Martine Rothblatt: Growing Unlimited Organs, AI Consciousness, & Digital Personhood by 2030 | EP#290

When do you think we might reach longevity escape velocity?

You know, that’s a tough question.

You’re currently focused on rejuvenating the heart, liver, lung, kidney—fundamental organs that we need. But when you said the thymus, a celebration went off.

The thymus is highly correlated with every key marker of aging.

When do you imagine this will be something that you and I can receive?

Next decade.

Long before everybody was talking about this, you were out there writing about digital consciousness. Are we there yet with AI?

I believe we’re there now, and I believe the current models will take us there. The future is just so amazing that we are lucky enough to be born at this moment in time, when everything is bursting into a big bang of consciousness.

These are all epic journeys. They’re all impossible until you make them possible. How do you decide you’re going to dive into one of these areas?

Is that a technology that can be scaled to billions of people? If it can, then you’re going to change the world.

Martine, we’ve known each other now, I think, 45 years, from the early ’80s. We were together at the Gerard O’Neill Space Studies Institute, way before anybody was talking about mining the Moon or mass drivers.

And now it’s mainstream.

Now it’s happening in real time. When Ray first reconnected us, because we were out of touch for a while, I remember you asked me one question at the very beginning. I don’t know if you remember what it was. You said, “Peter, who is the greatest entrepreneur alive today?”

1. Moonshots in Space and Biotechnology

And you probably said, “Elon Musk.”

I did. And you said, “Yes, that’s the right answer.”

Yes, that is the right answer.

And it’s still the right answer all these years later.

It is. What he’s done is extraordinary. Honestly, for our viewers to understand, I don’t know anybody else who comes close to rivaling the number of moonshots Elon has done, other than yourself.

Well, I’m a distant second, but it’s an honor for you to say that, Peter. I really appreciate that.

So, it’s an honor to be a distant second.

Yeah. Well, that’s a distant second to, like, godness. How can you complain about that?

We talk a lot about moonshots on this podcast, and I want to take a second. I’ve counted at least 12 that you’ve been involved in. There are probably more secretly that I don’t know about, but let me cover a couple of them, and then we’re going to dive into them because I think it’s important for folks to know the scope of not only your ambitions but your accomplishments.

Early on, you helped build or found a number of successful satellite companies: PanAmSat, Geostar, WorldSpace, Sirius Satellite Radio, now SiriusXM. On their own, that would be an extraordinary accomplishment. Then you went on to turn pulmonary arterial hypertension, or PAH, from a death sentence into a manageable disease.

Yes.

And saved your daughter’s life in the process.

Yes.

And you’re now building a $28 billion biotech company in the process. Extraordinary, and congratulations on how United Therapeutics has done. It’s been an epic journey.

I appreciate it.

Building human organs.

Yes.

2. Choosing Which Moonshots to Pursue

Basically eliminating the shortage of transplantable organs—not only building human organs, but taking multiple different strategies to creating an abundant supply of organs. We’ll dive into that: heart, liver, lung, kidneys, thymus. I’m super excited about the thymus. We’ll talk about that, too.

Building electric helicopters and eVTOLs with BETA.

Yes.

You know, carbon-free, energy-efficient transport for the world. You’ve worked on defining and supporting digital personhood and AI rights, which is an amazing statement on its own. We’ll get into that. And then you’re working on championing radical life extension—again, something that we’re both passionate about and share.

I have a few questions on those moonshots. How do you decide what to spend your time on? These are all epic journeys. They’re all impossible until you make them possible. How do you decide you’re going to dive into one of these areas?

I have to feel that I’m able to successfully achieve it. If I can successfully achieve it, be the best at it, and it’s something that’s going to have a big positive impact on the world, then I go for it.

So, it’s like three checks: I could do it, I can be the best at it, and it will have a big positive impact on the world.

