Exponential Optimism: Cultivating a Longevity Mindset with Dr. Peter Diamandis

Welcome to Flow Radio. I'm Ryan Wicks, Chief of Staff at FRC, and today I have the privilege of sitting down with our Executive Director and bestselling author Steven Kotler, as well as a special guest and longtime friend of the collective, Peter Diamandis. Recently recognized by Fortune as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders, Peter serves as the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which is a pioneering organization known for creating and managing large-scale incentive competitions with over over $500 million in launches. He's also the executive founder at Singularity University and ends up pushing the boundaries in technology and innovation every day. As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has made significant marks founding over 25 companies across various sectors like health technology, space, venture capital, and education. As an author, Diamandis has achieved New York Times bestselling status with our very own Steven Kotler, for their works, including Abundance, Bold, and The Future Is Faster Than You Think. His latest literary achievements include co-authoring the number one bestseller Life Force with Tony Robbins and his most recent work, Longevity: Your Practical Playbook, a deep dive into the transformative developments in healthcare and biotechnology, something that we'll be discussing today. In wrapping up his illustrious profile, Peter also holds degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT, along with an MD from Harvard Medical School. Stephen and Peter, I'm just super happy to welcome you both. This month, we've been diving into peak performance aging, starting with the mother of mindfulness, Dr. Ellen Langer. Now, we're going to shift into the other end of the spectrum. Longevity. To open up our conversation, I think it'd be fun to start with exploring about how your entrepreneurial journeys have influenced your views on healthspan.

Yeah, I want to actually take us off longevity for a second because we're going to spend the whole time there. And I want to ask a flow-based question that I've been thinking about for a while. So, Peter, you started 25 companies.

I know the person to answer that. That would be you.

But yeah, no, but I'm going to ask you a flow question. I want to know of the 25 companies you started, Yeah. Which do you think was the flowest to get off the ground and why?

Oh, God. Well, you know, it's interesting, right? Probably my first companies and organizations because I had no idea what to expect and I was not playing some other buddy's playbook. I wasn't like doing what I thought I should do based upon what I'd done in the past. I was doing whatever in the moment seemed like the natural thing to do, either out of desperation or out of sheer work, whatever the case might be. So, I mean, it's that or the most recent ones. It's either the beginning or the end. And I'll add into the mix there because I'm giving you a question to answer that obviously is not definitive. The ones that I was in love with the most, right? So for me, if I'm doing what I love and it's like just amazing and get to play with this every day, none of it's work, all of it's like just exploration. It's just fun. And one of the things that I, you know, I teach, you know, we teach together in our books is don't do anything for money. Only do those things that you love, what's aligned with your massive transformative purpose, because that's where you're going to keep going. You're not going to give up. You wake up in the morning, you're charged. When you're going through the night, you're charged. It's not work. It's your purpose in life. So, I mean, I think that's the most, most honest element. The ones that were the flowiest were the ones that I was in my highest calling. And that changes over time, you know. So for me, the early days, my first decades were space and then into sort of solving the world's grand challenges with XPRIZE and Singularity and the last decade, it's been building longevity companies. Why? Because I'm getting older and I love what's going on in the world and I'm excited to see more. I would see as much of it as I possibly can.

I think this is such a cool place to start because between the two of you, I think that there's over 40 companies that have been founded. And Peter, as you mentioned, you and Stephen, you both train entrepreneurs both in your books and in your businesses, right? You're working with business leaders to perform at their best when it matters most. One of the stressors that founders often confront is uncertainty. And Peter, you kind of mentioned about how that helped you, helped some of your early companies be more flowy. How do you think about uncertainty at this stage in your life? And are you intentionally seeking that out as a condition in your different businesses or the problems that you're in, challenges you're looking to solve?

I mean, I think whenever an entrepreneur has a success, if you truly have that entrepreneurial gene, phenotypic, whatever you want to call it, you don't do something smaller. You always go and try to do something much bigger, right? So it's like, you know, the reason we've got so many people going after the space industry today was they had successes early on, right? Elon did PayPal and Bezos did Amazon. And like, if I can reinvent, you know, finance, if I can reinvent, you know, shipping and consumer goods, surely I can take on the world's, you know, most difficult aerospace industry and get us, you know, become a multiplanetary species. You don't try smaller. So I think there's this inherent desire to go big because easy is not fun. Challenging is fun until shit hits the fan and you hit a brick wall and you're like, oh my God, why did I take this on? And then, and then you've taken it on. You can't give up. You keep going and you solve it. And you then, once you solve, you know, slightly reusable rockets, you need to go after fully reusable rockets. After you solve getting to Earth orbit, you need to go to the moon. After you go to the moon, you have to go to Mars. It's like this addiction to want to go and stretch yourself. And I know that's been true for me in, in all of my companies. You know, Stephen, how about you? Is that, is that fair to say?

Yeah, I think it's definitely true for me, though. I have to— I want to roll back. You started an asteroid mining company.

I did.

Is there anything bigger than asteroid mining? Like, what's actually bigger than asteroid mining?

You know, honestly, and I'm going to go back and do it.

I have to.

It's— it was just too early. It was just— yeah, I learned that. I remember having a conversation with Elon on the subject because I was— back when Trump got into office, I haven't told this public story. When Trump got into office, and I'm not putting my political affiliation there, Elon and Peter Thiel called me and said, would you be willing to serve as NASA administrator? And my instant reaction was, no way. I'd rather put a gun to my head.

