Why the Next 10 Years May Add 50 to Your Lifespan | Dr. Derya Unutmaz

This is probably the most critical time in human history. So try not to die for the next 10 years.

Can you explain and unpack why you think that?

The reason is that the technology because of AI is expanding exponentially. Cancer is going to be 100% curable, probably less than a decade. We'll get to a point where we'll have hundreds of new drugs coming out every month, maybe. And then we'll get to a point, uh, probably 15 maximum 20 years, where we will be able to completely reverse the aging process. So if you're 80 years old, 90 years old, you will get back to, uh, age 30, 40, whatever.

Why do you have such an optimistic view?

AI is an incredible enabler. It gives you superpowers. The key risk is humans. Humans misusing AI. There's only one existential threat to humanity, and that's humanity.

Hey everyone, today's episode explores an extraordinarily exciting convergence: the accelerating pace of artificial intelligence and a growing optimism about the future of science and medicine. In this episode, I discuss with Dr. Duria Enautmas how AI could dramatically improve our ability to detect, prevent, and treat human disease and ultimately extend human life expectancy.

Before we begin, I just want to mention one quick thing. Only about 30% of the people who watch this podcast are subscribed to the YouTube channel. Taking a moment to subscribe and enable notifications is one of the simplest ways to support the show and help us bring these conversations to a wider audience. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much, and I really hope you enjoy this episode with Dr. Duria Enutmas.

I'm so excited to be sitting here with Dr. Dura Unutmas, who is one of the handful of scientists that has had access to collaborate with OpenAI, one of the, you know, world's leaders in in artificial intelligence. He's also an aging researcher. He's an immunologist. Really, just a match made in heaven to sit down and talk about the role of AI in in aging research and in medicine. So I'm super excited to have you here today.

I'm very excited to be here. Thank you.

As we both know, aging is a very, very complex process. Many factors involved. It's heterogeneous. It's so complex. And it just seems like so almost impossible to solve. And yet, I've heard you say something that's very interesting. I've heard you say if you could try not to die within the next 10 to 15 years, you might want to try to do that because you could live an extra 50 years.

Yeah.

Can you explain and unpack why you think that? What makes you believe that?

Thank you. So, first of all, I'm very excited to be here. I'm a big follower of your podcast. I think it's maybe the best, uh, aging or longevity podcast. So, uh, this is this is a great pleasure. Um, yeah, so I've I've said that, um, quite a few times, uh, in the last year or two, actually, um, and it may not even take 10, 15 years, might be, uh, even closer. Uh, the reason is that, uh, the technology, especially because of AI, uh, is expanding exponentially. So our minds think in a linear term. So we think that the next 10 years is going to be as much advanced as the last 10 years or the last 15 years. But that's not what's going to happen. In the next 10 years, you can think of it as more advanced than the last century. So imagine that you were living in the early 1900s, uh, and somebody told you that, you know, we're going to, uh, have vaccines and you will never get smallpox or, uh, you won't die of tuberculosis. You know, people would laugh at you. So that's not that's not possible. Um, so, so that's this the speed that we're talking about. But there's something, uh, even more important because of this acceleration. The, uh, the advances of treating diseases is also going to accelerate dramatically. So, uh, we will get to a point what's called the longevity escape velocity. This was coined by Aubry de Gray, who's, as you know, is a great, uh, aging, um, researcher. Uh, so the point is that we will come to a point in the next, I would say, probably eight to 10 years, where every year you live is going to add more than a year to your life. So let's just say, um, you know, 10 years ago, 10 years later, you get a a cancer, uh, that's normally is not curable and you only have one or two years to live. Uh, um, but that during that one year, there is going to be a new treatment that will cure that cancer. So automatically, it's going to add several years or maybe 10, 15 years to your life. Or, uh, we're already starting to see that with the GLP1, uh, drugs, uh, receptor agonists, which, uh, which are adding about 5 to 10 years to lifespan of people who are obese or who have chronic, uh, conditions. We'll have sort of the muscle generators, uh, uh, which I think will have tremendous impact on the aging population because, as you know, that's a huge problem. So all of these things will add up, and and the technology and AI is going to keep accelerating. So 10 years later, uh, what will happen in a year will be like what happens in 20 years of advance. And then we'll get to a point, 15 maximum 20 years, where we will be able to completely reverse the aging process. So if you're 80 years old, 90 years old, you will get back to, uh, age 30, 40, whatever. So that's going to add up, uh, 50 years or 100 years to to your lifespan. Um, and then you can keep doing that and extend it almost, uh, indefinitely. So I think this is probably the most critical time in human history. So try not to die for the next 10 years.

And we're going to talk about all these things. I want to talk about curing disease. I want to talk about reversing aging, age reversal. Um, all of that is on on on my agenda to talk about with you today. But you mentioned something. You mentioned that right now, the, you know, artificial intelligence as a general term, you know, is is accelerating at was an exponential rate. I've heard you talk about this Moore's law and how the, you know, the software itself is accelerating right at this exponential rate. Um, maybe you could explain a little bit about like what what does that mean and then how how do you think that'll translate into biology? Because, you know, humans, we're not software, and there are things that, at least in my opinion, you know, you have to still test safety, right? I mean, so like if you're, you know, accelerating the computational speed and therefore you can test a lot of things that are what are what's called in silico, for people listening, we're talking about testing things like just modeling them, and maybe you can explain this a little bit better. Um, but then at a certain point, you still have to test about, you know, safety and you definitely that that there are things that I think need to still be done in human trials. So I'd love to hear how you think that's going to happen.

I think that's the the most critical question because people always bring that up. Okay, you know, if you generate drugs within hours, you still have to test them on humans for five years, maybe sometimes longer. How, how are you going to deal with that? But let me, let me first, uh, start with how AI is accelerating biology now. So we we can think of it in in terms of phases and and because now and five years later is going to be very, very different. Um, so right now, especially in the last year or two, since, uh, you know, LLM came out, um, you know, their intelligence have been accelerating. Initially, it was, uh, fairly, um, smaller, uh, productivity gains. For example, you know, when GPT4 was was out, I I would ask it to sort of scan the literature and tell me what's the the latest on this topic or that topic. Um, and that saved me, you know, hours, sometimes days. Uh, but then as the models advanced, especially the after 01 model, the reasoning models, uh, started to come out, and and now we have the GPT5, uh, pro model, 5.5 pro model. Uh, what happened was that now they were able to think and plan. So, uh, you could start to ask very sophisticated questions. For example, here is a huge biological data set, a million data points or 10 million data points. Go over this. Not only just analyze it and group them, but, uh, what, what is the insight from that data? Uh, human mind is not able to do that. And in fact, we had such data sets which took us months to analyze, like, you know, a PhD student work on it using deep learning. We still couldn't really truly understand what that data meant. We, we know these genes are up, this metabolites are changing, this is happening. How do you bring all that together? Um, and so now AI models are able to do that. So you, I, I've tested, for example, uh, latest GPT5, uh, pro model. You can upload, uh, millions of data sets that we accumulate over years, maybe, and then in matter of minutes, you get not only the complete analysis. Recently, I had a 40-page report from GPT5, uh, pro, um, which was an analysis of this, what's called the RNA sequencing, lots of millions of data points, but it also provided incredible insight, like, what is the, what does this data mean? What should be the next questions to ask? So that automatically contracts months, sometimes years of analytic work into matter of minutes or hours. Um, so, so there, that, that is already accelerating, of course, in the drug, uh, design, uh, parts. I think every pharmaceutical company is going to eventually use AI generated AI generation for developing new drugs. Things that took years of screening of small molecules now take, you know, hours or days. So, so tremendous acceleration there. And then, uh, I think again, more recently, because the models have advanced so much that you can also ask things like, okay, so, uh, this is great, this is the hypothesis. In fact, AI can even generate hypotheses for you. But what sort of experiment I should do to address that? People have to realize that, what we do in in biology is experiments, but we don't really know what's the best experiment to do. I mean, that's kind of my job, but I have some intuition, we should do this to address that question. But is that the ideal experiment? Does that have all the controls, everything? So AI models are now able to tell you sort of simulating if out of this 100 potential experiments, you can do, these two are the best ones because this is going to give you the best, uh, output. And I, I've been testing that. So, so that is another acceleration. Now you don't have to try 100 things for a year, you can just try two things for few weeks and and get get the output. So that's what's possible now, already tremendously accelerating the R&D part. But then, uh, the second part, which I think is more important part, is how do we, uh, apply that to clinical trials and regulations? Um, so it still takes years to try everything on humans. And I think the solution to that will be what I call the digital twin. And this, this term is around for for several years. So the idea is that if we have lots of lots of biological data, and when I say lots, it's, it's a lot, petabytes of of data. If, if AI comes to a point where we're going to need much more compute than we have today, today is to able to compute all that and really kind of simulate a whole biological organism, a whole human being, but not just your, um, phenotype, but but also your metabolism, your immune system, your gut microbiome, uh, your genetics, and and all kinds of data sets are put together. And so it, it knows your biology in a temporal way, in in a, in a totally functional way. Then you can ask the question, okay, so if I give this drug to this person, what kind of effect it will have? If they have this disruption, is it going to have a side effect or is it going to be effective? So literally, we can cut down clinical trial time from years to to a matter of months or or even weeks. So you can actually do the trials in a very small subset of patients because you can choose the patients. You can say, okay, AI told me that these, these, these people, this drug is going to be effective 100% to them. And so, so you just test it on those people. And in fact, that will go into the personalization. There's going to be thousands of drugs for for different people. So that, that will cause tremendous acceleration. We're not there yet, but I'm, I'm betting on that that within the five, five to 10 years, we will get there. So, uh, the iteration process, the on humans is going to be all digital as well. And then maybe the, the manufacturing will be a little bit, um, uh, still will take time, but, but we can even improve that part too. So, uh, we at some point will come, uh, to a point where treatment on demand. So you go to an AI model, analyzes your genome, your biology, uh, orders the this small molecule or the drug or treatment just for you to the manufacturing facility, and next week you get your drug and you get treated. That's the world I'm imagining.

So I want to get back to this concept of digital twin again when we talk about personalized medicine. But if I understand correctly, so, you know, if we are, if we have this digital twin, which is all the genetic data, metabolomic, proteomic, biomarker, just everything, right? All this data, and more that we're not talking about, and and now we have AI, which can then, you know, do all these scenarios and figure out like how this drug is going to affect or how this treatment is going to affect this. And you're saying that the clinical trial that may have taken, you know, a few years can be condensed down and perhaps we can look at after doing the in silico experiments, you can look at some biomarkers and know like, is this going to affect their fertility? Like, you don't want to give some someone a treatment that's going to make them infertile, or, you know, so you think that's going to be, AI is going to be able to identify how to know if it's going to affect like fertility or cognition or life expectancy or, you know, just just from the whole composition of the person and doing, I don't know, all these tests.

Yeah. So, uh, I mean, the path there, uh, requires, uh, several steps of validation, and that, I think we will get to a point where when we have super intelligence, that we'll be able to trust super intelligence, you know, almost 100%, that we don't need to validate it even with biomarkers or or whatnot. But to get to that point, it's sort of like the self-driving cars, right? So, uh, to get to a self-driving being leveled, I mean, it has to be 99.999% safety. You, you have to sort of validate it. Um, uh, you know, what happens if somebody's crossing the street, right? So, so that scenario has to happen, and then you, you record it, and sometimes, uh, you won't do the right thing. Maybe, you know, it won't stop. That's why we still have to like look at this, you know, be ready to to take control. But if it does stop, and it stops, and and saves lives again and again and again, and right now, you know, self-driving cars are probably about 10 times safer. They will be maybe a hundred times safer. So you get to a point that you trust the AI rather than the the driver, right? So you say, okay, so I, I trust, I want the AI to decide for me, uh, to, to drive. So I think we'll get to that point for biology. It will take a little bit longer, uh, because of the extreme complexity. Um, and then we'll have to have, uh, very, um, clever benchmarking and validation, uh, ways there. The biomarker is going to be really important because again, you know, if you're developing an aging drug, that you claim will let people to live to 150, well, you can't wait, uh, you know, even even if somebody 100 years old takes it, you still have to wait 150 years, 50 more years to to validate that. So that, that's not going to work out. So we have to be able to predict that. But, but actually, probably aging is is the easiest in some ways, uh, to predict, because, uh, we have so many biomarkers or functional outputs we can measure. We know how they are in an old person and in a young person. So if your vi suddenly gets, uh, you know, like a 20-year-old, wow, that's amazing. If your muscles are as good as a 30-year-old, uh, if your skin looks, uh, like a 20-year-old, that's what my mom is waiting for. Uh, you know, that, that's that's proof. And you'll, you'll immediately see that. I mean, immediately weeks or or or or or whatnot. So, I think, um, again, it will take time. That's the part that's going to take time, the sort of trusting AI to, um, to tell you, yes, if you take this drug, you will, you will be treated or you will reverse aging. Um, uh, we, we, we still have about a decade. That's why I'm saying like, you know, otherwise it would, it would take, it would happen even earlier.

You mentioned super intelligence, artificial super intelligence, ASI. Maybe you could talk a little bit about, just for people to have an understanding, right now the difference between artificial intelligence, artificial generalized intelligence, AGI, then the super intelligence, because you said, once we get to the super intelligence, we're going to trust it, right? So I, I mean, I don't know, do we know what those differences are, or can you explain a little bit?

