This Guy Takes 75+ Supplements A Day & Does The Most Advanced AI Diagnostic Imaging For Health (& Wrote A Guide On How He Does It All!) With Dr. Peter Diamandis

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, here's the shocker.

When we looked at what correlated with heart disease, you know, we looked at everything, triglycerides, you know, LP little a, HDL, LDL, all of these molecules. We found one thing that correlated the highest with heart disease. And it wasn't your triglycerides, wasn't what was your LDL or HDL, wasn't your Lp. It was—

Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Ben Greenfield: Alright, it's official. I'm coming to Melbourne, Australia. I'll be there for a couple weeks, but as a part of this tour, I will be hosting a fantastic public event, one epic night at Luminaire in South Melbourne with the team from Saint Haven Private Club. Whether you're into health, performance, longevity, fitness, or any other element of life optimization, I will teach you how to become boundless. It's going to be an incredible evening, here's what you need to know. It will be June 26th, 6:30 to 8:30 PM, and there will be an option for a VIP experience with me that includes a meet and greet and the book signing. You can get all the details and get your limited seat now at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Australia2025. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/Australia2025. Ben Greenfield: You know, a few years ago, I had the opportunity to interview a really incredible duo, Peter Diamandis. He came on with Tony Robbins, and I think it was one of the top podcasts I recorded that year because Peter and Tony just blew my mind when it comes to all of these emerging technologies and tests and advancements in the field of longevity and anti-aging. But, it turns out that later as of a few months ago, Peter actually wrote his own longevity guidebook. I got my greedy paws on this thing a few weeks ago. You can see I got a lot of pages turned over. It's always cool to get inside the mind of somebody who is not only an MD but also an investor, an entrepreneur, a guy who really understands and is deep in the trenches of health technologies for lifespan extension. So, I figured what the heck, why not get Peter back on the show? Peter, welcome.

My pleasure. I feel guilty for not being on my walking desk or my Tekko Gym bike here. So, it's like sitting is the new smoking and I hate it. So, literally every time I've got a non-podcast, a Zoom of some type, I've got a healing infrared sauna over there. I take my Zooms in or my bike over there. It's like, how can you do 2 or 3 things at once?

Yeah, exactly. That's a big part of a lot of this stuff is it's like stacking to the point where it becomes brushing your teeth so that you're not spending 8 hours a day figuring out how to move your body well. Yeah, the treadmill thing just kind of gets easy after a while. You start to learn how to talk, how to function, how to focus when your feet are moving. And now, it feels weird for me to sit and have a conversation statically. I almost get a little bit fidgety.

Anxious.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm feeling that right now.

That's all right. You can go for a run after this. So, you're an MD. I don't think a lot of people really realize you're an MD. They hear your name, they associate you with investing and health technology. But tell me about the medical side of things. Like, did you, did you actually want to be a practicing physician at one time, or do you do any of that now?

Oh yeah. So I grew up in a medical family. My dad was an OB-GYN. Uh, you know, my parents are both born in Lesbos, one of the islands in Greece, came over here, and it was sort of expected as a child that I would become a physician. I'd follow in my dad's footsteps. Uh, and I got infected by space, you know, Star Trek and Apollo sort of like lit my mind on fire. And I was committed to becoming an astronaut first and foremost. And then when I realized my chances of becoming an astronaut were like 1 in 1,000, uh, you know, the best probability was either you're a fighter pilot or you're a physician. So I figured, okay, I'll go to medical school and make my parents happy and then follow my medical activities. Well, when I got to medical school, finally, I was doing a joint program at MIT as an undergrad and grad student. I went to Harvard for medical school, harder to get into and even harder to fail out of because I tried. Um, and I was doing a lot of activities at the same time, and I realized that even with a medical degree, my chances of becoming an astronaut were very low. And so my goal became just to graduate medical school. And then I went focused on all of my interest in space and my interest in exponential technologies. And I came back to medicine about a dozen years ago. So I never did my internship, never did my residency. And just to be clear about that, but medicine got— became of interest to me about a dozen years ago when I returned to longevity as a field. And it was like, okay, listen, here is a field that is ready to rock and roll. And I started building businesses, building a venture fund in the biotech longevity space and writing about it and really reeducating myself because most of medical school, most of what you learn in medical school is not relevant for what we can think of as advanced exponential medicine going forward.

Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, the way I think about this is I would imagine you're probably able to interpret and filter the dizzying amount of different supplements, technologies, wearables, et cetera, out there because as anyone knows who's taken a quick glance at a medical and pre-med education, you've had to go through a pretty decent working knowledge and memorization of biochemistry and organic chemistry and microbiology. And I would imagine that probably helps in the investments in entrepreneurial space and health.

I mean, it does. And the credentials— I mean, listen, what you learn in medical school is how to memorize a huge number of facts and learning how to learn. But today, I think what's leveled the playing fields is really the access to all of this knowledge. By simply diving into a large language model. It's all there in excruciating detail.

Yeah, as long as you know how to prompt it effectively, which I think is a critical skill. So I want to dive into some of the really interesting things in your book that I learned that was new to me or things that I found really interesting. And one thing that caught my attention, I think this was in the introduction, was you basically said longevity doesn't really have that much, or not as much as we may have thought that it had with your genes. Can you explain?

Yeah. So a lot of people think, okay, well, my mom and dad or my grandparents had a short life, so I'm going to have a short life. If your parents didn't make it past 70 or 75, And there were a number of studies done that looked at correlating your life expectancy with your genetics. Uh, one study that was done on a huge population dataset, uh, showed that there was the contribution of your genetics to your life expectancy was only 7%, that the remaining 93% was a function of your lifestyle. Other studies showed it to be 30% genetics, but 70% of your lifestyle. So the fact of the matter is, even if it's, if it's 30%, the notion is what you do every day, what you eat, how much sleep you get, how much exercise you get, your mindset, all of these elements which are lifestyle elements are the vast impactor on how long you'll live. And I think that's a critical insight. Uh, and you have control over it. And a lot of these things don't cost a lot of money. They cost willpower, they cost time, they cost attention. Uh, but if you truly want to add those extra decades of health to your life, you can. And I think that's one of the messages that needs to be first and foremost gotten out to the world.

