[0:00:00] Some jobs will go away. I mean, they do with every technological revolution. Many jobs will just be done differently. There will be all kinds of new jobs created. You know, it's always pretty quickly after the big technological revolution. When you think about this, because especially around humanity and healthcare and longevity and us surviving on existence, essentially, it's in the hands of very few people and it's all private. How does government get more involved? Because they just aren't. In the way they used to be involved in science research and...
[0:00:26] The beginning of the internet. We have said many times that in a well-functioning society, you know, OpenAI would have been a government effort. I could say that about a lot of other industries too. How do you help fix that? Because you've all moved into the space, right? I mean, a lot of people are like, oh, are you mad at the tech people? I'm like, that's what they do. They move into spaces. It's the government that's abrogated its responsibility. The government should be...
[0:00:51] During the AI research, the government should be doing the longevity stuff and making those things available. The government should be figuring out fusion. You mostly do interviews about OpenAI. We're going to talk about another area that you're interested in. And you and I have talked about you're interested in energy and all kinds of different things, which I think people don't know much about this part, which is longevity. I want you to define what you think you're interested in right now and the way your investment theory is going on this time. For longevity specifically. For longevity specifically.
[0:01:19] I'd say that the broader category is an interest in healthcare. I'm interested in longevity for a bunch of reasons, but I remember once someone saying that most diseases are diseases of age. You know, 20-year-olds don't get nearly as sick as 80-year-olds. And so if we can figure out the general purpose thing here, maybe we can improve healthcare outcomes across the board. I had a passing interest in longevity for a long time.
[0:01:45] And then when the partial reprogramming discoveries began to happen. Explain what that is for people. The idea that we could sort of rewind cellular age a little bit, not all the way back to a stem cell, which you don't want to be turned back into goo, but we could make your cells a little bit younger. Right. So that seemed like a kind of crazy, exciting discovery. And I ended up making a large investment in a company called Retro to pursue that.
[0:02:14] Where did it come from? Where did this interest? Was it you wanted to live longer or what was the, or you were interested in sci-fi or what? I think kind of all of the above. I was, as I mentioned, like really interested in healthcare and is there like a, I think my whole kind of approach to startups and technology is can we identify like the crux issue for something? And then for healthcare, if we could truly keep you, you know, health-wise younger for much longer.
[0:02:44] That would address a lot of the health issues. And so rather than like kind of try to like fight disease after disease and problem after problem, maybe this was like, you know, the Gordian knot we could cut through. So the idea is most of the costs come at the end of your life in health care. Most of the costs, but also just most of like the degradations in quality of life. Right, and living badly, essentially. Were you yourself scared of that? Because there is this sort of trope of, you realize the trope of Silicon Valley guys wanting to live forever.
[0:03:13] Narcissism, etc. And there's a lot of examples of that. You can see Brian Johnson, whatever. All of it is vaguely selfish and sci-fi inspired in some fashion of becoming a robot, becoming a cyborg, etc. That's not your... At least not consciously, no. I don't like... See you in a minute.
[0:03:33] By the way, I don't think a technology like retro will make you live forever. No, that's correct. I think you'll be healthier for longer and then a very steep decline. So you just have healthier for longer, not live forever. I definitely don't want to get really sick for a long time. So explain what retro is doing and why you picked that particular company. There's lots of people sort of hitting this from... There are a lot of things now. At the time, there were not as many. This broad area of partial reprogramming seemed to me like the kind of thing that...
[0:04:02] It looked incredibly promising in the lab. It was one of the few approaches that I thought could really work across a whole person and seemed worth pursuing. I have become increasingly negative on the ability for academia to make things happen. I think academia is still really great at some things, early discovery. But it's like, all right, if we really want to take this idea and maybe make it into something that can really help people.
