Can We Live Healthy Forever? The Frontiers Of Longevity Science with Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis
Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis talk with Dr. Mark Hyman about extending human healthspan through stem cells, epigenetics, and regenerative medicine. They discuss personal experiences with these treatments and where longevity science is headed.
Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. We know our DNA is not our destiny. And the metaphor we try to share with people is, your DNA is the plan. It's like the piano. The epigenome is the piano player turning on and off.
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And if you care about living well and living long, and avoiding the ravages of aging and having a vibrant long life. Well, this conversation is gonna be for you because I have two extraordinary guests today, Tony Robbins and Dr. Peter D'Amours. Tony, you probably heard of. He's the number one New York Times bestselling author. He's a philanthropist. He's one of the top 50 business intellectuals in the world. He's called upon by leaders all over the world, presidents and CEOs, Fortune 500 leaders, great athletes, entertainers. He's the founder, partner, early investor in over 100 privately held businesses. with sales exceeding $7 billion. He does incredible philanthropy. All the money from his new book, Life Force, is going towards feeding America. And he's literally provided 800 million meals to people trying to get to a billion by 2025. And Peter is an old friend as well, who is just an extraordinary man who believes the world is full of abundance and possibilities. He's written a book called Abundance, which I love. He's a founder and executive chairman of the X Prize, which leads the world in designing and operating large scale incentive competitions. You've probably heard of some of them. for example, the SpaceX prize you probably heard of. And he's now got one on aging longevity on greenhouse gases and climate change. He's just incredible. He's one of the world's greatest 50 leaders according to Fortune. And he's also the executive founder of Singularity University and a graduate, which is a graduate level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world leaders on exponentially growing technology. We're gonna talk about exponential growth, which is where we're at with longevity. So welcome, Tony, and welcome, Peter. I love you both. And actually, you know what? I actually read this entire book, which is no joke. It's like almost 700 pages, cover to cover, every word. Every word of it. You're gonna give you a PhD for that? Yeah. Honestly, I mean, I'm just gonna be honest.
Okay, well, I, I, my new commitment.
Is to radical honesty or compassionate radical honesty. And normally I have a guess, and I'll skim the book. I'll, you know, I'll read a lot, a bit of it, you know, some less, some more. I literally read this cover to cover. and Tony and Peter, I really want to start with a big picture, which is Tony, why were you inspired to write this? Why were you inspired to pull together Peter and Bob Hariri, who's another extraordinary physician in longevity science, to write this.
Book called Life Force? Most of my life, I've been obsessed with answering the question, how do you increase the quality of people's lives? How do you enhance that? And there's only a few areas that matter. There's your body, obviously, your mind, your emotions, your relationships, your your business, hopefully a mission, and the spiritual side of life. So I've always been invested in all those areas and I've been a biohacker myself because the demands of what I do. You know, I go 12 hours at a time, three, four, five days in a row with 15,000 people who wouldn't sit for a three hour movie. You gotta keep their attention. So I've learned a lot about the body over the years. But the real impetus for this book was because about four and a half years ago, I had several experiences, but one of them was really severe. I was being an idiot going down the side of a mountain snowboarding, chasing a 22 year old near professional snowboarder who could clearly do things I couldn't do. And I had a crash. I thought I broke my neck, but I tore my rotator cuff so severely that, you know, I've lived a lot of pain in my life, but it was 99 pain on a zero to 10 scale.
And.
And I just. I didn't know what to do. So first I had to figure out I couldn't even sleep. It was, you know, an hour and hour and 15 minutes one night, an hour another. I got a pemf pulse electronic magnetic frequency device, which took the pain down. You know, there's about 3, 000 studies on this now. bone healing, nerve healing. So it took the pain to like a five where I could sleep. But then I had to figure out the solution. Of course, I went to all the traditional doctors and, you know, I went to, I think, four, actually five, but in the end, they all recommended immediate surgery. And, you know, when I talked to some of the people, they said, you know, I even asked those doctors, what's the prognosis? You know, will I be able to fully do everything? I said, well, you could, but you may not be able to raise your arm above your shoulder. And how long will I have to recover? Well, four to six months, you know, four months if it goes well, six months if it doesn't. It could tear again. I could tear again. And so, you know, I've always been a person that says there's got to be a better solution. And I hang out with this guy, this genius over here. And so I called Peter because he's my dear friend and he knows everything in technology and he's so health oriented as well. And I said, listen, I've read all this about stem cells. I hear all these doctors when I bring it up, they all say, it's bullshit. Well, it doesn't do anything. And then I've heard other people rave about it. You know, where would they go to get the best source? And he said, well, you go should go talk to Dr. Bob Harari. And I go, He's a neurosurgeon. He goes, Yes, but he's one of the greatest fathers of stem cells. He did those original studies 38 years ago where they gave old rats young blood and we all know what happened. They got younger and vice versa. So I met Bob and it's kind of like saying, you, want to learn about basketball? Let me introduce you to LeBron James, my friend. That's coming to be your new best friend, right? And Bob made it clear. He said, Tony, you don't want to do stem cells with your own body, you know, autologist, because stem cells drop off the cliff and 40, 45 years old and I was in my early 50s. and he said, you know, you need the force of life. That's why I call it life force. He said, you need young stem cells, literally, that are, you know, four days old. And he said, you don't need placenta or you need cord stem cells. And I said, I don't want to do fetal tissue. He said, no, no, no, it's not fetal tissue. When babies are born, they tend to throw these away. Now some people save them. And he told me where to go. I went down and I did, you know, three days of stem cells. It was just an IV and a shot. They told me in advance, you know, you might feel tired. I did. I'm sleepy, no problem. The second day I had a cytokine response, which I knew what it was, so I wasn't scared. A little shaking and freezing for about 20 minutes. And then they said, well, that often gives you a bigger reaction. And I go to sleep. I left out the most important thing. The last doctor I talked to, he'd been all my work and told me how great it was. And I changed his life and made him most money and saved his marriage. And then he looks at me and says, but now because I'm a doctor, I have to shoot you straight. He shows me my spine. He goes, Life as you know it is over. I said, you clearly didn't go to my communication seminar, right? But I laugh about it now, but I said, what do you mean? He goes, you know, let me show you your spine. He goes, you have severe spinal stenosis. He said, one good hit from a snowboard, one good jump, we fall that any of these things. He goes, you have to change your life completely. And, you know, if you were ready for it, you can take a good punch in the gut. I gotta be honest. It took me down for a couple hours. My brain's like, what's happening in my life? And then my brain kicked back in and said, this is BS. And that's when I reached up. Peter. So on the second day of these stem cells, I woke up with no pain in my shoulder. I've done the MRI since then, everything's fine. It was like four years ago, it's totally fine. I have no challenge whatsoever, no surgery. But the most unbelievable thing is for 14 years, I had massive back pain from the spinal stenosis. I woke up with no back pain. I still don't have it. So I became just an evangelist. I wanna know everything about stem cells. And then Peter was going over to the Vatican, where the Vatican every two years has this conference where they bring in the best of regenerative medicine. That's how far it's come because the Pope sees it's not fetal tissue. So I want the best doctors. This is healing humanity. And then they invited me to be the cleanup speaker. And so I was like, I'm not gonna go just be a cleanup speaker. Peter already invited me. I was like, I'm gonna go for the full four days, and then I'll, you know, my cleanup will really serve people. And Peter and I both sat there and learned things that just blew our mind. I saw this person that Bob had worked in, this 11 year old boy that I think it was four when he was told he had like a six percent chance to live, whatever the percentage was, he wasn't supposed to live. But Bob convinced the parents to get stem cells from the young, the daughter that's just being born, saved his life. Saw people that were sent home to die or sent to hospice and they wouldn't give up and they did CAR T-cells. And, you know, I'm sure you saw Dr. June in Nature this week that came out. They're actually, you know, you know, cancer guys don't talk about cure, but they're calling it a cure because 10 years later, those CAR T-cells are still wiping out cancer in their body. It's just amazing. And so after seeing all these breakthroughs, I was like, and my own experience, and I met Jack Nicklaus there, we developed a relationship, and he was supposed to have his, he was, couldn't stand for more than 10 minutes without massive pain. So here's a guy, the greatest golfer of all time, can't golf, can't play tennis, can't do anything. They wanted to fuse his spine. And I'm sure you know, less than 50% of the time does that work. 26% of the time, those people never make it back to work. 76% of the people that don't do it, get back to work. Thank God he didn't do it, he did stem cells instead. Now he's 82 years old, and he's playing tennis, and he's playing golf again. with no pain, right? So I said, I gotta write this book. This is what I'm good at. I go get the best like I did with Money Master the Game, interview the 50 smartest billionaires in the world that started with nothing, figure out what they do. I'm gonna do this with 150 doctors. But I thought, who could I write this better with than Peter and Bob? So I went to them and said, Listen, this is what I want to do. I convinced Simon and his team to do it. Why don't you join me on this journey? And so we've been working our tails off, having Peter for three years, two and a half years in the middle of COVID trying to figure out how to wrangle all these doctors so we could get the information we did. But we're really proud of it because what we discovered, and I'll just give you a highlight, and I know you'll take us deeper, but I mean, think about it. We all know, I've heard about CRISPR now, and Peter's a genius in this area. He can give you more details, but we're literally curing disease with gene therapy and with CRISPR. I mean, you know, there are people that haven't been able to see that other side back. You know, stem cells are curing problems within people in a matter of days. Christian Ronaldo gave me a quote for the book because he had this capital, not a soft one, a severe one, right? Could take him a month or two. He was healed in two and a half weeks using stem cells, right? So, you turn around and you see now today there's a company out there that's in stage three trials, you know, but just so your audience does. Phase one is safety, phase two is efficacy, phase three is efficacy at scale. They're in the third phase right now. They believe they're going to prove early next year if they do, A single injection causes the part of your body called the wind pathway to create your own stem cells and regrow your tendons in 11 months. And, they're based on a clean epigenome. So, you get like 16-year-old tendons even if you're 50 or 60 years old. That's amazing. You know, Dr. Sinclair is a mutual friend of all of us. He's a genius in longevity. He's 53 chronologically, but he's 33 years old in his biochemistry because we don't age at the same level. and we've been applying that. I just did my test. I'm 62 in a few weeks, but I'm 51, which is nice. I want to get that down to early 40s. And so we're living. And then there's these diagnostic tools. So we're living in the greatest time to be alive. And I'm a guy that had, you know, one of the first cell phones. That's all I am. You know, it weighed two pounds. It was a foot long. It costs four thousand dollars to be 10 grand today. You know, you had to be in a place where, you know, you could charge it for six hours to get 30 minutes of talk time. Now you got an Apple phone, you can get it for free with a service contract. It's got a hundred times the power of what took us, you know, the Apollo to the moon and back. So that, as you know, is happening in medicine, but most people don't know that's happening. So, yeah, we wrote this book to show you what you can do to make yourself stronger, healthier, more vital, be able to change the trajectory of your health span or longevity, and also deal with some of the biggest diseases and challenges and how to prevent them. And so we're real excited. And like I said, we're donating all the money to make a difference. 20 million meals defeating America and the balance is going for Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease and aging research with some of the greatest researchers so people can get these answers, but they can also help somebody else simultaneously.
