Longevity Protocols: The Truth About Ozempic & The Quest For Immortality | Peter Diamandis

Your body is amazing at hiding disease.

Yeah. The first symptom of heart attacks for 50% of people is sudden death.

You do have functional control over this. You don't have an excuse.

Human life expectancy is one of the most incredible breakthroughs in modern medicine, right? We've seen our life expectancy dramatically go up since the turn of the 1900s. And unfortunately now it's starting to go down. It's starting to go down. We see a little pop up this year, I think, because of the post COVID recovery. But basically we've more than doubled the global average life span in the last 100 years. But our healthy life years have not increased at the same rate. There's a lot more sicker people at the end of their life. So their health span doesn't equal their lifespan. And what's happening is our world's population is growing and our aging population is growing even more. So people over 60 are expected to double from 12 to 22%. between 2015 and 2050. So we got to find solutions to not only improve our lifespan, which is, I guess, important, but what's more important is how do we improve our health span? How many years of life that we have that are healthy? And for most people, the last 20 years of their life is spent in poor health, which means, let's say you're, you know, live to be 80, some 60 years old, you got some chronic disease or another. So you've written this important manual, and you're talking about this health span revolution. So, why does it matter? What is it and why now?

So, I think what I'm hoping to do is to impact people's longevity mindset. You know, I think you can will yourself to live and will yourself to die. I think your mindset is so fundamentally important. And, my mission here is for people to realize we're in the middle of a health span revolution. that the convergence of technologies like AI, sensors, networks, gene therapies, epigenetic reprogramming, cellular medicines, all of these things are making and will continue to make a massive dent. There's a topic we've spoken about before and hopefully folks have heard the term of longevity escape velocity that today for every year that you're alive, if you're reasonable socioeconomic and reasonably taking care of yourself, science has the potential to extend your life for somewhere between a quarter to a third of a year. And there's going to be a point in the future where for every year that you're alive, scientists extending your life for more than a year. And that idea is called longevity escape velocity. When I interview my dear friend Ray Kurzweil, with whom I'd started Singularity University, Ray's expectation is that we're going to hit longevity escape velocity in just 10 to 12 years. talking to George Church when I was-.

Well, that means you can never die. Like, the theoretical aspect of it is that you keep extending your life, and I'm not so sure about that.

Well, so I think the point is not immortality, but everything that is possible is being made available to you to maximize your health span. So, you know, one of the things that hit me when I was in medical school, God knows, you know, a few decades back, Just a few.

A few.

You and I both. You actually became a real doctor. I had two companies going my fourth year of medical school, a space university and a rocket company. Not your typical internship. Anyway, so, but I remember learning that Bowhead whales could live 200 years and Greenland sharks could live 500 years. And you've heard me say this story a thousand times. And if they could live that long, why can't we? It's hardware software. And so this is the decade that we're making a dent in understanding human hardware and human software. And we are, at the end of the day, a large functioning molecular machine or quantum chemistry at a atomic level, but we're a large machine that can be repaired and can be upgraded and these are the technologies that are coming our way. And if we do have fundamental breakthroughs in these areas, if you love life like you and I both do, wouldn't you want to be around long enough to intercept these? You don't want to be the last person before the new nanotech revolution comes around and says, oh my God, we can reverse all these things with aging and reset. So the idea from this book is, listen, there is, we're in the midst of a health span revolution. There's more capital flowing in by 10x over the last 10 years into longevity. There are more tools and technologies, the cost of genome reading, editing is plummeting. And so because those things are coming, you probably should keep yourself as healthy as you can intercept these technologies. And there are a number of things, Ray Kurzweil talks about a bridge to a bridge. Bridge one to getting to longevity escape velocity is doing certain things around sleep, diet, exercise, mindset, not dying for something stupid. Bridge two, our technology is accessible to us today like stem cells and perhaps exogenous natural killer cells and other things. And step and stage three or bridge three is going to be those technologies that are, you know, a decade or two away. And so that's what this book is about. I wanted to make it- you- want.

People to get to live long enough to get to the longevity escape velocity.

It's like, listen, do these things. I mean, I've read hundreds of books. At the end of the day, I try and take notes, but There are certain things which are just fundamental and certain things that depend upon what your genetics are, where you were born, your other situations in life. And so, I just wanted to make it super easy. My target was 100 pages. It turned out to be 120 pages. But I think it's a practical playbook. That was the goal.

Yeah. It's really great. And I think I want to get into the nitty-gritty and meat of it because I think everybody knows that There's some basics that we all have to follow. And then we're gonna get into, in a kind of rapid fire, popcorn way, a lot of the cool things that people may or may not have heard about that are on the horizon that you're using to optimize your own, something I'm actually using myself, very similar. I was shocked at how similar our programs were. I was like, wow, we must be space- Dude, I learned from you.

I learned from the best.

I was like, wait a minute.

So, I'm paying attention.

It's so true. I mean, yeah, and one of the things that people don't understand is how much of it is under our control, right? 90 plus percent, I think, is under our control.

Can we just, can we hit that one second? 'Cause people say, well, my parents died early and so forth. When you look at the numbers and it's somewhere between 7% to 30% and there are different studies giving different numbers of your potential lifespan is a function of your genetics. The vast majority, 70 to 90%, is a function of the choices you make your lifestyle. You do have functional control over this. You don't have an excuse.

Yeah.

Well, you know, Peter, it's interesting.

