EP #34 The Mindset That Extends Your Life w/ Steven Kotler

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When something goes wrong, the brain notices we get an error signal, right? If you have a fixed mindset, that's the only signal you get. If you have a growth mindset, you have a violence that that says oh, I'm learning from this mistake and growing from it. But if you've got a fixed mindset, the brain doesn't even bother spending that energy because it doesn't believe you can learn, you can grow, you can change mindset of old functions sort of the same way.

And a massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe.

Okay, So I am Dr. Tori Higgins. I'm the head coach at the Flow Research Collective and I have the opportunity to moderate what's sure to be a phenomenal conversation between 11 time bestselling author, founder, executive director of the Flow Research Collective and one of the world's leading experts in human performance, Steven Kotler. Steven, hi, how's it going today?

Hi everybody.

We're also joined tonight with by Peter Diamandis, who's a world renowned entrepreneur, author, founder of various successful companies. Peter has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capitalism and education including Fountain Life, Cellularity and Vaccinity. He's also a best selling author of four books including Abundance, Bold and the future is faster than you think co authored with by our very own Steven Kotler. And Peter also holds degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and an MD from Harvard Medical School. His quote, the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. Inspires people around the world to take on grand challenges. Peter, thanks for hanging out with us today.

Live long, as they would say on a longevity podcast.

Well, well put, well put.

So the title of today's Crowdcast is extending human healthspan. So to kick things off, Peter, can you explain the difference between lifespan and health span and maybe why our focus today is largely going to be on the latter?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I was at the Vatican holding this conference or the session on longevity, and I'm there with about 300 scientists with, you know, members, cardinals and extraordinary group. And I asked the question of the group, how many of you here would like to live to 120 or older? And like a third of the hands went up and I'm like, what in the world? I mean, what, what am I not understanding? And the challenge is that most people, when they think about living to 120, they think about, you know, sitting in a wheelchair, drooling, and that's lifespan. It's how old are you alive and your brain has got some brain waves and your heart is ticking, but you may be not there and you may be in pain and suffering. Healthspan is how old are you? And feeling great. How old are you and have the vitality, the cognition, the aesthetics, the mobility that perhaps you have today? And that's healthspan. You know, for most centenarians, people getting to 100, centenarians typically will get to a hundred year lifespan and a 95 year health span. It's, they're feeling great, feeling great, and then they fall off a cliff. Unfortunately for most Americans who are making it to 80, they're healthy towards, you know, till 65. They have 15 years of degradation. And we don't want that. We want to be in vital health throughout the majority of our lives. And, you know, Stephen, I don't know about you, but, you know, I hope it's a lot more than 100 years old. There's a lot going on in the world out there. I want to see.

Well, if you're sticking around, I'm sticking around.

All right, buddy. I love that.

I feel like I just heard like a challenge accepted.

Two of us, last man standing.

So in both your recent work, so you really kind of urged people to rethink aging and how we look at it. So, you know, Peter, in Lifeforce, you talk about how aging is a disease, a disease that correlates with every other disease. And this isn't really how many people think about aging. So what are the implications of framing it this way?

Yeah, there's a couple ways to frame this. So first of all, you know, I think most of us listening here know somebody who's gotten to 100. 100 is now an expected life expectancy maybe not a health expectancy, but life expectancy. But there's species on this planet like the bowhead whale that can live to 200 years old and the Greenland shark that can live to 500 years old. In fact, Greenland shark can have babies at 200 years old.

And so if you get some of that shark DNA, I'm shooting for it. I got some of that shark DNA, I'm silent.

So the question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? Right? And that's a really important question. So that's one way I frame it. It's either a hardware problem or software problem. Another way that I frame it, Tori, is, you know, when you're born, you get 3.2 billion letters from your mother and 3.2 billion letters from your father. It's your genome. And your genome doesn't change as you age. Your genome is the same at birth at 20, at 40, at 80, at 100. So why don't you look like you did when you were 20, right. Why don't you have that six pack and, you know, and ripped muscles? And it isn't what genes you have to a large part, it's your epigenome. It's which genes are on and which genes are off. What we're beginning to understand is that you can impact that. You know, Stephen talks about that in his extraordinary work. We've talked about it in Lifeforce. And it turns out, you know, the number, Steven, you may know it is either that your genes impact somewhere, I've heard, as low as only 7% of the impact of your life expectancy or as high as 30%. It's not the majority. It's your lifestyle. It's how you live. And which is what our country is to a large degree about.

Yeah. Even the famous, I want to say it's the Swedish cardiology study where they, where they track this. This was where all the blue zone work came from.

Sure.

They were looking at the genetic studies, right. And they're like, holy crap, genetics is only 10. It was 10 was their number of the equation. So what's the 90% that is actually determined our health span, our longevity, the quality of our later years, all that stuff. That's where all that research started too.

Yeah. I'll put one last framing item which I think is important to realize. We take for granted our life span and health span today. You know, when we were evolving as hominids 100,000 years ago. If you look at when were humans, cavemen and cave women is about 100,000 years ago, the average life expectancy back then was late 20s. You know, you would go into puberty, age 13, you'd have a baby. By the time you were 26, 27, your baby was having a baby or a grandparent. And if our mission was to perpetuate the species, the last thing you wanted to do was steal food from your grandchildren's mouths, and so you would die. So most of human history, the average human lifespan was 30. And just the last century that everything from antibiotics and pasteurized milk and, you know, better sewage systems have given us additional health span. But I think it's this decade we could talk about that, that real breakthroughs in stem cells and epigenetic reprogramming in solitic medicines could add 10, 20, 30 healthy years and maybe buy you enough time to get the next 10, 20, 30 healthy years.

And I think, you know, the way that we're reframing this, we've opened up the possibility space immensely. Right. When it comes to extending lifespan and health span. So I want to take us back for a second, Stephen. In our country, you tell the story of just this radical experiment in peak performance, aging, teaching yourself to park ski at the age of 53. And this seems like an incredible feat that would have been unlikely just 20 years ago.

Right.

And what is park skiing, Stephen?

Park skiing is the. Oh, right. Park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps, on rails, on wall rides and boxes. And for those who are totally unfamiliar, theoretically, it's supposed to be incredibly difficult to learn. If you're over 35 by the time you get to, like, 4045, it's moved down to downright impossible. And if you're in your 50s trying to learn to part skiing, I think you're fucking crazy is probably the technical term that sort of gets applied.

Well, that would, that would explain you.

Thank you, sir. Not much has changed on that front, but that was that. Right. All the. The reason our country was possible, the reason I could write a book about it, is, you know, the discoveries that we've made over the, the past 20 years. You know, the big one is all the skills we used to think declined over time. We now know their use it or lose it skills. And this is all of our physical skills, this is all of our mental skills as well. And what's getting really cool is also how specific we are at getting, like, how good we are at getting each of the, each of the various categories of things that used to wane and how effective our tools are for Training these things, it was getting to be really, really interesting. Not that was apropos of nothing, wasn't I think the answer to your question. But it is getting really, really interesting.

Well, I'm, I mean that's exactly what I was leading into. So can you speak to some of the theories that have, you know, that we're, we're debunked or you're debunking in our country really. And how, yeah, how aging research changed.