There's no—

I mean, not that NASA is an amazing organization. The NASA administrator is an honored job, but it is thankless to be leading any part of the government, unfortunately, because it's so difficult and you can never make anybody happy. But during that conversation, I was saying, I was telling Elon about Planetary Resources and would he purchase liquid oxygen from us that we would mine from these carbonaceous chondrites, these dirty ice balls out there. And he said, sure, if you can deliver it to me at the same price or better than I can take it from the ground, of course I would buy it from you. But Peter, it's too early. And he was right. We had 2 launch failures. We had a missed B-round financing. And at the end of the day, we had to sell the company for pennies on the dollar. It's still an amazingly good idea and I still want to go and do it. But before then, but before then, we need to get to longevity.

Yeah, let's talk about, let's talk about longevity. Let me, let me transition us into longevity. There's a man, there's the book's dense and for such a short book, it is dense with practical tips. So my question is, there's so many different things in the book as a way of starting the conversation. Where do you— which— what do you think are the biggest levers for longevity? I, I'm not going to ask what are the top 3, top 5.

I—

that's kind of a silly question. But if there's a lot of stuff in that book, what do you think are the biggest levers? Where would you tell people to start looking? This is a question I get asked a lot after writing in our country about peak performance aging. People always want to know where to start, and I sort of hate the question, but I'm asking you.

Yeah. So, Tony, as you know, buddy, I was unfaithful to you. I have to say is that just for public acknowledgment, Stephen is amazing. And we wrote 3 books in a row together— Abundance, Bold, and The Future Is Faster Than You Think. I took writing lessons from Stephen because I loved his writing style so much. And we ended up— I called him one day and said, I've got the book we have to write. And it was Abundance. And it was a turning point. I would argue for, for both of us in our careers. Yeah. And I love writing. Stephen and I would get up at 5:30, 6 a.m. every morning and get on a phone call together. This would be pre-Zoom, and we would exchange chapters we'd written and read it to each other. And our wives were both very jealous of the time we spent with each other. And then I wrote a book with, with Tony, which was a completely different writing experience called Lifeforce, and it was a 700-page book. It, you know, using the Tony rocket engine, it reached number 1 for a number of months. And at the end it was— it's a great book, but it's hard to read a 700-page book. And so I said, there's got to be a way to communicate the most important things more easily to people. So first off, I began by— I came up with a 5-page Word document that I give out to people like, you should do this. And then it became a 10-page and a 20-page and a 50-page. And then I said, hell with it. I want to I want to turn this into a practical guide. So Longevity: Your Practical Playbook became a thing and it's 100— I want it to be 100 pages, 120 pages. It's, it's beautifully illustrated with a lot of practical tips. And I broke the book into chapters, write a chapter on longevity, diet, sleep, exercise, meds and supplements, mindset, and then a category I call not dying for something stupid. And each of those— and there's a chapter on women's health as well, written by Dr. Helen Messier, who's the chief medical officer at Fountain Life. And each of those chapters, you know, I think those are the most important things to do. I think that food, diet, exercise, sleep, mindset, and, and uploading digitally, uploading yourself, each of those things contributes to extending your healthspan. And one of the things that I note in the beginning of the book, which I think is important, is I don't need to do something that's going to add 30 or 50 years right now. What I need to do is buy an extra 10 or 20 years.

Why?

Because there's a concept that Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil talks about called longevity escape velocity, that if you can get to a point— so today, to back up a second, today science is adding about a quarter to a third of a year of life for every year that you're alive. There's breakthroughs going on that are Beginning to understand various reasons why we age, how to slow it, stop it, potentially reverse it. And there's going to be a point in time where science will add more than a year of life for every year that you're alive. And that point is called longevity escape velocity. And the question is, when is that happening? Ray, Ray's prediction is it's within a decade. George Church at Harvard, really one of the most prolific scientists on the planet and one of the most brilliant, along with David Sinclair, put it at between, you know, I think David might be more optimistic, but George puts it at around 15 to 20 years. So my goal— I used to know people say, how long do you want to live? You know, I used to say I want to live, you know, 500, 700 years because, you know, Greenland sharks and sea turtles can live that long. And if they can live that long, why can't I? But really, I want to live long enough to intercept the breakthroughs that are coming that will then extend my life even further. It's a much more practical way to think about it. But I didn't answer your question, did I? Should we take it one segment at a time in each of those? So let's talk about diet first. And a lot of these things are not expensive. A lot of these things are practical. The expense is your willpower. So the single most important thing for folks to know about diet is the body was never designed to take in as much sugar and high glycemic carbs as we take. And glucose is a— it causes inflammation, cardiovascular and neurocognitive inflammation and disorders. And what I tell people is sugar is a poison. When we were evolving, a lot of this— and we've talked about this in our various books— you have to look back to what did the human body evolve for? And the human Homo sapiens evolved, you know, between 100,000, 300,000 years ago in an era that it was hunter-gatherer. And we didn't have sugarcane. We didn't have Froot Loops and Apple Jacks and Cap'n Crunch and all of this.

Peter, I've seen the Flintstones. They have sugary cereals in the Flintstones. So I think there were sugary cereals back in the dinosaur age. I mean, I've seen on TV.