Yeah, they don't cost much or there's cost savings baked in. Let's say you're not having an extra $18 cocktail or you're out to eat at the steakhouse. So, some of the stuff can actually save. With the genetics thing though, you know, maybe I'll use myself as an example. A lot of people say, "Well, how long do you think that you'll live, Ben?" And I look at, say, my my dad or my mom. My mom is still alive. And, a lot of the men in my family seem to, based on what I've been able to dig up, pass away sometime between 70 and 75 years old. And then, I'm often asked, "Well, how much time do you think with all this stuff you're doing that you can gain over and above what— it seems that the men in your family seem genetically programmed to die at? And I don't really have a good answer to that question, but I'm curious how you approach a question like that. Like, my great-grandfather, my grandfather, they passed away when— and my father, they passed away when they were maybe 70, 75 years old. I'm doing all this stuff. How long could I actually expect to live based on that? Is there any data or in any way that you think about that?

Yeah, I do. I think that people pass away for a reason.. It could be that they've developed cardiovascular disease or metabolic disease or a cancer, whatever the case might be. And we are now gaining the ability to prevent those diseases or discover them early enough to reverse them and, and cure them. So it isn't like we have no agency here. So for example, my father had passed away from effectively cardiovascular disease that led to vascular dementia and a fall that broke his hip and landed him in the hospital and then pneumonia that followed this cascade of events that occurred. And so what happens then? Well, I am focused on my cardiovascular situation, right? So I am taking a series of different medications. I'm taking Repatha, which is able to cut down and reduce my Lp.

That's a PCSK9, right?

PCSK9 inhibitor, right? And, you know, I look at my numbers. I am monitoring and measuring myself every quarter. This was technology, both medical technology and measuring technology, that didn't exist when my dad was in his 50s, 60s, 70s. And so the world's very different. You know, you can, if you, if your dad had, you know, prediabetes or diabetes, you can now make the decision. You don't want that. You want to prevent that, right? We have GLP-1s now. We have a whole slew of different technologies. So yeah, people used to die at age 30, right? You have to remember that for, most of human existence, you know, 200,000 years ago, as we were cavemen on the savannas of Africa, you would be pregnant by age 13, and you're a grandparent by the time you're 26, 27. And back then, the best thing you could do for the perpetuation of the species was not steal food from your grandchildren's mouths, and you would die. So if we look at the human body, you know, we were, we were designed to live to about age 30. After age 30, it's a slow decline. Our pituitary hormones, our muscle mass, our stem cell populations, all of these things begin a slow and steady decline after age 30 because we were never engineered. There was no incentives to live longer than that.

And then, just to clarify, by the way, you say slow and steady decline, I'm assuming you mean unless you do something about it because obviously, I mean, there's even studies—

Unless you do something, guys.

So, people, you know, males at 80+ years old are able to not just battle sarcopenia but put on muscle.

Yep, for sure. One of my missions last year or about 18 months ago was a mission of putting on 10 pounds of muscle mass, which I did with, you know, effort, right? It takes, you know, enough protein and creatine, working out 5 days a week, and you can do this. So, you know, the fact of the matter is modern science enables us to overcome what our parents or grandparents had as limitations in their lives.

10 pounds of muscle. I'm writing that down on this little Post-it note, Peter, because we definitely are going to come back to that. How old are you?

I turn, you know, I, May 20th is my birthday. We're recording this on the 19th and you're gonna be probably sending this out after. So I'll be 64 when this gets broadcast.

Happy early birthday. Yeah, 64 putting on 10 pounds of muscle. That's impressive. But before—

I was 62 when I started the journey. I'm 63 when I ended that journey.

Okay. All right, cool. Got it. So I brought up alcohol, said you could save money obviously by not ordering a bunch of cocktails at the restaurant. But the alcohol debate is interesting. I think it was Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, who put out the most recent data showing that if you have risk of cancer or preexisting cancer, definite no-no. Obviously, psoriasis, liver fibrosis, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, et cetera, would definitely be out. Family history of alcoholism, definitely think twice about it. But across a wide range of epidemiological data, it seems like you could make a case that small hormetic-esque doses of alcohol could actually be better for you than not drinking at all. So, what's your take on that argument about alcohol being a hormetic agent that when consumed responsibly might increase lifespan.

So listen, I've stopped drinking. I probably now last 2 years. It doesn't mean I don't drink at all. My wife's a sommelier and my friends will bring out a great bottle of wine and I'll have, you know, a half a glass of wine maybe every couple of weeks. And it's more socialization. So, you know, listen, being happy, being connected, being socialized, being in connection, those things all have positive attributes, just, you know, being around friends. But don't expect that drinking alcohol is going to have an impact on its own. I think alcohol is a is something that contributes to your blood sugar levels. It, it contributes to a whole slew of other secondary impacts, including the potential for injury. And as you get older, one of the biggest negative forces for longevity is injury. All right. You may be in reasonably great health, you injure yourself, you fall down, you trip, whatever the case might be, and you break something. Your, your body is going to decompensate very rapidly, and getting back to where you were is a challenge. You can do it, but it's a lot more work.