This morning, I actually had a chance to review my own genetics, and I've done my whole genome sequencing, but that's like, you know, 30, 20, 30,000 genes. It's, you know, it's impossible to get your head around. And I did a subset of about 700 SNPs or variations in my genes, and it was with a company that's doing an incredible job. of actually mapping out the most common SNPs that are actionable. In other words, even if you have genetics that predispose you to things. For example, I discovered that I had this gene that predisposes to B-cell lymphoma, which my sister had. And it makes you much, much higher risk of getting this particular lymphoma. But it also was so interesting to see how they looked at all the scientific literature and mapped out what are the interventions that affect this gene and change the gene expression. for example, maybe resveratrol affects this pathway and this gene expression. Or, I had another gene that regulated vitamin D and I noticed a surprise when I was in my 50s, my bone density was low and I was a runner and I wasn't lifting weights. I was doing yoga and very athletic and I shouldn't have had low bone density, particularly as a guy. And I found out, I had this gene that affects osteoporosis and vitamin D receptors and I was able to sort of see, oh, I know I need to take a lot more vitamin D than the average person. So, I figured that out on my own, but my genes can give me a guide how to even optimize my genes. So, even though it may not be genetically predetermined, you might have control over it. A predilection, right? And so, you actually have control over it and that's what's even more interesting is that even if we have genes that are kind of problematic, we can modify the expression of those genes. So, it's super cool and we do it.

Do you remember which company that is, by the way?

Yeah, it was called Intellux DNA and it's really driven through functional medicine practitioner based because it's very complicated. Most doctors don't have the patients or time for it. But, you know, and you can segment the genes based on, you know, mental health, ADD, inflammation, nutrition, cardiovascular risk, and so forth. So, it was really quite fascinating. So, I was just looking at it myself and learning about it and, you know, seeing what's always new on the horizon and applicable for my patients. And, I was like, wow, this is a different whole different level of looking at the DNA because it wasn't, really just looking at the SNPs, it was actually telling you not only what they meant and what their risk factors were that were maybe you were predisposed to based on these genes, but actually what you could do to modify that gene expression. But the truth is that most of the things that were included were foods. I know I need to eat two ounces of pomegranate juice because it affects this one gene that puts me at risk for cardiovascular disease, right? I need to take more curcumin. And it was really interesting to see how there's a lot of data on these things.

This is fantastic. And even though we've sequenced the human genome, we're continuing to learn about your genome, everybody's genome, every single day as different relationships are discovered. And there's gonna be a time sometime in the next, I would say, three years, I don't think it's much further than that, that your personal AI that knows all your single nucleotide polymorphisms, your SNPs, will be guiding, if you turn on the function, will be guiding you every minute of the day on what to eat, what to do based upon your current genetics, your blood chemistry, your objectives, and it becomes a super hyper personalized if you want that.

Yeah. And I think that's right. And I think they hadn't even applied AI to this model. I was like, wow, once you do that, you're going to get a hierarchical set of recommendations that you can implement that are actually doable. And then you can measure the results and see how you feel and what's going on in your biology. But the basics of changing these gene expressions, which are epigenetics, is really about our lifestyle. And that's the foundation of the beginning of your book, is what we eat, how we exercise, sleep optimization, and then we get into kind of a bunch of other stuff. So let's start with just the basics of what are the do's and don'ts for eating?

And let's start with that. We want to live. This is like a lowly priest talking.

To the pope about what to do.

I'm not that pope. I'm Jewish, for God's sake.

Okay, for God's sake.

Okay, fine. I'm not sure.

I just- the rabbi. The rabbi.

What's the highest rabbi out there? But listen, and tell me where I'm off, but I wanted people to have, it's one, two, three, too many. At the end of the day, if you need to memorize, oh my God, this, that, and the other thing, like what are the fundamentals? And the most important fundamental is sugar is a poison. We never evolved to eat as much sugar. and so I really have eliminated not everything, but 95, 99% of sugar from my diet. I will have a small piece of dark chocolate. If I eat something, I'm going to take the moment in time to actually enjoy it and I'm not stuffing my face. It's whole plants, as you've said so many times. One of the things I wrote about in there that I love is the order in which you eat your food.

Yes.

It can matter.

Exactly.

I mean, so you go out to the restaurant and they bring you a basket of bread and wine. And it's like, oh my gosh, the worst thing they could possibly do for you would try to kill you. So ask them to bring it back when the main course comes instead of eating it right then and there. And then the- well, they know that.

It makes you hungrier and eat more. So they order way more food and dessert. Yes, it's exactly that.

You have to make the request. and like, I'm at a party and they, everybody serves dessert and they put the plate in front of you. I have gotten so good at like just catching and saying, no, stop, go away. If it's sitting in front of me, my willpower will erode. If it's not there, then I'm good. But going back to the order of the food, on your plate, you're gonna have veggies, protein, and carbs likely. Eat your vegetables first. your fiber first, it slows down digestion, your protein next. And then your carbs last. And your absorption of nutrients and your desire to eat the carbs, everything improves or your lack of desire to eat the carbs, everything improves when you eat in that order. And then there's always that glass of water you drink before you consume your meal.

So, water, we talked about, you know, Timing and order of food, cutting down sugar, eating more vegetables and plant foods.

Basic, basic stuff.

What about protein in fact?

So this is a conversation I want to ask with you. So I'm on a mission to add muscle, right? And so I am on a high protein diet and I'm targeting, I weigh 150 pounds, I'm targeting 150 grams a day. And I looked at the studies on intermittent fasting. and it didn't look that like intermittent fasting actually made a substantial difference other than reducing your total caloric intake. And so getting enough protein in my diet when I'm eating just between 1 o'clock and 6 o'clock was difficult. So I cut out my intermittent fasting and increased my protein intake. What are your thoughts on that?

And how do you feel? And what's your body?

I feel great. I feel great. And I've added more muscle. I've added five, six pounds of muscle. I'm trying to get to 10. I'm pushing, you know, I'm increasing my workouts from three a week to five a week.

My creatine, you know, I mean, the proof is in the pudding. You feel better, you have more muscle. Your body is, I always say that your body's the smartest doctor in the room. So you could have an ideological view that you should be a vegan or you should, you know, eat tons of meat or you should, whatever. you have to try it out and see what happens.

Right.

Because your body's going to tell you if you feel better, if you look better, if you're stronger, you're building more muscle, if your biomarkers are better, then that's your answer. It, you know, I always say, don't.