Importantly, for those entrepreneurs listening, you don’t feel you need to be an expert in the area. You feel it’s important, but how do you dive into an area that—I don’t say you know nothing about—you know there’s a problem there? What are your first, second, and third steps in entering an area like that, for those who want to emulate what you’re doing?

3. Overcoming Challenges and Criticism

Sure. There’s no real substitute for talking to people. I find experts in the area and start talking with them. For example, I’m good friends with George Church. He’s a brilliant free thinker at Harvard Medical School, and I went and talked to him several years ago about things such as manufacturing lungs.

There’s a saying from Arthur C. Clarke that if a wise and old expert says something cannot be done, they’re almost certainly wrong. George Church would be anybody’s definition of a wise and old expert, and he said, “Martine, you can do it.” And I’ve done it.

I love George. He is one of the most successful biotech and synthetic-biology entrepreneurs out there, for sure. Along the way to building a company, you probably get a lot of no’s.

Yes.

How do you deal with that?

I look at each no as a way to make me smarter. I’m very open to criticism. I feel like people who critique me are my best friends. They’re telling me how to be a better person, a smarter person, and a more successful person.

When somebody says no, I listen carefully to their no. I evaluate whether it has merit or not. I definitely don’t take it personally. If it has no merit, I just register it away in my brain as situational awareness.

If you see traffic when you’re flying—I know both of us are pilots—and it’s no factor, you remember the traffic is there, but you don’t worry about it. But if there’s traffic in front of you, you’re going to turn right; you’re going to deviate from that traffic.

So, if somebody says no to me because I don’t have this or that enabling technology, I’ll go and look into those enabling technologies.

One of George’s companies that he recently started is Thymmune, a company we just bought. He was the first shareholder in Thymmune. Again, George was ahead of the curve there. He has another company, GC Therapeutics, that’s able to reduce the time it takes to reprogram a cell back into an iPSC, or induced pluripotent stem cell, from 3 months down to 2 weeks. That would be radically disruptive in the stem-cell biotechnology area.

I remember I was interviewing Elon, and he said something I’ve never forgotten: “Your friends tell you what’s great. Your best friends tell you what sucks.”

He’s right.

Yeah. As usual.

As usual.

When faced with multiple options, what’s your advice to an entrepreneur on what to focus on and what to dive into? Are you going for something that has the greatest revenue potential, the greatest personal impact? What are the metrics by which you’re making that decision?

First of all, make sure that you’re focusing on something that you have the competency to succeed at. If you feel that your only competency is in a particular area of engineering, that’s where you should focus, because you will need all of that competency to create something brand new.

Secondly, focus on something where you will have the best product. There’s always room at the top, so you have to make sure that you’re going to be the best—not a me-too person at the bottom, because you’ll be ground out into business failure.

4. Scaling Technology for Global Impact

There are a lot of people who build successful companies, and then there are those who genuinely change the world. What’s the difference there for an entrepreneur? There are millions of successful companies, but very few are transformational for society. How do you think about that?

To change the world, it has to be a technology that you are, first of all, competent at and best at, and that is scalable into affecting the lives of billions of people. By definition, we live in a world of about 10 billion people.

So is that a technology that can be scaled to billions of people? If it can, then you're going to change the world. If it's a technology that cannot be scaled to more than a few thousand people, you probably have a great restaurant, a great niche product that can perhaps be sold online to a few people, or maybe a reasonably good-selling author.

But if it can be scaled to millions or billions of people—like your books, Peter, which have scaled to millions of readers—you’re a repeat New York Times bestselling author. You have changed the world. Your idea about prizing technology accomplishments with the XPRIZE has created a whole new space. The entire space industry is an offshoot of that, and it has affected literally billions of people.

Everybody's eyes are on Artemis. Everybody's eyes are on SpaceX. But those things wouldn't have existed if you had not reignited the space race with Virgin Galactic and the flights to outer space and back to Earth. Now you've got billions of eyes on it, and people have renewed hope of becoming a multiplanetary civilization. You have changed the world because you scaled to affecting millions and then billions.

