BIG IDEAS BY NEW ECONOMIES
00:11:30 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:11:30] S1: So here's a world question. If you weren't building your companies and you wanted to solve aging, is there a particular area of focus you would like to really double down on to maybe help us all live longer? Are we going to be in the world in 50, 60, 100 years where we all live past 100? Maybe we start living to 120. This is just crazy, right? But maybe is this going to be available and possible in the future?
00:12:00 · Richard Socher
[00:12:00] S0: Yeah. I mean, generally life expectancy has improved already massively. And so I think we'll continue seeing that trend. I think there is a built in mechanism where many people also lose the will to live. And I think you need to have a special mindset to even want to live beyond a certain time and keep fixing, like working on really hard health issues that arise as you get older. But if you have the will to live, I think, I hopefully think it'll become more and more of a choice for how long you want to live. And can sort of in a healthy way. Obviously, no one wants to be like a vegetable for another 50 years or just like vegetate in bed. But like, I think that that is absolutely possible. At the same time, you know, the future, a lot of people think the future is kind of this prediction exercise, but it's often a construction exercise. We need to actually build these things. And so if I was to do something else, it would probably try to help And efficiently in a computer will be able to allow AI into an experiment on very large scales. And so that is just not possible right now. We don't have enough data that we've collected in biology. We did collect a lot of proteins and so we're able to build a language model for proteins and now we can generate new kinds of proteins that have certain antibacterial properties and so on. I think we need to collect a lot more data to Be able to build, for instance, a complete virtual cell, then a virtual tissue, and then a fully sort of virtual twin of multi-organ systems and ultimately full people. And I think there are a lot of exciting mixtures of robotics and biology companies that are going to be possible and necessary in the next few years.
00:13:52 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:13:52] S1: Do you think we are on a very short timeline for this to become possible? Is this 12 to 18 months away for this to actually start happening?
00:14:00 · Richard Socher
[00:14:00] S0: It's interesting, when I'm talking to the really bullish people in AI, I'm usually the one who's like, actually it's going to take longer. But compared to the normal people, I'm extremely optimistic at the same time. But the problem with biology is that even let's say we had this like magical molecule that our AI told us with very high accuracy is probably going to cure like there's no single aging, right? Aging is this like multi-organ process and your eyes age differently. To your hair and to your liver and your kidney and your heart and your bones and your skin and all these different things. They all age differently. Let's assume we have 10 different molecules that would help reverse aging or reduce aging in 10 different organs. You'd still have to go through clinical trials. And so those clinical trials, just by virtue of the FDA and so on, take several years. And then you want to know long-term risks, especially if you want to think about We're taking drugs for healthy people. The interesting thing is the bar is obviously lower if there's a drug and like without the drug, you're in late stage like lung cancer and you're going to die in three months. So if the drug gives you sort of 10 years later another cancer, You just don't care because you'd be dead anyway without the drug. Right? And so you could take a certain medication if you're really, Really sick already even if it has bad long -term consequences but for aging If you were to take a drug when you're healthy, the bar is even higher. So you'd want to have very long-term studies to really rule out all the complexities. And it will take a while for your eye to have enough data to be able to make all of those predictions. So it will take a few decades to really cure all the diseases and all of aging and all of that. But I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll get there in a few decades.
00:15:58 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:15:58] S1: And there's also the other side, right? You mentioned that around the consumers being a little bit conscious about taking these drugs, which are yet to be fully proven. But then there's also the medical professors, right? The doctors and professors, people who study this stuff all the time, they don't even know the consequences yet. There's obviously a huge cost production to this, especially for the consumers. If it's a very expensive drug, if it's around helping you live slightly longer, if you've got lung cancer, which you kind of alluded to, this is going to potentially be super expensive.
00:16:29 · Richard Socher
[00:16:29] S0: You know, it's interesting. I feel like everyone across the political spectrum could and should be pro technology scaling because as technology scales, It makes the world more equal. It used to be that certain people could afford communication devices, right? Like the first big brick cell phones, like they're just like old school ads and only like the really fancy, expensive, like managers could carry their big brick phones. Now, whether you're a billionaire or a normal middle class, like teenager, you can afford this pretty much the same iPhone. It's actually kind of incredible if you think about it. What are other goods and services that currently only billionaires have access to? It's personalized healthcare advice, it's a personal assistant, it's a personal tutor for your kids. They're all expensive and there's a bottleneck on intelligence. As we make intelligence cheaper and cheaper, more and more people will have access to those things. And that should be an aspiration for, I think, anyone on the political spectrum. So yes, I think if you just have a new So if you have a longevity drug out, probably in the first few years it's going to be very expensive. And then if there's enough demand for it, and this is probably if there was a longevity drug, you would be a multi-trillion dollar company if you just figure that out. One rare, uncommon disease And you cure it, or you help people stay alive for a little bit longer, that's a billion-dollar-plus company. So if you could have one drug that has basically everyone on the planet be a potential user or customer of it, would be extremely valuable. Initially it would be quite expensive and then it scales and the patents for medications will run out and then there will be normal generic versions of that drug and then you basically will give more and more people access to it. And that's been the case for almost all different technologies. Once we can scale, more people will get access to it. So I'm not too worried. It's obviously something that Once we make a technological breakthrough, we should try and do our best as a company or as a society really to then distribute those benefits to everyone. But I think sometimes some people want to sort of not have anyone benefit from it because not everyone can benefit from it right away.