Let your ideology run over your biology.

You know, because it's easy, you know, and we're all different. And now, some people, I mean, I know if I don't eat enough carbs, like sweet potatoes and things like that, I'll just drop too much weight. And so I don't want to do that. So, and I need to eat more fat and more protein. So I think, I think it's really about listening your body, but, but conceptually, I I think as we age, you need more protein to overcome what we call anabolic resistance, which is means it's harder to build muscle as you get older. So you need more workouts, more, more protein, and, and you probably need more high quality protein, mainly animal or whey protein. And, and you need probably something like creatine to help boost it. And you need to exercise usually within an hour to take a protein load about 40 to 50 grams an hour or two after your workout. So that's a great formula. And I noticed when I'm on the road and I can't do that, I lose muscle when I'm at home and I'm doing the same workouts and I do that, I gain muscle. So it's pretty reliably there. And I think, you know, people are confused about the autophagy was like, well, you should inhibit mTOR and we'll talk about some of the things about that in a bit. But I think that that's kind of a big meme in the longevity space, which is you want to inhibit mTOR to increase autophagy and self-cleaning. It's like it's the way your body accelerates self-cleaning and repair, which is great for longevity. But it also has a dark side, which if you do too long and too much, you lose muscle. So, you need like, by the way.

I don't know if you recognize this packaging.

It's, I read that.

I'm on day two of my Prolong fast that I do, you know, a couple of times a year.

Well, that's great. Okay. So, that's food. What about exercise? 'Cause we just talked about your muscle mass. And I think that's, when it comes to longevity, I think muscle mass is the unsung hero.

It is. You know, exercise, you know the numbers. If you're over 60, the number one thing you can do to maximize your longevity, you can reduce your chance of cancer by threefold, your overall chance of mortality by twofold is exercise. Get in a couple, at least a couple of days a week of resistant exercise for half an hour. if nothing else. For me, I belong to three different gyms. There is no excuse. There is zero excuse. I got two different trainers and it's like I just have everybody just, I pay for all of this so I don't give myself the excuses for not working out. And when I'm on the road, I actually have Yanni on my team who travels with me. He's a young PhD, and supports me across everything I do. It's like, you know, I'm like, we're going to the gym at 6 a.m. He goes, no, I gotta get some sleep. I said, no, we're going to the gym at 6 a.m. Go to sleep early. And so, you know, it's a priority. I think I have never had exercise this much of a priority in my life than I do at 62 years old. And I feel great. you know, I've got two 12 year old twin boys and they are exercised for me as well. So, you know, yeah. So that's, that's joyful.

I think that's important. Like, you know, I think, like I always say, you can drive a Toyota Camry off the lot and drive over a hundred thousand miles and never touch it. But if you got a 1959 model, what are you? 1959 model.

61. Yeah.

I'm a 59 model. You know, I mean, you know, you can't just drive it around and not take care of it and, and change the oil more and get it tuned up more and make sure everything's lined up more. And so, so it just takes a little more effort as you get older. And I think it's not impossible, but it requires much more focus.

And you have to, you have to want it. You have to love it. You have to have a purpose for it. And for me, you know, it's interesting, right? People say, well, how old do you want to live? You know, my friend Dan Sullivan wants 156. When I was in medical school, I learned that certain species of, you know, sea, sea life could live 700 years. So I said a ridiculous number of 700 years, by the way. if you can make it an extra 30 years from now, I think you're going to intercept so many breakthroughs that bias a century if you want it. What my mission is to arrive at that point of longevity, escape velocity in great health, whenever that is. I think that's true. And it's also, for me, the definition.

Of health is really simple. It's being able to get up in the morning and do whatever it is that I want to do. If I'm visiting my daughter and she lives in Salt Lake City and she says, Dad, I want to go on a nine mile hike up to 9000 feet elevation. Can we go? It's, I'm like, Sure. And like we ran up the hill, I got all the way up. And it was actually funny because I actually made fine. And then I realized that the time zones wrong and I thought I had a call and there was no service. So I only ran down the mountain, which at 64, there's a lot of stability issues and a lot of risk of falls. And if you don't maintain your stability as well as your strength and flexibility, and cardio. And, I was able to just go down like a mountain goat. And, it's not because I'm superhuman, it's because I've been training for doing the thing. I don't do my band exercise to do my band exercise. Okay, I like to listen to music, listen to podcasts. I've gotten to like it. But, it's not like my fun thing to do. I want to play tennis. I want to hike up to the Himalayas.

I want to go riding across the Mongolia on a horse. I want to do whatever I want to do and not stop. And, I do. And, by the way, the number one thing for you and I to be concerned about more so than someone who's in their 20s or early 30s is injury, right? Injury is the biggest issue. You know, fall, break your pelvis or hip, end up in the hospital and with pneumonia, and you're screwed.

And the mortality for someone breaking their hip is in a year is 50%. So if you break your hip, you're 50% likely to die in that year after, which is staggering. It's like worse than getting terminal cancer.

For people over 60, I think the number is, yeah.

Yeah.

So, got to exercise. I love your routine and you go through exactly what you do in the, in the, in the, in the book.

That's really great. One other thing is, is your aerobic exercise, right? So zone two training. Um, and I talk about in this, you know, what you want to do is you want to stimulate mitochondrial growth. and you want to stimulate it. And there's something called zone 2 training where your heart rate is at a particular band. For me, it's at about 110 to 115. I show you how to calculate that. And so, I've got a stationary bike, a techno gym bike, and there's absolutely no excuse to take a board meeting or a phone call sitting on your butt. I'm feeling guilty sitting down and doing this with you right now.

Yeah, yeah. But the podcast would look funny if we were both bouncing up like this.

I'd be somewhat out of breath. But, you know, I remember tweeting out sitting is the new smoking. And it really is. I mean, we sit in front of these damn Zoom conversations for most of the day and it's abusive to your body.

Yeah.

So, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

I just went in a beautiful hour and a half walk up the mountain this morning. Maybe I got a little over zone too, but it just keep moving or you don't. I met this guy who was 95 once, Peter, and he was he was like bouncing around like a spry 50 year old. He had a 20 year old younger girlfriend. And I'm like, what's your deal? Like, and he was eating bagels and locks at this thing. I'm like, what's your story? He's like, well, whatever I did yesterday, I do today. If I played single tennis yesterday, I do it today. I mean, if you ride your bike 20 miles every day, you're going to keep being able to ride your bike 20 miles every day as long as you live.

Right?

So just don't stop. So now, now the other thing that's really important, Peter, you talk about, I think is sort of one of the unappreciated and most important aspects of health is sleep. and a lot of people have sleep issues. There's 70 million people with sleep issues in America. There's, you know, so many people struggle with falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up early, getting in the middle of the night. What's your personal story about your transformation of your sleep and your routine?

Yeah, I love, I love this. So I am lucky to be a reasonably good sleeper. I just came back from Saudi Arabia, so I was 12 time zones away. and so I'm in the middle of shifting myself back. I was up at 3:30 this morning, but I went to sleep at 8:30 last night, so it wasn't too bad. The body needs eight hours of sleep, at minimum seven hours of sleep. One of the things I tell people is when you're sleeping, you're not reproducing, you're not hunting for food, you're not protecting yourself, you're very vulnerable. If evolution could have done away with that, extra hour of sleep, it would have. So the fact that it hasn't means you need it. And so what do you do? There are certain, I go through the basics here. I'll tell you the most important things. Number one, it's going to sleep at the same time every night. It's consistency of going to bed because typically your body wakes you up at the same time. And so my body, I'm up and awake at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. in that band. And if I go to sleep at 9:30, I'm good. if I happen to go to sleep at 11 o'clock at night, I'm screwed. I can control my go to sleep time. The other things are I use a Manta mask. I love this mask. It has foam around the eyes and it's a beautiful mask. It seals it out. I set the temperature in my room to 63 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty damn cold. I use an eight sleep. There's lots of different cooling mattresses. And then, at the end of the day, I also use a mouth guard, which is a mandibular adjustment device. It moves my mandible out a little bit and keeps me from snoring and keeps my open airway and keeps me as a nose breather versus mouth breather. And, you do some other things, right?

You block the light at night. You measure your sleep. You don't eat before bed. You don't have caffeine in the afternoon. These are just basic sleep hygiene principles, right?

Yeah.

It is sleep hygiene. It's, I don't eat two hours before, I'm not drinking water, you know, an hour before I am. I've given up most all alcohol. Maybe a glass of wine every couple of weeks.

How about you?

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting, you know, I wear this aura ring and I track my sleep and I'm like, damn, I drank that wine and my sleep was messed up. My heart rate didn't go down, my heart variability plummeted. I'm gonna look like I was in some severe stress response. Yeah, and it's interesting to get that feedback because you wouldn't have known otherwise, right? So, I really have minimized it. Maybe I'll have a drink a month to come out or a shot of tequila, but that's about it.

That's exactly the same. And, on the sleep, by the way, I use my Oura ring. It doesn't do anything to get me to sleep or to give me better sleep, but it makes me aware. so if I'm deciding whether or not to have something to drink or deciding if I'm gonna grab that snack, I'm thinking to myself, it's gonna screw with your sleep tonight and you're gonna see it on your data in the morning. So it's just what you don't measure, you don't actually impact. So we measure it that way. I'm curious, my heart rate when I'm sleeping is like 38-39. It drops down really, really low. And, I mean, that is low.

I mean, what's your resting heart rate during the day?

Probably 55.

Well, that's good. I mean, that's good. I mean, if your heart rate was 70 and dropped to 30, that would be, I would worry about some kind of heart block or something like that. But, you probably should have an EKG, but I'm sure it's fine.

I've had so many from fountain, it's yeah, I think cardiovascular. I'm okay. But I'm just. It was interesting. It was like, okay, don't go any lower. A certain number of heartbeats in your life.

I'm gonna keep them. Although I did a podcast with Deepak Chopra yesterday, and he's like, basically, the. The. The ancient Hindus and the yogis who live to be, like, they say, 180 or whatever. They said, he said they measure their life not in years, but in heartbeats and breaths. So you kind of have to go slow.

Yeah.

And I don't know if that's true, but it sounds good. All right, so. you know, one of the things that, that you're involved in is, and by the way, there's so much more we're going to talk about in a minute, but I want, I want to touch base on, on not dying of something stupid, because that, that's basically the subtitle of your book. And, and what do you mean by that? And I think, yeah, I think you're referring to basically tracking your biomarkers and your biology and your Imaging tests so you know where you're at and that you don't die of something that's totally preventable. And, and, you know, we do, we use you know, I mean, one of the things that shocked me was reading, you know, if you're 35 and you smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, your risk of getting cancer is far lower than if you're a seven-year-old and you don't smoke at all.

Right.

Because it's just age is one of the biggest risks. And same thing with heart attacks. And so here's, here's how I think about not doing something stupid. First of all, you know, wear your seatbelt in the car. Don't text while you're driving. Wear a helmet while you're going skiing.

Right.

Those are like the basics. But here's the other part, and it really It bothers me how few people understand this. Your body is amazing at hiding disease, right? You don't feel anything until you have a stage three or stage four cancer. 70% of heart attacks have no preceding, no shortness of breath, nothing on imaging. It's a soft plaque that evulses and kills you.

The first symptom of heart attacks for 50% of people is sudden death.

Yeah, that sucks. so if you're, if, you know, you don't, you don't have Parkinsonian tremor until 70% of the substantia nigra neurons are gone. So again, your body's really great at hiding any symptoms of something wrong going on. And so when you ask people, are you in good health? Is there anything you need to worry about? Most people say, yeah, I'm fine, but you don't actually know until you look. And then people say, well, I don't want to know. well, it's like, of course you want to know. I mean, you're going to know. Do you want to know, you know, when it's too late to do something or you want to know when you can do something about it?