There's a bunch of different ones, but like we could just go through a handful of the physical skills. So it used to be for the past 20 years, didn't really matter what you thought you could train. VO2 Max, which is your upper respiratory capacity was this thing that it starts to decline at 25. At 50 it really starts to fall off. And it didn't matter what you like what argument you made for peak performance agent. Physiologists would always be like, yeah, what about BO2 Max? It's a goner, right? Like, and it was, it was like this hammer that they would beat you with. And it turns out then they went out and measured the VO2 max in octogenarian triathletes and they found that as general. Octogenarian triathletes. So you're in your 80s and you run triathlons. You've got about 30 years of, you're not professional, you're not, this is just, you know, a hobby. But you got about 30 years of training, right. You started in your 50s, you kept going into your 80s. Most of them had the VO2 max of healthy 35 year olds. The world record is now an 88 year old man has got the VO2 max, I believe of a 24 year old is what like. And that's just. And we don't measure that often. So like saying this guy has the world record. It's not like we went out and did a, did a wide study to, to find him. So that's just one example. I'll give you another, a weird one. So risk aversion increases over time and you can fight against a lot of it, but part of it is tied to white matter density in the temporal parietal lobe. In this part of your brain, white matter is what wraps around, is myelination, wraps around the neurons, the axons, and it's like insulation. So when myelination erodes and the white matter erodes, processing speed slows down.

Right.

When our brains start to process information more slowly, everything else, every risk aversion increases, we're a step behind. Right. And this is this. Like, there's a lot of ways to fight against this. But one of the interesting things that we're learning now is that there's a connection between bone health and white matter density. The bones are the mineral stores of the body and all the calcium in the brain, which is what the brain uses to do anything coming out of the bones. So they used to think, oh crap, white matter is declining. What do we do? Brain is. Now we are starting to know that if you keep up bone density and there's a lot of ways you can do this, if you increase bone density, you can slow this natural risk aversion because you slow the attrition of the myelination. So, like, all it's getting, that's like three steps removed from what anybody used to think about. So, you know, Peter was talking about we're getting better at the epigenetics. That's like, you know, metaprogramming on our program. We're really starting to figure that out. A lot of stuff in the brain is working this way where there's a distant connection that we're just starting to figure out and we're starting to solve for. And it's leading to really incredible breakthroughs over stuff that we didn't think we can preserve. That's just two random examples. I pretty much. We could take whatever skill you want. And I can give you a parallel. Exactly.

You know, one of the things, Stephen, that, that I think about a lot. You know, when I. I feel like I'm in my best shape I've ever been. I'm 61 now, and it's. I measure it by my workouts and how many push ups I can do and pull ups, whatever the case might be. But for me, my number one objective other than cognitive sharpness is muscle. Right? Is maintaining muscle mass. And there is a direct correlation between muscle mass and longevity as a store of stem cells blood supply keeping yourself from falling and, and breaking.

So the number, Pete, the number one correlation. I don't know if you know this or not. The number one correlation for longevity is thigh muscle mass. Thigh muscle inversely proportional to mortality. Like literally it's. And it's part of it is exactly what you're talking about is part of it is also the bones. Right. When you're building up thigh muscle, your leg muscle, those are the biggest bones in your body, right?

Exactly. Here's a stat that should scare the of anybody. If you're over 65 and you break your hip or pelvis you have a 70% chance of dying within a year. I mean it's, it's serious. Right. And it's, you end up in a hospital and you end up with a pneumonia and it's a very quick spiral. And so really maintaining balance and muscle mass if you're in your 70s, 80s, 90s is one of the creeps key correlates. But yeah, so I worship, I worship at the, at the altar of muscle and sleep.

These are not bad alters by the way. Matt, in the, in the, in the comments asked about grip strength and grip strength is another indicator. It's not as directly correlated as, as lug mass but they can they a lot of these skills like they have the numbers on like when grip strength starts to decline and when you're going to die. But it's not even just on the physical side. So there's correlations. Openness to experience. This is a great one. There's a. In later adulthood because risk aversion starts to increase. We don't fight against it. Openness to experience starts to fall off a cliff. And there's a point at which where it gets down so small that they know within a year of you losing your openness to experience, you cognitive decline shows up almost immediately. So it's not as fast as death, but you're literally. You lose your openness to experience and it leads to cause of decline within a year.

Yeah. And if you're hanging off the edge of a bridge, grip strength directly correlates with life expectancy.

Very tight correlation there.

Yeah, you are totally right on that. I stand corrected.

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You've been dancing around risk aversion a little bit here, so let's dive into that. Can you speak a little bit more, Stephen, about how the role risk aversion does play in aging and how we can intentionally push back against it to fully embrace the potential of these extended.

Yeah, so I mean, what's cool. So you got to start at the beginning with this one is one of the new discoveries in the past 20 years about, about the sort of what happens as we age is there's cognitive changes in the brain, beneficial ones that start in our 50s. Epigenetic. There's epigenetic alterations that start turning on certain genes. They're only activated by experience. The two halves of the brain start talking together each other and working together like never before. And the brain starts to recruit underutilized regions and around in our 50s as a result of this, you get access to whole new levels of intelligence, empathy, wisdom and creativity. And I mean really robust, really important development. This is why the idea that you can't teach an old dog new tricks is actually totally wrong. It turns out old dogs, as Peter just sort of pointed out, are better at learning certain kinds of tricks than young dogs. But, but like a lot of things in adult development and psychology, it's an if then you have to do certain things to get these superpowers and you have to do certain things to hang on to them and to hang on to these intellectual benefits, get in their 50s and 60s and beyond. You have to first you have to one, you have to train against physical fragility because what if Peter's pointed out a bunch, what good is this supercharged Mind if you lose the body and everything we've been talking about on that side. Second one is you have to train it up. Risk tolerance, right. And the reason is as we become more risk averse, fear levels increase. This is a problem for a bunch of reasons. One, we can talk about this in a second. There are nine known major causes of aging, all of them tied to inflammation. Inflammation always ties to stress. So that's just sort of first and foremost is why risk aversion is a problem. But actually the fear, the norepinephrine that underpins that fear will block learning, block creativity, block empathy, block wisdom. So the fear we get from the risk aversion actually blocks all the very superpowers that come on in our 50s. And a lot of these powers. Like Peter talks about being a better athlete now than ever before. The same is true for me at 55. A lot of that also comes down to things like expertise and wisdom and things you actually need. Like before, one of the reasons I believe nar country was going to be possible for me, meaning I could learn to park ski, was because of this added level of wisdom and empathy. And you know, the. I was hoping for some emotional maturity where that came along with the wisdom, maybe temper some of my natural tendencies. You know, things like that. A guy can hope, right?

You know, I think part of it as well, pal, bringing it into something we both, we talked about when we wrote Abundance and we've continued in our other books is the idea around the mindset and purpose driven mindset here. If, if you're someone whose future is bigger than your past, right. You're more excited about the world ahead of you and you're not lamenting what you've missed in the past. Then you're in a mindset of wanting to be in great shape and wanting to have the physical capability to go and do whatever you want to do in life. And that for me is the foundational underpinning of, you know, it's, it's jumping out of bed because you're excited about the day, you're excited about what you're working on. You have a purpose and a passion in life that, that is driving you to want to see the next 50 or 100 years. And I think that connects directly with the idea of being risk philic, like being excited about your next job or your next adventure versus scared to change anything in your life.

I think there's two things I got to add to that because they're just so important. The first is in general, Peter's Describing is what is technically called positive mindset towards aging. Right. My best days are ahead of me. This is one of the most well established facts in peak performance aging is that a positive mindset towards aging correlates to an extra seven and a half years of healthy longevity. So if you are morbidly obese and have a shitty mindset towards aging, it is more important that you change your mindset than you lose weight. If you're just going by the scientific numbers. The second thing I want to talk about this is sort of a little bit. This isn't even peak performance aging. This is literally just healthy aging or adaptive aging or successful aging, whatever. So we talked a second ago about moderators. In your 50s, you need train down physical, physical fragility and train up risk tolerances in your 50s. By age 40, you need to basically have a way that you spend most of your time that in a way that generates passion, is line of passion, purpose and produces flow. Otherwise you have real problems in your 50s and beyond. This is just standard adult development stuff. So you like, if you really want to be successful, certainly anytime after, after 40, there's copious amounts of literature that say if you're not living in such a way to generate a lot of flow, live with passion, live with purpose, you're just going to have tremendous problems afterward. Mindset would feed into that. But, you know, purpose is a little separate from mindset in this, in how its impact, right? But also what Peter's point is, if you have the right mindset and you've got the right purpose and you're putting them together and really getting that feel, that's the secret, right? That's really, really what. What propels you.

