Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Thank you so much everyone for coming out this early, especially after last night. I hope you had a wonderful evening to bring you and excite you about the weekend that we have coming on. Today is a really, really big day for us. It's going to be a little bit packed. We have incredible speakers today that are going to tell you a lot about their companies and how they've themselves put so much effort into creating new categories that all have this common denominator of improving humanity and improving health. I'm very, very excited to have you all here today. Without further ado, let's start with our first presentation. We have Bryan Johnson coming up next. Bryan, many of you know him.
He's been subject to the "Don't Die" documentary of Netflix that I'm sure many, many of you have seen. Bryan also runs his own Blueprint protocol. It's the best documented longevity protocol in the world. He's attracted millions of people to follow him alongside his journey, and I'm very, very excited. Bryan is also, by the way, an amazing human being as well. I'm very excited to welcome Bryan. Bryan, everyone please give him a very, very warm welcome.
Thank you. Thanks so much.
Oh, quickly, one point. We're also going to do a Q&A afterwards, and so I'm going to be coming back up, and then we'll have microphones running down the aisles, and you can ask some questions.
Hi, you guys. Good morning. Did anybody get a margarita in the corner over there? If you did, confess now. Okay, cool. You guys, today is-- Can you go back one slide? Today is all about you, okay? The slides I have presented here is for context, then I'm going to dial in and I'm going to focus this entire thing on your life, okay? First what I'm going to do, stand up. Can you go back one slide, please? Okay, you're going to choose one foot, left or right foot. I'm going to count down from three, and you're going to stay stabilized on that one foot as long as you can, okay? Arms are kind of close together, not out and about. Feet is kind of close together, not out and about.
You're trying to stabilize yourself as best you can, like bend your knee a little bit, okay? You're going to find when you close your eyes, it's hard to stay upright. Be careful. Don't fall. Yeah. Look at this guy. He's already closed. You're nailing it, man. Looking good. All right. Ready? I'm going to go three, two, one. You're going to close your eyes and stay upright for as long as you can. I'm going to count the seconds, okay? Three, two, one. Go. Five. 10. 15. 20. Five more seconds. 25. Okay, stop there. Okay, great. How many made it to 25 seconds? Stay upright. Good. Okay, good. All right, shake it off. We're going to do it one more time. It takes a few reps to kind of get stabilized, okay? Now, here's what you're looking for.
This is a biological age test, okay? This is measuring a part of your brain that is responsible for balance, and it doesn't get much exercise because oftentimes you're balancing yourself when you're upright and eyes are open, but rarely eyes closed. This is why when you get older and you fall and you potentially hurt your hip, break your hip, it all-- cause mortality skyrockets. This is a really important bio age marker. Your goal is 15 + seconds, okay? That's the best score in this, okay? If you're between zero and seven seconds, your biological age of this portion of your brain is 60 seconds - 80 seconds. Seven to 15 seconds, 40 seconds- 60 seconds. You ready? Okay, shake it out. Choose your foot. Bend your knee a little bit, okay? Women, take your heels off if you have them. Don't get a bad score. Okay, ready?
Three, two, one. Close your eyes. Five. 10. 15. We'll go all the way to 30 this time. 20. 25. 30. Okay, cool. How about that? It's better that time? Cool. Yep. Why don't you come up here? What's your age? Yeah, come on up. What's your age? 11. Come on up. Yeah. Watch this, you guys. Watch. You're good at this. Watch him, okay? Just do your thing. I mean, unbelievable, right? Look how steady that is. In youth, you're just default stable. As you age, it's harder to maintain your balance. You have that natural wobble. That is unreal, right? Just incredible stability. Good job, man. What's your name?
Good to meet you. Stay up here. I have something else for you.
Okay, great. All right. Next test. You can go ahead and take a seat. Okay. Next, we're going to do a biological age test. Okay, here's a study of the balance. 84% higher risk of dying from any cause during the follow-up compared. Balance is important. All right. Next, we're going to do grip strength. Can I get a few volunteers? Who wants to come up and play this game? Yep, come on up. Come on up. Great. Okay. Anyone else? Yeah. Great. Okay. Fun. Okay, you guys, what you're going to do, you're going to each test your grip strength. Welcome. Yeah, come on in. There we go. Okay. You see, guys. Oh, you guys can't really see the board very well. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Can you put up the graphics? When you guys get your score, you're going to find your age, okay?
If you're a male, your age category is 20-29, and see how you have percentiles, 50th, 75th, 95th, and 95th percentile? You're going to look at your percentile. You're going to do the test, get your score, and then you're going to tell the audience your percentile, okay? Want to start down here? What you do here, start button, and then you're going to have one hand on here, and you're going to squeeze as hard as you can. You're just trying to peak it. It's not the duration you hold, it's just getting the highest number possible. All right, let's do first. Yep. If you need to grunt, get after it. No, I'm serious, though. Okay, 111. We'll come back because you're chill. You're going to be grunting, right? You're going to get after it, I promise.
We'll come back to you. 111. Find your age and tell me your percentile. Okay, go ahead. 138. 95th percentile. 75th. 75th percentile. Just do it. Start again. Reset it. It's slipped. There you go. Good job. Okay. What's your percentile? I'm pretty bad. No, what's your age? Yep. Okay, cool. Come on, guys. Yeah, It slipped. Yeah, I think you need to square up your grip. Like that? There you go. Yeah, only use one hand. I want to tell you guys, right? The first one's super chill, and by the end, no holds barred. Okay. We'll come back to you. Yeah. It's your grip. It's just, yeah, just slipping. One hand. Yeah, put it down like this. There you go. Yeah. There you go. Oh, awful. That's all right. 32. Okay. That's all right. It's so easy though.
Get it. Okay. 20.9. 50. You let go now. 54.8. 20. You let go. It's good. 25.5. Okay, the reason why grip strength is important is linked to aging, risk of dying early, and brain health. Okay, a study of 140,000 people across 17 countries over four years, for every 11 pounds drop in grip strength, people had a 60% higher risk of dying from any cause during the follow-up period. Grip strength really matters. You guys, thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah. I share these biological age tests because you associate yourself with your chronological age, okay? You think of yourself as from the time in which you were born, but you can actually measure your biological age in hundreds of different ways.
You can do grip strength, you can do one-legged stand, you can measure your heart, your lungs, your liver, your brains, your hearing, your tongues, your gums, everything. Over the past couple of years, I started this project, Blueprint, and I've become the most measured person in history. 1.5 billion data points on my body, and we've done biological age assessments for over 70 organs of my body. The project has gained a lot of attention around the world. People are interested. The fountain of youth is kind of the oldest story ever told. It's the thing that humanity has always chased. There's a lot of intrigue around what is this. It's gained a lot of cultural relevance. First, we hung out with the Kardashians. That opened up to something else.
Netflix did a documentary. A few months ago, we walked in Paris representing immortality in Paris Fashion Week. This is by far, without question, the most fun I've ever had in my entire life. It is endlessly entertaining and difficult and painful, but I love it. It wasn't always like this. For 10 years, I was chronically depressed. It was kind of like what I didn't have imagined possible in life. When I was 21 years old, I had just served a religious mission. I came back. I had this desire to try to do something useful in the world, to be useful to humanity. I wasn't good at anything. I said, "I'm going to just make a whole bunch of money, and then with money, I'm going to do something useful." I went off on that track.
14 years later, I was successful. I sold my company for $100 million. I made a few hundred million dollars. The problem was I was broken. I got the money in the bank, and I couldn't feel anything. This is me, absolutely dead inside. The depression was so bad that I wanted to take my own life. Now, I would have. I really, seriously would have had I not been for my three kids. The 14 years that took me from goal intent to this point cooked me. I was depressed, overweight, my 10-year marriage was falling apart. I had a crisis of faith, and I basically had no identity, no purpose, no drive. I just didn't know what to do with myself. The thing that kept me going is my children, and it was time to rebuild.
I was at this point in my life where I almost could start with this blank slate, and I started doing several things, like how do you figure out what to do next in life when you're in this kind of state? I did this thought experiment, which I found to be really helpful. I imagined being present in the 25th century. This is a few hundred years into the future. It's hard to imagine, but let's just imagine whatever form of intelligence that exists then, whether it's humans or AI or some version of humans and AI. They are there amongst themselves talking to each other, and they are expressing gratitude for Homo sapiens that existed in the early 21st century. That's us.
They say, "We are so grateful to Homo sapiens, who, in the 21st century, did blank, that allowed intelligence to thrive in this part of the galaxy." What did they say? This is kind of like imagining we look back at the 3rd century and the 15th century. We compress these entire centuries into one or two or three points. The rest of the century just kind of smooths over. As rich as our lives are and as many things that's happening today, our century is going to be smoothed over. We will be remembered for one, two, or three things. I thought about this question for years. I think they say two things. I think they say that's when Homo sapiens gave birth to super intelligence. Two, that's when they figured out they would no longer die. That's it. That's what our century is about.
We thought, if that's the case, what do you do about that? I started poking around at various entry points. First, I invested $100 million in deep tech. Synthetic biology, computational therapeutics. The goal was, if we can sit down at a computer and write zeros and ones and code works, can we engineer biology in the same way? Can you actually predictably engineer biological systems? I invested money there. Two is I thought, if AI really is the emergent phenomena of our century, wouldn't it be useful if we could start pairing ourselves with AI and merging our minds? We built the world's first mass-market brain interface. This is like a wearable fMRI. Invested $60 million there. I'm very proud. It's in clinical trials today, looking at neural degeneration, early treatment, early identification, but also prediction for depression treatment.
If a person is depressed, you can get a scan with Kernel, and it will predict whether you will be responsive to an SSRI or TMS or some other depression treatment. Instead of having to mess around with treatments like will it work or not, it does that prediction. Blueprint, which invested $35 million. That's how I took the money that when I was 21 years old, made the goal, made the money, lost myself, and this was kind of the bounce back of like, how do we start thinking about this? In this context, behind this entire thing is the biggest story of our time, which is that AI is moving blindingly fast. Fast, we can't model what's going to happen.
If a farmer in 1450 was imagining what their children would do for a living, they'd probably say a farmer, and their children, probably a farmer. My children are 22, 20, and 16. They have no idea what's going to happen next year, let alone five years from now or 10 years from now. Our ability to know what's coming is increasingly brought to our faces. We can't really see much anymore. With that said, the opportunity here is that immortality already exists in biology. Biology has solved immortality in various species. It's not like we're trying to go faster than the speed of light, something that physics just cannot do. It exists. We need to port it over to our actual biology, but it does exist already.
There's a lot of evidence right now, a lot of trials going on, showing that we can, in fact, dramatically reverse aging in various systems. If we walk into this idea that we're kind of playing with this crazy idea that we may be the first generation to not die, kind of wild, but wild things are already starting to happen. Like this basic idea, what if I could turn off my hunger? That's a wild idea. Well, turns out it exists. These drugs just keep on getting better and better. What if you could turn off your aging as well? That's what companies are working on as well. How do you stop the aging processes? When they do happen, how do you reverse that aging that's happened? We think that 2039 is the year we will achieve immortality.
Now, this does not mean true immortality. It means our lifespans will begin extending longer than. If we have a lifespan now of 77 years old, 77 or 79, it moves to 82, then 87, 95, 100, 110, pretty soon, you're like, "Huh, it keeps getting longer, and I'm getting younger." At some point, you start forgetting about your lifespan. That's what I'm talking about, like an escape velocity on aging, that by 2039, I think that will be the moment where we'll say we can basically a year of time will pass, and you stay the same age biologically. This is how my projects are going so far. I started this a couple of years ago. 2018, I was dead. 2023, I was this "Lord of the Rings" elf. It was a tough year. This is where we're at now.
In five years, this is really meant to give you motivation. In five years, with limited technology, we don't really have any really powerful drugs, but just with the technology we have today, these are a sampling of my biomarkers. Muscle in the 98th percentile of all men, not men who are 48 years old, all men. Fat, same thing. Bone marrow density, same thing. Down the list of fertility. My fertility and my sexual health, 99th percentile of all men. Vascular health, grip strength, all the above. My body, even though I'm 48 years old, functions largely like a 99th percentile 18-year-old. Blood glucose, vascular function. It really is something that's remarkable, and these are gold standard measurements. This is not made up. Motivation that you can come from whatever state you're in now. We also, in this experiment, we achieved several first-in-human observations.
Microplastics, you know, are omnipresent, they are difficult to get away from. Microplastics were recently found in 100% of men's semen. That's a bad situation, right? Microplastics are in the fertility supply chain. We set out to do an experiment, we are the first human in the world to demonstrate complete elimination of microplastics in the semen. We think it was probably attributable to sauna. We don't know. This is a good demonstration that in a situation where we all kind of feel powerless to this toxin in the world, we got rid of it. Let me run through a couple of other experimental results. On skin aging, I basically have frozen my skin age for the past five years, which is effectively a nine-year age reversal. I use multispectral imaging. This is the gold standard measurement device. Sauna.
My body is the most quantified human in the world in sauna. We have done over 224 sessions, 250 biomarkers measured. The results have been spectacular. Extremely effective in eliminating toxins, improving fertility. We think that might be attributable to icing the boys when you're in the sauna. Men, if you're doing sauna, if you're not doing this already, you want to have an ice pack on your boys. If you don't, it will wreck your fertility markers. Even if you say, "Well, I'm not trying to have a baby, it doesn't matter," that has negative feedback loop into your other hormones. If you're in the sauna, have cotton underwear on, take a BPA-free, plastic-free ice pack, slip it over, then put cotton shorts over it. Always keep the testicles cold when you're in the sauna. We quantified this.
You see here at the bottom image, you see 15 sessions without ice destroyed my fertility markers. Sauna is one of the best therapies in the entire world, all you have to do is sit in a hot box. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, same. You can see the data here, remarkable outcome on markers. This was the most quantified hyperbaric oxygen therapy protocol in the world. We did more measurement than anything that'd ever been done. You can see the effects on the microbiome, vitamin D, Alzheimer's markers, telomeres, et cetera, amazing results. Magic mushrooms. A lot of people, psilocybin magic mushrooms have been long understood to be an ancient practice, ceremonial practice, never has it been tested as a longevity drug. We found a mouse study that had been done that pointed at a possibility of psilocybin being a longevity therapy.
We said, "Let's give it a go." Again, we did the world's most quantified psychedelic experience. We measured 250 biomarkers. Kate and I, my partner, we did a live stream on this. Did anyone see that? Cool. Yeah. It was a good time. We found several things. For example, my blood glucose, was in the 98th percentile optimal of all healthy populations. It went to a 99.8%. We found a mechanism that no one had found before that it's possibly a metabolic reset in the brain for blood glucose control. We think it's possible that psilocybin will become a better longevity therapy than many things out there already that are top of class. We think it's very interesting. We extended that. We did 5-MeO-DMT. We did a very large dose, intramuscular and inhaling. As you can see here, the data is amazing.
The one that was most shocking to me was the 40% more childlike brain patterns. Kate, my partner here, can attest to this. Man, first of all, this was the most spectacular experience of my entire life. Like without question, the crown jewel of conscious existence. I feel like I had been working my entire life for that moment. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Man, I am without words to explain the profoundness of the experience. Really dramatic improvements in the brain. Again, we're very bullish on psychedelics of both the psychological experience but also the biomarkers support. They're really robust, and they warrant further study. Microplastics, we talked about that. We took my microplastics level to zero in the semen, actually about 98% down in my blood. We showed we effectively could eliminate microplastics from my body and blood and semen.
I still have microplastics probably lodged in my tissues. We can't measure that right now unless we biopsied it, but still a dramatic reduction, which is great. On the microplastic stuff, there's a lot of evidence that it's really bad for embryos, for early development. It's just not a good situation. Sexual health, fertility, this is a mention that this is for nighttime erections on the right here. When you go to bed, men and women, you have nighttime erections every night. Okay? You go to sleep. Men, you get erect, and you have three to five episodes, and you get erect according to a certain scale of certain hardness. Women, you have the same arousal cycles. Your clitoris gets engorged. It's not a sexual thing. It's just the body pulsing sexual function to keep it healthy. You can bio-age that.
Just like you do a one-legged stand test or grip strength, it is a biological age. Now, it's not something where you go to the gym, and you're like, "I'm going to push a lot of weight and work really hard." You just go to sleep, and it happens, and you get a score. Okay? When I go to sleep, my body functions like a 99th percentile 18-year-old in its sexual function. Right? You can't make that up. Okay? If you want to try it, there's a company called Adam Health. It's a little teeny device. It's not uncomfortable at all. Women, we're trying to get this measured in Kate. It's very hard to measure female erections. Men, you want to know this because your capillaries in your penis are the smallest ones in your body.
If you have problems with nighttime erections, it is an early warning you're going to have a cardiac event within five years. Okay? Shows up in the penis first, then the heart, then the brain. Okay? All right. Nutrition. Yes, take a picture of this. This is, I think, the most evidence-based guide in the world for health. We just went through, and we have a philosophy that we say every calorie we eat fights for its life. Nothing is just like a nice to have or convenient. We say every single calorie, and we rank it. Your best performers. The number one food I eat is extra virgin olive oil. It is 15% of my daily diet. We source our own olive oil. We get third-party lab tests. We verify the polyphenol count, the other chemistry, but all my food as well.
We've just found that the world, the global food supply chain is very toxic. As much as we can, we source our own foods. We do third-party tests. I would encourage you all to be very mindful of food when you can find companies that do third-party testing. I can say, like in Las Vegas, it is an absolute desert of healthy food, right? It's just unbelievably challenging. Love is an amazing longevity therapy. Kate here is my partner, and I never understood how big, how important of a longevity therapy the right relationship is, and also how the wrong relationship is so corrosive to health. It dramatically affects your health. Be very mindful. If you're in a bad relationship, take stock of it.
If you're looking for a good relationship, hold out for the highest bar because it really, it makes or breaks life, and I could not be happier. I've never had so much fun in my life with someone. Okay. Failures. All this time, I'm the most measured person in history, probably the most health-conscious person in the world, and yet I'm a complete idiot. I've got this toxic turf in my backyard this whole time. The irony is that I can't eliminate my idiocy in the things I do. I got rid of the turf, but not without being an idiot first. This was me. In 2023, I lost a lot of weight because we were doing caloric restriction. My face got very skinny. Turns out when your face is skinny, you look old. I tried to get some fat back in my face.
Protect your fat on your face. It's so important. I didn't have enough fat on my body, so I did a donor fat and I blew up. That was not fun. Okay. We also wrote a manifesto for this. The point here is before 2025, the only option in life you had was to YOLO. You're going to die anyway, so choose your YOLO path, might as well. In 2026 is the year of Don't Die. On a historical perspective, future generations will look back and say, whether it's 2026, 2027-ish, that's the year it became possible. It will be in the history books. The moment where humanity said, "Huh, we may be the first generation who won't die." We wrote a manifesto, and we basically said it's crazy that we don't have existence as our only objective as a species.
That the fact that we're conscious and alive is insane, and that we would do anything to jeopardize that is crazy. Just adult crazy. The fact that we allow companies to make products and services that kill you and then make money for it is bonkers. It should never be allowed. A company should never be rewarded with financial success if they kill another human. With fast food, making them addicted, do anything to cause the person to die. Am I good on time? I'm not even going to care, okay? We're just going to go. Okay. That was all a setup for now, I'm going to talk to you and make this all relevant to your lives. Cool? Okay, let's stand up. Let's take a deep breath. In this moment, I'm going to confront you on all of your bad habits, okay?