Yeah, it's like a downstairs stair-stepping effect. You know, you, you're in pretty good shape, you throw out a shoulder, maybe you don't do some upper body stuff for a couple of weeks, the shoulder gets weaker, but maybe you're, you know, 50 now instead of 20, so it's harder to build up that muscle and then maybe you fall down snowboarding and hyperextend the thing or fracture it. And, it's just a slow-rolling snowball. And, you're right, avoiding getting injured is, I think, one of the best ways to maintain youthfulness and vitality as you age. But then, at the same time, you've probably seen this, Peter, you got guys like Laird Hamilton who are having a lot of fun getting injured a lot, but they're out there surfing big waves and hoisting kettlebells and doing things that might actually increase risk of injury. So the way I think about it is there is kind of like an injury-fun trade-off. You got to have balance there too, right?

Yeah. And it's the same trade-off with alcohol, right? So I don't think there's any physiological— I don't think you can rationalize alcohol from like, it's good for me. That glass of red wine and resveratrol is good for me and so forth. You can psychologically rationalize that, but physiologically it's not going to do you any good. If you are more relaxed and have fun with friends because you've had a little bit of alcohol, that's fine. I think it's a balance, but I've chosen to minimize it in my life going forward. The other thing, by the way, what happens, and it's insidious, is you have a drink, it lowers your, your willpower. And what happens after you've had a drink is you start munching on the bread, you start, you know, you know, munching on dessert. And that's when things get dangerous because the alcohol is a slippery slope into a lot more calories, empty calories, sugar, especially at night. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, 7 calories per gram. I think a lot of people don't realize you got more than carbs, more than protein, close to what fat has at 9 calories per gram. Those are not free calories. And you're right, even something as simple as, hey, I've become dependent on a sip of wine to clear my palate after each bite of steak becomes, oh, I got a 12-ounce ribeye, so I'm definitely going to need another pour. And all of a sudden you're beyond. What I would still— and maybe I differ from you on this, I would still consider that glass of wine to potentially have hormetic effects that based on endogenous antioxidant production might actually have lifespan extension effects from a cellular resilience standpoint. It's a very small amount. I mean, I think the last— I haven't seen the evidence.

Yeah. But we can agree it is—

Yeah, it's about 0.2 to 0.5 servings per day, which comes up to 10 to 15 drinks per week. Potentially causing that. What the Surgeon General report showed was a slight decrease in all-cause risk of mortality. It's just, I think when, and you pointed this out too from a practical standpoint, it's a very low number of people who are drinking that way and not drinking to excess or at least drinking to excess occasionally. So, I think it's a real tightrope.

Fair enough.

But coffee, coffee is something, you know, I, I think I saw in the book you said, what, like 3 to 5 cups a day?

Yeah. The evidence is, is mounting that, that coffee and it's not just, it's not necessarily caffeine, it's all of the other attributes, all the other, you know, sort of molecular content of coffee is, is definitively positive for your longevity. So I will have 3 cups of coffee probably in the morning. I think I'm just finishing my 3rd cup right now. I enjoy coffee. I am a slow metabolizer, right? So I understand genetically that I'm not going to drink any coffee after 12 noon, right? Sleep is too important to me and I don't want anything you know, sort of interfering with that whatsoever.

Yeah. So, but that's, I mean, obviously if you're a slow metabolizer and you're trying to get all coffee out or at least be done drinking coffee or ingesting caffeine sources by noon, that's a lot of coffee from the time that you wake up until noon if you're looking at 3 to 5 cups.

But I get up at 5:00 AM, 5:30 in the morning, I'll have a cup of coffee then. Probably have one about, you know, a follow-on cup around 6:30 or 7, and then maybe something around 10:00 AM, and then I'm done.

Yeah. How picky are you on, on coffee?

Relatively. And, you know, one of the questions that people should be asking themselves is the mold content of coffee, which is a, which is a problem. And I get probably most of my coffee these days. I don't want this to be a Starbucks commercial, but probably from Starbucks. At the end of the day, I should be pickier on my coffee than I am.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I haven't really seen like a mycotoxin mold analysis of Starbucks lately. I fall into that trap too, Peter, when I'm traveling. You know, at home, I'm pretty careful to choose organic, but I also have to admit, like, I kind of use coffee as a sometimes drug, similar to how I'll use sugar. As something that I generally avoid. But if I've got a really hard workout, I might get a little bit for that added bump in high glycemic index energy. With coffee, I do a lot more tea, these newer mushroom coffee blends, collagen or mushroom non-coffee blends, collagen, et cetera. And I might average 2 or 3 cups of coffee a week at home. And then, when I travel because I've got a much more unpredictable schedule, less sleep often, greater need to be awake for a long period of time and socially or intellectually stimulating scenarios. I'll go kind of like you do, like 3 to 5 cups a day. But of course, when you travel, it's a lot harder unless you're traveling with your own kit to actually get the good stuff. Yep, for sure.

But nonetheless, you know, we're moving into an era today of a lot more data on all of this. And so, like I've said to many friends, just get into one of the large language models, whichever is your favorite, Claude 3.7, you know, Grok 3.5, and start querying and ask, you know, give it your data. I mean, if you've been genome sequenced, you can drop that into a large language model and start to ask, okay, you know, how much coffee is good for me? What is the evidence? You know, what's the evidence that's pro-caffeine or pro-coffee? And let's not, let's not just, you know, say coffee equals caffeine because coffee has a lot of other molecular components that are shown to be pro-longevity.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah. And this is obviously not in your books. This is great information. What, what What LLM do you like to use for something like a blood and biomarker lab report upload with feedback?

You know, I use— I'm using 3 of them all the time. I'm using, you know, GPT-3.0, you know, sort of through ChatGPT. I'm using Grok and I'm using Anthropic, you know, Sonnet 3.7 inside of Fountain Life, which is my longevity diagnostics and therapeutics company. It's a sort of a national platform with centers in numerous cities. We have an AI app that we build where you get all of your data is on your app, and we use Sana 3.7 right now in there to analyze your data.

Okay. Well, what'd you call it? Sana 3.7?

It's Anthropic's.

Okay.

Got it. You know, AI model.