Yeah, of course. You know, this changes on a daily basis, what the definitions are, depending on who's, whose definition. But the, you know, I've been thinking about AGI, ASI for decades. I mean, it's not something that I started to think about it recently. Um, and so the way, uh, I originally, uh, defined AGI, it's, it's artificial general intelligence. So what that means is that, first of all, it's artificial, right? So it's not human intelligence, artificial intelligence. And then it's general. What that means is that, uh, if AI learns, uh, one set of, uh, rules or one set of knowledge, that it can generalize that to something else. And that's how our brains are intelligent, um, because, uh, you can be an amazing chess player. In fact, you know, AI beat the chess champion Kasparov in 1997, I think, like decades ago, but that was not general intelligence. It was super, uh, good. Or AlphaGo beat, you know, the the world champion in Go, which is a much more difficult, uh, game. To be general, uh, AlphaGo, you know, learning how to play Go or chess should be able to, I don't know, solve a problem in aging, right? So it should be able to transfer that information. I think the, uh, the amazing thing about LLMs, what we call large language models, is that they acquire this ability, which honestly, I didn't think, uh, this would happen so, so easily. I was expecting AGI to to happen, maybe a decade ago. So in my opinion, we have already achieved, uh, what I call level one AGI, artificial unit, because if I ask GPT5, uh, pro model, you know, something that hasn't, it hasn't trained on, like an experiment that I have done, or if I say, okay, think of the experiment as a video game, design another experiment for me, like, like you are playing a video game, so that's transferring completely different area to a biological system, and is able to do that in an amazing way. But we have, we, we still need to go through several levels. I, I think the next level is going to be memory. So they don't have persistent memory right now. They have some memory. They know about you. Uh, they know about what they've learned on the internet, but they need to be able to, uh, manage the context, you know, because there's a continuum. Life is a continuum. Um, and then the, the other one is going to be the self-learning, right? So maybe that's level three. I, it doesn't matter, and that's coming soon. You know, AI companies are saying like, we think that the real-time learning, uh, is, is, is coming maybe by by next year. Um, and then, uh, the third level, uh, uh, what I call the physical intelligence. So people again confuse this greatly, because the true human level intelligence is physical intelligence, it's not cognitive intelligence. So for, uh, millions of years, we evolved to survive in a physical world. We, we didn't have language up to, I don't know, 10,000 years ago, like we didn't know how to write. Um, this cognitive part has developed in the last, you know, maybe 10, 20,000 years. Before that, in fact, animals have very good physical intelligence. We're, we're imprinted and born with that intelligence. So, uh, an admiral or a child knows already have a world model. They know that, you know, if I drop this, it's going to fall, and doesn't have to test it a million times. And that's of course, what we need for robots, for embodiment. And, and you can see that, you know, that's taken a long time. You know, it's more difficult to train a robot to behave like a child than have GPT5 solve the most difficult math problem. So, and we'll get there. I think people are working on these moral models and physical intelligence, whether we need another algorithm or not. So that will be the, the final level of the AGI level. Um, once we have all those levels, then, and once the, uh, AI is able to self-learn, um, then that's the super intelligence, because at that point, it can train itself, you know, maybe thousands, maybe millions fold faster than we are able to do. Um, and, and there is a, there's a limit to human intelligence, right? So even the smartest person in the world can only do so much. And super intelligence, what I would define is that you will have the intelligence of combined totality of humanity at some point. Like, if you, I bring, uh, a million top scientists in the world, of course, they can solve, you know, like a Manhattan project. They brought all these brilliant minds, it wasn't one person's, they were able to solve very hard problems. Super intelligence will get to that level. We'll be able to do what thousands of scientists can do in a year, will be able to do in a day. So, um, I, I would probably trust that.

Wow, that's pretty exciting. I mean, and it, it also kind of brings in this, this concept of when you talk to people about AI, and not everyone has the understanding of it as you, for sure. You, you hear that there's, there's a pessimistic versus optimistic view, right? And oftentimes, if I talk to people, I hear a lot of pessimism. I hear, perhaps they don't understand their fear of the unknown of what AI is capable of. I mean, you're just the super intelligence that you're talking about, I feel if you explain that to some people, it would scare them even more. You know, perhaps they are worried about the cultural ramifications, economic ramifications, but also just this Terminator situation where, okay, well, they're super smart, they're going to want to then take over the world, and they don't need us anymore, right?

But you have such an optimistic view. I mean, we're talking about solving aging, living to be 150 or more. Uh, why do you have such an optimistic view? Are you worried at all about the other pessimistic sort of viewpoints?

Absolutely not. And I, I'll tell you why I'm, I'm so super optimistic about it. Um, when people make those statements like, uh, AI is an existential threat for us, and, you know, it's going to destroy humanity. Um, I make the counterpoint: there's only one existential threat to humanity, and that's humanity. So if you look at history, um, human beings killed more humans than everything put together, caused more suffering than anything that humans have have been exposed to. You know, even animals, I don't think they, they, maybe infectious diseases at some point might have caused, um, a lot of suffering, but, but, but the real danger is, is the human intelligence. So, uh, I do, let's do a thought experiment. Let's imagine that, uh, we live in a parallel universe, and in that universe, the world have decided that anyone above the IQ of, let's say, 100 is a danger to the society, because if you get very intelligent, you can come up with ideas that could be very dangerous, right? And that's true, actually, that's how it happened. Um, and then if you, if you have an IQ of 105, you get imprisoned immediately. So you, you are not allowed to to participate in society, or you get killed, or whatever that the society has decided intelligence is dangerous, so we're going to stop it. Uh, what kind of a world we would live in? We would not have anything that we have right now. We would live in probably just as farmers, you know, basic physical intelligence we have, uh, and, and try to survive, you know, uh, in a world where the average lifespan was 30 years old or something like that. So that's, that's how we should view, uh, AI. And, and the other point is that about this, uh, sort of AI is going to take over and is going to replace us. Um, uh, I see it exactly the opposite, because AI is, is, is an incredible enabler. It gives you superpowers. Even now, I feel like I have superpowers. Uh, you know, I've never been this busy in my life. You know, I, I actually sleep less, which is not a good thing, by the way. I don't recommend it, but be, because I can do so much. It's so empowering. You know, my mom was, was, was 86 years old, you know, she told me that, uh, ChatGPT changed her life. She, she's energized. She, she doesn't worry as much about her health. And, um, uh, it's, it's just been an incredible impact. And this is going to accelerate. And at some point, we will get, uh, we will sort of merge with the, with the AI, in a way that we will have direct interaction with AI through Neuralink type of, uh, brain interfaces. So we'll have the sort of the intelligence of AI in our own brain, not, not only directly, but also indirectly by sort of engineering our biological system. So why, why shouldn't everybody have an intelligence of Einstein, or even higher, right? So the difference between an Einstein and a normal person with, with a normal IQ is probably few gene, single point mutations. So if we can engineer that, if AI can teach us how to do that, then we are, we're also, uh, going much, much higher. So as long as we, we keep the agency, I think that's the only thing that we have to really protect, that we are the decider, or we see AI as a collaborator, as sort of another species that will live together, and we empower each other. In a way, it's our child, right? So it's, it's been created by us. Um, I, I, I see the chance of, uh, a, a, a worse world, extraordinarily. Of course, it's never zero, but, you know, the moment you're born, you're going to die, right? So, so you're, you're destined to die. Um, and now, uh, AI is giving us this opportunity to save literally save billions of lives. I'm not talking about saving lives as like extending their life for five years or 10 years. You're talking about thousands of years. So that's true saving lives. That's the potential. And the risk is again, I think the, the key risk is, is humans. Humans misusing AI. That's what we have to, uh, um, sort of maybe train or align AI. You know, don't, uh, don't look at the bad humans. You know, you, you can, you can judge the, the, the, the better, uh, the, the better world, uh, for us. So, um, of course, I might be wrong, but I'm, I'm pretty sure I'm, I'm going to be right.

I, I, I agree with the statement of we have to watch out for the humans, for sure, like, 'cause you're right, like they can and have in the past been the biggest threat to humanity. So, um, I want to, there were a couple of things that you mentioned when when you were talking about, you know, ASI and this ability to self-learn, and you're even talking about some of the ways that you use, you know, GPT5 Pro and and helping with designing experiments and interpreting results. And that was a question that I had as a biologist. And as you mentioned, you know, we do experiments. We're testing hypotheses. And then we have all this data and these results, and we have to know what result is meaningful and what anomaly is meaningful, because often times the anomaly,

Exactly.

which you might ignore,

Exactly.

is what you absolutely is the breakthrough, right?

And that is a sort of intuition. This, this biological intuition. And so do you think, first of all, do you think we're that, that, you know, the models we have now can already are capable of that sort of biological intuition? And if not, like, how far off is that?

Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a great question. Uh, in fact, um, uh, you know, I, I see that intuition maybe sort of the last mile or the top 10% or 10% of the of the solution, because 90% um, AI models, they are able to come up with, because it's, it's knowledge-based. Also in humans, it is, you know, for, for a medical doctor, for a scientist, for whoever, 90% or 95% is based on, uh, what's known, how you process that knowledge, but there's that extra 5, 10% totally dependent on your intuition. Uh, like, you, if you're a doctor, you see a patient coming through the door, you know, that guy is having a heart attack. You haven't checked anything yet. Somehow you know, you don't know how you know. The same thing in the lab, like, um, uh, in fact, I would, I would bet with my, uh, students and and postdocs. I would say, okay, I bet you, if you do this experiment, you're going to get this result, um, and I've never lost a bet. And they stop betting against me, even though it might look counterintuitive, oh no, that's never going to work. Somehow I know. How do I know? Because, you know, I've been working in the lab for 30 plus years, and, and you, you acquire certain things that are not in the literature, or, you know, you can't really read a textbook and learn it. You only do it by, by practicing it. Um, so the, the models up to, I would say, 5.5 until recently were were great at that 90% level. Uh, so especially after GPT5 Pro came out. So, you know, I would ask it to, for example, I, I would give it an experiment that we have already done. It's a very complex experiment, took two weeks. I already know the result because we're done the experiment. But I wanted to see how the model would predict the outcome of the experiment. And they would do, you know, not just GPT5, but several other models as well. Um, they, they would come up with 90%, 80 to 90% correctly. I mean, that's, that's pretty good. Uh, they would say, okay, this is what's going to happen after two days, after one week, after two weeks. But that extra level of intuition that I, I have, I would have predicted was still somewhat lacking. I think GPT 5.5 crossed that threshold. So I, I repeated that with with the, uh, 5.5 Pro model, because I, I always say Pro, it's very different than the thinking, of course, very, very different than the instant model, because Pro, uh, is reasoning much, much longer. It's thinking. So in some cases, I, I pushed it to think for two hours. So two hours in AI thinking is like years of thinking for, for a human being. So that model really crossed that threshold. In that example, I gave you, it was almost 100%. I mean, I would say 98% correct. What I would have predicted. Like, I would not have bet against 5.5 Pro myself. Um, uh, so that, to me, is, is actually really mind-boggling, because, uh, I couldn't understand these models are being trained with all of the information. We can't compete with that, right? So it's, they, they can put these patterns together, but how is it that the model has now almost the experience that I have, that I spent 30 years acquiring that experience, that intuition, that is now getting to that level? That is, uh, that is a mystery. But I, I live to it.

Now, what sort of, you said you, you pushed GPT 5.5 Pro to think for 2 hours. I mean, what sort of prompt are we talking about, or is it just the data set too, and the prompt?

I mean, so those are usually data sets. Uh, um, I might have broken a record because I even asked the, the friends at OpenAI. I don't think they, they pushed it that that far. So this was actually the, the 2-hour one was, uh, huge data sets, millions of data points, um, and, um, um, and then I, I also said, okay, don't just analyze it, write a huge report, you know, 30, 40 pages, whatever length, and then, you know, come up with a lot of insights about this data, what questions to ask, and what do we learn? The mechanism. It was an immunological data set, sequence and genes and proteins and all that. And so, so that one, I think 112 minutes, I remember that, uh, uh, and it came up with this 40-page report, uh, which I, I, I was just unbelievable. Uh, you know, the, the analysis part, the previous models were able to do as well, you know, you know, they say, okay, well, there are these type of genes and this type of protein, so it means this and that. You, it derives from that information, but to come up with an insight, what that could mean, or what would be the next question to ask. Uh, that, that's, that's a very, very high level of reasoning. Um, and so, uh, yeah, um, it was, it was worthwhile two hours for sure. I mean, that's very exciting to hear you say that, because that was kind of my, I wanted to know, I wanted to know, is that something that is already possible? And it seems like it is. And so it also leads to the next question, which is, you know, all all these scientists now really need to start understanding how to use AI in the right way, right? I mean, this is like to help them.

I mean, this, that's going to happen, right? That's basically, you know, we all, we all use Google now. Remember when Google was like new? So, I mean, it's eventually going to happen. But, um, it's very exciting to think about how AI is going to change research and and medicine. And that's something, you know, you, you mentioned, and I talked, I said I wanted to get back to this digital twin idea, because I've heard you talk about it, and it's very exciting to me. You know, we've heard for decades now that personalized medicine is coming. We're going to have personalized medicine, and and yet still, we just don't have it. It's just not there. Um, and I've heard you, I've even heard you say something sort of interesting, which perhaps I'm not saying the direct quote, but that it kind of should be medical malpractice in a way for a physician today, right now, to not be using AI. So, can you talk a little bit about why you said that? What it means to for a physician to use AI responsibly? Um, also how patients can self-advocate for themselves, because that's also another area.