Well, that's so perfect, Tony. I love that story, why you're inspired to do it. And I think, you know, Peter and you and I are all about the same age. I'm 62 and, you know, stuff starts to break down. And I was told also that I had to have a spinal stenosis, a spinal surgery, a spinal fusion that I would be basically incapacitated for a year. I couldn't function. I had three back surgeries. I literally couldn't move. And I didn't know this.
Yes.
And I did the same thing as you. I got to a regenerative medicine specialist. I got exosomes and placental matrix and all kinds of goodies injected in my back, worked out with my Tom Brady training program, and I'm literally stronger than I've ever been. I literally just beat a bunch of 30-40 year olds at a plank competition. My biological age is 39. and my friends can't keep up with me here in their 30s and 40s. And I play tennis, I go helicopter skiing, I'm stronger, fitter and faster than I've ever been because I'm taking advantage of these new technology and the science that's pushing us all. And I was chatting with Peter before we started. I'm like, okay, you know, well now I'm 60, we're kind of basically starting to figure life out and get happy, right? You kind of have to deal with all the crap of like making your career and your family and all this stuff and meaning and purpose. I think you're like, okay, I made it. And then, you know, it's not time to wind down. It's time to wind up. And I, and I feel like what your book and, and, and, and with you and, and Peter and Bob has done is really mapped out one, what we know now about the science of longevity and aging. Yes. That's not being applied stuff that works right now that we can do. We're going to go over that. Two, what are some of the extraordinary technologies that are emerging in the science? And some of them might prove to be, you know, you know, false or some of them might actually be life changers like the cancer therapies or the 10 injections WNT pathways you mentioned. And also you've also provided a map for people to navigate the landscape of what's out there. It's encyclopedic and I've never seen anything like it out there. And I'm in this field. I pay attention to it closely. I read everything out there. And your book does something that nothing else has done, which is really create an entire kaleidoscopic view of this field, where we are, where we're going and where we're gonna get to be. and it's so exciting. I mean, like, I, I was talking to my friend, like, I, I want to, you know, get to be 120 or 100. I'm like, no, I think maybe I'm gonna do 180 now, you know? And then, and then Peter, Peter is talking about longevity, Escape velocity. If you keep living long enough, you can't, you keep extending life.
So maybe there's no end in sight. I don't know.
I don't know how I feel about that, but this is just, this is just tremendous. So that was, that was a great time ever to be alive.
Yeah.
And, and Peter, you, you, you know, your mind, Peter, is, is so extraordinary because the way you think is really different. And Tony, you really taught people how to think about their psycho-emotional spiritual lives in a really profoundly different way that has impacted so many. And I think I bought my first Tony Robbins cassette tapes in 1990. And I listened to them in Idaho when I was a family doctor. And Peter, I've known for decades and have just been in awe of his ability to dream, you know, and I.
Think But what I love about Peter though is he doesn't just dream, I don't want me to step on you there. I know you know this about him, but I want your audience to know, he doesn't just dream. This man executes and he brings the best tools and technology and so many things that we did here is like, I didn't even know about, some of them he knew about, some of neither one of us knew about, but it was like this incredible set of discoveries as we found more and more of these researchers. But Peter, like is probably the most networked person on finding solutions that I know of.
He's just the genius in that area. I didn't want to, let you know.
How important it is. I agree.
It's not about, it's not just about, and I, you know, one sec, I just want to say this one quote because it speaks to what, it's emblematic of Peter, which, which is Robert F. Kennedy's quote. He said, he said some, some men, and it should be people, right? Some men see the way things are and ask why others dream of things that are not and ask why not. Right. And so I might have bungled the quote, but it's something like that.
Oh, that's real close.
And haeter And's Peter it's like that's.
Why I hang out with this guy. I know I like to hang out with geniuses, him and Bob.
I make sure my mom gets to watch this episode.
So so so, Peter, take us through some of the foundational concepts, because ' there's a lot of really wonderful signs that's emerging, that's not quite ready for prime time. But take us through what we know now about the fundamentals of longevity because you know, this is not stuff you're necessarily hearing at your doctor's office. And it's redefining our whole framework of Aging from being just a normal process. Right. Oh, we look around us and we see, oh, God, everybody gets sick. Six out of 10 Americans have a chronic illness. Four out of 10 have two or more. You know, 80 of us are overweight. 88 of us are metabolically unhealthy. I mean, it's just, we live in a terrible world. So who wants to be old and decrepit and die? And, and nobody wants to do that.
So you're presenting a different view, which.
Is that aging is not normal how we see it today in this world. It's actually abnormal aging.
It's exciting, Mark. So let me begin by giving context about even the concept of aging. Our bodies were 40 trillion cells in our body, and our bodies evolved as Homo sapiens hundreds of thousands of years ago. And if you go think back in time, we would go into puberty at age 13. and by the time we were 14, we were pregnant. And by the time you were 28, your baby was having a baby. And that was the cycle of life. The challenge was back then, food was scarce. There was no McDonald's, no Whole Foods. And the worst thing you could do if you wanted to perpetuate the species was take food out of the mouth of your grandchildren. So you would die. The human body was never truly meant to live past age 30, 35, maybe 40. 100 years ago, the average lifespan was just under 40. Today it's risen up into the high 70s and the early 80s. And because we had a short life, there was no selective pressures against the diseases that we would have as we aged. So there was no selective pressure against heart disease or cancer or dementia because no one ever lived long enough to have those things. And today we're realizing that we don't have to accept the the genetic deck of cards that we were dealt over the last 100,000 years because we're beginning to get the tools that could allow us to modify those, to identify and understand what isn't working and where we're going. Now, here's another question, which I know you know the answer to, but for people listening, you've got the same genome when you're born as when you're 20, as when you're 40, 60, 80, or 100 years old. If you've got the exact same genome, 3.2 billion letters from your mother and 3.2 billion letters from your father, why do you look different? Why don't you have the six-pack that you had when you were a teenager, right? And the same quality.
You have a keg instead.
Well, it turns out it's not your genes, it's which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off. It's your epigenome, epi from the Greek word above. It's the control of the genes And so, you know, if you look at the genome of a 20 year old and if you could move that time, go through time to a 60 year old person, the same person, you just find different genes are on and different genes are off. And the work that's being done and we talk about, you know, Tony and I highlighted a number of really heroes in the book. You know, Bob Hariri is one of the heroes we talk about. Carl June from CAR-T therapy we'll talk about. But David Sinclair and his work in understanding the epigenome and some pivotal work he did in December of 2020, published in the COVID of Science, that he was able to reverse the age of the visual systems of mice who had lost their sight because they age. He didn't just treat them, he made them biologically younger. he was able to use what are called three of the Yamanaka factors. These are the four Yamanaka factors. Dr. Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for this, being able to take your skin cell and de-differentiate it back into a pluripotent stem cell. Well, four factors bring you all the way back. Three factors brought you back to a youthful state. Wait, just to stop you there for.
A second, just so people are listening, get what he's saying, what you're saying. basically there are these regulatory factors that control how your genes work. They can take a skin cell or a liver cell or any cell in your body and bring it back to its original embryonic state where it can become anything else, which is radically changing our view of how we can regenerate our health and actually extend life. So these Yamanaka factors are a big deal. We're still figuring out how to use them, what to do with them. They're a little bit confusing, but it's just radically shifting our view, which is We literally have within us the code of a baby. How do we activate that code and reprogram our biology?
What's on screen with those mice is they have glaucoma, so the nerves are gone. You don't regrow nerves in the brain. But by doing that reversal, they regrew them back and could see it's the first time in history it's happened.
I'm sure it'll get nominated for a Nobel Prize. It's pretty extraordinary. It is. And then the work was done about six months later to do the same type of biological age reversal in the heart of mice. And now George Church is taking this into dogs. And the expectation is that we'll start to see this kind of technology in humans before the end of this decade. So to frame it properly, the entire conversation about age reversal, not longevity, because you can't truly prove longevity unless, you know, we're able to live 50, 60 years and say, well, this person now got to 150, but Can you actually reverse age biologically measuring the epigenome? We'll get to those epigenetic clocks in a moment. But the conversation was crazy five years ago. And today it's the hottest subject of research. And it's we've just seen incredibly in this one year alone, we saw the crown prince of Saudi and of Abu Dhabi. fund a multi-billion dollar foundation called Hevolution that is investing in longevity and age reversal. We saw Yuri Milner and Jeff Bezos fund Altos Labs to hundreds of millions, clearly eventually billions of dollars. We saw the founder of Coinbase start a company. So we're seeing massive amounts of capital flowing in. And the money- Not from the National.
Institutes of Health, unfortunately, which is only.
About But I'd rather trust the entrepreneurs.
To solve this problem.
