Episode 134: Living Longer, Living Stronger

Hi, this is Dan Sullivan and I'd like to welcome you to another episode with Peter Diamandis called Exponential Wisdom. The wisdom about how things are changing exponentially. Okay, not all news about exponential has wisdom in it, might have hype in it. And we try as much as possible to give the underlying principles and the mindsets that you would have to have in order to take, take advantage of cutting edge technology. So, Peter, we've each, over the years, kind of on our own individual paths and most of that really lonely, have tried to use all the available resources and skills and capabilities to actually extend our lifetime, personal lifetime, working lifetime. I'd like to share some of mine. And one of my big things is don't retire. Yes, that's one of my tricks. Don't retire. Don't even think about retiring. Don't even have a glimmer of a thought in your head about retiring.

Retirement is a four letter word because.

The universe picks up on even the glimmer of a thought of retiring. And it says, we'll put him on the schedule. Eight years, probably will have a pickup.

I think the average lifetime between for men, retirement and death is like five years or something like that. On the average, yeah, it's pretty short.

Very short. I mean, the people who can tell you are the life insurance people. I mean, Social Security after 60 years, you know, hundreds of millions of people on Social Security, the average number of payout checks was 29 months, which means they lived two and a half years after they retired.

Crazy.

Yeah, I mean, different times people lived. You know, a lot of it was industry, it was heavy manual work. And that was a big deal. To live to 67, that was a big deal.

You know, to structure the conversation here on sort of what do you do to live a vibrant, long health span? Let's put a couple of categories out there. So mindset and purpose is one category. We should talk about sleep, we should talk about exercise, we should talk about diet. And we should talk about the last category I call not dying from something stupid. Does that sound like good? So let's. On one of our last podcasts, you talked about the average age of the early US Presidents compared to the national average. And it's the notion of if you're doing something significant in your world, you're going to want to live to see it. You have purpose, you have energy. What are your thoughts there?

You know, I just have a simple rule, and it's called always have a future that's bigger than your past. Okay, so I'm 70 and I kind of did it in quarter centuries. So two years ago I reached 75. So I'd put in two, three quarter centuries each was, you know, more exciting than the previous. So I said, well, my next, my fourth 25 years, which takes me to 100, I said, it's actually got to be more exciting than the first three 25 year periods. Period. In other words, there's a lot of exponential capabilities in the world. There's a lot of exponential opportunities. So there's no reason why we, what I achieve personally, what we achieve as an organization and what my network of entrepreneurs achieves should not be exponentially greater than everything that I've done during the first 75 years. And what that means is that I have to have the same feeling of risk and failure over the next 25 years as I've had during the previous. Because I think risk and failure and deadlines and having to produce, I think a lot of people want to retire from discomfort. I don't want to be in a position where I can fail. And I says, it keeps you alive. Of course you want to be in a position.

I love the saying, do something scary every day.

Yeah, well, I don't know about every day, but you should be involved every day in something that's got a chance to fail. And I worry sometimes about people who make so much money that it's not possible for them to fail in a way, certainly economically or business wise, because nobody takes him seriously. I mean, he lost a billion dollars and he can only round off with a billion dollars. My sense is that it's weird to watch them because they can't fail in the normal way, so they start failing in abnormal ways.

You hit on something that really irks me, which is all the billionaires out there not leveraging their capital to change the world.

Right?

So the only person doing it at scale right now is Elon, where he bets everything and he bets it over and over again.

Well, James Dyson in the UK has done an enormous amount of, I mean, not spectacular, but he's not living in the United States. I mean, the United States is a magnifier of projects. And I said, you know, I think it's much safer for the world for billionaires to spend all their money on pleasure than to try to improve the world. Because they just screwed things up when they tried to improve the world. They should just spend it on themselves. You know, it was like Bill Gates daughter got married a couple of weeks ago and he gave her a horse farm for her graduation from Stanford. And somebody said, isn't that disgusting? I said, that's probably one of the best uses of $24 million. What a neat thing. You know, she's a good equestrian and it's a nice farm and everything. I said, that seems like a purely beneficial, you know, harmless way to spend 24 million. But it's really interesting because we are getting to the position with exponentials that there's going to be simply incomprehensible amount of money that individuals are going to earn.

I agree. We should do a podcast on the future of what I call the abundance of capital, because it's interesting, the velocity of capital and such. Let's talk about the next subject. So purpose and mindset is critical. Having a longevity mindset, having a future purpose bigger than your past. Absolutely. And if you don't. Oh, man, oh, man. It's like, it's sad. I feel sad for people who haven't found that. And my job is to help them find their mtp, their massive transformative purpose. The second topic I think that people undervalue that, you know, you and I have talked about in the past is sleep, the critical world that sleep plays.