And you both write extensively about having a massively transformative purpose, having clarity, knowing how your passions and your purpose intertwine. Stephen, I love in. In our country, you write about chasing big dreams before it's too late to chase down those dreams, right? So can you both speak to what are. What about the people that are listening to this who have maybe given up their dreams, right? Or they think that dream, certain dreams are too audacious for the second half of their life. What are their recommendations on how they can approach maybe developing more clarity around that massively transformative purpose, really going there and then setting goals.

So first of all, there is no dream that's too big. And I really want to, you know, you don't have to actually do the entire thing yourself, but you can find the right people to partner with. So if you wanted to do something big and bold in days of old. Rhyme it out it. You know, you either had to be the king, the queen, the robber baron, in some way, have enough wealth to go do it, do that. Today you can be anywhere on the planet and be part of a big, bold mission. You don't have to be the CEO, you don't have to be the financier or the owner, but you can be part of it at a minimum. The second thing that's going on is that we have all have access to such extraordinary technology. Right? We're living during the explosive birth of AI, generative AI. And what does that mean? It means that all of a sudden, within the next couple of years, it's not 10 years, 20 years, the next two, three, four years, we're going to have access to such extraordinary power that what is it you want to do? You're going to have the tools and the skills. What you need more than anything else is that passionate, driven mind to say, that's where I'm going. That, you know, picking a target and then reaching out, finding other people who want to go on that target with you, get access to all of the exponential tech resources that Steve and I wrote about in the future is faster than you think. So I don't think there's any dream too big. You can be part of a Mars mission if you want. You don't have to actually go to Mars, but you can be part of designing it, thinking about it, writing about it. So what is it you really want to do? The single most important thing is connecting to that childlike awe and excitement. It's an emotional connection. And if you've got that, then the rest is just putting the pieces together.

Peter said it better than me, and the only, the only thing I want to add.

But you would have written, you would have written it better than me.

It's true. It's true. I got to take credit where I can get it. No, the only thing I want to add, and this is, you know, this is stuff that covered a little bit in, in, in the art of impossible. And if you don't know what your passion is and what your purpose is, right, for the, for the 5% of our listeners maybe, who are still sort of floundering around, you know, one, the passionrecipe.com which is something that's free online, that I put together for this. But passion is built out of curiosity. It's the intersection of multiple curiosities. That's how passion is built biologically. One curiosity is great, but it Just doesn't have enough energy over the long haul. But if you can find a place with three or four, five of your curiosities start to intersect and you play there with patience. And I want to emphasize the, with patience play there over time. This is what, this is where this is grows passion and this is where purpose comes from. But the most important thing is you cannot be impatient with yourself.

You're.

You're to really uncover your passion and purpose. Your brain has a built in pattern recognition system. You're want, your brain has to do, has to do this finding for you, right? It's your job to show up and explore and play at the intersection of these curiosities. It's your brain's job to figure it out and automatically figure it out. That's what pattern recognition systems do, right? But if you're put too much pressure on yourself if you want to be there tomorrow, that's I think one of the problems with. I see people who are hunting for their passion, hunting for their purpose and they think it's going to show up overnight. They think it's going to feel totally different. Like they're going to wake up one day and oh, I've got a totally different side. And these are slow builds, right? I always say that like if I, if I ask somebody for a description of passion on a basketball court, they're going to talk to me about Steph Curry or LeBron James whirling in for a windmill dunk. But the truth of the matter is that's mature passion. What passion looks like on the front end is just like a little kid in a driveway driving to get a basketball to fall through a hoop. That's what it looks like on the front end. We mistake mature passion, mature purpose and what that looks like, or we think it's going to look like and feel like in our own lives for what it actually looks like on the front end. And it's a lot, it's a lot smaller on the front end and something you nurture and you feed slowly over periods of time.

And by the way, that that slow build also means it's got endurance, right? Doing anything significant in the world is not a quick hit, you know, true moonshots, true massive transformative purposes are decadal long investments of your time. So it's got to be something that's going to be with you for a decade or more. It doesn't mean you can't change it, but something that you really want to fuel you and it can change over time. Steven, you and I have developed our passions and our, our mtps over time. I'm sort of on my third right now, you know, focused on the longevity space and space as, as where where you and I met was my earlier one. But these are things that it captures your shower time. It's. You dream about it and you build out of curiosity a body of knowledge and a, a level of expertise that makes you more and more fulfilled over time and brings people to you and attract a tribe around that. And it takes time.

One other thing I want to say because there's a peak performance aging sort of message here that isn't often talked about, but there's a lot of data on this I would nurse in our country. My quest was to learn how to park ski. Right. Because I had unfinished business in parks and I wanted.

And what's next, Stephen?

Well, my point in for peak performance aging is this kind of really seemingly difficult challenge is really important. One of the things that we know about older adults is they perform really. And older can be over 30 here. Right. But they perform really well with long term goals. Long term missions actually feed health span and longevity in really important ways. There's a bunch of neurobiology underneath it. There's a bunch of stuff I don't think we quite understand underneath it because there's a lot of evidence here and the evidence seems to outpace some of the science and some of what we've learned. But having these kinds of long term missions in the second half of our lives, really crucial to thriving the second half of our lives. So you want to live with passion, purpose and flow. But as Peter really pointed out, you want to turn that into a long term mission or a series of them. It's going to help you thrive in your later years, however long you have left. Right. And if Peter's right, some of you are going to live to be 400.

It's exciting. And Steven, I like how in our country you do detail out kind of that goal stack that's really helpful in pursuit of your purpose. So having those mission level goals, then having high hard goals and clear goals also strikes me that this is an opportunity because I know people have just listened to you and are like, okay, but how, how do I do this in my life? And one of the vehicles that you talk about extensively in the book is through dynamic, deliberate play. It's a tremendous opportunity to systematically pursue your purpose. So can you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, dynamic is. I said that all of our skills are User or lose it skills, everything we used to think declined over time, right? So let's say you want to hold on to physical fragility, physical ability. That's what dynamic is. Dynamic is a, is a single word that means strength, stamina, agility, flexibility and balance. These are the five physical skills that need to be trained over time to really preserve physical functionality as long as we want. Saying all those five skills out loud and you know, it's a long list, so people call them dynamic. That's what dynamic means. One of the things that's really interesting about dynamic movement is also when we. This is cool when you pair like power and strength with coordination at the same time. Something about that. If you really want to hold on to cognitive function, what you want is neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, synaptic plasticity, you want those new neurons to form new neural nets. And actually something that's not talking about nearly as much angiogenesis, the birth of new vasculature to support those new neurons. Right. Dynamic movement, when it's strength, when all these things are together, actually promotes neurogenesis and angiogenesis, which is very. No other kind of physical training does that, but dynamic movements do that. And so you're not just getting new neurons and they're forming new neural networks, getting the new blood vessels to support those neurons at a dynamic movement. Deliberate play is the opposite. We've heard about deliberate practice. You want to become an expert. Deliberate practice, repetition with incremental advancement. And it turns out that's great for expertise, but in a very narrow range of subjects. If you're trying to become a classical violinist or you're trying to become a world class mathematician, there are certain things where the deliberate practice is going to work for you. But in general, deliberate play, which is literally translated as repetition without repetition or repetition with improvisation. I'm doing the same thing I just did, but instead of trying to like get it a little bit better, I'm just improving, I'm freestyling, I'm. And it's literally on a certain level, play is just way more fun. We're less self conscious. It amplifies learning, it amplifies motivation, amplifies progression. But from a peak performance, aging standpoint, there's like seven or eight auxiliary benefits to play that are, that are really also important. So dynamic, deliberate play is an approach to your passion or your. We've been talking about mindset, passion, purpose. How does this stuff get like unfolded in your life in a way that really works? Dynamic delivered play. And I think Peter and I will both agree because we both, we've done this together and we've done this individually. We've done a lot of, we've shepherded a lot of long term projects that most people thought were impossible are very, very difficult in the world. We've seen them all the way through and, and what the other. And both of us have tried very hard to create playful environments around our like Crazy as Moonshots because it's too fucking much work. If you're just heavy lifting all the time, you're miserable, you're never going to get there.