I've not messed at all with Anthropic. I'm primarily using Grok and GPT. And actually, Grok seems to do pretty well with blood and biomarker prompts. But you guys basically took the Anthropic framework and then you have your own Fountainlight-branded app that uses that as the foundation for the lab interpretation piece.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, I want to talk a little bit more about Fountain Life and some of these more advanced health diagnostics here in a little bit. But, let's go back to the muscle piece. So, 10 pounds of muscle, 62 years old. What were some of the key things that you learned going through that process or really good principles that you applied that really worked?

It was 5 days a week was better than 4 days a week and definitely better than 3 days a week. Right. So it is really pushing yourself in that regard. Having a trainer to push you beyond your normal limits is important. I'm, I'm, I will go without a trainer for maintenance, but if I'm looking to actually push myself, adding, you know, 5 grams of creatine per day and then adding, you know, a gram of protein per pound of muscle, per pound of body weight. So I was up to about 150 grams of protein, which I would take throughout the day. You know, I would start with a protein shake, add some egg, you know, some eggs to that, have some salmon at lunch, some, probably some salmon or chicken at dinner. But it's getting enough protein and spreading that protein intake over a series of elements. In the book, I sort of lay out a typical day of of protein and caloric intake. But those 3 things, you know, routine workouts and making the room in your schedule and prioritizing it in your day was fundamentally critical. Like, you know, right now, as soon as we're done with this podcast, I'm off to the gym for an hour.

Yeah. Yeah. So the 5 days a week. Versus the 4 days a week. That's actually really interesting because some people will say, well, as you get older, you need more recovery days, lower frequency of training. But with 4 versus 5 days a week, were you doing a certain split or was it full body every time or what did that look like?

When I was with a trainer, I would split it out and do, you know, upper, you know, arms and back and legs and, and split that out with them and just go to exhaustion and over and over and over again on reps. When I'm on my own in a maintenance mode, I'll probably for 3 out of the 5 days be doing full body, and then one day I'm, I'm just focused on legs, and one day I'm just focused on upper body. But that's me. It's like I need to have fun and enjoy my workout. And it also, I travel a lot, so it depends on what the gym is like at the hotel. One of the things, one of the hacks I use is I'm typically traveling with members of my team and I will say, okay, listen, we're meeting at the gym at 6:30 in the morning or at 7:00 AM in the morning and making an appointment to be at the gym with somebody on your team or you're traveling with just increases the probability you're going to get your lazy butt out of bed and into the gym.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, paint yourself into that corner. It's a great strategy. The protein piece, splitting it into smaller portions throughout the day, and it seems despite there being that one, I think there's one study 2 years ago that said, well, 100 grams after you finish working out might be superior, but there are, I think, some flaws in that that we don't need to get into now. But this idea of splitting it up throughout the day, is that because you just find it's easier to digest that bolus of protein? Is it just something that you fell into because you like that cadence of smaller protein feedings? Or are you kind of looking at the research and saying, okay, so for maximizing muscle protein synthesis, I'm trying to get multiple surges per day?

It's a question of how much can you absorb in the small and large intestine at a time. And if you overbolus the protein, how much of it goes undigested, you know, through, through your gut. So I also take digestive enzymes to support digesting that food, that protein.

So with the, with the digestive enzymes, are you, because I know you take over, I think you've stated in the book, something like 72+ different supplements.

Yeah, I know. I, I, I cut it back recently, but it's still at 80 plus. Yeah.

Okay. Gotcha. With, with the digesting enzyme, do you have like a certain brand or form that you use specifically for like proteases for the protein digesting piece or something that, yeah, that you kind of felt as far as the back?

It's a Panaplex. Yeah, it's a Panaplex digestive enzyme protein. It's Basically a full set of digestive enzymes. And, you know, it's, for me, it's remembering to take 2 of those capsules with the meals. And a lot of this is just routine. It's like having it in my pocket or in my jacket when I'm traveling and just remembering. And the other thing that's important, we can talk about food in general, is putting yourself into a, you know, parasympathetic mode. The rest and digest mode for being able to absorb the nutrients in your body. And my biggest stress, my biggest problem is I am just living a go, go, go, go, go life. And it's like just trying to slow it down to eat and digest your food.

Ben Greenfield: I recently interviewed Sahil Bloom, who wrote a book about the 5 types of wealth. And in the book, he gets into the ways that we structure our business in terms of the certain things we work on. He said a lot of people are pretty good at content production, reactive work, creative work, but one oft-neglected component of someone who is entrepreneurial-minded is consumption, right? Because often input equals output and you have to carve out some time of the day where you're actually learning, reading, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, et cetera. And I personally find those activities very parasympathetic or more parasympathetic than say being on a Zoom call. So, my strategy is I save for breakfast and lunch. Those two meals I save for that 10%-ish consumeristic time where somebody sends me a YouTube video, goes into the notes folder for that day, and I pull that up while I'm eating my lunchtime salad, for example.

Nice. I get that. I do my input when I wake up in the morning. I'll do about a half hour of red light therapy, and I'll be sort of consuming content during that period of time. But yeah, I agree, that's a good idea. If you can make the time. The other thing is, of course, meals. I have two 14-year-old twin boys, and so I'm trying to take my meals in conversation with them whenever possible and just make that family time.

Yeah, that's dinners at our house. I'd forgotten about that. I don't know if you remember, I have twin 17-year-old sons.

Yes.

We both have double boys to tussle with, which is great. So, GLP-1, that was another area that I paid some attention to in the book because you talk about some things that a lot of people know about like chewing your food a lot to release GLP-1, and you talk about the sequencing secrets, vegetables first, then proteins and fats, then starches and sugars last. But, there's a couple other things you talk about in the book. Yerba mate, you described that as a GLP-1 booster.