[0:04:28] Maybe a startup is a good idea. Right, which is spoken like a true Silicon Valley person. You know, I have my bias, obviously, but sometimes it works. Space travel, everything. Sometimes it works. The goal is add 10 years of health span. So maybe it doesn't keep you alive any longer at all, but you're healthier for longer. And the approach that I am personally most excited about is give you some proteins, some RNA or DNA that will express those proteins, whatever it is,
[0:04:59] But somehow do something to your cells that will partially reprogram them back to a younger state. A lot of people we've talked to are all pointing to AI as an important tool in whether it's cancer research, whether it's all kinds of whoever's doing approaching these things. Talk a little bit about the role that something like OpenAI and AI in general will have. Healthcare is one of the biggest uses of chat GPT with GPT-5.
[0:05:25] We made a big push to improve it for health care. People use it to understand their health all the time. They upload their medical records. They ask you questions about symptoms. You can read a lot of stories on the internet about people using this in super important ways. And obviously, we think that's great. So with GPT-5, we did a big push to make it better at health-related queries. So when you think about that uses as patient uses, doctor's uses, in 10 years, what could it be? I've heard a lot of
[0:05:54] Doctors and healthcare workers say that they hope that in 10 years everybody gets, and they literally mean this, everybody gets better healthcare than the best healthcare anyone can get today. They imagine a world where you can start with an AI medical advisor service and you can say, here's what's going on for me, or hey, this is my normal life. Here's my sleep data, what I'm eating, my blood tests, my symptoms.
[0:06:25] A service could early on say, hey, you're at risk of this. You need to go test for this. You need to make this change. You need to go to this specialist doctor. This is a little weird. You need to go here. The other day I had a, sounds crazy, I used ChatGPG for this. I had a thing on my hand. I'm like, what, is it a wart? What is it? I took a picture and I put it in. It really did. I had gone through a pricker bush and I had forgotten I had done that. It said, did you go to a pricker bush?
[0:06:50] And I said, I did go through appreciation. And I said, that's what it looks like, which was interesting, which was a good outcome, right? Talk a little bit about the things you're worried about. Because there's a lot of things. There's a lot of stories of things that get out of control. You recently had a story of a kid who was using chat GPT to tragic effects. What are the things you worry about when you're trying to fine tune this? Mental health in general is something that I'm
[0:07:17] Increasingly worried about with AI. Again, I think it can be done for tremendous good. But this is happening very fast. I think ChessBT is coming up on three years old. And for the first year, it was used as a sort of curiosity. Maybe a Google replacement a little bit. Maybe write my essay for school or whatever. Only with...
[0:07:46] More recent evolutions that people start to use it as a life coach, sort of a therapist and close advisor, things like that. We have learned that a lot of people need someone to talk to and give them advice. And I am worried that given how quickly this is moving, that societal scale behavior could change in a way that affects societal scale mental health.
[0:08:10] And we are working super hard to get a handle on that and understand what's happening. But it is something I'm worried about. So you engage 250 doctors in doing this. One of the things most people tell me when they're talking about AI's impact on health care, longevity, everything else is there has to be that human element. In a lot of ways, you almost want to eliminate the human in it. No. It tends towards that way. I am pretty sure, though, that people, even if they know the human doctor is going to perform worse than the AI doctor, will.
[0:08:39] I would significantly prefer the human doctor. I certainly would. I want my doctor to use all these tools. I want to use these tools myself. But there is something very deep. I have not had that many serious health issues, but when I did have one, I really would not have been happy leaving my fate in the hands of an AI. I really cared about that human doctor and their humanness.
[0:09:00] Some of it's driven by frustration with health care, of course, the difficulty of making even an appointment. No matter where you are on the economic scale, unless you're very rich, you can invite the doctors in. Most people have difficulty getting care. Let's say I got like bad poison oak. And I took a picture and I sent it to ChatGPT. And I was like, it says you have poison oak. And I said, that makes sense. I was hiking the other day, like those exposed areas. I think you're right. I'm really uncomfortable. And it's like, would you like a prescription?