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Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. You know, one of the things that David discovered was, I'll give it to you in this simple non-doctor frame. There's a couple terms that be useful ones. We know our DNA is not our destiny. And the metaphor we try to share with people is, you know, DNA is the plan. It's like the piano. The epigenome is the piano player turning on or off. but these seven sirtuins, these seven master genes do two things that are critical, two radically different things that are competitive a little bit. Because as you probably already know, your stem cells drop off in your 40s and the source of fuel for these sirtuins drop off in your 50s. But these sirtuins, the first thing they do is they turn on off, they affect the epigenome, which genes get turned off, whether you're going to get ill or not, whether you're going to age or not, is affected by it. They also affect inflammation, which as we all know is the basis of so much of disease. and they also affect your mitochondria, the source of energy in your body. They feed it, they make it possible to generate that energy. Now, the other competing aspect is, as we get older, we accumulate challenges in our DNA because of radiation, chemicals, all things we're exposed to. So at 20, you got a certain level. At 60, you got a lot more. And the metaphor that Bob often uses trying to explain even with stem cells is imagine you have this mansion, you have these Great young staff members who fix everything all the time. It always looks beautiful, but as they get older, and then also you don't have the same resources and things to go fix and you age. Well, these sirtuins, they're supposed to clean up your DNA. That's what they do. But their source of fuel is something I'm sure you've heard of, and lots of people have heard of called NED plus. That's the fuel. You don't have that fuel, sirtuins can't do their job. And guess what? NED plus drops in your 50s through the floor by at least 50%. so now you've got this competing thing. When you need most of your DNA cleaned up and your energy strong and inflammation dealt with and your genes there, it's all breaking down simultaneously. But the good news is, I'm sure you know, there's a precursor to NAD+ that allows it to go in the cell and maximize. And that's NMN. Never mother, never. Well, you know, Peter and I, in our company, we went out and, you know, we knew the power of NMN because it's one of the things that Dr. Sinclair uses, one of his core core elements. that's made him chronologically younger. He's got his 80 year old father transformed through this. So we were quite excited about it. But if you go out in the marketplace, you can buy an NMM from 35 bucks to like $120. But we haven't found out of six companies any NMM left. And I was like, I talked to our guys, it's like, coming from China, are these people just thieves? And they said, well, they could be, but more likely it breaks down in 30, 45 days. So here's the cool thing. There is some NMM that works right now, and that means all of this can be restored and you can make this change in your body where you get the energy and the DNA cleanups, you can have sustained health. But there's a company called Microbiome and the founder of this is collected about a hundred, very much like Altos and others, some of the greatest people in regenerative medicine. And we got a chance to meet him, hang out with him. He's become a friend of mine. He's actually coming here again on Saturday. And he has created a crystallized version of Eminem that doesn't break down. But it's even more powerful. Think of this so your audience appreciates this. If you take an old mouse, a 70 or 65-70 year old mouse is like, as you know, about 20 months old. And you put them on, you know, on a track and they try and go, then most they can hit usually is a quarter of a kilometer. Whereas a young mouse can do a full kilometer, four times as much. After 14 days on just this traditional MMN, they can run two to three kilometers, literally. Two to 300 times more than a young mouse. But here's what's unbelievable. You go, well, yeah, but, you know, I always go, well, mice studies don't always transfer to humans. Well, this company, Microbiotech, unbeknownst to anybody else, has been working in a top secret project with our armed services, specifically with the Special Forces. And they did a two-year study. And the commander got so excited, he dropped the beans, and it got exposed. He talked to a reporter, and then last week it was in the Daily Mail. But their reporting is still not the real full details. And I can't tell you those either. We've invested in the company. We know some of the details, but I can tell you this. They just got their initial results back. And it's unbelievable. Similar experiences. Think of the most fit people in the world, both men and women, special forces, now with greater endurance than they've ever imagined, building muscle faster with the same exact exercises and increased cognitive capacity. So now, I think they're in phase three right now, beginning on a COVID test for preventing that because as you know, COVID comes into the mitochondria and sucks the energy out of it, right? Creates massive inflammation and it's so far looking really good. They're doing some on kidneys because that's the other challenge as you know with COVID And, this looks like a huge breakthrough but this will not be a nutraceutical. This is going through the FDA and right now the FDA is tearing up what they're doing with the military. So, they hope to have this out in 18 to 24 months. I mean, These are the types of breakthroughs that none of us could even dream of in the past.
And what you both are talking about, I want to take a minute and zoom out for people because what you're talking about is not curing Alzheimer's or heart disease or cancer or diabetes. You're talking about going way upstream to deal with the root causes of all of it. And so we've been doing whacK-A-Mole medicine by trying to whack down these different diseases by different pathways and different drugs and find a cure for cancer, the cure for Alzheimer's. why have we spent billions of dollars and done over 400 studies on Alzheimer's.
And come up with nada, nothing?
Because we're, we're going to finish for a second. So, so the key to think for people is that by looking at aging differently, by looking at what you're talking about, Tony, is you're not actually treating a disease, you're actually teaching the body using natural substances or things the body already does or already programmed into our DNA to regenerate, repair, renew, revitalize, and enhance what we already have and make us younger without treating disease. In functional medicine, I don't treat disease. I help people enhance their function. That's what it is. That's exactly what functional medicine is. Yes, it's important to know what disease has. And yes, you need some drugs to help people who've already gone way down the path. But for most of us, these therapies, your back was a fricking mess. Mine was a mess. And yet somehow we figured out using these therapies to regenerate our tissues and.
Revitalize ourselves so we're stronger like the bionic men.
At 62 years old, right? This is what the take home lesson.
Here is aging is a disease itself. And it's a single core commonality between all diseases. And the conversation that's changed, and we talk about in the book multiple places, is the idea that aging is a disease that can be slowed, stopped, and for the first time ever, rationally thought about being reversed.
Yes.
And that's, you know, There's this concept called longevity escape velocity, which you mentioned a little bit earlier, Mark, which I love. Today, we're in this period of massive exponential growth where AI, computation, sensors, networks, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, all these technologies are doubling in power every 18 to 24 months, and they give you miraculous things like this conversation we're having today right now for free. It's awesome. It's also changing the course of the human lifespan, the health span. So today we're gaining about a quarter of a year for every year that we're alive, about three months. There is a point in which science is going to all of a sudden, for every year that you're alive, extend your life for greater than a year. And that's called longevity escape velocity. So I've heard about this term from a long time. for a long time and I went and started asking people who I consider in the know when they think we're going to hit this. So our forward for the book is written by Ray Kurzweil, who's one of my mentors, a dear friend of Tony's, my co-founder of Singularity University. And Ray's prediction is that we will see singularity, we'll see escape velocity in about 12 to 15 years time.
Which is- We'll be in our 70s.
Right when we're all gonna need it. Exactly.
We are living in a video game. Don't ever forget it. We're gonna get that at the last level of gameplay. But then I went to someone who is extraordinary, one of the other heroes in our book, Dr. George Church, a friend, professor of genomics at Harvard Medical School. He has started 24 companies in 24 months. Just brilliant beyond belief as an entrepreneur and a core scientist. And I was having the same conversation with him for this book and asked, you know, so George, when do you think we're going to see longevity escape velocity? I expected him to say 30 years, 20 years, probably about within the next 15 years. And I'm like, oh my God, that's extraordinary. Now, two points don't make a proof of it, but from two different perspectives. So if that's true, if we have the ability to reach this departure point of longevity, escape velocity in 15 years, all of our jobs is to reach that point, to not die.
We want to follow the Bee Gees song, Stayin' Alive.
Our job is not to die from something stupid in the interim.
And it's just- You should cancel my helicopter skiing trip then?
At least wear a helmet.
You know, that brings up Mark Diagnostics, as you know, which I think is so great.
Yeah.
You know, and Peter, I had a different philosophy. I really want to acknowledge Peter for this because Peter's like, I want to know everything. And I was like, I don't know if I want to get in that system of knowing anything. You know, people overreact to things, but today, you know, you know, going to a physical where somebody, you know, Taps your knee, looks down your throat, listens to your heart, checks out your ears and makes you cough. I mean, that's about 80 years old. Nothing wrong with it, but it's far from what we really have today. And so you look around at diagnostics today, and you know, most of the people in the book that are these heroes, the one common denominator they almost all have is they've lost somebody they love. A husband, a wife, a child, or maybe a patient they really connected to. And it drove them to not just accept the standard of care. And one of those is a gentleman who created Grail, which is, you know, you look at cancer right now, the cancer society to study with 100,000 people, and they came up with these two round numbers are important to know. It's more important than the numbers, know that just the direction. That if you are finding something at stage three or four, you got an 80% chance of dying. Now, I'm not big in that. I got a 20% chance of living, let me figure out how. But the point is it's a lot harder. If you find it at stage one or two, you got an 80 to 99.9% chance of living. And so most of the diseases that kill us with cancer, you know, we've got mammograms, we've got colonoscopies, But, you know, it's the diseases we have in those tests for. So Grail is this new blood test that can test 50 different cancers and find them before the symptoms are there. We have a gentleman that came here to Fountain Life and his wife, you.
Know, he went to a traditional physical.
And- Wait, Tony, what's Fountain Life? 'Cause people don't know what that is. Oh, I'm so sorry. Peter and I are partners with Dr. Cap and several others. He owns 12 different hospitals and he decided he wanted to get out of traditional care and want to do precision medicine. So we have centers across the US. We're opening one in Abu Dhabi. And we work, for example, in Pittsburgh with the entire Pittsburgh Steelers. And it's all about regenerative medicine. How do you prevent and how do you maximize and optimize what the human body can do? So some people come because they have problems, some people come to prevent a problem. But we do, for example, diagnostics there. And this man comes to us and he's just out of physical and he did his urinalysis and his blood. And his wife just was saying, you got to do this. These guys have a different level. and sure enough, we go in and we do the Grail test, and we do an MRI for what the Grail test can't pick up across the blood-brain barrier and so forth. And sure enough, he's got kidney cancer just the beginning of it. Well, it's an outpatient process that took 30 minutes and he's free of cancer versus phase two or phase three, right? You know, our partners, Dr. Bill Capp, called me about, I don't know, five, six months ago. And he said, Tony, we have access, first access to one of the greatest breakthroughs in cardiology in the last 10 years. And Dr. Capp is, he's an understated guy. He's not an overstated guy. I said, that sounds like a big promise. I said, what is it? He said, you know, you've had CT scan before. He said, yeah. And he goes, you're looking to see, you know, what's your calcium score? And we're trying to make decisions. And he said, it's so hard to read. It's so grayed out. Even doctors make mistakes. A lot of times surgeries happen that really don't need to happen. He said, so the breakthrough is there's a new device called a CCTA scan. And what it does is it uses AI and opens up the arteries digitally and goes in and looks for has this calcium hardened, which means you're totally fine, or is it soft plaque that can break off and be the widow maker that gives you a heart attack or a breakdown in your brain? And he said, Tony, it'll blow your mind. So I said, I'm coming. I'll come in a couple days. And my father-in-law is with me. This is what so touched me. He just turning 80. He's a self-made man, self-educated guy. worked in the lumber business, a pretty strong guy. But when you're turning 80, everybody around you is like, you should arrange your affairs and you never know what's gonna happen. And I could just see his entire psychology change over the last, say, three years. So I said, you know, Dad, I said, I'm gonna go do this test. I explained it to him. And I said, listen, we're both at a stage of life where we're gonna have some soft plaques. Be good to know where they are, 'cause I'll tell you where and the amount. And then they give you, you know, they can predict a heart attack five years in advance. more importantly, they can show what you do to prevent it. Why don't we do this? He goes, all right, I'll come. So we go there. I'm better than I was five years ago. I'm thrilled out of my mind. But my father-in-law is, like, perfect. He's got no problem whatsoever. His entire psychology changes. And then we have this set of tools that we use a lot of world-class athletes. I torqued my ankle on stage years ago, like 15 years ago, and the nerves got trapped and nothing we did worked. I tried all kinds of therapy, so after a while, it's just, I let it alone, right? if a massage therapist don't touch my heel because, or my ankle because the nerves would just shoot through me like electricity. And they go in and they use ultrasound, they scan it, they look at the connective tissue, they can see where you're not getting circulation or the nerves trapped, five minute little intervention, and they put the fluid in, it opens everything up, and my ankle, I can smack the hell out of it, nothing ever happened since. So my dad's there, he just found out his heart's perfect, he's got nothing to worry about, and his hip, you know, he can't walk right. So we got some brilliant doctors there. I took him 30 minutes to scan it, find it, implement it, and now he's walking smooth as silk. So we get on the plane, this is my favorite moment with him, and he's got his arms crossed like this and he's looking at me and he goes, you, know, Tom?