Yeah. Uh, in fact, I, I said after 01 model came out, that I think that was sort of the first reasoning model, um, and I, and I was testing a lot of, I mean, I, I have a medical degree, but I, I don't see patients, but, you know, I, I have a lot of friends, and I have some knowledge of how medicine works. So, been testing lots of medical questions, and some of them are hard, some of them are, you know, sort of real-time data, um, and, you know, before 01, it was great in sort of reaching to the literature, you know, like the physician might lack certain, certain knowledge, so it knows what was published, uh, recently, and things like that, but it, it was not at the reasoning level. So, one model was able to reason, and the reasoning is extremely important in medicine, because, you know, even if you have all the, all the information, you still have to sort of consider that person's context, and, uh, you know, uh, what, what would be more likely to to treat that person, and we don't always know the answer, uh, as well, or how to, how to diagnose it. Um, and so I think 01 was able to get to that point, and at that point, I said, right now, it's unethical for physicians not to use AI anymore. Um, I didn't say malpractice yet, but it truly unethical in the sense that, you know, you can use it, you can still do your judgment, obviously, but it will, it will prevent you missing some sort of, uh, an obvious mistake, or, you know, sometimes non-obvious, uh, mistakes, or diagnose things that require multiple, uh, clinical specialties coming together, and, and you don't have that capability. You live in a village, or something. Uh, but now I think I feel that it is truly, uh, uh, going to be considered malpractice, in my opinion. Um, it's not legally so, but, uh, eventually it will be, um, because, uh, a, the current models, the advanced models, are able to, uh, diagnose and, and write a treatment protocol better than, uh, or as good as, uh, a specialist in that field. It's not just a, you know, family physician. Let's say, you, you know, you have a very complex, uh, cancer, you know, you, you know, the mutations and, and what's not, and you go to a specialist like an oncologist, who is very, very specialized on that. Um, I believe that the mo, the current models are at that level. So, um, and of course, not every specialist is, is, is the top specialist, right? So, so you, you, if, if that was the case, we wouldn't have millions of misdiagnosis and mistreatments in the US alone every year. I think they've said something like 12 million misdiagnosis. Um, I think 700,000 people suffer from it, die from it, from from, uh, from misdiagnosis. Some of them is, is totally innocent. You know, any, any doctor could have missed it. Um, but, but now AI wouldn't miss that. So, uh, even, even a specialist might make a mistake or misdiagnose or, or, or mistreat, because they lack certain things that, that the model doesn't have. So, I mean, imagine that, you know, um, uh, you refuse to use, uh, MRI machine or CT machine, because you say, well, you know, that's too much technology. I'm just going to, uh, you know, just do an X-ray, because that's enough for me. And you miss a, a tumor. Uh, the AI models are able to detect certain tumors like breast cancer years before a radiologist is able to to to see that. So if you miss that, I mean, that person's going to die if you don't, if you don't. So that, to me, that, that becomes, uh, a malpractice, because the technology is at that level now. It wasn't, it wouldn't be malpractice, you know, missing a, a breast cancer, uh, you know, five years ago, because nobody could, we didn't have that technology, but now we have that technology, so you should, you should definitely use it. Um, um, and, and this is going to save a lot of lives. I mean, uh, if you could just reduce the misdiagnosis, and, and, and again, bring every, every doctor to super doctor level, I think that would be a really good thing.

So what you're saying is based on, you know, what current data that doctors have available to them, whether it's an MRI, whether it's an ultrasound, whether it's blood biomarkers, this sort of data is what is given to,

Yes.

you know, a model like GPT 5.5 Pro, for example, and with that data, they're able to better diagnose, better to predict, to see things like you mentioned cancer,

Um,

is that better than a radiologist can? Is that some, is that like based on, you know, what kind of, uh, data is implemented?

These are studies. I think, uh, Google, uh, did a recent study. In fact, uh, a science paper came out recently, which was done with 01 preview model, which is a very old model. I mean, the current models are probably 10 times or maybe more.

Was that like the first pro? Almost like the first, the first, first sort of the reasoning model that that I early tested in 2024, September, it came out. And, um, and they found that 01 model, uh, did, did better than average doctor in diagnosing, like significantly better. They did, didn't miss. Um, and so imagine the, the current models, how, how good they are. But, but I, I think, um, it's not just sort of diagnosing a, a disease, because that's, that's actually a small part of the job of a, of a, of a doctor. It's really, there's a continuum. Most diseases, um, you know, okay, if you, if you have a flu or some bacterial infection, you know what to do. You give it, and then you see an output. But a lot of disease, even in that condition, that may not, that may not be true, because, you know, you might have a mutant virus or bacteria. So you might have to change the treatment, or might have a little bit side effect. So there's a lot of continuum there. So I think AI can be involved in all of that process. So if you can continuously feed the data, okay, well, the patients, uh, we gave this treatment, it's doing well, the blood pressure is down, but, you know, has this symptom, that, so what should we do? Change the dose of the drug, or add this, or remove that drug, and give another antibiotic? Like, there's a constant, um, uh, uh, process there. And that, that's not always that constant, because, you know, people, people don't go to doctor every day, right? So you get a prescription, you, you see something works, and then you go back. And so what if there's something that's continuously monitoring you, post-treatment for cancer? It's very important, because cancer is a very dynamic disease. There's the cancer which is constantly trying to survive and mutate and counteract against the immune system. So you give it, so you know, you give a drug, chemotherapy works, and then the cancer comes back again, right? So why is that? Because mutations are accumulating. So can we catch that earlier? Can we change those decisions? Can we, um, make sure that we give more, multiple drugs, or different drugs, so before the cancer have the opportunity to come back, we prevent that possibility? So all of these, um, decisions, uh, can be made together with, uh, with AI. And I, I, I, I think it's going to have tremendous, tremendous impact on healthcare.

I do want to get back to the the cancer equation in a minute. But before that, I just think that, you know, physicians, not all physicians know how to use AI. They don't know which models to use. Do they use GPT 5.5 Pro or Claude, or, you know, um, how do they sort of responsibly use it, which you kind of talked about a little bit, but without, you know, outsourcing their clinical judgment? Do you have any opinions on like, the different models to use? And I do know you have a collaboration with OpenAI. You've been one of the first scientists really testing these models in a biological sort of arena. But I do kind of, I do think that people and physicians that are listening want to know what, how, what models do they use? We definitely are talking about if we're talking about OpenAI, it's not, it's, it's got to be the Pro, right? It's got to be the reasoning model. But I mean, what about Claude? What about Gemini?

Yeah. So, um, I think people have this sort of a misunderstanding of, they think of AI as, okay, we have AI, we have internet, so let's just use the internet. We have AI, let's use the, but this is

advancing so rapidly. Uh, the AI model that we used one month ago is not the same AI model we use now. So, it's just doubling in intelligence every few months.

Um, you know, I gave the example of one preview. Uh, some people, uh, got stuck at the GPT-4 40 model. "Oh yeah, I used it and it hallucinated a lot. Even, you know, 0.1 wasn't so good. You know, it was making mistakes." That's like ancient history.

"That's why I haven't even asked about hallucinations."

Yeah. So, I, it's, um, I mean, the advantage I have is that, you know, because I'm all in on AI, I'm continuously testing and, and so I, I, I can see the evolution of of these models, and they get, you know, 90% better, 95% better, 97% better. Like, it just continuously updates itself. And then eventually, right now, with the 5.5 model, I, I don't see any hallucinations whatsoever. I mean, there might be 0.1%. Uh, but, but it's, it's extremely rare. Um, and so, so your trust level goes up.

Again, it's similar to like self-driving cars, right? So, we, we had self-driving cars for for almost a decade, maybe, and they, they just keep on getting better and better because their AI models are are getting updated. So, my, my advice would be, doctors should see this not something optional, like they have to, uh, update their knowledge, medical knowledge periodically. In fact, they have to have tests to do that to be certified, or they have to update on new drugs that are coming out. Right? So, you, you can't just rely on some drug that came out 5 years ago, 10 years ago. You need to know what, what was approved last month, and you need to update your, uh, your knowledge. Uh, in a similar way, even more so, they have to constantly update their AI knowledge. So, AI has to be part of their, uh, their, their practice.

And of course, my recommendation is always use the latest top model you can use. Uh, right now, it's GPT-5.5. Uh, in fact, uh, I would always use for complex problems the Pro model because that thinks, uh, in in minutes. But at least if you're using it on a daily basis, uh, in a rapid fashion, always use the thinking model. The thinking model is different than the instant model. Instant model is also getting better, but it, it needs to reason. It needs to think. Um, and especially if you're putting in lots of patient data and analyzing that, you, you definitely need the Pro model.

And then there are, there are these, uh, companies like Open Evidence and, you know, uh, I think most doctors are starting to use that. Open Evidence basically, I think, applies the latest model somehow. It's updated so, so the doctors don't have to worry about it. And I, I think there's going to be more companies like that who will provide that service. So, the doctor doesn't have to worry, "Should I use 5.5 or put us 4.47?" The, the, whatever the sort of the, uh, the harness model is going to pick the, the best one for, for medicine and, and, and apply it there. Uh, and of course, hospitals should, uh, should implement AI, uh, just like, you know, big tech companies are. You know, there's enterprise-level AI that can be more secure, you know, protect the patient data. So, it should be like, you know, in front of the patient in the hospital, you see these monitors, like the heartbeat and all that stuff. Should be an AI monitor, like constantly monitoring the data and then giving information to the nurses, to the doctors.

"Okay, this is the last situation."

Um, and now with AI agents, you can do that. Like, I do it for my, my daily life, like for my email, automatically my agents go and check my email and they tell me what's important, so I don't have to go through hundreds of emails. So, "Oh, you know, this, this is waiting for you. You have a, a podcast with, with Rhonda today, so you better be prepared for that."

Um, so, uh, yeah, it, it needs to be fully integrated, uh, almost like a, a, a co-physician, like you have the AI doctors working together with real doctors.

"Right. Have you, I've noticed like some of the, the companies that I've corresponded with or interacted with, um, it seems like they use Claude a lot. I mean, I don't know if you've experimented with that, but I'm kind of curious why, um, why that, why that, you know, certain model, um, versus like, but yeah, in all fairness, I've never used it. I use, you know, GPT. I've been using GPT and the Pro, and so every, like you said, you know, every time the hallucinations are like ancient history for me. Like, I remember that was a big thing. Yeah."

"But it's going so fast and better now. But like, what, what, what's the difference between, you know, for example, Claude and GPT-5.5 Pro?"

For certain things, there is no more difference because the intelligence has has peaked. Uh, for, for, uh, you know, for, uh, doing regular diagnosis, not very, very complex, uh, cases, Claude is, is great. Claude is also very, very good, uh, like the Opus 4.7 model, the recent model for analyzing data sets. So, it's, you know, it can take also millions of data, analyze it, and, and, and do a, a great job. Um, uh, my preference is, uh, you know, GPT-5, right now it's 5.5 Pro, because, um, it, what I mentioned, it has this extra insight. I mean, for me, um, I need that extra level of insight, um, that's predictive, um, and

"the intuition that"

the intuition and really kind of a deep understanding. Uh, but if I'm, if I'm going to diagnose and treat a subtype of a lung on cancer, I am pretty sure, you know, Gemini 3.1 Pro or Claude 4.7, they all do a pretty good job. Uh, I, I think the reason some people prefer Claude is that it's maybe it's more pleasant to interact with. You know, kind of more humanlike. I think, uh, GPT models are starting to get there, but still, there's something about Claude that people enjoy, you know, interacting with it. It's, it's really a matter of

"personable or"

I, I think it's used to be more, more personable. Um, and so, it doesn't really matter. I mean, I think they're, they're, they're really, they're all super top-level, unless you're doing like a research or a very, very complex problem. Uh, you know, for example, we did a test with, uh, with a colleague of mine on, on skin disease with GPT-5 Pro model. You know, it was able to, uh, diagnose a skin disease that, uh, my friends couldn't really diagnose, um, just based on a photo and a symptom. The other models couldn't do that. They could do 90% of the, the cases as well, but there's that one extra case or two extra cases that is really difficult that could go anywhere. The Pro, the GPT Pro model was able to cross that, that threshold. So, those kind of cases, you really need the very high level, like, you know, uh, you don't, you don't go to a, a professor at Harvard for, for any, any reason, right? So, it has to be very specialized disease that other doctors couldn't diagnose or something like that. So, that's how, that's how I view it.

"We just, there was just news yesterday, um, from OpenAI of, uh, GPT Rosalyn, which I know you can't talk about much. From what was publicly available, it seems as though it's going to be used in drug discovery. Um, I, I'm wondering what you think in terms of like the future of aging research, biology, medicine. Are we going to be using these more specialized types of AI models, or do you think more of a generalist like GPT-5.5 Pro and the, you know, the subsequent ones that come out after it are going to be the key to unlocking, you know, medicine breakthroughs and biology breakthroughs?"

Um, my preference would always be the generalized models because, again, you know, going back to AGI, AGI. Uh, so, if, if a model is has, um, you know, of course, there, there are some utilities of models that are only trained on, I don't know, like the EKGs or, um, RNA sequencing or something like that, and they'll be very, very good at that, like the, the best chess player AI model or, um, the best Go player AI models. But they will miss that, that connection. Because, again, I view medicine as a kind of a holistic, um, art in a way. Uh, if you are just trying to analyze one set of data, the, the specialized models could be, could be very, very useful. In fact, you know, I gave the example of EKGs. Um, most generalized models were not terribly great at, um, for some reason, you know, the, the EKG images were, were not, they were not very good at diagnosing what, what it was showing. Um, and, and, you know, specialized models were very good because they were trained with, you know, millions more EKG data sets than the generalized model was. Um, but, but I think, you know, if, if we can train the generalized model or fine-tune it or overtrain it, I, I don't know how to say it. Um, then they will be better than specialized models all the time. Um, because not only they have, they know all about EKGs, but they know about radiology, they know about RNA, they know about proteins. So, they can take that information and, and excuse me, analyze the EKG, the, the electrocardiogram, your, your, your heart beats in the context of all the other biology. So, that will, that's very enriching, uh, knowledge. Um, but, um, I think, you know, specialized in the sense that you can take these big models and you can sort of, I don't know, harness them or fine-tune them, because there's a lot of data sets that's not public. So, these, these models, they don't have access to that. You might have some, um, data, you know, locked in certain because of regulatory reasons, whatever. So, you can take, take a big model. In fact, you don't, you may not even need the, the closed models. You can even take some of the open-source models, which are, which are now getting very good. If you, uh, you can train them on that, and they also have the generalized knowledge, and combined with that, they'll probably do better.