Close your eyes. I'm going to get you ready so you'll be open-minded when I tell you to cut your shit, all right? Okay. Close your eyes. Okay. Breathe in. One, two, three, four. Out. One, two, three, four, five, six. In. One, two, three, four. Out. One, two, three, four, five, six. Keep on going with that cadence. What we're going to talk about now is the world is insane. It has die by default, and today, you're going to commit to make life your primary priority. You're going to become aware of the things you do in life which are life-supporting or death-causing. Do a few more breaths. Okay. How do you guys feel? Yeah? Okay, take a seat. Okay, health is confusing and it's complicated. The goal is to simplify into things you can create habits around that become systems. Okay?
Your number one goal in life is to manage your resting heart rate before bed. Do this now. Okay? Put your fingers on the side of your neck, I'm going to count to six seconds. Count the number of beats you feel, you're going to multiply that by 10, that's going to be your heart rate. Ready? One, two, three. Stop. Okay. Multiply that by 10. Okay, that's your heart rate. Okay, let's just say you're 65 or 60. Tonight, you're going to do the same exercise. Lay down on your pillow, put your head down, take a few deep breaths, calm yourself down, check your pulse, get your heart rate. Let's say tonight it's 60 beats per minute. Your goal over the next month is to lower that to 55 beats per minute. Okay? If you're 55 beats, down to 50 beats.
The way you're going to do that, the reason why this is important is your heart allows, basically is a read of your soul. If I can see your heart rate, I will see you entirely. I will understand your food habits. I will see your stress. I will see how you deal with your phone. It reads everything. Okay? The heart is literally the heartbeat of your body. What you're going to do is you're going to identify a bedtime. Okay, let's just say your bedtime is 10:00 P.M. Your goal is to be in bed at 10:00 P.M. every single night. Not 11, not nine, 10, okay? The body is a clock. It wants routine. It wants consistency. If 10:00's your bedtime, at 10:00 your bedtime, so at 6:00 P.M., your final meal, your final food of the day.
No more snacks, no more food after 6:00 P.M. You do that because the body needs that couple hours to digest food. It needs the space to do its thing, so by 10:00 P.M., it can lower your body temperature, express melatonin, and be ready for sleep. If you eat at 9:30 P.M., your body's going to increase blood glucose, increase body temperature, suppress melatonin, all the things that will send your heart rate up. Okay? If your baseline heart rate is, say, 60 beats per minute and you eat at 9:30 P.M., your heart rate will climb to 65 beats or 70 beats or 75 beats, depending on what you eat. Okay? That is going to crush your sleep. When your sleep gets crushed, your mood gets crushed. When your mood gets crushed, your willpower gets crushed. It has this really negative chain reaction. Okay?
Inversely, if you eat your final meal at 6:00 P.M., your body has space to digest. Let's say your baseline's now 60 beats, but now it's down to 56 beats because it had time and space to digest food. Your sleep is going to go up. Your mood's going to go up. Your willpower will go up. It's a really positive cycle. Okay. The second thing is now you've got food four hours before bed. Four hours is a rough number. Maybe you find it to be three, maybe two, maybe five, maybe six, somewhere. Just do experimentation. My last meal of the day, so by the time I gave this talk this morning, I've already eaten breakfast, and I've eaten lunch. After I talk, I'm going to eat my dinner.
I stop eating food at noon because I did over 2,000 experiments to say, "When is the best time for me to eat my final food of the day?" It's noon. Last night before I went to bed, my heartbeat was 41 beats per minute, which is in the absolute elite territory, right? It is calm, my body's digested, and I had fantastic sleep. Food four hours before bed, do your experimentation. Number two, screens off 60 minutes before bed. I know that's hard. Everybody is addicted to your phone, right? We all are. You have to turn the phone off. Okay. Even if you're on your phone looking at pictures of pretty cats and whatever, it doesn't matter, the phone is going to arouse you. You cannot be on your phone. You're getting blasted by the light.
Phone's off at 9:00 P.M. if your bedtime's at 10:00. Okay. In that one hour, do anything, literally anything than be on your phone. Okay. Best if you can walk, breathe, meditate, talk to a friend, journal. The best thing, a book in hand. Like a literal paper book in your hand for 10 minutes performs as well in the evidence as a sleeping pill. Book in hand. Okay. Get into that practice. Your body needs the space to calm down. Next is beware of lights. You want reds and ambers in your body, in your environment, not blues. In my house, we basically don't turn the lights on. We come up with the sun, we go down with the sun. The only thing we have is a red light lamp, and we have a red light and an amber light.
Otherwise, we're pretty much natural light. Light dramatically influences your sleep. Next is you need to have a wind down routine. Okay. When I go to bed, I do this thing where my bedtime is 8:00 P.M. By 7:00 P.M., which is true, like last night, I was in my room by 7:00 P.M. I do this self-dialogue. I have Sleep Bryan, who shows up at 7:00 P.M., and he's in charge of my body. All the Bryans line up. The first Bryan in line is always Ambitious Bryan, and he says, "I've got a brand-new idea, and I'm so excited about this idea." It's like a banger thing. Sleep Bryan says, "Ambitious Bryan, we love you. You're doing a great job. Really, like fantastic job. Also, we are in sleep mode.
We're going to write down your idea. Tomorrow we're going to think it through." Ambitious Bryan says, "Are you sure? We kind of have to go now." Sleep Bryan says, "No, no. Tomorrow we're fine." Ambitious Bryan walks away. The next Bryan is Anxious Bryan. He says, "Today at the Enhanced Games, you made a blunder on the broadcast. You sound like a complete idiot. Everybody probably thinks you're stupid." Sleep Bryan says, "Thank you, Self-Aware Bryan. Really helpful," right? "We're going to work through that, right? We're going to get better. We're going to use it as a learning lesson in life." Okay? All the Bryans want to talk to me. They want to tell me what's on their mind, right? If I don't do it, what happens?
The evidence is my heart rate increases because it's elevating my nervous system. It's saying like I have unresolved things. I'm looping. If you have that looping, you put your head on the pillow, you just sit there, and you can't fall asleep. Why? Because you're looping. You finally fall asleep. You get maybe one or two hours of sleep. You wake back up. What happens? You're looping again. You can't stop thinking about the same damn thoughts. The evidence is if you don't somehow speak to the inner voices inside your head, it's going to manifest in your heart rate, which will suppress your sleep and cause that negative cycle. Whether you do my version, whether you do it through your version, through a journal or something else, you have to speak to the voices in your head. We all have concerns.
We're all upset. We're all excited. We have all the emotions. You have to have some system of reconciliation. The evidence that it's working is your heart rate. You can't be spiraling and also a low heart rate. They just don't work together. Okay? The heart rate will drive down. That's really basically it. Establish a bedtime, eat four hours before bed, light in your environment amber or red, wind down routine, screens off. If you do those things, those are the power laws of health. You don't need to chase IV infusions. You don't need to chase crystals. You don't need to do really much of anything, right? You can, of course, add on more things. You can do sauna, great. Really, those are the power laws of health.
The thing is, if you lock in these basic habits, the key thing is this will improve your willpower through everything else in life you want to do. The thing is, society does none of these. Is that true? You do. Absolutely, right? Society does absolutely none of these. This is what I'm trying to tell you, is we follow the norms that society has laid out for us. They're bad for us. All right. Let me stop there. We'll do a Q&A. My goal in this with you guys is to lock in and be a voice in your head of somebody who's standing up for the sovereignty of life, to not be puppeted by companies that are asking you to do things that are against your self-interest. They want you to scroll. That is bad for you.
They want you to snack. That is bad for you. They want you to binge-watch TV. That is bad for you. Okay. Their interests are not your interests. You have to set boundaries and say you are on a schedule and a system. Let me give you a few data points to maybe hit another motivational angle. Okay. A few nights of four hours of sleep, your body stops looking for cancer cells by 72%. The body is so busy trying to take care of the catastrophe, that it stops surveilling for critical things that keep you alive. Four hours of sleep a night for a couple of nights shows a protein in the brain that is similar to a traumatic brain injury. The body experiences lack of sleep as absolute trauma. It's not like a cool thing.
In society, there's a motivation to flex, like, "I only need four hours of sleep a night. I can sleep under my desk. I work so hard." That is just silly. It is contrary to science. The body does not work that way. The goal of this conversation is to say you are self-sovereign. You are independent of those forces. You will not be puppeted. You will make decisions to defend your own life and those around you. We are all like each other. We cannot prevent being like each other. You can choose to have others influence your life, or you can choose to influence other people's lives. Be that force. Okay. Now, I know it's challenging. Most social events are late at night. A lot of social interactions are late at night. It takes some time to gradually move things a bit earlier.
If you're at dinner with friends and you feel the pressure of everyone's eating a lot of food, put a little food on your plate, nibble, don't make a big deal. Just make really small adjustments and start winning this game. Okay. All right, I'll stop there. Do questions. Yeah. Yeah.
Do you have any suggestions when the people who switch time zones frequently?
Yeah, we did also a measurement. We did international travel. We measured 250 biomarkers when I went to China and also in India. It is absolute wreckage. It is. People talk about what can you do for jet lag? Nothing. The human body did not evolve to change nine time zones in 13 hours. It wrecks hormones, it wrecks circadian rhythm. Even when you return, it takes 21 days to get your sleep architecture restored.
I would tell you guys, if you have to travel internationally, I would say your maximum budget per quarter is one trip per quarter. Okay. And that's max. Max. More than that, it's just your body's in an absolute chaos. Okay. Smaller time zone shifts, one or two hours, okay, like here and there. The thing is, here's the stat. When you go to bed at 10:00 P.M., there's a trash collector waiting to pick up the trash inside your body. When you're not in bed by 10:00 P.M. and sleeping, the trash collector doesn't go through your body. The trash accumulates in your body. If you miss your bedtime, you can't be like, "Tonight's my bedtime at 10:00 P.M., I'm going to go to bed at 1:00 A.M., I'm going to make up in the morning." It doesn't work like that. The body is a clock.
It works on routine. That's why these patterns are so important for consistency. It's tough. Now, of course, you can do things like, when you're on the airplane, here's some practical tips. When you get on the airplane, you realize these airplanes are going to try to kill you. Okay. You walk into the airplane. It's true. Walk in the airplane. What's the first thing they offer you? Alcohol. Alcohol. Yep. They sit you in front of a big what? Screen. They blast blue light into you, right? Then you get up in the air. What's the first thing they serve you? Massive food. Right. Three things, high heart rate, high heart rate, high heart rate, and then the whole cabin is blue light. Right? It's the worst thing in the world for your health. Okay.
When you fly, have blue light blocking glasses on, don't eat the food, don't drink the alcohol. You take off, go to sleep. Okay. Don't do it. Otherwise, it's just wreckage, right?
I'm a surgeon, which means that I have to take call. Every, let's say six to seven nights, I have a pager nearby, and maybe I get sleep, maybe I don't, but I can just perceive my heart rate being higher-
Yeah
Whenever I'm on call because you have that-
Yeah.
Anxiety in the back of your mind. That's not something that I can immediately fix in my life.
Yeah.
My question is, what strategies could I implement to minimize the damage that does to my own health?
First of all, thank you very much for being you. You play an essential role in people's lives, and I appreciate you making that sacrifice. Really, sincerely. It is a hard job, and you pay the price, thank you. I guess I'd probably say when you go to sleep, if your bedtime's at 10:00 P.M., if you can have a consistent bedtime and get your first hour and a half of deep sleep and then come up for a few calls, what you want to do is you want to lock in sleep as best you can. That deep sleep window right when you fall asleep is so important because deep sleep only really happens in that first sleep window. You can't buck up for REM.
If you get calls on the REM cycle, you can still potentially take naps and stuff like that, you really want to just lock in your bedtime, get that first deep sleep window. If you come up and you get a few calls, like, okay, we'll deal with it, and then try to scatter some REM. I'd just say try consistency more than anything. I don't know what time the calls come in. I'm not sure how much schedule you have. I would try to tackle it with consistency above all, and then I guess you deal with the natural variation. You just want to give yourself the highest probability of the best sleep quality possible given the circumstances. It's just clearly going to be challenging for you.
Thank you.
Thank you for the talk. Can you tell us more about your experience with prescribed medications, like peptides, hormones? Obviously, everyone responds differently. We'd love to just hear a bit about your experience.
Yep. Cool. First of all, let me mention, Kate, do you want to come up? I'll quickly mention this, given you're a female. Kate, my partner, we just announced this past week that Kate is now starting a Blueprint. She's doing the same protocol I've done for the past five years. She's doing it on her body. Hi, Kate.
Hi. Hi, everyone. We're pretty excited. Essentially, as a female, I have to collect a lot more measurement just to get a baseline of my waveform throughout my cycle as a menstruating woman. We're going to be doing that for the next five months, and then with that data, we're going to be able to test what happens when I do certain medications, I do sauna, cold plunge, that kind of stuff. I also have suspected endometriosis, we're going to be tracking that, trying to diagnose it without surgery, and then do interventions on it if I do end up having it.
There you go.
Good.
All right. We'll be spending $2 million a year on this protocol, the same as mine. She will become the most measured female in history in short order. We're going to hopefully do some interesting things with female health. To your question, medications are among the best-performing things in health. I do several things for my medication stack. I do acarbose, which helps blunt blood glucose. I do low-dose tadalafil, so that's Cialis. Men, actually men and women, if you're above 40, it's a good idea to look into taking low-dose tadalafil, five milligrams a day. It's one of the better-performing longevity medications. And even men and women below 40. Now, the evidence below 40 is not as good as above 40, but low-dose tadalafil is one of the more promising. I do Jardiance, I do candesartan.
I do low-dose oral minoxidil for hair health, 3.5 mg. Those are my longevity meds. Kate, what are your longevity meds? You're doing nothing right now, right?
Nothing, aside from a microdose of Accutane, which is fantastic for skin health.
40 mg a week.
That's right.
We are very pro-prescriptions. We think that they're very well-characterized. On the question on peptides, my assessment of peptides is that people are doing it as a psychological health medication, that the idea of a small bottle and a needle is pretty cool, and to inject yourself is also pretty cool, and to talk about your peptide stack is also cool. No one knows what the peptides are doing, so they're not measured. They have this fake idea that peptides are only good. I just did an experiment with a peptide CJC-1295, and I published my results. The goal of that was to increase growth hormone. Yes, it did, it increased growth hormone by eightfold. Also, there were five other measurements that were basically in range, and then there were a big list of side effects.
For example, it took my blood glucose from top 99.8 percentile optimal to pre-diabetic in two week time. It lowered my sleep quality by 23%, it reduced my insulin sensitivity by 50%, and my pancreas had to work 50% harder for the insulin sensitivity. In two weeks' time. You can say it's not a good peptide, fine, you can make that argument, still, the point is, drugs that are approved on market have gone through an extensive characterization process. We know what it's good for, we know the side effects, it's really nice. Peptides, we don't know. The gray market peptides, of course, like the GLP-1s, great, really, if you're going to do peptides, measure yourself. Okay? Make sure you've got blood panels, what you're seeing, because nothing is free in biology.
This also is a good example where a lot of people will have an idea like red light therapy is good for you. That's true. they'll say, "If five minutes is good, three hours must be better." It's not true, okay? You want to be absolutely precise with your dose, okay? Sleep, five hours is as bad as nine hours. You want to be in the zone of seven to eight hours, eight and a half hours, depending on how active you are. dose precision is really important. Yeah.
Hey, Bryan, how's it going?
Hey.
I have a pretty young community on social media, obviously, this whole looksmaxing thing is blowing up right now. could you give us some social commentary and also tell us how to reconcile the Don't Die agenda with the looksmaxing agenda?
It's great, right? It's a human pursuit. Have at it. Do your thing. It's fantastic. Measure, make it a quantified endeavor. I love that if you give humans an endpoint, right, like a goal, they'll form games around it. looksmaxing is fantastic, right? It's like care for yourself, care for your health. I think it's a really positive trend. I just say the more quantified it can be, the better. it's like the whole goal here with Enhanced Games and also Don't Die, the reason why I'm here, and the reason why we have so much in common is that the Enhanced Games is doing the exact same thing I've done for five years, right? Basically, they say, "We're going to do this in a scientific way." We're going to say, "Here's the menu of options.
We're going to measure, have clinical oversight, see the data, and loop it back again." If looksmaxing were the same, it'd be fantastic. Yeah. We basically want to teach society the scientific method, measure, look at evidence, and then do it again.
Cool. Thank you.
Yes. The question was, is the idea before its time? Basically, a longevity escape velocity immortality. Yes. No technology exists today that does the trick. What we're saying Am I okay on time, you guys?
Last question.
Last question? Okay. What we're saying is if you zoom out and take a big enough picture of what's happening on this planet, in this part of the galaxy, we are conscious, and we have just given birth to a godlike intelligence. It is moving faster than we can imagine. We are about to evolve as a species into something we don't know what it is. In that emergent reality, the only thing we know is that nobody wants to die right now. It's literally the only thing. Every human on the planet has that one objective. They don't want to die right now. Now, if you say, "Don't Die in 20 years," everybody has a different opinion. Right now, every single human agrees upon that. In fact, all of biological life agrees upon that. It's the one unifying thread.
What we're trying to say is, in our most sober possible contemplation, we would say we don't want to die as a species. We want tomorrow. That is the single thing. It's a philosophical and ideological shift. AI is going to produce the medicine, it's going to produce longevity on some timeframe. The key thing we're trying to say is let's get our heads about us correct. Let's get our priorities straight that death is not a good idea. Killing each other is not a good idea. Dying is not a good idea. If you believe in an afterlife, fine, just procrastinate a little bit, right? Everyone wants one more breath. Really, this is one of the biggest moments in the history of the human race. Probably is the biggest moment in the history of the human race.
If we can get our heads about us, that's what we're trying to say is in our most sobriety thought. I'll close with this, you guys. First, a special shout-out to Christian and Max, you guys. I have a lot of respect for them because they're doing something very hard. They're doing something that gives critics a ton of material to work with. That they're being reckless, they're doing things that are wrong. They're changing the status quo, and they basically are creating an opportunity for the world to punch through a new era where humans can decide to become what they want. That means if you want to enhance yourself to perform, you have the ability to do that.
If you want to solve your own life, if you have a life-threatening disease and you want to cure your own disease, you should have the right to do that, the right to exist. This is about athleticism, it is about athletes, but also is about a fundamental human right, the right to exist if you please. That's what we're after. That's what the zeitgeist, that's what the moment is. I think they're on the forefront. They're taking the hard-hitting things up front. I hope that the games here will punch through, and people will say, "We are in a new time." Respect and appreciation for you guys. All right. We'll close with this. Our sincerest desire is to be a positive force in your life.
When you're on the couch at 9:22 P.M, and you're hungry, and you're stressed, and you're mad, and the bag of chips is just a few feet away, you say no. Right? You know the consequence. It'll raise your heart rate. It'll make your sleep bad. You're going to ruin your mood. If we're honest, half the people in this room are suffering from a very serious mental health issue. It's true. You guys know it. We all know it. Okay? That's because our habits are terrible. Make your health your number one life priority. Get your routines in order. Again, be a sovereign person and set those boundaries. All right. Great to hang out with you guys.
Thank you so much, both of you. I think definitely you're achieving your goals. You're 100% through the work that you both do an absolutely positive force in people's lives. Thank you so much from all of us, I would say, for the work that you do and for sharing it with the world. That's really important. Thank you. We heard Bryan speak about it already a little bit about the positive impact that psilocybin can have on people's lives. This is something that our Chairman and Co-founder, Christian Angermayer, has been very, very focused on over the past few years already. He founded a company together with his Co-founder, Srinivas Rao, AtaiBeckley, which is traded on NASDAQ. I think it's a very, very exciting time to speak about and hear these two in conversation today.