He goes, you, know, I don't know.
About those people say 110, 120, like Peter. He goes, I don't know if I buy that stuff, but he goes, you, know what? My heart is perfect. You know, I'm walking perfect. I could live to be 100, 20 more years. You've only known my daughter for 22 years. It's like a whole new life. His entire mindset changed. So I really honor Peter because he's always done this. It's like, you should tell him, how much data you took then.
So Tony, I've been boarding this for five years. I'm going tomorrow, in fact, to Fountain Life. I'm flying over to Naples and for my annual upload, right? So in five hours, I'll do the AI enabled coronary imaging, I'll do the full body, the brain, brain vasculature MRI, the DEXA scan, the genomics, and it's 150 gigabytes of data. But I'll tell you, I feel naked until I go and do it. I feel like I don't actually know what's going on inside my body. And when people say, well, I don't wanna know, I say, of course you wanna know. You wanna know 'cause you can actually do something about it now than before. And so it's, for me, it's one of the most extraordinary things. We've all known people we've lost and they show up in the ER with a pain in their side and the doctor pulls them aside and said, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you've got this and this. And, and it didn't just start that morning. It's been going on for some time, but we're all optimists about what's going on inside.
Yeah.
And it's time to be realistic about it.
Well, it seems like there's two things you guys are really talking about that are real breakthroughs. The first is, understanding the root causes of aging itself and how to revitalize human biology and really reprogram us to a younger you. That's right. And the second is all these incredibly cool technologies that are like taking us to a body shop and giving us a hundred thousand point checkup and finding all the little things that are off and tweaking them using amazing new technologies that are a little bit downstream. So if you screwed up your hip or you got a heart thing or you got this or that, Yes, we can still fix it. Like you're back and my back, Tony. We did some damage by being crazy. And thank God there's stuff to fix it. So we've got these two things happening in parallel. So one, we're actually going to help prevent getting these things in the first place, knowing what we know. And two, we're going to be able to fix the things that we can't even imagine are fixable. Like your father-in-law didn't think he could walk straight or his heart was good or any of these things. So this is what's so exciting. I think, you know, when we talk about treating diseases and your book does a really good job of like talking about some of the things that we can do about Alzheimer's and cancer and some of the new discoveries and immunotherapy and it's all great. We need to be doing all of it. But the truth is if we cured cancer and heart disease, we'd get probably a total of three or four more years of life. That's it.
That's right.
If we eradicate it from the entire planet. It's crazy. But with these technologies we're talking, we're talking about not just three to five.
Years, we're talking about 30, 50, 100 years.
Of extension. That's mind-blowing.
There's also, you know, for people listening, some people that doesn't interest them. Like when we were at the Vatican, Peter asked, how many will live to be 120? Like I said, it's like two-thirds didn't raise their hand. And Peter's a press ball. And I said, dude, here's what they're thinking is old and drilly and not looking good. But there are things you can do right now that we already know about, like hormone therapy. Actually knowing where your hormones are sounds so simplistic. And most women think of it because of going through menopause. But hormone replacement therapy is different than hormone optimization therapy. And so, we had a guy who came to Fountain Life, I think he was 36 pounds overweight, feels like he's gotten old, brain fog, all these things. So we did all his blood, did all his tests, and then we did his hormones. And, people don't tell you, I think he was 225. Well, I think you're around 150, they tell you, you got a real problem. But most men need 7, 8, or 900 to feel like a human. And all we did was change hormone therapy, lost the 36 pounds, turned around his business, turned around his life because he felt like 10 years younger. But people wait until the traditional form of medicine is there's a huge problem when you can do some simple things, do a test so inexpensive, and then completely change the quality of your life today, and then reprogram to stay younger. And then if there's a disease, deal with it. But I think it's important that people know things they can do right now as well. as these incredible breakthroughs that are coming.
Down the pipe that can help us reprogram our bodies. Well, that's right. What Peter was talking about was the epigenome, right? And we know that it doesn't take millions and billions of dollars and huge technologies and full body MRIs to affect the epigenome. What affects it is what you eat, the type of exercise you do, sleep, stress, relationships, love, cuddling actually improves the function of your epigenome, just hugging somebody. that's so powerful. You talk about all the times how you change your state, changing your state, hormetic therapies like hot and cold therapy.
Right.
Right.
Powerful stuff that we, we can actually use now that the science is there for. And it wasn't even, some of it is so simple, like, just like you.
Said, the hot and cold. I start every morning in my cold plunge, you know, but I also, I, I, you know, I'm about saunas forever. I do a sauna every now and then, but in research for the book, we worked with this. researcher who's brilliant in this area. And, you know, you literally four times a week in a sauna. You don't even have to own one. You could go to the gym and you reduce your risk of a heart attack by over 48%. The result of a stroke by 56%. You know, it changes your blood pressure. I mean, and a lot of people can't imagine going exercising, but they can imagine sitting in a sauna for 18 to 20 minutes, and then all of a sudden they start feeling it. Now they want to exercise, now they want to do other things. So there's so many Little shortcuts in here. A cancer, he's afraid of cancer. You look up and you find out broccoli sprouts, there's a thousand studies showing how it defends against cancer and 80% reduction of cancer in breast for women, right? And it's got sulforaphane in it, who would have known, right? It doesn't cost you a fortune. You don't have to do a giant medical invention. So I want people to know while there's these great technologies, there's also these.
Simple lifestyle things that change it all. After I read that in your book, I went and bought the broccoli seeds and I have them, but I haven't.
Figured out how to sprout them.
Sprout him yet.
You hire someone to sprout him for you, Mark.
You talk about this all the time, Mark, in your work. And I think it's worth just repeating it for folks again. Let's talk about the basics of sleep, exercise, diet, hydration, mindset, you know, in addition to scanning your body to make sure there's nothing going on inside, right?
Yeah.
So, first off, you know, we dive into that.
We.
So sleep, something that, you know, I used to like. Pride myself on four or five hours sleep when I was in medical school. And today I pride myself on eight hours sleep, right? I got my aura ring, I'm measuring it, I'm making sure I go to sleep early, I'm in a cold 64 degree room with a chill blanket underneath, eye shades, and I don't watch TV for the hour before I don't actually watch TV at all. But, you know, sleep is something I'm proud of getting more than ever. Our brain needs eight hours.
If we- and ironically, I want to object just for a second, I'm working on the sleep chapter at 6:15 in the morning. I gotta be up in three and a half hours. I'm like, what's wrong with this? We talked to Dr. Walkers, you know, head of neuroscience at UC Berkeley. And he convinced me, Peter convinced me to read his book. And then I went, we did our interviews. And the way he convinced me is he said, Tony, there's been a 1.6 billion person study. I was like, how would you possibly coordinate that? He goes, we did. 70 countries have daylight savings time. And he said, here's what you got to know. When we spring forward and lose just one hour for the next three days, on average in each country, there's 24% more heart attacks. When we go back in the phone, get one hour extra sleep over those three days, 21% reduction in heart attacks. And he does the same thing with car accidents. You know, Peter and I were both four or five hour guys. My wife loves eight hours. Same thing. It's like I work at it now. I got my whoop on. I just make sure I'm in that bed for eight hours. and so, you know, I might get six and a half hours now, but it's completely different than the four and a half or five. And I feel such a difference when it's there. And then there are times when I.
Violate it and I pay the price.
Yeah.
So the second category, food. And, Mark, you know about this better than anybody. And if I were going to say there's no single diet for, it depends on your genomics, where your, your family of origin is. But there is one thing. There's one thing that everybody needs to know, and that's that sugar is poison. Sugar causes neuroinflammation. Sugar causes you know, cardiac inflammation and cardiac disease, it is fundamentally something the body never evolved to have. We didn't have sugar as we were growing up on the plains of Africa. It's a recent invention and it's addictive and it causes disease in so many ways. So the question is, can you eliminate that from your diet? That's the number one objective that will change your dietetic life.
Well, thank God you got the message, Peter, because I've written about 18 books on the topic.
You know, by the way, once again, again, there are things you can do, like for people that are overweight, there was a study done in Lancet two years, and here's all they did. Eliminate 300 calories a day. So that's a bagel, or that's one of the nice Starbucks that you have. And they lost 16 pounds on average, and their blood sugar balanced out. I mean, it's like, again, most people, I'm one of those people, I like all or nothing, go so extreme. But there are a lot of ways that you can make these minor changes through time as a new habit.
They completely change your biochemistry and the quality of your life. Absolutely, Peter. Before you go on to the next topic, I want to reiterate what you're saying because you were talking about NAD and sirtuins and this master regulatory system that controls our mitochondria and our energy and our gene expression and inflammation, all these things. And I was at a conference at the Menla Center, which is Bob Thurman Center. He's a Tibetan Buddhist and he had the Dalai Lama there, all the Tibetan longevity experts, all the longevity science, Leonard Guarente who discovered the sirtuins, David Sinclair, all these guys were there. and I'm walking, you know, down some country path with Leonard Guerite. So, Leonard, what is the deal with sirtuins? What is regulating them and how do we fix this? He says, well, it's sugar. Like sugar is poison to these things. And it turns out that one of the hallmarks of aging is these nutrient sensing systems. Sirtuins is one of them, something called mTOR is another one. CMPK is another one. And they regulate protein and sugar. But sugar is the poison that actually causes these to dysregulate and cause rapid aging. all across the board. So, Peter, you're so right on this.
Other things real quick, two liters of water a day at least, keeping yourself hydrated, especially if you're a caffeine drinker. La Haye, cheers. And then a whole plant based diet, Mark, which you write about extensively. So, Tony, what about exercise? I mean, it's something that you've- before.
You skip on diet, there's a lot of stuff that that you cover in the book, I just want to touch on quickly, which are things like time restricted eating, eating with a narrow window, giving your body a break from the overwhelm of food and the abundance. We eat so many more calories than we did even 50 years ago. And so giving your body time where you're not eating, whether it's 12, 14, 16 hours a day, actually trying different things like fasting, mimicking diets or ketogenic diets or intermittent fasting, fasting a day a week, five, two diets. There's a lot of ways to do it. The whole idea is to give your body a rest because when you stop eating is when you activate all those healing repair mechanisms in the body that regenerate and repair and renew yourself. And that's really what we're talking about here.