So, you know, Peter, before you, before you go to the next thing, I just want to emphasize something is what you're saying is really important in medicine. We are trained in medical school to not look until something's wrong, except for very few things like screening for cholesterol, screening for breast cancer, mammograms, colonoscopy, pap test, but very few things. And, and we're taught you know, we don't want to over test, we don't want to over diagnose, we're going to pick up things that are going to be red herrings, it's bad medicine, and you only want to do a test when you want to confirm a diagnosis, which means that you're not picking stuff up until very late, like you said, it's like, it's like, you know, the, you kind of like a glass or filling up that doesn't spill over until the very end. And you're, you know, by the way, though, you're filling it up the whole way. And it, and that's really what's happening in medicine. And so there's a chance really now with our technologies and what you've developed with fountain life to really dig deep and to kind of look at your body in a way that we've never done before and not be that. And, it just reminds me of this one patient who said, Dr. Hyman, I want to get a check. I'm like, okay. And, we checked his blood sugar was like 110. I'm like, wow, this is like pre-diabetes if you talk to your doctor about it. He's like, well, yeah, but he says, you know, come back when it's higher and I'll give you some medication.

So, I think how is found life different than that? Listen, at the end of the day, it is possible to answer two questions. Is there anything going on inside your body that you need to know about it? And the second question is, what are you likely to come down with? What's likely to cause you medical problems down the line? And what can you do to slow it down or prevent it? And that's fundamentally the diagnostic side of Fountain Life. And then there's the therapeutic side. so here's what happened. You come through fountain life. We have centers in New York, Orlando, Naples, Dallas, Texas. We're opening up in LA next year. We have a, we have 40 centers that were planned around the world, and you come in for a day, typically an overnight stay. If you can, you can do it in the day, but we recommend overnight, and we're going to digitize you. We're going to do a full body MRI, a brain MRI, brain vasculature, brain blood flow, a coronary CT with an AI overlay, not looking for calcified plaque, but soft plaque. If it's calcified and it's in the walls of the artery and it's not blocking your coronaries, you're fine. If it's soft plaque that can just break off in a vulse, right? If it's calcified, it's cemented there in place. It's the soft plaque in the walls that can vulse, that can block the coronary artery and then you know, you're dead. We do DEXA scan, we do your full genomics, metabolomics, your microbiome, retinal scans, strength and balance, all of those things. 150 gigabytes of data. It's the most exhaustive upload we provided. All that data gets uploaded. There's AI overlays on everything, and then there is a convergence of the data to provide a return and a review of those results. Understand, again, those two questions, what's going on inside your body that you need to know about and what's likely to happen. So here's the data. The first 5,000 members going through it, 2% of people have a cancer they don't know about, which blows me away, right? Two and a half percent have an aneurysm they don't know about. And then 14.4% have either cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, or metabolic disease, or the aneurysm or, or cancer. And so that's a significant number of people. And, you know, I've had in the last month, two friends who've gone through fountain life and we've discovered, and we've saved their lives. And then we had hundreds of people, right? Um, one of my friends who we're doing business with, he's a massive, developer, hotel developer, and he was coming through because we're starting to work together. We discovered two, not one, two aneurysms in his head that were like just paper thin. He was in surgery a few days later and now he's out. The doctor said, you caught it just in time. And these were significant aneurysms. Another friend of mine, 50% occlusions, and his LAD and his coronary. I mean, so we've saved hundreds of lives and I think at the end of the day, if you're able to afford this, and it's not cheap, right? We have a 12K offering, a 20K offering. It's the, it is the cheapest money you will spend. And it's a chance for you to actually feel confident, like, I'm actually okay. so every year I go through this, I go through an upload every single. It's a lifelong, long life membership, so to speak. And at the end of the day, I am anxious until I go through my upload, and then I feel relief, and I will find something someday, but I'm gonna find it at the very beginning. Like, when's the. When's the best time to catch a fire? You know, at the start, at ignition. When's the best time to find cancer? You know, at stage one. and so that's the, and you also.

Do liquid biopsies, too, not just the Imaging.

Right. We do liquid biopsies. We do 120 blood biomarkers. We do, you know, it's, it is the most exhaustive. I mean, you know, Dr. Helen Messier. She, like you, is a functional medicine doctor. I recommended her to you guys. I know you did. I want to, I, and, and thank you. I knew her from years back from HLI, but she's now our chief medical and chief scientific officer, and she's amazing. and it's the most exhaustive functional medicine upload possible. And that's half, the other half of the business is therapeutics. It's like you're on our medical advisory board, thank you, along with a number of other incredible individuals. And our mission is what is a therapeutic out there that is safe enough but has outsized potential gains? And then we make that available to our members. right? So, like therapeutic plasma exchange, we can talk about that or access to rapamycin or natural killer cells or stem cells.

Yeah.

Let's talk about that because I think, you know, that's the other thing you talked about in your guide, which is really great. So, functional health, if you can't afford it, what do you do? Is there a way to kind of get around it or how do you-.

So, I mean, so first of all, you can go to fountainlife.com/peter and you can get the information about it, we will have a digital, lower end digital membership. But the imaging is really important. And we have stood up an insurance company, a health benefits company, on the insurance side, where self-insured companies can buy this for their employees. And what happens is those employees are getting a series of blood tests. And then if the blood test gets to a particular point and triggers the need for a CT or an MRI so that it's escalating level of, of testing. But the problem is, you know, most health insurance pays you after you're sick, after you had the problem. And that's the problem. You know, it's not preventative at all. It is basically, you know, I hate this. fire insurance pays you after house burns down, life insurance pays your next to kin after you're dead, health insurance pays.