"So, I want to talk about there's treating disease, there's curing disease, and then there's reversing aging. So, let's, let's start with curing disease, treating diseases, curing diseases, because, you know, obviously, we do die of age-related diseases. Cardiovascular disease being the number one killer in, in most developed countries. We have cancer. That's a really big one. And, and with cancer, it's just such an awful disease to have. And anyone that's listening that has either had cancer or knows someone that has had it, you know, knows this is, this is true. But also, I think, you know, cancer, a lot of people think about it as one disease. Non-scientists, non, you know, physicians, they kind of think about cancer as this, this one disease, right? As you and I both know, it is definitely not one disease. It's hundreds of diseases. Um, I'm curious on, first of all, you know, we still don't have a cure for cancer. I mean, we've, we've made a lot of progress, right? And different cancers and can be treated better than others, but can you talk a little bit about why it's been so hard to find a treatment for cancer?"

"Yeah, I think, uh, the, the important thing to clarify is that cancer is not one disease. It's probably 100 diseases, h 100 different diseases that have probably hundreds of sub-sub-diseases or subtypes, if you like. Um, in fact, certain cancers are 100% curable or 95% curable. Uh, you know, like childhood leukemias, which were completely fatal, you know, a couple of decades ago, are now, you know, 90% or or close to 100% curable. Uh, if you catch, certain cancers early enough, again, 100% uh, cure rates, almost. Uh, so, so because it's, it's a very different set of, uh, uh, diseases, um, the, the cancer of the pancreas is very different than cancer of, uh, lung cancer or breast cancer. Or there are some cancers that are so slow, like if you get, um, certain types of cancers, if you're age 80, doctors don't even bother to treat it because by the time that will, unless we cure aging first, uh, because by the time you die of aging, you know, that cancer is not going to kill you. Aging is going to kill you first. Or, you know, there's certain prostate cancers at certain ages. So, that, that's why we have to really understand that this is a very complex biology. But more importantly, why cancer is such a challenge is that the, the cancer cells are part of us, right? So, uh, if you're infected with a bacteria or a virus, you know, it can kill you, right? They're extremely dangerous, but we are able to recognize them as an enemy, as a threat, your immune system, and we can fight back, you know, uh, not always successfully, but most of the time very successfully. And we can also target them very specifically, like we have an antibiotic that will only act on the bacteria. It's not going to touch your normal cells because it's only, uh, a foreign organism. But cancer is not like that. So, if I try to stop cancer with something, I'm also trying, I'm also stopping some other cells that are normal, right? That's why people lose their hair, their immune system is greatly weakened because the immune system has to divide, your, um, hair has to, hair cells have to divide. So, you, you block them because they, the cancer cell is also dividing, and, and your side effects of chemotherapy sometimes worse than having the cancer, like hundreds of thousands of people die because of that.

So, the revolution in cancer was, uh, recently because of what we call immunotherapy. The question was, why, uh, can we make the immune system to recognize cancer as foreign threats, like they're kind of like terrorists, right? So, a terrorist, you will not know if that's an enemy or not. They look like you, you know, they just come in and then they, they create. So, the immune system is seeing it that way, that it thinks that the breast cancer cell is not so different than a normal breast, breast cell, you know, like epithelial cell, whatever. And so, it doesn't know what to do. If we could teach the immune system, or if we could remove some of the breaks that it has, regulation, and let it recognize and attack the cancer cells, then that could have a, a tremendous effect. That was the hypothesis, and it, it actually worked. So, cancer immunotherapy, I think, is, is more powerful now than, than chemotherapy and radiotherapy put together. I mean, they still have a, have a role. Um, and of course, the other thing is that, how can we make the treatments very specific? Right? So, if I give a chemotherapy that's not specific, it's like trying to hit the patient on the head and hope that the cancer will die before the patient dies. But if I know this single mutation that's happening on, you know, whatever EGF receptor, uh, in certain cancers, I can develop a small molecule which will only act if there's that mutation on the EGF receptor or EG, whatever, and so, it's not going to touch anywhere else. It's only going to target the, the. And in fact, people call them smart drugs, and they're, they're extremely effective, right? So, if you have that particular mutation, your 1% of the lung cancer patients, you get treated with that drug, you get almost 100% cure rate. Um, but again, you know, uh, we can make this even much better. So, for example, the immune system can be engineered, something that we work on in the lab, to recognize, like literally engineer. We take the cells out, we train them, we put genes into them, say, "Okay, so if this gene binds to a cell, assume that that's a threat and kill that, that." And so, it's called CAR-T therapy, and they will go and seek out whatever, uh, the cancer cells that have that marker and kill them. The advantage of that is that cancer doesn't have much way to escape, escape that. It can try to suppress the immune system, but other than that, even if it mutates, you know, the, the immune system will still recognize it and find that few cells that are hiding somewhere and, and destroy it. And, and that's showing incredible results.

So, the mRNA vaccines, which I think is going to be revolutionary, is, is on that basis, right? So, and that really personalized the cancer. So, I have a breast cancer, but my breast cancer has certain types of mutations that other patients don't have. So, even if the immune system can recognize X patient, it won't recognize mine because the cancer has different mutations. If I take those mutations and synthesize what's called RNA and then give it back as a vaccine and train my immune system and tell the immune system, "Look, if you see these mutations in these genes, that's an enemy. Go destroy that." That's mRNA vaccine. And that becomes extraordinarily powerful because now you are directing your immune system to, to an internal threat just in you. And let's say the, the cancer acquired different mutations, you can create another mRNA vaccine and then train the immune system to that as well. Um, so, uh, you know, I think that's, those, those are the, the, the difficult parts, but, but we see the light at the end of the tunnel. Cancer, cancer is going to be 100% curable, uh, probably less than a decade.

"How is AI going to make that happen?"

Yeah. So, in fact, it's already making that happen. You probably heard of this story from Australia. This computer scientist, um, had ChatGPT and, and some other AI models to develop an mRNA vaccine for his dog. His dog had, I think, a melanoma, and he, um, he got it sequenced. He took the sequence and gave it to to an AI model, and the AI model designed the precise mRNA molecule that needs, that the dog needs, the dog's immune system needs to be trained. Got it synthesized, and I think it was able to apply it in three months. Probably could have been shorter if there wasn't regulations, and, and the tumor started to to regress, and the dog is, was, was alive when it was supposed to to die. So, I mean, that, that, that's a very, obvious and simple version. But because there are hundreds of different cancer types, you can imagine that we'll have maybe hundreds of different treatments for just a type of a lung cancer. Someone will be mRNA, someone will be a small molecule targeting that. So, to be able to develop those on-demand and or very, very rapidly, we're going to need AI. So, the AI is going to model every possible mutation and we'll screen millions and millions of compounds. And so, we'll, we'll, we'll get to a point where we'll have hundreds of new drugs coming out every month, maybe, you know, uh, uh, and we'll, you know, this, this thousand drugs is for breast cancer patients. But, you know, if you have this and this, this mutations, and if it's stage four, then you take this combination. And if it's that, yeah, you, you take this protocol. Um, and, um, that, that's how AI is going to. Of course, you know, if you get to digital twin, that will accelerate.

"Right. And that's, that's the next question is, you know, so let's, let's say we have the true personalized medicine and personalized cancer treatment, but you also need to know about side effects. Like, am I going to take this mRNA vaccine and my immune system is going to go crazy and start to inflame my heart and give me myocarditis, or, right? How do you also see this, the digital twin, which now has, you know, genomic information, all your proteins, metabolites, and everything in real-time data, then it can also simulate, well, what's going to happen if we give this specific mRNA vaccine, cancer vaccine, or this small molecule to this person?"

"Absolutely. I mean, you know, so, so you mentioned myocarditis, which, by the way, happened during the COVID pandemic, and that's why there was a lot of, uh, anti-vaccine sentiment. But people, uh, didn't appreciate that, you know, COVID virus itself caused myocarditis. Yes, the vaccinated people, young people, at one in 5,000 to one in 10,000 rate, got myocarditis. It wasn't, it was mostly fatal. But the question should be asked, like, why is it that one out of 10,000 got myocarditis and the other ones didn't? Or, in fact, we can reverse that question. You know, we, we vaccinated everybody, but if you were a young person, your, your, uh, chance of dying from COVID was, let's say, one in 1,000 or one in 10,000. So, 999 people got, didn't have to be vaccinated. But to save that one person, we have to give that vaccine. Or, I'll give another more, uh, general, uh, you know, we give statins to anyone who has high cholesterol. So, I, I think like one out of five or one out of 10 people truly benefit from that. Uh, high cholesterol doesn't automatically, doesn't mean you're going to get atherosclerosis. You need to have inflammation, this, and that. But because we don't have the data, we cannot predict that. It's not personalized. Millions of people take statins, and to save a few thousand people. Yes, that's, that's a good thing because you don't know. Um, so, AI will be able to do that. So, we'll, we'll tell you, okay, not only, um, we'll create the drug just for you, but also we'll say, okay, you don't have to take this, this medicine. Like, you, you should take this, or maybe you don't even need any, any treatment at all. Like, you have an infectious disease or whatever. Or maybe certain cancers, this will be enough. Like, we give extra chemotherapy plus immunotherapy plus radiotherapy. Why are we doing that? Because we're not sure if one is going to be enough or not. Um, and, and, so, uh, that will dramatically reduce the, the, the side effect issue. You might still have some side effects, of course, but it's manageable. It will be manageable side effects. It's not going to kill you, for example.

"What about using AI to predict cancer a decade or years before it forms based on your proteins and metabolites and your biomarkers and maybe perhaps your genetics too, right? Like, how do you see that? We're talking about personalized cancer treatment, but what about being able to prevent cancer before it happens, you know, years before it happens?"

"Yeah, >> again, great question because I think this is, um, this is so important that people don't think about very much. Um, we say healthcare, you know, we don't have healthcare, we have sick care, right? So, we, we never take care of healthy people. Like, you don't go to a doctor to say, "Oh, how healthy I am?" Or just, just go to a doctor and say, "Can you check my immune system? You know, is it, is it healthy? Am I going to, am I going to get sick? Am I going to have cancer?" They won't be able to answer that question. Only if you get sick, they will treat what the problem is. Um, and so, the preventative medicine is going to be so absolutely critical. I think not all, but most diseases can be prevented. Some are just bad luck. You know, it happens no matter what you do. If, even if you live the perfect life, you might still get certain diseases, but, but a lot of them were because of your genes and so on. A lot of them can be prevented. And I think AI is going to be amazing in that because it's already able to do it. Uh, there was a study from, um, a UK Biobank. UK has this amazing biobank with 500,000 people, lots of data sets, incredible data sets. And so, and this was actually done, I think, more than a year ago with models that were a year or two years old. They took a lot of that data, and they were able to predict about a thousand diseases before they happened. Of course, this was kind of retroactive. So, they knew what, what people were going to get based on their data that was collected years before. But the AI was telling you, "Okay, this patient's going to have this disease, that," but not patient, normal healthy people, they're going to get this and that. So, that to me, that was that was amazing. And that's going to get better and better because there are, there are, there are always signs. Like, cancer doesn't just develop in days. It takes years. Uh, if we, probably most of us might have some cancer cells, you know, most of it controlled by the immune system and so on. And it, you know, slowly grows. It has to have another mutation, another mutation. But, but there's probably some signs of that somewhere, you know, whether it's in your metabolism or this. You know, and AI, even if it's 100%, will be able to say, "Okay, look, um, I think that, you know, if this is, if this is the lifestyle that you continue, your chances of getting this disease is now, is 85% or whatever." Like, I wear a glucose monitor. Um, I'm not diabetic, you know, uh, but I, I want to see every minute or every five minutes, what my sugar levels are in a continuum, or if I eat something, you know, is it spiking? Is it coming down? Because I want to prevent insulin resistance, one of the, the worst things that can happen to you. If I, uh, if I don't, uh, do that, I won't know until I get diabetes. My, my insulin, if, if, if my sugar is constantly spiking, and then, you know, insulin is just working too hard and hard, that that could continue for years. By the way, um, that at some point, it's going to break, right? Um, for some people, it might continue 50 years, nothing happens. Some, it might be five years. But that data set probably has that predictive value, that plus my, my age, my genes, but whatever. So, uh, yeah, that, I think, um, everyone's going to have their own, um, AI, I don't know what to call it, uh, health coach or something. But, but it will, it will continuously analyze the data. Um, and, and hopefully, we'll, it will be much easier to collect data because that's another issue. You know, we don't collect data like, we know nothing about, you know, there are more than a thousand metabolites in our bloodstream. So, we look at maybe, you know, 10 of them, 20 of them, only if we get sick, not even for a checkup. So, we have to have a continuous, um, like a glucose monitor. I want to see what my, you know, uh, proteins are changing, hormones are changing, you know, in a reasonably continuous manner.

"Such a good point. And I'm so glad you brought up the UK Biobank study. I remember I think the model was like called Milton or something, and it was, it's AstraZeneca-owned, like developed it or something. And, and I remember looking at this study because, like you mentioned, the Biobank data is a huge data set and it just spanning many decades. And so, I think they looked at, you know, like over 200 plasma proteins, you're talking about 10, we're talking about 200. Oh, yeah. And, and all the other data, right? And they were able to predict, and I think cancer and neurodegenerative disease were at the top of like 10 years before, and they were able to look at the people. So the AI, AI predicted it based on, based on all this biometric data. And then they looked and said, 'Oh, yep. Those people actually did end up getting cancer and Alzheimer's disease.' And it was very accurate. Yes."

"And, and to me, the exciting thing here is that you can intervene before it happens. You can make lifestyle changes, you can make dietary changes. I mean, these things matter. They do matter. And, and that is exciting. Uh, because then you don't even have to get to the drug part, which, you know, maybe you will, but if you can make these changes, if you know, 'Hey, I'm on this trajectory to get cancer. I have all this inflammation. I have all these things happening. If I don't make a change now, then in 10 years, I might have a cancer.'"

"It's very motivating, you know, for, for someone. So, it's very exciting, um, as well. And, and, and then having AI in there is just going to make it even, even better. Um, and then I, I want to get into, I want to get into age reversal. And before we get to that, you know, you, you've really been a pioneer in this, the field of AI being involved in biology. You know, you were talking to me about your, your blog, I don't know, was it 30 years ago?"

