advantage and I think we're really there and
the fact that so many people you until your mobility impaired because your back goes out
or you've got a twisted ankle you don't realize and then it becomes this huge limiting
thing being able do it with exoskeletons is a superpower because anything where you're
working moving things around you're in construction you're just
senior who's wanting to walk down the street and not have to worry about all the ramps and
things, it's going to be another one of those game changers.
And it'll be something where once someone can't move, they end up on that degradation
curve where you lose muscle mass and everything.
So being able to help you move in healthy ways and not be in pain or not hurt yourself,
huge deal, huge deal.
I think the aging population is going to be using exoskeletons in the future.
Break a hip, recovery, or you just have less mobility.
Exoskeletons are going to bring their mobility back.
Today, it's just a maze of healthcare and physical therapy and all of that is great.
But this technology exists today and you can strap it on and it could give a senior their
mobility back.
We're going to see super duper wheelchairs that work like Batmobiles, right?
And uh things that climb stairs, which we've already seen some versions of that, but that
just becomes a bigger and bigger deal.
I cannot wait to see what happens.
I want an exoskeleton where I can go do parkour, and we'll see.
We'll try to get there.
I love that.
I want to watch that, send a video.
all of these things that we're talking about today are so fantastic and brilliant.
And there's so many people building things that changed the world.
And I do believe a lot of people are building all of this innovation because they truly
want to help people in the world.
But we know that everything is very expensive.
So are we heading into a future where we're going to have
real radical health inequality or are prices is going to come down because of exponential
chips and technology to help start solving these problems for more of the masses?
What do you think about that?
I think the answer is it's going to get worse and then it's going to get better.
And I think we are going to throw off an amazing number of spectacularly expensive new
medical technologies.
that will only be available to people who can pay incredibly high price for.
But the good news is the ones that work will for the most part be scalable.
AI should be the most democratizing technology we've ever seen
AI in medicine should be something that is incredibly levels the playing field.
ah But in the short term, we're going to see maybe some N of one things, some things that
are very super expensive to personalize and do and only will apply to who have that team
of experts who can work on it and do it.
uh
But what replaces a team of experts is really, really good AI wants the experts do
something once.
And that's my hope.
So, so yeah, I think it gets much cheaper, much faster than anything has in human history.
And also, doctors are so busy seeing so many patients.
When do they have time to keep up with all this stuff?
So I think one of the benefits
is just knowing what clinical studies are going on for patients who could go in and ask
their doctors, can I get involved in this?
There's going to be a treatment in six months and just having knowledge is power.
It makes them feel empowered.
I totally agree.
best patient is an empowered, informed patient.
The best observer of your health is you.
And if you have those things and you can work with your doctor and your doctor can work
with you, like the good thing about the American healthcare system is you can shop around
for a doctor who will
mesh with how you do things and use that to your best advantage.
if people routinely live to a hundred or beyond in the future, how do you see that
reshaping society, careers, our education, our relationships, and even how we identify
with ourselves?
I believe I saw
a recent study that blew up the whole notion of phases of aging and that we don't really
leave adolescence until we're 32.
And that explains maybe this next generation of being very kid-ults, right?
And then the next phase from there, something changes, in your 60s and then
80s.
And that's when your brain really is at risk of really changing at the age of like 83.
So I saw this new study and it reframed the phases of aging.
So if we're going to live longer potentially or live better for longer, what is society
going to need or what will it look like in the future?
love that question,
I think it does affect everything.
the idea of like multi-generational families, To what extent will relationships be like
that?
Will we be more settled or less till death do us part?
That's
Wait, that's how long?
Damn.
uh you know, maybe, maybe you're a lot less willing to settle I like to think that we're
going to have this very optimistic future where people can choose to do the things they
want.
It's going to be a future bigger and bigger choice.
The technologies will be available and will somewhat be in the background and
you know, ubiquitous, optimized and friendly rather than forced upon us
the idea that you are choosing your relationships and you really have these intentional
families of people that you want to be around.
that that means that people then get to work on the things they really want to.
what does it look like as the human species starts to branch off?
If you really have these brain computer interfaces, what happens is you offload more of
your processing into a computer and it's not just like
You know, your mobile phone is your second brain, but you've got a second brain that's
connected to your brain and is doing some amount of thinking for you.
Whenever you're trying to be as smart as you can,
And it's not going to be like, you know, mom, I got a tattoo.