You after you're sick. Yeah, right. It's crazy. So some of these other technologies and techniques are things that are kind of on the margin, but that are interesting and that you're doing that you outline in your in your wonderful manual. And there are things that are around, you know, managing the risk factors, whether it's, you know, prescription medications for managing cholesterol, whether it's off label uses of medications and things like rapamycin and peptides. Can you kind of walk us through what you're doing? And remember, everybody, this is personalized for Peter. This is Peter's map based on Peter's biology, his tests, his own things. But there are some things that are-.

I put that as a disclosure in the book and also in my PDF that everybody can download for free at deamandus.com/longevity. It's a 30-page summary of the book is a summary of books out there. The PDF is a summary of the book itself. So it's a summary of a summary. which is available for free for anybody. You need to have the data. You can read all you want. If you've got a physician, go over it with them. I'm much more of an experimentalist. Tony Robbins, who's a co-founder of Fountain along with me, same thing. And in Life Force, we talk about a lot of the experimental elements we're doing. this is what's going on right now. We've just stood up therapeutic plasma exchange at Fountain. And this is, you're familiar, you've done it many times.

Yeah.

And it's basically getting an oil change for your body. It's basically in one arm is an intravenous pulling blood out. It goes through a separation and filtration system. separates out your red blood cells, your white blood cells, and then the remainder, the plasma, which is mostly albumin or saline, gets thrown away and replaced with fresh oil, fresh albumin and saline mixed back in with your cells and put back in your body. You accumulate waste products in your bloodstream, and this is a mechanism for getting rid of that. One of the things that were that we're standing up under an FDA IND protocol, which I'm excited about. It's not ready yet. It'll be available in the first quarter. We're doing it with cellularity is.

The.

First thing we do is we give the individual a deep tissue massage. And that deep tissue massage liberates stem cells. It triples number of stem cells in the peripheral blood system. so we then do the TPE, the Therapeutic Plasma Exchange, and we separate out the stem cells for banking purposes. And then when we give you back your albumin and saline, we are going to be introducing umbilical cord plasma. So we've all heard about young blood. this is the youngest possible growth factors. Turns out, cellularity is the largest storage facility for placentas on the planet, both cord blood and also cell products and tissue products from placentas. And it's got a large supply of umbilical cord blood. So this will be under study, and it's for those people who want to be part of experimental protocols. And there are people out there who want it. like me, maybe you.

Exactly. Yeah, I think I've done it. I think it's going to come down in price like everything else. But there's other things you can do that are really helpful that you're doing.

That.

May be cheaper. For example, I'd love to know your thoughts on rapamycin and the peptides you're using. Because you talk about those as part of your regimen.

I'm on a rapamycin protocol. probably the same. It's a function of your body weight. For me, it's six milligrams once a week and it's basically three months on and a month off. Are you on rapamycin now?

Yeah, I've started based on the literature and looking at it, I think it's one of the most promising molecules out there from a pharmaceutical perspective. And it's basically derived from Rapa Nui from the dirt and it was a molecule they found in there that was on Easter Island. It turned out to have a lot of benefits in modulating not only immunity but also mTOR, which is one of the key regulators of autophagy. So, it's sort of a way of mimicking fasting, right? So, instead of fasting, you can take mTOR and it seems to have effect, which is really remarkable because even at later dates in your life when you start it, it seems to have an effect. Yeah.

Like when you're in your 60s.

Yeah. If you don't exercise until you're 60, it's probably not a great thing. But, if you start this even when you're 60, it's actually can work and even extend life in animal models. So, there's not enough human trials yet, but it's something that's used as a FDA approved drug for other indications.

I agree with you that it's one of the most promising and most meaningful longevity meds out there. I mean, a lot of stuff is hearsay, but this has the strongest body of evidence and and there are studies that have either been funded or will soon be funded to actually demonstrate the efficacy in humans.

Yeah, that's what I'm excited about. So, yeah, before that, we're kind of guinea pigs, but we're very cute guinea pigs.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the things I'm excited about that fountain is doing is it's got a massive amount of data. So we know every single member who's on rapamycin and we're we're uploading every member every year. So we have a, you know, vast amount of data on these individuals. So we're effectively doing large scale studies with the members permission, and we'll publish results as we get them.

Yeah.

So I think tracking the data is important. That's one of the things I love about Fountain Life is that you have, you know, rigorous science behind it. You're looking at not just doing stuff, tracking the outcomes on your patients, which matters. And I think, you know, in a way, this is how we learn. Yes, you know, it's very expensive and it's not available to everyone, but it's giving us insights into what will be effective. And the prices will come down, you.

Know, the price, that's the case in technology stuff is when in the beginning, when it doesn't work perfectly, it's expensive. And then as, you know, as it starts to work better and better, the price comes down and becomes available to everybody.

Yeah, like a full body MRI would have been 10, $20,000 years ago. Now it's 2,500. It's probably coming down to 3, 400. their whole genome sequence you could have done for was that 100 million?

Well, let's see. When Craig, when the US government did it for 3 billion, Craig Venter did it for 100 million and it's been dropping at five times Moore's law. And, you know, depending on who you talk to, it's 200 to $500, which is crazy. In seven hours, yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, so 500 bucks from 3 billion, that's pretty good. So I think we'll get there for everybody, but this is how medicine and science works. What about cognitive enhancement? You're talking about nootropics and Modafinil, Provigil, talk to me about that. I don't know about these things.

I can interview you about that as well.

Am I interviewing you? Are you interviewing me?

But listen, so it's interesting, right? I think about this cognitive, at the end of the day, people want a few things. They want to be sharp, they want to move well, they want to look good, and cognitive enhancement. so it's interesting. A study done years ago looked at hundreds of molecules to determine what actually increased college students performance on exams. And they found two molecules in particular. I know you know what they are. It was sugar, glucose and caffeine.

Yeah.

Coffee and sugar.

