This transcript is my gift to you and it is from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Episode #220: Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots. Recorded December 22, 2025, at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. Released January 6, 2026. In this part 8 we focus on

Speedrunning to a Star Trek Future

Elon is solving many of the world’s biggest problems, and he stays grounded with the longevity hype. Peter Diamandis, a big advocate for extending life, pushes the conversation forward: Life’s about to get wildly interesting—”we’re speedrunning Star Trek,” as his collaborator Alex Wissner-Gross puts it. Elon: “Yeah, speedrunning Star Trek would be cool.” Dave Blundin amps it up with escape velocity talk—if we double lifespans, kids could hit “infinite” expectancy, cramming 50 years of AI breakthroughs into far less time. Peter echoes that we’re getting those 20+ years of progress in a rush. Elon grounds all this with his classic line: “I don’t know. I got too many fish to fry.” (Translation: Too busy building the future to over-speculate right now.)

In this segment, Elon Musk frames aging as a “solvable” software glitch in our biology—your body as a synchronized program that’s “extremely obvious” to hack for longer life. He predicts longevity solutions will seem “obvious” in hindsight, drawing laughs and pushback from Peter Diamandis, who urges preventive health scans to avoid “stupid” deaths.

ELON EXPLAINS WHY IN RETROSPECT, THE SOLUTION TO LONGEVITY WILL SEEM OBVIOUS

Elon Musk: This is something, by the way, that I—that I think I just—I think it’s very, and obviously other people think this too, but I’ve long thought that, like, longevity or semi-immortality is an extremely solvable problem. I don’t think it’s a particularly hard problem. I mean, when you consider the fact that your body is extremely synchronized in its age. Yeah. The clock must be incredibly obvious. Nobody has an old left arm and a young right arm. Why is that? What’s keeping them all in sync? You’re programmed to die in the way you’re programmed to die. And so if you change the program, you will live longer.

Peter Diamandis: And we’ve got, you know, species of—the bowhead whale can live for 200 years. The Greenland shark lives for 500 years. And when I—when I learned that, I said, why can they? Why can’t we? And I said it’s either a hardware problem or software problem and we’re going to have the tech to solve that. And I do believe that is in this next decade. So the important thing is not to die from something stupid before the—before the solutions come.

Elon Musk: In retrospect, the solution to longevity will seem obvious. Extremely obvious.

Dave Blundin: I think the thing worth working on—and Peter’s going to work on this anyway—but the thing to work on is exactly what you said. Calcified old ideas don’t just die off. Add that to the pile of things we need to think about today. Because there are a whole host of other AI-related things we need to think about today.

Peter Diamandis: Let me finish on the longevity point. One second, Elon. I want to invite you again. So there’s a company called Fountain Life that I created with Tony Robbins, Bob Hariri, and Bill Capp. And we do a 200 gigabyte upload of you—everything knowable about you, full genome, all imaging, everything. President Bukele and the first lady came through, called it an amazing 10 out of 10 experience. I don’t want you to pull a Steve Jobs—Elon Musk: And kick the bucket because of some curable cancer.

Peter Diamandis: I mean, do you actually know what’s going on inside your body right now?

Elon Musk: I did an MRI recently and submitted it to Grok and none of the doctors nor Grok found anything.

Peter Diamandis: But that’s a fraction of the information, right? I mean, it’s your full genome, your microbiome, metabolome, everything. And it’s possible—

Elon Musk: Okay, don’t call me.

Peter Diamandis: What’s that?

Elon Musk: Don’t call me, bro. Is that your water bottle? Haha… God damn it. Too late, sorry.

Dave Blundin: It’s already in the works.

Note: In the banter’s punchline here, Elon jokingly infers the water bottle on the table might be a sly tool for collecting his saliva/DNA sample—playing into the theme of invasive-yet-inevitable longevity tech. Classic Elon: paranoid humor amid profound futurism.

My 2 cents: I was standing in my dining room when I heard Steve Jobs died. I was crushed. My husband and I listened to one of Steve’s last talks, it was one he gave at Stanford University in 2005. I cried. He gave too few talks, too few interviews. I wish he had given more.

Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer (specifically a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, or pNET/islet cell tumor) in October 2003. The exact day isn’t publicly specified in reliable sources, but it’s consistently reported as occurring that month (e.g., discovered incidentally during a scan, and he kept it private for about 9 months before opting for surgery in mid-2004). Steve died on October 5, 2011, at age 56, from complications related to the cancer. Specifically respiratory arrest due to tumor metastasis (spread to the liver and other areas). This rare type of pancreatic cancer is slower-growing and more treatable than the common adenocarcinoma form, which is why he survived ~8 years post-diagnosis despite initially delaying conventional surgery for alternative approaches (a choice he later reportedly regretted, per his biographer Walter Isaacson).

Read on to Part 9 here.

This transcript is from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Episode #220: Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots. Recorded December 22, 2025, at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. Released January 6, 2026.