[0:09:29] A prescription for prednisone, I'm sure this is your problem. I would say great. I'm comfortable with that. On the other hand, if I have some really weird symptoms and an AI says, that could be cancer, you better go see a doctor, I will definitely go figure out a way to get that appointment and really want to go talk to a doctor. GPT-5 is the first time where there have been real, small but real examples of this. Give me an example. I saw on Twitter a couple of days ago, there was a math proof.
[0:09:58] And then someone said, maybe we can do a little bit better and asked GPT-5 Pro to work on it and came up with a novel and better solution. So it could do little discoveries starting to... But a real useful, like actual discovery. That humans couldn't do. Or hadn't done. Or computers to this point hadn't done. So you said by 2035, you anticipate AI will be able to cure, at least treat most diseases. Really?
[0:10:25] Mitigate some people. Yeah, treat, mitigate, something like that. Right, right. But I think we are, I mean, again, this research project with Retro is one example where it's like, wow, this is like, this just pushed us years ahead in our research. I have to mostly go with what the biologists and the pharma companies say here. This is way out of my field of expertise. So this is squeezing time is what you're talking about. Or finding new insights. Both, speeding up the rate of discovery of new insights. And then making the insights themselves. Yeah, now.
[0:10:54] That quote about 2035 that I heard people, experts say, that's when they think we know what it is, how long it takes to actually get that into the clinic. There people are like, that's getting worse and worse. One of the things, it's incredible after all this time, we know very little about human biology, especially the brain, for example. Talk about how superintelligence overcomes that. We are not that smart, and biology is enormously complex. We can imagine kind of anything. We can have someone explain.
[0:11:22] Enormously complex things to us, and then we can get it. But to discover these things requires a lot of brain power, and in many cases, maybe more than we have. If an intelligence a thousand times or a million times smarter than us can figure out really how all of this works.
[0:11:39] And then explain it to us. I believe we'll be able to understand it, even if it was too complex for us to figure out. In the first place. Yes. So it will give us the answer. Yes. And then we'll go, oh, right. You and I can understand very complex physics, but it would have taken lifetimes of smarter people than us to figure it out. You could understand complex physics. You can, too. I had lunch with my son the other day, and he's tried to, and it was a waste of time. And we moved on to the Superman movie. I'd love to take a crack at explaining it. I get what you mean. I had a blood thing where I have low white blood cells.
[0:12:06] And doctors diagnosed it as neutropenia, which means low white blood cells. That was a description, not an explanation or a diagnosis. And I was like, well, why? Well, because it's low white blood cells. And I was like, but that's not an answer. It's a description. And that's where medical people often hide behind a description versus a diagnosis. And I remember standing in front of a nurse and she said, oh, a lot of women who just had babies have this. And I was like, really?
[0:12:32] She goes, yeah, I've seen a lot. But it was in her head from memory. And I looked behind her and there were sheets and sheets of paper of all the patients. And I thought the answer is in there somewhere. What I think we can do for sure is really empower individual people to be able to advocate.
[0:12:50] For better outcomes for themselves. Where do you find the problem in accepting these technologies? Is it the medical? Is it pharmaceutical companies? I would think pharmaceutical companies would embrace it so they can do drug discovery faster. We have not seen the kind of rejection from the medical community that people told us we were going to get. In fact, every time I go visit a clinic or a hospital or whatever, and I'm kind of asked, I'm like, you know, how's it going with us, whatever, they're like...
[0:13:20] Don't tell anyone, but every doctor here uses this all the time. And we just do it at home and, you know, please make a HIPAA compliant version so we can do it at work. But we all like, we all love it. When you think about extending longevity, you're saying you're giving power information in the hands of people. How does that work? Do you think it has an implication on health care and longevity besides detection? I think these are like somewhat different. I mean, I think what we've been talking about mostly is giving consumers access to like.
[0:13:48] Good health care, good information is one thing. About themselves, personalized medicine. Yes. We've finally gotten. Which I think is going really well. And this is no longer like a theoretical thing. This is like here, people do it. A lot of people do it every day. And then there's this other category of can we use AI to do better longevity research with any of the companies or approaches that are working on it. And I think those are pretty different. I mean, the same intelligence matters for both of them. So AI will work for both of them. But they're quite different approaches.
