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- [00:02]
Peter Diamandis
Lemonade. What would you do with 30 extra years? A lot. This future of an extra 20 or 30 healthy years is possible. We're living during the most extraordinary time ever. We're in the midst of an AI not revolution. It's a reinvention of everything, of all.
- [00:25]
Dan Buettner
The things you've tried on your body and you've been doing this for a while. What hasn't worked? Peter, it's great to see you. I think we've shared this stage in all these thought leader conferences, the Ted's and the Googles for 20 years. And it's been such a joy to watch you evolve. You're largely in technology and now really all in on longevity. And I actually want to start the podcast by reading something from the New Yorker. You were just profiled in the New Yorker. I was impressed with the fact that you caught New Yorker's attention. But this article starts off with Peter Diamandis is willing to try nearly everything to extend his life. A leader in the biohacking movement, he consumes 150 grams of protein and five packs of pills every day, uses three red light therapy devices at a time, and dabbles in therapeutic plasma exchange, spending more than $100,000 a year on longevity. Does that sound about right?
- [01:29]
Peter Diamandis
That's a conservative estimate. I mean, the New Yorker piece was interesting, right? I gave the writer sort of card blanche access to my life for six months. I would say his article was a bit cheeky and every writer needs to find some kind of crazy hooks and accurate to a large degree. I don't actually talk about living forever. I talk about extending health span, which you and I both, I think is the most important conversation to have by 20, 30 years. And then maybe, you know, getting to longevity, escape velocity. But in general that's true. I'm constantly looking for what are the highest value most scientifically validated reasonable risk therapeutics that I can try for myself and then make available through Fountain Life, which is a company I'm a co founder and chairman of the.
- [02:27]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, and so people listening today, let's just say an average 40 year old. If, if these therapies prove to work and if we can get them widespread, what is the value proposition in terms of X years? How, how long could the average 40 year old live, do you think? If these really work?
- [02:46]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. So the most important thing people think about, we're living during the most extraordinary time ever. We're in the midst of an AI, not revolution. It's a, you know, it's a massive disruption. It's a reinvention of everything. And so when we talk about extending health span and then second to that lifespan. Right. You and I have become friends of late. I, you know, love the work that you've done and your focus on extending health span versus lifespan. Right. Sitting drooling in a wheelchair at 120 is no interest to anybody. But, you know, recently. So I spend half my life in AI. I have a large venture fund in AI, over a billion that we invest out of MIT and Harvard. I advise a number of AI companies. And then I have a large venture fund in Longevity Biotech, Bold Longevity Growth Fund. And I invest and build companies in that space. So the two are intimately interconnected because AI is going to have the single most outsized impact on longevity. And, you know, if you believe folks, which I do, like Ray Kurzweil. Right. Ray's been a mentor for me.
- [03:59]
Dan Buettner
He's got Singularity.
- [04:00]
Peter Diamandis
Singularity.
- [04:01]
Dan Buettner
Brilliant man.
- [04:02]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. We co founded Singularity university. He wrote two incredible books. He's got an 84% accuracy rate if you look it up on Wikipedia for his predictions. And one of his predictions is we reach this thing called longevity escape velocity by the end of the year 2030. That's like five years from now. Right. So those who are in good health will intercept breakthroughs that will extend our health span for every year that we're alive. Extend our health span for more than a year. That's the vision. And it's not coming from good hopes or better eating. Those kinds of outsized gains are gonna come from breakthroughs derived from artificial intelligence, understanding physiologically why we age, how to slow it, stop it, and reverse it. And so when I'm on stage just talking about this, Dan, there are three people I sort of like, pull quotes from. One is Sir Demis Asabas. Demis is the CEO founder of DeepMind, which is sort of Alphabet's AI engine. And he was on 60 Minutes predicting that we would cure all disease within the next decade, which is a pretty extraordinary claim. And then you've got Dario Amadei, who's the CEO of Anthropic, at the World Economic Forum in January of 25, talking about potential to double the human lifespan in the next five to 10 years. Add that to what Ray says. Add that to our $101 million Healthspan X prize, trying to reverse the ravages of aging, which you're behind as well. Yeah. Which I raised the capital and helped create and build. And then there are people like, like David Sinclair and George Church. And there's enough scientific focus, energy drive, leaning towards this idea that, that the current increase in life and health expectancy is going to take an upward leap.