We've had in April an executive order signed by President Trump to fast track the review of the funding and the reclassification of both psilocybin and ibogaine in drug development. Please join me in welcoming both Christian Angermayer and Srinivas Rao to join them in a conversation about AtaiBeckley.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good morning, everybody. First of all, again, thank you indeed to Bryan and Kate. I know Bryan since a long time. He was always amazing, but I'm very, very happy that I think the two most important changes in his life are the love for Kate and discovering psychedelics. Psychedelics tell you t hat at the end, it's all about love. I think it's a very good circle coming together. Yeah. We are here now. You heard about from Bryan already a bit, and I think a lot of you know because you know me and like I'm blasting it out all the time, how amazing psychedelics as a group, psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, but there are many more psychedelics are.
As you know, the one is sort of the hype, or it's not the hype. Hype is the fundamental sort of positivity they have. We also need to get the work done to bring back these psychedelics into the medical world to make them available for people who need it for, in the first instance, various mental health issues. I hope we even can sort of broaden the use cases.
That's what we're doing with AtaiBeckley. Srinivas is my co-founder and our CEO, he's doing the hard work daily. I'm talking about it, he's doing it. I thought it's good if we, for half an hour, give you a little bit an overview. Where are we really with the science, but especially also with the sort of regulatory approval, because the good news is we're very far. Yeah, you're going to have psychedelics sort of with your doctor under medical supervision, hopefully very soon. Thanks, Srinivas, for joining.
Thanks for having me.
Let's maybe start because we're always using these terms interchangeably, psilocybin and then psychedelics, whatever. Maybe order it a bit and sort of what is our pipeline at AtaiBeckley and where are we? Also mention COMPASS because we spin it out with psilocybin.
Yeah. No, perfect. That's a great intro. It's really tough to follow Bryan. Also just realized once again how screwed I am. Flew in from Europe last night, so yeah. All good. All right, so let's kind of jump in here. We're a public company, as Bryan said, and as Christian indicated, so just I would refer people to our SEC filings here. What are we trying to do with AtaiBeckley? A full stop, our mission is really focused on treating mental health and with using basically next-generation approaches. We are focused on a couple of indications. Our leads currently, our clinical leads are focused on treatment-resistant depression as well as social anxiety disorder, also have a very strong interest in substance use disorders. We can talk a little bit about this, but classically, dealing with mental health conditions has involved things like SSRIs.
They take a long time, they don't have a very large effect size, and you're taking them daily. You're getting the side effects from day one, but the efficacy can take some time to actually manifest. We'll talk a little bit about this other element as well, this issue of commercial scalability. The long and short of it is that there exists a paradigm for treating mental health in an interventional psychiatry paradigm. We are designed for that, albeit with psychedelic compounds. That's an important element that's different than psilocybin and LSD, which are more on the first generation side of things. Important for any kind of public company that's in drug development, obviously intellectual property is pretty critical.
Now, I do want to also mention, and I think Bryan had alluded to this as well, and we're doing this, and certainly Christian mentioned it, we're doing this through the FDA-regulated path. There's a number of reasons for that, because people always make this analogy between some of the psychedelic companies and basically the cannabis industry. We're not like that. This is all regulated. We are going for actual labels, as I mentioned, so it'd be treatment-resistant depression or social anxiety disorder. It'd be for the treatment of those things. There is tight control, as Bryan mentioned, on what is in the products. It's like any other prescription medication. You know exactly what you're getting when you get that prescription. It's an important point to highlight. Here's our pipeline currently. This is our clinical stage pipeline. BPL-003 is an intranasal version of 5-methoxy-DMT.
Bryan had mentioned some of the transformative effects that 5-methoxy-DMT had on him. We are developing this for treatment-resistant depression. The reason I was in Europe is we had a company retreat there, and one of the things we had there was a patient who had been in our clinical study and just kind of outlined how transformative this experience had been for her. This is why we're doing what we're doing. It was really both heartrending, but also really motivational and inspirational. There's a process to clinical development. You start out with something called a phase I trial that's in healthy volunteers. You're basically trying to figure out how does it get into the system, how much gets in. The serum concentrations is a function of time. Excuse me, my mouth's all dry here.
We completed that, we went to phase II. Phase II is sort of the intermediate trials. That's in patients. Here, you're looking at assessing the dose, the dose ranging, getting some preliminary reads on efficacy. You go to the agency, you go to the FDA and you say, "Hey, this is my plan now. This is the end of phase EoP2. That's the end of phase II, meaning this is my plan to get this drug into the market. Do you agree or not?" That kicks off a phase III program, and that's PH3 there. That's initiation. These are on the order of two to three years, basically. We're guiding our top line in 2029. That's our lead. Behind that, we have VLS-01. This is also transmucosal, but this is a buccal film form of DMT.
This is like a Listerine strip. You stick it on the inside of your cheek. Also looking at treatment-resistant depression currently in our phase II, probably will transition that to a little bit broader indication of major depressive disorder. We're looking at top-line results for that trial later this year, that would go, we'd have an end of phase II meeting there, go into phase III shortly thereafter. Finally, on the clinical side of things, we have ENP-01. That is our MDMA. Some of you may be familiar with some of the news around MDMA being used in PTSD. There was a company that was developing that. They were a not-for-profit. They definitely struggled with the amount of cash they had. For this reason, they had small trials. They did some other things that were a bit unorthodox.
They did get rejected by the FDA. We're doing something very different. It is R-MDMA. MDMA consists of sort of two molecules that are mirror images of each other. We are taking one of those, and by doing so, we have a very different profile. That's what we're developing. We're looking at social anxiety disorder and some really great data earlier this year. We're going to be announcing our full plans for that shortly. We have earlier-stage assets, discovery, pre-clinical, et cetera. One of which is Ibogaine, something that we're looking into. Oral Ibogaine has a lot of challenges. We're looking into reformulating that. As you can see, we've got some other options here. That's what we're looking for there.
If I may just interrupt.
Of course.
we also want to make it very practical, and I had one discussion, a question which comes up a lot, kind of trip advice. For all the friends here who might have done MDMA ever at a festival or whatever, two important things. The one is if you go back while we're doing MDMA, because it has, or in our case, R-MDMA, because it has very, very good medical properties as well. MDMA is not a psychedelic. It's a different class of drugs. Why I'm saying that is because so many friends come up to me and say, "Oh, you always tell me," which is true, "that psychedelics have a very, very, very benign side effect profile." While you don't actually, I think, don't want to do psilocybin or whatever every weekend, from a medical perspective, you could do that. This is not true for MDMA.
I want to always say that because friends are mixing, or also the public is mixing MDMA very often into the psychedelic group, and then people take away MDMA also has practically no side effects. That is unfortunately not true. I want to tell everybody for the practical use, MDMA is great. MDMA has very, very good upsides in a clinical setting. The personal advice is if you ever do it at a festival, don't do it more than twice a year. Twice a year does not mean the weekends after. It means you should do it with six months in between because, don't want to go too much into detail, but the mechanical process which is happening in your brain with MDMA, which is completely different from psychedelics, can exhaust itself.
We have seen people, look, they did it very often, but who practically then exhaust their serotonin mechanism and have a medical problem, actually. That's not fun. Use it wisely if you do it. It's not a recommendation. Just saying.
Yeah, that was not medical advice. Valid point.
Kind of was.
Oh, yeah. Valid. One of the things that we wanted to do by actually separating the single enantiomer was to actually try and improve on its side effect profile. What we saw was different and potentially better. Of course, we need larger trials to actually demonstrate that more convincingly.
For the connoisseurs in the room, R-MDMA, as Srinivas said, we hope has less side effects than traditional MDMA, actually has a higher psychedelic feeling. Not that I have ever tried it, but it's kind of like what 2C-B is.
Yeah, absolutely. Given that profile, we're looking at different indications. That's what we're really targeting that for. It looks like it could be a particularly interesting compound for trauma-related things. social anxiety disorder has a sort of small T trauma associated with it, with bullying and things like that. That's where we're really headed with that one. In terms of depression, anxiety, et cetera, these are obviously huge issues in the current world, essentially. If you look at the panel there on the left, one in five meet criteria for mental health conditions on a yearly basis. All of these mental health conditions are really on a spectrum, right? You kind of draw an arbitrary line and say, "Hey, on this side is normal, and on this side is abnormal." There's really more of a spectrum.
If you look at things that are sort of subclinical but still severe, still impacting the patient's life, obviously, those numbers are larger. 22 million people with MDD in the U.S., which is pretty crazy. social anxiety disorder, 18 million people. Just really huge numbers, huge toll on the patients themselves, their ability to retain work. Obviously, a big impact on their families, right? Their spouses, in particular their children. This is something that has huge impacts that actually transcend generations, essentially. Really something that we want to try and address. We talked a little bit about the issues here. We're really targeting next-generation therapies and really things that have been optimized in many ways, and I'll get to that in the next slide. Again, faster relief is key. Not everybody responds to every drug. That's just how it is, and that's okay.
We want to see if it's going to work, you have a sense of that really quickly, the next day. That's what we want to see. You're not stuck waiting and suffering for an extended period of time. Durable impact is also key. You don't want something where you have to keep going back. We'll get to that, but that's one of the challenges with Spravato, which is our ketamine. Most people who are in maintenance are getting it every week, which is really untenable for reasons that I'll outline. Root cause is an interesting one. These drugs have a tendency to kind of give you some insights into what's going on. They give you this period of behavioral plasticity, if you will, where you are willing to try new things.
You're able to break some old habits, and I think that's really interesting and potentially driving some of the long-term benefits here. Again, sort of convenient non-chronic treatment is what we're after here. This is how interventional psychiatry has sort of evolved. What is interventional psychiatry? That basically means you go into a doctor's office and get your therapy. This is different than obviously getting a prescription and taking the drug at home. Some of the early forms of this, going way back, are things like ECT. Shock therapy was the original interventional psychiatry in essence. More recently, people are doing things like TMS. This is like where you have those little coils on your head, and basically they induce a magnetic field and current in your brain.
Well, It wasn't on label, so people have been using ketamine in a way to improve mood. Esketamine, this is by J&J, they brought this to market in 2019 and have been very successful with it. There are some challenges with it, which is the frequent dosing. First generation molecules are psilocybin and LSD. These are being developed by Compass and Definium, formerly MindMed, respectively. They are actually almost through with their phase III program, so they'll be on the market sooner. They do have limitations. Psilocybin is an entire day in the clinic. LSD is beyond a whole day in a clinic. Typically these trips are pretty long. How that's going to scale is still TBD. Patients come out of this really exhausted. It's a long day. The site staff come out of it exhausted.
These are the sort of issues we are trying to look at, and we're the leader in this short duration space. We're using dimethyltryptamine and again mebufotenin or 5-methoxy-DMT. Again, way ahead of everybody else in this regard. This kind of gets into a little bit more of the details here with how these different drugs look, how they compare with one another. Spravato, totally paradigm shifting, but many patients are getting it every freaking week. They're going into the doctor's office, they have to check in, get dosed, monitored for a minimum of two hours. If they're medically cleared, they get to go home. They are not driving home. No one's driving home. You've got to get an Uber. You got to get someone in your family to take you. Most people are basically losing, at the minimum, half a day per week.
How many of the people in this audience can take a day off or half a day off from their life on a weekly basis? Typically, the answer is not many. I certainly can't. The patients that are getting Spravato are having to make this decision, it's really untenable decision, "Do I feel better or do I remain an active participant in my life?" Really a tough choice. With the psychedelics, we can improve on that. These, we're talking about redosing every right to 12 weeks. Psilocybin and LSD, as I mentioned, super long and kind of exhausting. Both of our lead assets fit that Spravato paradigm, and that's really the key. There's some other really nice things here. It's very concentrated prescriber base, very good for us in terms of our ability to commercialize by ourselves. Obviously a lot of people have been interested in AtaiBeckley.
As a leader in this space with short duration, there's been a lot of press recently about how successful Spravato has been, a lot of inbound interest. Frankly, the way I always start these conversations is, "Well, we can do this ourselves," and we can. It's a really great position to be in. All right, this is just a very quick comparison across the board here. Whether it's BPL-003 or VLS-01, it's kind of the same thing. There's this trifecta, this rapid onset, durable efficacy. In the case of BPL, we've seen it out to eight weeks. We have no reason to believe there'd be any issue out to 12, and this two-hour dosing window. I'm not going to go through this column by column, but you can see that really no one else meets those criteria. We are in a category of one.
Again, very excited to be here with these programs and having had this opportunity to build this incredible pipeline. Okay, lots of stuff that's coming up. 2025 was kind of a crazy year. We had a lot going on, multiple rounds of fundraising, in large part thanks to our chairman here in helping us pull that together. Actually in-licensed or acquired the company that was developing BPL-003, that's the strategic combination there. Got breakthrough designation, which just expedites things with the FDA, really is very quite helpful. Lots of patents. We became a U.S. company at the end of last year as well, which just facilitates things with fundraising, et cetera. This year and the next promise to be very busy as well. First quarter, we've already had these readouts from our ENP-01 and a phase II meeting, kicking off our phase III program.
Towards the end of this year, Q4 2026, really looking forward to that top-line readout from that VLS-01 phase II-B trial in treatment-resistant depression. Done?
Okay. Yeah, let's do it.
All right.
Let's do one or two questions, if any. It can be about the company, it can be about the science of psychedelics, the practical questions, what you always wanted to know and didn't dare to ask so far. Okay, I see Moritz. I think it works without the micro. If not, I jump down. We have a micro guy. Oh, it works.
My question would be, what's the major difference between, let's say, recreational use of psychedelics and therapeutic use?
Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. There's quite a few things. One of those is what I alluded to. You don't know what you're getting necessarily with recreational products. Maybe a little bit easier with mushrooms. We're obviously not doing that, right? We're looking at two different moieties, 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine and DMT. You don't know what you're getting, and you don't know the dose. The dose is really quite important. Well, the goal of this entire clinical development program is to really quantify the risks and the benefits, right? If you follow this particular protocol, you do exactly what the label indicates. There's this probability you're going to get better, and there's this probability that you're going to get these adverse events. When you're taking something recreationally, you don't know that.
Again, mushrooms probably a little bit better, but even there's a lot of variability in the amount. LSD, 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, DMT, you really don't know what you're getting.
Maybe from the more personal side, I would say, first of all, most people who do it recreationally take much less than sort of the clinical therapeutic doses. My very simple sentence, because I had somebody ask me the last two days, "Actually, I don't even know how much I take," which shows you don't know how much you take. The question is, can you still walk and talk or not? Yeah. When people say, "Oh, no, I was on a hike," which is, by the way, amazing, yeah. It's a fairly low dose, which is, that's my personal opinion, in a country where it's legal, yeah, is an amazing thing to do, but is not the therapeutic dose. That's the dose thing.
The second thing is, that is actually the question I get the most because people are like, "Hey, Christian, are you not a little bit of a hypocrite?" Obviously, at the moment, I'm doing it twice a year in a very proper setting, but technically outside the medical system, because the medical system is not available yet. It's a narcotic, I have to either do it in a country where it's legal, blah. I can tell you, when most likely people in this room are doing it recreationally, and you are sort of in a good state, it's going to be amazing. The people who come in or who will use it in the therapeutic use, they want to cure something. They have a depression, maybe even a severe depression, whatever. I've seen very, very positive cases where the outcome was very positive.
For those people, the sort of trip, the session, can be very, very challenging. I don't like the word bad trip. That's what you would colloquially use for it, because it's only a bad trip if that happens to you when you don't expect it. You are at a festival, you maybe take a little bit too many mushrooms, then the mushroom tells you, "Hey, let's talk about your trauma." It's definitely not the place. Yeah. Then it becomes bad because it doesn't fit at all, then it actually can even sort of have a negative effect. Yeah. While when you're with a therapist or with a clinician, that is, A, told you before that if your underlying root cause, which is often the case for a mental health condition, is trauma, then you get a briefing.
Look, your session might be not easy, but very valuable. You have somebody next to you who can literally, that's where the term trip guide comes from, guide you through it, and that's how it's unfolding. Yeah. I want to do it because we have the time, and I think it's very important because that is really like, I tell you one patient story. In a time, it was actually COVID, a friend reached out. She said she's very depressive. I didn't know that. By the way, it's also like the probability that here in the room, people are with a mental health issue is very high. It's unfortunately still a stigmatized disease, which it shouldn't be. Yeah. It's also somewhere people can function, but they're obviously not well.
This person reached out to me, actually a fairly good friend, I did not know, and she actually opened up and said, "I'm in therapy since a long time. I'm actually getting suicidal, and I need help, and my therapist can't see me because it was in COVID." A very messy situation. Her question was like, "Can we organize a psychedelic session? Because I have no other choice, and you talk about that so much." In this case, I drove with her to the Netherlands, and I sort of helped her because I felt obliged, and I want to, obviously. On the drive, she actually told me, which was fair to say, she wants to tell me that she has been raped for four years continuously between the age of 10 and 14.
Actually, we called her therapist together on the drive, and he was like, "Look, we both," like the patient and the therapist, "did not believe that this was actually the reason for the treatment-resistant depression, but I don't know what it was either." She kind of fairly was honestly saying, "I made my peace with it, but I still don't know why I'm so depressive." I thought, "Look, this is going to definitely be something." While the psychedelics, in this case psilocybin session, she literally regressed in front of me to a 10-year-old child, because unfortunately, that's the hard thing, to cure trauma, you need to relive it. She had to really make peace with it. She was for four hours over and over telling me every weekend.
Came the one point where she's like, "This weekend, my little sister," who was at the time six years old, "is in the room as well, and he's raping her in front of me, and it's my fault, and I deserve to die because I brought this onto my little sister." That was actually the real trauma. That trauma, we know that from trauma research, when something that sort of terribly happens, by the way, to a person of any age, your brain can literally decide, "Look, I wouldn't sort of cope with it now, so I put that away." In her case, it was really she had practically forgotten it. This was kind of like cancer. Cancer is the word, but you know what I mean, like a cancerous thing in her brain, but she didn't even remember it.
That was actually the real source of her depression, no therapy. She was in therapy for years. Was able to bypass the ego to sort of come to the point of real healing. It came all because she blamed herself, which is obviously wrong, I mean, I'm not going to tell you. In this moment, this 10-year-old girl did. Here, in this very moment, why I tell this patient's story is in this very moment, if she had been alone, she could have well made it worse because she was in this state of, "I deserve to be punished for bringing that on my sister." Yeah. Obviously, my job as her guide was to say, "Hey, look at the situation.
You have now the unique choice, kind of travel back in time and rectify the memory," because I don't need to tell you're 10 years old. The only person she didn't blame was the neighbor. Yeah. That what we worked then on an hour. I was repeatedly, literally only saying the sentence, "It's not your fault. It's the neighbor's fault." She came out of it. She went the next day to the police because it was only 15 years ago, in Germany, we anyway have no statute of limitation on it. The guy is in prison now, more importantly, because she remembered everything and made peace with it and realized it was not her fault, yeah, she is not depressive ever since.
A, that shows, I think, well, many things, the positive power of psychedelics, also a little bit how they work because we haven't spoken about it, they reduce the ego and allow you to sort of explore your subconsciousness, I would say your soul. Most importantly, I deeply believe that for the medical part of it, for the healing part of it, if people seek healing, you need a clinician next to you because these can be very deep experiences, yeah, depending what is what, as you know, I would say God or your soul wants to tell you, it can be very challenging, it's worth it to do it. Yeah. That's why I think it's the right thing in the medical system.
I think that it brings up a really good point. Why are we doing this in the medical system? I mentioned some of the benefits, right? There's clarity around what you're getting. The other piece is that this is unfortunately not a unique story. I mean, we keep hearing these kinds of stories that are incredibly heart-rending, going through these clinics and everything else is pretty financially difficult for many people, right? I mean, it's several thousand dollars every time you have to do this. By putting it into the medical system, and seeking reimbursement from insurers, we can offer it to many more people. That's really the objective here is to get this to as many people as we can that are suffering silently.
