Transcriber: Fiammetta Cartelli Reviewer: Michael Nystrom
Longevity is near.
And I would like to talk with you about what it means for us,
what is longevity,
and how I believe it will change the way we lead our lives,
and how our society evolves.
Now, if you reach the year 2045 in good health,
you don’t have to die anymore.
And that’s something I heard in 2016, and probably, similarly to you,
I was a bit like, ‘Well, okay, that’s maybe a bit science fiction’.
‘Um, nice idea, but unrealistic’.
It turned out it is quite realistic.
And the question is, though, who am I to tell you about this topic:
longevity escape velocity?
There we go. Sorry.
That is the term for that, yeah?
So if you reach this 2045 and you don’t have to die anymore,
you have reached longevity escape velocity.
Now, you know, I'm not a biologist, but I am an entrepreneur.
I have been building companies since the age of 19.
I always liked to be involved with new topics, exciting stuff.
I turned into an investor.
As we have heard before,
I have the honor to take part in ‘Höhle der Löwen’,
the ‘Shark Tank’ of Switzerland.
And there you see a lot of crazy ideas.
And later on, it turns out that some of these crazy ideas are quite realistic
and become very successful.
So crazy ideas are not necessarily a bad thing.
I like to think of myself as being an early bird,
as somebody who is able to identify innovation.
In 2009 I started to invest against climate change.
Today that’s, I think, on everybody’s mind,
and it has to be.
In 2009 people looked a bit strange at you when you told them:
‘Invest in solar parks and wind parks and energy efficiency and so on’.
In 2016 I went into blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
Luckily, I could say I was able to sell the company in 2021 at the all-time high.
Having said that, I still believe in the topic.
And since 2020, I’m looking at this new topic: longevity.
And what is it?
Why is it that some people live much longer than others?
And why is it that some people really live a healthy life until they die,
while others suffer from bad sicknesses for the last 10, 12 years of their life?
And when we look a bit at the map here,
that’s the Blue Zones you might have heard about.
That’s places where people get very old in good health,
places where people can get 110, 115 years old.
And the interesting thing is
they don’t die because of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cancer
and all the other age-induced sicknesses;
they die of old age.
And this tells us humans are made to reach 115 years, maybe,
if we stay in good health and then we die of old age.
And that’s quite a nice idea, I think.
Now, this changes.
While today this is only available for very few of us,
and if you live the good life in Okinawa or on the little island of Sardinia,
I think this soon is something we all can talk about.
And why is that?
Because in the year 2013, a paper was published,
and this paper was called ‘The Nine Hallmarks of Aging’.
And it was the first time that scientists have identified the causes of aging.
20 years ago, if you would have asked your doctor: ‘Hey, why do I age?’
You would have been told: ‘Oh, you know, this must be genetic’.
And then you would have asked: ‘So what exactly is happening there?’
And you wouldn’t have got much of an answer.
And now basically scientists around the world,
not only one university, but many worked together,
and they came to the conclusion it’s basically these nine reasons.
And these nine reasons you see here.
You don’t have to learn them by heart. You can look that up, I guess.
‘Nine Hallmarks of Aging’ you can easily find.
But it’s all about the division of our cells.
So every day, we have millions of cells dividing into new cells.
And the older we get, the more problems start to happen:
information gets lost, proteins are folded in a bad way.
And now we know that these problems are -
You can bring them all back to these nine reasons.
Why is it important to know about the nine reasons?
Well, now scientists know the problem, and they can start finding solutions.
And that’s exactly what has happened in the last ten years.
Scientists have been working hard,
and they came up with a lot of solutions to that.
And what I can tell you today is it’s impossible today to live forever,
but it's already possible today to slow down aging.
And in very few areas of these nine problems, you can even stop aging.
And in two, you can rejuvenate.
Attrition of telomeres, you can lengthen your telomeres again.
That’s a rejuvenation.