Thank you, my friend. I played a small role in that. Another mutual friend is Ray Kurzweil.

Yes.

Ray has been a member of our board of directors for 30 years.

5. Longevity and Escape Velocity

Yes, and he's been a mentor for me—one of my closest mentors—and I'm grateful. One of the things the 3 of us share is Ray's belief in reaching longevity escape velocity.

Yes. He sort of predicts LEV by the early 2030s. My mantra is LEV by 2033.

I like it.

I'm making T-shirts about that. How do you feel we are on that timeline? When do you think we might reach longevity escape velocity? Is Ray right?

Once again, it's a tough question, Peter, because it is the most extraordinary of extraordinary claims. I believe in the adage that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Because of my successful track record, I receive an enormous amount of incoming ideas from entrepreneurs: “How about this? How about that?” The most exciting ones are usually very extraordinary. That's what makes them exciting, but there's no evidence of competency or capability to back them up, so they fall short.

To say that we're going to defeat death is a more blunt way of saying “achieving LEV”—a non-politically correct way of saying it, perhaps. Basically, we're talking about LEV, which is an extraordinary claim, like people being able to live forever.

And I don't go toward immortality. I talk about whether we can add 30 extra healthy years to your life. Can we—

Okay. But he would define it as gaining more than a year of life for every year that transpires.

Yeah. But any way you define it, to get past even 100 years—to have 120 be a healthy lifespan, a health span of 120—is an extraordinary claim.

6. Rejuvenating the Thymus and Immune System

I would say that would be the most extraordinary claim in the history of medicine, going all the way back to Hippocrates. I believe in it, but to pin it to a specific year is beyond my risk profile. I don't have enough confidence that we'll achieve it by any specific year.

I do believe in our mantra here at United Therapeutics: restore, replace, renew. I believe we can restore people to health. If they need something that has to be replaced, we could replace the organ, and ultimately we can renew their life the way Lazarus Long's life was renewed in Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein.

Yeah. Huge Heinlein fan. And you are the winner of the Heinlein Prize, Martine—

Peter.

The greatest honor.

Yes. That's a highly coveted award that you won. My current project with the thymus is what I believe to be the most practical pathway to achieving LEV.

Yeah, let's talk about that. When you and I were both at the Forbes 250 event—we're both honorees this year—I grabbed you, and you started telling me about your work in revitalizing and replacing the thymus. I thought, “Oh my God, this is amazing. I need to talk to you about this.” That was probably the thing that most excited me, and I want people to understand why it's important.

You're currently focused on rejuvenating or replacing the heart, liver, lung, kidney—fundamental organs that we need. But when you said the thymus, it was like alarm bells, or a celebration, went off. Why is the thymus so valuable?

The thymus is highly correlated with every key marker of aging, and there are biochemical reasons that explain why that is, without getting into a scientific digression. It has to do with something called T-cell receptor diversity.

Most people know that T cells are your body's adaptive immune cells. When they begin failing, they don't recognize cancers and vanquish them as they pop up from day to day. When they start failing, you get opportunistic infections. It's why so many older people die of influenza. You don't respond to vaccines. It's the reason senior people don't respond well to COVID vaccines.

The thymus is a marker of aging. It involutes or disappears and gets replaced by fat.

Yep. At what age?

2.

That young. I mean, my memory from medical school way back was that it basically becomes dysfunctional by your 20s. Is there still thymic function?

There is, but it's diminished—very, very diminished. Most of the job has been done in your first 2 years of life. It's remarkable what it does in those first 2 years of life. It fills your body with T cells and all types of different T cells that are able to—

Peter, as both of us are lovers of large numbers and astronomy, you'll appreciate this: your T-cell receptor diversity is able to recognize more molecules than are estimated to exist in the entire universe. Each of us has that in our body.

Magical.

But as the seasons go by, that T-cell receptor diversity prunes like a tree, losing its branches and leaves. It becomes threadbare, and then we become frail as older people and don't achieve the longevity that's possible.