Yep. A natural substance that you can use to boost GLP-1 production. It's not something I use. It's just something I reported on in the book. You know, listen, GLP-1s are a miraculous drug and they're now going from just an injectable to oral tablets and such. The, the reality and the biggest caution, of course, is if you're morbidly obese, please put yourself on that and try, you know, take control back of your life, take control back of your consumption. I mean, a GLP-1 at the end of the day is something that reduces your level of hunger substantially. The difficulty is that, uh, people who get on GLP-1s, as you well know, they stop eating, which can impact the amount of muscle they're maintaining on their frame. And if you're on a GLP-1, one of the more important things you need to do is be in the gym exercising and you need to be cautious about taking in enough protein and really working on maintaining, if not building muscle. And the downward spiral is I get in on GLP-1, I'm losing weight, You're losing fat, yes, but you're also losing muscle. And then if you get off the GLP-1 and you start taking in food, the majority of additional mass you put back on your body is fat versus muscle. And so the rebound there can be very dangerous.

Yeah, yeah. The yo-yo effect is for real with that. Have you ever tried it or used a GLP-1 just to see what it feels like, Peter?

I did. I went on it for about 2 weeks as an injectable, and it definitely reduced my hunger, but I lost too much weight. My mom is like, you're too skinny, stop it. And it's like, you know, I'm in the gym adding muscle, but it impacts your facial structure as well as your body structure. So If, I mean, listen, the GLP-1 can be fantastic for a certain percentage of individuals who truly need to, you know, lose that body weight, but it should be used as a period of time to train yourself to get better habits, like learning how, what it feels like to eat less, learning what it feels like to, you know, control not having a dessert and learning what it feels like to actually stay in the gym adding muscle mass.

Yeah, yeah. The training wheels effect can work. Obviously though, you still have to be careful with that with the yo-yo effect. I tried GLP-1s too, Peter, just out of curiosity to see what they felt like. And the number one thing or a very important thing I realized was, like you, I'm advising people eat more protein, lift weights, eat more protein, lift weights. If you're using a GLP, it's hard to eat enough protein when you're nauseous and to lift weights when you have disaster pants. Like, just practical aspects of GLP-1 use that I didn't realize until I tried them. I thought, geez, gastric distress, nausea, then you're not eating enough, so you don't have energy to go to the gym because maybe your blood sugar is super low. It's practically kind of easy to say eat protein, lift enough. And man, when people get on these, it's just hard to do. But, what I do like is there's people like Dr. Tina Moore who I interviewed. She talks about microdosing with GLPs using much smaller doses than you get in a standard pen typically by working with a compounding pharmacist. And, you still get— because I actually tried this also after I talked to her, you still get an appetite-suppressing effect, but it's kind of mild. It's still significant, but it's mild and it's curts a lot of the side effects of these standard dosages.

I believe that. I believe that. So, you know, listen, at the end of the day, this also needs to be done in consultation with your physician. I think it's important not to be sort of playing around open loop on this. You need to be measuring what's going on in your body, especially when you're introducing, you know, sort of these advanced drugs into your, into your your biology.

Yeah, yeah. Now, there's one other thing I thought was interesting before I ask you about some of these more advanced health technologies and some of the stuff you guys are doing at Fountain Life. In the sleep chapter, you talk about mandibular advancement device. Mandibular advancement device. Yeah. What is that?

I love my MAD. So, at the end of the day, One of the biggest issues with sleep is undiagnosed sleep apnea. It's— you think you got a good night's sleep, but do you really know? And when you're on your back and your tongue falls back into your throat, or if you have excess body weight, and if you're sleeping alone, you don't have a bed partner to tell you, man, you're snoring, or you're you know, your breathing is irregular. It's important to be able to understand what's going on. You can go to a sleep lab. There's also an app, I think it's called SnoreLab, that's on your phone. You put your phone by your desk and, and the, the phone will record your breathing and your sounds, and it will give you a map, an audio map through the night. And there's a segment of it called Epic, where you have epic snoring if you do. And I came, you know, I tried for some time a sleep mask, basically a positive air pressure mask that forces air. Yeah, like a CPAP. A CPAP, exactly. And it truly is a torture device. I mean, if you have severe sleep apnea, it can save your life. And it's important to be— to look at this. But what I discovered was that a device called a mandibular— your mandible, your lower jaw over here— if you can get jutted forward as you sleep, it can move your tongue forward and keep you from snoring.. And so a mandibular adjustment device, you can go to your dentist and get it fitted. It's basically an upper and lower, what do you call it, fitting on your teeth. First of all, it keeps me from grinding my teeth, but it makes it so that I am sleeping with less sleep apnea, less snoring. And I've gotten to a point where I can't sleep without it. So when I go to sleep at night, I must have my mouthpiece in place and I must have my sleep mask. And I do, I travel with that everywhere.

Yeah, it's kind of funny. I saw a bioesthetic dentist down in Phoenix, Dr. Nico Loud. She's fantastic. You know, she does the cone scans and the x-rays of the mouth. She, rebuilds in a way your jaw mechanics, your cervical spine mechanics, and your mouth mechanics to eventually do aesthetic work with the purpose of not doing aesthetic work in a mouth that's eventually just going to get ground down later on due to poor habits. And she made me a device. It's called a MOGO. I forget what it even stands for. It doesn't do upper and lower like this mandibular advancement device that you're talking about, But, you do feel much better oxygenation and higher SpO2 measurements based on wearable analysis during sleep. But, like you, it does create this other issue where if I don't have that or my sleep mask, all of a sudden, I definitely don't sleep as well. So, I did figure out that if I forget it or if it breaks, which it has a couple of times, in addition to a long tube sock working okay for a sleep mask. If you tape your mouth, use mouth tape to tape your mouth, it can somewhat approximate what some of these mandibular devices are doing. It's kind of like a cheap quick hack if you don't have access to one of these devices. Do you ever mess around with that, the mouth tape piece?