One very quick question, then we hand over to two more colleagues, one more is good.
That therapeutic relationship, a guide, a sitter, a therapist. When you're studying this compound, is there a therapist on hand? Is it a psychiatrist? What sort of support is involved in that journey?
Yeah, it's a great question. What we have currently, the FDA's had some guidance on this, clearly it's in a psychiatrist's office, right? There's someone medically trained that is within the office. The FDA currently does mandate someone else in the room with the person. That can be sort of different backgrounds. It doesn't necessarily have to be a therapist, though, typically that person is. It's a little bit of a strange place at the moment that those folks are not really giving true therapy. They are certainly helping the patient and supporting the patient, not unlike what Christian was getting at, right? Just making sure the patient's doing okay. Typically, when patients start to get agitated, they'll rip off their eye mask. They want to kind of reground.
It's really kind of getting them settled down a bit and helping them breathe and kind of settle it back down. There is some integration work that it's basically safety focused, but it's integration in the sense that the patient does talk about what happened. Things do come up, and if something like what just happened with your friend, obviously they need to see a therapist, and that's something that would be arranged at that point.
It is like to put it in context, it's a long discussion we have with the FDA. There is, I would say, a pragmatic answer how it will be, and then sort of the scientific answer. In the scientific context with the FDA, you want to show that your drug standalone works. It's a very messy thing when you say, "I have one drug," and then you need to combine it, for example. That's why also you don't do combination trials. It's not really good. You want to show your drug works. The amazing thing with psychedelics is that their effect is so good and so strong that even if you only do sort of a light touch assistance, yeah, they already result extremely well.
My personal belief is if you look at the data, which is spectacular, we're delivering, the real-life effect will be even better because obviously you should have therapy before or after. By the way, I talk to all our clinicians who will use it. These are good people. It's not like something magical like what I told you. I could do it because I hopefully am a good person, and you know what you do in that moment. We cannot do that in a trial because it would kind of open then the question in the case of, for example, my friend, the FDA would say, "Well, great, she was healed, but was it now psilocybin or because you are so amazing, Christian?" You can't split that out.
No, it's important to understand, but it's great because the great news is, I think psychedelics in real life will do much better, actually, because obviously the people in the room will give more guidance, whatever. We can't do that in a trial to not just mess up the data, because we can't say what comes from what.
Yeah, it's a good point because with esketamine, Spravato, when that was brought to market, there was really no therapy. I mean, esketamine, I would say it's sort of psychedelic adjacent in a way, but things do come up, right? Things can come up when you're taking those drugs. Interestingly enough, in the real world, so to speak, a lot of clinics are in fact combining that with forms of therapy. So-called KAP or ketamine-assisted therapy or KAP. Yep. That is something that's happening in the real world.
We need to close here for this session, not for the state. If you have any more questions on psychedelics, Srini's around, I'm around. You know where to find me. Thank you so much, I hand over to Max for the next session.
Thanks, all.
Thank you so much, both of you. Really think the work that you do is truly impressive. Thank you also, Christian, for sharing this moving story. It really showcases how powerful psychedelics in the right environment and under the right supervision can be. As we think about longevity as a broader topic, right, we all know that it's not just about increasing lifespan, but it's about increasing healthspan. The next company that we're going to be listening to is Cambrian. Cambrian's been founded by Christian and James Peyer. James is going to join us on stage. He's the CEO of Cambrian. He is really in the drug development space to help people increase their healthspan, if you really want to summarize it in one brief sentence, we all know that at some point, there's going to be a drug that will be able to cure aging.
Cambrian is on a mission to find that drug. James, please come on stage, he's also joined by Lauren Van Nuland, who is the CEO of Apeiron. Thank you so much, both, today.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you, Max, for the kind introduction. Psychedelics and Christian, always a tough act to follow.
Longevity, I think, is equally exciting. Thank you for joining us, James. For those of you who don't know James is one of the leading voices in longevity science. Longevity is seemingly everywhere. There's clinics, there's labs, there's podcasts, there's protocols. Maybe to kick this off, James, what does longevity truly stand for, and when are we actually going to be able to see meaningful breakthroughs in this space?
I think just about everyone here saw Bryan's presentation an hour or so ago, where he called out for, "Hey, there will be this time point," and maybe it's 2029, maybe it's 2038 or whatever, where we will have drugs that can target and reverse aging. What would those drugs be, right? What do we mean when we say longevity? I like to tell the story about a hero to everyone in this room who's interested in longevity. Just as a show of hands, who is excited about the aging biology, the longevity space here? Yeah, almost everybody. It's become a big thing. Have any of you ever heard of Rich Miller? Probably not. Rich is a professor at the University of Michigan who got funding in like 2004 to run the first studies to try to find drugs that slow aging in mice.
All of the excitement that exists right now is because of the work that Rich did, where he found rapamycin, acarbose, all of these other things that people are taking now came from Rich's studies of how could we fund the first things in mice. I think what we're experiencing now is this kind of gap that exists between the work that Rich and a bunch of other academic scientists started, showing that actually aging is changeable, and we can do it in mice. The transition between the mouse work and creating human-targeted drugs that target those same aging pathways, it takes for fucking ever. My take on what this longevity space is right now is that it's really two things. The thing that I care about is sometimes called geroscience, right, which is what the academics call themselves.
Which is somewhere in clinical trials, and we have a few drugs that I'll talk a bit about, there are drugs that target these core pathways of aging, but they're all still in clinical trials. When they come out, they're going to change our lives in a huge way. Then there's longevity as a wellness category, which is, until those drugs come out, what can you do? What are the imperfect solutions that might help us today? Nothing is going to be really moving the needle in a giant way. I like to. I mean, I'm a drug developer, so I'm constantly grumpy.
I like to think that we put way too little attention and focus on the stuff that's going to change our lives, but that's not here yet, and try to find the short-term solutions instead, but the short-term solutions are deeply imperfect. If you're excited about this space, the trick is to watch what's coming in the clinic, what's coming out of the scientific realm, and really going to be tested in the right way. Anyways, that's my what is longevity.
James, unfortunately, we don't have forever. What can we see coming out?
As Max kind of mentioned, as a background, I'm a mouse geneticist by training, and for the past about 12 years, I've had the pleasure of working with a whole bunch of different scientists who have made discoveries about aging biology to try to turn those into drugs. I've started about 20 different biotech companies, about a dozen of them under the banner of Cambrian. The principle there was you plant a bunch of different seeds, right? Because 90% of things that work in mice don't work in humans and never will. You plant a bunch of different things that work in mice and then figure out which ones have the highest probability of working in humans.
What we've found at Cambrian over the last about seven years is that the highest probability of translating positive results from mice to humans was going to be in resetting metabolism. As many of you guys might know, metabolism, all of us, from the time that we're about 20 until we die, our metabolism declines every single year in a pretty predictable way. That's driven by a few different pathways, but there are three big, big, big ones. One is mitochondrial decline. Second is that our big sensor of energy levels that coordinates our responses to exercise, it's called AMPK, declines. The third is mTOR. This is the target of this drug rapamycin, which I'm sure many people in this group have heard about.
Cambrian focused in on those three pathways, and we've now got drugs that are actually midway through human trials that are the first ones to safely target those pathways and kind of reset them from their sort of aged state back to a youthful state. I think those, and there are more companies we could talk about, but I think that these are the furthest along ones that get me most excited.
Within that subcategory, what are you most excited about, particularly AMPK? Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Sure. The AMPK story is the one that I get really pumped about. We all kind of feel it, right? When you're 50 and you try to eat a whole pizza, your body doesn't behave like it does when you were in college and you ate a whole pizza. That's because our metabolism has declined. Without going into too big the details, we've known for 20 years that if you could activate AMPK with a pill or genetically, that you could get the benefits of Zone 2 cardiovascular exercise without needing to do the exercise first. We've known this in mice. It's been tested in a number of other organisms, but there's never been a drug to do it. Every single pharma company tried and failed to build an AMPK activator.
The reason that they failed is that they didn't understand how AMPK was actually naturally regulated in the body. Over the last five years, we actually found this drug. It's got one of these boring technical names. It's called ATX-304. It'll have a real name eventually. We've now brought it through its first human trials to show that you can safely activate AMPK, and the way that we did that is by activating AMPK and mitochondrial function together. If you have one go up but not the other, the cell goes out of balance, and the cell going out of balance will cause toxicity in the cell. If you have mitochondria go up but not AMPK, it has a similar kind of imbalance. Our bodies bring both of these up together, both of them down together as we age.
By having a single molecule that takes both AMPK and mitochondria up together, we seem to have found this solution where at any level of this drug in an animal, we've done mice, we've done dogs, and now we're kind of going up, kind of turning up the dimmer switch on metabolism from dim to bright in humans, that it seems to be extremely safe.
A story I love to tell is that I was talking with the scientist who discovered this molecule, I was digging way in to the supplementary figures that he had published 10 years ago, I pointed at it and I'm like, "Thomas, do you see that when you give a whole bunch of this drug, the mice just start losing a ton of weight?" He's like, "Yeah, it's so annoying because I want to study the role of AMPK in diabetes because that's what my academic lab publishes around. When we gave too much of the drug, the mice started losing all this weight.
I sent the paper in to a journal and they were like, 'Oh, well, you just lost the weight, and that's why the diabetes is getting better.' I had to lower the dose, and that's how all my publications have been. For the past now three years, we've realized that this AMPK and mitochondrial activator is going to be an amazing obesity drug, probably better than the GLP-1s. Do you want me to kind of explore the why?
Yeah, go a bit. Are you essentially saying that this is exercise in a pill? That's a real thing?
The short version is yes. If we ask the question, why does the body get more healthy in response to exercise? What does exercise do, right? What exercise does is it depletes the ATP, the fuel in our cells. Our muscles have energy. If I go for a run or for a bike ride or for a swim, weightlifting, whatever, it's going to deplete the ATP in my cells. That depletion of ATP sends a signal to the cell, "Hey, we're out of energy. We have to mobilize calories from fat. We have to turn on the mitochondria to produce new ATP. We have to pull sugar in from the blood to replace the sugar that we're going to use to make new energy." The sensor that coordinates all of that response to exercise is AMPK.
If you could turn on AMPK and have it coordinate this exercise response, you don't need to do the ATP depletion first. In fact, our bodies have this system called ATP synthase that allows it to sort of do what we call futile cycling, where it makes ATP and then turns ATP back into ADP if it needs to burn off extra energy. It's not like you end up with even dysregulating the cell by making too much ATP. You can actually have mitochondrial and AMPK activation safely as a pill, which is now what we've got going into phase II trials.
It's really exciting. Can you tell us more about your rapamycin program as well?
Sure. Maybe one thing before leaving AMPK, as I mentioned, we did this weight loss experiment where you ramp up metabolism in the mice, and you get this dramatic weight loss. An important feature here is because it's exercise-like and unlike the GLP-1s, which are sort of diet-like, when you ramp up the level of metabolic activity, you see this sort of GLP-1like weight loss in obese mice and the same in dogs, but it actually isn't accompanied by any decrease in food intake. Food actually goes up while weight is going down. Because you're activating the energy in the muscle, all of the weight that's lost is fat mass and the lean mass is actually protected, which I think is going to be a key thing, especially as we think about what is the future of weight control medications.
We want to be tackling the things that are going to deliver long-term healthy weight loss, and that looks more like good diet with exercise than extreme fasting, which is sort of what the GLP-1s are. Anyway, that's the last bit about the AMPK story.
Sure. On to rapamycin then.
Again, just curious about this group here, how many of you in the audience know about rapamycin and mTOR already? Okay. There's a lot of folks here. Do you guys know what rapamycin is FDA approved for? That's right, organ transplantation. It's an immunosuppressive that was approved to give to patients getting kidney transplantation. At lower doses, so lower levels of exposure than you use for kidney transplantation, is what Rich Miller and colleagues used to extend healthy lifespan in mice. For 15 years, the giant question in the mTOR field has been, how could we make a version of rapamycin that gave the pro-longevity effects that you see in mice, but without the immunosuppressive effects that you see when the dose is just a tiny bit higher? A group at MIT in 2012 discovered that rapamycin actually has two targets.
There are two mTOR complexes, complex 1 and complex 2. If you inhibit just complex 1, you get all the longevity benefits of rapamycin, but if you hit both complexes 1 and 2, that's how you get immunosuppression. A huge arc of my career over the past 10 years has been to try to find variants of rapamycin that could only hit 1 and not 2. We did this deal with Novartis four years ago, where they weren't that interested in playing with their chemistry around rapamycin, and we were, we bought all of it and cracked the code on a rapamycin analog. We changed some of the chemistry of rapamycin and found a version that hits just one and not two, and showed that it still has these longevity benefits, improved heart health, immune function, muscle function, cancer prevention.
At any dose tested, and now we've gone all the way up through monkeys here, we have no immunosuppression at any dose. This MIT group from 2012, it's now finally validated with a molecule. The place that we've taken this, we've actually got two programs that have spun off from this discovery. The first I am really excited about, which is there is a code that the World Health Organization creates. Everyone knows at the FDA, you have to run phase I, phase II, phase III clinical trials, and those have to be targeted towards some disease, right? Obesity, 5% + weight loss, treatment-resistant depression that Srini was talking about, cancer, whatever. There is no disease for aging yet. A few years ago, the World Health Organization created a code in what's called an ICD-11 for a thing called decreased intrinsic capacity.
It was lobbied to be put there by a bunch of scientists studying the biology of aging. Now there's a U.S. government program under ARPA-H, which is like DARPA, but for health, if you haven't heard of it. This ARPA-H program is trying to create a pathway for improving intrinsic capacity in elderly individuals as an FDA approvable endpoint. We won a grant from ARPA-H that's paying for all of the clinical development of our mTOR inhibitor to test whether we can increase intrinsic capacity in healthy, lean, elderly individuals with our rapamycin analog. That's, I think, really cool first story.
The second story on mTOR, which is a little bit out of my wheelhouse, maybe more in this group just a little bit, is that there were a couple of scientists. Rapamycin, in addition to being used for immunosuppression, it is used as a mild anti-cancer drug. It is okay. It is not curative, but it does a decent job for some cancers. A group of scientists was using it for a type of tumor that occurs in the skin. They had a side observation in this paper that the appearance of the skin around the tumor, the age spots, the thickness of the skin, all improved when rapamycin was applied topically. This made some compounders really excited about like, "Oh, hey, we can put rapamycin in skin creams," and people can buy those for the past couple of years.
It got us excited because we were like, "Oh, well, we have all these novel safe rapamycin analogs. Maybe we could register one of them as a cosmetic ingredient and go run clinical trials for skin health." I recruited a team from Allergan, the company that brought Botox to market, and handed them one of these compounds 18 months ago, and they ran clinical trials on the skin showing improvements in elasticity and in collagen deposition that were better than retinol in skin health. That actually launched onto the market last year. Actually that was just in about a dozen dermatologists' offices, and it is now actually available for purchase as of two weeks ago.
This is a kind of cool experiment of what if we took brand-new longevity molecules that take forever to go through phase I, II, III trials if we are going to take them systemically, but there is sort of a pathway to treating topically on the skin that you can do in two years instead of 10, and see how the world responds to that. That is a second one that I think is pretty fun.
Did you bring any samples for the crowd?
I did not. I would love to get feedback on this. If anyone is interested, you can go to the website. The product is called Re-Q, R-E-Q, and the website is reqhealth.com. You can tell me how this consumer team is doing. They call me up when they need advice on mTOR biology, but I'm letting them do the marketing.
Great. Final question before we move into some Q&A. We heard Bryan mention earlier 2039. What's your view?
As hopefully should be apparent from the last, I don't know, 15 minutes, whatever we believe is the possibility in science today, we're going to have to work fucking hard to get there. If being philosophical for a moment, I like to think about what the inflection point is going to be. Have we already passed it? Is it in the future? I actually think the key inflection point for this geroscience longevity space, it's a little bit out in the future. It's going to be the first time that we have a drug approved that truly targets a key pathway in the biology of aging and prevents disease in something that everyone in this room would take, not just people with obesity or with depression or whatever. The story that I always come to is the story of Magic Johnson.
Probably most people in this room have heard of or know who Magic Johnson is. A star basketball player, then in 1992 was diagnosed with HIV, which he got from a blood transfusion. In 1992, HIV was a death sentence, right? Magic Johnson had an estimated three to five years to live. Between 1992 and 1995, AZT, the first anti-HIV therapy, came onto the market. That gave him a few extra years. It was a deeply imperfect drug, but it gave enough time for a second version, a second antiviral to come on, that gave him a few more extra years. Then another compound targeting a different pathway that was combined with the antiretroviral to give him a few extra years.
Now we don't even use AZT, that first molecule anymore, but you can take a cocktail of pills once a day to manage HIV as a chronic condition and live a completely normal life. The AZT moment for the aging biology space is going to trigger this positive feedback loop, and what that compound is going to be and when it comes, that's going to be the key question. I think it could be this AMPK activator, it could be an mTOR inhibitor, it could be another molecule. As far as things moving through the clinic, we're looking at the start of that sort of virtuous cycle of innovation happening sometime in the next five years. I'm pretty, yeah.
Well, that's incredible news.
If we do it.
Really exciting time to be alive. I think we have time for one or two questions in the audience.
Hi, James. Question for you. Can you quantify how this ATX candidate drug amplifies AMPK compared to the very imperfect solutions that we have right now, like metformin or MOTS-c, SS-31, so the audience has a frame of reference?
AMPK is a really complicated molecule. The way I like to talk about it is once you get into the guts of a cell's metabolism, everything affects everything else. Take a look at metformin, for example. Metformin has been called an AMPK activator for years, but it's not really an AMPK activator because when you poison the mitochondria or you damage the mitochondrial's connection with the cell, AMPK gets turned on as a panic mechanism. Most AMPK activators that we have today are being turned on as a panic mechanism because the metabolism of the cell is being destabilized in some other way. There have only been two compounds that directly activate AMPK.
One of them is a class of molecules that the pharmas tried to take forward, which turned out to be toxic, and the other is where we have a lot of this sort of exercise mimetic effects in mice from. That's a compound called AICAR, A-I-C-A-R, which is a variant of AMP. Kind of the ATP becomes ADP, becomes AMP, and that's the trigger. That is the sensor that AMPK is designed to sense. The problem with AICAR is that it only lives in your blood for about five minutes before it's gone. If you wanted it to work at all in rats, you had to put it to them at super high doses in the water, and they had to just be taking enormous amounts of it all the time. People tried human trials of this, including putting people on a 12-hour IV of the stuff.
Still didn't work. This is why the mission for me is how could you find the first true AMPK activator that actually directly activates AMPK, and that's, I think, what's unique about this molecule.
Okay. I think one more.
The question for those who might not have heard is why not just go after the telomeres, right? The ends of the chromosomes that shorten at every cell division and eventually lead to cellular exhaustion. 24 years ago, when I got into this field, telomere shortening was the leading hypothesis for what you could do to benefit aging. I actually pitched my PhD thesis on restoring telomeres as an anti-cancer approach. One of the 20 companies that I've started was actually with the person who first immortalized human cells by giving them extra telomeres, a guy named Jerry Shay at UT Southwestern. What we found is that telomere shortening is not upstream of much of the age-related decline that we see in humans. That at the end of our lives, most of our cells will have their telomeres in really good shape.