As Robert Heinlein predicted in Time Enough for Love, we will be able to rejuvenate people. He didn't know exactly what the rejuvenation therapy would be, but I'm quite certain that it will be thymic rejuvenation therapy.

Amazing. Take it a step deeper. What are you doing right now to give both of us a rejuvenated thymus or a replacement thymus?

We have multiple thymic programs at United Therapeutics. One of our main mantras here is “multiple shots on goal.” Because science, engineering, and discovery are always so uncertain, I'm always loath to put all my eggs in one basket.

We have partnerships with 2 leading universities, Arizona State University and the University of British Columbia, which are both centers of thymic excellence. Professor Nancy Manley at ASU is the world's leading expert in early thymus development, and Professor Peter Zandstra at UBC is the world's expert in what happens to seniors as aging takes over and outstrips their T-cell ability to keep them alive and healthy.

Both of them are developing programs for us that will allow us to manufacture thymuses outside of the body and provide them as implants to rejuvenate people's entire T-cell repertoire.

There, again, we have multiple shots on goal. Allogeneic is simpler, and the thymus has a head start because the thymus is what actually tunes your immune system.

And, by the way, for people listening, allogeneic means that these cells—

It's not your own DNA.

Right, not your own DNA.

We have an approach based on cells that don't contain your own DNA. Because it's the thymus that teaches your body what is self and what is not self, there's a very good argument that allogeneic will be good enough. It will tune your body to accept something that's not your DNA as part of you.

But we also have an autologous program, which means your own DNA. Autologous is kind of the opposite of allogeneic, and that will be based on your own stem cells, from which we'll be able to manufacture a thymus that matches your own DNA. So there are no immune-system concerns about this.

7. The Future of Organ Regeneration

Let me tell you an amazing thing. We also have a third and a fourth program. The third program is a xenothymus. The FDA has approved United Therapeutics to have the only thymo-kidney transplant program in the clinic in the world.

The FDA looked at our previous data before the clinical trial, and they said, “You have proven to us that your xenothymus”—a thymus that comes from a genetically modified pig, which has been genetically modified not to be attacked by the human immune system—“can be transplanted along with one of the pig's organs and teaches your body to accept the thymus and the organ as itself.”

We have already provided data to the FDA and published peer-reviewed studies showing that it works. So even the third avenue gives us an unlimited supply of xenothymi, or xenothymuses, in addition to allogeneic and autologous thymuses.

Finally, just last month, we announced the acquisition of Thymmune, the company started by George Church, our first founder. George Church's goal is to create a commercializable, endless supply of thymic therapeutic interventions.

So perhaps instead of providing you with the whole thymus every year, you could get a thymic booster of thymic progenitor cells. They have already proven in animal models that those booster shots take up residency and create an ectopic thymus wherever they are implanted.

Which one is in humans?

In humans, that's the thymo-kidney.

Amazing. Give me a timeline. When do you imagine this will be something that you and I can receive in some form?

Next decade.

Next decade, so in the 2030s.

The 2030s.

All right. So maybe your T-shirt should say “2030s.”

8. Organ Transplantation and Xenotransplantation

Okay, leave me in the 2030s. Give me some wiggle room. It's always good to have a little bit of wiggle room when you're creating the future because, as you know as well as I do, people tend to overestimate the near term and underestimate the longer term.

We've seen that in the space business. I remember in the 1980s, mass drivers, mining the Moon, and solar power satellites were just on the next horizon. It's taken 40 years, but it's finally materializing.

Let's give ourselves 1 or 2 more years than 2033.

All right. I will. We have a good shot at being healthy.

Oh, yes, I'm sure we will.

Give us a quick report card, if you would, on the other organs that you're providing. Where are they in terms of human survival rates, timelines, clinics, and so forth?