It's going to be mom, I got a brain computer interface, right?
do we really end up like with this incredible diversification of the human species
existing in a lot of different ways?
in the future, we're going to have a much larger aging population.
We have fertility issues.
mean, the next generations are going to be smaller and smaller.
We know that's happening.
We're going to have one of the largest aging populations probably in history.
what if people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s in the next 20 years their bodies don't
have to break down, their brains don't have to break down.
They're not going to live to 110, but they're going to live really nicely to 95.
And they can still be mobile and they can still have their brain and their cognition and
their memory.
and they can still have careers.
they might be able to contribute to society and all the money that we spend on healthcare
against that whole population can be moved to other things that could be helpful for
society versus just solving for the breaking down of our bodies and our brains.
Absolutely.
I've actually seen these projections where people say if we were able to both eliminate
the health care cost of treating chronic disease that we have now between roughly 40 and
80 and reinstate the productivity,
you end up with what's like a tripling of the global domestic product and every step along
the way has these profound economic effects.
we know there's been clinical and biological studies conducted, I think the University of
California, San Diego, and on the ISS and by NASA that going into space accelerates our
aging.
process, DNA damage, muscle loss, immune dysfunction, epigenetic aging.
Do you think that some of these inventions and interventions and innovations that we've
been talking about today could help people actually get to space 20 years from now in a
healthier way?
Absolutely.
In fact, one of the things that I say is there are two groups of technologies that are
super important to space exploration and having like a space economy.
And one of them is cheap mass to orbit, like a rocket that will get things up at a minimum
cost per pound.
And the second one is everything with biotechnology.
And that comes from so many different things.
One is
we started looking like if you traveled to Mars.
there's a number of challenges, one of them is it takes months to get there and you're
going to be subject to radiation and anything we've looked at conventionally, it puts you
like your chance of cancer in a lifetime in the double digits or more, you know, because
of that exposure.
So, and people have said, well, then we'll have to build spaceships with this kind of
shielding and this much water.
And you do this, or you hide in this little closet when there's a radiation storm.
Or you could upgrade the human basic set of equipment and there seem to be some really
good genetic and biological and even things with a microbiome ways that you could do that
where you have better DNA repair and the spin-off from that and NASA is famous for its
spin-off technologies would be, boy, there would be less cancer for anybody anywhere
because you could reprogram to address and that's just one narrow thing.
I think though the real killer application is if you're going to
live in space or live anywhere else, you've got to have, you've got to bring the biosphere
with you.
And in fact, you've got to understand it and be able to recreate it and program it and
monitor it environmentally and have all these things.
having these great technologies for growing food and recycling air and making sure waste
and toxins don't build up to an extent, especially in a
built environment.
And again, I think that's all addressable and super fascinating and interesting.
And it's got this great spin off technology of being able to help people live better,
healthier lives in their home and in their whole landscape.
So yeah, I love the application of those.
There's a couple of really interesting startups that are just getting off the ground like
people who are trying to work with SpaceX to build biosphere control into these big uh
rockets so that whenever they do longer and longer missions, uh I think we've got like an
even chance of seeing uh human moon missions
the next three years
I'm so excited about the opportunities for space in the future and what it could be.
If cost wasn't a thing, we still have so much work to do to bring citizens anywhere off
the planet.
So think of the year 2045
you hope for your personal impact on this world to be?
I really hope that every once in a while there's something that I say that matters to
somebody, my children, my students, people that I have worked with.
like the best gift anybody's ever given me is to come back years later and tell me, oh,
you know, this one thing echoed with me.
And it's the nicest thing, but it's also the part that I want.
to feel like I've got a stake in the world to come and that the way I think is valuable
enough that someone else, it's changed the way that they think.
And that they will share that gift with me.
one of my kids is off at college and after telling me, you know, all the things that I was
wrong on and all the things that you shouldn't do and this and that, I decided to study
biotechnology.
And I was like, I thought out of all the things you could do, you wouldn't follow in my
footsteps.
They're like, dad, I've decided there's so much I want to do in life.
We've got to figure out how we can live long enough.
to so I can do all the things and fit them in.
And I was like, I love the way you're looking at that.
I would love to think that I will be a person, a creature that is going on, affecting the
world well, and still able to know when I'm wrong and do something about it.
I love that.
Well, Raymond, I want to thank you so much for today.
I learned so much from you today.
This has been truly mind blowing.
What a great talk.
Thank you so much.
And thank you for hanging in with me and listening and having great questions and telling
me about things that I'm learning about.
So thank you.
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