- [06:00]
Dan Buettner
Yes, but you know, when you. From 1850 to about 1990, we saw life expectancy grow by two and a half years per decade. So in other words, if you could live another decade, you got an extra two and a half years.
- [06:12]
Peter Diamandis
So three months per year, right?
- [06:14]
Dan Buettner
Yeah. Well, that acceleration, life expectancy is flattened off.
- [06:18]
Peter Diamandis
In fact, it dipped during COVID Dipped.
- [06:20]
Dan Buettner
During COVID but it has continued to slow. It's continued to Plateau since 1990.
- [06:25]
Peter Diamandis
The numbers I saw look like they started to pick back up at that rate. But maybe Jay Olshansky, a demographer from.
- [06:32]
Dan Buettner
University of Chicago, wrote a very influential paper in Nature showing that we've starting to plateau. So the, the interventions you're thinking of are somehow have to overcome the current headwinds that life expectancy have today. And we're this, this potential doubling of life expectancy in five years. Where's it going to come from?
- [06:56]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. So first of all, I mean you and I both agree, I, I written my book Longevity Guidebook, like the stuff.
- [07:03]
Dan Buettner
It's a very good book, by the way. Very. Makes it very simple.
- [07:06]
Peter Diamandis
Thank you. I read it, I wanted to make. So Tony Robbins and I wrote a book called Life Force which is like 800 pages, which is brilliant. It was number one New York Times bestseller for like, for two months. But it's 800 pages. It's a lot to digest. And I wanted to make something that was very actionable and I think, you know, the clear point is sleep, diet, exercise, mindset, fundamentally those things. In mindset I include community and love and family and all of that. Those things will get you so far.
- [07:39]
Dan Buettner
That's right.
- [07:39]
Peter Diamandis
Right. But can those things get you to a healthy 90 year old, 100 year old? I think they can. And that work that you've done so well.
- [07:48]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, that's what blue zones is.
- [07:49]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, exactly. To get beyond that, I think we have to overcome our existing biology. And so the way I think about it is each of us are a collection of 40 trillion human cells that make us up. And every one of those cells is running 2 to 5 billion calculations or chemical reactions per second per cell.
- [08:10]
Dan Buettner
Wow.
- [08:11]
Peter Diamandis
It's massively complex. And so there's no way for a human physician to really grok that all, to understand it all and integrate that all. But I will and I can, I'll tell you my, my basic thesis here and I'm always looking to test it out on, on brilliant people like yourself, which is we do have species on this planet that live, you know, routinely well past 100 years. You know, the bullhead wild makes it to 200 years. The Greenland shark, ghost turtle. Yeah, yeah. And the turtles. The Greenland shark makes it to 500 years. And my, my question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? And my, my sense is it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. I believe that this is the decade where we're finally getting the tools that will enable us to actually begin to modify the software, modify the hardware, and it isn't going to happen. These extensions in human health don't happen from eating something different or sleeping an extra hour. They're going to have to come from a number of biological interventions, which some people will be willing to do and others will, Will not.
- [09:28]
Dan Buettner
And don't you have to come up with an intervention that somehow intervenes to all 40 trillion cells?
- [09:34]
Peter Diamandis
Because you do.
- [09:36]
Dan Buettner
There's so many, you know, we have our, our brains and we have heart disease and we have joints that break down. And how, how does one intervention address the 99 different systems in our bodies?
- [09:49]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. So there's a few different fundamental beliefs or if would, if you would, scientific theses that are being put forward here. So David Sinclair, whose work, you know, David's a dear friend. I just did a, a really in depth podcast with him on my Moonshots channel, which, which was one of the most watched that I've done. And in that we talk through the, what he would call the age reversal strategies right now. And the work that he's been working on, he's published on the, you know, the. I think it was the COVID of nature in 2020 about age reversal in, in the eye of a rat or eye of mice. And now that work has been replicated in primates. It's about to go into humans this year. And the idea is that, you know, Dr. Yamanaka out of Japan, backed by Mark Benioff's philanthropy, found these four genes, these four proteins, the Yamanaka factors that are able to take an existing, older differentiated cell, a skin cell principally, but could be a neuron, hepatocyte, could be any cell, and take it back to a youthful state of basically a stem cell that can then differentiate.