It is only in people that have chronic cytomegalovirus infections that they have severely shortened telomeres, that there's a trend, a decrease in telomeres as we age, but it never reaches really a critical point. Even most cellular senescence is driven by inflammation, not telomere loss. That was one of the seeds that we planted that did not make the cut for what would be the first aging drug.
All right. I think we're at time. Thank you so much, James, for taking the time and sharing your perspectives.
Thanks, everyone.
I think we're going to have a quick 15-minute break now, then we'll resume on the sports one's up. No. Yep.
No break. Sorry. No break.
Get a coffee. We make it very quick because I don't want to lose you. You can also get a coffee. Let's make it two to three minutes, please come back because now it's the main session, because as I said yesterday, in my speech, at the reception, because he is really the main person, which is Maxi, Maximilian Martin, my co-founder for the Enhanced Games, and our CEO, and he will give you all the insights beyond the sport. I think you have heard a lot already about our sporting side, he's going to give you the insights about the business side. We're running late, we start in two to three minutes, so if you want, get your Enhanced coffee or the cookies. Cookies are not good, for today, it's okay. Please, in two to three minutes, we start.
I'm going to be up to welcome him then. Thanks.
Okay. Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. We are starting in one minute, grab your coffee, take it with you, please take your seat. I do it one more time.
Okay, I need to work on my natural authority. If you could move back to your seat, that would be highly appreciated, because I want to give Maxi the forum he deserves. Okay. Let's start. Again, he doesn't need an introduction. I did it yesterday properly, but I'm really proud of him. Our CEO, Maximilian Martin, and he's joined by Curry Baker, our analyst from Guggenheim, who will moderate the session with him. Get to stage.
Hi again.
Everyone. This on?
Yeah.
Great. I guess we'll talk the business side of things, Max. Maybe you can start high level. The business doesn't really fit neatly into a box. You've got a cutting edge science, direct to consumer business, live events, sporting, Red Bull, Formula 1 come to mind as we think about your business. Can you maybe help us frame how you think about the business, the flywheel you're trying to create for investors maybe as a starting point?
Absolutely. Thank you so much, great to have everyone here, maybe you all know a little bit already what Enhanced does. To really summarize it in a nutshell, what are we trying to pursue is to give people around the world the opportunity to live enhanced. We have two businesses that facilitate that. The one is the reason why we are all here today, which is our sporting business, the Enhanced Games. In the Enhanced Games, as you know, the main disruptive thing that we do is we allow athletes to take advantage of all the performance-enhancing science that we see in other industries happening left, right, and center, we now finally incorporate it into sports. Athletes are allowed to utilize FDA-approved substances under a doctoral supervision in their preparation and during competition.
The second big thing that we do in sports is we start paying the athletes very well. If you look at the NBA, the NFL, literally every other sport, athletes are paid properly. Just in Olympic sports, athletes never got properly rewarded. The Olympics don't pay athletes at all. The only way that athletes get paid is by their national governing bodies. Depending which country you are from, it varies. We properly pay our athletes now at the games. Some of you might have heard already we have a prize pool of $25 million for 42 athletes, that we have equitable pay, the women get paid exactly the same as the men, that is something we are truly proud of. Sports in itself has been the core idea of Enhanced and why we founded the company three years ago.
What we learned through sports is that for the 42 athletes that we will be seeing competing tonight, we have already changed their lives, that is beautiful. 42 people is not enough. There is so much that we learn through the work that we do with these athletes that we want to take it and share it with the world, so that not just these athletes have the opportunity to live enhanced, but also everyone. This is where our second part of the business comes in, the Live Enhanced consumer platform. If you ask yourself, what does it mean to be enhanced? It is very subjective. It is something different for every single one of us. For some of us, it might be just taking multivitamins and doing cold plunge and sauna, on the other side of the spectrum, what you would have is injectable hormone therapies.
Where you sit on that spectrum is entirely up to you. What we did with the product suite in the Live Enhanced consumer platform is we tried to cover as much of the spectrum as possible. What we have is two certain categories, I would say. One is supplements that are OTC available, literally anyone could buy them in a CVS, et cetera. There we have stacks that are focused on certain objectives. One is exclusively focused on longevity. That is the Longer stack. The other is the Stronger stack that is focused on strength and recovery, all OTC. On the prescription side, what we have is a variety of substances ranging from hormone replacement therapy for women to TRT for men, certain other longevity prescription drugs, also new and big peptides. All of these substances are all FDA approved and regulated.
This is the product suite that we've built through which we want to give people the opportunity to live Enhanced. Both of these businesses themselves are great businesses to own, but then to the flywheel that you just talked about, Curry, is that we own them under the same brand makes us truly special, particularly for two reasons. The first one is everything on the product offering side is going to continue to be at the top of the market in what you can purchase. Every athlete, when they get Enhanced, they get personalized protocols based on who they are as an individual and what event they're participating in. Think about it like this. Some people in the audience might like milk, others might be lactose intolerant. Depending on what your physiology is, that implicates what your protocol looks like.
For the athletes, which event are they doing? Are they running the 100 m or are they snatching two times their body weight above their head? Depending on what event they participate in, there are certain protocols to help them excel at both. This is the approach that we take from the sports world to the consumer platform. Are you 25 training for your first marathon or are you 65 looking for more energy to take your grandkids to the playground and play with them? Depending on who you are as an individual and what your certain objectives are, there's a personalized protocol that can help you become the best version of yourself. That's the first big one. We really take all of the work that we do with the athletes and make that knowledge that we generate there accessible to the people.
Second big thing is, if you just think about the craze that we see in longevity, and we've heard James and Lauren talk about this just now, the peptide market, specifically in the U.S., is already $85 billion large. At the end of the day, what we're selling is FDA-approved substances. The question is, who's going to be the leading force that will capture and dominate that market? I believe through all of the work that we do in sports, through all of the capital that we invest into science and the medical monitoring of the athletes and their learnings that we then make accessible in the personalization approach of those FDA-approved substances, is really how we're going to establish us as the leaders of the space.
The goal is to capture of that $85 billion market, 5%, 10%, maybe even more, as we continue to build out the Enhanced brand.
Thanks. Maybe we could talk a little bit about more how you see the performance medicine category evolving over the next few years and how you're positioned to win.
Lovely question. I think performance medicine is something that we've seen already like kind of pick up over the past year or two. If you take a look at it on a broader perspective, how does medicine overall change over time? When we think about traditional medicine, it's all about you have a disease, something is wrong with you, and you want to get back to your baseline. The space of performance medicine is all about the space of beyond. Letting science help you to go into a space that you otherwise typically couldn't access. It lets you tap into another pocket of potential that we otherwise just wouldn't be able to assess. That I think is extremely exciting.
If you look at what's happening, or at least my social media feed, is all about people injecting themselves with unregulated substances that they order from China as research chemicals to just seek for some benefits that they hope to achieve. We see people doing this because they're so desperate to get more out of themselves already, and the price they're willing to pay for that is with their health. That performance medicine category, I think people are already investing in it. People are more proactive around, what can I do already now and not just when I turn 65 years, 70 years to think about my healthcare.
The problem with all of the glorification of these unregulated substances that we see today is that people are going to implicate themselves with health risks, which is completely unnecessary because all of the substances that actually give you those benefits are the same performance enhancements that are banned in sports. These are substances that are regulated by the FDA, can be prescribed to you by doctors, compounded in the U.S., and then sold to consumers. We're having this approach to give people access to those products in a safe and supervised way to think about their healthcare differently and take their body, which is literally the only thing that we all have in common, right? We're all born in different countries.
We have different religious beliefs, different political beliefs, but where we're all the same is that we all have a body and time that's been given us on this planet. What we're doing is we're giving people all of the tools to make the most out of their physiology, out of their health, to get the most out of the time that we have on this planet.
Great. Maybe we're at the game, so let's drill down a little bit more on that. First, how the games fit into the overall business strategy. I kind of think of it as like the engine or the fuel. Secondly, how you're going to monetize the games. I think you expect to make money on the sports side. This year I think it's primarily sponsorship. Can you maybe talk about the sponsors that you have, the pipeline, what's bringing those sponsors in?
Yeah. From a sporting perspective, what we thought about is these sports have been the ones that we do track, swimming, and weightlifting, have gotten on the stage globally once every four years. We want to take this system that the people love every four years into a system that we can do it like a league. Like the MLB has more than 153 games per season per team, what can we create for these sports and these athletes to be out there more? At the end of the day, what we're trying to do with sports is to make it an entertainment business. In entertainment, we do through content creation around it. Everything that we think about on the sporting side is content creation for us.
We think about this as a content pyramid de facto, the Enhanced Games are at the pinnacle of that pyramid. Think about it like this as in what WrestleMania is for WWE. We have other layers of content like SmackDown, Raw, et cetera, that we produce throughout the year. The games are going to happen for now in an annual cadence, we are continuing to break world records on a singular basis. We will be doing documentary style exploration of other sports that are maybe a little bit longer. Think about like the Ironman, think about a marathon, think about long distance cycling. What can we achieve in these sports through the help of science? Everything on the sporting side becomes this content creation machine that is running 365, 24/7. We monetize all of this content predominantly through sponsorship, as you say.
We have already three big sponsors that came in that already greatly contributed to the financials of hosting this event. What is very important for us and the sponsors is that we align with them from a principle basis on what we're trying to achieve. All of the sponsors that partner with us, and you've all seen the headlines, you've all heard the criticism about us and what we're doing, so it's been quite challenging, just honestly, to find, like the Nikes of the world, they wouldn't touch us, which is okay, but we have found such amazing other companies that in their own fields change and disrupt the systems that we previously thought aren't disruptable. One example that I want to call out, for example, is our content creator platform, ZOOP.
ZOOP is our presenting partner. ZOOP is all about changing for content creators, literally what we're doing for athletes. What we're doing for athletes is we're putting them at the center of it, and we're starting to pay them because they are the backbone of the ecosystem that we've built. Similar situation, actually, in social media. If you look at Meta, through Instagram and Facebook, pays roughly 50% of their top line to creators. TikTok, actually in some countries, doesn't even pay creators at all. The approach that ZOOP has is to put the creator at the center of it, pay 80% of their top line to the creators, and also have the fans that actually consume the content, right? We heard this, Bryan speaking about this before. We are all doom scrolling. We're consuming so much content that others are capitalizing on.
ZOOP is a model for viewers that are actually doing the valuable thing in terms of consuming the content. They're rewarding them as well. We're so much aligned in terms of how we're thinking about the disruption and putting the people that make the ecosystems work at the financial center of it. We have a similar analogy, and I should be quick because we have a lot to get through, for Rezolve, our AI partner, who's helping us with the AI infrastructure of our consumer platform in terms of learning as much as we can from the analysis of the consumers that are on the protocols to constantly improve our prescription guidelines for consumers. Lastly, Rumble, another streaming platform that we've partnered with.
With Rumble, the ability we have is we actually, on the advertising side for our consumer product, through Rumble's advertising center, we have a much more efficient customer acquisition tool than we would have on other platforms like Meta, et cetera. With all of the big sponsors that we have, we are so much operationally aligned with them that we not just benefit from the financial contributions they do to our organization, but really because there are so much synergies with us partnering on an operational front as well.
Going forward beyond these games, how do you think about media rights, hospitality, ticketing, and widening the net for sponsors?
In year one, we're actually not monetizing on all of these other traditional sporting revenues that you see. Why is that the case? For media rights specifically, we decided not to sell them because we wanted to have the content as accessible as possible around the world. This is also a product, we said this yesterday in the press conference, that is not built for television. By designing the Enhanced Games, we took these ancient sports that are happening now in a four-year cycle to 2026 through social media. Every event that we have is shorter than a minute, specifically, so it fits perfectly into a Reel or a TikTok and can be amplified through socials. I actually think that more than 90%, or probably 99% actually, of our overall views and people that we reach, we're going to reach through a handheld device.
We kept this in mind for designing the games from the beginning, so we actually didn't produce it. While the games themselves are going to be amazing for all of us as we're attending live, they're going to be even more amazing when you watch them on a screen somewhere, because that's what we produced it for. Selling our media rights was not an option because we didn't want to give them exclusively. We also now have more than 180 creators that are on-site with a global audience of more than 375 million people that they're reaching through the content that they produce.
We invite the creators in, we distribute our content globally, and that's how we create so much more awareness of the underlying thing, that enhancements under the right medical and clinical supervision are not just helping your performance and your health, but are also safe. We are focusing so much more on the reach in the beginning than monetizing and a quick buck on selling our media rights. This is really a long-term investment that we're making into the own growth of our organization. Then in terms of ticketing, we have 2,500 people here. All of you are here because you're purposefully here.
It's not that we gave away some tickets for free, but everyone who is here has a reason to be here, a reason because they've been part of us becoming who we are today, a reason because they can help us amplify our message to the world. I think we're going to keep it like that because selling 2,500 tickets now is not significantly going to change our top line, but the experience that we can create for the people that come here, the feeling that we leave them with once they leave the stadium, that's really what matters. It's really about us building a sustainable brand that then has the opportunity through the consumer business to capitalize on it.
One thing, and then I'll shut up and promise, is that while we are not going to break even though on the sporting side with our sponsors in this year, we believe that the sports business in itself can be a cash flow positive engine for us so that it spends off cash rather than consuming it.
Maybe on the athletes, obviously key to the games today. Could you maybe talk about the program that you have, the benefits, the pay, why athletes are so excited to be a part of Enhanced? Also, do you see the roster growing materially beyond what we're going to witness later today and also the slate of events.
Yeah
Going forward?
The athletes, I'm so proud of every single one of them. First of all, I really want to say this. What these athletes have been through in their prep and how they've been taken through the mud in the media, you really have to give it to them. The dedication they put today, day after day, saying no to friends, saying no to families. We had some guys that were in the training camp in Abu Dhabi while we had a war there that had their wives pregnant at home that decided to stay to continue to train because they also believe so much in the bigger mission of Enhanced. It's just unbelievable, and I'm so proud of every single one of them and can't wait to see them compete. Why the athletes are so attracted to this is because it's all about transparency and fair play.
Doping has been an issue in sports since doping regulations were introduced. There are studies that show that 43% of Olympians admit to using banned substances, and only 1% of those are getting caught. What that means is every other person on a podium is a cheater. Every other person that takes home gold is a cheater. There's actually, since the London Olympics in 2012, 50 medals that got reassigned because the testing improved and people got tested positive, but they got away with it in 2012. No one cares. The people are still considered the ones to have taken home the gold.
For the first time, the athletes, even the ones that are natural, they love it that they know what they're up against because for the first time the playing field has been leveled and you actually know who you're competing against and the guesswork is taken out. The medical enhancements that we offer them are also truly inspiring for them. Many of our athletes have never taken those before. Many of our athletes, for example, the swimmers, many of them had shoulder surgeries that they couldn't get treated like everyone else of us would've gotten treated because their treatment would've included substances that would've gotten them banned from competition. They had to suffer more to get through injuries that were induced by the sport to keep up with the sporting world, which is ridiculous in my opinion. That's what they're excited about.
What we also created is much more beyond medical enhancements. We've created an environment, the Enhanced Performance Team, where athletes that are typically in individual sports, part of a team environment, where we have some of the best coaches in the world, access to the best recovery facilities in the world. Every individual athlete gets their meal cooked based on what their protein intake is, what their carb intake is, what they specifically need. Physio's available all the time. Literally, we also have mental support for the athletes to coach their mental health and have a competition mindset. There's so much more that makes a great athletic performance than just enhancements. This is really what we've created for them in this team setup.
The athletes, even the ones that are non-enhanced, they still get benefit of all the medical screenings, the medical investment that we do into them. Actually, in Abu Dhabi for the training camp, which was four months, we invested more than $100,000 into each athlete, into their own health protocol. $25 thousand a month per athlete, even if you don't enhance. That's really what the athletes are so excited about, that for the first time in their lives, they get the appreciation that they deserve. Over time, I think the roster is going to change. We've signed some athletes for just the Enhanced Games 2026. Other athletes are on three-year contracts with us. I think that over time what we'll be seeing is that the average performance of a member or of an athlete in the Enhanced Games is constantly going to increase.
I think that in a few years from now, every single event that we will have at the Enhanced Games is much better on with an average performance of the athletes than any Olympic final.
Okay. I think the last one for me before Q&A is the enhanced, direct-to-consumer platform that you guys have. Could you maybe talk about how it's differentiated, the consumer experience products and maybe your target demo there?
Yeah. Good question. What is truly important for us is make enhancements accessible to people. Now, getting enhanced is de facto nothing new, right? We're based in New York. We have longevity clinics popping out of the ground left, right, and center. There's some protocols that you can buy in New York in certain longevity clinics for like $250 thousand a year, and that already gets people enhanced, but it's not something that you can scale on a demographic level. What we always want to keep in mind is that we want to create products that are accessible to the people that also differentiate themselves from the product quality per se, both in the supplement side as well as in the prescription side.
One thing to call out, just in terms of how dedicated we are to the quality of our product, if you look at the Longer supplement that you take on a daily basis that gets shipped home to you on a monthly basis, like an AG1 and IM8, the quality of the formulation is so much better than everything else you have in the market. We do not have any proprietary blends that we do not disclose. Every single substance that you take is disclosed. One of our hero ingredients is a substance called urolithin A that's there to improve your mitochondrial function and basically helps you rejuvenate from the inside out. In the Longer product, you get 1 g of this per day, and we sell the overall Longer product for $99 a month.
The next best supplier of just this ingredient sells you urolithin A also for $100 a month, but half of the dosage. Just with that one substance, we're already beating the market by half the price. What you get on top is 20 other stellar longevity products in that same Longer product that you take on a daily basis. Our product is not just so much better, but also so much more affordable for the people that consume it. That's really something we are very proud of and very committed to give people affordable access to those incredible products.
Overall I think in terms of demographics, it's really for the people that are looking to take a proactive approach to their healthcare, that are not lazy because there's no products that let you just. There's not this magic injection that you get to improve your health. That doesn't exist. The people need to take care of their nutrition. They need to take care of their sleep. They need to take care of their exercise. There's so many people that are excited about this. This market is growing so much, this is something we're so excited about. I think we can play this fundamental role in this to inspire the people through the work that we do with athletes to think about their healthcare differently.
Through the athletes that are 35, healthier than they've ever been, but also performing better than when they were in their 20s when they were a two-time world champion. We're actually going to see Megan Romano swim later tonight, who is exactly that. She was a two-time world champion for Team USA when she was in her prime in her 20s, tonight she's going to be swimming quicker than she did back in the day, that's incredible. This is who we're targeting with our product. I think what we will also be doing is we're going to expand the global market of it. I'm very excited about potential regulatory tailwinds that we'll be facing.
The FDA actually at the end of July is going to start targeting reclassification of certain peptides to make them move from category two to category one, which makes them, again, prescribable and compoundable in the U.S. We'll be already ready to capture on this opportunity to supply more FDA-regulated peptides to our consumers. We're overall thinking as this as a general way to improve society because healthcare is one of the biggest negotiation points in any government. If some of the biggest benefits of enhancements are recovery and injury prevention, we have people that get less injured, especially also when they age, but then also when they recover quicker. We're going to have such a massive lift on the healthcare system. Then on a wider adoption, I'm seeing headlines, "60 is the new 40." What does that mean on our overall economic output?
If people don't retire at 67 because they feel like they're 50, how much longer can they work and do what they love for longer? That's going to have such a massive impact as well on our economies. This is something that we're just so passionate about, everyone in this organization, starting from the athletes, all of our partners, but every single individual truly believes in this mission and really gives it every single day, everything that they have to make this successful.
Great, thanks. Do you want to do Q&A?
Yeah, let's do Q&A.
Yeah. We've got a few minutes.
Samina, yes. Samina, you see in the front.