Let me, let me add a couple of things here I think is really important. First of all, if you're going to take on a big ass moonshot, it's really important to do it with people you love. It's important to do with people you care about. You're going to spend more time with your business partners and associates and, and you know, band of, of crazy moonshot artists than you are your family. So you better really.

Point of hold on, Peter. I'm gonna have to get you point effect. Peter, what's your wife's nickname for me?

Yeah, you're my, you're my secret lover. Yeah, because during the times we were writing our books, I was spending more time with Stephen at 5am in the morning and 6am in the morning. I would wake up with him every morning and yeah, it's like, it's crazy. So listen, if you're doing something that is a big ass goal, it's a, you know, a true moonshot. Do it with people that you really love. If you don't like them, your, your moonshot's gonna fall apart because you don't like spending time with these people as much. The second thing is all we are emotional human beings and, and Stephen can go into the neurochemistry even better than I can. I've given him an honorary MD and PhD I think over the years. But because the emotional energy is what's going to carry us through for a decade. Loving what you do or hating the existence of a wrong that you have to fix. Connecting with that emotional energy is what's going to fuel you. And to Daniel's question here about how do we motivate older adults to do repetitive exercises? It's making it fun. So again it's who do they do the exercises with? Right? So going out and exercising with a friend is a hell of a lot easier than doing it on your own and making it fun where it's part of sports versus Just part of, you know, pumping iron. So it's the setting, who you're with. And ultimately it's having an emotional purpose for doing the exercise. Like, you know, connecting with the fact that I want to live another 20 years to see my grandchildren getting married, whatever the case, having a purpose for that beyond just, I gotta do it, gotta go make.

And the other. The only thing people forget when it comes to, like, exercise, Peter's totally right. You gotta, like, if you can bring in a training partner, if you could do something that makes it fun, you only have to keep that up until you start to realize how much benefit the exercise brings to your brain. Like, how much calmer you are, how much happy you are, how much better you feel. Feel. Right? Because at a certain point, the drug known as exercise is gonna start functioning like the drum. And it's an amazing drug, right? It's phenomenal. So all you got to do is get over the hump and into, you know, the point that your habit machinery takes over, and that's 28 days to three months, depending what you're trying to onboard. So you're not saying I need a training partner for the rest of my life. You're saying, I need somebody to walk into the room with me and help me set this habit up until I can take it on my own.

Stephen, let me ask you a question, because when I think about, you know, the secrets of healthy aging or of health extension, one of the secrets, for me, there are two parts here is don't die from something stupid, right? We've talked about this, about really doing the full body checkups and so forth that we offer at Fountain Life, for example. The other is avoiding accidents because a lot of the downside is the spiral that occurs when someone has an accent and is bedridden, and all the secondary and tertiary impacts of that. How do you think about that?

So I think about it in a bunch of different ways. A great question. So, one, this is one of the reasons why leg strength is so important, right? One of the reasons preserving leg strength is to. It preserves your balance. But two, like, I. So I work with a woman named Eve House and who does a movement system known as revolution and emotion. And of all the things we train, proprioception and balance are the. At the heart of it. And it's interesting because that's one of the things she's most known for, is this training. I will tell you something really weird. This is just a random thing that I didn't even know was going to happen. But after a Year of working with Edith and we're working like in, you know, on mats, on Bosu balls and exercises balls like that, kind of. But we're not in the wild. But I now when I go into the ski mountains, I see lines, like ways down the mountain that before I had never seen before. I would look at the thing and I'd say, oh, I can't ski that. It's totally impossible. And it's not that my skiing has improved. My balance and proprioception has improved so much that I can look at the line and I know how my body is going to stay upright to do it. So my vision has changed as a result of balance and proprioception training. So people, what are those?

What does it.

Oh, I'll give you a standing on a Bosu ball, which is that half shell ball with one foot with like a kettlebell in one hand, doing quarter squats on one leg with different foot positions and doing different things with my eyes very. Stuff like that is, is an example. But what's. What I want to. Oh, you derailed me. Where was I?

Sorry, buddy.

No, it's all right. It's all right. Oh, the other, the other thing I wanted to mention on balance, the other side of it is also the World Health Organization is really clear on this. They say that Once you're over 65, you should be training balance, flexibility and agility three times a week to prevent this. Right. So they're really clear on, like, there's a training schedule to prevent this. The other side of it is. And where people also sleep is on the recovery side, right. When like, one of the, one of the ways to preserve your balance is not let your muscles lock up. And so stretching and flexibility starts to really matter. Epsom salt bath saunas, like the. What we're doing after we work out so our muscles stay life and don't clamp down on us, that also really starts to matter.

Yeah, I totally get that.

Let me take it one step further because I want to take it into something, you know, a bunch about Peter, which is the cool thing about the. All these stats that we're talking about is we are getting much better at muscles, ligaments and bones. We can't regrow cartilage yet that I think is coming. Maybe we can.

I'm not sure about that.

I haven't seen it. Well, I've seen. So I've seen stuff where we can increase bone density and, and regrow it that way. So I've seen it indirectly. But I also like where stem cells Exosomes, placental matrix. All the tool kits are, we're good with tendons and ligaments, muscles and bone is what's next. So, like a lot of the stuff that we're talking about, there's a window where this is like next five years, this stuff is killing you and then that window is going to close because you may fall down and break a hip, but we're going to be able to regrow that hip in a way that's really sort of viable and interesting.

There's, there's a, there's a bunch of, of work going on right now by two or three different approaches to regrow cartilage on your knees. Right. And they have shown definitive increase in cartilage depth. And this is from WNT pathway manipulations and senolytic medicines. Right now the problem is if you have a, if you have a total knee replacement, you can't regrow it on the metal. Right. It's. So there's a window. I, I mean, I think in the next five years we are going to regrow hair, we are going to regrow cartilage, we are going to be able to start. You know, there's a few different approaches to solving both sarcopenia and osteopenia. In fact, one of my company's vaccinity is looking.

You're going to have to define those. That's the loss of bone density.

Yes. Osteopenia is reduced bone density and sarcopenia is reduced muscle. And sarcopenia sucks. It really is hard as you get older to build muscle mass. Right. So I have like tripled my protein intake, I've tripled my workouts using a number of, of supplements and I'm just like pounding at that muscle and it's just a number one priority for me. But there is a couple of approaches from stem cell derived medicines. And then another thing is a vaccine we're developing for space flight to stop muscle loss and bone loss, which could be used by octogenarians to stop muscle loss and bone loss, which would be amazing.

That is amazing. I didn't know that was going on. Yeah. So the went pathway stuff is because I've been paying a lot of attention to it because it's all arthritis. Anytime there's arthritis. Yes. Went pathway stuff. You know, I've got, because I've broken my back and most of the other places I've broken, I've healed completely, but I've got, on one side of my back, I've got like lingering arthritis. I can most of the, most of the way I've gotten most of the pain to go away and I've rehealed most of the bone, but it's very slow over time. So I've been keeping my eye on some of those one pathway stuff. We're supposed to see the knee stuff. Doesn't it get through phase three trials in the next year or two?