- [11:15]
Dan Buettner
Isn't the metaphor kind of going back to the factory settings of ourselves?
- [11:20]
Peter Diamandis
Exactly. I mean, so here's a question I, when I'm in an audience, you know this, I say, listen, when you're born, you get 3.2 billion letters from your mom and 3.2 billion letters from your dad. It's your genome. It codes for some 22,000 genes. And you had the same genome at birth at 20, at 50, at 100. Why do you look different at 100? Why don't you have that six pack that you had when you were 18?
- [11:43]
Dan Buettner
It's now a keg.
- [11:44]
Peter Diamandis
Exactly. What's, what's going on? And it turns out it's not the genes that you have, it's what genes are on and what genes are off. Effectively, what's called your epigenome. Epi, from the Greek word for, for above. And the hottest area of research right now is this thing called epigenetic reversal. So can I go back? My epigenome right now controls this. Genes are on, these genes are off. That makes a skin cell a skin cell and not a brain cell. Right? But as we age, like, for example, we have genes for, I think like 22 or 23 collagen genes. And when we're young, all those genes are turned on, and our skin is very soft and supple. And as we get older, many of these genes get silenced, they get turned off. The epigenome shuts them down. But if you could reverse them so they're on, you'll get more youthful skin again. And so David has been working, as has George Church and others, to use gene therapies to insert three out of the four Yamanaka factors. Four Yamanaka factors take that skin cell back to a pluripotent stem cell where it can become anything. Three of those factors, leaving off one of them, takes it back to a more youthful skin cell. And so he's demonstrated with this, the ability to take these cells into a more youthful state. They behave younger, they look younger. But what he's been doing of late, and he describes this in detail in the, in the Moonshots podcast, is he basically has has screened millions, maybe hundreds of millions of AI generated molecules that instead of a gene therapy where you're using a virus to go into different cells, you're taking a, a cocktail of three molecules and those molecules taken as a pill. His words, not mine. Three days, you know, three times a week over a few months will reverse your physiological age. And so for me, that's like the Holy Grail, right? Because those, those molecules digested into your, into your circulatory system, hit all of the cells in your body. So we'll see.
- [14:04]
Dan Buettner
Just to put it in language a 16 year old would understand, for example, these Somehow go to all 40 trillion cells in our bodies.
- [14:14]
Peter Diamandis
Just like when you take vitamin D or you take, you know, you eat, you eat food, the protein, the glucose gets distributed by a circulatory system to all of the cells in your body. You know, when you take a medicine, when you take an antibiotic or you take whatever those. Your circulatory system is basically distributing these molecules through all the cells and they.
- [14:35]
Dan Buettner
Get to all the cells. And this is perhaps oversimplifying, but these three molecules, somehow they get distributed to all of our cells and. And they set them back to factory settings, more or less.
- [14:49]
Peter Diamandis
They trigger them to go to a more youthful state. And again, listen, this is early in the work. My point is that's one approach and there are countless approaches coming. Because if you know this, I mean, health span extension is the most valuable thing in the world. I mean, what would someone not pay for an extra years of. 30 years of vitality?
- [15:16]
Dan Buettner
Yes.
- [15:17]
Peter Diamandis
The other thing, Dan.
- [15:18]
Dan Buettner
Priceless.
- [15:19]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, it is priceless. You know, we've exchanged these quotes before, but the man or woman who has her health has a thousand dreams. The man or woman who does not has but one, like get my health back. The other thing going on, I'll just mention it to sort of anchor. This is, as you mentioned, I've been working on now for better part of seven years, launching a large scale, originally a longevity X prize, rebranded as a health span prize. Very much from the work that you've done that is asking teams around the world to come up with a therapeutic that I can deliver to you. Deliver to a population. I think we're looking at ages like 55 to 80 in that timeframe, that in the course of a single year, you could deliver the therapy in a day, a month, but no more than a year. Right. It's time constrained. And by delivering this therapy at the end of this year, the subjects have regained the function that's been lost in your immune system, your muscle and your cognition. You know, we think about what do you want to live, you know, vibrantly. You want to have great muscular strength. I mean, muscle is a longevity organ. And it's critically important. Right, your immune system to fight infection or cancer and cognition. You want to have the lights on for as long as you can. Yeah.