I'm not— it must be true. It must be true. So, you know, on, on the diet front, the single biggest difference someone can make is minimize sugar. And it doesn't mean it's zero. It's like, can you cut back, please? And sugar is very addictive. If you're going to eat something sweet, do it mindfully. Do it so that you're appreciating it. Don't just be, you know, mouthfuls of, of, of sugary substances, not thinking as you're, as you're watching TV. It's just it has so many downstream negative effects. In every disease. You know, glucose in the blood is the, is the fuel source of preference for all cancer. Anyway, the second thing is whole plant foods. And this is the basics, right? It's eating your plants. So some of the, some of the things I speak about in the book are just very, very important quick tricks. Like, for example, if you're sitting down to food at a restaurant, please when they bring the bread and the wine before they bring your food, ask them to bring the bread and the wine back with your meal. If you're going to have bread, dip it in olive oil so it blunts the glycemic index. When you've got a plate of food, the order in which you eat your food matters. Eat your veggies first. Eat the fiber first. Right. I love broccolini. It's like— and asparagus. It's like my favorite foods. Eat that first. It slows the digestive tract. Eat your protein next and then eat your carb last. Just making that change will increase the absorption of the best additive nutrients to your body versus, versus spiking your glucose and your, your insulin in your body. So these are some things obviously you've heard this before. Drink a glass of water before you sit down and eat your meal. All of these things are about small habits that have a huge huge impact. I mean, that's, that's food, right? So you don't have to go much further than that. I then, you know, I've been focusing on adding muscle. And so I do add a significant amount of protein in my diet. So mostly fish, some chicken. I don't take in red meats or beef, but 150 grams because I weigh 150 pounds. It's about 1 gram per pound.

You know, I don't have any questions immediately about food, but the mention of, of you wanting to put on muscle mass, Peter, at this stage in your life, I think is, is a perfect point for us to transition because we know that research suggests that one of the key moderators, you write these if-then conditions to successful aging, is combating physical fragility, right? Decrease in muscle mass, strength, bone density, VO2 max, etc. And I know that you're both seriously committed to your physical training. You really take casual exercise to the next level and you double down, you know, on that use it or lose it adage of exercise. And so how important is exercise and training to combat physical fragility and to extend your healthspan?

The answer, and of course Stephen embodies this extraordinarily well, is it is the single most important thing you can do. I think the numbers are you, you reduce all-cause mortality by 50%. You decrease the chance of cancer by threefold. If you're over the age of 60, I'm 62 right now. It's the single number. It's the number one thing you can do to extend healthy lifespan. And there's a direct correlation between muscle mass and length of life. And one of the things that is so important, and it goes beyond just muscle mass, it goes to strength and balance as well, is not falling. Injury is your biggest, your biggest foe. And, you know, the numbers are staggering. If you fall and break a hip or pelvis— really high, I think it's like 65— your chance of death are like ridiculously high because you end up in a— you end up in the hospital and you get pneumonia and it's a spiral.

Well, it's why they— there was that— I'm going to blank the name, but I wrote it in— I wrote about it in Our Country. But it was a study that came out of London, England. I want to say it came out of Imperial College where they found that the single— the single biggest factor, or they found that mortality is inversely correlated with thigh muscle mass because it's— it's the thing that keeps you from falling on top of all the other muscle things, right? Leg strength is what keeps you from falling. So like the single most important thing you could do to live longer is work out your quads. Squats, man.

Have you seen those? Have you seen those airbags for old people? No, no. It's like, it's like you've got this belt on, and when the accelerometer feels you falling, it inflates these giant airbags to keep you from— whoa. Just, just Google on YouTube, you'll see. It's hilarious. Crazy.

Um, yeah, I was, you know, that was one of the things— I mean, we've— I've known you for a long— I mean, you know, you were— you've been exercising. I mean, we were running together way back when. I mean, definitely before we were even writing Abundance. So like, that's already, you know, 15 years now. But what I, what I noticed is how much— the thing that I always sort of point out is you need to train for old age a little bit like a professional athlete. And that's Like, you know, all the studies show everything is a use-it-or-lose-it skill across the board, but you have to train everything at a fairly robust level. What are you doing for bone density?

Not enough. I have tried various, various machines over the years, and I agree with you, bone density is clearly important and I'm not sufficiently doing anything from bone density. I mean, I do, I do my DEXA scan every year to check on where I am and I'm, I'm in the safety zone right now. And if I were to fall below that, I would probably pick up sort of higher impact and high bone stress. I mean, what do you do?

I lift heavy weights. I, you know, Otto Kumbhar, who's one of the founders in the Flow Research Collective, is an investor in OsteoStrong. Both Ryan and I have played. I've used OsteoStrong machines.

OsteoStrong. Yeah.

Those are, those are interesting to me. One of the things that I'm really paying attention to is there's a bunch of new data. I don't know if you've seen this that shows that they're one of the things they're thinking about in terms of dementia, Alzheimer's, etc., is that the bones are the mineral supply house for the brain as well as the body, right? We store our minerals there. We store a lot of the calcium that runs the brain in our bones. So there's one of the things that I've been paying attention to that I'm really interested in is this overlap between bone health and brain health, which seems to be a little bit of a frontier right now.

Interesting. I mean, listen, the whole body is so interconnected, right? We're seeing so many studies on your microbiome and brain health, your oral flora and brain health. All of these things are interconnected. You are one giant multi— cross, cross-disciplinary, you know, ecosystem of systems. So bone is, is important. There's no question at all. Again, the, the biggest challenge becomes as you grow older, your ability to survive a fall. And it's a spiral because if you, if you fall and break or rip or tear, then all of a sudden you're not exercising. And if you're not exercising, everything else starts falling off and rebuilding yourself. Is, is critically is important. I will say, listen, I've always had— I've always been in reasonably good health, but I'm most definitely in what I consider my, my peak physiology today. Right. I really went heads down over the last 5 years and really over the last 2 years on muscle and working out, you know, multiple times per week. And I've got a Technogym bike you know, right over there that I take my meetings on and get to my, you know, zone 2 heart rate, really to stimulate my mitochondria. And so it's, it's integrating it into your lifestyle, right? I got 2 workout coaches. I belong to 3 gyms. There's zero excuse for me never to be doing, you know, some kind of a workout on a regular basis. You know, hopefully 4 or 5 times a week.

