The Future of Immortality: AI’s Role in ENDING Aging | Peter Diamandis

There is a very high correlation between your beliefs, your mindset and your physical body. Optimists live 15% longer than pessimists.

You and I can both do two to four weeks of reading papers in 10 minutes. Doing anything intentionally that hurts for a minute or so up to three minutes, it changes dopamine sensitivity throughout the rest of the day. It takes less dopamine to motivate you so you're happier and you're less stressed all day long.

99.9% of the world have no idea what's going on inside their body bodies. And one of the things that's important to realize is your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. You don't feel cancer until it's stage three or stage four for you.

What's the highest return longevity thing you've ever done? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's guest is none other than my dear friend, Peter Diamandis. I got to know Peter more than 10 years ago when I went to, I believe it was a 2014 Abundance 360 meeting and very quickly found myself at JPL with Peter as he led a tour as I held lunar rovers and met the guy in charge of stopping asteroids from hitting the planet and toured SpaceX and met Elon and went through this just incredible experience of looking at the future of technology. And I've been attending Peter's events ever since. And one thing that I love about Peter and that you're going to love in this episode is that Peter actually is a rocket scientist and a medical doctor, and he's one of the few people out there who can legitimately say he's been in the longevity space longer than me. I've been doing this for 25 years, starting with a nonprofit in Palo Alto, California in my mid-20s. And Peter's got 30 years of working in longevity, which culminated very recently with the X Prize foundation, of which I am a donor. And he did $101 million health spent X Prize to award any kind of group out there who's working on longevity. If they can hit specific goals, they'll get $101 million to spur innovation. So with no further ado, I think that was a pretty good intro other than your new book on longevity called the Longevity Guidebook. Peter, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Dave. It's always a pleasure. It's like hanging out with friends, your buddy here, and I'm excited to learn as much from you as I'm excited to share with you.

We Always have the most fun. And I've been on your stage, you've been on my stage, we've recommended each other's books and I feel like we're brothers and this how to make the world a better place in multiple directions at the same time. So I want to go deep with you on the stuff you're doing around longevity, both for yourself and for others, so that our listeners can learn and I can learn and we'll compare notes and I can make fun of what you're doing, you make fun of what I'm doing in a brotherly, happy way. Like, why would you do that? I don't know. Here's why. And so we're both going to learn a lot and our listeners are going to be blown away by one of the smarter guys out there, which is you.

Thank you, bud.

So how long have you been tracking your sleep and how do you do it?

Listen, I've been on a longevity journey a while, but I've been really tracking things in a much more aggressive fashion this last decade. I was one of the earliest investors in Aura. And I don't know if you remember when Aura was not this little fine, it was a giant like beetle sized thing on the top of your finger to be able to cram enough battery life and enough electronics in there and you know, obviously all things go exponential and it's gotten higher fidelity in its recording and longer in its battery life and smaller in all those ways at the end of the day. I've been recording my sleep using Aura for, I don't know, since they started. I recently bought a, you know, innate sleep bed as well, which is much more optimistic than my OURA ring, by the way. It's like, that's helpful.

I was the Chili Sleep launched on my podcast 10 plus years ago. I invested in them and they exited.

And I've had a number of chilly sleeps over the years.

I think mine just sprung a leak and it makes weird noises. So I'm getting an eight Sleep next and eight Sleep's been on the show and right now I'm wearing an OURA ring and an ultra human ring, which is a new competitor. And I actually think I like its data a little bit better. Sleep space. I've been an investor and advisor there. I think they have the best algorithms right now even to take data from your ring or your watch and give you more close to hospital grade. So it's exploded.

Yeah.

You've been doing it for 10 years. I have 17 years of sleep data because I used to Sleep with a headband because my sleep was so crappy and the headbands are much less Victoria's Secret approved than your ring. But I just was like, I'm so bad at this. Especially I was starting bulletproof and working full time in tech and like, I just got to get good. So how good is your sleep? You have 10 years of data. Are you good at sleeping?

I think my sleep is excellent. Not perfect, but excellent. And it's varied. I mean, there are periods of time where my sleep was crappy and where I ended up having brain fog as a result of that. And I'm like, man, I am so off my game. And I think one of the things that people need to realize is sleep is a absolute fundamental. As Matt Walker, who wrote an amazing book, why We Sleep Talks. It's the foundation upon which exercise, diet, mindset, everything else is built. On top of that, if you don't have your sleep in order, you're suffering. So I track very carefully, in particular my deep sleep over rem. And you know, and I write about this in Longevity Guidebook at length. And you know, Matt Walker is when I recorded my longevity guidebook audible, I put interstitials between every chapter and I bring in a world expert to talk about the field with me between the chapters. And Matt Walker does the audible conversation after the sleep chapter. But at the end of the day, deep sleep should become is the early, early period of your sleep, right? If you're tracking your sleep on your oura ring or your eight sleep or equivalent, you'll see you're in deep sleep at the beginning of the night and then you're in REM towards the back half of the night. So if you shortchange yourself on sleep, you're typically hitting your REM versus your deep sleep. But, but deep sleep is critically important, as you know, for our ability of our brain to clear proteins and tangles and all the stuff that is problematic later as you age.