- [16:47]
Dan Buettner
You want to stay sharp till the end.
- [16:48]
Peter Diamandis
So we have 630 plus teams have entered this competition. I raised 157 million for it. 101 million is the grand prize. And we have some other elements there. And we'll have a winner.
- [17:02]
Dan Buettner
10 cup in your neighborhood or how'd you do that?
- [17:05]
Peter Diamandis
Oh my God. Pitching a lot of people. So I put in a significant amount for me, you know, some single digit millions. But I got a group out of Saudi Arabia called Hevolution, Think of health and evolution, that is our largest sponsor.
- [17:24]
Dan Buettner
What's in it for them?
- [17:26]
Peter Diamandis
They're given the mission to extend health globally. So Mahmoud Khan, who runs that, Dr. Khan, who was the chief scientific officer at Pepsico and he was the CEO of a couple of pharma companies and he worked earlier with David Sinclair. He was hired and brought in to create this institution. And so they have a multi billion dollar budget and they fund science and back technologies that are extending health. I'll come back to that in a minute. The second major sponsor, an amazing human being, Chip Wilson, who was the founder of Lululemon, who has a muscular dystrophy, was the, you know, is the co sponsor of this. And then a number of people in my abundance community have put up between 2 million and 10 million.
- [18:16]
Dan Buettner
That's kind of a philanthropic.
- [18:18]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, all philanthropic. The whole thing here is, is philanthropic, but there's no greater value to society or to a nation state. You know, people talk about how do we balance the budget? You know, we have all these deficits. You want to balance the budget, you want to get rid of your deficits, Extend people's health span by a decade.
- [18:36]
Dan Buettner
That's right. Keep them working.
- [18:38]
Peter Diamandis
Keep them working. Yeah, yeah.
- [18:42]
Dan Buettner
One of my favorite things about being home, especially up at my house in Wisconsin, is gathering friends around the kitchen. We'll chop vegetables, pour a glass of something good, and let dinner take its time. In every blue zone I visited, from Okinawa to Sardinia, food isn't just fuel, it's community. People cook together, eat slowly and laugh a lot. That shared meal is the heartbeat of a long and happy life. When I'm home, I try to recreate that rhythm. Simple plant forward meals, good conversations, maybe a game of cards after dinner. But the reality is I'm often not at home. So leaving my space open for someone else to experience, that magic really works for me. That's why I host my home on Airbnb. That way, my kitchen, my table, my fireplace, all those moments of connection keep doing what they're meant to do. Bring people together. So think about it. If you've got a space in your home that you love, maybe other people would also love to experience its magic. If you host it on Airbnb, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host. You know, the best trip I took in recent memory was a Duvine trip. I gathered up 10 of my best friends and we took a trip to the Blue Zone with Duvine. They took of everything. And as a cyclist who likes to have a bike that's working, who likes to eat good meals, and who likes to know what I'm seeing as I go, I could not have asked for a better experience than with Divine. And not only that, it turns out that cycling is one of the best activities for longevity. It's one of the top three. Why? It's easy on the joints. You get regular, low intensity physical activity. It's not boring. It requires some balance, something you can do for the long run. You know, Duvine believes cycling is for everyone. So they design trips for all levels of experience. And they'll take you anywhere from easygoing bike paths and how into epic climbs in France. Plus they offer E bikes to make the trip accessible to everybody. And this. And the support van is always with you for not only emergency repairs or water or snacks or to carry your extra gear. So whether you're a seasoned cyclist or a total beginner, if you're ready to give it a try, our listeners get $150 off per person. When you book your first Divine tour. Head to divine.com livebetterlonger to book now. I fully support what you do, and I think that I actually believe you that within the next five years, we're gonna see a major innovation that provides a leap in life expectancy. We've had David Agus on this podcast talking about how AI is going to help fuel that. But in the meantime, there's so much low hanging fruit, for sure, that can add to healthy life expectancy. You know, I found three areas in the world I don't want to name them yet, where people are enjoying 12 more years of healthy life expectancy than Americans are. And it's not complex things. One of them is universal healthcare that's worth about five years of extra life expectancy. Living in an extended family, three extra years of healthy life expectancy. Educating women of childbearing age, making sure they get an education, very simple thing. But they have children who are healthier. First of all, they have fewer children. They tend to be healthier, more educated, they grow up more productive, and they create this upward spiral of health. And, and what we do is complimentary. And, you know, a lot of times people do different things, are competitive with each other, and I love how we're, you know, I think we really admire each other's work. But to. To go back to.