Inspiring. Thank you so much for everything that you're doing. It's really just an honor to be part of shifting the Overton window to, not only helping us evolve to a better, faster, stronger species, but also hopefully a more conscientious and happier species, too. My question is with regards to precision health and wellness, having survived a massive brain tumor and just turning 54 years old as an investor, advisor, and futurist and keynote speaker in this space of longevity, the future of wellness is precise and personalized. I'm 92 pounds, I can't take 1,000 mg of your urolithin A. That would be too much for me.
I'm excited to hear about the plan to incorporate genomics, at the very least, vis-à-vis blood biomarkers, so that we can customize the precise dosage to the milligram level precise for the supplement stacks that you're creating for not only vitamins, but also hormones. I'm also taking hormone therapy, I'd love to hear what your plans are for that. As I mentioned in an email a couple of weeks ago, I'm excited to introduce you to some potential acquisition partners, since you guys made a bunch of money with your IPO, to potentially incorporate an operating system that will give you the ability to ingest genomics, proteomics, wearables, blood, et cetera, so that your platform can be the most precise and personalized in the world.
Great question. Personalization is what this is all about. Perfectly on point, I'm glad you're bringing this up so we can spend some time on it. Both on OTC and the prescription side. On an OTC side, we're actually working already on a personalized supplement to give you exactly the right amount of vitamins, minerals, et cetera, that you specifically need. This is already in the works. For now, we just have these static two product, but this is going to be the next step for us in terms of personalization. On the prescription side, it's exactly like that as well, right? This is where the true IP of what we're doing comes in. For the first time, we are actually able, through a clinical study that we've been doing with the athletes, what the impact of those performance enhancements are on an elite athlete population.
The learnings from this is how we improve our own prescription guidelines for certain hormone replacement therapies for women and other performance-enhancing protocols that we will be offering to our consumers. The way to maybe make it more tangible is think about the work that Formula One is doing. Formula One is that when the engineers in a Formula One team developed a Formula One car, that's at the forefront of scientific innovation and technology. That Formula One car is never going to get mass-produced. What they learn in developing that Formula One car, in some form of a derivative, is going to trickle down into the road car production a few years down the line. The shifting paddles that you have in cars today or the anti-blockage system comes originally from motor racing. It's very similar for us.
What helps an athlete break a world record or Megan beat her personal best from when she was in her 20s at 35 is way too complicated for the average consumer. The learnings from all of the clinical work that we do with the athletes is constantly helping us improve our own prescription guidelines for consumers to make it as personalized and as targeted for them. This is really why I said before, this glorification of peptides online is so bad because it's not personalized. Just because a certain substance works for me, just like milk. Maybe I like milk and I say to Curry here, "Have milk," but he's lactose intolerant. It really doesn't work, right? Then if you're 25 training for a marathon or 65 looking for more energy to play with your grandkids, it really depends.
Actually, fun fact, who's also very much enhanced is orchestra musicians. They obviously don't take the same protocols that our athletes take, but they take beta blockers to help them with stage fright. Ping pong players take Adderall and modafinil to help them with concentration and reaction times. Really depending on what you do, the personalized approach is really the right one, this is what we're offering. This is what's constantly getting improved by the work that we do with the athletes and made available to the masses through that IP and prescription guidelines that we create, share with the doctors they then use to put their patients or consumers on those protocols.
Anyone else?
Thank you. You mentioned about some of the peptides being considered by the FDA for reclassification. Could you mention where they are in the process?
Yeah. What's happening at the moment, the HHS has indicated that they will be for that, the FDA is starting a process now to review whether they can move them up from category two to category one. What that would then mean is that if they went ahead on it, roughly two months later, that would become effective. What this would mean is that doctors, again, in the U.S. could prescribe them to patients, and compounding pharmacies here in the U.S. will be able to compound them again and ship them out to consumers. What this means for Enhanced specifically is that we can broaden our product offering and have those newly moved to category onel peptides available as a product that the people can purchase from us as well.
Do we have one last one or?
Hey, guys. Julian from Beyond Tomorrow podcast. Do you think this space is going to become as commoditized as, let's say, energy drinks and fizzy drinks? If that were to happen, how important is trust in brand? When you think about trust in the long term
How easy do you think it will be to lose that trust if, let's say, an incident were to happen, especially with the consumer?
Yeah. Great question. I think absolutely. What I was trying to allude to, I'll make the point more, is at the end of the day, testosterone is testosterone, and it is a FDA-approved and regulated substance that can be compounded and given to people. What is therefore the case is that other people will be able to offer the same products that we will. Where the edge of Enhanced comes in is really in these two things that we tried to touch upon earlier. One is it's not about just getting a certain substance into your system to help you. It's all about finding out what is the right protocol, maybe even a combination of substances, that help you specifically become the best that you could ever be.
There, what becomes really interesting is, for example, with a substance like testosterone, there's certain prescription guidelines from a T-score of X to Y, how much can you prescribe, et cetera. This is the space where we will have the best prescription guidelines that are constantly informed through the work that we've been doing with the athletes and the consumers that we serve, also combining certain substances with others to put you on a protocol, also amend this protocol with you over time. If you just look at my personal enhancement journey, the protocol that I started with two and a half years ago is very different than what I took a year ago, very different than what I took six months ago to what I'm taking on right now.
Your physiology changes, your lifestyle changes, and so should the protocol that you're on. With the products that the people are purchasing from us, what they're also constantly required to do is to continue to do their blood work, continue to speak with a physician to amend their protocol over time to make sure that they're always safe and tailored towards them. That's where I think the differentiation in the market comes in, and I fundamentally believe that the IP that we have from the work that we do with athletes will be able to differentiate ourselves in that personalization approach to everyone else in the market. Think about it like energy space as well, right? You have Red Bull probably the most dominant player in the space.
Our model is actually quite similar to Red Bull's model, because what Red Bull does is they break world records, they produce lots of sporting content, and they utilize this to create awareness about a performance-enhancing drink that they're selling on the back end. Very similar with us. The work that we do with the athletes not just spins off money for us, but also creates that awareness for those performance enhancements that we're selling. Trust truly becomes very important because obviously you're putting substances in your system, and that is something that every single one of us have as a different comfort level with, right? Coming back to the spectrum of what it means to be enhanced.
I think with the work that we're doing, informed through our independent medical commission, which is some of the best doctors in the world on them, our independent scientific commission, which is some of the best scientists in the world on it, the environment that we've created with the athletes, the capital that we invest into it, I certainly believe that we can become the prominent brand that people trust, but then also go to for education. In the content pyramid, what we have as well is education as a really important layer. I would be even super happy if people purchased from our competitors but still go to Enhanced to get educated about enhancements.
That's what's so important for us to be really the driving force in that space from an education and responsibility perspective that people go to so they trust, and then we can sell them products.
I think we might be at time, Max. Thanks for talking about the business. Appreciate it.
Thank you so much, everyone.
Forward to the Enhanced Games.
Thank you, Curry.
If you could introduce Guido, please.
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. I just talked about the medical commission that we have. I'm very excited to announce Professor Dr. Guido Pieles, who is the Chair of our medical commission. Guido's truly been instrumental in everything on the medical apparatus and how we've been able to build it. Just give me two minutes because I want to introduce you. Come up here. Hey, welcome. I'm really honored to have Guido. Wait one second. I just want to give you an intro.
Sorry.
Guido is one of the best sports cardiologists in the world. Really his resume speaks for itself. Guido was the cardiologist for Manchester United for a very long period of time. Guido was also the lead cardiac risk advisor to the U.K. government in COVID. Guido's been writing the cardiology guidelines for FIFA. Actually, just one quick anecdote. I think two years ago, there was a cardiology conference in London. I was just having dinner with Guido at a restaurant. There were cardiologists walking up to our table, I kid you not, wanting to introduce themselves to Guido because he's so respected in the cardiology community. They were just like fanboys coming up to him. That was truly special. That's really the case. I'm very honored to have you as part of the commission. Guido, the floor is yours.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much. Maxi, this was a bit too much anyway. Thank you for the introduction. We've heard a lot about the big visions and so on. I want to give you in 20 minutes, we won't be longer, really the vision of the medical and scientific setup of Enhanced. You might have heard a lot about it, for you to gather and have an inkling that it is actually central to Enhanced, that's true. I want to take you onto the journey. I won't show you many scientific figures and so on, but just take you on the journey, what we've done. This is what we wanted to do, okay? They're the Enhanced Games. I put this slide up first because this is the core. This is the core.
Not the science around, not the medical knowledge, not the data mining. This was the core. That's why also personally, I came to this project because I thought, this is interesting. They want me to do science, but actually this is a sporting event, there's a company behind it in the medium term. How can we do this properly? I've led many studies in university, government, regulatory environments. I thought, "Let's go for it." What have we wanted to do and who did we need? I put a couple of faces up here really also, firstly, to thank them, but also to give you a picture. They illustrate a lot. This is really the setup, how we wanted to do science and medicine.
You can see there's a doctor in the middle, there's a very good sports scientists on the left, there's a gentleman on the right I wouldn't want to be treated by for heart disease because he's one of the best senior athlete performance managers. We all were there to lead this program, this was really one of the cores. This was important for Enhanced, not only science, not only medicine, but really performance altogether. What was the objective? What did we want to do? Okay, easy. You've heard it a lot. Yes, we wanted to optimize performance, we wanted to do it safe, we wanted to also contribute to science. We didn't want to do it in a timeline of five, six years. We wanted to do this here and now.
This is really something that is rarely done, and it requires a lot of synergistic working together. Again, how is this done? This is done by a small team of medical and science professionals within Enhanced. You have to take my word for it. All you know is every mid-table Premier League team has a larger science and medical team than this. I can also tell you for a fact that every mid-table Premier League team does not perform as well as these seven boys and girls have actually in the team. What we've done with this small little team is really build up a whole IRB-approved, Institutional Review Board-approved study. An ethically approved study that really hits the highest standards of how we do science, be it in Japan, in the U.S., Germany, Abu Dhabi, where we are, wherever.
This is important and why. The question is now, why did the Enhanced Games need this? I've also been asked, I did an interview with The Lancet, and the very knowledgeable editor of The Lancet, one of the most prestigious journals in medicine, he said, "Why the hell are you doing this study? You're using compounds that have been around for 50 years. Why are you doing this? Why are these guys doing it?" This is partly the right answer, but we are doing it because what has been reflected onto Enhanced from the early beginning is that it is irresponsible, unscientific. What was reflected from us as scientists who say, "Do you know what? We need a bit more knowledge. We need a bit more practical knowledge to inform how we optimize performance in athletes." These are the reasons why we did this.
Some of the reasons. There's a high prevalence of misuse, of course. There are of course side effects, there's really nothing really to tell anyone doing this in a professional way how to do it. The other question to answer this, why does this exist? The IRB also exists because of the founders, be it Christian, be it Aron, or be it also Maxi, were extremely not only receptive, but really, really, really, really pushed this idea. I've worked with universities, and I've sat in front of many scientific bureaucrats in universities trying to convince them why we need science. I didn't need to do this here as a compliment to those three guys to do this. This is one reason.
The other reason is, which we shouldn't forget, we talked a lot, and I have raised my voice clearly and said, "Look, these enhancements we are using, they're not death penalties. The risk is completely overstated. This figure holds true. If you take enhancements, particularly anabolic steroids, uncontrolled, over a long time in very high doses, you die earlier." We really need to be aware of it. We have to really get the knowledge in healthy people and athletes to make this curve go away in the scientific literature. This curve is there because this use has been completely uncontrolled, and this is very important. This is another reason to do this study. This is a more tongue in cheek reason, but this is also true.
This is from [Foreign language] the equivalent maybe to "Time," the weekly journal. I got interviewed, and they say, [Foreign language] means this is a toned-down, printable version. What I've been asked by colleagues, "Guido, for God's sake, what you're doing?" Even worse, "What are you doing?" There's such a misconception out there, not only by the public, by journalists, by fellow athletes, for us important, for Enhanced important, by doctors, scientists, and by regulators. In the U.K., I sit on one of the expert panels in a regulator, the MHRA. There, I don't want to be convinced by world records. I want to see the science. Enhanced, if Enhanced wants to do a successful business, has to have these scientific arguments on their side.
The most important argument, however, why we did a scientific study for the games is this. The athlete is in the center. Yes, we could have rounded up a bunch of athletes and let them compete here this afternoon and left them to their own devices. They are the center. Within a study, this is really the best way to give them a voice, to make sure reliably they are safe, and also to tell them about the risks, which there are, so they do consent. This process has been really elaborately done with the Enhanced Games so that all the athletes, if you have spoken to them, they are really content, and they trust the medical team, and they trust the scientific team. These are the reasons really why this study is there. How did it look like? What did we want to do?
Look, this is really the impact, not this study, but the Enhanced Games, the work with athletes, be it now professionals or in the future, recreational athletes should have on our health environment. Of course, there are benefits, and we want to explore them. There's athletic potential. We will see what enhancements and this whole environment of a medical scientific setup can do. Please don't be fooled. If they break world records today, that's not only the enhancements. That's maybe 1%-3%. It's the dedicated coaches, it's the dedicated athletes. It's a whole environment that Enhanced created within this scientific study. All these things we want to do. As you can see on the left side, it's not only. I'm a cardiologist. Normally, I do studies. I look at the heart.
This is a study that goes far beyond it and why it has neurological, cardiological, endocrine data points that we harvest. It's really challenging and exciting. Because there's so many data points, we have a whole medical commission. Again, I show you this and go on to the next people. You can read this because they're all fantastic individuals, and it was really an honor to work with them. Most importantly, look at their subspecialties. Yes, there's endocrinology, neuroscience, women's health, general. There's internal medicine. There's sports hematology. We got these people together because it's extremely unusual to do a study where we really say, "I study the whole human network of performance." There are many studies in athletes looking at cardiac function after intense training at altitude, all these things.
This is probably the first study where all these people came together. This is unique for the data we are getting. The same is true for the science. We've got a separate scientific commission. These are not clinical doctors, but these are scientists top in their field who helped us to design the whole study. This is also something new, because normally these studies are designed by a small group with a certain interest, and then they're conducted. Here, we really made it the big throw and got all these people involved, and I'm, again, very grateful to them. What did we do? How did we approach this? This is a 400-m track. We wanted to do this whole loop of involving the athletes up to the performance in 40.306 seconds. That's Wayde van Niekerk's 400-m world record. We might want to do it faster.
The athlete comes, the athlete gets profiled. Every athlete, if you're on the left upper corner, you have your health profiling, the inclusion/exclusion criteria. We get all this data, we organize it, we talk to our colleagues. If there are any abnormal findings, we address them, and then we make a decision what protocol is best for them. Talking about individualized medicine, extremely important. We're not just dishing out some performance enhancements as per protocol. We started off doing this in groups and then really individualize this. You have the whole loop. The athlete runs his/her 400 m without even knowing that he or she has been in this study, because what we don't want is that these athletes feel they're here for the sake of the study. They're here to perform. This was one of our major parameters.
That's why we've done it in the way it is depicted here. This is a performance hub. This is a training center. You can see in the upper right there, sporting and venues environment. This was in Abu Dhabi. That's where the athletes wanted to be. It was a problem for our scientists because we wanted the athletes to be somewhere else. We want to do science. We wanted the athletes to be there at a state-of-the-art university scale hospital with all the diagnostic tests, beautifully new, and we had the support of the CEO, Dr. Marwan, and Dr. Ravi, our PI. They were there. The athletes had to go there to do the research. I've worked with a lot of athletes, and this is usually a stopper. The attrition rate is usually high, meaning athletes say, "Come on, I'm not going to go there.
I want to perform. I don't want to do your studies." What we've done is, this is of course, just an allegory, but we put this together, which means, yes, the athletes had to go to the hospital sometimes for tests, but also we brought the hospital to the athletes. Many tests, even the enhancements they took, they could do this at the track. They could do this in their environment. I think this is something also that is rarely done in sports medicine research. Another really novel thing we did. That was the athlete's journey. This was a journey that was really under a lot of time pressure. The athletes went there in January. They had their assessments done. They went into their protocol for nine weeks. They had blood tests every two to four weeks.
They had a very big medical test, over two to three days, neurological scans, cardiac scans, blood markers. We did all the omics, of course. We did genetic profiling. All this we have not got back yet, so it hasn't influenced our protocol, but the biomarkers certainly have. Up to the 24th of May, where we are now. Look what data we got. Of course, we got a lot of data. Here's a big question, because why we had only 36 athletes, is this data really that useful? This is really when we talk about large-scale data and data scaling in size where there's data depth. In terms of sports medicine, even sports cardiology, sports neurology studies, enhancement studies, this is clearly the best study in terms of data depth.
Of course, we've got all the measurements that you can from your smartwatch, you might ask, "Well, that's not very much." Look already, when you look at the left lower bottom, you've got blood tests. We have really four to six blood draws for these athletes within this time. This really is a big game changer. We have these easily accessible metrics like heart rate variability, we can really correlate them to much more deeper data of the organism, such as blood inflammatory markers, hormone profile, cardiac biomarkers. As you see at the bottom, we have all this data on the different organ system. This, again, of course, we haven't worked this up, not yet. That's why we also need this commission, because we've got all these neurological, cardiac, musculoskeletal systems that we have really deeply phenotyped.
I think this is, I wouldn't want to say mine, it sounds too crude, this is really almost a meadow of data we can really now get into and get very important data that will inform, of course, the next generation of studies. It has already informed the performance protocol the athletes were on. Now come to this group, I call this group really the powerhouse of our Enhanced Performance Team. This is an additional group. This is the performance task force. These were the colleagues who determined the individual protocols the athletes were on. I was just a gatekeeper down there. I just told the guys sometimes, "Hold your horses. We're working within a regulatory study framework. We cannot do this. We cannot do that." We've got also a limit on doses and so on.
This was fantastic because we met three, four, five times a week if it needs to be. We discussed the performance of each individual athlete. We discussed the blood test. We really came to a prescription of the individualized performance program. This is really something that is unique, that makes it firstly safer, as you can imagine, it also optimizes your performance truly. Of course, you can all think next time what we do is we have also the genetic background data there. We have the omics there to inform this even deeper. This is how we worked. I will not present you any data, as a cardiologist, please allow me to indulge you for two minutes on the cardiac data. The heart has been much discussed in enhancements, the question is still out.
Are enhancements, particularly anabolic steroids, really beneficial for the heart, or really is the heart just an organ that has to endure? Which I think I'm much more on this side. We have a lot of data, like I showed you before. Oh, it's bad for the heart. You get cardiomyopathy, you get heart failure. Really? Well, I don't think this is a truth unless you don't do any medical supervision for years, and then someone comes to you. Yes, I've seen it as well. I've seen cardiomyopathy in athletes who took enhancements. What we've done, though, is we measured the heart at rest and during exercise. On the left, you see the panel. The upper panel is heart function at rest. At the bottom is during exercise. Because athletes have a sluggish heart at rest, and we wanted to know what happens during exercise.
We can then look at the heart function of exercise, and you see these very beautiful, nice curves of the different parts of the heart, which shows that all is normal. If you look at the right, which is even better, and we will be doing this because enhancement effects, be it good or bad of the heart, they're often very subtle. The heart is very forgiving and selfless I do suspect. If you have a heart strain, your heart will not tell you. If you go for a run and you've got a one or 2-tier strain, you can hardly walk. Your heart is a silent worker and will continue until it gets really bad. You can find out, Bryan Johnson talked about heart rate and so on.