[0:14:18] People want, like consumers, patients want it to work so badly that it attracts charlatans. And they make a lot of money because people will try anything. The crazier the better, it sounds like. So I find that obviously really distasteful. It speaks to how much people want something. It's like everybody wants a magic pill. You tell people like...
[0:14:43] Sleep eight hours a night, get exercise, eat reasonably healthy, and don't drink so much. They're like, nah, fuck you. I'm not going to do any of that. I want a pill. And so in the search for this cheat code, people take all kinds of crazy stuff, limited to no medical evidence. Do you fall prey to that? Do you? At this point, I don't. It's hard not to, isn't it? I mean, it's all around. When the GLP-1s first came on the scene, a long time ago, many, many years ago.
[0:15:11] Right. There was this compounding pharmacy that'll make it for you. Right. I had no idea what a compounding pharmacy was. So they make it for me. They screw up the dosing. And I do. I don't remember the exact number, but a mega overdose. Yeah. And I had never taken it before, so I had like no tolerance or whatever. Right. And I like injected it like a, you know, it's like a Sunday or something. Let's call it 11 a.m. 2 p.m., 3 p.m., start feeling really bad, convinced I'm like really sick. I had my friends over for dinner that night.
[0:15:40] My now husband looks at me, he's like, you're dying. I don't know, you're like, you've got some crazy, you're dying. Yeah. And I hadn't put it together that it was this yet. Oh, wow. And I go to bed feeling horrible, puking all night, whatever. I now have kind of put together that maybe it has to do with this. Maybe, yeah. And I, you know, my pulse is like 150, something like that. Blood sugar, unbelievably, like just fully crashing in the morning with this ER.
[0:16:09] And then, like, over the next day, they give me, like, a glucose drip, whatever. Over the next day, we kind of figure out what happened. But there's nothing you can do. You just wait. Right. And an interesting and unknown thing about this is the, or not that well-known, is it makes you not have a desire to eat. Taking enough of it makes you have a desire, not have a desire for anything else. So I spend, and I'm usually, like, a very kind of, like, I need a lot of, like, I need, like, new stuff to think about. Yes, I know. I'm the same way.
[0:16:36] And I have these few days laying in this hospital bed staring up at a white ceiling, thinking nothing, not looking at my phone, not wanting anything, feeling terrible, but just no desire for anything. One thing that is better about longevity is everybody gets old. And so there's like a mass, mass market there. You don't have to worry about that part. I do think these things where there's only like 20,000 people in the world that have a disease, it's not so obvious about how to make capitalism work for this. But I think anything that we could come up with.
[0:17:04] They would add 10 years of healthspan. We'll have the benefits of capitalism to help us make it cheap. And I think that's what I would do. You do. Are you worried about saying a certain amount of rich? All the sci-fi is around the rich people taking all the goodies. I mean, the version of this, I think about this much more for AI than longevity. But for AI, yes, it absolutely has to be fixed. I think we're actually doing a really good job right now of distributing the benefits of AI quite broadly. But you can imagine a world where it doesn't go that way. And if you have...
[0:17:33] A lot of capital and you put it all into your AI brain, that's like a huge advantage over people who don't. How many people at OpenAI are focusing on time research on health-related goals? I actually don't know the size of the chat team. It's not tiny, but it's growing fast. And then we have the scientific research teams. One of the complaints, of course, is that it's not just you. And it happened early in the internet. I remember a lot of these companies saying, we're here to help humanity. And I thought...
[0:18:00] No, you're not. You're not really. And I always used to reference the Twilight Zone episode, To Serve Man, which was the aliens come to help us and then they want to eat us, essentially. How do you push back against the idea that health goals is just marketing for the other things you're doing? I mean, again, it's like, I would bet it's a top three use case of ChachiBT at this point. Like, it's a significant, it's a significant thing. It is fair that it's only one of our goals. Like, we also want to help people, right?