Yeah, it's really soon. It's really soon. And there's also of course, stem cell work. It's still a little bit the wild west, but it's this decade. It's not like 20 years from now, 10 years from now. It's like next five years. I think we're really going to have some incredible breakthroughs. And the other thing that's going on is the whole AI of it all being able to really model this and understand this. So it's a good time to be alive. So stay alive.

Hang in there. Well, Steven, you experiment directly with some regenerative medicine in the book. And I like your standard that you look for stuff that works like ice. So what'd you find out with this experiment?

It's a lot of what Peter and I have been talking about, I think. So 1. Let me just point this out. Peter may disagree or agree with me. I think you may actually back me up on this. Most of people who do regenerative medicine are functional medical doctors. And functional medical doctors are a ridiculously optimistic group of people as far as I'm concerned. And I find that they're a little, let's be, let's be nice and say over exuberant about what they actually can fix and what they can't fix and what works and what doesn't. And what I, what I found in my experience with most of the functional medicine docs that I've worked with is tendons, ligaments, bone, even at the bones. Like, can I do. We've got cures for Covid and like, like those kinds of things.

Are we talking about, are we talking about the same person?

But what I do think is that if you're healing tendons, ligaments and bones, whether it's, you know, affordable medicine that you can now, like PRP 2015, when I was using PRP plasma, platelets, enriched plasma, it was totally cutting edge, totally regenerative medicine. There were a handful of doctors who were doing it was 10 to $20,000, super whatever. And now my mother just had shoulder PRP PRP injections in her shoulder and her insurance covered it. Right. And so like this stuff is, is getting mainstream really, really quickly. The cutting edge of PRP now is they are using massive quantities of your plasma. So it started out with small quantities of your plasma and they got right the new versions like this mass prp, massive dosing and seems to be doing really cool stuff as well. I just think that when it comes to, like, you have to be. When it comes to organ regeneration and things like that, we're not quite there yet. Peter and I could talk about, you know, all this stuff going on there and it's so some of it's really, it's a lot closer than you think it is for something that sounds like a total Star Trek technology, but we're not there yet. And, and so like when it comes to Peter was talking about accidents and like, don't die from something stupid, right. I think it's also important to sort of have an understanding of what we can fix and what we can't fix, right. And off that's worthwhile. But like, you know, in skiing and snowboarding, people are terrified about knee stuff, right? And as long as you don't totally blow out your knee, right. And need a total. Peter pointed out, because you can't grow stem cells on metal, pretty much everything is fixable at this point. With exosomes, with placenta, it's still very expensive, right? And you know, if you want to try to heal something like a broken back, you could put a college education into your back. It will fix it, but it'll still cost you that much at this point. So like, some of it's financial. It's not just affordable for everybody at this point. Some of it is the tech isn't there, but some of it is, it's advanced a ton and most people don't actually realize how far it's come. And also, like, as I pointed out, like we're Talking about these 1 signaling pathway drugs for knee arthritis. This is this year, right? And there's a bunch of them. I think it's just four or five different drugs that are in development with different companies. So, you know, there's multiple approaches to the same target and they're all getting closer.

I mean, it's, it's science fiction becoming science back, right? And we are in the, on the verge from three or four different approaches to regrowing heart, liver, lung, kidney, even, even thymus. So your job, like I said, so, so just, just.

I know your folks have probably heard about it, but why don't you tell everybody where Martine Rothblatt is at with her regrow lungs project, because this is all the organ printing going on, her work, I mean we wrote about it faster. Her work still wins as far as the most sci fi thing going on and I know she's getting a lot closer.

Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the Crisis News Network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog, Martialog, looks at exponential technologies, AI 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR.VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of muse you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmanandis.comblog and learn more. Now back to the episode. Yeah, so Martine's daughter Genesis had a fatal disease of pulmonary hypertension. And Martine was the founder of XM Radio and Sirius Radio and quit. All of that started with a high school textbook. She had been a FCC lawyer in the satellite business, started with a high school textbook, learned biology and set out to cure her daughter's disease over the course of many years, finally found a treatment, got a hold of this, built the capability to manufacture it, started a company called United Therapeutics which created a drug to treat her daughter's disease. Not cure the disease, but treat it, postpone death. And that company, United Therapeutics, became a five now $12 billion public company. But in the interim, Martine set the goal of being able to create lungs to provide a total lung replacement, which is the only true cure for her daughter's disease. And after going after lungs, decided to go after kidneys and other organs, hearts as well. And the approach that Martine has taken, as any good entrepreneur takes is approaching it from four, five, six different ways. The way that is gotten the most advances is it turns out that pig organs have the rough same size as human organs, same size lung, kidney, livers, hearts. And so if you could transplant a organ from a pig into the human, that'd be great. The problem is your body will reject it for a number of reasons. The surface antigens on the pig is not human. And then pigs have a large number of these retroviruses which can infect you. So working with some of the top geneticists, Martine reengineered a pig, humanized a pig to create the surface antigens that are more human, like to get rid of those retroviruses. And the first transplants have started occurring over the last couple of years in heart and liver, I'm sorry, heart and kidney. It's still early days, but then she's taken an approach to 3D printing the scaffolding of lungs and then being able to go from a skin cell taken from you to create an induced pluripotent stem cell and then grow that stem cell into lung tissue and have it basically populate on the scaffolding of this lung. And there's a few other approaches that she's taken. So it's, it's pretty cool. By the end of this decade, we should have backup organs for you, Right? That's just an amazing thought.

That's, it's the crazy. Yeah, that's why Martinez we're talking about is, is. It's also like what you. The window of what you sort of have to hang on for until we start getting really crazy. Medical advances isn't all that long.

Ray Kurzweil talks about it in one of his earlier books, Fantastic Voyage, and he talks about, really a bridge to a bridge to a bridge. Your bridge right now to get healthfully into your 90s to 100 is diet, exercise, sleep, mindset. It's the fundamentals, right, that we've been talking about. And then there are a number of new technologies coming, whether they're epigenetic reprogramming or sen medicines or stem cells. And those will buy you the next 10 or 20 years. And then there's a new generation of technologies, nanotechnology, the impacts of AI and quantum computing. So we, we talk about this idea called longevity, escape velocity. We talked about it in futures faster than you think that there's going to be a point in time that for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for greater than a year. And once that happens, you're in a pretty good shape, as long as you don't die from something stupid.

Peter, we just got a question in the chat about exosomes. Do you think they're a big deal?

I do think exosomes are a big deal. So what's an exosome? An exosome, Exo from the Greek word outside and some from the word body. So when Stem cells are doing their thing. They're creating these growth factors, these signaling factors. And what they do is they just don't pump them out into the outer extracellular matrix. They put them into these little vacuoles, these little packages of signaling packages. These are called exosomes. And today, exosomes are in the gray area. From an FDA standpoint, you can get them. They're not fully authorized. I have had exosome treatments when I. I've had both shoulders reconstructed. I did my right shoulder, I don't know, 10 years ago, and then two years ago, I did my left shoulder and I had exosome injections post surgery a few times. I can tell you the speed of repair was massively better on my left shoulder. And it's just. It's signaling growth and repair for the musculoskeletal system. So I think they're very important, and I think we're going to start to see a lot of science wrapped around it to get FDA approvals. That's what's going to happen in the next three or four years to get the science done.

So, Tori, I used exosomes for both shoulders, both of my knees, and my back. And I all. All pretty much super successfully. The thing, the. The thing that most people don't know, the exosomes are essentially what stem cells secrete, right?

Yes.