Yeah. Coca-Cola you know, no dose. Anyway, for me, the one particular drug I will use, especially if I'm hopping off a jet and need to go on stage and be sharp is modafinil, Provigil. And, you know, I should look it up. It has had zero side effects for me and I've spoken to a slew of neurologists on it and it, you know, it will list a number of potential downsides, but it is a when I use Provigil or Modafinil, I feel like all of a sudden if I had four cylinders firing, all of a sudden it's eight cylinders firing. It's the it's the closest thing to, you know, what was that movie? You know, you took a pill and all of a sudden your intelligence increased multifold.

I don't know what I want that pill.

Yeah. Yeah.

So you're right. I think the compounds out there like drugs, I mean, people take Adderall or speed or other things.

Yeah, I don't like Adderall for the other side effects. and Modafinil was actually developed for fighter pilots to be awake for long periods of time. You just don't want to, if you use it, you don't want to take alcohol along with it.

Yeah, and you probably want to take it late in the day.

Yes.

It can be very effective, but there are other substances that are nootropic, which basically means enhancing cognitive performance, right? Nootropic means brain and trophic means growth. So, there are things like lion's mane and, Even things like fish oil or choline or vitamin D, other compounds that you can actually take as supplements. It can be quite effective.

So, do them all.

Yeah, I think that's interesting, right?

Because a lot of these drugs that we, these medicine supplements we take, we're taking them out of faith because some study said something. But I'll tell you, the question is, do you have a visceral benefit? Do you actually feel so caffeine, you'll feel a visceral. You know, nicotine is a neurotropic as well, for sure. Not one I want to engage in, but it truly is.

Well, people are taking nicotine, you know, things in their cheek or their nicotine sprays, not only from smoking. So I, I had a friend who gave me that once. I was like, wow, a little much for me. Yeah, a little much for me, but. what about your peptide regimen? Because peptides are things that people don't understand, but they're essentially these small mini proteins that are used to regulate information signaling through the body. And they're regulating almost everything. There's thousands and thousands of them, not exactly like hormones, but they're like, kind of the same concept. They're, they're little tiny proteins that are messenger molecules that regulate every biological function.

And, and they're, they've gotten an increasing use over the last and increasing FDA scrutiny at the same time.

Although FDA tends to want to shut down anything that works, it's not a drug. Like Ozempic is a peptide and they're like, oh my God, Ozempic, what a gravy train. Let's lock this all stuff up so.

Nobody else can use it and charge 10 times what it actually costs. Let me ask you before we jump into the peptides I have in my longevity practices, let's talk about GLP-1. drugs and Ozempic because the evidence is coming out that it looks like it is also a longevity medicine.

Really? Well, what are you learning about that? Because I haven't seen that. I've seen a lot of other things that concern me a lot, but I'd love to hear your perspective.

Just, I guess the, it's triggering reduced appetite and reduced caloric intake.

Yeah.

Which over, you know, It's interesting when you look at what extends life in humans, there are a few things. You can become a eunuch.

Not happening.

Not happening. You can minimize your caloric intake down to like a bare minimum, right? Not average. 1200 calories per day.

Next.

Yeah.

And then you can exercise, you can eat whole plants, you can get rid of sugar and all those other things.

I'm down. Yeah.

So caloric reduction is one of the things that causes enhanced health span. You may not enjoy it, those of us who enjoy an enjoyable meal. So I think Ozempic's having a longevity impact, increased health impact because of its caloric reduction. People just don't eat because they get nauseous.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that's interesting. I don't think it works mechanistically like rapamycin, which inhibits mTOR, which induces the same phenomena of caloric restriction. In other words, mTOR is shut down when you're starving and you can mimic starvation by taking this drug rapamycin. And if you take it properly, and I think the way it's being studied, it's going to be very effective. It's very different than, say, taking a drug that makes you nauseous and not want to eat and lowering your appetite. So, there was a great study, Peter, where they took people who were obese and they were very obese and diabetic. And, one group got a gastric bypass and the other group, the control group, got the same diet that people who had a gastric bypass had to eat after they had a bypass. There was no difference in the end.

Oh my God.

Exactly the same result.

And, I had a friend of mine die during a gastric bypass. It's a dangerous surgery, especially when you're morbidly obese.

But the point of that is it's not the surgery. It wasn't the drug. I think it's just the not eating the bad food. Now, I do think that I'm concerned about Ozempic for other reasons. One, it seems to have a dramatic increase in pancreatitis, in small bowel obstruction, and things that are quite serious. So normally when we see an increase in a phenomenon in medicine, we say, oh my God, you know, eating processed meat increases your risk of colon cancer by 20%. that means your risk goes up from 5 to 6% at 20% relative increase.

They use market and lingo.

Right.

Okay, but that's a big result. But what we're seeing with those epic is not a 20%, but like a 900% increase in pancreatitis, like a 450% increase in small bowel obstruction. And the longer you take it, the worse it is. so I, I think there's some challenges also with muscle loss and weight muscle. I agree.

We've seen at, at found those on ozempic. We've seen a reduction in significant. The weight loss comes more from muscle than other parts, which is, which is a problem.

Yeah.

And there may be ways to mitigate.

That by rigorous strength training and lots of protein. And, but I, I just, I don't think it's an easy fix. And, you know, I literally, I just had a patient email me the other day. He said, I lost, I just lost 200 pounds following your program. like it, you know, you don't need to, to go epic. Now, there's other issues with brain regulation, and I think I'm working on a whole sort of, sort of series of articles around how our brain has been hijacked by food and, and have the addictive properties of food. So, by the way, can we put.

Can we put, like, warning labels on the side of most consumer Foods? Like, you know, like, I mean, and.

The, I'm not profit. I'm working on Oh my God.

I mean, it's like, you know, the crap that kids eat and that's passed off as nutritional food. I mean, cereals, it's criminal. It is fundamentally criminal. Yeah, it is.

When you go to Europe, you got the cigarette packs and it says, this will kill you. You can barely see the brand on it. It literally says, this will kill you. But it should be like that in.