And you've gotten a lot deeper with your studies than I have. I mean, I kind of have a common sense attitude that, you know, the days when I get really good sleep, I have a better next day. But you've really gone deeper all the things. I mean, it used to be pooed. Pooed, you know, and certainly the medical industry is the prime violator against the importance with their ridiculous residency requirements and everything. I mean, it's hypocritical.

It really is. So a book I recommend to everybody is why We Sleep by Dr. Matt Walker. He tells an incredible, compelling story. And listen, here's the reality. We all need eight hours of sleep. There is less than zero. I think it's like 0.1% of the population that can get by on six hours physiologically, but 99.9% need eight hours. And here's what you should know. If nature, if Darwinian evolution had been able to reduce the amount of sleep that we need, it would have. Because when you're sleeping, you're prey for any carnivore. You're not adding value to society. And if there was a species of humans that could do as well on six hours of sleep, they would have out competed everybody else.

Yeah, but one of the things I notice, Peter, is the direct relationship between the amount of sleep and the amount of exercise. Exercise, you know, and I have a CPAP I have sleep apnea. So I have for the last 12 years. And I love it. I love it because it more or less does all the work of breathing for you at nighttime. And it's very relaxing, but it has very, very accurate about what was sleep and what was not sleep during the night. So I was just looking because we were going through, you know, signing on for a service, a medical app service, and they asked the last 30 days, what do you say? The average? And I know exactly, it was eight hours. For the last 30 days, I had an average of eight hours sleep a night. I check it every morning I get up, and if I have a 7.5 one night, 9 the next night, you know, I just compensate. I just want to make the connection here. And that is that if I get, you know, let's say two or three nights in a row, I'm going to a conference or something where there's social events in the evening and we're up early in the morning. The third morning, I don't want to exercise, I want to eat. Sugar?

Yeah. No, it's crazy. Let me add, you know, we used to romanticize, I can power through it. There's plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead, all of that. And I wish I knew better back then, and I don't, but I know now. And so I shoot for eight hours of sleep. And this is my tricks. You know, Dr. Walker talks about this. Number one, I put my room temperature down to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Number two, I bought something called a chili pad, which is a cool pad under the top sheet that reduces the temperature on my back to whatever I said. Typically like 65, 66. I use a Manta eye mask that blocks out all the light. Super comfortable. I love the Manta eye mask. And then mine just broke. But I use, instead of a cpap, I use a mandibular advancement device. It's a mouth guard that moves your lower jaw forward a few centimeters. And I got to the point where I couldn't sleep without it. I have to go get it replaced because my dog chewed it up. And then I have my aura ring that I use to measure my sleep like you do. And I gamifies it. You know, I know I better get in bed by 9:30 because I'm shooting to wake up at 5:30.

Well, I gave up television completely three and a half years ago because I found that any television in the evening just jangled me like it took me quite a while to get to sleep, you know, besides it's all negative and it's useless. First of all, I've been remarkably energetic during a really tough period for our company, during the COVID period, you know, and I haven't gotten sick with anything. I haven't gotten sniffles or anything during this period, you know, and I'm a great vaccine taker. If it's available, I take the vaccine, you know? You know, I mean, I don't want to get into the discussion, but I said, Look, I'm 77 in two years alone. When I was in South Korea, in the Army, I got 10 vaccinations because the health conditions were so bad there. And I said, I have easily had 100 vaccinations in my life, and I've not been harmed by any one of them. And they all did what they were designed to do. I didn't catch whatever it was they were supposed to protect me. I said, so I'm not going to have a discussion or a battle on this issue. If you're willing to take the consequences of not doing it, I'm totally supportive. But I said, we're not going to have a discussion about it.

Yeah. All right. So that's sleep. I commend sleep to everybody. It works, and you'll be all the better for it. Let's talk about exercise next, Dan. And you're doing an incredible job on your exercise protocols. Share with us what you do.

Yeah, well, first of all, it's heavy on intense aerobics and intense lifting. Okay? So those are the two main areas. You know, I want to get as much value out of the time that I put in. And I would say on a seven day period, I put in seven hours. Seven hours, start to finish. Wow. On average, I mean, some days, 40 minutes, weekends. And what I did, Peter and I shared this with you. I don't put such emphasis on what did I do today. I put on what did I do in total for seven days. Okay. Because, you know, schedules vary, your energy every morning is different than it was the day before. So I just said, let's just go on seven hours. And then I have a scoring system that I've devised for myself that this exercise is worth this much. And my seven day goal is that every seven days my score goes up. So what would I score myself on? So, first of all, I've got two great assistants, and one of them is an elevation training mask. Okay. Which restricts the amount of air. You know, I mean, I started with 16 holes. It's not meaningful unless you see it, but it's got 16 holes. I'm down to three holes now. I'm doing all my breathing through three holes. Okay. People said, well, what's that feel like? I said, well, clean it out and I'll give it to you. And you can breathe at 16. And they said, wow, this is really, really hard. I said you would dive with three, but I can go an hour with three. And my lungs, my internal and measures VO2 max is a huge. Yeah.