Let me ask you a question, which— so in Faster, really, I probably going back to even parts of Abundance, we started talking about different longevity technologies and, and certainly a bunch of things that, you know, we wrote about as possibilities in Faster are now realities. What's coming now that has your attention that wasn't around when we were writing Faster? What are you paying attention to at the cutting edge of this where you're like, this is really neat, I didn't see this coming? Yeah.

So, first and foremost, it's the epigenetic reprogramming that's coming. So, as you know, Stephen, I'll just mention to those listening, about a few months back, I was able to launch something I was working on getting ready for the last 5, 7 years. We launched the largest XPRIZE ever in history, the largest incentive competition ever in history called the Healthspan XPRIZE. It's $101 million and it's going to the team that's able to demonstrate the reversal of function loss as we age in cognition, muscle, and immune. Right. So as we age, this is going to be So to win the money, you've got to demonstrate in individuals age 65 to 80. That's the, that's the age range. You give somebody, you give your cohort of patients a therapeutic treatment that can last up to a year. It could be one injection if that's what it is, or it can be a treatment every day, but no longer than a year. And at the end of that year of therapeutic treatment, you need to demonstrate that you have reversed function loss by at least 10 years, and the goal is 20 years. So what I mean by function loss— function loss is, you know, there is this issue as we grow older of sarcopenia, right, that we lose muscle mass and muscle strength and it gets increases over time. And it becomes harder and harder to, to make and maintain muscle as we age. So let's say that you're 75 and or 70, and as a result of this therapeutic, your ability to add muscle, maintain muscle was equivalent to you when you were 50 instead of 70. Right. Cognition, the same thing. Span of memory, sharpness, reaction times, all of those things. Can you have that which you had earlier in life? And immune function. We don't think about immune being so important to longevity, but it's fundamental. Your ability to fight an infectious disease and more importantly, your ability to fight cancer, right? Your immune system. Most people don't realize humans are constantly generating cancer cells and it's your natural killer cells, your innate immune system that finds cancer cells in your body and zaps them. It's when your immune system is unable to recognize them or they're using camouflage techniques, so to speak, and they become— they're able to grow uninhibited that we develop a cancer. So as we age, there's something called immunoadoption. Your immune system becomes exhausted and you're not able to fight it as much as you did. So can you revitalize your immune system? So That XPRIZE runs between now and 2030. And so my goal is that we're going to see coming out of this XPRIZE— you go to— if you're a team interested in competing, registration is open. If you want to learn more about this XPRIZE, you go to xprize.org. I think it's /healthspan or just go to xprize.org. You'll, you'll connect there. And at the end of the day, For me, this is really important. I'm a contributor. We had a foundation out of Saudi in the US called Hevolution put in a large amount. Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon, amazing man, put in a large amount. And then we have about, you know, a dozen other investors who've contributed, you know, $5 to $10 million. I ended up raising $141 million to launch and operate this XPRIZE. But I think it's one of the most important ones. So we've got In the first month, we have some 200 teams registered already. You know, I want to get it north of 1,000 if we could. Yeah.

At the height of the, of the first XPRIZE, the SpaceX, how many teams were registered? Just out of curiosity, do you remember?

26, 27 countries. Yeah. I will tell you the prize that, that I'd gotten Elon to fund, the Carbon Extraction XPRIZE. Right. It was at $100 million. The Healthspan is $101 million because Chip Wilson wanted it to be larger.

Yeah, it's just— I'm sure somebody wanted it to be larger than Elon's Prize. Of course.

Anyway, we ended up with Elon's Prize, which is going to be culminating in April of '25. We had 6,000 teams preregister for that one. Yeah. And we've got 1,300 active teams still at this point, and we'll have 300 teams that are building hardware, perhaps more, to win that prize. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know if this is all just inflation, buddy, or whether we're getting, you know, getting out there a lot more than we had in the past.

Let me— I'm going to take a left turn into another one of your chapters in the book just because I want to ask you this question, because I've always wondered it, which is supplements, and you're obviously taking a bunch. You know, Ray Kurzweil, back in the day, you know, when he was writing about longevity, he was, you know, at that point, you were taking 50, 80 supplements a day. So here's my question, which is not to say that— and I— and none of this is to say that I don't take supplements myself. But this is the thing that I've always sort of wondered about, which is we know with older folks that one of the largest health complications is polypharmacy. Right. They're taking so many meds. How does that— things interact? What are the real big problem— problem on the functional medicine side of this, the longevity side of it? We're seeing people take way more supplements and these are— they're going to cause the same kind of problems. And nobody's sort of looking at like polypharmacy with supplements or does this work with that? Those sorts of things. And I was wondering, do you think about that? Have you thought about that? Is this just work that needs to get done going forward?

So I do take a lot of supplements. I probably take 60 pills a day, maybe 70 pills a day, and I'm constantly updating that. I am— I literally had a phlebotomist here this morning drawing my blood and and I meet with my physician team on a regular basis and review the results and determine what to add, what to remove. And you're right, there is an unknown unknown here. Where we're going to get clarity is going to be as the data and AI is put to use. Right. It will my dream, and we'll talk about one of my companies, Fountain Life, in a moment. My dream is that within Fountain Life, what we're going to be building is an AI system that is able to take my genomics, my upload of data, right? I go for a full body upload 150 gigabytes every year. Everything knowable about me is knowable in that upload. And then my objectives. What do I want? I want muscle mass. I want cognitive clarity. I want energy. What are the things that are most important to me? And then how many pills am I willing to take per day? Right. So if I can put those in, you know, genomics, my full body upload, my objectives, my, you know, willingness to consume supplements, there is an optimal— there is an optimal for me that's independent of a physician's opinion. And it's based upon massive data. And I think we're going to get there. We're not there yet by any chance. Right now, you know, the study comes out that says taurine is, is important in, in longevity. And I add taurine. Studies coming out saying that rapamycin is probably the single most effective longevity drug out there, and I'm on rapamycin. So, you know, NMN, you know, to boost your NAD+ levels. And I'm on 2 NAD+ boosters. Right. So the reality is I'm throwing the kitchen sink at it. And in the book, I list everything I'm taking and why. By the way, if, if folks listening want a free there's— I did a redux of the book, which is 30 pages, and it's the very core of it. It's available for free. If you go to diamandis.com/longevity, you can get the book there as a download. Not the book, but, you know, one of the earlier versions of that document I was building because I want people to have the, you know, the information. And so, you know, I don't commend the same supplements and the same number that I take. This is what I'm doing. I'm my own guinea pig and I still feel as strong or stronger than I ever have. And that's a good thing.