And the issue with stem cells is all the early work we were injecting, okay, your knee is a problem. Let's inject stem cells or whatever. The problem is stem cells don't stay in one place. They migrate. So you can inject them at the knee, and they'll. Within a week, they're all over the body. Exosomes, which are what stem cells secrete, are actually built to stay in place. So when you inject the exosomes, they stay in place. And Peter pointed out, they recruit. Not only do they do healing work, but they recruit all of the body's other healing properties. And as Peter pointed out, if the stuff is in a gray area. Right. So there's not. The level of it with. The results are undeniable with exosomes at this point. But there's still a bunch of questions and. Because, in a sense, good news, bad news, it's not big pharma yet. So the cost has stayed somewhat down. Right. The concern is that it's kind of become big pharma and get very expensive or covered by insurance. But the point is that there's not been the level of research there could be. So we're really at the front end of seeing what they can do. And already what we know is pretty amazing.

The other thing to mention is stem cells come with surface antigens and, and DNA. They are cells. And if they are coming from another human being. Right. If they're placental or cord blood stem cells, there is the potential for having a reaction to someone else's nuclear material. So exosomes don't have that and they're typically perceived much safer. Not saying that stem cells aren't safe, but the work hasn't been finished yet.

I want to go back to recovering like a pro. Peter, I would love to hear some of your go to recovery strategies.

Wow. So first of all, in this area, I put Steve as the pro, so I'd want to recover like Steve. For me, it's a lot of it is mindset. A lot of it is my recovery becomes the most important thing for me. It's not something that's secondary or tertiary. Right. When I fell and injured my shoulder a few years back, it was massively inconvenient. I was just starting to get my exercise routine and it was. I'm going to do everything I can to get back on top of this. It became my primary mission. And so I think that's critically important. People who. It's an inconvenience. I'm going to still continue doing my work. I'm going to put it off. That's not a good recipe. In my mind. That plus the use of regenerative medicine, stem cells, exosomes, placental matrix and so forth are the only real go to things that I would say. Steven, what about you?

Well, I, you know, I. There's. There's levels of recovery and levels of recovery. Right. You started with the. The most important thing which is sleep as it just like as a recovery tool. Right. Like and for people, performance, aging, perspective. If you want to preserve mental function, expertise and wisdom are your two best defenses against Alzheimer's and dementia and cognitive decline. Because expertise and wisdom form very, very vibrant and robust neural networks all across the prefrontal cortex, which is the area that's most vulnerable to cognitive decline. Most cognitive decline is the prefrontal cortex. It's the newest structure in the brain. From an evolutionary perspective, it's the most vulnerable. Right. Very rarely do we have. You might have a stroke to deep brain structures, but they don't tend to erode where like the more recent structures and expertise and wisdom is redundancy across sort of the prefrontal cortex. You can't learn a damn thing without sleep. So like, I mean from a recovery standpoint, if you don't have deep seven, eight hours of deep delta wave sleep at night, doesn't matter what you learn during the day, you're, it's not going into long term memory, it's not going into storage, it's not neuroprotective against cognitive decline. You haven't like, you haven't done anything other than fill your day with an activity because you're not sleepy enough. And then you can go into more active recovery saunas, Epsom, salt baths, long walks, that sort of stuff. And, and where Peter went is like, and when those tools don't work, there's regenerative medicine, right? Like I think it's, it's a gradient. There's stuff you want to do every day and there's the tools you reach for when, when the shit you're doing every day isn't working or things break down further.

And Gloria asked a question that I think is important, which is what is your best suggestions for insomnia? Because sleep is so important and I, I'd love to share what I do. First of all, it's important to realize that eight hours of sleep is what your body needs. It isn't six hours, five hours. I'm always a medical squeeze to pride myself on, on getting away with five hours of sleep. But if the body, if the human being could have evolved to get away with five hours of sleep, we would have, right? The, during those three hours between five and eight hours, you're not reproducing, you're not hunting, you're not protecting yourself. You are. It's a waste of time otherwise. If you can got rid of it, we would have, we can't. Eight hours is the, is the target. You know, seven is my minimum. Eight is my target. So what do I do? First of all, the single most important thing is getting to sleep at the same time every night. It's, it's, I try and get in bed by 9:30 at night because I know I'm going to be up at 5:30, right? My eyes pop open at that time. It's just, I used to be a late night owl, but now I do my best writing and thinking in the morning. So I get the temperature of the room down to 63, 64 degrees cold. I have a cooling blanket on my bed. I use a manta eye mask. And between those things and slowing it down. So I just don't go from like, you know, I don't watch tv. First of all, I think Watching TV in bed is like one of the worst things for getting to sleep. But I don't go from like you know, exercising or pounding on the computer and try and go to sleep. I have a wind down period. I'll actually probably listen to a audible book for 15 minutes, set it to a timer to go off on its own. It's like being read a bedtime story. So those are the things that work for me.

Yeah. I want to just respond to Don's comment which is about booze. Booze and sleep is tricky because they're. Now we go into the blue zone literature. You'll find that they, in certain blue zone communities, long lived communities, they drink a lot of. They drink wine. One of the things that's predominantly for resveratrol. You can go down the David Sinclair rabbit hole if you're interested in that. But the problem with alcohol is once you, depending on your body weight, once you're at one to two glasses of whatever, pretty much anything over two, two glasses will impact sleep. So there's a sleep penalty for booze. And it's one of the, it's one of the problems with booze as a way to wind down is it'll wind you down and then four hours later all the sugar in the booze is going to wake you back up and it's going to interrupt your sleep. So as a general rule, booze is, is not a, is not a go to if you actually want to get good night's sleep.

Yeah. And let's see. Brad here surfaced why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, which is one of the best books on the subject. It's a quick read or a great audible. Once you read it, you're going to like I do pray at the altar of sleep.

I want to call out another question from the chat here too because this is a question as a coach who teaches people to sleep all the time, I get it regularly. So I'm curious to hear what both of you have to say. So Daniel's asking what why do some people like Tony Robbins? I also hear Elon Musk in this case. A lot exist and deliver on little sleep.

I know Tony well, I know Elon a reasonable amount. They don't prefer that. And you can get away with it, but it will wreak havoc on your health.

There's also. I want to take it one step further. There's a flow penalty. So it is lack of sleep. It's really hard to get into flow for a number of reasons. But the first is that you produce a lot of norepinephrine, you might notice when you're tired, your startle response is really jacked up, among other things. And it's your edgier and that edgier. That edginess is norepinephrine. And too much norepinephrine blocks flow, blocks learning, blocks creativity, blocks empathy. Like, we can go on. There's a big list of penalties. So downstream from, like I said, besides all the physical stuff is a. Is a bunch of emotional stuff that is also really detrimental. But, like, you're blocking peak performance.

Yeah. Again, I would say, having written a book with, with Tony on this subject, he's not happy with his sleep. He doesn't like sleeping that little. He really wants to sleep more. And he is working on it. And again, can you survive on it? Sure. Can you thrive on it? No.

Well, the other thing I want to point out with Tony is, and this is so when you are on stage, you get. Tony spends a lot of time on stage, and there's a huge amount of dopamine that comes your way free of charge on stage. So, like, for those of us who do anything in the public eye, I. When I do a podcast, like, my day ends in a podcast or even today, because this one will add about 3 o' clock. And just simply from being like, in front of a. In front of a crowd through a zoom that pushes dopamine into my system. I have to go. I know I'm going for a walk. I'm going up the mountain behind my house with a dog after this is over because otherwise it'll mess with my sleep. So if you're on stage a lot, you can use the flow high, the dopamine high, to get over for not sleeping. Like, you'll. That. You can fuel yourself for a while on that until you. You burn out and fall apart. Which, you know, I, you know, through. I know about Tony vicariously through you, and I know that's a common thing for him, that he pushes himself. He rides his flow high from these public events, and he freaking collapses afterwards. So, you know, you have the illusion of somebody functioning without a lot of sleep, and what you're not seeing is the collapse.