What brand do you use for that breathing mask?

I go on Google and it's called Elevation Training Mask. There's different ones, but this one is. And they have, you know, they're upgrading so they can sell you something else. But I've been using it for eight years and my overall cardio capabilities, you know, when you go and get tested, is up 40%. I'm equal right now to about a 35 year old.

Wow. You know, you've been saying this forever and I think it's time for me to get one.

Yeah, it's 80 bucks. Amazon will deliver it this afternoon in Santa Monica.

Yeah, I'm on Amazon right now. So there's the training mask version 2.0.

Yeah. Well, go for the upper end, 3.0. If you're going to learn on one, learn on the one they make more money on. All right, they'll have a 3.0. The other thing is I always wear a 30 pound weight vest for all my exercises.

Interesting.

So when I'm doing aerobics at 30 extra pounds, then I do stair work, you know, where I just walk two stairs. I'm lifting, but I'm always carrying an extra £30 with me. And it strengthens every muscle in your body when you're carrying that weight. Okay. So that's just constant. I'm always wearing the mask, I'm always doing that. And then I really push. I do as hard as I can sprint. So I'll do the equal of probably 24, 15 second sprints where I just sprint. I use elliptical machine because I have cartilage out in my left knee so I can't take. And then I do squats and I move between lifting £120 so be £60 in each hand, right up to £70. So when I'm wearing that vest, I'm lifting close to my weight. I'm lifting on my squats. And squats are the best single exercise that you can do because one rep, you exercise eight different muscle groups and you bring them into integration and coordination with each other.

Amazing, Amazing.

And then I do lifting Weights, and I do stretches and everything else, and I vary it up so I don't get bored.

That's extraordinary, buddy. I love that. You know, for me, I try and do 10,000 steps a day, and my watch measures that.

And walking is phenomenal. Walking's like sleeping.

People talk about sitting as the new smoking, and if we sit on our butts all day, it becomes really problematic. So getting out and walking, I take my meetings walking, even take zooms on my phone, walking, just to get exercise, get that extra hour or two in. And then there's a app I use called the 7 Minute Workout. It's free. Johnson and Johnson made it. And in seven minutes, you get a very diverse aerobic workout. And you can always find seven minutes in a hotel room. That's super useful.

Yeah.

And then I have dumbbell weights that I use. You know, typically 10, 20, 25 pound weights that I use for different type of lifting.

Well, I will tell you this, and I think it's a general truth that nature totally supports you to age 30 with muscle. In other words, you'll be at full muscle at 30.

Yeah.

After 30, nature doesn't care. You're supposed to have done what you're supposed to do before 30. And you lose 1% of muscle mass every year that you don't do resistance training. So if you've gone 30 years without any resistance training, you're down 30, 35 pounds of muscle mass. And you're asking your joints to take all the weight. Okay. No, I'm average size and my skeleton is seven pounds. Seven pounds. You know, it's mostly air.

Yep.

And it's not meant to take weight. It's for flexibility, it's for mobility. But muscle is what protects your joints. But I think that if you're losing muscle, you lose confidence. My feeling is that you're losing ambition, you're losing energy. It's the biggest aerobic burner. I mean, the metabolism for muscle, the metabolic rate for muscle. You burn far more calories with muscle burn than any other exercise. And what I notice is there's a lot of people who are really slim. They're very fashionably slim, and they're slim because they have no muscle.

Yep. So absolutely true. You know, the other thing that I'm doing is I live near a place called Upgrade Labs. And Upgrade Labs has a Vasper machine available that I go and use, and.

I do it three times a week.

Yeah, yeah. Tell us about Vasper.

Well, it tricks your brain, so it combines three things. It's a recumbent elliptical machine. You're sitting down and then it's got compression sleeves that you put around your upper arms and your upper legs. They have one for your chest too, but I just use the legs. And it's like blood pressure cuffs, except what's being pumped in is not air. It's cold water at 43 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yep.

And then it starts you a routine. They have 20 minute routines. They have, you know, really nice exercise right up to Navy SEAL if you want to go to, you know what Navy Seals do. And so it's 20 minutes and they have a whole variety. You can custom design your own ones and they just warm you up. And Peter, the moment that you start the exercise, your brain thinks that you're having muscle tears. The compression and the cold water keeps the lactic acid inside your muscles. And your brain, your brain says, oh, there's muscle tears going on. And that's how you grow muscle, because it's muscle tears that the brain starts pumping growth hormone and anabolic, what are they called? I forget the muscle Steroids. And so probably a minute into, you're just warming up by going back and forth like this. You feel like you've been doing intense exercise for about an hour. Your muscles just burn. And then they do sprints, you know, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, everything like that. And I do it three times a week because it kind of restores intense muscle lifting and that it can kind of get you in a kind of a stiff position. So the vasper really cold. We're discovering the difference between warm and cold is huge for healing and for growing. I mean, I use an uler, which is like you're under the sheet cooler.