[0:18:29] If AGI happens and it's designed to help protect humans and make them live longer and do better things, what is your worst scenario and what's your best scenario for, say it exists, let's just assume it exists?
[0:18:58] I think in all of those cases, people are confused about whether they want to think about it as like a tool or a creature. I think it's like this incredible Rorschach test. And the way people talk about it says much more about them than it has anything to say about AGI. No one knows, obviously, and people can do it. But, you know, if you're like, I think it's kind of always really revealing to hear people. How do you look at it? I think of it as this tool. Like, I think of it as it's going to be, it's going to do like amazing things, but it is not.
[0:19:29] Going to be this like self-aware thing from the sci-fi movies. Let's say the next CEO of OpenAI is an AI. You know, I get to like write the prompt for like what I would like that AI to go off and do. And it may then go do crazy complex things. It may look to the world like it's paving these highways and doing whatever. But it was still like some person had to ask the system to go like accomplish some goal. Which it comes down to the prompt, right? Yeah, now again.
[0:20:00] It could be so complex over such a long time horizon, so many side quests along the way, that it doesn't feel like that. With having to do with human health and our existence, our actual existence on the planet, can ethics keep pace with the progress that is happening? Ethics already runs behind. I was going to say, I have some hope that AI will help us figure out better win-win systems.
[0:20:30] I think we need new ideas in the world. And clearly we're not coming up with them on our own. So that'd be my positive case there. That in the end it will be better. Yeah. That we will come up with better ethical systems with this tool helping us think than without. As you said, the prompt matters. Like what's the question that's being asked in the first place? Just like a Google query. When you think about health care, what should the prompt be?
[0:20:59] Well, more generally than just healthcare, although this fits really well into this, I think the prompt that most people want some version of is help me flourish in accordance with my goals, whatever those are. Maybe help me figure them out, but once I figure them out, help me flourish in accordance with my goals over a very long time horizon. And that is... Flourish mentally, physically. Physically everything.
[0:21:26] Since you're not using any of these things, I'd love to know, have you heard of something recently that's been crazy around longevity that you're like, oh, stop it? The ice bath people are so annoying to me. Why? They're so... Religious? Smug about it. Yeah. Like, they take such pleasure in, like, telling you, oh, my ice bath is, you know, 36 degrees. I stayed in for 45, mine's 35, I stayed in for 50. And they're, like, so convinced it works. Maybe it does, but there was this study recently that it doesn't. Yeah.
[0:21:55] And I just sent it to like all these friends that brag about how miserable they are. Yeah. And they don't like it. Yeah. Not the fasting people. They drove me crazy. There was a whole period in Silicon Valley where I had to go to dinner parties with fasting people. And then I just sit there and eat that steak or whatever it happened to be. Would you upload your brain into the intelligence? I am much, I stay very skeptical. I'm much more focused on the downs. I can see ways where that's horrible. Yeah.
[0:22:21] I want to be mistreated in a simulation for all of eternity. What about putting your brain into another being? There's a famous thing where aliens come down and they're like, why are humans using their meat flaps? It's an old, old teleplay. Would you like to just be an AI? Would you like to merge with an AI? No, I like my body. I like the world. You wouldn't want to put AI in your brain? A Matrix-like solution.
[0:22:50] There's like gradations, right? There's like some version of that where I would augment. Suddenly you play piano. Something like that. But, oh man, would I be skeptical. How do you want to die? Quickly and painlessly. How so? I don't know, like, you know, a stroke or heart attack in my sleep when I'm really old and I've had a great life or something like that. And if you could extend your life longer, how old would you like to be?
[0:23:17] I turned 40 recently. I was like, all right, this is kind of traditionally about the halfway point. And I felt okay about that. I assume I'll live much longer than 80 if things go well. But I had a very rich life. Did that change you at all? No. But I do really want to stay healthy. I really value that.