Other stuff we're eating here. Curios or the Apple Jacks or whatever, it's sugar or sugar. on the peptides, I'll just mention real quick. Peptide I love is in the skin cream I use. It's called one skin. It's a 10 amino acid peptide that's a synolytic. So, you know, it's killing dead cells in your skin. And then, you know, others I list them in detail. Cgc 1295, which is for, for muscle and BPC 157 for reduced inflammation and so forth. I won't go into it. It's in Again, if you go to deamandus.com/longevity, you get a free download 30 pages of all of this. Let me mention for your viewing audience, if I could, something that I'm very proud of that we did last week. And I was in Riyadh with a group of longevity scientists announcing the largest prize ever in human history. And so this is called X Prize Healthspan. It's $101 million prize. And it's actually, I raised $141 million. I'm a significant contributor to this. It's my largest contribution ever made. $40 million came from Hevolution, which is now a foundation in Riyadh, in Boston. It's the largest funder of age and health related research on the planet. And then a quarter of the prize came from Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

He has a muscular dystrophy called FSHD. And we, in addition to the 101 million, we put a 10 million dollar bonus prize on FSHD. So to win this prize, all you have to do is reverse functional loss in muscle, immune, and cognition by a minimum of 10 years, a goal of 20 years. So this is a request for teams around the world to run massively parallel experiments. So far, after one week, we have 80 teams registered. I think we'll get to north of 500 teams around the world in this competition. And we're going to be teams have to recruit their own subjects. They'll probably be cohort sizes of 50 to 200 people. When they're ready, if they're a serious team, we send our judges there to measure that cohort. We measure their muscular strength, their cognitive ability, their immune function, functionally. In other words, I don't care what your clock says. I care how functionally, can you climb those stairs? Can you remember these numbers? Can you mount an immune reaction to a influenza vaccine? And you get to treat that subject group for up to a year. You can treat them for a day, six months, or up to a year. And at the end of that, we're going to measure function again. And did we bring you back in time? At least 10 years, my goal is 20 or more years. and, you know, the competition is going to run for seven years. And so if you want more information, anybody listening wants to put a team together, if you go to xprize.org/healthspan, it's x-p-r-I-z-e.org/healthspan, and you can register for a team. I've had friends of mine like, oh my God, this is amazing. I'm going to register. I'm excited to see what comes out of this competition.

I mean, that's so important, Peter, because, you know, what I want to point out about this is so unique is that most of medicine and most of medical science has been focused on the study of diseases, not on the study of health. Yes. And it's a fundamental frame shift that's going to change everything. If we can really reframe our conception of the body from focusing on just diseases and their Origins and their treatments to understanding the biology of health and the laws of nature that govern the biology of Health, it's going to revolutionize everything in medicine. And I, I think it's, it's, it's just one of those cataclysmic events. If we can actually do what, what you're saying we can do, and I believe it's going to happen, I, I think it's going to change everybody's mindset. And for functional medicine, what I do, it's essentially what that is. It's a science of, of Health, of understanding how to study Health, create Health, understand deviations from Health. It's not about treating diseases. I never treat disease. I look at what's going on in the body and where it's out of balance and then tweak it and tune it up. I literally just did a podcast or interview with a guy who's going to be skiing solo to break the world record to go from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole carrying a 500 pound sled by himself, unsupported. Okay, now we did testing. He's 39 years old. He's incredibly fit. He's already climbed every major mountain.

I thought you told me he's 95 years old.

No, no, he's climbed every peak on every continent and the Peak. He's rode his boat across the Drake Passage to Antarctica. Wow. He's crazy. And I was like, this guy's gonna be healthy. I'm not going to find a single thing. But I found he had a number of things that were, were really fascinating, significant that nobody really knew that were not diseases, but he had methylation issues. So he wasn't able to properly detoxify, and he wasn't able to, you know, when his, when he puts body under stress into a thousand mile bike ride, his liver kick. conked out. His B vitamins were low. His vitamin D was low. His iron was low. And, and I'm like, wow, this is really interesting. So he had a whole bunch of different things that weren't diseases, but they were just things that weren't optimally tuned. And so I think by giving him a program to optimize his health, which is really what you're talking about with this X Prize and then shot for the health span, is, is really getting people to think about this problem, to look at this problem, to solve this problem, which has never really been done before. There's no, I mean, the joke we have, the National Institute of Health, Not, it's the National Institutes of Diseases, really. It's not anything to do with health.

Yeah, you treat a disease at a time, you treat an organ at a time. And the origin of this competition is a few different things, conversations with Aubrey de Grey and with Sergey Young and George Church. And I've spoken to you about this and gotten your advice on this competition over the last four plus years. At the end of the day, Our hope is that what an individual develops here is something, a therapeutic that actually targets fundamentals of aging versus just one particular tissue type. And if that's true, if the therapeutic actually is targeting aging, then not only will you improve cognition, muscle, and immune, you'll improve every organ, every tissue in the body. And that's the objective here at the end of the day. Can we address aging fundamentally and health fundamentally here? So excited about this. I hope you and I will talk about this over the years to come and follow these teams as they... Maybe.

I'm gonna work on it. I wanna win the 100 million dollar prize.

You're totally able to register for it. Yeah, it's a great idea. I had my, you know, I'm on the board. So, you know, full disclosure, there will be a separate set of judges who judge this, and the judges will have no conflicts, no nothing. But I had my company, Cellularity, which is up in, you know, New Jersey, Bob Hurrie, doing natural killer cells and stem cells. And he goes, can I register for this? I said, yeah, I guess I'm going, I'm going to win this thing. I had my team at Vaccinity, which is doing vaccines. against neurocog diseases and muscle loss. And can we register for this? Yes, we'll go for it. So we're gonna see a lot of teams, a lot of different approaches.

That's amazing. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.

Insulin resistance is the sentinel problem in all of these chronic metabolic diseases because Insulin resistance is a manifestation of mitochondrial dysfunction.