So slowly but surely, we move in a direction
where science enables us to slow down aging
and maybe to push out the limit of the healthspan.
We can push this out now. We can live longer, healthier.
We still have to die today.
Now, we have heard it before: longevity escape velocity.
Yeah, this is happening.
And now I really see it happen after the last three years
when I really involved myself.
I had talked to a lot of scientists. We organized conferences on that topic.
I start to believe this is actually possible.
Now the question is:
is this good, is this a problem, or is this an opportunity?
If I tell you now: ‘Hey guys, you don’t have to die anymore eventually’.
You will come up with a lot of ethical questions about that.
Then when you talk with the politician, the question will be:
‘How do you finance that?’
Yes, these are questions we have to answer.
I would like to look a little bit at that together with you,
but I see it as an opportunity,
and that’s probably also because I’m an entrepreneur.
Well, I already can tell you
this is going to be the biggest market we have seen so far
because all of you and everybody on this planet
eventually will be a customer.
Nobody wants to be old and sick
if you can be senior, healthy and happy.
You will be a consumer of services and products in that field.
You will change your lifestyle.
All of that basically means new opportunities
for products and companies, services come up.
UBS has done a study.
Quite interesting, they asked their older and affluent clients,
like people who own more than a million:
’How much of your total wealth, including your house and whatever,
would you be willing to give away
for an additional ten years of healthy life?′
They asked people above 60,
and what we saw is that the richest ones, so the people who have 50 million or more,
they are all agreeing that they give away half of the total fortune they have
for an additional ten years of life.
And if you think of it, it makes one hell of sense.
I mean, if you are sick, you cannot enjoy how much money you ever might have.
So it’s much better to be healthy.
That’s when we see the value of health coming up,
but this tells us this market is enormous,
and it’s very interesting to be in that market.
Now, when we talk about these people from UBS clients,
it doesn't matter whether you are rich or poor,
what you want to do is you want to extend the healthspan versus the lifespan.
And maybe eventually, you’ll live forever. But that’s not even the topic today.
Today, I think we should talk about
that we, all of us, will see people staying young much longer,
or you can say die as young as late as possible.
This is happening.
And why is it happening? Or what does it mean for Switzerland?
As an example, in Switzerland, you get basically today 83.4 years old.
That’s the average. Well, that’s quite good.
It’s the second best in the world after Japan, by the way.
Little problem: you are only healthy for 71 years on average,
and then you suffer 12 years of age-induced sicknesses.
That’s very uncool.
And now this is about to change. We push out this healthspan.
And I would like to offer you some ideas of where I see opportunities.
I mean, one of them is clear: all the fields of supplements,
and not only Vitamin C, new stuff is coming up.
And it’s not only producing supplements.
It’s basically websites which sell supplements.
It’s workshops about the topic. So a lot of things are happening there.
I read of therapies, just as an example:
people will want to have young blood therapies and so on.
It’s possible. You can do this today. Question is, where do you get it?
We need new clinics. We need people producing that stuff.
We need people who are knowledgeable
about how to administer it to their customers and so on.
Stem cells, huge topic. I have seen crazy stuff happening there.
Today I would say this is the beginning, but in the next ten years,
we will see a lot of new developments in the stem cell area.
That’s a big business area as well.
Now, very important - it’s all about data.
So today, I could tell you: ’You know what?
If you want to get healthy 100, you have to run marathons and eat vegan.’
That’s wrong.
That might be true for some of you here, and it might be very wrong for some others
because we are all different.
We have a different gene base.
So today, we are for the first time in a situation
where we can read out your genetic code,
so I can tell you who you are based on your genes.
And I can tell you whether it makes sense to run marathons or not,
or whether you should do a keto diet or better not,
or whether you should be vegan.
I have been vegan for a year, and I thought, ‘This is cool. I’m vegan.’
And then it turned out, after a DNA analysis,
that I had built a lack of vitamin B12,
and B12 is quite easy to get with meat and more difficult to get as a vegan.