You know, I talk to people in seminars all the time and I say, you know, where does energy come from? And people yell out food. And I say, okay, well, tell me about your last Thanksgiving. You know, tell me about the meal you had and tell me how much energy you had afterwards, right? And then I ask, how many of you have ever gone on a fast for five or six days? And, you know, you get maybe 18, 20% of the audience that may have done that. And I say, okay, get past the first day. I know that's a rough one, but by day two, certainly by day three, you had no food. Does your energy increase or decrease? Everybody talks about how it increases, right? Unless you've had that experience. But Dr. Longo's approach to this where he's got this intermittent fasting, 12 hours or 16 hours, depending how you go about it in the book, we describe some ways that don't feel so extreme.
But where you can get the same benefit. And, that's what we call a hermetic therapy, just like the hot and cold by restricting, it's like an inver, they call it adversity mimetic. They mimic adversity. And when the body has a stress, it bounces back stronger, whether it's cold therapy or heat therapy or restricted eating.
Or exercise, different kinds of exercise, which you need to talk about. Exercise is the perfect example, as Peter was just saying. So it's like exercise. It doesn't have to be a hard exercise. You know, we did a study, it was done in the study in the JAMA, and it was saying literally one hour of walking on a treadmill and you reduce your chance of a heart attack by 48%. you know, there are some cool things. You know, years ago, I heard about static contraction. They did this study with 35, 000 athletes, mostly people, bodybuilders that are, you know, going seven days a week to the gym. And they discovered a lot of things, muscle confusion, a lot of cool techniques came out of those original studies, like 18 years ago. But one thing they didn't know what to do with initially that came out that I got exposed to was that they, these, inevitably, these, you know, bodybuilders would get injured or get sick. and they get injured. And most of them are plateauing because they're going to the gym six, seven days a week. And most of us know you don't build muscle while you're making the stimulus. You make the stimulus, you make it when you sleep and your body has been stimulated to rebuild. Right. So these guys are over training, but no one got it until they saw these guys would get sick or they get injured. They come back 10 days off or two weeks off, and they do a personal best. So this group created this thing called static contraction. So, you know, I got long arms. So if you were doing like a you know, something like a bench press, I would do like 210, 220, something like that, you know, short guy, a little bit easier, right? And it was never my focus. But I started studying this. And what they do is they say, look, if a car was coming at you, would you start here with the barbell or the car and try and push it away? No, you're gonna start out here so you can use all the muscles. And so they do this process. They. This is what they did originally, where they drop just below bending point, so you're not locked out. and you have to find a weight that you can hold for 15 seconds. If you can at least five, if you can hold it for 15, you got to go heavier. Well, my first way of doing this static contraction, I was 425 pounds. I took a woman who was doing this for a while, who was like 62 or three years old. She looked a little older, gray hair. And I took her to Gold's Gym to film her. And there was this 25 year old kid with, you know, ponytail and really built. and he's doing the leg press machine. He's got all these weights on there. He's sweating profusely. I got a camera crew because I want to capture this because I want to show people the static contraction. And so he finishes, you know, he's in the middle of a set. He finishes one of the sets. And this one says, excuse me, sir, while you're resting, can I get a, you know, can I jump in and just do a quick set? And he's looking at her. He sees the camera. He thinks he's being punked. And she goes, could you guys add 150 pounds? I swear to God. And, you know, because she didn't bring it all the way here to her legs. She was out here just below. and she held it and it fires off all those muscles. So I did that for several years. I built 24 pounds more muscle in my body. I thought I was so great. But, you know, I got to, like, 5 75 on the weights. I got people trying to hold it, and then one late, one arm was a little stronger on the other, and I torched out. So I was in so much pain, I stopped doing it. I said, someday somebody's going to build something with. I thought it would be, like, compressed air, so you wouldn't have something that could kill you. Right? But now there's a company and it's called OsteoStrong. I invested with them because I was blown away. They took this technique and, you know, muscle developed and is limited by the strength of your bones. Most people don't know that. And so, you know, most women know that, you know, osteoporosis is a real problem past 50. And, you know, most of the drugs fossilize the bones. This is the first technique. You got to get three and a half times your body weight. Most people could never dream of doing that. But with this device, you can build to that point. My wife couldn't do 120 pounds and she's done 350 to give you an idea. Amazing. And it doesn't make your muscles bulky. It makes them long and sleep and strong. And it's four exercises with these machines. It takes 10 minutes you can do with your clothes on and it works for every muscle in your body. You know, there are people who don't want to work out. So now there's VR workouts I'm sure you've seen that are unbelievable. Like there's so much fun. and you don't even realize you're working out. So part of it is just consistency. Part of it is getting the right stimulus and the amount of rest still. Because what happens is if you overdo this, if you try and do it a week from now and you don't improve, they say take 10 days off and sure enough, come back in 10 days and you improve again. So there's great breakthroughs and exercise. So it doesn't have to just be doing the same crap over and over again.
Yeah.
It's true. You can really see it. And by the way, I'm sure you know, that lack of muscle, the breakdown of the muscle. Now it's being seen by a lot of people in medicine as important as blood pressure, because when people age, that's, you know, that's what starts to break down.
That's where they end up in the hospital. And then now they're, you know, the whole thing starts to break down. No, it's sarcopenia is the biggest driver of all the metabolic changes, little hormones, inflammation, blood sugar issues, all that stuff.
And, you know, Tony, I read, I read in the book that you love.
That machine so much. You got one for your house. So I'm coming to Florida in April. I'm going to come over. I want to try it.
Come over. I'll have you check it out. It's pretty awesome. It's four machines. But come on over. We'll do it. Okay.
So Peter, tell us, tell us more about some of the basic foundational things besides the diet exercise. So we talked about, we talked about.
Keeping hydrated, we talked about food, minimizing sugar, whole plant diets. The work that this guy, Dr. Mark Hyman speaks about and writes about, so proficient.
That quack, that quack, I wouldn't listen to him.
On the exercise front, you know, it doesn't have to be heavyweights. It's just getting, you know, stressing the muscles. Muscle is a direct correlation between muscle mass and longevity. most people die because they have a fall and break a hip or break a pelvis and end up in the hospital and it's a spiral from there.
Yeah.
One of the things that I do and I commend to everybody is I take as many of my meetings walking as I can. So I will try and get 10,000 to 20,000 steps a day because I'll do my Zooms. They work on my phone. I wasn't going to do this one walking or have a walking treadmill. and I take my meetings there and it's getting as much as I can. So I feel good about it.
Yeah, you drag me out at five in the morning for a walk in the Santa Monica Pier one day. I did, I did.
I take my many meetings walking on the, I mean, I live in Santa Monica, but you might as well enjoy doing that, right? You have to excuse if you're in the middle of Buffalo. So, you know, that exercise mindset is so important. I cannot express enough, right? You all know those studies of, you know, a man and woman who are deeply in love and the wife dies and the husband goes a few weeks later or vice versa. You know, you can will yourself to death and you can will yourself to life. You need to make sure that your vision of your future is bigger than the vision of your past. You're excited to be alive. This is the most extraordinary time ever. And so, what would it be like? What would you do with an extra 30 years of healthy life? Now, most people get sad and they want to retire and they want to slow down.
Why?
Because they're in pain. They're not enjoying, they're exhausted, they don't have the energy, they're in pain when they move. And so what if you didn't have that pain? What if you had the energy? This is the vision of healthy longevity we're talking about where you have the aesthetics, you look good, the cognition, you're thinking clearly, the mobility, you're moving well, and then it's like, yeah, I'm in. You know, put me in for the next round, coach.
Most people really don't understand the power of their mind. I mean, we talk about placebos in that next last chapter, which I told you, you got to read that. But you can do all the health things, then you can mess yourself up with your mind. Right. You know, placebos started in World War II. Most people don't know that they were discovered because they ran into morphine. It was actually not the doctor. It was a nurse. And, you know, these people are going to go into shock. They're in massive pain. And she hands him a saline solution and says, here's some morphine because he was freaking out. So he injected him and of course he had total certainty he was going to work. He assured them, your pain will be gone in a few seconds. You know, you're going to be fine. Not one person went in shock. Most of them, their pain disappeared and they were given nothing but saline but with total certainty. So he came back to Harvard after the war and he started what we now look as standard operational practice, which is comparing a drug to a placebo, but almost nobody talks about it, but lots of placebos outdo the drugs, but you don't make billions of dollars telling people about a placebo. And here's what's really interesting. The bigger the intervention on the placebo, the more the brain seems convinced, the greater the result. So if I give you a small pill versus a big pill versus an injection is more powerful, the most powerful is a fake surgery. The VA did a study on orthoscopic surgery. They took a third of the people and did a fake surgery. They just cut open the skin, sewed them right back up and did nothing. The nurses didn't know. And then they followed up a year later and the stats are in the book. It's mind boggling. But the people a year later who had the surgery still had problems, still had pains, the ones without it, the majority had no pain, talked about how healed they were because it was that powerful. It's even more. Harvard has shown you don't have to give something inert. You don't have to give a placebo. They've given people a barbiturate. and a red pill and said, this is an amphetamine and, you know, the probituals gonna make your body drop and their body's accelerated and vice versa. You know, Dr. Langer there at Harvard is a good friend of mine who helped create mindfulness. She's done these studies taking people in their 70s away to the CAT skills where she did this, I think it was two week long program and they changed it so everything there, the TVs, the radios had all the stuff from 35 years ago. Told everybody instruct him speak as the present moment as if it was 35 years ago. I think it was 10 days or two weeks, can't remember. But what was insane was that their eyesight improved at the end of those two weeks. Their blood pressure improved. They look better, right? It completely shifted. And I interviewed Norman Cousins when I was 24 years old. He came to one of my fire walks because he was always interested in psychoneuroimmunology and he saw this as fascinating. so we developed a great friendship and I interviewed him for my original, it wasn't podcast in those days, it was called Power Talk. It was this interview format I did. And he told me a story. He said, Tony, he goes, you need to understand that the mind will make you sick, used improperly and that it's viral. I said, what do you mean? He goes, you know if somebody's yawning and you find yourself yawning or they're laughing and it's not that funny, but they're cracking up enough you laugh. He goes, I'll tell you an example. So I could give you a dozen of these. He went, he was there. He went to this college football game. I don't think it was UCLA, it was a different one. And he said, Somebody got really sick, projectile vomiting. And people saw it and the doctor came, was on staff, and the doctor is going through what he did that day, trying to figure out what was making him sick. And the only thing that was different than what the guy did daily was he had a vending machine Coke. So the doc decided, well, maybe there's copper or something leaking in it. So he made an announcement across the loudspeaker and told everybody, Avoid the Coke machine. They said, Tony, it was like a movie. People were projectile vomiting like all of them. They literally had 12 ambulances, 12 taking people back and forth to the hospital. An hour later, they did testing, found out it was all fine, and they told everybody and everybody healed. And then here's the most important one. The CDC, we all know today that the biggest fear people have, based on the world we're in today, they're gonna die of COVID And outside aging, which is the number one factor, the real factors you control, we all know is obesity. 80% of the people die are obese, right? But here, I found the study with CC, I put it in the book because nobody would believe it unless you read it. Everything's documented. The number two killer on COVID, number two risk factor is gonna make you die, anxiety and fear. Yeah. Because anxiety and fear suppresses the immune system. Anxiety and fear will make you not be able to catch your breath. Anxiety and fear, I mean, it's just amazing. And yet we look at our media and they're good people. They're not trying to harm anybody, but they're trying to meet their shareholders needs. You just get more eyeballs. And we all know fear sells. If it bleeds, it leads. So, we're living in a world where we need to take back control of that. And that's really what the last two chapters of this book about showing you the tools so you can shift all.