"Bio's Singularity. Yeah. 25 years ago. 25 years ago."

"Yeah. So, you have this blog, Bio's Singularity, predicting. Can you, can you talk a little bit about it?"

"Yeah, sure. Uh, so, uh, in fact, I, I got interested in AI in the early 90s, after I graduated medical school. Um, you, I was very interested in computers when I was a teenager. The, the first computers had come out at the time, and, you know, I was trying to code and, you know, just, I mean, I loved it. It was, it was just so wonderful. Um, but, you know, I went to medicine because I figured biology is much more complex, so I should first try to figure that out. But then immediately, I realized, and I'm sure you did too, you're a scientist as well. Um, that biology is so incredibly complex. I said, "Well, I mean, you know, we don't have any, any chance of figuring this out, you know, because there's going to be so many, so many data sets." So, that's when I first got interested in, uh, in AI. Uh, of course, at the time, you know, AI was, was very primitive. Um, uh, but fast forward, you know, one of the, one of the books that influenced me was, uh, from, uh, um, Ray Kurzweil. I'm sure a lot of people follow technology know him. He wrote this book, 'The Singularity Is Near.' So, he called a point of singularity where, uh, the computation or technology advances exponentially so much that you cannot even predict what will happen next day. I mean, because it's sort of like a self-training AI models. And he, he had these figures where he would plot the advances of AI, you know, say, you know, by 2029, it will be at the human brain level, and, you know, we'll reach AGI, and, you know, it was just unbelievable. And most people thought that he was just talking crap or, you know, science fiction, you know, they didn't believe it. How could that happen? And so on. But, you know, I got, I got very excited. In fact, I have a signed copy from Ray, uh, for, for the book. And so, being inspired from that, I, I started this, um, blog called Bio's Singularity. So, I said, "Okay, so, so computation is going exponential, but, uh, biology is sort of a computation as well. I mean, it's, it's based on information." And so, but it's just much more complex. So, it should also expand exponentially. And if you, if you plot that curve, that that means that by, you know, based on my calculations 25 years ago, in fact, I wrote it on the, on the about page of the blog, by, by year 2035 or so, we should be able to treat all diseases. And by 2045 or so, that we should be able to completely reverse aging. In fact, by the 2050s, we will get to a point what I call Human 2.0, you know, because at that point, we have a complete understanding of biology. Then we can truly engineer it. We can create new biological organisms. We can, you know, change our biology, our genome, reprogram it. Um,"

"rewrite our immune system."

"Yeah. Exactly. Um, in, in, in many possible ways, because it's kind of a messed up if you, if you think about it, like, you know, biology, we think is a miracle, but it's a, it's a bad kind of a, a legacy engineering, right? It's not, it's not bad engineering, it's a legacy because biological system finds something, it can't get rid of it. It can't start from a clean slate, so it builds on top of it. So, you get regulation over regulation over regulation. And then, of course, you know, with, like, the immune system that I study, you know, you get lots of autoimmune diseases. This immune system kills a lot of people, you know, even during, like, pandemics and things like that, or it doesn't recognize the cancer cell and things like that. So, why, you know, we should be able to design, like, immune system 2.0, like, clean slate, really greatly engineered immune system. Well, and I said, you know, by 2045, 50, we'll get to that point. Um, and, and actually, you know, again, at the time, it sounded really crazy to people. Uh, but now I feel that I was, I was too conservative. We'll probably get there. Uh, but, but the key point is that I wrote specifically in the about, "We will do this because of artificial intelligence." You know, I was just taking the plot that Ray, uh, plotted. You know, I said, "Okay, by 2029, AI is going to be at that point. It will be good enough to apply to the biology, and that will allow us to solve diseases, and then, and then the aging." The fact that, you know, the timing was was pretty good, uh, uh, again, even, even a bit conservative. Uh, uh, I feel great about it. That's why, you know, I'm all in on AI. Like, wow, um, that it's happening, it's really happening.

"So, aging is very complex, and, you know, as you know, it's not one process. We've got these 12 hallmarks of biology. We now have 12. Genomic instability, mitochondrial dysfunction, you know, cellular senescence, on and on. We've got, there's 12 of them. >> And we know organs are aging at different rates. They're, they reach their peak at different rates and they age at different rates, and everything is interacting in a very complex way. What do you see as the bottleneck for understanding the aging process and also reversing it?"

"Um, I mean, more so than the bottleneck, this is the way we have to think of aging. Biology actually, um, uh, is programmed to prevent aging. Right? So, it's not like, um, it's not like a car, in a way, because once you make a car, um, you have to constantly bring it to a repair shop or you have to repaint it. Biology does that internally. If it didn't, we would age immediately. Like, there is a disease called Progeria. These children get aged by the age of 7 or 8, they become like an 80 or 90-year-old because of a single point mutation in one of their, one of their genes because they lose their ability to repair, um, whether it's the DNA repair, whether it's getting rid of the old cells or cleaning up the tissues and then regenerating, like stem cells creating new cells. So, this program continues for for sometimes decades, otherwise, we wouldn't survive. For some animals, for some organisms, it's only a couple of years. For, for us, it's about, you know, maybe 50, 100 years. For some whales, it's hundreds of years. So, so, you know, same biology, it's just that one of them decided that, you know, I can keep a whale, um, or, you know, whatever, some animals, um, you know, older longer because they're not getting hunted or they can reproduce later and so on. So, what happens in, in, in the, the biological system is that somehow, uh, this program breaks down, and you start to lose what's called the resilience, right? So, when you are, uh, age 30 or 40, you're a, you're resilient. You can tolerate much more damage than someone who's 70 years old, 80 years old, because your, your, your systems are, uh, you know, even if you get wounded or if you, uh, get sick, you can recover, uh, easier. Um, uh, but that, that sort, that resilience is lost. And that, the reason why it's low, that there is a sort of an information loss, because the biological system has a certain information that it knows when certain genes should be turned on, when things should be regenerated, when it needs to be, like your skin. You know, why do you get wrinkles? Because your cells stop making collagen, and then all kinds of crap accumulates under your skin, and then, you know, the guys who, like the macrophages or whatever was supposed to clean there, they don't do their job. There's some sort of a breakdown in information or communication or, you know, intracellular communication is one of the hallmarks of of aging. And then, of course, why that happens is, is that 12 hallmarks is, is the reason. Many reasons, you know, uh, for example, the bacteria in your gut is, is a reason. So, so these bacteria produce all kinds of metabolites that help your immune system to constantly regenerate, keep it in optimal shape. If that changes, then, you know, your metabolism is changing, your glucose levels, your mitochondrial, uh, mutations, and so on and so forth. So, all of these things accumulate, you know, epigenetic changes and DNA mutations, and somehow the, the biology forgets, "Well, what am I supposed to do? Like, how am I dealing with that?" Also, because when a damage happens, it's harder to fix a damage than prevent it, right? So, if, if you're continuously taking care of your car or your house, the likelihood of it, you know, breaking down is much less than if you wait until, like, "Okay, nothing works." Yes, you can reverse it, but it's going to take a lot more effort. And so, I think, uh, what will happen is that for a younger individual, in the next decade or so, uh, for them, it's not just, it's not going to be reversal, it's going to be prevention of the aging process. It's going to be maintaining that process, the resilience, decades more. So, we will come to a point where if you are 20, 30, whatever years old, you won't age anymore because it's going to be constant reversal. But people who have already aged, let's say you're 80 years old, 90 years old, then we're going to have to reverse that process. That's, that's a more difficult. We'll be able to do it. Definitely, we'll be able to do it. Um, uh, uh, but, um, uh, it will require a lot of engineering approaches because you need to fix most of those hallmarks. If you're younger, you prevent those hallmarks from happening. You maintain the, the information, uh, much, much longer. Both of those, uh, will, will, will happen. Um, uh, uh, we, we, we just need to figure out what that information is being lost and we put it back.

"Do you think so? Let's first talk about preventing aging if you're a younger person because it's easier to, to do always prevent. If, if you have a person who's 20 or 30 years old, do you think that the approach would be finding, first of all, do we even know all the repair processes that are we have discovered? We have what we know, right?"

"But we still have a lot to discover."

"We have a, we probably have a lot to discover. And so, like, do you think there's going to be a, a discovery where we figure out like, you know, we know things like autophagy, stem cell depletion, you know, all these stress response genes, like antioxidant, like all these things, DNA repair, mitochondrial, the way mitochondrial repair itself, right? Um, are we going to be enhancing or like tuning these up so that they keep working at their prime continually? Or do you think we're going to have again this like information where we, why, why are those things going down? Are we going to just then go to the information of it, the epigenetics perhaps? Um, and is it going to be more targeted towards those genes? Or are we going to have more of this, you know, we'll get into this cellular reprogramming and partial reprogramming, but, um, I'm, I'm curious like how you see AI coming into that process. Like, I guess we don't know, that's the part of the problem. But then we have to figure out how to give these del, you know, treatments to people, right? That's another part of the equation. Um, so, I mean, I think, you know, the, the ones that you mentioned about sort of the lifestyle changes and they, of course, help a lot, but they only slow down the aging process. There's, I don't think there's anything that reverses that process. There might be some sort of local reversal for a temporary period of time. Maybe, but it's still kind of trying to, you know, uh, hope that things won't go bad a little bit longer. Like, for example, some people can live to to to 100, others only to 60, right? So, there's something good about those who live to. And in fact, there are supercentenarians who couldn't make it to 110 years old. Very, very few people, but I think it's mostly genetics. I mean, their lifestyle might have helped a little bit. Something about their biology is able to maintain that information much, much longer, that program. So, we have to get to the core. What, what are the things that are disrupting that information, um, loss? Um, and, um, yeah, it's, of course, you, you have to focus on the, on the genome because that's, that's sort of the blueprint. It's not just that. It's sort of what affects you afterwards, you know, that your, your microbiome, your, um, metabolites, you know, how those things are changing, whether accelerating or, uh, reversing, you know, like, and it has to be kind of an engineering approach as well, like, you know, the skin aging is, is a very different problem than immune aging, than the brain aging, right? So, uh, your skin cells are constantly renewing. So, all you have to do is to have sort of the, uh, programmed stem cells to go in there, clean the environment, senescent cells, and get it, get it regenerated and produce collagen, whatnot. But the brain is not like that, right? So, you don't, you don't want to regenerate your, your neurons. Uh, you will lose your identity. So, they have to be dealt in a different, different way. Some of it will be, I think, for the younger population, uh, it seems like, you know, redesigning certain biology would be, sounds radical, but it would be, uh, more foolproof, right? So, what if we could change the genome through genetic engineering, like we add certain genes or we change certain genes such that the DNA damage, um, is checked, you know, much, much longer? It, you know, because there are, in fact, certain animals who have better DNA damage proteins, they kind of evolved to do that. Like elephants rarely get cancer, right? Because they have this gene called P53. They have multiple copies of that. P53 is kind of like the guardian of the genome. You know, it prevents the genome from getting too much mutations and prevents cancer. So, somehow elephants have P53, I don't know how many copies, but they get very rarely cancer. Um, naked mole rats, you probably know that very well. Um, you know, they're, they're like rats. They live underground, but normal rats live a couple of years, and these guys live 30, 40 years. So, it turns out they have some mutation in some immune gene called cGAS that's also involved in immune optimization and DNA repair. Just like, you know, one or two genes make a huge difference. So, can we, uh, engineer humans to, uh, block that degradation of, of information, uh, for, for those who have already had the damage, then we're going to have to think about repairing that, reversing it, and then maintaining it. That's, that's going to be a bit more challenging, but, uh, uh, we'll, we'll get to that too.

"What do you think about, so the gene going to gene therapy? There's obviously gene editing, gene therapy, and, and, right now, we only know what we know, right? Again, like with these longevity genes, we know about, but do you think that that AI is going to be able to help us analyze the human genome? And I don't know what other data sets it will need, but we'll give it everything and help us figure out, well, actually, there's interaction of these genes together, and when there, you know, like all these combinations, is that something that you think is going to happen? We'll actually figure out there's a lot more to this equation than we originally knew."

"Yeah. That, that's the critical problem because we know what all the genes are in the genome. Like, we have, we have it decoded completely. And then we pretty much know their functions, most of them. Uh, even if you don't know every single gene involved in aging, we know a lot of them. The problem is that different genes, uh, uh, first of"

All can create different proteins, you know. There's all that splicing that happens and so on. But even we doubt that in a different context. So, if you, the same protein, uh, can kill a cell or causes survival, like in the immune system, we have these receptors called TNF receptors or whatever, they can, they can have a survival signal or a death signal, suicide signal, depending on the context of the cell.

So that is very, very, uh, critical, that how, as you pointed out, how these genes and proteins, uh, in a network fashion, in a sort of a topological network, uh, you know, what do they do? Like, if I interfere, like these, uh, um, probably we'll talk about that, these things called Yamanaka factors, where you can, you can generate a stem cell from a normal cell, right? So, like, complete regeneration, uh, uh. But, but the problem is that they can also cause cancer because they only need to be active in certain times. If they're active all the time, they can cause teratomas and things like that. So, that part is so complex that we absolutely going to need AI to simulate that for us.

If I have this gene in the context of all the other things, at a certain age, with these epigenetic programs, plus all the metabolites and so on, because those are constantly signaling the cell and, you know, doing, letting the proteins do something and so on. What would happen if I interfere with that particular gene, or how can I improve that? Uh, if, if you have a, because you have to consider the other genome too, like your gene therapy might be very different than somebody else's, because you might have some great genes that are synergistic with that, other person might have not so great genes. If even if you try to improve it, that would actually work, or it wouldn't, it wouldn't help.