You know, it, it's not lost on me that one of the things that's going on right now is sort of with folks like you and myself a little bit too, as well, because I certainly have been playing with a bunch of this stuff as well. I feel like we're conducting like one of the largest ever sort of ad hoc experiments in longevity. There's no real controls there. There's— but, but there are— it's, it's definitely the largest mass experiment in longevity that's ever been conducted. Now, we're not collecting the data or anything else, but a lot of people are out there experimenting with a lot of stuff.

I am collecting the data through Fountain. Maybe let me take a second and talk about what we're doing at Fountain a moment because I think it's important. One of the chapters is called Don't Die for Something Stupid, and it's, it's meant to be a little bit tongue in cheek, but it's very real. So if I said to you and to everyone listening, hey, are you absolutely sure there's nothing going on inside your body that you need to know about? Right. Most everybody would stop, think about and go, well, actually, I don't know. I feel fine, but I don't know. And here's the problem. Your body is extraordinarily good at hiding disease. Your body is incredibly good at countering the symptomology of disease. What do I mean by that? Well, you don't feel the impact of a cancer until it's either stage 3 or stage 4, right? At which point it's really hard to combat. 70% of all heart attacks have no precedent, meaning that there's no shortness of breath. There's no issues. There's, there's no pain. It's just, it's there. And a lot of times the first symptom is a heart attack. And like half of those people die on the spot. So do you know that you don't have cardiovascular disease that is concerning or metabolic disease that is concerning? So in the first few thousand members that have gone through Fountain Life, and I'll describe it in a second, These are seemingly healthy adults. 2% have a cancer they don't know about. 2.5% have an aneurysm they don't know about. I have a close friend, extraordinarily wealthy, very successful entrepreneur. We're doing business with him in Fountain Life. And I said, come and go through the experience, see what it's like. And he did. And 2 days later, got a phone call. He said, we found 2 brain aneurysms and it's urgent for you to seek treatment immediately. And he did. And he was in surgery a week later and back at work a few days after that. But these were the kinds of brain aneurysms that could kill him. Right. And we all know people who didn't wake up in the morning, who went to the hospital with a tremendous pain. And the doctor says, I'm sorry to tell you this, but Right. And so we don't know unless we look. And people say, I don't want to know. And I'm saying, well, listen, you're going to know. Do you want to know now when you can do something about it or you want to know, you know, later when it's too late? So what we do at Fountain Life is we put people— it's an annual membership. We put people through an upload, a digital upload, which is a full body MRI, a brain brain vasculature, brain function, a coronary CT with an AI overlay, a DEXA scan, 120 blood biomarkers, metabolomics, microbiome, full genomics, everything that's noble about you. And that data is all digitally uploaded and it is then reviewed by our functional medicine team and our AI systems. To say, listen, this is what you need to know and this is urgent, take care of, and this is where you're going. So we want to answer 2 questions. Is there anything going on inside your body you need to take about— take care of right now? Right. So 2% have a, have a cancer, 2.5% have an aneurysm, 14.4% of people going through who think they're healthy have something going on that's urgent— neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, metabolic, you know, it's just the body, as you know, we're at peak in our late 20s, you know, 30. And that's when evolutionarily we then stopped reproducing. And so nothing— everything is in a slow decline after that. So the don't die from something stupid element of fountain life for me is, is important. I get a huge amount of relief and confidence when I go through that upload every year. And then throughout the year, the Fountain Life membership comes with a concierge physician who understands the, you know, the depth of this data as a functional medicine doctor. And then there's, you know, regular blood testing on a, on a either quarterly basis or as-needed basis. And the goal is to optimize your health and not die from something stupid. And give you the ability to reach what we talked about earlier, which is longevity escape velocity.

Peter, you're an enormous advocate of medical diagnostics. And I know, Stephen, this is a topic of conversation for us often, and you have mixed feelings about it, especially, you know, with what we know about the mind-body connection and that really being a misnomer, that there is no separation. And this is why having a positive mindset towards aging can add 7 years to our life, but having a negative mindset can cost us as well. Peter, you're a huge champion of mindset as well. How do you think about diagnostics influencing mindset? I'm curious to get both your take on it.

Yeah, so I was just thinking, so there's a new study you want to talk about that, like the, you know, Ellen Langer points out that like the notion of a mind-body connection is laughable, right? There's no— the term itself is stupid. There's no separation at all whatsoever. It was a, it was a bad idea, was a bad term. And like, we shouldn't even begin to think about that. And I just— there's a new study that I saw, I think it was published last week. That's the most emphatic study I've seen out of this, where they discovered that your perception of time— is it passing quickly? Is it passing slowly?— influences how long it takes a wound to heal. So they wounded people, and, you know, people who thought that time was passing really slowly, the wound heals really slowly. People who think time is going by really quickly, the wound heals fast. So like, again and again and again, no mind-body separation is not there. So what, what Peter, what Brian was asking is— this is the question I always have with diagnostics, um, which is, how do we know that, okay, you, you know, you find a a microcancer in me, how do we know that it's going to develop into something? One, right? And how do we know that, that, you know, a change in mindset somewhere along the way isn't the fix you need? Like, those are the questions I start asking because we don't—

We did that experiment with Steve Jobs and it did not work well.