- [22:53]
Peter Diamandis
Except you get. You get to go a lot cooler places than I do.
- [22:56]
Dan Buettner
I do get to go.
- [22:57]
Peter Diamandis
You get to enjoy yourself a little more than I do.
- [22:59]
Dan Buettner
Right now. I'm not as hardworked as. Yeah, you're ridden hard and put away wet. And, you know, I'm going to Sardinia to look for a new Blue Zone next month, which will involve drinking wine and hanging out with locals. But there's a lot of wisdom there. You look forward for answers, and I look backwards.
- [23:17]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Fascinating. It's very true.
- [23:19]
Dan Buettner
And evolution.
- [23:20]
Peter Diamandis
You value both.
- [23:20]
Dan Buettner
Yeah. Evolution teaches us a lot. And we often sort of blindly think that technology is gonna solve our problems. And I'm thinking specifically now about connecting with other humans. The desire to connect to humans is other humans is a fundamental, almost need. And we've now defaulted to, you know, first it was Facebook, and then now it's Instagram or Twitter or X. And we're finding out now that that's not nearly as rich or valuable. Indeed, it might be detrimental. As opposed to what you and I are doing right now, Peter, which is sitting across.
- [23:54]
Peter Diamandis
I'm so happy we're doing this in person and not on Zoom.
- [23:57]
Dan Buettner
Yeah. And I wish everybody listening to us right now could be sitting here with us right now. And then, you know, we go have a glass of wine afterwards. But you can't really beat your programming. And, you know, I know enough about you that this, the. This is your purpose.
- [24:11]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
- [24:12]
Dan Buettner
This is your. Your calling.
- [24:14]
Peter Diamandis
And.
- [24:15]
Dan Buettner
And this what makes life meaningful for you. And even though it drives your body hard, at the end of the day, you can't not do it.
- [24:21]
Peter Diamandis
It's my nature. You're right.
- [24:23]
Dan Buettner
I tried to retire five years ago from Blues.
- [24:25]
Peter Diamandis
And I think, honestly, I believe retirement equals death. I mean, I've said to people, listen, if you're thinking about retiring, Google the correlation between retirement and death. It's pretty damn high.
- [24:35]
Dan Buettner
The most dangerous year of your adult life is the year you retire. There's a spike in mortal. You can't explain it any other way than. Than. Than retirement.
- [24:46]
Peter Diamandis
Yes. If you're. If you're listening to this conversation. I'm talking to the camera. You listen to this conversation, you're thinking about retiring. Think about finding your passion and joy in life and making that your new career.
- [24:57]
Dan Buettner
That's eight years of life expectancy right there.
- [24:59]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Nice.
- [25:00]
Dan Buettner
AI. Everybody's talking about AI how, if you can put this in simple terms, your best guess, how AI is going to Accelerate this leap in in life expectancy for humans.
- [25:13]
Peter Diamandis
What? Sure.
- [25:13]
Dan Buettner
How's it going to help?
- [25:15]
Peter Diamandis
So there's a number of different ways. And so let me, let me take them from the immediate near term happening now to the theoretical longer term. So right now, the best AI in the world is your, is your diagnostician. You're familiar I had co founded with Tony Robbins. Bob, Hurry. Bill Capslin called Fountain Life.
- [25:37]
Dan Buettner
Fountain Life? Yeah, it's all the talk down in Miami.
- [25:39]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, we have, we have four centers right now. New York, Dallas, Orlando as our headquarters in Naples. We're opening up here in Los Angeles and then we're opening up Houston at the end of this year and then Miami at the end of this year, first quarter. So we'll have seven centers and there's a lineup of like 25 centers. And when you go to the center, we digitize you. We collect about 200 gigabytes of data. So it's a full body MRI, brain imaging, brain vasculature, a coronary CT using an AI overlay looking for soft plaque. Really important. Talk about soft versus calcified plaque. Low dose, long.