This is a very important marker, of course, but I've seen so many athletes with a heart rate of 40, which is optimal, but they have heart problems. What we're looking at here, we're looking at all the four chambers, we're looking at the timing. The four chambers of the heart, they're indeed literally like a four-chamber orchestra. We look exactly at the timing. Do enhancements influence these timings, how these four chambers contract positively or negatively? This is data that has not been seen before with enhancements. Just imagine what my neurological colleagues, my endocrinological colleagues would have to say about their data. A lot of data, which we'll go through very quickly. We started this already. What we know so far, all the athletes that will be starting this afternoon, they're healthy, they're well.
They have had all their checks after stopping the enhancements and before the competition. We can say this. Really to wrap up two slides. What are we going to do with this data? What can you actually do? Well, look, we have a wonderful study. We get a lot of fantastic data in this study that will contribute to science, that will contribute to the individual health and performance of these athletes. I think it's got much broader consequences because this study was not just designed for these 36 athletes. I would even say if you come to me with any drug now you want to be studied, of course not completely investigation at early stage. That takes longer. Within four weeks with this template, with this science template we've established, we can say we can study your drugs in athletes.
This is really a huge advantage. This really then sinks in also to the Enhanced business model to really use these protocols we're doing and use the results in individualized enhancement work. What you asked before. It's still a bit of a way to go. I don't want to overstate this, but I think this is what we can really do. This is a pathway what we think an athlete can do, an Enhanced athlete can do. This is the Enhanced signature pathway. If you're an athlete or if you're just a weekend warrior, you can come to Enhanced. You can either be part of a study or you just want to have your enhancements prescribed. How do you start off? You get an assessment, you get your enhancements, you get feedback. You get your enhancements optimized.
You do this either online or what I would like to think, the Enhanced pathways might even involve in the future some Enhanced centers of excellence where you can actually go, because some of us still like to see a physical doctor. I know this for a fact. You can go and really have an Enhanced assessment, follow the Enhanced pathways. Now we've moved from science into medicine, clinical medicine. How this is being done is informed by the science. I think in this way, we've designed this study to really be a template for the scientific future work, but also for the scientific medical work of Enhanced. That's all I wanted to say. From our medical and scientific point of view, the games can begin. Any burning questions? I'm moderating myself here. If you really have, otherwise, thank you very much. Please go ahead.
I mean, as I say, we haven't mined the data, but what became clear is really it's about an optimum, this was really important for us to learn. Maximal parameters in hormone, in testosterone, and so on, didn't give you the best parameters in inflammation and all this. This is really individual. This was one surprising thing. The other surprising thing was that after a 10-week program, we did not see any adverse cardiac effects. I was surprised. It has been described, but our task force just pitched it right. The athletes got the benefits without the cardiac side effects. The rest we just need to still analyze. Bit early. Good. Thank you very much. Maxi, Christian? You take over.
Perfect. Right now on stage, we're going to be joined for our last conversation, which is going to be about the future of the world. We're going to be hearing from two incredible individuals. One of them we actually talked about already before, which is Dan Wagner, who you can see here on the catwalk. Dan is the CEO of Rezolve Ai . Rezolve really focused on integrating artificial intelligence, particularly in retail, which is why they're so amazing as a partner for us to have. He's joined by Peter Diamandis, who is a name for himself, a pioneer in the longevity space, has founded more than 25 businesses in the spaces of longevity space, venture capital, and education. Best known for his work probably through the XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University.
Who is also going to be joined with us, Jayden, I actually don't recall Jayden's last name right now. Jayden, what's your last name? Watson. Sorry. I apologize. I don't know Jayden. Jayden Watson, who is the founder of Aion, an AI company that's also capitalizing on tons of opportunities, helping companies find out what their own strategy is in the field of AI. I'm very excited to have these three come up now and talk about the future of the world.
Should I sit in the middle?
Yeah.
Hello, everybody. I hope you're enjoying the session so far. You'll be pleased to hear this is the last one of this morning's sessions.
The best one.
The best one. Very certainly the best one. Let me just introduce myself quickly. I'm Dan Wagner. I was introduced very kindly just now in an enthusiastic way, but on a more down-to-earth basis, I'm CEO of a public company called Rezolve Ai , with a Z. We do AI for commerce and retail. We're working with Enhanced Games, of course, providing the infrastructure for their digital channels and their platforms. We own our own technology and language models, and our focus is really to prevent hallucinations, which is a big problem with AI, as you probably know, when leaving them alone to run interactions with customers and brands. The topic for today is the future of the world, which is a hell of a topic, really.
When I was shown this, I thought, "Geez, how am I going to frame this and make this interesting for everybody?" Fortunately, I've got some very good, talented people alongside me who will allow me to get away with it. I think that it possibly is the most important question, and one of the most important conversations of today, because the future of the world is of interest to everybody. I think we're at a very important milestone in humanity. That's my view. I think that there have been moments in history over many centuries where the trajectory of civilization shifts dramatically, and I think we're in one of those moments today.
If you think about how electricity changed the way in which we lived, and how the internet changed the way in which we connected, and mobile changed the way in which we behaved, many believe that AI will fundamentally change the way we work, think, create, govern, heal, and perhaps even what it means to be a human being. The question is no longer whether the world will change. It already has. It's just about how fast, who benefits, who's left behind, and are we prepared? Fortunately, as I said before, we have two extraordinary people here to help us think that through. Peter Diamandis has spent decades exploring exponential technologies, abundance, longevity, and what it is that's shaping humanity's future. He's one of the world's leading futurists and entrepreneurs. He's sitting here, in case you didn't realize.
We also have Jayden Watson, who is building at the frontier of AI, infrastructure and intelligence systems through Aion and Ratio Labs, seeing firsthand what's emerging beneath the surface before most of us even realize that it's happening. To kick this off, I'll ask the question: Are we living through the most important tech transition in human history, or is this just hype? Peter?
It's not hype. We're living through a transition of the human species, fundamental transition of the human species. I wrote a Substack a few weeks ago that we're about to see what I consider the five major forks of humanity. We're going to speciate going forward. There's the difference between the consumers and creators, those are the couch potatoes, and those that are enabling the use of AI to create future visions of "Star Trek." We're about to see a split in humanity, those who go down the extreme of longevity escape velocity, and those that choose not to take those options. We're going to see a fork in AI or in humanity as we begin to move off-planet permanently into the cosmos, and those that decide to stay.
There'll be a fork in those that connect their neocortex with the cloud and go through an advanced BCI journey, and those ultimately that decide to upload themselves. These are different forks in the road that we will take over the next few decades. I think people don't realize how fast these different avenues are going to be available to us. Yeah, we are at a point where we're giving birth to new species of humanity.
Let me ask a question. What is it that people don't understand about this?
They don't understand that we are local and linear thinkers. We evolved in the savannas of Africa where nothing affected you that was not within a day's walk, where the life of your great-great-great-grandparents was the same as your great-great-great-grandchildren, and that's the way our mindset works. We are local, linear thinkers. We are in a period of hyper-exponential growth. I think people are not tracking how fast things are changing and how fast things are about to change. We extrapolate linear when in fact we're in the most significant period of change that's going to disrupt societal structures in a good way and a bad way, and disrupt every company and industry on the planet. It's happening. I'm just blown away how people are not seeing this coming and how they're not preparing.
One more question for you before I move to Jayden. Why are you optimistic and not fearful of this change?
It's an important question. I'm optimistic because of historically our ability to adapt. Ultimately, I think fundamentally human nature is good. I believe in the positive side of human nature. I also believe that we're giving birth to what will be called advanced super intelligence, ASI, whatever it is. I think in the longer run, not in the interim near-term run, advanced super intelligence will have a tremendous level of wisdom, and we can talk about that. I think wisdom falls out of where we're heading. You can ask me about wisdom afterwards, but I want to give Jayden a chance to address these points. I think that I'm not worried about danger of artificial intelligence. I'm worried about human stupidity more than anything else.
I think we're going to have some ability to live in a world where we have greater wisdom and the ability to make the right choices.
Okay. Jayden, you're right at the forefront of all of this with both Aion and Ratio Labs. What are you seeing that's happening under the hood that is bubbling up in the capability of technology that you feel is exciting you?
Yeah. I think the best way to answer this would be if maybe we do an experiment with everybody here. I know it's the end of the day now, so I'd like to get everybody involved. I'm sure you guys are familiar, if you guys have been to Catholic Mass, that at some point in the Catholic Mass, everybody stands up and you greet your neighbors around you, next to you, behind. If everyone could take 30 seconds to stand up and greet the person next to you, behind you, around you. Maybe you know them, maybe you don't.
Jayden, good to meet you.
Pleasure.
Oh, nice to meet you.
Yeah, likewise.
Nice to meet you.
Pleasure. They take commands well.
Yeah.
Just a few videos. You're going to have to give them the sit down command too.
Yeah, I'll wait, like 10 seconds. All right. Okay. All right. Thank you, guys.
C ontinues later.
Yes, okay. Now I'm sure you guys are probably all wondering why did I do that, right? Okay, because this room that we're in is one giant web. It's a giant network of people, connections. Some of you guys are here for Christian, some of you guys are here for Max, some of you guys are here for the athletes. I hear there's a really hot swimmer, you guys are here for that. Or maybe you guys are here just here for the vibes. Will this go well? Will this flop? Ultimately, you guys are here for some reason, and whether you knew the person that you just shook your hand or said hello to them, you are connected to them. Whether you were connected to them before or after this moment, you're all connected, right? This is one giant web, okay?
This web is important because of the connections, not because of the list of the people, right? Because if I were to take this list of people, have the exact same names, but I were to change the connections on who you were connected to, this event wouldn't be about the Enhanced Games or the future of the world, right? If I were to build this, not around the Enhanced Games, but I were to build this around Dan and everyone who's here because they were connected to Dan, this would be about e-commerce, right? Okay. Now I'm going to treat this as current AI, or everyone knows an LLM, right? I'm an LLM right now. We just built this amazing network. We just added to this network as well.
When you guys shook someone's hand and said hello to someone, you just added a new point and a new edge, okay? All of you guys are points, and the relationships are edges to make this amazing graph, okay? This is where the structure, where you know that this person works with this person. You guys are together. You are here because you love the hot swimmer. You're here because you love Christian. Okay, I'm an LLM. I'm language in, I'm language out, or tokens in, tokens out. I squash this amazing graph that we have just built, and we just added to it. We just added another layer to it, and I make it one dimension. I take the structure, the relationships, and I remove it all. Okay? Now I just have this list. Okay?
Yeah, maybe I could build connections from this list, like 1D is sitting next to 1E is sitting next to 1F. Maybe I can presume that maybe they're a family or maybe they work together. Right? Is there anyone here with the last name Watson? No. Okay. Well, if there's someone next to them here, Watson, they would presume that I'm related to them, right? I'm not related to anyone else here. Okay. We take this list and this amazing structure, and we squash it. We remove all the relationships. We have no clue that these two people work together, that there's investors here, then they have their mentor here, a boyfriend is here, a girlfriend is here, right? What I'm doing is we're building graph neural networks that traverse the graph.
It doesn't squash everything into a one dimension and remove the structure and the relationships. It keeps the relationships and the structure there. Why is this important? Is because this room that we're in is not the only graph that exists, right? Your company is a graph. You have suppliers, you have your employers, you have your logistics, you have your operations, you have your customers, you have your contracts so on and so forth. That's the enterprise. Laws of physics, laws of science, symmetries, everything at the end of the day is a graph. When you squash it into an LLM and remove all the structure, that's when it starts to hallucinate. It makes false citations. It pulls in random details that aren't relevant. This is what we're focused on.
We are focused on applying AI to the relational world, in the physical and scientific world. Aion is focused on enterprise adoption, which is like the biggest graph possible. It's just a giant knowledge graph. We focus on going into the organization and building out the graph and the models for them. Ratio is focused on redoing what's currently being done in the physical and scientific world. Currently, AI doesn't understand that if I were to push a cup off a table, that it would fall and possibly break if there was glass. If it had a substance in it, that would spill. That if I were a child and I pushed the cup off the table, that my mom would then come in and be upset with me. In that instance that I pushed the cup off the table, I learned two things.
I learned the physical and scientific world. I learned about gravity, I also learned cause and effect. I learned that if I push the cup off the table, that my mom will come in and she's angry at me. Okay? An LLM, because it doesn't understand any of the relations, it doesn't understand the scientific or the physical world, all it would understand is that cup near the edge could be cup on the floor because it's just autocomplete. It's just guessing the next best thing rather than guessing what actually will happen.
Jayden, thank you very much. I think if I can just summarize that very succinctly. The idea of layering a graph neural network over an existing AI language model will prevent the dislocation of connections, which was very well illustrated by Jayden, with everyone standing up and saying hello to everybody, which I think is the next wave of how we use artificial intelligence to be more intelligent. Okay, let's move on to the next question. I want to ask a question that's kind of closer to where I live and operate. Do we think that humans will still choose to search, choose, and transact, or will AI agents do that for us? At what point does it become irrational not to trust AI for decisions and manage our investments, or book our travel, or run our business, Peter?
We trust humans to do that right now. I think there will be a point, and it's in the very near future, in which you will trust your AI to do most everything for you other than a human. Let me break that down to a few examples. I'm in the longevity and health business. I'm a medical doctor by training, but don't ever come to me for anything. I had the minimum credits ever issued for getting a medical degree and was running two companies my fourth year of medical school. Right now, the large language models offered by a number of companies are far better physicians, diagnosticians than a doctor. One of the companies I co-founded with Tony Robbins and chaired, called Fountain Life, we do a 200-GB upload of you.
Everything possibly knowable about you, from your genome to full body imaging to microbiome, metabolome, everything. An AI can do that diagnosis and give you an understanding of what's going on in your body, what you need to deal with right now, and importantly, what's likely to happen to you. The best surgeons in the world will be embodied AIs in humanoid robots. You know if you need a surgery, you ask one question of your surgeon, "How many times have you done this surgery this morning?" Right? The frequency means the prevalence of knowing all the AV malformations and everything. Humanoid robots will have done and have shared memories across millions or tens of millions of surgeries. Across every single area, I think we're going to see AIs take that lead.
In terms of the advertising, the best sort of social model of AI is probably J.A.R.V.I.S. from "Iron Man," where you're going to have an AI that is your AI that knows everything about you. You're going to give it permission to listen to every conversation, see everything that you're seeing, knowing everything about you, your AI also will know where you're looking, where you're focusing. I love that color. I love that jacket. It will ultimately do the buying for you. You'll give it rights for surprise and delight, and something will show up on your doorstep that you didn't even know you want, but you had been staring at it and you've been fixed on it. Your AI knows your gene makeup, your tastebud capabilities, so it will order the foods that are the healthiest for you, that you probably love, that you've never tried before.
I think there's going to be. I've talked to my friends at Google saying, advertising, you can advertise to the AI, or you can still advertise to the human, even though you're going to give buying authority to your AI. I think a lot of change is coming in that regard.
Well, I take some issue with that.
Okay.
I have a.
Please do.
I have a view.
My job here is to be provocative.
Yeah. I think that there are some people in this room who are somewhat privileged financially, including many people in the audience, I would imagine. For them to give authority for a certain amount of money isn't an easy decision. For most people, allowing an agent to spend hard-earned cash from their wages on anything.
We just saw Google at its Google I/O announce its new shopping capability, right? Where it will search for you for the lowest cost, highest value items. You may want something, but your AI can do far more evaluation of what is the best value.
No, I agree with that. I'm sorry. I 100% agree with the idea that AI can assist you in your purchase decisions. I think the question I was asking is, will you allow it to book your travel? Will you allow it to go buy stuff for you randomly, like you said? It sounds to me that your view is that you will allow an agent on your behalf, within certain constraints, to go and surprise you with gifts.
Well, that's-
I kind of like the idea of that.
That's a small part, I think if I'm looking to go someplace, my AI agent will find me the very best deal.
Yes.
I'm going to say, "I need to leave at this time and end up here. Give me the best value and give me the full connectivity from the Uber picking me up, the autonomous Uber picking me up, to getting me to my location." We hire travel agents.
I agree with that. I'm sorry. I agree with that because I think at that point you would be given a price for this journey, and you would authorize that purchase on a case-by-case basis. I agree that AI will go that way. I'm skeptical, but I'm happy to be convinced by somebody potentially more in line or in tune with what's happening. I'm interested to know, Jayden, what your view is. I would be skeptical that I would allow an agent to go do stuff for me without my consent on a purchase-by-purchase basis. I do think that it would be extremely valuable, of course, I'm very much involved in it, of it helping me make the decision to make a purchase. Jayden, what's your view?
I don't really think it's much of a technological perspective there. We've really only had, I think, one agent, I believe it's Sierra, that's been certified to make payments on your behalf. It doesn't matter. We could have every single agent company with the certification, but at the end of the day, it's up to the person. Do they want to be in the loop? Do they not want to be in the loop? I think it'll be very political. It's like I'm perfectly fine letting an agent make purchases on my behalf up to a certain threshold because, as you were saying, if you prompt it well enough and you give it enough context, it will make the best decision for you.
Not everyone will make the best prompt or the best context, it will definitely hallucinate, and it will make a bad purchase or pull the wrong tool. Ultimately, it will become a political opinion. Do you want to make decisions yourself, or do you want to be in the loop, or do you want to be completely autonomous and give your rights to your bank accounts to an agent?
Let's just ask one more question on this point before moving on. Let's say you have an investment account with your bank. Would you let an agent make all the decisions on making the investments for you, buying and selling the stocks and the other financial products that you want to make money from, and just tell you what the yield is at the end of every week or at the end of every day or whatever? Do you think that that's?
Listen, the majority of all trading on Wall Street is algorithmic right now.
Yes.
It's the algorithm making those decisions. There's nobody in the loop saying, "Oh, well, I'm going to approve that." You're aiming for a local or an absolute maxima on returns at a speed that no human can do. That is the case of what's going on today. Now, can you bring that benefit down to the human? I think eventually, yes. You're going to have an AI able to do evaluation of investment trades and portfolio trades far beyond any human could. You could fool yourself and put yourself in the loop if you want, but you're just going to slow it down. I deal a lot in abundance and the idea of abundance, and right now the single scarcity we have is time. If AIs are able to take off your plate a whole set of decisions. Now, are we there yet? No.
Will we be there in the future? Absolutely.
I'm glad you mentioned abundance because of course, I know that you have been very interested in this area. My next question actually was, does AI create abundance or disruption? Or both?
Do you want to go first?
I'll go. I would say AI, that everyone knows today, like I said at the very beginning, like LLMs. I didn't really say everything I want to say in the right way, but basically LLMs today, it's just auto-complete. There's no reasoning. It's trained on tons of images and essays and data points and Reddit. It has seen so many different versions of text that it is so good at understanding all of this, and this is most likely to come next. In most scenarios, it will be correct, it will be accurate, or it will be extremely plausible. However, it still can tell you things like the ball will roll up the hill, but the ball will never roll up the hill. Or if you ask it, "Should I walk or drive to the car wash?
It will tell you should walk to the car wash because it's closer, but you do not need to walk to a car wash because you need your car at the car wash. I think that because it's auto-complete, because it gives you the answer, people are like, "Oh my God, it's going to take my job. It is doing what I do every day." Yes, in some cases, I would say that is true. There are very small tasks where sequences and language is fine, and that will be replaced. However, I believe that we're entering a renaissance period in this next wave of AI, because the next wave is not about language, it's about the physical and the scientific world. Everyone's talking about world models right now. If you think about it, the calculator didn't remove mathematicians.
The Excel sheet, the spreadsheets didn't remove accountants. CAD didn't remove engineers. In fact, it amplified it. It made people realize, oh my God, I can now become a mathematician. I can now become an engineer. I think we'll see an influx and too, in the sciences and also in the art world, I really believe in the next wave of renaissance in the sense that more artists will appear, more influencers will appear, more models. Okay, on the artistic side, like the next human agenda, I fully believe in that. However, I also believe that we'll see an abundance of biologists, chemists, engineers, aerospace engineers, so on and so forth, because now we have, in particular what we're doing in Ratio, we are able to speed up CFD simulations that cost millions of dollars and take hours into seconds and cost pennies. Okay?