That in your life. Yeah, I think, Tony, you're such a master of this. And in the book, you quoted Norman Cousins. He said, Our bodies are apothecaries. We convert our expectations into chemical reality. And you say, the quality of your life is a quality of your habitual emotions. and so, Peter, I want to come back to you to talk about some of the vitality pharmacy, some of the supplements, some of the kind of advances in peptides, exosomes, cool stuff that people are doing. But before we do, I want to talk about the why, because if you're miserable inside, who the heck wants to live a long time, right? The quality of your life is the quality of your habitual emotions. What is your emotional home? And you talk about the three things that lead to emotional mastery, right? What we focus on, what does it mean, and what am I going to do? Can you unpack that in a couple of minutes for us?
Because I think it's so important. I think it's so important. So I tell you, I found it out, you know, when I was really young, the reason I feed 100 million meals a year is I was fed when I was 11 years old and we had no money and no food. And my mom and dad were fighting and my dad and mom were saying things, you know, once you say, you can't take them back. I've got a five-year-old younger brother and seven-year-old younger sister. I'm trying to make them not hear. And there's a knock at the door. And I go to the door and there's this tall guy, I'm just a little kid standing there with two bags of groceries and an uncooked turkey on the ground. and he goes, Is your father home? And I was like, Just one moment, right? So I go get my dad who's screaming at my mom. She's screaming at him. And I said, the door's for you. He goes, you, answer. I said, I did. It's for you. So I'm sitting there, little boy just so excited. My dad's going to be so happy. He opens the door and he was not happy. And this is, they'll understand why this affects the mind, right? And he says to the guy, We don't accept charity. He goes to slam the door, but the man's foot was there. He wasn't trying to, and he just bounced off of his foot. And then my dad got a little madder and he said, Sir, sir, look, I'm just a delivery guy. Somebody wants you to have a great Thanksgiving. Everybody has tough times. You know, this is for you. My dad said, We don't take charity and started push harder. And the guy leaned in. So now it hit his foot and his shoulder. And I'll remember and I'll never forget, the guy saw me and there was a long pause and he said, Sir, please don't make your family suffer because of your ego. My dad's veins in the side of his throat went crazy. I thought he was going to punch him in the face. There's this long pause. And then he took the food and didn't say thank you and took the food and slammed the door. I didn't figure it out then, but I was shocked. I was in so much pain. And then shortly after that, my father left our family. And so I was trying to uncapped, you know, figure out what this is. And I realized there's three decisions we make every moment of our life. And if you take conscious control of these three decisions, you have a different life. And most people do them unconsciously. 48% of what we do roughly is habit. so the first one is what do you focus on? Because whatever you focus on, you feel. So if you focus on your kids, this is going to happen, it's the worst thing, you're going to feel sick to your stomach, it's going to be real to you. Because focus equals feeling, right? There's three habits. Like, do you focus more on what you have or what's missing? Most people focus more on what's missing. Achievers, superstars, focus more on what's missing. So how do you sustain happiness? It's never enough.
I mean, some of the most unhappy people I've met are billionaires.
I interviewed 50 for my book and without naming names, there were probably four, maybe five that were really happy, at least in my presence, consistently around their family, right? Which is crazy. But money didn't do that to them. These habits did it to them because it's never enough. Second question, do you focus more on what you can or can't control? Well, in COVID, most people focus what they can't control because there's so much you can't. So add what's missing and what you can't control. And then a third one, Do you focus on the past, the present or future? Lots of people, it's the past or a future they're worried about. So, you know, I ask people in my audiences, how many of you know someone who takes antidepressants and still depressed? 90% of the room will raise their hand. How's that possible? They're taking a drug. Well, because the drug numbs them, but it doesn't deal with the source. If you're constantly focused on what's missing and what you can't control, you're going to be pissed off or angry or sad or depressed. So Stanford, came to me because you know how much we've had the greatest drug overdoses in the history of the United States in the last year. We've had, you know, some of the greatest, you know, number of suicides, as you know. And so, you know, if you look at traditional on the meta studies, these guys at Stanford came to me and said, the meta studies show, you know, traditional therapy with drugs, you know, for depression, you know, and therapy, about 40% of the people improve, 60% don't improve. After a year's worth of therapy, and of the 40% that improved, the average improvement is 50%, meaning they're 50% less depressed. Some get totally well, some not at all, that's the average. And then there was a breakthrough that happened two years ago. Johns Hopkins decided to use psilocybin, you know, a psychotropic drug, along with a month's worth of therapy. And they got results that never been seen in history. 53% of the people 30 days later did not have the symptoms of depression. It's the greatest breakthrough we've seen. So they came to me and said, we've seen, we talked to so many people, we've met people, we know people that have been through your programs are depressed, they're no longer depressed, but that's anecdotal. Would you mind if we did a scientific study? So I said, sure. So they took my date with destiny program six days. They recruited clinically depressed people. They created a focus group or an alternative group to measure against. Most of the professors at Stanford, when they told them they're doing these said, well, it's just positive thinking. I have no clue what I really do. They said, okay, then What do you suggest? He said, well, do gratitude journaling. That's really a positive psychology. It works well. 30 days later, the people were still depressed. There was a slight improvement in depression. They took the group and went through six days of changing their perceptual filters, their belief structures, their values for six days, no drugs. 100% of the people had no depression 30 days later. 19% had ideations of suicide zero after 30 days. They did a study 11 months after the program. 70% reduction in negative emotions, 55% increase in positive emotions, no drugs. So there are things you can do within you that can change the quality of your life completely. But learning to control what you focus on, second decision, what does it mean? Is this the end of the beginning? If you think it's the end of a relationship, you're going to be very different than you think it's the beginning. Is God punishing me? Is that why I have this problem? Is God challenging me? Is this a gift from God or am I just a lazy bastard? It's not God's fault, right? Yeah. Is this person dissing me, coaching me, or loving me? Because whatever you decide it means, changes your emotion and your emotion affects the last decision, what am I going to do? And if you're pissed off, you're going to do something very different than if you're feeling grateful. So, those three decisions are habits.
And when you change them, you literally change the quality of your life. I mean, honestly, Tony, the Life Force book is amazing for all the science and longevity, but I found that section on mindset one of the most powerful parts of the whole book. And I think it's important for people because we know, for example, that meaning and purpose extend life. If you have meaning and purpose, this is a recent Jam article. And I think those are all really foundational to everything else we're doing. Yeah, I always say optimists live longer, even if they're wrong. I think I'm like that. It's just a flesh wound. It's fine. Tony's jumping on stage with a broken back. It's just fine. It's okay. Never mind. So, Peter, let's dive into the vitality pharmacy part of the book. Cause I think that is so profound. And it's stuff that's safe usually. Sometimes it's stuff's a little on the edge. It's available, it's things people can do, and it's honestly things that need more research for sure. But these are all the things that I'm doing that you both are doing that we're trying out and kind of experimenting in ourselves as guinea pigs. And I think it's such a powerful.
Section of the book about the vitality pharmacy.
Yeah.
So there's a number of what we call nutraceuticals and supplements and medicines that are affecting the body and are the pathways in particular the potential for this concept of age reversal. Tony mentioned it earlier, right? We have seven sirtuin genes that generate seven sirtuin enzymes and these sirtuins are doing two things. They are going back and forth between keeping the epigenetic structure of your DNA as it should be, and then they're going off to repair the DNA. then they're going back and forth. And the more repair you need because you're older and you have more mutations, the less they're controlling your epigenetic programming. And it starts falling apart. It accelerates falling apart because what fuels these sirtuins is NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, right? It's this molecule that's sort of the energy currency. And so the question is, and as Tony said, we, you know, lose half of our NAD at least. So when you need it the most because you're repairing mutations and trying to get your epigenome back in shape, you're down for the count. And so there are a number of NAD precursors, and there are two that are publicly discussed. One is NMN and the other is NR. NMN is something that you can find online. There are multiple providers, there are some crystallized Tony, you mentioned Metro Biotech. I take about a gram of NMN a day, as does David Sinclair, as.
Does- I actually do shots of NAD.
Yeah.
And then, and then there's nicotinamide riboside, NR, which is a precursor just before NMN. And both of those are shown to increase intracellular, this is NMN, and you want your NAD inside your mitochondria. Um, and so that's one of them. Tony, you know, do you wanna talk about peptides a second?
Sure. I mean, you know, peptides are these proteins that were, they've been discovered a long time, but they were used by the Russians in the 80s for their athletes. And there was a particular doctor there. He also worked with people in a submarine that were having radiation frequency. And so he made these discoveries, but we have a list of like 14 of them. And some of them, for example, like, you know, men can have a blue pill if they're having difficulty for, but men, it's only blood flow. For women, it's desire. It's a neurological trigger. So there's one that actually is now shown to make a difference in women's desire and men's desire as an example.
There are some that are interesting.
PT 141 or Melanotan or- Yes, 141.
And then you- I use that, I started using it, I'm like, wow, okay then. I'm like, whoa, what is going on here?
I'm 62. Everybody looks at his face, that looks like it all.
I'm like, whoa.
But most people would never believe that works. And there's the ones for your gut. I mean, there's, there's- I mean, we could sit here and go for 45 minutes on them, but they're listed in the book and you can see what it is. And here are some of the options, but you need a person who's qualified, obviously, to make sure this is what's right for you. And then, you know, there's net form.