Okay, fair enough on that.

Listen, we're going to use science to combat ignorance and stupidity. I'm going to come at it just that bluntly. If you've got a cancer, you got to do something about it. Right. And it used to be 20 years ago, 30 years ago that the diagnostic technology had— didn't have the fidelity to actually find things. You'd see a shadow and you'd do a biopsy and you'd wonder if it were or not cancer. We come at this now from multiple different directions. Right. So people who are going through Fountain are getting a blood biopsy, a GRAIL test, for example, as well, which is looking for micro DNA fragments from cancer cells in the bloodstream at the same time that they're doing a full-body MRI or a low radiation dose lung CT. And you look at this from 3 or 4 different places and you can say, yes, there is something here. We need to take care of it right away. And I, I— that used to be an issue. It is not now. Now we can know, yes, you have an aneurysm. Yes, you've got a cancer. Yes, you've got, you know, this level of metabolic disease. We have the ability to, to get enough richness of data that we can say there is something going on here that we take action on. Now it may not be— you have to weigh, do we take an action today or do we monitor this? But at least we know to monitor it. Right. And people can go from 0 to a, you know, a stage 4 pancreatic cancer in a year's time. And mind-body, you know, listen, I am a huge advocate and I agree with you. I quote a study in the book that says, you know, optimism can buy you 15% extended lifespan. And I, you know, I consider myself— it was great. I did a— I did in my Moonshot podcast, I did a podcast with Elon last week on abundance.

Yeah. Peter, I've been meaning to ask you this. Have you— have you always been a pessimist?

Yeah, dude. I was bored, you know, it was like, you know, it was, it was like Elon said, you're probably the most optimistic person I know. I said, good, that's going to add to my lifespan, you know? And I think optimism is you win on both sides of the equation. I think there's very little downside to optimism. I think there is a lot of downside to pessimism.

Yeah, I think the only unrealistic optimism is the right— if, if that's the— that's the only—

I can fly as you're jumping off a building.

Exactly. You know, there's a false positive issue with certain levels of optimism. But no, I mean, you're, you know, you're, you're right, because it, it— I mean, it really— the benefits of optimism and mindfulness, especially over time, um, are just— they're, they're phenomenal. And if you're, you know, it's— it was— it was Matt— what was Matt Ridley's book years ago? The Right— The Rational Optimist. And as long as it's a kind of rational optimism, I think that there's really— there's no downside of the upside is huge, right?

Yeah. So going back to, you know, the original question you asked and the— and the— and the book, we talked about diet. We talked somewhat about exercise and its muscle mass and For me, it's VO2 max or zone 2. It's your metabolic optimization, not dying for something stupid. Mindset. I think optimism is incredibly important in the mindset. I believe, you know, I believe you can will yourself to life and will yourself to death. I think that there is a very powerful element of the mind. And for me, part of mindset, I talk about a longevity mindset with folks. And my goal here is if you believe that we are within striking distance of longevity escape velocity, if you believe that we have cellular medicine, right, from stem cells and exosomes and epigenetic reprogramming and a whole slew of other technologies that are all going to be part of this $101 million healthspan prize. And it's coming. And by the way, the single biggest engine driving all of that right now is AI and will continue to be until it's, until it's passed by quantum compute and quantum science. These are unlocking why we age, how to slow it, stop it, and reverse it. And so, I mean, these are for me, these are the key elements. We haven't talked about sleep, which is the last sort of leg in this multi-legged stool. And I think sleep is, you know, incredibly important. I remember in medical school, I used to pride myself on getting the minimum sleep I possibly could.

Like, it's so funny to hear me hear you talk about sleep because I, you know, I've known you a very long time at this point. And this is— you're a recent convert to the cult of sleep.

I am, Peter. I am. I am. I am. I used to like, you know, if I can get by with 5 hours, I was so like, yes, I can do it. I can force myself. How much do you sleep, buddy? I mean, how much is sleep part of your protocol?

I have always— I cannot— I'm not wired. I've never— maybe it's because I'm a creative and I write, and that tends to be the first thing I do. But, and I can't do it without sleep. So I've slept 7 to 9 hours a night almost my whole life. I've never really been able to function on less sleep either. It's because I'm performing as an athlete and as a creative, and the combination has just sort of— I've demanded sleep. And I've, I mean, I've probably napped, I don't know, probably since college. Like my whole life, I've, you know, I've— if I can— it's one of the reasons this sounds really funny, but one of the reasons I never took a job with a company, like didn't work for, work for anybody, was I— middle of the day, I got to close my eyes for half an hour, otherwise I'm not— I don't function. And like, I couldn't fight, you know, yes, I can come work for your corporation, but I gotta, you know, go sleep in the middle of the day. That's not really— I mean, now people, that, that's, that's acceptable, um, but it wasn't for a really long time. And I like— so I've always— sleep has always been a priority for me. Mostly as a creative, just as a writer, I've needed it.

Yeah. Well, it explains why you're so brilliant. And so, you know, 8 hours. How about you, Peter? So, you know, throughout medical school, throughout the first, you know, 30, 40 years of my life, sleep was not something I prioritized. The last decade, I most definitely do. So I will trade other things for sleep. I think it's one of the most important things. You know, when you have Matt— Matt— not Matt Ridley, Matthew Walker wrote a great book, you know, Why We Sleep. And, you know, one of the points he makes, which I think is absolutely true, and a lot of this goes back to, for me, to evolutionary biology. If, if evolution could have gotten rid of an hour of sleep, right, it would have. Right. We are the most unproductive, unproductive undefended in our sleep. It is. So why the hell do we need it? Well, it has an actual physiological function.