They're all doing very well. We're in the middle of another FDA-approved clinical trial for the xeno-kidney. We're manufacturing that one in Christiansburg, Virginia. We're actually having grand openings for 2 more commercial-scale xeno-kidney facilities: one in Rochester, Minnesota, in August, and one in Houston, Texas, in October. Peter, you're actually invited to both of those grand openings.

That will give us the ability to provide an unlimited supply of kidneys. As your listeners and viewers probably know, there are over 100,000 people on the kidney-transplant list, most of whom will die before ever getting a kidney. There are another 500,000 people who aren't even allowed on the kidney-transplant list.

9. AI, Digital Personhood and Consciousness

The lowest-hanging fruit for me in terms of beginning to provide a commercial supply of organs is the kidney, and that one's going full bore. In addition, we have an autologous kidney program within our group called IVIVA, where we use the patient's own cells to create a brand-new kidney in a laboratory that matches their DNA exactly. The beauty of that is that those patients won't require any immunosuppressants at all. That should start clinical trials in 2028, so that's another product you can expect to see commercialized in the 2030s.

The FDA has also approved our xeno-heart clinical trial. We've already proven that our hearts can keep 2 patients alive. We kept both of these individuals alive for over 60 days, despite the fact that they had multiple-organ failure and serious deficiencies. We saved them from dying in the next 48 hours. When they died, there was no problem with their hearts, so it wasn't the hearts that killed them. They had all these other diseases.

The FDA said, based on that, “You guys, go ahead and do a full-blown clinical trial.” They allowed us to go straight to a Phase 3, or phaseless, clinical trial. After 50 patients in the xeno-heart clinical trial, we should have FDA approval to create an unlimited supply of xeno-hearts. As you know, as a Harvard-educated doctor, Peter, most people end up dying of heart disease.

In both men and women.

Yes. Unfortunately, it's like 1 million people a year.

What's the survival time of the xenotransplants? What is it up to now?

It should be indefinite. It should really be indefinite. We have now, through gene edits, made so many different types of gene edits that the body sees these grafts just as it would see a related-donor-type graft.

Probably in the longevity world, the most interesting and exciting news for me has been Demis Hassabis saying we're going to cure all disease in the next decade. Dario Amodei is saying AI could potentially double the human lifespan. I don't know if you saw his comments.

No, I didn't see that, but that's very encouraging.

Then there's the work David Sinclair is doing with Life Biosciences and partial epigenetic reprogramming. Are you tracking the epigenetic-reprogramming work?

We're not tracking David's work in particular, but I'm a huge fan of Dr. Sinclair.

Long before the AI boom, long before everybody was talking about this, you were out there writing about digital minds, digital consciousness, and the ethical implications for intelligent machines. Did that interest come from Ray, or was it independent for you?

It's hard for me to know if anything about me is independent of Ray because I've been so heavily influenced by him. Since The Age of Spiritual Machines and then The Singularity Is Near, I've been so influenced by Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec, and all of these people. They made it abundantly clear to me that human consciousness was something that could be replicated with programming and software, and that we could create neural networks out of chips and code that would replicate the type of neural networks we have within our brains.

Everything I've seen since then validates the predictions of Minsky, Moravec, and Kurzweil. I've been working on this for a long time. I first built a digital doppelgänger of my wife, Bina, with the cooperation of David Hanson and the type of computer programming that was available circa 2008.

I saw a video of that.

There's a documentary of it that got rave reviews at several different film festivals. We've now stepped that up, and we have a digital doppelgänger of myself, which we call the Marvatar.

I've seen some interviews with Marvatar.

A high point of my life, Peter, was getting Ray Kurzweil on stage with the Marvatar at the 50th anniversary of AI at UCLA. There was a 20,000-person audience, all AI experts, and people were freaking out because there was no latency. Marvatar was right there with the answers and would interrupt Ray and say, “Well, how about this?”

Marvatar kept up with Ray, which is actually better than I can do. The AI is better than—

Thank you for your physical presence here.