This speed up will not replace all of these engineers. It will cause an influx of new engineers to come because now anybody can create the next SpaceX or the next Honda or the next Toyota or the next robot that will actually be walking amongst us because currently they can only do one singular task.
That's slightly in conflict to what Peter was saying before about the robot that's doing the surgery for me that knows how to do the surgery. How many surgeons are required to oversee the robots that are doing the surgery?
Going to your original question of disruption versus abundance, yes, we're going to disrupt what has been 200,000 years of scarcity, right? We evolved in a world of scarcity, and unfortunately, our cognitive biases are around scarcity. The fact is we have been creating measurable abundance across every single area. I've written two books on the topic, and you can watch and measure abundance in food, energy, water, healthcare, education, even to a great degree, freedom. It's measurable, and it's been up and to the right across everything. We're also creating an abundance of microplastics, obesity, depression, right? It's not necessarily all positive, majority positive, but there are negativities there. Technology is a force that takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant, right?
The example I give is we live on a planet that is bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun hitting the surface of the Earth every day than we consume as a species. Energy is plentiful. It's just not in a usable form. Then we bring in photovoltaics, perovskite, solar thermal, and we make that energy that is ambient and abundant usable. That's what technology does. It takes what's there and makes it more usable and more accessible. We're heading towards a world of extreme abundance.
The work that I do at the XPRIZE Foundation, my abundance community, Singularity, is all about recognizing that we are lifting eight billion humans out of abject squalor, which is 1,000 years ago was the king and the queen, the emperor, the pharaoh at the top of the hill, and everybody else in squalor supporting those few individuals. We've moved people out of that into from extreme poverty to poverty, middle class, and we're moving the needle upwards where we can give every man, woman, and child access to everything they need. I interviewed Elon at the beginning of this year. We talked about at length this idea of universal high income. Then again in March, we talked about AI and robotics will produce products and services at such a rate that you could not want enough stuff, right? This is a direction we're heading.
It's just very difficult for us to understand that given our preexisting mindsets.
If I'm 18 today, what should I study?
Really important, I think, that I have two 15-year-old boys. I think about this. I was lucky when I was growing up, Apollo and Star Trek gave me my purpose. A passion is something you love doing. A purpose is something that you love doing that is of value to other people. The greatest gift I want for my kids or for anybody is to help them find their purpose. Right. The two mindsets you need today is a purpose-driven mindset and a curiosity mindset. Curiosity enables you to use the greatest tool for education ever, AI, to learn, to do, to be a creator versus a consumer. Purpose helps you direct where your curiosity is going. If you want to do something else, become an expert in a problem space, not a solution space.
The problems typically persist. As new technologies come online, you learn how to apply that new technology onto that problem space. I'll say one final thing, which I think the most important thing to learn on top of all that is entrepreneurship. The social contract of do well in high school, go to college, get a degree, get a diploma, and get a job is gone. It's cooked. Today, the single most important thing is find something that you care about, find a problem, become an entrepreneur. Don't go and find a job. Create your own job.
Jayden, do you have a view about where and what people should be studying at the age of 18?
Yeah. I don't want to say exactly what he said, but I very much stand for that. I think people need to have agency. I don't think everyone should be an entrepreneur, okay, but I do think everybody needs to have agency. People need to not be told what to do to understand, like, "I want to progress and I want to move forward." They need to find ways to make themselves progress and move forward, and I agree, it's highly driven by having a purpose. I would say, like, ambition is what I would say. You need to have ambition because I don't think I have ambition. I don't know if I've found my purpose yet. I hope I'm on my mission to achieve my purpose, but I have an ambition, and I hope along the way I achieve my purpose.
I would say having agency is the most important thing, because like you said, you don't need to go to school. You don't even need the high school contract to get into a really great college. That is no longer needed. Now, you can now drop out of high school and start a company and be a solo entrepreneur or join a tech startup, right? I always say there's so many things that you can do now. The world is really in your hands. As you said in the very beginning, AI is the greatest educator of all time. You have to take advantage of that, and that is ultimately up to you. No one is going to tell you how to become an entrepreneur or successful or ambitious. You have to teach yourself how to do that.
I would say that's the most valuable thing as an 18-year-old is teach yourself how to be responsible for yourself, and go all in on that. I would say the most important thing nowadays is being yourself. Everybody wants to be like someone else or join this great company or do this next thing. Do this saying that someone else did, which is fine if that's your goal in life. The thing is, you'll get lost in wanting to be someone else, right? That you'll never be happy or content, and you won't go all out. I would say in the current time that we're in, you have so much at your fingertips. If you're not going all out, you're wasting your time.
I've got a more sort of dumbed-down question to do. Forgive me, because I'm the least intelligent person on this panel. What jobs are going to disappear, and what jobs are going to expand?
I've got two short videos I'd love to queue up. One of them is on that topic. Where's the video? There's a video from Google I/O about the Build with Gemini XPRIZE. Could you show that?
This is Josh Woodward, who heads Gemini Google. I run the XPRIZE Foundation. I'm Chairman. Anousheh Ansari runs it day to day. There are two big problems that I'm concerned about. One is, what do we do with jobs? The second is the fact that there is a great deal amount of fear around AI.
He's ready to run the video.
Okay.
Shall we do it?
Yeah.
Okay, let's run it.
It is the ultimate platform to make an impact. We are officially launching the Build with Gemini XPRIZE Hackathon. This global hackathon is going to offer up $2 million in prizes for builders who create apps that solve actual, real-world challenges. The premise is simple: pick a problem worth solving, build with Gemini, and let's all try to positively impact the lives of a billion people. To build at that scale, you're going to need some serious power.
The problem I see is a lot of youthful unemployment coming, which is going to lead to a lot of social unrest. One of the goals I have is to change the mindset. I believe the more entrepreneurs on the planet, the more problems get solved, the better society is. This competition, which I dreamed up a few months ago and got my friends at Google to fund, is around teaching people that if you find a problem, you can build a solution in English. This is no coding. This is writing up what your app or your website or your product's going to be and having it coded up and running it. We already have thousands, after two days, thousands of people competing for this.
The goal is to build in public and to show everybody that you can be, if you desire, be an entrepreneur. That you can build something, generate revenue. This is a global competition, which for me is around changing people's mindset about, "I can't get a job." That's fine. Go and build something or go and find a small team and build something together. If I could just show the second video, get these out of the way. The second video is, for me, one of the most important things I'm doing, and this is something that Christian Angermayer has helped fund. I believe there's a huge amount of fear in the world today that's growing, that's going to cause problems.
I'm the eternal optimist, we're going to have a period in the next two to eight years of a rough ride on the backsides of what's coming. The fear comes from two things: people's not being sure about what my future is, will I get a job? Will I keep my job? The second problem is that Hollywood has taught us about killer AIs and rogue robots. If you see "Ex Machina," "Terminator," "Black Mirror," and you say, "Well, that's where we're going," why the hell would you ever want to have that life for yourself? We need to flip the script. We need to create films that are going to show a positive vision of the future. I don't know if you guys remember, eight, nine months ago, Claude was blackmailing people. You guys hear about that, right?
Yeah.
Why? They just released two weeks ago, the training data that caused Claude to do that blackmail was it watching movies and films about AIs and self-preservation and doing just that. We were training the AIs to do that. I want you to imagine what's going to come from positive visions of the future. Let's roll that video.
You know, this exists because of a TV show, and I'm not exaggerating. Martin Cooper, the man who invented the mobile phone, said he built it because he saw it on "Star Trek." He saw Captain Kirk flip open a communicator and thought, "Hey, I can make that real." The iPad, it started as a prop in "Star Trek" too. Video calls? "Star Trek." Voice assistants? "Star Trek" again. Props became products. Fiction became multi-trillion-dollar industries. Here's the question: what's a vision of the future that excites you?
What stories offer humanity a hopeful, compelling, and abundant vision of what's to come? We're putting up $3 million in prize money plus millions in film financing to make your movie. Our program, in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation, Google, and Range Media Partners, is called the Future Vision XPRIZE, and it's one of the world's largest competition to address humanity's greatest need: hope. Create a trailer or short film, three minutes or less. Show us and the world your vision of the future. That vision could become the next blueprint for all of humanity. Find out more and register at futurevisionxprize.com.
We're going to flood YouTube with many thousands of these positive film trailers. Then we're going to make at least one of the winning films, hopefully more, and create an engine that flips the script.
Just a shout-out to Tyler over there for his work on this.
Okay, great. Moving now to something more pertinent to today's very exciting starting gun for the Enhanced Games. Peter, you've spent years talking about longevity. Today's 50 - 60-year-olds, are they likely to live longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives?
Yes, without question. You look at the human body was only evolved to live to the late 20s. Back 200,000 years ago, you'd go into puberty at age 12 or 13, you'd be pregnant. Then by the time you were 27 years, 28 years, your baby was having a baby, right? If you look at our physiology after age 30 or so, it's a slow downhill. From your hormone levels, your stem cell population, your muscle mass, everything is in a period of degradation because back 200,000 years ago, before food was abundant, if you stole food from your grandchildren's mouths, it was the worst thing for your species. You wanted to perpetuate the species.
Today, between 1900 and 2020, we were seeing a gain of about two months for every year, the idea that one of my mentors, Ray Kurzweil, talks about longevity escape velocity is the point that we're going to have science enable us to understand how do we extend your life for more than a year for every year that you're alive, that idea is called LEV, longevity escape velocity. His prediction is 2033 for that, I feel that we're tracking. Demis Hassabis, the head of DeepMind, has been very vocal that we are going to solve all disease within this next decade. Cancer, heart disease, inflammatory disease, autoimmune disease, every disease within this decade. Dario Amodei was on stage a year ago saying we're going to double the human lifespan within the next five to 10 years. Again, our linear-thinking mind says, "That's bullshit.
Never going to happen." You know what? The stuff that I'm seeing, we just launched a $101 million XPRIZE for reversing functional age by 20 years. We have 830 teams in that competition. David Sinclair from Life Biosciences, I'm an investor and a backer in all these companies. His work right now is in humans for epigenetic reprogramming. Can we turn back your epigenome, the control system for your 22,000 genes, to an earlier state of youth? You've got the same genes at birth, at 50, at 100. Why do you look different? You're running the same software. Well, it's not the genes you have, it's which genes are on and which genes are off, your epigenome. The work right now in animals, including primates shows that, yes, we can reverse your epigenome. All of these things give me incredible confidence in this.
You're saying 2033 was what? What was the milestone?
Longevity escape velocity, LEV. The year at which science and technology is able to extend your life for more than a year for every year that you're alive.
Is it possible that I could compete in the Enhanced Games in sort of 2035, around that sort of time? What do you think?
Well-
I think I-
I'd have to see your moves.
Okay, look, I think I've exhausted the list of questions that I had, but I'd be very happy to open the questions to the floor and see. We have a question here from a gentleman in the front. Hao.
The mic runners are running?
Yeah, we'll repeat it.
Yeah.
You guys, first of all, great timing. Super important. You guys mentioned that there's a choice, a fork in the road at the very beginning of this, where people can choose, are you a creator, are you a consumer? Do I want to embrace AI? Do I not want to embrace AI? We also talked about we need more people to be entrepreneurs, to be in the problem space versus the solution space. People in this room, as Dan mentioned, we're in a very privileged group, right? There's probably six, seven billion people out there that either aren't aware of that or don't have the ability to actually make that choice. Gemini Spark that came out on Google I/O, that's $100 a month. Most people, the majority of the world, can't afford $100 a month in order to have an agent that supports them.
I guess my question is, should AI be more capital-driven in terms of the XPRIZE, in terms of all the stuff we're doing, in terms of having private enterprise driving it? Or is this so fundamentally important, like electricity, like the internet, like mobile, that should government play a bigger role in it? I know, for example, in the current administration, David Sacks has been very vocal that we need to be more positive, right?
I assume this aligns well in terms of the government strategy, in terms of driving more positivity in society, in terms of people understanding the benefits of AI. Where, in your respective opinions, how much should government play a role in making sure that maybe it's not a fork, it is something that society as civilization, we need to be adopting AI and driving AI versus capital, really? I think there's going to be limitation in terms of accessibility of AI, if that's the case.
I believe that governments 100% should endorse it for the reasons that you said. Not everyone can afford $100 a month. I mean, majority of people cannot. Okay? I think that's also where the fork lies, okay? As you said at the very beginning, should we focus on for capitalism, or should we focus on AI for everyone? Okay? Should governments make AI for everyone? Like I said, that's the fork within governments as well, because you have the people on one side that is gung ho capitalist. Let's make as much money as possible, okay? You have the opposite side that is going all in on the fact that AI is going to take humans' jobs. AI is the enemy. AI is the bad guy. Okay? You have the conflicts outside because people are like, "Oh, is it for capitalism?
Is it for everybody? Is it" Also within government, you have that same argument, because you have people that are for capitalism, and you have people that are against capitalism. My view is, I think governments have to endorse this. I think sovereign AI is the future. Every country will have its own model, its own data centers, its own infrastructure. The future, if the future goes how I would like it to go, in the best ways and the worst ways, the future of everything will be fought through AI. The best companies will be the ones with the best AI. The best defenses will be the ones with the best AI, so on and so forth, right? The future of everything is in here. If the governments don't endorse it, then we'll just be falling behind.
Before, I'm very interested to hear Peter's, and I'm sure everybody in the room is very interested to hear Peter's answer to that question. Before he does so, I'd just like to give my perspective on this. Unfortunately, we live in a world which is driven very much by capitalism, and governments are driven largely by their desire to compete against other countries. We have a race at the moment amongst the global economic powerhouses to be the owner of the most effective AI capabilities such that they can control other countries and other markets and the economies. You have a really capitalist-driven approach to this, unfortunately, which is not serving the interests of humanity. Peter?
I think that's absolutely the opposite side of the equation. The fact that capitalism is driving this is what's enabled all this. You mentioned energy and mobile phones and internet. All of those were driven by capitalism and entrepreneurship. The fact of the matter is, it's the only force that drives the price down. We've seen a 99.9% drop in the cost of inference. It didn't happen because of regulation. It happened because of competition. Yes, you can buy Spark for $100 a month, but you can also get access to a shitload of incredible AI for nothing. Anybody with a mobile phone has access to it. Right now, there are more mobile phones on the planet than there are humans. It's going to get cheaper and better. Yes, if you want the highest level, the latest model, you're going to pay for it.
The models that are free are incredible compared to anything two years ago. Yes, there's the cutting edge that you're going to pay for, but the majority of humanity has access to incredible capability because of entrepreneurialism, because of capitalism. Yes, governments are going to come in and make sure that what they should do, that their populace has access to this, and it's the responsibility of governments. It's also the responsibility of capitalism, entrepreneurship, all of this, to drive the cost down and increase the capability on a regular basis.
What you're saying basically is that governments need to educate the populace that these capabilities are already there and they don't cost $100 a month.
We've seen out of India and the partnership between Mukesh and Google for a $40 phone and incredible 5G. This isn't happening because of government regulation. It's happening because of the capitalist engine and entrepreneurship. It's the only thing that's going to work here. Yes, governments need to make sure that they support those who can't got it, but do not get in the way and try and over-regulate this.
No, I agree with that. Don't misunderstand what I was saying. Okay, next question.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Peter, you mentioned that you're an optimist. You also mentioned that you think that human nature is fundamentally good. Banking off of this conversation of competition, do you believe that human nature is also driven by self-interest? Is this abundance that AI promises, is that counter that human nature? Will we lose the motivation that got us to this place in the first place?
I don't think so. I think what is going to be enabled is my ability to do good and help people is massively amplified, right? I talk about this within Singularity University and my abundance community that every one of us now has the ability to find and solve problems to positively impact the lives of a billion people. In the past, it depended what village you were born in, whether there was any books in your village, whether you spoke the language, whether you could ever travel outside of it. Today, anyone anywhere who wants to self-educate can and can build something that positively impacts a massive number of people. That's the reason, this Gemini XPRIZE. Pick a problem that impacts 100,000 people or more and solve that problem, and earn a living in the process. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.
You want to become a billionaire? Help a billion people, right? These are alignments in that regard. We'll never run out of problems to solve.
We'll never run out of problems to solve. We just get higher and higher problems and bigger and bigger opportunities. We're heading towards that Star Trek universe.
Peter, my name is Dr. Christopher Khorsandi. I'm a plastic surgeon, practicing. I'm also a co-founder and chief medical officer of a tissue engineering company that has allowed us to have off-the-shelf human fat without any DNA in it. My question comes as a father of three. You have children. I'm a Moonshots mate. Love your show.
Any fans of the Moonshots podcast here? Thank you.
How do we, with the dependence on AI with our children, allow them to maintain emotional sovereignty in the future? As you were talking about with Google in your talk recently with them, they are an advertising company. They are the middleman for retail in some sense. Over time, there's the potential for an insidious sort of creep in terms of manipulation. How do we prevent that, and how do we raise children who have that independence emotionally to do the things that you're saying, to become the dreamers, to become the entrepreneurs, and not just the consumers?
I think part of that is just parenting, unfortunately, is teaching your kid agency. I think it's one of the most important words today. To help them find their purpose, to expose them to as much so they become intrinsically motivated to do things where they find a great tool. How do they use it to fulfill their purpose? How to remain curious in that regard. I also think our educational system is for shit. I think our high school educational program, I'm working with Max here, we're building out abundance education, reinvent the high school education program. I think college is cooked. I think we need to reinvent what you do in post-secondary. You can call it whatever you want, but that's going to be reinvented.
Yeah.
I'm happy to discuss it more with you.
Great question. Thank you. Any other questions?
What are your thoughts about education, Jayden?
Mine?
Yeah.
Unless you're wanting to come get a PhD or a master's in something, I would say very niche, I would say everything is really at your fingertips. It really depends on what you want to do. If you are wanting to become a domain expert, then education is very important. Go pursue a master's or a PhD or study underneath someone that has a PhD or a master's. I would say like everything else, if you're not trying to be a domain expert, you can learn by just going out there and exploring and being a part of the world. I've learned more from Dan in the past two years than anyone could have taught me in school on how to be a CEO or an entrepreneur. For me, I think school is, as you said, at this point, it needs to be reevaluated.
I'm really a big fan of the school in S.F. It's two hours. It's all AI. It's two hours, and everything after that is a project. I think that's more or less how things should be. I went to school. I have my master's. I wish if I grew up now, I would not do any of that. I think I would probably try to figure out how to convince my parents how to drop out of high school and start building something immediately.
Yeah. I think the education system as we know it, as Peter and Jayden have just described, is still stuck in a structure.
Industrial age.
In a sort of industrial-age structure. They need to completely pivot into an AI-driven proposition and rethink the way they do their education altogether. This has been very stimulating for me. I'm very pleased to be sitting here alongside two brilliant people and learning so much. I hope that all of you in the audience have enjoyed it and learned as much as I have. Thank you very much, Peter. Thank you very much, Jayden. Thank you, everybody.
Everyone, just a couple of things. First, want to thank all the panelists. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jayden, and all of you for being here. I'm Sid. I'm the CFO of Enhanced. A quick scheduling note for the games that you're all here for. If you could get there by 3:00 P.M., that would be great. We just want to make sure everyone's good with tickets, everyone gets to their places, and everyone enjoys everything we have to offer. 3:00 P.M., please, at the competition complex. Can't wait for you to be there, and have a good one. Thanks, guys.