Ben Greenfield: I have tried them and they do. It's amazing how a little bit of sleep tape on your mouth, which you can easily overcome if you need to by opening your mouth, still that little bit of pressure keeps you as a nose breather.

Yeah, yeah. Some of these things though that are quick to slap on, they have the nasal expanders now too that work great. Some, I forget the name of the company, they just sent me some, some that really stay on the nose. And yeah, it sounds silly, but having a nasal passages opener affixed to the nose and even just mouth tape on it, it makes a big difference in some of the nighttime oxygenation issues. That you're talking about, Peter. Okay. So, Semmecta found life because this is kind of like the cool sexy stuff now. So, advanced diagnostic tests that we can use to track our health as completely as possible. That's a real big objective for us. Before I ask you about this, I should probably point out the fact that, and I don't know if you agree with me on this, Peter, I don't necessarily think that things like full-body MRIs and clearly AI-driven CT angiographies are something that we could roll out en masse to the entire population without a huge financial burden on the medical system. But, if we're talking about people who really have longevity as a pedestal goal, these type of diagnostic tests seem like a pretty good idea. Would you agree with me on the idea that they're kind of not necessarily for everybody, but for the people who really want to go from, say, like, good to great?

Yeah, I agree in part. I mean, the reality is that when Fountain brings a new member in, and this is not a one and done, this is a membership that hopefully will be year after year after year, and you're just really understanding physiologically in your body, is there anything going on you need to know about and take action? And what's likely to happen to you? And how do you prevent things from happening in the future? How do you optimize yourself? Today, it's not cheap. We have a product that $6,500, a product at about $10,000, and a product at $21,000 for these, these memberships. But I also understand fully that this stuff will all demonetize over time. It will come down in price over time. The most expensive part of a Fountain membership is the medical team that you have around you, right? You get a, you get a functional medicine doctor, a functional medicine nurse. A dietitian, a health coach with you throughout the year to help you interpret your results and implement them, put them into action, and then test again the following year and then iterate and move forward. The MRIs will come down in price. There's a whole set of new MRI designs that are— I've seen that will bring the price down 10x on that. And of course, a lot of this is a function of volume. But here's the, here's the most important point. When you come through a Fountain Center or, and there are other companies like Human Longevity and Atria and others that, that provide this sort of immersive diagnostics. Uh, the, the thing that's important to realize is our bodies are incredibly good at hiding disease. Um, you're, you don't feel disease, whether it's metabolic, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, cancer, aneurysms. You don't feel anything until it's pretty far gone because your body compensates, compensates, compensates. And this was evolutionarily driven over. Over hundreds of thousands of years. And only at the end, at a stage 3 or stage 4 cancer, do you feel an obstruction? Do you feel a problem? And you go to the doctor, the doctor says, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you've got this stage 3 or stage 4 cancer. Well, guess what? It didn't happen that morning. It's been going on for some time. You just haven't looked. The same thing with cardiovascular disease. 70% of all heart attacks have no precedent, no shortness of breath, no pain, nothing. And you have a heart attack and half those people don't wake up from it. And it used to be you get a calcium scan and looking for calcified plaque. Well, it turns out that classified calcified plaque is not the issue. It's the soft, uncalcified plaque that's the issue. And this is what it, what it clearly, you mentioned clearly, it's one of the scans that we do. It's a, it's a new algorithm on top of a CT imaging of your coronary arteries. And if the calcified plaque is blocking an artery, yes, you have to take action right away. But you could have zero calcium score. Meaning you see no calcified plaque of any significance in your coronary arteries and have a heart attack that night and die. And, uh, it's, it's happened over and over and over again because, uh, what happens is you've got soft plaque, uh, in the walls of the coronary arteries. These are the arteries that feed oxygen and glucose to the muscle of the heart, uh, that needs the oxygen and glucose to keep pumping. But the soft plaque can break away, can evolve in the middle of the night, block that coronary artery, deprive that muscle in your heart from oxygen and glucose, and the muscle dies and you have a heart attack. So, you know, understanding your soft plaque levels from a Clearly Heart scan, and there are other companies coming forward with the same technology, is fundamentally critical. Yeah.

Yeah, conversely, I'm curious to hear your take on this. I think you'll see some people going for a standard calcium scan score test high for the stable calcified plaque. And in many cases, they are athletes. In many cases, endurance athletes, for example, have very high CIC scores. But then, and I've seen this, they'll go in for a CT like a coronary angiography and show that doesn't reside in problematic areas and is also stable. And so it's a little bit less of a scare than they initially thought from just the basic CAC.

You need to know exactly on both sides is if you have calcified plaque, which by the way is like, think of it as cement on the side of the piping. If it's not blocking the artery and it's stable, it's fine. It's again the soft plaque that could evolve in the middle of the night. Your job is going to be to reduce that or to calcify it so that it isn't going to break out. And you can now know, and we've seen heart attacks in, in people as early as 30. And, you know, if you're in your 50s, 60s, 70s, it's important for you to understand what's going on in your heart, in your heart, right? Coronary disease is still the number one killer, both in men and in women. Understanding what's going on— is your heart getting the proper level of oxygen and glucose? Do you have a problem? And this is an example of, again, how lifestyle can beat your parents' longevity, because you can look now and you can change your medicines you're taking or change your lifestyle approach to make it, you know, pro-cardiac longevity.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you know the answer to this question. This might be more of a question for, you know, Dr. George or someone else on the FoundLife Medical staff. But I'm curious how often it is that someone has a pretty good, lipid panel as far as triglyceride to HDL ratio and LDL particle size and ApoB, et cetera, and then goes in for a CT angiography like a Cleerly scan and actually finds something concerning like unstable plaque. Do you know if that's a frequent occurrence, if that's kind of pretty rare?