And maybe you want to touch base on that because I want to talk about the peptides for a minute, because I, I use peptides, and I, I was very, I was very skeptical about them both as a doctor and as a patient for myself, but I started, I mean, I always try on myself everything before I started doing it. And, you know, I started using it. I found a really profound difference and I recently tweaked my shoulder. I had like a bicipital tendinitis from lifting or something. And I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna shoot up some BP C157 in there. And I just like gave myself a little shot, like a diabetic needle. I'm like, 10 minutes later, I'm like, whoa, what the, you know, it just gone. And I was like, did another one the next day and it just, that was it.
And I was like, this stuff really freaking works. For everybody, you know, a peptide is a sequence of amino acids. It's the same components that make up our protein. and these are these short chain peptides are signaling molecules and they're activating different repair mechanisms in the cells and they're hitting the cell surfaces and there is a list of them. One of the things that we ended up doing in the book is identifying those that are, there's a great chart, I'm just looking at it right over here.
Yeah.
You know, it's identifying those that are approved by the FDA. those that are available. And then giving you a chart of this one's for weight loss, this one's for increasing your growth hormone, this one's for tendon or muscle repair, whatever the case might be.
Immune system function.
Immune system function, absolutely. You mentioned Metformin. So Metformin, also known as Glucophage, is a drug that costs literally pennies per pill. It's gone off its patent label. It's been around for a while. and it has two major objectives. Number one, it reduces your blood glucose levels. So if you're pre-diabetic, it was given for people who are pre-diabetic, but it seems to have a cancer protective feature. You'll lose a couple of kilograms on the metformin. It reduces the glycation, because glucose in your bloodstream, again, we talked about it being a poison, right? You get glycosylated cholesterol that can deposit on the hearts, it causes neuroinflammation, and so Metformin is a way of bringing your glucose levels down. And of course, cancer thrives on what? It thrives on glucose. It's the only fuel that cancer uses. So, if you can reduce your glucose levels, it's like removing oxygen from the room, cancer has a much harder time proliferating.
By the way, if people are interested, they get the book, but if they go to lifeforce.com after they do that, they say, well, God, I want to do diagnostics. We have an app that you can download. So, our company, which has, you know, multiple locations around the United States, but we can also direct it to you, like a CCTA test. Your doctor can order it. We can set it up for you. So, you don't even have to necessarily come to our center. And then we have mylifeforce.com. if you go to lifeforce, it's there as well, which is a separate company that just does peptides and hormones for people, does the testing and delivering it for people as well. We're trying to provide people with simple.
Solutions with professional doctors and telemedicine that's available from wherever they are in the world.
Yeah, it's really a great resource.
The book doesn't make a difference if it's just entertainment. If it doesn't change the way you behave, the actions you take in your life, then please don't pick it up. It's meant to change the course of someone's health span. And so the passion that Tony brings to impacting hundreds of millions of lives around the world, you brought to this book as well. And of course, it's my passion as well. of giving you, here are the assets, here's the knowledge, here's the on ramps, if you would, towards this incredible future we've got.
I want to plan to see about one more thing because some of your viewers or listeners may know somebody who has Parkinson's, for example. And we have a chapter about this new technology called Insight Tech. It's literally, you know, it's incisionless brain surgery, basically. if you've ever seen, I saw this woman who couldn't walk across the room on 15 different drugs and, you know, wobbling. It's a pretty scary thing. It takes them about an hour to figure out the location, and they may do this ultrasound that zaps that part, and it just stops. It is mind-boggling this woman just went on a 50 mile bike ride two years after her treatment, to give you an idea. Couldn't walk across the room. And if you've ever seen somebody who's gotten, you know, the ocular implants when they can hear for the first time crying, that's the kind of reaction you get. So if you know somebody you care about, it's got Parkinson's, you gotta look in Insight Tech. And what's so cool about it is it's in like 100 hospitals now and more importantly, around the world, but more importantly, it's also linked to insurance. So it's something that somebody can really.
Do and worth looking at to see.
Whether it can make a difference because that's what's so great about it. And that situation are in really huge.
Psychological and emotional pain besides the physical channel.
Yeah.
And Tony and Peter, why the book is so great is it includes all the latest advances that are sort of sci-fi high tech cool stuff that people are figuring out about how to fix people with real issues. But it also has really practical foundational stuff for everybody to use. And that's why life force.com and my life force are great resources because they help people navigate those territories of the Vitality Pharmacy. And we just touched on a few, whether it's metformin or peptides or NMN or NAD, but there's various supplements, broccoli sprouts, and, you know, and you can't, you can't do all of it, but I try to figure out in my own life, how do I, in the context of my life, build the structures and the systems and the process that make it easy for me to do the right thing every day? So today, you know, I woke up and I made sure I had a good sleep. I have my eight sleep mattress with the cool bed, my eye shades, my earplugs. I'm a little goofy, but it's not the sexiest thing in the world, but I got a good sleep, woke up, I did, you know, my journaling every morning to just kind of get my mind straight. I played tennis. I took a hot steam and ice bath, did my peptides, had a great smoothie with all my, I call it my healthy aging longevity smoothie with all my good adaptogens and this and that. I did my NAD shot. You know, I'm sort of like, it sounds like a lot and I'm a weirdo, but I like it. I also did five different DNA methylation.
Tests to measure my biological age today.
Because I want to see, you know, one, please let me know what you find. How do you test legit? And two, you know, is what I'm doing working and three, what's going to happen in six months from now as I do all these things? Yeah. Because we now are actually, Peter, you know, launched the next prize for longevity and is trying to figure out how do we measure and what are the metrics we can use to actually see if this stuff is working or not? Because we can talk about all day long, but unless you can prove it's working, like get your cholesterol down, that's a metric, right? But there's biological age clocks now. There are DNA methylation clocks and other clocks that people are looking at to measure the rate of aging. And, you know, you mentioned yours was 50 something. I did my telomeres a few years ago. I was 57, I think, or eight at the time. I was 39. I'm curious to see what my DNA methylation clock is, but all these things are things for us to look at, to try. And the foundational stuff is really key. And I think, you know, we can get off on tangents of all the kind of cool gizmos and gadgets and diagnostics, and not everybody's gonna be able to get an MRI today. But the exponential technology, the part of the book was so exciting, Peter, because we all, you know, like you mentioned about the phone, like, you know, this is, I mean, I think my, my first calculator was, like, over 100 bucks, and all I can do is add and subtract, you know, and, and, and now you're talking about, like, this whole idea of exponential technology, and people don't get it. Like, you say 30 exponential steps, you know, regular steps, 30 steps, you go 30 meters, 30 exponential steps, you go six times around the planet, you know, 26 times. 26 times. Oh, 26 meters.
Yes.
And then, and then, you're like, you get people all, you want a dollar a day for 30 days, or you want a penny a day that doubles every day. People go, I want the dollar a day. That's 30 bucks. At the end of the penny a day that you double every day, you get $10 million.
People just have a hard time comprehending that. Our brains are not wired for that. We're linear thinkers in a scarcity-minded world. And the technology that we're developing, and remember I said earlier, we're seeing billions, tens of billions of dollars going into AI and massive computation. Quantum computing is coming. One of the things that quantum computing is going to do, I won't go into the details here, but is going to allow us to simulate molecular chemistry and interactions. We're able to understand what drug is perfect for just you, not just for all humans. And we've seen AI, we're seeing a company we talk about in Silicon Medicine that my venture fund is one of the many funds that backed it, that's using AI to design new drugs that are a thousand times faster and cheaper to develop. It's an extraordinary world. You know, I do want to mention for science fiction, Come Science Back Tech that's in the book. I'm sorry, I have to do this.
Go for it.
Go for it.
I was just gonna ask you about them, actually. That's where I was going. That's where I was going.
So, number one is regenerating organs, creating organs in you. So, we have a friend, Martine Rothblatt. I've known her for 40 years. amazing, who saved her daughter's life by finding the drug to solve her lung disease. But she said, listen, there's 100,000 people on the waiting list for hearts, livers, kidneys, and lungs, and we just don't have enough people dying in motorcycle accidents to provide them, nor enough organ donors. I'm an organ donor. Should I pass? I want my organs to be gone to use. At the end of the day, what she did was work with Craig Venter to engineer 10 genes in the pig genome to remove what are called endogenous retroviruses and to change the surface proteins so that you were effectively humanizing the pig. And it turns out that a pig has the same size heart, liver, lung, kidney as a human does. and if you could humanize that pig, when you sacrifice it, you've got literally a near infinite supply of organs as well as bacon. And this is not theory, it was actually demonstrated a few months back using a pig originated kidney transplanted into a human, right? It's magical stuff. Then we talk about another brilliant individual, Dean Kamen.
And by the way, it was just done with a heart a few weeks ago. And Martine was part of that because I reached out to her to cover because she said to us, we're asking your timing. She says, by the time people are reading your book, I think it'll be happening. And that was like a year ago. It sounded like ridiculous at that stage, but it's actually occurring. But what's even more exciting is go.
Ahead, Peter, share with them what's being done. This is amazing.
Yeah.
So, Dean Kamen, who's the creator of first robotics and implantable insulin pumps, and he's got 1500 patents.
He's one of the most, he's like the Edison or Tesla of today, right?
He's like, yeah, he's the Edison or Tesla of today, without question. And he's a, is a just an incredible soul. So he was not in the bio area. Well, he was building robotic arms and robotic, you know, leg replacements. And at the end of the day, he ended up getting a grant from the US military about $150 million total. And he built a consortium called the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, A-R-M-I Army. And what they've done is they've built a machine that in one end of the machine, you put those induced pluripotent stem cells, you take a skin cell from yourself, you turn it into a earlier precursor stem cell that can then differentiate, you put it in the beginning of the machine, and over the course of, you know, a month and a half to three months, it differentiates into the tissues and then it's engineered and manufactured. So at the end of those three months, you've got a pediatric heart that is come out that is ready for transplantation. They've already done bone ligament bone segments for your knee repair, your ankle repair, the body shot.
Yeah.
And the next Target. So the military is doing it because they want a supply of organs for injured vets. and so forth. But this is, I mean, between those two approaches, and there are a number of other ones as well, it's like we have the ability to, you know, give you a replacement set of organs. Yeah. Which connects me to the, to the next breakthrough, which is the work that Bob Hurry, one of our, our partners in this book, does. So Bob discovered years ago that the placenta that I think of as a 3D printer that manufactures the baby is the origination of all of the stem cells that are used to differentiate and make the fetus. And everybody, you know, most everybody has the placenta thrown away after the afterbirth. But Bob said, no, no, I'm going to save it and I'm going to extract from the placenta the cells. And so what comes out of placenta? One is stem cells, a perfect sort of age zero stem cell population that can be used and is going into research right now for regenerating muscle, being able to actually grow organs, being able to reduce inflammation, a whole slew of different benefits. Exosomes are sort of the growth factors that come out of stem cells. And then natural killer cells and T cells and What Bob has done in his company.