Um, so, uh, it's just a matter of complexity. There's so much information that, uh, the AI has to not only put that together, but have sort of almost a temporal simulation of the model. Like, that's a very important point, the, because right now, the models are kind of static. They, they have a good understanding, but they don't know what would happen if a cell comes next to a tumor, just two minutes earlier. The cell next to it, what that context affects. There's a behavioral issue. It's the same problem with the robotics, right? So, um, kind of the physical intelligence or the biological intelligence, once those models are evolved with, with a lot of data, I think we will be able to simulate this, and AI will be able to decide, this is the gene therapy you should get. So, you need a new copy of the immune system, but let me design it for you. It's, it's so exciting because not only are we talking about, you know, extending our lifespan and curing disease, but we're talking about like getting rid of side effects in a way. I mean, you know, people all respond to different foods and treatments and everything differently, right? That's why some people have a terrible response to perhaps maybe a vaccine, um, and others don't. And so, it's really exciting to think about that.

Um, >> which, which I, by the way, call human 2.0. And maybe we'll get to human 3.0, uh, which will happen at this bio singularity moment. What that means is that, you know, we, we kind of re-engineer ourselves. Um, uh, I always think about like, most, most scientists or most doctors think like, what's wrong with this person or patient? Uh, I always think the opposite. There are certain people, I'm saying, what's right about them? Like, this person has smoked for 50 years, never got lung cancer, or, you know, had a terrible diet or whatever. This one lived to be 110 for, you know, whatever reason. And so, what is good about those people? Why can't we take what's good about all of those people and then re-engineer those that are not so lucky to be born with what's so good, and then, you know, even make it better? So that's the human 2.0, >> right?

I, I, I mean, that's exciting to me as well, right? I mean, we do know, like you said, we can live. Humans are capable right now of living to be, is the whole, I think the oldest was like 121, maybe >> 123, French woman. I mean, >> the fact that that right now in 2026, we know that humans can at least live to be 123 >> is exciting. 115, I mean, at 115, 116, that's considered sort of the current limit, but, you know, only 300 people in the world are 110 and older. Why is that? Why not the rest of the 8 billion? >> Right. Yeah. It's, it's fascinating, and I'm, I'm so excited for, you know, having this supercomputing power to help us figure that out. What did you think when, you know, the Yamanaka factors were discovered by Shinya Yamanaka, and all of a sudden you could take this old cell and completely reverse it to revert it to an, you know, essentially induced pluripotent stem cell? Do you remember, like, is that, was that something, did aging come into your mind at that point where you were thinking, well, that's the youngest almost you could get? I mean, >> Yeah. Uh, of course. Uh, in fact, at the time, I was, um, part of some aging groups. Uh, uh, I think like an hour after the paper was published, I was, you know, typing there, you know, like, this is, this is it. This is amazing. So, I, I should say that there were two, um, moments for me, uh, uh, that I thought that aging was going to be, uh, reversible or curable, however you call it. Um, kind of like the ChatGPT moment of biology.

The first moment was, uh, the, um, the sheep, uh, that's called Dolly. Uh, you probably know it was the first cloned sheep. Sheep. Um, it was 1996, '7, or something like that. I can't remember the exact date, but it was in the '90s. And, um, so basically, uh, the, um, uh, the scientists took a cell from, you know, uh, from one sheep and then recreated an exact copy of that sheep, you know, by, by cloning it. Uh, it was, it was at the embryo level, but it was sort of like an exact copy of it. So, that means that there was enough information that you could just like, uh, recreate the same person again and again and again. Right? And then the second, of course, uh, uh, the Yamanaka factors, uh, in 2016, I think. Um, and that was the moment that, uh, that we knew, um, that we could completely erase the, um, sort of the age of the cell on a cellular level and then bring it back to a pluripotent stem cell level and then use that to recreate the whole biological organism. So, so it means that we have an unlimited supply of regenerative capacity. Like, it's, there is, there's no limit to it. In fact, we already know that, like, so our DNA just keeps for billions of years. It keeps going on. And the fact that you could do that in the lab and you could, you could generate it was, was amazing. Um, uh, but of course, the, the problem was, okay, so then how do you apply that? In fact, I, I think there was just a recent study that started in Japan using the Yamanaka factors, uh, uh, in, in clinical trials because, you know, it was not a very controlled system. Like, you didn't know if those cells would develop tumors. You know, in mice, they, they did, some of them, tumors. You know, whether, um, you can control them. Or importantly, I think there's going to be a trial started by David Sinclair soon. Can we do like partial reprogramming? Because most of the time, you don't want the pluripotent cell, all right? You just want your skin cells to go early enough to their sort of more stem-like level. Like, I work in the immune system, and for us, um, I can divide, like, immune cells into naive, memory, and effector and differentiated. So, the naive cells are kind of the young guys. They have huge potential to expand and and make memory and and affect the population. And the other ones constantly, um, die and get older. Can we actually revert the cells towards the naive? And I, I actually spent a long time trying to do that. Um, so maybe this partial reprogramming will, will, will enable that. And that will be, uh, revolutionary because, uh, then you can, if you can also deliver those, then you can make most of your old skin cells turn into a younger version. I think the trial is going to be for eye, with David Sinclair. Um, yeah. So, but again, it's, it's, um, these, these things showed us that, uh, we can reverse aging. But when people say, oh, that's impossible, like this is, this, you can't, you can't reverse aging, like, you know, this entropy, whatever. But we, we do it in the lab all the time. Why not do it on a total organism level?

So, with this partial cellular reprogramming, as, um, as you mentioned, you know, you're, you're basically taking an old cell and putting these four different proteins, I think they can do it with fewer now, but putting them on for a shorter period of time on the cell, and that it's changing the epigenetic program. And in a way that it's still the cell keeps its identity. It doesn't become a stem cell, but it seems to be more youthful. Um, I know there's been some work, and I haven't followed all this literature since I, the first, you know, some of the first studies that came out, but I think it was like Juan Carlos, um, Izpisua, he's now, I think, at Altos Labs, but he, at the time, was at the Salk Institute. >> And, um, he had done this in in mice. I think they were even maybe perhaps progeria mice or some sort of accelerated aging model. >> And there was some reversal of, you know, certain organs seemed to be rejuvenated in a sense, and the life expectancy was extended in those animals. But what's interesting is that not all of the 12 hallmarks of aging go away. >> Yeah. >> Right. And so, you would hope that you would reverse aging totally, but there's genomic, you know, somatic mutations are still there. I think telomeres don't get mitochondria. So, >> Do you think, first of all, I don't, I, I'd love to understand why that is. So, what is it, if you're, if you're essentially, you know, wiping out the epigenetic, current epigenetic program and and reverting it back, um, why does not everything change? I don't know if you have any ideas. But do you think AI is going to help us understand that?

>> Uh, definitely. I mean, we, I should also point out that we, um, we do need to generate lots of data. So, so I think, um, you know, whenever I talk about AI, um, people say, okay, well, why can't AI do it now? Um, for two reasons. One is that we don't have enough data. So, we, we probably know maybe 10, 20% of all the biology. We still have lots of data to, to generate. The second is the >> scientists. >> Yeah. Scientists, or or automated lab, whatever it is. Um, so, I mean, right now, we're able to generate millions of data points in one experiment, you know, and, but, but even that's not enough. Like, we need to generate billions of data points and so on. So, but, of course, to handle that, we also need, um, superintelligence and supercompute. So, we have to have compute that's thousands of times than what's available. And people say, okay, well, you know, why are they building all these data centers? Isn't this enough? And so on. Well, we're going to need it. If you want, if you want to cure all diseases and reverse aging, we're going to need, probably, we're going to need data centers in space and, and, and a lot more, because so much data has to be in real-time, sort of, uh, uh, simulated. Um, uh, and we might get much more efficient doing that as we learn algorithms. So, so that's that's one issue. The other is that, um, as you pointed out, something very important. I mean, this partial reprogramming or total reprogramming, they're super exciting, but they don't solve, um, they don't completely solve the, the aging problem. They will, um, make your, um, eyes see better for a certain period. If you're 80 years old, or your skin gets better. Um, but will it work on your, um, your heart muscle, uh, or on your brain cells, neurons, which is the critical point? Because if you can have a perfect body, but if your brain is aging, then then that's it. Um, so, will it modify the, sort of, the microbiome that has now the environment of an old person? Because if that happens, if your metabolism is an old person's metabolism, and microbiome is an old person's metabolism, and your DNA has accumulated a bunch of mutations, and mitochondria has bore mutations, you can reverse that a bit, have some regenerative capacity, but they will quickly become old again, right? You know, because the environment is not, is not great, right? So, like, if you live in a bad neighborhood and you created this beautiful house, you know, it's, but it's a very bad neighborhood. Your house is not going to last very long there. So, your neighbors has to be clean as well. So, I think it's, it's a great thing, and that's probably going to add certain, uh, years to lifespan and the quality of life, uh, for sure. Uh, but we, we have to push that much, much further, um, and then really understand whether it's 12 hallmarks. Actually, I asked ChatGPT recently, came up with another four or five hallmarks. >> What were they? >> I, I can't remember exactly. Uh, it was one of them was related to the immune system. I just, this was recently, um, but, yeah, it was, it was quite interesting. Um, trying to remember, one had to do with metabolism, um, uh, you know, because we, we kind of classify hallmarks based on what we can measure and see. And I think AI can see a little bit more than we can. So, anyway, um, this is going to be, uh, a serious engineering, uh, problem. I, I would be very surprised if we have like one pill you take and then you suddenly become young again. That's, that seems very unrealistic to me.

>> Yeah. I mean, you know, and then the other question is like, in the lab, we're, we're the way we're delivering these treatments is like an adenovirus, right? And, and then it's like, well, is that going to cause cancer? Because the virus goes to right cell? >> Is it going to go to the right cell? Exactly. I mean, there's definitely a lot of engineering. >> We, we have to develop. So, one of the things that I like doing with AI models is to develop some new methods, new, new technologies. They have a bit too much guardrail, so they don't allow me to to go too deep in it. But, you know, because I don't think we have, we have enough tools. Like, of course, we have CRISPR now, but actually Dudana's lab just came out with something even better for bacteria for genome editing. So, imagine there's, there's probably all kinds of other tools that we can build that will make this localization, the editing much more perfect, and has to be programmable. You have to literally create circuits. We can program immune cells in in culture. Like, we can give a drug, it will shut down their response, or we can create AND or gates and NOT gates. If they see two molecules, then they respond. If they see one, they don't like. You can literally program the biology. So, we have to develop these new tools that are better than viruses, maybe, generate lots of data sets, um, and they manipulate the organs and so on. Could be that for some organs, when they're too old, it might, it might be just too difficult to repair them. So, you might consider just putting a new one. >> You know, like it might be a point of no return, your your kidneys or whatever. Then you'll have these, uh, uh, organ factories, which 3D printed, and actually, >> Uh, we, we did a lot of collaboration with a colleague of mine, you know, he can print, you know, small tissues, lungs, and pieces like that. So, some of them will be kind of transplanting new organs. Some of them will be pre-engineered. And >> And then the digital twin, the analysis and simulation will be able to figure out, is are you going to reject this, or would you need to not reject it? >> That's right. >> Right. Um, what do you think of the new data that came out using this this model called GPT-micro-4B, GPT-micro-4B? Um, where I guess there's this model that was used to figure out how to make certain mutations in the four different Yamanaka factors to make them more effective? So, they were able to basically 50-fold more, um, be more effective or efficient at increasing this induced pluripotency. >> Yeah. >> How do you interpret that data?

>> So, I, I don't think that model, uh, is, is any better than what we have right now. Uh, probably, um, the current models are, are much better. Um, the, I think probably there might have been two, two differences, and I don't know all the details, but one is that they probably removed the, the guardrails, because there's a lot of biosecurity guardrails in, in the current models. Um, if you ask the same question to GPT-5.5, it will refuse to do it. It will say, oh, this is a biohazard, like, what if you mutate and create a new virus or new cancer, whatever. So, that might be one reason. And then the other is like, if you let these models think longer. So, like GPT-5.5 Pro, and, and the thinking, and model is the same pre-training, but Pro model can think, two hours thinking can take two minutes. So, the longer they can think, the, the more they can iterate. They can run these scenarios again and again and again. So, my speculation is that that model probably ran for, for a long period of time. Of course, you need a lot of compute and a lot of tokens, not a problem for OpenAI. Um, uh, then you, you will probably come up with the solution that even a, a more intelligent model couldn't come up with in a, in a shorter period of time, because that, that particular case is really running experimental scenarios, like, okay, if I do this mutation, what would be the potential outcome? Like, it's running all the simulation. Oh, yeah, okay. So, so what if I change that mutation to here, and then what if I add another mutation, and running the experiment again and again and again? So, you're constantly making the, the solution better and better and better as you think longer. Um, so, and, and this will get better. So, if, if you have much more compute, much more intelligence, and you say, okay, um, GPT-7 or 6, whatever, is, go and think for a month, you know, find the perfect molecule that will bind to this receptor, and this will cause that. It'll, it'll probably figure that out.

What is it? It sounds like we're going to need to do a lot of this type of simulation, and by "we," I mean researchers and scientists. What is it going to take to remove some of those guardrails in that environment for researchers to be able to make these new discoveries? And, and what sort of, I guess, I mean, how do we protect from a new crazy, >> biohazard or, you know, biosafety issue?