Yep.

Let's change gears for a second because, Peter, you mentioned mindset in terms of recovery. Stephen, in the book, you talk about old being a mindset. Can you talk a little bit about how the language we use with ourselves, our self, talk around aging.

Right.

Can impact how we actually do it?

Yeah, Let me, let me just jump in with a handful of facts. And then let Peter build on them because the facts are really freaky. So we talked about mindset towards aging. You get an extra seven and a half years if you've got a positive mindset towards aging. So what about the negative, right? What happens? You got a shitty mindset towards aging. What happens? There haven't been exactly. But where they have been studies is on. If you're subjected to somebody else's negative mindset on aging. We call that ageism, right? It's the most socially acceptable stereotype in the world. Which is wild because we think about today. If I walk outside my house and I sort of display any prejudice in the world, I'm gonna get canceled by the time I'm on my mailbox, I don't even make it to the end of the driveway, right? But I can walk outside and I can look at Peter and be like, dude, you are too old for that. Put that down. And that's totally fine. Everybody laughs. It's cute. But here's the thing. If you spend your 30s and 40s and 50s being exposed to negative mindsets towards aging when you're 60, if they measure your memory, you're going to exhibit 30% greater memory decline than people who are not exposed to negative stereotypes around aging. There is a really tight correlation between mindset and health and longevity. And it's impacting things like where our memory is at by the time we're 60. Forget about, like by the time we're 80. You know what I mean? So if you look at like the negative and the other thing about the negative mindset towards aging is it's a by. It's biological, right? As soon as we have stuff we want to hold on to, right? That we want to protect, conserve. It's all the youthful mindsets are about seeking out, who am I in the world, how I'm going to make my living, right? As soon as we set up and this is, oh, I've got this job I want to keep. I've got this spouse I want to keep, I've got this car I want to keep, right? That's the mindset of old. We're switching our addictions from being addicted to like the dopamine and excitement you get from seeking to serotonin, oxytocin, these protect safety and security systems. And it's. It's a drug addiction, right? And healthy aging demands all of our neurochemical systems at once. Old people, in a sense, are addicted to the wrong drugs, but it's just endogenous neurochemistry. Not exogenous chemistry. All right, I shut up there and Peter, your lap. All right, all right.

No, no, it's, it's, it's great. And no, nothing, nothing. Just funny looking. Just kidding. So listen, I, I think mindset is like, is as important as anything else and people forget it. So what do I mean by that? First of all, how old do you feel inside? Right? So I'm, I feel like I'm in my early 30s, late 20s. That's how I feel. That's how I relate to people. You know, I don't, I think about the next 50 years, I talk about the next hundred years, I talk about, you know, what businesses I'm going to be creating in the 2000 and 30s and 2000 and 40s. As soon as you shut that down, you begin to tell the universe. I want to give my bits back to the environment. The worst four letter word around this is the idea of retirement. There's no such thing as retirement. It's like what am I doing next? What's my next career? My next career after that. One of the things I think it's very important is who do you hang out with, right? You are the average of the people you spend the most time with. If you're hanging out with people that feel old, that are talking about aches and pains and you know that R word, it's going to have a negative impact. So I have, I feel very lucky. I've got an extraordinary tribe around me in my abundance community, my singularity community, my X prize community, you know, on this longevity journey with me and it's, you know, we routinely talk about what's your target? Lifespan, health span, right? And is it 120, 150, are you going for 200? What is it you're going for? And it's like judo. You're punching through your target. And a lot of this is having the longevity mindset. What does that mindset mean? It means I'm not sure how I'm going to get there, but I am confident that the rate of change, the converging exponential technologies are going to transform this. And I have some mental proof models. Right. Remember I mentioned about the bowhead whale and the Greenland shark. I know that large mammals can live hundreds of years. If they can, why can't I? It's a software hardware problem and the tools to modify those things are coming our way. So I'll ask you to think about from a mindset perspective, what are you reading, who are you hanging out with, what's on your walls? You know, you know, it's. I. I'll give you one last thing. I had my two boys and. And Stephen was there in. Not there, but yeah, we were partners at that time. I had my two boys when I was 50. I'm 61 now. And having kids later in your life is definitely part of the longevity recipe. They keep me young and I'm, you know, having a blast with them.

Can you both speak a little bit more to. Because you both have these tribes, right? Well, Peter, you called a tribe. Peter and Stephen, I think you just called us your crew of misfit toys. But, you know, same goal, right? You have a tribe of people to help you extend your health span. Right. So can you talk about what do those tribes look like? What are you looking for?

I'm looking for people who are not dead before they're dead is what I'm really. Right. Like, I like, honest to God, first and foremost, I don't care what age you are. Right. I mean, I, my. I like Peter and I like to say we like smart, funny weirdos. Peter and I like the same kind of people, right? We share a lot of friends in common and we've been part of a lot of the same drives. We built the same kind of drives. We like smart, kind, funny weirdos.

That's.

That's across the board. But I really, I look for people who are not dead before they're dead. I call it getting geezer. Getting geezered is.

Oh, my God.

Gets your. They get there. Oh, you're too old for this. Juice all over you. And it like, it's amazing how off. If you start noticing and you're over 40 in your life, how often that happens to you and I. So I look for people who would never, ever do that. I look for people who are not dead before they're dead. Right. I look for people who are going to be like drag, kicking and screaming from this life because they've got so much they want to do.

The term buddy is individuals whose future is bigger than their past. Right. That's a powerful, powerful idea from Dan. From Dan Sullivan. Yeah. You know, one other thing I would love to just mention here if I could, Tori, the category of not dying from something stupid, which I think is funny, but not. So what does that mean? Most of us are optimists about our health. We don't actually know what's going on inside our body. So the human body is extraordinarily good at hiding disease. So if you've got Parkinson's, for example, you don't get a tremor until 70% of your substantia nigra neurons are dead. If you have cancer, you don't notice a cancer at stage zero or stage one or stage two. It's at stage three or four when it's having an impact and you're in some kind of pain or discomfort, whatever it is. And you go into the doctor and the doctor said, I'm sorry to tell you this. And so one of the things that I've done, and Stephen knows about this, we've written about it in our books. I wrote about extensively. And Lifeforce is started a company called Fountain Life. And Fountain has facilities today in New York, in Orlando, Naples, Dallas, Texas. We're opening facilities around, around the country and around the world where you go for a full body upload. And over the course of six hours, we digitize you. It's a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature. It's an AI enabled coronary ct. It's a DEXA scan. It's genomics Executive health. It's a grail blood test that looks for 50 different blood cancer biomarkers. And if there's anything going on inside your body, we find it at inception because it's pretty. A couple of scary facts here. 70% of the cancers that kill people are not routinely tested for. It's not breast cancer, it's not prostate cancer. It's something else. And because you're not tested for, that's what gets advanced and kills you. Another scary fact. 70% of heart attacks have no precedent. There was no shortness of breath. There was no blockage. It was what's called soft plaque that evulses in a coronary artery and blocks it and gives you a heart attack. And so unless you check, you don't find these things. And so we built Fountain Life as a means to find disease at the earliest stages. My question is, like, when do you want to know? You're going to find out. Like, when do you want to know? And one of the things that we did, because it's still expensive, Fountain Life's, you know, $19,500 with the concierge doctor and your annual upload and quarterly testing, it's still a bunch of money that not a lot of people can afford. If you can, you go to Fountain Life and, and, and, and get information. But we started something, I'm very proud of Stephen. We, we started something called Fountain Health Insurance, where for the same price as normal health insurance, we do all of the testing for free for employees. So we actually save money downstream from treating someone with stage three or four or whatever. And we put that money into advanced testing. And so everybody gets the mri, the AI enabled coronary ct, the Grail blood test, you know, continuous glucose monitoring. And we find disease before it hits people. And that's the future. It's, it's preventative, personalized health. I just want to get that message out because I think it's so important.