Well, that's when the light beams come down from Cygnus 9 and I'm in communication with the mothership.

Well, listen, I appreciate your, your origin story, but so, you know, I've learned my hacks. I mean, for me, for those who have difficulty sleeping, there's an entire chapter on, on sleep and maximizing it and what what to do and what the studies say. And, and it's very simple. I mean, the single— there are a few things that help drive great sleep, and it is going to sleep at the same time every night. That's one of the most important things, consistency, right? Because the body, my body at least, tends to wake up with or without an alarm at the same time. So I'll get up between 5:30 and 6:15 typically, which means if I want 8 hours, I need to be in bed by 9:30 at night. And so If I— 8 hours between midnight and 8 a.m. is not the same as 8 hours between 9:30 and 5:30. Right. Important to realize that it matters being in your normal rhythm. For me, getting the temperature in the room down. So I set my thermometer, my thermostat at 63 degrees Fahrenheit for those of you who are listening from overseas. We still in the United States, it still drives me nuts. We haven't switched over to centigrade and meters. Someday we will, but that's a different story. And so the other thing is I wear an eye mask. I use a mask that I love. I use a mouth guard that's a mandibular adjustment device. It juts my mandible forward, so it keeps me from snoring and from having any apnea. And when I have my sleep kit and my, my Oura ring to measure, it doesn't help me sleep better. It just tells me that I did or did not, and it gamifies me. So I know if I don't go to sleep, man, I have a lousy score in the morning, so I better go to sleep. You know, the—

because you can't flow over time demands, you know, 7 to 8 hours. It's a high-energy state. You need to sleep. So we're always training people to sleep. And one of the things that I always, I always point out to people, because as you know, you get a lot of pushback, especially from entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs love to push back on, on the sleep thing. And what I always tell people is the same thing. I'm like, okay, whatever, it's fine. Take an IQ test. There's a bunch of them online for free. Take one, one night after you've slept 5 hours, and then go back like 2, 3 weeks later after you've slept 8 hours and take the same test. Most people drop 10 to 15 IQ points.

Like, they literally—

you can go from genius to stupid with like 3 hours less sleep. And it's— people take that test and they're sort of like— it's sort of jaw-dropping, you know what I mean? You thought you were able to function really, really well until you see what your IQ score is like with 5 hours of sleep.

A question that we didn't get to in exercise that I've just been dying to ask you is, uh, you know, part of Stephen's training routine. I know has to do with skiing. Skiing is the carrot at the end of the stick to really get him to push hard like a professional athlete. Does your commitment to space exploration fit into your training goals?

Interesting. My commitment to space and my desire to explore the cosmos fits into the overall longevity goals, right? You know, I was born in 1961. And it was the Apollo program and that scientific documentary Star Trek that got me so excited about the future. Right. And that drove me. My parents wanted me to become a doctor. I wanted to become an astronaut. You know, it drove me. And this is how Steven, you and I met with the X Prize and you writing articles about the X Prize early on and then me falling in love with your writing style and taking writing lessons from you and then writing 3 books together. I will never forget that and always, always recount that with gratitude. None of the, none of the future scenarios have evolved at the speed at which I expected them to. You know, thank God for Elon. And Elon holds a promise of, of truly making us a multiplanetary species beyond anything. If Elon didn't exist, we would still be on this very slow path, right? I've known Bezos for 40-plus years since college. And Jeff is, you know, is deploying his wealth to opening up space, but more slowly compared to what Elon is doing. So I want to live enough additional decades where I can go and start a city on the moon, where I can go and do the asteroid mining, or I can go and help humanity become a multiplanetary species. This is something I greatly desire. And then—

Wait a minute, wait a minute. I just want to know what your city is going to be called on the moon. Do we have a name for your city on the moon?

Cotler— Cotlerville, of course. Not yet, buddy. Not yet. But, you know, what I really want to do is find a good underground—

That'd be the Lunatic Colony.

I want to find a good underground lava tube and fill it with 1 atmosphere of pressure and strap on some wings and fly around. I just think that'd be so cool. But, you know, I also have two 12-year-old boys. And so, you know, playing with them, like, you know, I have a regular touch football game with them and they're beating my pants off. It's crazy. But, you know, being able to keep up with them— I had, I had kids when I was 50 and it's, it's definitely a rejuvenative driver. Right. So, So that's part of it. But I just— I love life and I love what I'm doing and I want to be able to go. I run circles around a lot of the younger team members on my team, you know, and I push myself to the limit. The problem I have is just always doing too much. But that's the more is better disease. But that's a different issue.

I think at this point I've been around the longevity life extension space et cetera, et cetera, for really since like '99 or 2000. And yeah, the batting average for breakthroughs, everything we hear about, I think 20-25% turns out to be real and like 75% has turned out to be nonsense. Now that's sort of historically over, over a long view. What do you think the batting average is today? Where do you think we're at with that today?

That's a good question. You know, I really wish we were seeing slow increases, right? I wish we were starting to see people making it to 125 or 130. Right. The reality is the oldest documented human is 122 years. Right. And the oldest human alive today, I don't know, it's probably 114, 115, 116. We're seeing more people becoming centenarians on the average and even more people globally and definitely higher quality life, right?

Like into our hundreds, like for sure.

