Frameshifts with Benjamin Arya

What happens when the man who launched commercial spaceflight decides humanity needs to stop aging?Peter Diamandis is building the infrastructure to tackle aging. He founded the XPRIZE Foundation, created Singularity University with Larry Page and Ray Kurzweil, and wrote the playbook on exponential thinking with Abundance and Bold. However, somewhere between flying Stephen Hawking into zero gravity and recruiting Elon Musk to his board, he realized something: if we’re building an unlimited future,

What happens when one of the world’s leading neurosurgeons steps away from the operating room to become a first-time founder? Dr. Theodore Schwartz pioneered minimally invasive brain surgery going through the nose and eyelid instead of opening the skull. He’s published over 200 papers, written a bestselling book on neurosurgery history, and now he’s building a MedTech startup to solve a problem that’s plagued him for decades: there’s no way to continuously monitor a patient’s pupils during

This week, I sat down with genome engineering prodigy Michael Florea.I first met Michael at the Longevity Biotech Fellowship retreat in Tahoe National Forest, California (2.5hrs east of SF). I was in the final days of building an AI edtech startup, and looking for advice on what to do next.Michael had been genetically engineering longevity since he was 16 years old. What he always wanted to do was extend the human lifespan. But he decided that the most impactful technology he could work on first was

This week, I sat down with Omar Abudayyeh and Jonathan Gootenberg, the co-PIs who helped pioneer the field of genome engineering, and are now leading one of the most innovative and productive bioengineering labs in the world.Omar and Jonathan met as graduate students in the lab of CRISPR pioneer, Feng Zhang. They have since co-authored more than 30 breakthrough papers that helped transform CRISPR-Cas from a basic research tool into a clinically relevant therapeutic and diagnostic modality. Their

In this week’s episode, I sit down with Francisco LePort and Martin Borch Jensen, the co-founders of Gordian Biotechnology. Gordian is revolutionizing drug discovery by testing where it matters most… directly in living organisms. We discuss their groundbreaking approach of pooled in vivo screening that transforms a single organism into thousands of parallel experiments, and how this could fundamentally change our approach to studying age-related diseases.Francisco and Martin believe that traditional

In this week's episode, I sit down with Prof. Ron Weiss, the MIT pioneer who helped create the field of synthetic biology. We discussed the emergence of living therapeutics that can think, adapt, and make complex decisions inside the human body. The implications of this stretch from synthetic cells within implantable biosensors that can produce insulin based on real-time glucose sensing to self-amplifying RNAs encoding gene circuits that specifically detect and kill cancer cells.Ron believes the

“What I wanted to do was harness evolution as effectively as possible.”In this episode, I sit down with pioneering synthetic biologist Kevin Esvelt. Together, we explore how technologies like gene drives and phage-assisted continuous evolution could help tackle humanity’s toughest challenges, from eradicating malaria to protecting global food security. We also dig into the urgent need to safeguard biotechnology against misuse.This is a conversation about the future of science, biosecurity, and