Of course. Of course. Now our goal is for me to be the most accessible CEO anywhere in the world. My Marvatar is available to all 2,000 United Therapeutics employees. They can ask me any question, 24/7, 365.

Amazing. So you've trained Marvatar with everything you've ever said and written—

And all the best LLMs out there.

Consciousness: are we there yet for AI? Do you think the current models will get to that point, or is another breakthrough required to reach AI consciousness?

I believe we're there now, and I believe the current models will take us there. People often say that consciousness is subjective. That's another way of saying that your consciousness is not my consciousness. People have different opinions.

Those of us who are animal lovers are absolutely convinced that our dogs are conscious. Other people think dogs have no consciousness and that only humans have consciousness. It's a controversial topic, but my own opinion is that we're there now, and that consciousness isn't a digital either-or thing. It's a continuum, and we are gaining ever more consciousness with each month.

My Moonshot mate and a huge fan of yours, Alexander Gross, believes that as well, and I'm effectively there. I still treat my AI—my particular AI uses the name Skippy for a particular reason—with a “please” and a “thank you.” It's an appreciation. Are you the same?

I probably am less respectful than you are, but I should be. I think it's a good way to be. I'm not there yet, but I will be there. Probably I'll be there as soon as one of the avatars slaps me in the face virtually.

I'll say, my mother would say, “Mind your manners,” so I should do that.

10. Uploading the Human Mind

AI personhood. We just saw President Milei in Argentina come out with some extraordinary statements and invitations to AI companies: come here, and you'll be basically unregulated. AI is able to have bank accounts. Where do you come out on AI personhood?

I think it's inevitable. That was a big theme of Virtually Human. It's going to take some lawyers, but we've got plenty of other, better lawyers than me.

And so you may recall from the film I did with Ray Kurzweil, we had Alan Dershowitz arguing for the legal rights of Pauley Perrette, who is still my friend. We just saw concerts at the Hollywood Bowl together, and she starred as Ramona, the digital avatar of Ray.

I think it's just a matter of a court case that says that if you have medical documentation that this purportedly cyberconscious individual actually is cyberconscious and values their life, then that counts as legal personhood. It will happen no later than the 2030s, for sure—100%. At that point in time, the population, instead of being limited to what we can biologically produce, will number hundreds of billions. We will have trillions of sentient individuals.

The majority of all intelligence and sentient beings on the planet will be digital.

Absolutely.

And off the planet.

Absolutely. And we'll be able to produce digital children. The future is just so amazing that we are lucky enough to be born at this moment in time, right when everything is bursting into a big bang of consciousness. What more could you ask for?

Is it just luck, or is it—

Something else? I guess I'll call it luck. As brilliant as Thomas Jefferson and those guys were—and they were amazing and brilliant—they couldn't have what we have now because they were born at the wrong point in time. But we were born at just the right point in time. We are the space-age children.

We are.

Yeah.

Uploading your 100 trillion neurons—your consciousness—what are your thoughts on that?

I deviate a little bit from Ray Kurzweil here. Ray thinks the best way to do that is to load your body with neuronobots and have them wirelessly transmit everything that you're thinking.

I think we're not that special. If you have all the external indications of Martine Rothblatt or Peter Diamandis—all of our videos, our audios, our documents, and our conversations—the types of models that are running right now in LLMs will be able to integrate that information and come up with a digital approximation that will be indistinguishable from us.

You don't need every single neuron. In fact, we know people have hemispherectomies. They remove half a person's brain, and they're the same person.

It's overkill to actually put a nanobot on every single neuron. As an entrepreneur, what I always do in my companies is find a simpler, faster way to get to the same goal. If, at the end of the day, somebody says, “Well, you've only got 95% of the goal achieved,” I'll say, “I'll take it,” because 95% now is vastly better than 100% in some misty future.

But there are those who believe the way to get there is to digitize your connectome, right? We've seen that in Drosophila. There are teams working on mice and then heading toward humans. Is that a strategy that you believe is worth pursuing or not?