Yes.

And I go down to 58 degrees at night. I'm 58 degrees at night.

Well, let's talk about diet and I'll kick this one off. So on the diet front, I focus on a Mediterranean diet. I typically will do intermittent fasting, which means I will try and finish all of my food intake. Typically, I have dinner on 5, 36 the latest. And you know, we'll have finished eating by seven. And then I don't eat breakfast and I'll fast until 1 1:32pm I'll have 2, 3 liters of water. I have my athletic greens here. I've skipped all dairy, no sodas. And I'll try if I'm gonna have protein, I mean, it's as much whole plant foods as I can. I love Brussels sprouts and broccoli. And then I'll do fish but not tuna, not swordfish. It's typically salmon and then olive oil shots, as much olive oil as I can. So that's what I'm focused on.

Yeah, Babs is really good. She was nutritionist before we met, so she's always influenced a very, very good eating for me. We have like zero sugar. I mean, every once in a while we might have a dessert or something.

Yeah, yeah. That's the big thing is minimize sugar for sure.

Oh, sugar is cancer food.

Yeah. Sugar is poison. Yeah.

Oh, sugar. We don't eat simple, complex carbohydrates. Carbohydrates. We have a lot of vegetables, we have a lot of gre. We have everything else, mine just on the schedule. We're pretty much finished eating by six at night and we're usually in bed latest around 8:30, because I get up at four. Four, well, eight hours later. If I go to bed at 8:30, I get up eight hours later. So you've had six hours, you've had 10 hours already. And it flips over to burning fat during those 10 hours. But I do take a athletic greens first thing in the morning because I'm. I'm going to do really intense exercise. So I do it, but I don't eat breakfast until about 7 in the morning, so it's been about 13 hours. And then I don't eat anything until lunch till about 1 o' clock and then I've stopped snacking. I don't snack. I tried that. Juvenescence. Yeah. It made a difference. I did mine and I did Babs. Free samples and yes. Yeah. And I don't know. I've certainly signed up for it and do it just for everybody who's listening. It's a supplement that you can take first thing in the day or twice a day and it triggers ketosis in the body. In other words, your body goes to burning fat for energy rather than looking for snacks. Hostess, Twinkies, things like that.

The last subject in our last five minutes is, I think, important, which is not dying from something stupid. And we've talked about this a little bit, that most of us are optimists about what's going on inside of our body and you can now know. And people saying, well, I don't want to know. I don't want to have the whole body mri. I don't want to have my genome sequenced. And it's like bullshit. Of course you want to know and you want to be able to find out about it early when you can do something about it.

Yeah, I always Tell people you don't want to know now, but when would you like to know when something's wrong? I says, because you will. I mean, I've said I'm a great believer in getting. If there's bad news, I want the bad news right now. I also want the good news right now because that's good for confidence. We've gone through testing through HLI and I've had other labs and that I've gone to. People come back, boy, I wouldn't really want to know that stuff. And I said, well, that's okay. You don't have to know it now, but I can guarantee you you will know it later.

And I should just say, of course, that. Consult your doctor on any medical advice. This is what Dan and I do. It's not medical advice that we're giving to you. It's just what we do right now.

Yeah. I will tell you, though, that the more that you explore this in the way that you're exploring it, Peter, really, as a frontline reporter and finding out all the new stuff, and me just sort of benefiting from your explorations, I really have to hold my tongue when I'm with my general practitioner.

Well, switch your general practitioner.

Well, I know, I know, and that's part of it. But they're gatekeepers here in Canada. You don't see any specialists unless you go through your gp, you know, and we have one in Chicago. And I sit there and I say, she doesn't know this. She doesn't know this. She doesn't know this. She doesn't know about this. She isn't informed about this. But she's a good doctor, you know, so it's interesting thing, but the fact that we're even having this conversation, you know, two people having a conversation, you know, by the standards of 25 years ago, I'm an elderly gentleman and you're heading.

I feel like a kid.

Yeah. And I just said, you wouldn't have found anywhere on the planet where this was a normal conversation. Trading tips, trading, you know, discoveries, knowing people who are doing remarkable things. This wouldn't have been a discussion.

Yeah. Now, it's an amazing time to be alive. I'm psyched for the next century ahead. Well, Dan, thank you as always. A pleasure to spend time with you on this program.

Thank you, Peter.