Now you said something, and this is one of my favorite things to do ever. So I've seen you on stage in front of 500 people at the Abundance, 360 meetings forever. And you're always saying, think bigger. Like, think bigger.

What game are you playing in the world? How big are you going in the world?

Right? In fact, I quote you in Game Changers, one of my books on personal development about that. Like, every time I think that I'm thinking big, as someone's going to step up, usually you and say, no, you're not.

But in a kind and Gentle fashion.

Yeah, kind and gentle. But I got to push back. Peter, when you say sleep is fundamental, why does it have to be?

So these are interesting questions, right? Why is eating have to be? Why does sleep have to be? Why do all these things have to be? And it depends if you're accepting the. The software code that developed over the years or are you able to rewrite it or hack it in some fashion. Well, I'll push back in the following way. You know, during sleep, you are the most ineffective, most unproductive, most open of predation. And we ran this multi billion year evolution game and no one ever eliminated sleep. Even earthworms have this period of reduced activity that looks like sleep. But humans, Homo sapiens, for the last couple hundred thousand years, depending on when you think Homo sapiens came into existence, if we had been able to evolve away from sleep, any sub tribe that could have evolved without sleep would have been more productive, more reproductive, less dead from predation. Those genes would have been passed along at a significantly advantaged Darwinian fashion. But we haven't seen that. So I think there's something very fundamental going on during sleep, whether it's the quantum functions of your neurotubules in your brain connecting with the universe. I don't know.

I love it that you said that.

Yeah.

The quantum microtubule effects in sleep are really important. And when you give someone sedation, it turns off their microtubules, which seem to be fundamental to consciousness. Right.

Yeah.

Now, we know dolphins have half their brain that sleeps.

I wish I would love that.

Yeah.

And half my brain.

And we know the genetics. There are a few people out there who have genetics that means they require less sleep than average.

There are. There is as much as Matt Walker says, if you take the percentage of humans that require less than six hours of sleep and round it to a whole number, it's a zero.

But six and a half hours. In all the research I did, the people who live the longest are six and a half hours. But it's good sleep because healthy people need less sleep, not because less sleep makes you healthy. There's also another thing that you might not have come across. Please. And we're just thinking big here and just love it. So you and I both know that some of the best rocket engineers come from Russia. Right.

They came originally from Germany and then post World War II at a punamunda, which is where the V2 was developed. The German rocket scientists were divided between America and the Soviet Union back then. And that really gave birth to both moon programs. And A whole bunch of stuff.

The Russians, though, they're also powerful biohackers and they think about longevity and medicine very differently than the west does. So sometime back in the space program and probably in the 60s, if my memory serves, some enterprising Russians, they're like, well, it's, and I'll use maxi, it is very expensive, you know, to send human body to space. That was probably not a good accent, but so the first thing they did is they said, well, why would we ever pressurize a jet plane? Why don't we just make the pilots pressure resistant? So they developed a way to make pilots perfectly able to function at 15,000ft elevation. So as long as the jets don't go over 15,000ft, they don't have to pressurize the cabin and they can save a ton of money.

Was that just a pressure suit?

No, actually it was training the hemoglobin affinity in the blood using intermittent hypoxia, which is something we use at upgrade labs today. And it's, it's high intensity interval training for oxygen carrying capacity in the blood. And it highlights the, the perspective that Russians had on like, well, let's just hack the pilots.

I love that. In fact, the Russians, you know, here in the United States, we created the Fisher space pen that could write upside down in zero gravity. And the Russians used a pencil.

It's such a great example. And at one of your events, actually, I got to ask the president of SpaceX, like, you harden electronics for space. What are you doing to harden astronauts for space? And she's like, in 17 years, no one ever asked me that.

I love that. It's a great question.

Well, what the Russians did years ago is they said, you know, we waste eight hours a day on sleep. And for astronauts, we have to send another 33% of our people just so they can sleep in space. And we think that's wrong. So they developed the Russian sleep machine, which means you run a small amount of electricity over both ears in a structured wave and you can get a full night's sleep in two hours. I actually have had a machine that does that since 1997.

Oh, how much do you sleep, Dave?

I actually sleep in reverse, so I actually get time back every. No, I'm kidding. My average has been six hours and 32 minutes per night for the vast majority of the last 17 years of tracking it. And in the last year or two, I kicked it up to seven on average. And here's the interesting thing, though. So I go through cycles of using a Russian Sleep machine. Not to sleep less, but. But to sleep better. And I haven't used it in like two years. And then I moved to Austin when I was going, oh, there it is. It was in a box. And you and I both have probably a warehouse full of biomes.

Oh, my God. Of stuff.