You learn about that.
And now we have all those Fitbits and Oura rings and Apple Watches,
and we can basically monitor our health.
We can see the data.
How these inventions are changing our well-being.
And so for the first time we are really able to work on our life data.
We have a cockpit.
So I believe the field of data in connection of longevity is huge.
Active seniors - how do they play together, work together?
They are not staying at home when they are 65.
They don’t go on cruise ships because they’re healthy.
They want to be integrated with society.
Diets - what are people eating in the future?
In connection with that very interesting microbiome.
That’s something we don’t really understand much yet.
This is going to be huge.
That’s the second brain, our gut health, so to say.
What bacteria do we need - do you need specifically - once again?
A lot of developments are happening there.
If you say: ’Well, I don’t understand this microbiome. I’m not a biologist.
I know how to build houses’.
Okay, build houses because we will have new forms of living together.
And look, let’s face it.
If you are all going to be 115 years healthy,
do you want to live with your partner the whole time?
Well, I hope it for you, but statistics are against you.
The other thing, when you are pensioned today,
do you want to live in the house in the green
and wait for your grandchildren to visit you?
It’s a bit boring.
Maybe you want to be back in the city and go to events like this one.
You want to be closer to the city.
Most importantly, you want to be socially integrated.
You want to live together with other exciting people.
So one of the companies I’m building is Senior Co-Living.
We want to allow people to live together in a certain environment and so on,
but to have interaction.
Lifelong learning -
I mean, honestly, your career in the past was 40 years,
from 25 to 65 or from 20 to 60.
Now it might be a bit longer.
Maybe you want to change your job more often,
and maybe you want to learn things in general.
And universities are not anymore just for the 18- to 25-year-olds.
So a lot is happening in the education field.
And then the topic of retirement, how do we finance that?
Now, in the past, no problem. That’s the classic pyramid of age.
The young ones finance the old ones.
How does it look today? Like this.
How will it look in the future? Like that.
And what you saw first is Nigeria, the second Switzerland, the third Japan.
And all countries will evolve in the direction of Japan,
where you have very few young ones who have to finance all the old ones.
And so I tell you today, if you are under 30 today,
I’m sorry to tell you, but you will not get a classic pension.
It’s not possible to finance that.
You will not be pensioned when you are 65. Impossible. Get ready for that.
And I think if you are under 40 today, yeah, we are also there.
There will be challenges, but I don’t think it’s a problem
because if you are fit and healthy, why would you want to stop working?
It’s boring.
You need to have a purpose in life, and there are so many things you can do.
I agree it’s boring to do the same job for 50 years,
but if you can change it,
I think you have a lot of opportunities.
And that’s something we need to talk about with politicians, with the parliament.
And something I’m coming up with is instead of a pension,
why don’t we go every ten years for one year into a break?
You get money from that. That’s the new pension system.
You get one year financed every ten years, but only if you do some education.
You can take half a year off, travel, whatever,
and half a year you must take education.
Otherwise, you don’t get the payment for it.
And this allows you to reinvent yourself.
I think that’s something everybody can do
because every one of us has more than only one competence.
And so I believe that will be the future.
Yes, maybe when you are eighty, you say:
‘Hey, I don’t want to work so long.’
You find an asset management solution which pays you half an income.
You have a long time to save money now in asset management.
Now brings me to the end.
We live very long.
We will live 100 years or more.
And who knows, maybe this longevity escape velocity is really coming.
And so far, we only have one home. That's our planet.
And I think that’s something we all should take a bit as a mandate to say:
’Hey, if we have to take care about one thing here:
it’s not only about our pension; it’s about the planet we live on
because we live for a lot of years here’.
I’m 43. I expect to be here for another 70 years.
So I really should take care of my home.
And that’s what we all should do, I guess.
So with this, thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be here.
And I hope I gave you some ideas to think critically about,
and always happy to connect if you want to discuss longevity.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)