Right, right. But what we're not seeing is, is this extended healthspan as well. We've extended lifespan but not healthspan. And so, you know, there are sets of tools coming. We talked about cellular medicine. You know, I'm on the board of a company called Cellularity out of New Jersey. That is one of the leading placental stem cell companies, right? It harvests placentas and then decellularizes them to pull out stem cells and exosomes and natural killer cells and T cells. And it's becoming a longevity company because these cells from a newborn are part of the regenerative engine. And there will be use of these under FDA guidance eventually to to deliver rejuvenative capabilities to people. So excited about what Cellularity is doing and other companies. And then you've got folks like David Sinclair and folks out of Altos Labs and George Church working on epigenetic reprogramming. So what I mean here, so it's interesting, a couple of points. Number one, when you're born, You've got 3.2 billion letters from your mom, 3.2 billion letters from your dad. Those same— that same software is what you have when you're 20, when you're 50, when you're 80, when you're 100. Your software doesn't change. And so the question is, why do you look different? You know, why don't you have a six-pack at 80 or 90 that you had when you were 20 or the same full head of hair? And it's not what genes you have, it's which genes are on, which genes are off. It's your epigenome, epi from the Greek word for above, controlling the genes. And so as we grow older, a couple of things happen. Number one, we— and this is a part of what it's called our sirtuin system. This is what David Sinclair's book Lifespan. Lifespan is about— right. He talks about the sirtuins, which are a system of 7 genes, proteins that are, that are driven by NAD as the fuel. And as we grow older, the sirtuins have 2 functions. One function is DNA repair. So we are constantly undergoing this process of DNA breakage from cosmic rays, from, from environmental toxins, from just, you know, the abuse we get as humans. And so the sirtuins are there trying to fix those breaks, fix those, those genetic issues. But the same— the second thing that the sirtuins do is they control the epigenome. They are making sure that the right genes are on and the right genes are off. And if these sirtuins, as we're getting older, are having to spend more time in DNA repair versus keeping the right genes on and right genes off, you get this, this drift of some genes are being turned on that should have been off, some genes are off that should have been turned on. And then the other thing that's going on as we age is our NAD levels are nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide levels start to fall. And so the sirtuins, which are doing more and more work, have now less and less energy to do their work. And so you get this, this epigenetic drift. And, and so that may be one of the primary causes of aging. And what David Sinclair has been working on is means by which we can do epigenetic reprogramming and bring ourselves back to an earlier state of youth. Now, he's written a number of papers. I think it was the COVID of Science or Nature in December of 2020, and he was using what's called the Yamanaka factors. And this is Nobel Prize winner Dr. Yamanaka, who discovered these four factors that can revert a mature cell back into an immature stem cell, and it's called induced pluripotent stem cells. And what David found was that if you use 3 of the 4 Yamanaka factors, you can bring a cell earlier in its time, not all the way back to a stem cell, but to a youthful cell. And, you know, what we have to remind ourselves is that we go from a single 40 or 50 or 60-year-old male and a 20, 30, 35, maybe 40-year-old female to an embryo which is at zero age. Right. So the information inside our bodies to mean to know what zero age looks like is there. We know what a youthful epigenome is and Can we, can we revert there?

Because we pass it along to our offspring is what you're saying.

We pass along the information to what the original state vector is, is there, and we pass it along. And so David's been able to demonstrate this reversal of aging in mice where he's now doing it in primates. And besides using these Yamanaka factors and using gene therapy to introduce these Yamanaka factors, right, using a viral agent, an adeno-associated virus, to go and put these factors into the cell and activate them. Recently, he's published some papers which he's very excited about, and he just let us know he's going to be registering for— to compete in our competition. That there may be a cocktail of chemicals, of meds, drugs, whatever you want to call them, that can reset your epigenetic age. So all of this stuff is now on the cusp, and it's what gives me faith. It's what gives me this longevity mindset. And again, my longevity mindset is believing that we can, that we can extend the healthy human healthspan, that staying young, not eating sugar, eating whole plants, getting 8 hours of sleep, getting my exercise in, having an optimistic mindset, getting myself uploaded every, every year and catching any disease at the beginning. All of this is worthwhile because I'm going to be able to intercept these breakthroughs that are coming. And it— I think the greatest wealth as in humanity is our health, right? I love this saying: the man or woman who has their health has a thousand dreams. The man or woman does not has but one dream. And you and I have both been in our lives when we've been laid up sick or whatever it might be. And all you can think about is how do I get back? How do I get back to where I was? And so this is the promise of exponential technologies. It's the promise of AI. It's the coming promise. We are quantum systems and quantum tech and compute and chemistry is going to play a huge role in this. And that's not 20 years away or 15 years away. It's this next decade. So yeah, that's what keeps me optimistic.

Amazing.

Peter, as we wrap up this insightful conversation, where can our listeners learn more about longevity and what you're up to?

Sure. I mean, yeah, go to diamandis.com. If you want a free download of the, you know, sort of the what to do, go to diamandis.com/longevity. A number of resources for you there. My podcast, which Stephen has been on, is called Moonshots. I just did an episode with Elon. And so you can, you can check out Moonshots. And then at diamandis.com. I put out 2 blogs a week, typically on AI and on longevity, or go to xprize.org to find out XPRIZE. Anyway, a pleasure. Thank you, Ryan. Stephen, I love you, buddy.

Love you, buddy. We'll talk soon.

Yeah. Talk soon.

Yeah. You two are the best. Thanks, gentlemen. This episode has been an optimistic journey into longevity and peak performance aging. Peter, your wisdom and insights have been invaluable to us. Thank you for sharing them with us. And Stephen, as always, your probing questions have led us through another captivating exploration into peak performance, enriching each discussion. Really grateful for your guidance and expertise. To our dedicated listeners, if you found today's episode thought-provoking, I encourage you to subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave us your feedback. For a deeper dive into Peter's work and insights, check out the links in the show notes. And until our next session, remember Peter's favorite saying: the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. Thanks, everyone.