Yeah. It's time to use it all. So I guess it's great. I, you know, dust it off, find some electrodes that are still kind of sticky, put them on. And that night I got nine sleep cycles, six full cycles, and three partial cycles, and it was substantially higher deep sleep than I've had in a while.

So what is your typical deep sleep and what did you attain with that? Because again, REM is great, but deep sleep is when your glymphatic system, which is the sort of. Sort of the system that clears junk from the brain, is most active.

For sure. I also prioritize deep over rem. REM is good for memory consolidation and things. But yes, you only have one. You. You want deep.

Yeah.

So for deep, like you said, you go to bed earlier, you don't eat three hours before bed, and you prioritize darkness.

Yes.

And, you know, I've run True Dark, my glasses company that makes something far beyond blue blocking glasses. And for me, that was what shifted me to having a normal circadian rhythm.

By the way, I love True Dark. I have a number of pairs, and it's incredible. I, you know, I travel with it, I use it, you know, all the time. It's my safety net for. For getting myself ready for a great night's sleep.

Oh, my gosh. So thank you. I flew to, I think it was from Austin to Switzerland wearing the glasses, the two dark glasses the whole time. And I got seven hours of sleep with two hours of deep sleep after I landed, crossing nine time zones.

Nice.

And I can't do that unless I control the color of light. So I prioritize it.

By the way, you're wearing. So there are two versions of True Dark, Right. There's the yellow lens and then the dark blue blocking lens. Yeah. When. When do you use each of them? Because I have both.

The yellow lenses are during the day, indoors only, to block super bright LED light. It only blocks under 490nm, so I'm blocking the stressful, toxic blue and allowing the blue that wakes you up to come through. So they're partial blue blockers during the day, full blue blocking during the day. You don't wake up, and then you don't sleep well at night, and then after the sun goes down, or at least an hour before bed, I'll put on the TrueDark glasses designed for sleep. And that has shifted me from being at 2:00am bedtime, which I was until I was about 40. I just, that was always my bedtime. I'm an engineer like you. You know, we stay up late and get stuff done.

Throughout college, graduate school, medical school, I was in the same thing. I get into my creative productive time between 11pm and 2am and all of that is switched now. Now I'm in bed at 9:00am and asleep by 9:30.

9:00Pm I hope you mean.

9:00Pm. Yes, vampire, 9:00pm asleep by 9:30pm yeah.

So you're, you're doing better than I am. I recognize that. But I have a girlfriend, so I'm more of a 1030 guy. But if I go to bed even by 10, I do get more deep sleep. I'm prayer. My goal is 90 minutes. I get that quite a lot and Never less than 60 minutes unless I did something where I deserved it.

Yeah.

What do your numbers look like?

Let's see, last night my deep sleep was an hour and 34 minutes.

Nice.

Yesterday, an hour and 11 minutes. The day before that, an hour and 25 minutes. Yeah. So it's, it's typically in that realm.

Yeah, got it. So we're, we're sleeping about the same amount. And I think that's fundamental. I do know that I, if I run a small current over my brain, sometimes I get more deep sleep, heart rate variability is higher and it, it's, there's all kinds of benefits to microcurrent stimulation of the brain. It probably even affects microtubules for all we know.

Yeah. One of the, one of the things that I did in, in the recent book was the book's divided into chapters on diet, sleep, exercise, mindset, routines, don't die for something stupid, uploads and, and meds and supplements. And I wanted to make it very actionable how to and, and so literally write out exactly what I do, why I do it, what the science that backs it up. And it's meant to be because, you know, Tony Robbins and I were on your podcast and we talked about our book Life force, which was 700 pages. It was New York Times for like eight weeks straight, which is amazing. But it's hard to consume and remember a 700 page book. And so Longevity Guidebook was intended to be really like, you can just turn to any chapter, read a couple of pages and take away something instantly.

I love that approach. What I'VE seen in the biohacking world, which definitely includes longevity, if that's your biohacking goal, is that people say, I'm so stressed because I can't do everything. I'm like, you don't have to do everything. You're going to open it up and you're going to find three things that look interesting, and when you do them, you'll get a return on that investment and you'll have more energy and then do some more. And it's like evolving a path and a stack. And you may get to a point where you say, well, I was going to do option number seven. I don't need it anymore because option number five worked. So I'll just skip to option number 10. And you only do the things that have the highest return with the least work for you. What's the highest return longevity thing you've ever done?

Wow. So I personally think it's my mindset work.

Beautiful.

I think it's my longevity mindset work. And I. I put a whole chapter forward. Can I take a second to just explain it?

Yes.

Because I think it's really important. There is a very high correlation between your beliefs, your mindset, and your physical body. And, you know, this, the work you do with 40 years of Zen, the books that you've written, you know, harder, not smarter, or smarter, not harder. And, you know, there's an interesting study that was published in the National Academy of Science that said it was a study of, I remember the number 69,000 women and 1500 guys, because one of the only studies that was a lot more women than guys. And the study basically said, listen, optimists live 15% longer than pessimists. It was like.