So, here's the shocker. We are publishing these results right now out of our first 5,000 members at Fountain Life. When we looked at what correlated with heart disease, it, you know, we looked at everything, triglycerides, you know, LP little a, you know, HDL, LDL, all of these molecules. We found one thing that correlated the highest with heart disease. And it wasn't your triglycerides, wasn't, was your LDL or HDL, it wasn't your Lp, it was your glucose levels. It was your hemoglobin A1C.

So really, as you know, not even like the whole IR insulin sensitivity type of thing, just the, just the glucose variability itself.

So your hemoglobin A1C is a measurement of the average glucose in your bloodstream attached to your red blood cells over the course of 3 months. It's like, you know, it's not a spot check. It is an average over a 90-day period. Your heart and your red blood cells live on average 100, 120 days. And so how, how glycosylated, how much glucose is attached to those. And what we found is that your, the higher the H, you know, the hemoglobin A1C, the higher the probability of heart disease. And it turns out that, you know, I say this all the time and to the point where I get made fun of, glucose, you know, is a poison. Sugar is a poison. It is, you know, it is inflammatory, both for cardiac and neuroinflammatory. And the higher your glucose levels, the more likely you are to have heart disease.

I don't want to de-emphasize the important paradox of what you're saying compared to what still I think a lot of people believe. You're basically telling me, Peter, and correct me if I'm wrong, that a low glycemic index diet that arguably just based on the fact that the extra macronutrients have to come from somewhere might be a little bit higher in fat when it comes to heart disease risk based on the big data that you guys have gathered at Fountain Life, might actually beat out something like a low-fat, let's call it like the oft-championed healthy whole grain diet, which we know since whole grain bread can spike your blood sugar higher than a Snickers bar is technically a higher sugar diet. So, something like low-fat, high healthy whole grain, et cetera, might actually be inferior when it comes to plaque risk.

Yeah. Your goal is to minimize the amount of sugar in your diet. And that goes back to reducing alcohol, reducing, you know, chocolate, reducing things that have high glycemic index. And it's not worrying about how many eggs you have or egg yolks you have. You know, it is, it is really, it's really clear in the results. And we see people who've got, you know, high LDL, high HDL, high triglycerides, and still very little plaque. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that, that's, I mean, the book, you have the coronary CCTA with AI, but I mean, the whole list here, brain MRI and MRA, full body MRI, high resolution 3D breast ultrasound. Low-dose lung CT, DEXA scan, retinal scan, which is— I mean, some of these things you get into super detail in the book that we don't even have time to cover today. Photometric dermatology screening with AI. Then you have your EKG, pulse wave velocity, olfactory testing, grip strength, balance, oral and gut microbiome, EKG, and the whole genome sequencing, early cancer detection test, comprehensive blood biomarkers. I mean, there's a lot in here. That you would test for in an ideal scenario. For you, did you do any of these fancy tests that maybe you hadn't done before? I mean, I'm talking about Peter personally. Did you find out something that kind of shocked you or surprised you that you wouldn't have found out before?

That's a great question. And I think probably the areas that have opened my mind up Yeah. For example, on my, my coronary status, right? Again, I opened up earlier, my dad's heart disease led to vascular dementia and a number of things. So I'm very concerned about my cardiovascular status. So I monitor that very carefully. And again, it's the soft plaque I'm monitoring more than anything else. But my gut has been an important part. My oral microbiome and my gut microbiome. And my gut lining is what I'm working on today. And so every year I will focus on some key area. You know, if there's nothing like an emergency blaring red light, then on moving different systems forward. So cleaning up my oral microbiome, getting my gut microbiome and my gut lining in shape. Is critically important. But then there's a whole bunch of toxin testing that we do, right? What's your microplastics level? What's your heavy metal level, right? I was just came out of the Santa Monica Pacific Palisades fires here and my lead levels are spiked, right? So, you know, we have these environmental, I, you know, found my Uh, uh, my mold levels spiking. So again, you're— we're testing all these things all the time just to make sure that we understand what's going on in our environment. Environmental toxins are a growing problem in our lives. And yeah, you know, when you go through a Fountain Life, uh, program, we're collecting 200 gigabytes of data about you. Everything knowable.. And people say, well, I don't want to know. And I say, bullshit, you know, you're going to find out if something's wrong. You want to find out now we can do something about it or when it's too late. And so this is for me, I want to know everything. All of this 200 gigabytes of data gets fed into our AI system that our physicians have access to. But then you on your phone have access to that same, all your medical data. And an AI to help you look at it and analyze it. And it used to be that people said, oh, you don't want to take an MRI or CT, you might find something. Yeah, well, you know, you may. And in the past, if you found something, it was like an incidental oma. But what we're doing now is it's a multimodal analysis. We're not making decisions based upon one thing. It's your genetics, and your imaging and your microbiome and your blood chemistries. All of this stuff together is giving us a full picture of what's going on in your body.

Yeah, that's a good point because you do get that unnecessary medical procedure. You're going to find out a bunch of false positives that you'll then act on, waste money, concern the patient, et cetera. But what I just heard you say is that you don't look let's say a full-body MRI in isolation. You would look at that in combination with maybe a CCTA, a whole genome, good blood work patterning, and get a full picture before you take just the isolated full-body MRI results and move forward with treatment based on that.

Exactly. And you have a medical team to support you on that. So, you know, there are locations like Prenovo that have done a great job in commoditizing and democratizing access to an MRI, but that's all it currently is. So an MRI by itself, in my mind, can, can be, you know, life-saving if it deter— you know, if it detects an aneurysm or specific cancer, but it's a fraction of your medical picture.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That, that makes a lot of sense. You have this annual conference that you do, I believe it's in, in, in LA. Where you get a lot of people coming in, you see all the latest technologies, gadgets, kind of like the Consumer Electronics Show of anti-aging perhaps. Just curious for you because I'd be remiss not to ask this question having you on the show right now. Maybe it's not in your book, preferably not in your book. Is there something cool coming down the pipeline that you're particularly excited about? Like, something that just comes to mind is that either a technology or a health modality that you're just stoked on right now?