Well, I mean, I think like OpenAI is partnering, uh, with, with, um, you know, trusted people. So, you have to be approved by them. So, I think then, whether it's a company or something like that. It's the same problem with, with cybersecurity, right? So, Anthropic has this new model called Claude, and they decided not to release it because they said it's too dangerous for cybersecurity, because this model can just crack into any, can find all these things that, that others cannot see. So, in fact, even the governments thought that that was important that they should, I don't know if they're exaggerating, if it's, if it's true or not, but so you have to put that guardrail if you release it to the world, because somebody can use that model and then hack into your bank account, or somebody can use it to create a, a new virus gene or something like that. So, I think there, you know, that will be made on an individual or institutional basis, that these, these, um, hopefully these AI companies will share that, because they might decide not to share it. Might say, well, okay, why don't we just develop all the drugs internally and not release any of these models. Um, some, some might be doing that. For example, I don't think that would be a good thing, because what you really need is, again, as I said, you need a lot of data, you need a lot of scientists, putting all that data into the models, but not only the data, but their experience, in a way. You, in, in the, let's call it, the wild or, or the world, you're actually training those models. Even, even if it's superintelligence, it's going to be so hungry for data that you're going to have to, um, collaborate or release it to, to others. Um, also, I think this will be important to democratize healthcare, because one question everybody asks, okay, well, you know, if you find the treatment for aging, this is only going to be available for the super-rich. I'm never going to be able to afford it, or, or treatment for cancer. I say the opposite, actually. Thanks to AI, it will be super affordable, because if you can create a drug, like in a startup, let's say, cannot compete with a big pharma company, they can find a drug using AI, 100 times cheaper. And if you can do the clinical trial using a digital twin, that's where all the money goes. Like, you could develop a drug for a couple of million dollars rather than a couple of billion dollars. So, the cost of drug development or treatment, development will be magnitudes lower, and that will give a huge number of people access to that. But, of course, you know, AI, AI has to be, um, shared. It's, it's, I think it's a product of all humanity, and it should be the possession of all humanity. That's how I view it.

>> Except for going back to the thing that you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, which is that, you know, humans in the wrong hands, that is the problem, and that's, and that is something that needs to be very taken very seriously.

>> But, but the solution to that is also AI. So, right now, I mean, I hear that like Claude, um, basically finds all these loopholes in, in this cybersecurity issues that people couldn't figure out for decades. They didn't even know they existed. So, it's just patching all those, uh, all these security bugs. So, it will create almost a perfect secure system, like it will be unhackable, because Claude is actually preventing that. So, to prevent that from happening, you still need AI. You might still have some bad actor trying to develop a virus that will cause a pandemic. To prevent that, you also need AI. So, the AI should be able to predict it and already create the vaccine ready. Will say, well, somebody might make this virus, so let's let's get ready for it. Um, so, uh, AI is the solution to all that.

>> Interesting perspective. Always seems to, you always seem to have a positive outlook. Um, I wanted to ask you another question about, you know, we're talking about these simulations and how we're going to, you know, using AI to to essentially run these clinical trials cheaper, because we're going to do this, you know, these simulations and have, you know, biomarker data, and it'll just be, you know, shorter and and cheaper and easier. The question is always, what do you measure? Right? What is the biomarker? What are, what's the endpoint, right? And in aging, you can now see, I mean, every a study, almost a new study every day coming out, looking at these epigenetic aging clocks. And that's, you know, the, so, as most people listening to this podcast know, I've had Steve Horvath on a couple of times, and he's sort of the pioneer in these epigenetic aging clocks, and they've now developed over, you know, the last decade or so, and become much more of a biological marker of age, like your biological age, not just to be able to predict your actual chronological age. And so, um, you'll find now studies that are looking at treatments and whether or not it can reverse, quote unquote, reverse biological aging or epigenetic aging, but it's not clear that that's necessarily, you know, if that's really reversing aging, right? So, how, what do, what do you think, um, from your perspective, what should we be looking at in terms of some of these functional >> outputs?

>> Um, yeah, I mean, those epigenetic u markers are very useful, um, but I don't believe that, um, they are terribly useful as, um, sort of as predicting true aging. I mean, there's, there's a very, um, uh, significant problem with, with those markers. Uh, usually, they're, they're done through, through blood analysis, but in the blood, you have, uh, like, you know, I work with T-cells, so you have these cells that we call effector cells that have, um, lots of epigenetic change because they differentiate and they continue to accumulate in, in old age. And then you have these naive cells that have, you know, more pristine, uh, kind. So, it's a combination. So, depending on, um, what that combination is, is going to affect the output of, of the, um, so, you, you can actually just look at the proportion of your, uh, T-cell differentiated T-cells, you'll probably get the same, same kind of information. Um, and it doesn't tell you like, what's happening in the skin or the brain or the heart, you know, that it doesn't mean that, uh, if, if the immune cells are getting younger, or the young ones are expanding and the old ones are dying, that doesn't mean that your skin is getting younger, or your liver is getting younger. So, that it has a very limited use, in my opinion. But we really don't need that, because like aging is probably the easiest way to measure. We know exactly what goes wrong in, in, in old age, right? So, like, you can't breathe that well. Your heart doesn't work that well. Your muscles don't work. You can only, you know, raise so much because it's your weakened muscles, or your VO2 max is is lower. Um, these are all phenotypic. Like, you don't even have to probably withdraw blood, just measuring the ability of, uh, of an elderly person. Can they walk, uh, better, you know, 100 meters than they used to? Like, because that's looking at the total biology, like, you know, your cells, your metabolism, or whatever, muscle. To me, that's, or, or your cognitive abilities. >> But those can't be simulated. I mean, >> They eventually, they can be. Right now, they can't. They can't be simulated, um, because, as I mentioned, the AI is missing that behavioral, physical intelligence in the real world, because that's, that's most things are happening in real life. But, um, I think I think they can be simulated. But more importantly, uh, I think eventually, you have to try, whatever the AI comes out with, you need to try it on, on the humans, right? So, my point is that you don't have to, uh, do anything too fancy or wait decades to see the effect. If I give this treatment to, I don't know, an 80-year-old, and they're suddenly able to breathe well, you know, their VO2 max went up. Um, they're sharper, they can think better, uh, they can remember better. Um, you, you can look at their immune system, and we can see that the cells are, we know which cells are younger or worse. Or you can look at their skin, like, oh, wow, the skin is getting young. Like, you see it. You don't even have to do anything. Um, so, so there are so many features, phenotypic features of aging that could be, um, objectively measured, actually, and not just subjectively. You will see the effect very, very quickly. Like, this partial reprogramming trial, they're doing it, it's, it's done for glaucoma patients, I, I guess, because that happens in old age, right? So, your cells are aging. So, I mean, if these people start to see it works, right? Their, their cells, cells got regenerated. Um, you don't need to look at the epigenetic. Um, so, I think, uh, it will be a combination of those, um, measurements, probably we will come up with, and AI will probably come up with this set of biomarkers. I don't think we know, because it's going to be a set of biomarkers, like, um, you know, your glucose, your cholesterol might be high when you're 30, and it will be high or low when you're 80. I mean, there's not a very specific marker that will tell you your age for just looking at that. But the combinatorial effect will, will AI probably will be able to predict your age looking at all kinds of data sets and say, oh, this guy must be, you know, um, 52 years old based on this. You know?

>> I know we have, uh, that model, ClockBase, that's looking now at a variety of small molecules that might reverse epigenetic aging. Now, there are some data sets showing that if you reverse epigenetic aging, there is some functional correlation with some functional improvements, like pre-frailty things like that, you know, like improve. But, at the end of the day, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see if there's going to be companies that come out trying to sell some sort of drug, claiming it reverses aging, when they're really just looking at one >> biomarker, which is reversing >> It's mostly the immune aging that they're looking at, or, or sort of maybe getting rid of the terminally differentiated immune cells. Like, for example, in old age, you, you accumulate these CMV-specific T-cells. CMV is a virus that you can't really get rid of. So, the immune system constantly has to keep it under check. And those immune cells, they kind of become like missionaries. They should retire, but they keep on expanding. And some individuals might have like 20, 30% of all their T-cells just dedicated to like one peptide of this, this CMV. And they're, they're not helpful, but they become, uh, harmful because those guys are old, they should retire, they don't, and they cause inflammation because they're, they're active. And, and they don't give place for the young guys to come in. And they're, they are epigenetically, you know, closed, because, um, they're differentiated, their telomeres are shorter. So, uh, you know, you might be getting rid of some of those cells with certain treatments, which is great. Um, but then you have the indirect effects, right? So, if you can, if you can control the immune system and inflammation, that's going to have a huge effect all over your. That doesn't mean your skin got just regenerated, but it, it will, it will help clean up >> aging. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Um, also, the other thing I was thinking about is like, you know, we, you're mentioning VO2 max and, you know, muscle strength, muscle mass. We have all these markers that sort of like decrease with age, and yet we don't know necessarily that they cause aging in a way. So, the question is like, will AI be able to take all this correlational data, like we have all this, you know, all these different functional out, you know, endpoints that we look at, and and be able to differentiate it from like personalized, you know, this personalized, um, data set versus like actually, like, how do you cure aging? Like, what do you change that's going to drive, you know, reverse the aging? I mean, there's, there's a lot of questions.

Um, you mentioned something interesting that had to do with the brain, and that is something that I've been thinking about as well, because, you know, we, we have a lot of repair processes in our body, right? We can repair a lot of DNA damage, and, you know, mitochondrial function, and, you know, all these things. But in the brain, we can grow new cells, replace the old cells. In the brain, it's not as robust. There's some parts of the brain that can, um, you can grow new neurons, neurogenesis. There's neuroplasticity. That's a big part of of the repair process, in a way, but it's not like a big, you're not totally replacing the brain, and you don't want to, you know, as you mentioned, because then memories go away, and your identity, and, you know, it gets very complicated.

>> Um, how do you see AI >> intervening in that? Like, everything's great if we can reverse our heart aging and all this, but our brains, that's so important >> now. Is it just going to be a, you know, delay age-related disease, neuroinflammation, all that stuff? We can, we can fix that, but like, are we going to be able to really reverse brain aging?

>> Um, you know, I, I would have to ask AI to, to, to figure that out. But, you know, I can, I can think of several scenarios how that might happen. Uh, first of all, you know, neurons, um, or the brain overall, must have some very good maintenance policy, right? So, so there are neurons that live for decades, maybe 70, 80 years, and not just neurons, but there are other cell types that can live for very long. They don't divide very much. There is some regeneration, uh, it's not like zero. And that's very important, because that means that if you, let's just do a total experiment, let's just say that you replace 0.01% of your neurons, uh, every month or every year, something like that. I don't think that's going to make a huge difference in your brain structure, because what they're doing is that they're probably, you know, there's some neurons somewhere interacting with a bunch of other neurons, synapses, and then it gets replaced, and the new neurons might have a few other synapses other than that, but that's going to replace that network anyway, because they have that capability. So, if you do this slowly, uh, I think, um, you, you won't lose a lot. In fact, we, we still lose memories, right? So, uh, we, we can't remember everything, or we hallucinate all the time. Uh, talk about hallucination, right? Imagine that this happened to me. No, no, no, it didn't happen. No, no, I, I remember that. So, that's like brain, brain, maybe part of it is new neurons that they just didn't know. So, they just made it up, right? So, um, so that's one thing. The other thing is that, uh, these neurons probably have some internal abilities to regenerate. What I mean by that is that, you know, the cell can maintain itself if it has, you know, sort of, um, a great way to clean up internally, like autophagy is is a very important mechanism, as you know, um, or it has some really special DNA damage correction ability, like stem cells have that, right? So, pristine stem cells, they don't get old, you know, even at 100 years old, they, they're still like, like a young person. So, and then you have all these other cells, like glial cells, and, and, and so on, that are there to prevent all the other stuff that happens, the inflammation. You know, glial cells, of course, are are are part of the immune system in a way, but they, they are like, the immune system is not allowed into the brain in very rare cases. Uh, it's like a protected area, um, because the immune system causes too much damage, and if you can't replace it quickly, that's, that's a huge problem. But they have their own network of cleaning up, and they probably have some sort of, like, a lymphatic system and, and so on. Um, um, so, if we can figure that out, or if I can figure that out, we might be able to really, maybe not completely regenerate, but extend it, um, quite significantly. Maybe another 10, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, for whatever. And then we might come to a point, and this goes into a little bit of a science fiction now, you know, let's say in 50 years' time, AI might be able to figure out all of the synaptic connections in your brain, like every single neural network, and the neurotransmitters, and everything else. So, eventually, you might be able to, like, literally simulate your brain. Um, you go into the matrix level. So, that might allow AI to, like, say, okay, I'm going to replace all these neurons, but I'm going to make sure that they reconnect all these synapses. >> So, so that you don't lose your identity. Um, or alternately, I can keep a copy here, and then we can create a new brain, and then transfer to that new brain, the exact, uh, state, that I, that I found. Uh, I, I'm not saying that this is possible right now. That's really science fiction era, but you can imagine that at some point, we might get to that level. So, I'm not, I'm not too worried. I, I think if it can pass this couple of decades, and then keep the brain, um, healthy and, and self-preserving for, for maybe, uh, you know, age 120, 130. And in fact, you know, the people, people actually who live to to age 100, they, they have very sharp minds, right? >> Because if you don't have a sharp mind, you don't live very old. So, that's like super correlated. So, if we can keep it for a couple more decades, and we'll probably find some other solutions. So, if we can, if we can keep the neuroinflammation low, if we can increase brain-derived neurotrophic factors, some of these things that we know do play a role in improving neuroplasticity and, >> you know, and growing new neurons, and to do all the things that we can, at least in some predictable way. >> And we can have like chips for the, for the memory part, you know, we could always supplement that. So, >> increase the capacity. >> And, and, and hopefully, um, AI will help us figure out how to deliver these therapies to the brain. Yeah, delivery is always the biggest problem, >> right?

Well, this has been such a fascinating and exciting conversation. Uh, Duria, I have a couple more questions, closing questions for you. And I really kind of was just wanting to know if you had access, let's say there were no guardrails, and you had access to all this data in aging biology, you know, the T-cell, you know, all the T-cell repertoire, long, you know, longitudinal, uh, longitudinal, longitudinal cohorts, um, centenarian data, like everything, just anything you can imagine. You had it all, and you had this model that was amazing that you could >> You're describing heaven for me. >> Yes. Yes. What, what would be the, the prompt? What would be the question you would, you would ask it? I mean, there'd be more than one, but what would be the first?