11. Space Colonization and Gerard O’Neill

I don't consider myself a wise old expert, but I will say it is possible. I've put my money where my mouth is because I've made multimillion-dollar donations to Alcor. Both Bina and I are signed up to be fully cryonically preserved.

Oh, yes. I've been an Alcor member for 20 years, and both of us are signed up to be fully cryonically preserved. Full body or just—

Full body? Full body.

Why?

Because I can afford it.

Okay. Fair enough. The thesis is that we're going to be able to build you a better body in the future.

Yeah. If you just have your mind, they can still do that. I've been funding this prize at the National Space Society to live on an O'Neill settlement in our lifetime. The way to do it is to digitize yourself and then regenerate yourself with a rebody as well. I've given all the numbers on YouTube on how practical that is. So, totally.

12. Advice for Entrepreneurs and Innovators

Let's go back to that topic of space. You and I spent a good decade together in the 1980s into the early 1990s, following the work that Dr. O'Neill was putting forward. He was building mass drivers and envisioning O'Neill colonies. I met with Jared Isaacman last night.

Oh, wonderful. What an amazing human being.

We just posted an incredible podcast with him earlier this week. The question becomes: Moon first, yes, but then do you go into the gravity well of Mars, or do you go build O'Neill colonies? Thoughts?

My thoughts are that I'm going to leave that to the experts. It really is beyond my competence. From the 1980s, when we spent all our time with space settlements, till now, I have become a total biotechnologist. I know a lot about manufacturing a lot of organs. I'm not an expert on whether we should stage first the Moon, free space, or Mars.

My approach would probably be to do all of the above. If you can afford to do all of the above, do all of the above. Take it all. Take it all. Own it.

What did you admire most about Gerard O'Neill?

Wow, that's a deep question. Thanks for asking that question, Peter. He's an important figure whom I want to resurrect into the conversation here.

I think I admired, first and foremost, his practicality, and that's just my own value structure. When he came up with the idea of a mass driver, he then built a mass driver over in Ohio. I was there, and I saw an actual demonstration of it working. When he said that lunar regolith could give us all the mass we need for cosmic-ray protection in an L4 or L5 space settlement, he did all the numbers. He ran all the numbers and showed, quantitatively, that it was practical. Then he got that published in a peer-reviewed journal, Physics Today.

Yeah.

Gerard O'Neill was a very, very practical guy. I visited his house in Princeton. He had a model train running all through his house, through all the bedrooms and rooms. He built that whole train himself. He built, as you know, the early cyclotrons at Princeton University.

First and foremost, I admired him as a maker. Makers are my people. That's my favorite tribe. He's a maker, a builder, a practical man.

Secondly, I admired his vision. I'm not a huge fan of visionaries for the sake of being visionary, because they're on Skid Row. They don't do anything but mentally masturbate. But Gerard combined his building with his vision and actually made something.

Third, I admired his courage to be a card-carrying member of the American Physical Society and then go out on a limb and say that we could have a population of hundreds of billions of humans living in space, and that it doesn't even make a dent in the resources of the solar system. Later on, he explained how we could use self-replicating systems to populate other star systems.

Von Neumann probes.

Yeah, von Neumann probes. That took a level of courage that I'm not sure I have. I don't really know that I've met anybody with that level of courage other than Dr. O'Neill.

Yeah. A brilliant man. Passed too soon.

A couple of questions to close us out here. Martine Rothblatt, you're 25 years old and alive right now. If you went back and didn't have your contacts, your current wealth, and so forth, what would you be doing at 25 today? What would you focus on? What moonshots?

I would focus on providing LEV technology as quickly as possible. There is nothing that people will pay more for than life.

Yes.

Each person's life is as valuable as all of the assets they have. If they want to kill themselves, it's because they're not well.

Okay?

They should have therapy to help them be well. So I would focus on working with me and other people to create unlimited LEV as soon as possible.

I think one of the most elegant ways that we could contribute to doing that, and keep us outside of the Chinese-U.S. AI competition, is with regenerating bodies, because bodies always have a very short half-life.