Yeah. So on the Fountain side, which historically has been mostly diagnostics, we're beginning to really add access to FDA therapeutics in FDA trials. So the— what's changing right now, and I run an annual longevity platinum trip every September. This one's coming up in Boston, Cambridge, New Hampshire. And the last 5 days of September, people can go to abundance360.com/longevity, learn more. But it is a deep dive into all of the advanced diagnostics and therapeutics. And then Fountain right now, it's not enough. The diagnostics are all becoming commoditized. And accessible in many places. What I really want access to for our members is what are the most advanced therapies that can add decades onto your life? And I come at this from a number of different ways. One is we've got this $101 million Healthspan XPRIZE, right? So this is one of our largest XPRIZE ever. And we have 620 teams around the world that have registered for this competition to deliver a therapy within a 1-year period of time that can reverse the ravages of aging in muscle, immune, and cognition by between 10 to 20 years.

Muscle, immune, and cognition. So you're not making it such a big feat that they would have to target all pathways of aging. You're focusing just on muscle, immune, and cognition.

Yeah. So, you know, the feeling is that if you can hit those three, you're probably hitting fundamentals of aging in general. You're hitting multiple systems there. But at the same time, what I want to do is like, what's the most important thing for me to make you younger around? If, if you've got the muscle to be able to move in a, you a healthy, agile fashion, if you've got the cognition to keep yourself sharp, if you've got the immunity to defend yourself against cancer and against, you know, microbial, those are fantastic starting points. And, you know, it's really how do we buy additional health to allow you to get through the breakthroughs that are coming in the decades ahead from AI. So, I scan all of these, these companies, bring them to my Platinum trip, bring them to my, to Fountain Life, you know, advise and support those that I think are the most exciting. We're really in the midst of a healthspan revolution in the decade ahead that I think is going to be transformative. And our, our mission should all be add 10 healthy years in our life for the purpose of being around for the breakthroughs that occurred during those additional 10 years. That buy you the next 10 years and buy you the next 10 years. Yeah.

Yeah. The adjective there, by the way, people listening in, healthy. You want to— I forget how the saying goes. It's like a tongue twister. Die or die as young, as close to death as possible or something like that. You know how the saying goes, Peter, basically, you want to be as young as possible on the day you die.

Yeah. It's die old as young as possible or something like that.

Yes.

Die.

Thank you.

Die old as young as possible. Yes.

That one. So the point is, you know, be in— no one wants to be 120, decrepit, drooling in a wheelchair. The vision is how do you have the aesthetics, the cognition, the mobility, you know, looking great, feeling great, moving well, you know, at age 100 that you had when you were 50? How do we make you 100 years old and you 50? That's ultimately the goal. And I think that is within reach. We've seen some incredible announcements recently. You know, if you, uh, if you— Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, was on stage at Davos, uh, in January of '25 saying, you He could imagine that in the next 10 years, uh, due to AI, we could double the human lifespan. That's huge. Uh, then you had, uh, you had Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, right? This is under Alphabet. This is Alphabet's AI, uh, you know, organization. Uh, Demis was saying he could imagine basically curing all disease within the next 10 years. I mean, when you have these very provocative, very forward-leaning statements, but they're coming not from a biologist, they're coming from AI experts who are, who realize, you know, we're going to understand how, why we age, how to slow it, stop it, reverse it. And that isn't going to come from, you know, our 100 billion neurons. It's going to come from these large reasoning models, these, you know, what happens on the flip side of artificial general intelligence and then digital superintelligence that comes after that. I think human healthspan is going to be one of the greatest payouts that comes from AI.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're definitely on the edge of a pretty exciting era. And, I love what you're doing, Peter. I mean, you guys, we scratched the surface of what's in the book. Peter does hold these great events. I'll make sure I link to everything in the show notes. If we had more time, we'd dive into the 80+ different supplements, Peter, but we can save that for another day. You spell out a lot of this stuff in the book. I'm going to link to the book in the show notes and also the previous podcast with Peter who joined me with Tony Robbins. A few years ago. I'll link to that at BenGreenfieldLife.com/LongevityGuide. Longevity Guide. I'll hold up the book for you. This is the book, Peter's smiling mug, Longevity Guidebook: How to Slow, Stop, and Reverse Aging and Not Die from Something Stupid. Hopefully not too stupid. Peter, I know you're antsy to go work out now and practice what you preach. I am. So, we'll say goodbye, but thank you so much for coming on the show, man.

My pleasure, Ben. I look forward to coming back for yet a third time. And I just want to remind everybody here, you have the ability to extend your healthspan. And during those additional years, not a lifespan of healthspan, during those additional years, science is moving at an exponential rate. And there's this concept called longevity escape velocity, that there will be a time in the not too distant future in which for every year that you're alive, science extends your health by more than a year. That's what we're shooting for. It's not going to come because we're hopeful. It's not going to come from wishing. It's going to come from the impact of AI and these exponential technologies. We're truly living into the Star Trek universe. So get excited, motivate yourself to get out of bed and work out, get 8 hours of sleep, minimize your sugar, eat healthy, and I'll say have an amazing mindset. You're going to add as much as 15% to your health span by having an optimistic, positive mindset. It's one of the biggest impactors you can do.

Yeah. And maybe 200 years from now, Peter will be writing the book, How Not to Be Bored When You're 500 Years Old.

You've done it all. I love that. That's great.

Thank you, Ben. All right, folks. Well, Again, the show notes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/LongevityGuide. Thanks so much for listening. Peter, thanks so much for doing this. Have an incredible week, everybody.

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