It strikes me that your, your mindset around aging has to play a role in your. In seeking that type of opportunity. Right. What you're describing is a truly proactive approach to extending health span. Do you, do you see that interplay of mindset and pursuit of these kind of cutting edge technologies?

Yeah. If you believe that we have a potential to live an extra 20 or 30 healthy years in your health span, then you're going to seek it out and be there early. Right. So when there is a medical breakthrough, it takes 17 years to get from the breakthrough to your physician. On average, your doctor is not the most advanced person out there. They're, you know, they're turning the crank. They're doing what they do. They still use a stethoscope and it's not going to be that way in 10 or 20 years. But there are medical systems today. Fountain life is one, there are others, human longevity is another that are these advanced diagnostics and then the advanced therapeutics that are there. And of course, all of that is secondary to what Steven writes about in our country because you need your basics first. You need that mindset, you need sleep, you need exercise, you need repair, you need all of those things. It's like if there was one thing you can do is exercise. If there's two things you can do, it's exercise and sleep. If there's three things you can do, it's exercise, sleep and getting rid of sugar in your diet. Right. Do you agree with those, Stephen?

I. So I was wondering. So the, the question is, where do you put in maintaining robust social connection.

Is.

Is the all. I mean, like, it's got, it's got to be sort of really high up there. Probably a couple others, but yeah, I mean like that's the, the. These are non negotiables, I think.

And Steven, we haven't really dove into any of Jason Moser's work too about, you know, can you talk a little bit about his work with ERP and how that's related?

Yeah, so he was, Jason, Jason was one of. They were looking, they wanted to look at the impact of mindset his work was really on the difference between a growth and a fixed mindset. But it's really important because the mindset of old is essentially a fixed mindset, also about your future. And it has the same kind of impact. So what Jason figured out is that when, when you have a fixed mindset. So when something goes wrong, the brain notices. We get an error signal, right? If you have a fixed mindset, that's the only signal you get. If you have a growth mindset, you have a following signal that says, oh, I'm learning from this mistake and growing from it. But if you've got a fixed mindset, the brain doesn't even bother spending that energy because it doesn't believe you can learn, you can grow, you can change. Mindset of old functions sort of the same way. And what all of this means is the reason that Peter and I keep going back to mindset. I have to put it in peak performance language. If you have an external locus of control, meaning life happens to me, I'm a victim versus I have an internal locus of control. I'm power, I can control my destiny, et cetera, et cetera, peak performance is not even possible with an external locus of control. You've given away so much of your power. And the reason is, it's because the brain and the body, efficiency is the number one job. That's what they're going for. They never want to. Don't burn calories unless you have to burn calories. And if you don't believe you can learn, grow, change, benefit, your brain will not get up for the fight. It won't even do the basic work it needs to do to actually get you, get you in there. So it starts to get really, you know, I think you can, you can be, I mean, I don't think you can be flexible with your, with mindset work at any age, but it's a luxury of youth that you can have a crappy mindset. If you have a crappy mindset going into old age, it's going to kill you. It's like you don't get to be. You don't get to be super old. You don't get long. That's not, that's not in your cards. You've literally, like, that's what you're costing yourself. So having a mindset at any, at any age is probably problematic, but later in life, it's especially problematic. And Peter talked about a bunch of ways to tune your mindset. I want to add in a couple more that are important, especially around aging. Because they're obvious, but they're a little one obvious. The other one's a little more counterintuitive. The first is watch your language.

Right, self talk. Yes.

Right. Self talk is super, super critical. So Ellen Langer did a lot of the early work on mindset. Her original thought on aging was that aging might be the result of language priming. A lot of what we call aging is the result of language priming. So like one, I'm 28.

I'm 28.

I'm 28 dot watch how you talk to yourself. Watch how you talk to others. The second one is this. And this is really actually kind of interesting. So our brain deceives us into like we sort of, oh, I. I feel like I'm the same person I was yesterday and the day before. On the day before, we believe stasis and we perceive stasis, but the actual everything has changed. We're always constantly changing. So another way to actually have a successful mindset towards aging is to notice first of all, be mindfulness in general. Right matters. But that means mindfulness really means like being curious and paying attention to the present. But for a successful mindset of aging, they say, pay attention to the fact that change is the foundation of everything and that change and the natural evolution of things is for them to change, not to stay the same. If you're trying to keep things the same, you're actually fighting against how the universe works. And it has an impact on mindset. So that's another one. And I think the third one I'm holding up in our country because I think there is something to be said for a NAR style quest for exploding your mindset. If you pick a semi impossible challenge and go after it. And you know what I mean? As, as you start to succeed, it tends to. What I said in our country is like whatever my mindset was towards aging when I started to learn how to do 360s and 180s and nose butters and all, like it went like it went out the window because suddenly I was doing things that I didn't think were going to be physically possible for me ever. And I was like learning thing after thing after thing after thing exploded that mindset. And the last thing I want to say about mindset is, and Peter talked about this earlier when he said he doesn't like, watch TV in bed, watch your screen time. Cell phones are terrible for mindset. Cell phones create a mobile mindset. That means we are narcissist. We won. We think we're safer than we are, but it makes us very, very narcissistic, and it destroys a growth mindset and destroys a positive mindset towards aging. So putting down your smartphone is also a really great way to improve your mindset.

Stephen, who is NAR country for? If you were going to say who the ideal reader is, who's going to get the most benefit from it?

So it's, it's interesting, Peter. I mean, like, you have to flat out say anybody in and around 50 and beyond. But the point I make in the book is, and we know this, and I mean, you could speak to part of the peak performance aging starts young. Like, there's stuff psychologically and physically that you want to start doing in your 20s, in your 30s, in your 40s, in your 50s. What we also know is that interventions at any age, there are studies showing that interventions even in your late 80s and early 90s can make a big difference at any level. So interventions in any age, peak performance aging starts young. But I, you know, I, I, I don't know who the, who the book is for, because in a certain level, that shakes out in the reader. Like, I find that out now right as people are reading.

Sure.

But I think it's, you know, anybody who wants more out of the second half of their lives.

Okay, that's what I wanted to, that's what I wanted to hear. I mean, if so if you're in your late 40s or 50s or 60s and, and you sort of have this traditional mindset that you're on a downward slope and you want to say, no, I want more. I want to be able to, like, step up and be the best I've ever been. This is a book that gives you tools and motivations to believe that you can and the means to actually pull it off.

I think that's true. I think that's absolutely true. I mean, the, you know, I cover everything, but like, the stuff that you and Tony looked at in Lifespan or David Sinclair looks at in his, where I, you know, I did everything but the like, longevity science, because there's a lot of people working on that stuff. Nobody's working on, on the stuff we were, I went into and like the peak performance aging stuff, or not enough people are.

And for those of you joining my Moonshots and Mindset podcast, Stephen is one of the most brilliant thinkers and extraordinary writers. And I hope that you'll pick up a copy of Nar country as I have, I have to say I got mine for free, but I still may buy 10 copies to give it away. No, I will buy 10 copies and give it away to all my friends. So Stephen, I, I love spending time with you brother. Thank you for being in my universe and thank you for being one of my younger friends in my universe.

Oh I see, I see. Well you know that cross generational friendships are the foundation of any age friendly society. So there you have it. Cross generational. But you know as my wise elder I'm the one who's great. I'm grayer than you though.

Yeah. But my biological age is younger than you so we'll get there.

Oh, I see.

It's very Peter.

Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for joining me. My anytime I get to hang with you. It's wonderful.

It is a beautiful thing. All right everybody, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for the view. Thank you.

Thank you everybody.