Those are part of your immune system.
Yeah, the T-cells and natural killer cells. So it turns out that, you know, there's very few cases ever of a pregnant mother transferring cancer to the fetus. There's no metastases to the fetus. And it turns out that the natural killer cells in the placenta are extraordinary at identifying cancer cells and zapping them. and so what Bob realized was these natural killer cells from the placenta are supercharged and he has turned them into cells as a medicine and where he'll provide someone with a variety of cancers, including glioblastoma, which is a just extraordinarily harsh and incurable cancer. And finding that these natural killer cells can actually eliminate the glioblastoma. So it's just an amazing world. I've got one more, but let me take a breath and let- well, I.
Just want to point out something that speaks to what you're both talking about, which is this radical paradigm shift in medicine and science. It's unlike anything we've ever seen before. It's not an incremental improvement in our approach. It's a fundamental shift in our entire view. And there's some converging trends that make this possible, which are all coming together in this beautiful way, systems biology, network medicine, functional medicine, whatever you want to call it, which is really looking at the root causes and the biological networks. I mean, we have 37 billion billion chemical reactions every second in our body. It's just stupid to think that a doctor could actually look at a lab test with 37 billion billion lab results on it, right? But we now have that, then we have our ability to crunch those numbers using big data capabilities, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and then the Quantified Self metrics, which are all the things that you're talking about, the whoop. I have my levels glucose monitor on here. I'm like, I played tennis day. I'm like, why did my tennis go up so high? I think I was, I was, like, in such a stress state. My blood sugar went up. So I'm, like, learning so much about my own body, and all that data is going to be put into a way for us to look at all these metrics. You mentioned digging gigabytes and gigabytes of data from the fountain life workup. But we've never had that before and we've never been able to see the correlations and the patterns through quantum computing, through artificial intelligence, networks, understanding our networks and biology. We're literally going to be able to change how we think about health and disease in a way that gives us the answers to things we never even thought possible. And then we have all the technology advancements like nanotechnology and nanobots and little 3D printing of organs and augmented reality and gene sequencing and editing. I mean, it's just this is like next generation stuff.
Staggering, isn't it?
It's staggering. And this is on top of the basic foundational lifestyle stuff, which we already know works so well, right?
That works so well.
This is like just boom. Okay. Wow. I'm so glad to be alive right now.
I can't even tell you.
100.
And I'm so glad to be on this journey with you guys because you're all like my peer group.
You're all like 60-something guys.
I'm the younger, younger brother. I'm gonna take it. We're grateful to have you, Mark, who.
Love life and just want to keep contributing and giving and doing. Because think about it, it's not just a narcissistic pursuit to live longer so you can get more stuff and do more things. It's about service and love and connection and community and making the world better. I mean, in the Jewish tradition, there's a concept called Tikkun Olam, which means to repair the world, to heal the world, to bring, you know, justice and goodness wherever we go. And what a wonderful gift to be able to get people who've done a lot of the hard work in their life to get to that point and now have the energy, vitality and the ability to do this. It's just, it's so amazing.
Yeah, it truly is. You know, an interesting fact that was, or piece of research came about six months ago out of Oxford, London School of Business and Harvard, that if you can increase the average lifespan globally by just one year, Yeah. Worth $38 trillion to global.
Yes.
Right.
And, and this great resignation where we're concerned about where we're gonna get the workforce from and so forth. Ideally, it's people want to stay in the game longer. And at the top of your game, when you're 65, 70, 75, I can't imagine retiring ever. But, and by the way, there's a correlation between retirement and death that is not fun for men to look at, not initially as much, but for men, it's like five years after retirement. that you're no longer, you know, you give a signal to the universe, it's.
Time for me to get my parts back. Yeah, we're not talking about all these decrepit old people who are in nursing homes living longer. We're talking about people who are engaged and alive. And I saw that study that was in Nature Aging. I mean, 38 trillion in, for one year, for 10 years, it was 367 trillion. And you contrast that to the 4 trillion we spend today on chronic disease in our economy. One in five of our dollars of our economy is spent on dealing with all the problems that are going to be solved that we can figure this out. Imagine we could end poverty, we could, you know, end hunger, we could give everybody free education, free health care. I mean, that's an enormous amount of money.
And, you know, you think about the wisdom you accumulate over the years. If you've really grown, you have so much to give. If you're healthy, if your brain is healthy and so forth. And there's all these studies that show that, you know, will you look at where Health Care expense goes? People who make it to centenarians are close to it. in their 90s, they are very sick for a short time and die rapidly. It's the people that get sick in their 60s, 50s and 70s that have these long periods of time of suffering and huge expense to society. So, you know, there's our capacity to expand health span, not just lifespan, is, I think, the single most valuable thing that we have in front of us right now that can change society further greater.
Yeah, that's such an important point, Tony, because James Freese did this work at first. paper was in New England Journal of Medicine, 1980. And basically 16 years of the average life is spent in decrepitude, right? Which is a lot of years. And he talks about how people who exercise, kept to their ideal weight and didn't smoke and just, those are just three simple things. We're not talking about all this other cool stuff we're talking about. They, they actually compressed their morbidity into the very little bit of the end of their life means their health span equal their lifespan. They didn't have those 16 years of decrepitude and they were able to live long, healthy, vibrant lives, and then just die. And my dream is when I'm 120 or maybe 180, go to the cabin with my lover, go for a beautiful hike, a swim in the lake, have my favorite meal, a glass of wine, make love, and go to sleep. And that's it. That's my goal. Well, you guys, this has been such a great conversation. Are there any final words that you have?
We have, for the first time ever in human history, a chance to look at disease, aging as a disease. We also have a chance to cure and get rid of probably almost all genetic diseases and probably to begin curing over the next decade or two most chronic disease. We're heading towards a world in which AI biotechnology is literally demonetizing and democratizing access to health healthcare. If you think about it, my opinion, Mark, is it's going to become malpractice to diagnose a patient without AI in the loop. There's no way.
Yeah, 100%.
Probably within the next five years. And if you think about Google provides equal, exact capabilities to the poorest child and the wealthiest child. It's not just a little bit better for the wealthy, it's identical. and we're gonna see AI delivering the best healthcare to the poorest child and the wealthiest child and education to the poorest and the wealthiest as well. And there's an incredible future that humanity has. We've got work, but I've never been more excited. And part of the longevity mindset we want you to have from reading this book is there is tremendous hope. And it's worth staying in the game. It's worth exercising. It's worth getting sleep. It's doing those things a little bit every day. to give you a chance to intercept the next and the next breakthroughs coming our way.
I mean, in the time of this history where things often feel a little bit frustrating and divisiveness in our society and some of the challenges we're facing, I mean, this is such a hopeful message. And I think, I hope we can kind of take it to heart and rethink the way we look at our lives and disease and health and reimagine the future for ourselves. Tony, what do you think?
I think that the most important thing, everything we talked about is priceless. But what's, I think equally or maybe even more priceless is having a longer life. You're never going to have it unless you have a meaningful life. And a meaningful life is not just about yourself. If you look at people who have an extraordinary quality of life, an extraordinary kind of energy, it's because it's called forth by something. You know, there's two types of motivations. Life, there's push trying to make something happen, and there's pull where you're called to something. And I think, you know, when people find something they care about more than themselves, they truly care. But I don't mean care about on the surface. I don't mean virtual signaling. I mean, where it's like, you know, it's your family or it's, you know, making a difference in disease or it's whatever that is that you really care about more than yourself. That's what makes us want to use all our resources and stick around for a period of time. Because, you know, when, when ages or living long is not a scarcity, which sounds like we're going to get to at some stage, the new question is, what are you going to do with it?
Yes.
And I think the time to answer that question is right now, because if you answer it now, you're gonna have a reason to want to stick around. You're gonna have a reason to do these things. You know, if you don't have that, you can forget it. You know, I've got five kids and five grandkids, and I have a 10 month old, 10 month old as of yesterday, daughter and a 48 year old daughter.
Right?
So it's like, you know, I gotta. I gotta apply all the stuff so I can stick around. Right? So I have my mission, I have my family, and you've got to figure out what it is that you value more than yourself. If you can find that Touchstone and everyone can. Yeah. get around where it's better, get around people who are passionate about things and something's going to touch you. Then you're going to find the drive to take these tools, little ones, big ones, and use them. And what we try to provide here is a guidebook where you can do some really simple things and change it or when you need it, there's some great tools for you or a family member. Or if you're one of those people, it's about peak performance and regeneration. Holy cow, there's some tools here that will change your life, but you got to have a reason. And the reason is not just you because it's easy to get comfortable with yourself. you know, what's really interesting is, can you be called to something greater that makes your life meaningful? Because in the end, success, you know, success is getting what you want. You know, meaning is feeling like you've lived the life you're made for. And I think, you know, finding that is one of the highest and most important things for human being to do, because all the rest of this is just table dressing without meaning. And, you know, we all three have that. That's why we're so driven. That's why we want to help. That's why we work. So none of us have But we're doing more today than we did in our 20s and our 30s and 40s. We're making greater demands, but we're enjoying life to a different level because it isn't just about us. And I really call to people to think about what will ignite you. And the last couple chapters about the book are a good trigger for that as well. But you could start thinking about it right now because once that's solid, you're going to figure out how to maximize everything, including your health and your vitality in your strength.
Well, you know, both of you, I just have to give you kudos because it is no small task to do what you did. to find the world's experts to synthesize all the data to put it in a story that people can read. I mean, I've read a lot of books on science. This is, I think, the only one that made me cry many times. With all the stories in it and the hopelessness.
That was our goal.
To make me cry.
You know, some of the tears are because you're inspired by the people who gave so much, right? Of course.
It's so beautiful. And I think it's such a gift. Everybody really should get a copy of Life It's out now, anywhere you get your books, go to life force.com, learn about what they're talking about. This is going to change your life, truly. And I just want to give you such, such honors for the work that you both do in the world, making this place better than when you came in and leaving it in a much better place. So thank you. And, Thank you, Mark.
Thank you so much.
And for the guys on and thanks for all the work you're doing. Your brother along the path with us here. We're grateful to have us all together on this path trying to find the best answers for everybody.
I'm excited for our decades, many decades ahead.
Yeah, we're just getting started, right? Just getting started. I want you guys both to be at my 120th birthday for sure.
We gotta be there because we're almost the same age.
I know. We should have a joint birthday. Yeah. And for those of you listening, if you know anybody who's growing older, which is probably about 7 billion people, encourage, encourage you to share this podcast with them. I think it will help. leave comments about what you've learned about how to improve your vitality, energy, and what you've learned about longevity. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next time on the doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning in to the doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff, from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks. Picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks P-I-C-K-S and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi everyone.
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