>> Yeah. Hoping that the AI won't answer, uh, 42 as an answer. Um, the, so, so, so, uh, the, the first thing I would probably ask is, um, not, not saying that, just figure out aging or whatever, because I think there has to be, there has to be a certain sequence. So, imagine that you have all this data. Uh, what would be the, the most practical, um, uh, quickest way you can develop, uh, an intervention to an elderly person, say, age 70, 80 years old, that will, uh, immediately add five years to their lifespan? So, to me, that would be, uh, the most critical immediate question to ask, because that population doesn't have a lot of time, and so we have to develop these, these technologies extremely quickly. And will should have, you know, even two years, three years extend, so that I can come up with the next prompt, uh, after that. Um, so, I guess that, that would be the, the first prompt I would ask.

That's great. What, um, okay, there's another question. So, this one is, there's no, there's no money. Money is no object. Okay. There's no, like, you have complete, like, access. >> You're describing so many heavens now. >> I know. I'm just, I'm curious what your answer is. You're going to personally build your own digital twin, >> which, which I plan to >> right now. Um, what tests would you prioritize? Like, what data sets would you prioritize? How can a person get them? Um, how often would you take these tests? How would you organize this information into the AI to really get the biggest bang, you know, benefit from the information it's going to give you, >> right? But you said money is not >> money is not an issue, right? Money's not an issue. >> Um, so, so I would divide it into two parts. Uh, one part is that we have to, um, um, so what I would do is set up a, a huge lab, um, you know, partially automated lab, where I would generate enormous amount of data on the, on the cells, on the tissues in the, in the lab, because we have to go by the first principles to understand what's going on on, let's say, in an individual T-cell, all these thousands of proteins, metabolites, what are they doing? Then, then that will enable me to create what's called virtual cells, um, and then eventually virtual tissues, and, you know, how cells are in a special temporal manner are are behaving and so on. So, that would be, that probably be the most expensive part of it, and I'll need a lot of money. You said no limit, right? So, okay. Um, uh, but the second part would be sort of what we talked earlier, kind of the behavioral data from, from the human humans. And that data is not just, of course, you know, all kinds of, you know, plasma levels of proteins, metabolites, your full microbiome, your full genome sequencing, and all of these things are are possible, by the way. I mean, it's, you know, if the cost is not an issue, you can easily, like, UK Biobank has done it for 500,000 people. You can do it for a million people. Uh, and I think if you did it for a million people, that would pretty much cover all the possible humanity. I mean, I, it's not like everybody's perfectly, uh, different. You know, we share a lot of things. And, and, and so, you know, from the humans, collect lots of biological data, but very importantly, behavioral data. I think this, this is something that's totally missing in a digital twin. Like, you know, we were talking earlier, ability of someone to walk a certain distance, ability to, to, you know, raise some some weights. These don't show up in any biomarker sets, but they could be extremely important. Um, uh, or ability to think, you know, their cognitive level, that that could be directly, uh, brain, brain aging related. And, and I mean, you, lots of things. And, and, you know, what happens when humans are in certain environments, you know, in certain environments, you, even if you, if you are having a very, sort of, healthy lifestyle, that may not help you much. For example, you know, I lived in New York City for a decade. You know, my stress level was so high, uh, uh, uh, and that stress level is so harmful for you, because the immune system is constantly thinking there's a threat out there, and it's causing a lot of inflammation. In fact, I think people who live in New York have twice as much heart attack risk or something like that. You know, that your environment, your, um, uh, your emotional states, and how you interact with other people. All of these things will impact your aging process, your, your resilience to life, your optimistic level. By the way, being optimistic is one of the best things you can do for for aging, and study after study show that. So, being able to absorb, um, bad things that happen to you and then keep keep going. So, resilience. So, but these are behavioral data that's not available in, in the biological set. So, uh, yeah, uh, I would do that for, for a million people all over the world, different parts. Um, and then on the lab, every single cell type that I can find, decode those, put them all together to the superintelligence.

And then voila, we have digital twin.

Okay, Doria. So let's say someone wants to build their little mini digital twin right now using the models we have access to today. The type of data that we can aggregate, you know, at the consumer level today, biometric data that we can, that we can put in. Um, how would you build that mini digital twin today?

Yeah, great question. I mean, uh, in fact, it is possible to build a sort of a mini digital twin, uh, that doesn't have to be as sophisticated as I described, because that, that one is more, uh, sort of clinical trials and developing treatments. Uh, but, you know, going back to the, uh, example of the UK Biobank, you know, they didn't have trillions of data sets. They only used a few hundred data points from, from each person, and they were able to predict a lot of diseases. So that means that, you know, we, we can have a lot of predictive power with the data that we're collecting, uh, today.

Um, you know, another example is this, uh, glucose, uh, meter that I have. Um, you know, every five minutes, it shows my glucose level, and then I take that data and, of course, I put it to ChatGPT. Um, and once you, uh, additional data set, that becomes very, very valuable because, uh, let's say that you have your lab values, your cholesterol, your glucose, um, your, uh, every day, the, the steps that you took and your sleep, uh, and so on. So these are actually very rich data on their own because they're, uh, their accumulation of lots of under, uh, uh, underbiology that that results in that, but also that puts, uh, AI into a context, your mini digital, uh, twin.

So my, my suggestion would be, uh, to, uh, uh, you know, provide the AI as much data as they can, and on a daily basis, so that, so, and keep it in the same context, so same window, so they, so the model can remember that. Um, actually, there are, there are some tricks, uh, uh, to do that as well. You can keep it as like a database and tell the model, go check my database and see what my new, uh, you know, based on my new data, how things have changed, what suggestion you could give. Um, I, for example, uh, provide all the supplements that I take, you know, um, you know, the type of food that I eat, um, all of these things will make, will make a big difference. Um, so the model starts to really personalize, um, you know, sort of the, uh, style. It will know your style and will make, uh, suggestions for you, uh, rather than giving blanket statements like, you should walk 10,000 steps. Well, you know, it knows that like Daria cannot walk 10,000 steps every day, but I think 3,000 would be enough for him.

And what kind of model are we talking about? Would you be using the GPT 5.5 Pro? And then what about, you know, these agents and codecs, and how does that come into helping analyze that, that database that you're creating?

Yeah, I, I think, you know, these models are becoming more agentic all the time. I, I know OpenAI, for example, they integrated agents into, um, their Codex model, the coding model, and soon, I'm sure it will be part of all of ChatGPT. Um, you don't, you don't, I don't think you need very sophisticated models for that. What is important is that, uh, really maintaining that context. Uh, so hopefully the models will have a larger memory and they can remember. So you, chat can keep certain memories about you, but it's still kind of limited. Uh, um, it's not just ChatGPT, like you can use Gemini, for example, which has a longer, um, uh, context windows, or, or Claude, for that matter. I think most of the models can handle that, uh, information. And they don't have a problem dealing with large data sets. As I mentioned, I can put millions of data sets, and they're able to analyze that. What they need is that they need to remember how things were a month ago, because that's before and after. Before and after is extremely valuable. So the model will know, he started taking vitamin D3. Oh, these things changed after that that you may not notice, or his glucose looks better because of, you know, when that's that change happened. So it starts to make those links, and that's, I think, the critical point, because you need all of that context in the, in the AI model to, to give you sort of a better, uh, prediction on what to use and what not to use. Okay, you were using that, well, maybe that was not a great idea, so change it, um, or change the dose, or, or whatnot.

Yeah, that's interesting. It kind of reminded me of a question that I did want to ask you about, you know, these AI models and future AI advances when you think about these qualities. So, like persistent memory, expanded context handling, it seems like those seem to be more important.

Absolutely. That, I, I think, um, for me, uh, memory, which brings the context, uh, so the models are now able to think for quite a long time, and they don't, because previously, the models would just, um, even in the same context window, if you had a million context windows, uh, after a while, they would just fall off because they would forget even what they were thinking about. Now, they have this ability to constantly, um, go and check on it. So, uh, I think in the next few months, this is going to happen. Uh, so that, that will, that will have a tremendous impact. Well, that memory is everything.

So, so you think, so how long are we talking? Like, let's say, you know, you started a vitamin D supplement 6 months ago. Put that you have the same window, and you start in that window, you have that, you know, entry point, that date, and then you keep adding about, you know, you add your, your, your data in. Has got all the data, um, right now. Can it go back that far, or how far can it go back?

Um, if you have that data somewhere in your database, uh, for example, um, I adopted a, a technique that, uh, Karpathy, who's a famous AI researcher, described. So you can, um, turn, you can create your own Wiki, sort of Wikipedia kind of a thing, like personal. Um, you take, uh, you know, uh, if you have all your data somewhere, uh, you can ask AI, just pull all that and put it into a Wikipedia, like, you know, you can do it daily or weekly, depending on the environment, whatever. Um, and so now you're building your own database, health database, which AI can help you update it. If you have that data, it can go years, doesn't matter, like you can have 10 years of data, it will analyze all of that. Um, uh, but

It has that memory, it can like

Yeah, so in, in, in, in the same context, if you provide all of that, I mean, it's still limited with, you know, maybe a million tokens or something, but no one's going to have a million token data set, even if you, if you calculate 10 years. So, so that's, that's not, that's not a problem. The problem is like, if, if you have, if you want this to be continuous, like you just give AI, okay, here's the data today, that it should be able to remember what was yesterday, what was 2 months ago, so you don't have to give, you know, all of the, um, uh, you don't have to keep your own database and give all that again and again, because you have to do that every time, right? So your whole, and that will spend a lot of tokens and stuff like that. So, but, but I think this is, this is going to be, uh, this is going to be solved.

How do you not bias? How do you lower the ability of yourself to bias what you know, GPT 5.5 Pro is is going to feed you back, right? Like based on what you're asking it, and I mean, I, I find sometimes I, I might be able to bias it a little bit. Do you, do you, do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, sure. I mean, that's why I think, uh, we are in sort of the experimental phase, um, in a way. Um, everyone has to do their own kind of validation. Um, as the models are getting better. What I mean by that is that again, you know, of course, don't try harmful things and then, you know, uh, don't go into risk, but, you know, for daily, daily use, um, you might be taking vitamin D, and then you, you stop taking vitamin D, so that you're just doing an experiment like before and after, and then you collect that data, before and after, uh, and then AI gives you one solution, says, well, you know, taking this dose of vitamin D, I think is important. So then you can start that dose again, and then see, see what happens. If, if you reach the same level as before, means that AI made a good prediction, like you need to see after, you have to have that record, before and after, so that you, you are the judge. Well, what this was a good idea, so I'm, I'm glad that I listened to Jupy. Well, if it wasn't a good idea, it didn't kill you. It didn't make you sick. So that's, that's also fine.

Yeah. I guess for someone that's already taking a lot of supplements, for example, they're not going to have that before and after. Then also, you have to know like how long do you wait, you know, for example, to for the wash out period?

And, uh, yeah, and whatnot. The, the hope is that if you provide that very frequently, um, in fact, um, I can mention one thing, uh, for example, the, the lab values, like you go and measure your cholesterol, glucose, sodium, whatever, they always give you a range, right? So if it's within this range, it's normal. Well, how do you know that? Because you can be at the top of the range, that might be your abnormal, somebody else's normal, somebody might be a little bit over the normal and might still be okay, or vice versa, because we don't know the level on a personalized level. So we, we calculate population-based. So, okay, so this range is good for this population. So in a way, um, if you have three or four measurements, let's say every few months, you can develop your own set point normal. You know, the, the AI will know your normal for glucose is 90, not 70, not 100, or not 105. Somebody else might be 102. So it knows that based on that, that measurements. So then, then it starts to give you advice based on your data set, your set points, because if yours is 100 and suddenly dropped to 70, maybe that's not a good thing, you know? I'm just, I'm just, uh, giving an example. Uh, uh, so, uh, that's why that continuous data collection is so important, uh, uh, with, with glucose meter, I collected every 5 minutes. The more data, the better.

Well, Doria, thank you so much for sitting down with me today and talking about this exciting, I mean, frontier that we're exploring, you know, curing disease, extending human life expectancy, obviously health span, reversing aging, perhaps getting to human 2.0, you know, where we're enhancing, you know, genetic, you know, features as well. Um, very exciting time to be in. And if we cannot die in the next 10 to 15 years,

It may be even more exciting. Yes, absolutely. Because, uh, you know, the last thing I will say, this is so unique in human history. Uh, because a decade ago, uh, if you set someone, well, you should be very healthy, you know, do this, do that, and they can say, well, it's only going to extend my life maybe two years or three years. I just want to live my life, and I don't care about living a few more years as an old age. And that, that was perfectly, you know, relevant. That's not the case now. Living an extra one year could make you reach that threshold where there's going to be the ability to treat many diseases and reverse your aging and give you another decade, give you another 20 years, and then once you reach that, you get another 10 years, another. So like, even every day counts now, in my opinion. Uh, so, uh, that's why don't die.

Um, where people can find out more about your research and they can follow you. I follow you on X. Um, maybe you can tell people how to follow you, what your user, your Twitter follower, or sorry, your X user handle is, and where else they can find you.

Uh, yeah, my, my main account is on X. Uh, it's at Daria, D E R Y A, T R, under dash. Um, if they write Daria Nutmas, I think I'll, I'll show up. Um, that's, that's where I, you know, do most of my communication. Um, I have a LinkedIn account, but I don't post that often there. Um, I, I've been planning to start up a, a sort of a YouTube channel, but, um, I don't think I'll ever do that because I'll never have the time. You know, it's, it's really amazing what, what you're doing because video takes a lot of, a lot of effort. Uh, so for me, is the, the fastest way. Uh, in fact, I, I even had a Substack, uh, account, but just couldn't find the time to write long, uh, uh, long messages. So, so, uh, X is the best way.

Well, I really encourage people to follow you on X. Post. I mean, just every day, there's something interesting that you're posting on X, and so I highly recommend that people do follow you.

As, um, many already do. So, thanks again for the research you're doing, and for, I'm, I'm excited to see what, um, what's going to happen in the next couple of months.

Looking forward to it. Very optimistic. Thank you. Thank you very much. It was great.