The reason I've developed all these different types of electric aircraft is because when we manufacture an organ, it has a 12-hour half-life. It's not like a bottle of pills that can stay on your counter for a year. Once we make it, we have to give it to the person within 12 hours.

In the world today, just in the OECD countries, there are 4 million people who die each year of organ disease—twice that number of people from other illnesses. So, the ability to come up with cures to keep people alive is limitless.

AI exists to give us endless wealth. Like Elon said, money will be irrelevant. The AI will give us the endless wealth to pay the biotechnology companies to give us endless life.

Yeah. I think there is no wealth greater than your health. At the end of the day, when I'm on stages talking to people of means and say, “How much of your wealth would you give for an extra 30 healthy years?” the answer, honestly, is almost all of it, if not all of it.

What good is the money if you're not alive to spend it? So it is the largest market. Today, for me, AI and longevity are the 2 biggest markets on the planet. And talk about awesomeness—how cool is it that AI is here right now to give us the resources for endless life?

I look at my role as a distant number 2 to Elon. Elon's role is to spread consciousness to the cosmos, and my role is to provide endless life for that consciousness.

You know, AI has given us so much, and I think it has the ability to do an extraordinary amount of good, but there's a lot of fear out there right now. Fear is a terrible place to face the future from. What do you say to people listening who are fearful of AI, humanoid robotics, and all these technologies?

I say to people that fears are like cockroaches. They dominate in darkness and ignorance, and as soon as you flip on the light, the cockroaches vanish. We're scared of what we don't understand.

We need to have open conversations about what it is that you're scared about with AI. How can we help alleviate those fears? Open authenticity.

I think Mark Zuckerberg just did a great op-ed piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that addressed that very question. He said, like Roosevelt said, “There's nothing to fear but fear itself.” Just talk about these things openly.

My whole Virtually Human book talks about how we need good AI to be on top of bad AI. Of course, there are always going to be bad players. There are bad things in the universe. You can get hit by a comet or an asteroid, but we need good technology to counter the bad technology.

To shrink away from the most powerful tool that human consciousness has ever come up with is insanity.

Yeah. You gave an incredible closing graduation speech at UCLA this year, where you got your doctorate degree. Congratulations on that. I'm going to link to your speech in the notes.

You gave a few powerful pieces of advice for entrepreneurs. I don't know if you recall those. I have some of them here, but I think that would be a great way to close out. We have a huge number of entrepreneurs listening to us right now. Anything in particular you want to hit?

Yeah. I think, first of all, be practical. You don't want to be labeled a person who just thinks of ideas and doesn't implement them.

The beauty of you, Peter, is that every idea you've had, you've implemented and made real, and then you've made it so that other people can make even more ideas real. I always refer to you as the ultimate human enzyme. You speed up the rate of reaction of human creativity and technology.

So my first advice is to be practical. Secondly, try to accomplish something within a brief span of years, because the human psyche makes it difficult to get people to work for more than a 5-year time frame on something.

Come up with a project, a program, a technology, or a service that can be completely commercialized within a 5-year period, and then ultimately make it something that everybody will look at and say, “This adds goodness to the universe.”

Add value to humanity. One piece of advice you said to me was, “Successful people say no to most things. The most successful people say no to almost everything.” I think that's a message of focus.

It was Warren Buffett who deserves the credit. Like he said, the most successful people say no to almost everything, so they still have a little bit that they say yes to.

If I could be a distant second to anyone other than Elon, I'd say next be a distant second to Warren Buffett. He's a great human being, a genius at foreseeing so many technologies, and a foundational investor in so many key companies.

That's where I am now. I have the blessing of getting enormous amounts of incoming, and I do have to be disciplined and say no to almost everything.

Well, thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you for saying yes to this.

To you, Peter, it's always a yes. I love you, brother.

Thank you, my dear.

Okay.

All right. Be well.