- [26:18]
Dan Buettner
Wait, wait, what's worse?
- [26:20]
Peter Diamandis
Soft plaque is the killer. Yeah, calcified plaque, if it's not blocking your coronary artery and it's on the side of your coronary artery. The coronary arteries feed the heart glucose and oxygen, allow it to operate. Calcified plaque is safe. It's not going anyplace. It's what we've discovered in the last five years. It's the soft plaque that doesn't show up on a calcium scan that in the middle of the night can evulse, can break off and block an artery and then you're dead.
- [26:47]
Dan Buettner
It ruptures and it dilates your arteries and then causes sort of an internal scab over time that caused the block.
- [26:54]
Peter Diamandis
The issue about the rupture can be where the fatty material blocks the artery and causes the heart attack. So we do this coronary, what's called a clearly scan, we do a full, a DEXA scan, your full genome retinal scan, skin metabolomics, blood biochemistry, you know, your microbiome, it's everything knowable about you and that gets fed into our AI system. And the AI system is basically taking all these multimodal information, all the imaging, all of the metrics, and with that rich data about you, AI today is able to tell you exactly what's going on. So our, when you go through Fountain, not only do you do this upload once a year, but you get a Medical team, a functional medicine doctor, nurse, dietitian, health coach, that work with you based upon the results to optimize yourself through the year. I call that work. Not dying from something stupid. Right. So it's like people don't realize the body is incredibly good at hiding disease. And so you don't feel a heart attack, any symptoms until the very end. You don't feel a stage cancer until stage three or stage four. Right. 70% of the cancers that kill us are not the ones that are screened for. You don't die from breast or colon or prostate. You die from glioblastoma or pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer. The cancers that are not routinely screened for just. I'm a pilot, you know, I would not fly my plane if unless it had its hundred hour and its annuals and so forth, or drive a car unless it's in good operating condition. Most people have no idea what's going on inside their bodies unless they look.
- [28:39]
Dan Buettner
I remember at Lake Nona you gave this presentation, very well attended, that you showed a patient where you actually caught a cancer.
- [28:49]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, we've caught, I mean 3% of the members going through Fountain, 3% of our first, I think 6,000 that came through have a cancer they don't know.
- [28:57]
Dan Buettner
About that's gonna kill em, or a benign or you don't.
- [29:00]
Peter Diamandis
Well, I mean cancer that you have to take action on. Right. We typically can catch a cancer in stage one or stage two before it gets two and a half percent have an aneurysm, they don't know. About 14.4% have either cardiovascular, metabolic, neurodegenerative disease. And so again, we all are optimists about our health, but you actually, unless you look, you don't know. So one of the things on this health journey is AI enables us to understand and answer two questions. Is there anything going on inside my body I need to know about right now? And I go every year you need to come. I have blue zone information up on my wall.
- [29:43]
Dan Buettner
Okay, I'll be there then.
- [29:46]
Peter Diamandis
But you know, and come through and understand what's going on. I would not miss a year. Right. The second thing that we do through these uploads is what is likely to happen to you. It's predictable what is likely to cause you difficulties in the years ahead. And then how do you optimize yourself? How do you prevent that cardiovascular or metabolic disease or, you know, or cancer, depending on a whole number of factors. So like I have my Fountain Life app on my phone, all my data is right here. The other day I did something that was fun because all of my wearables come onto this too. I don't have my CGM on, but normally on my Apple watch, my Oura ring and such. And I went to our AI, which has all my data for like eight years now. And I said the name of the AI is, we call it Zori. And I said, zori, can you look at my sleep data and all of the meds and supplements I take and tell me, has there been anything that increases my deep sleep over the last year? And it said, yes. In this specific time you had a, like a 30% increase in deep sleep.
- [31:01]
Dan Buettner
What was that?
- [31:02]
Peter Diamandis
It was. I started taking trazodone.50 milligrams of trazodone. Trazodone has very low downside to it. And it moved my sleep, my deep sleep, from like 30 to 40 minutes to an hour and 20.
- [31:18]
Dan Buettner
Wow.
- [31:18]
Peter Diamandis
And it was, it. It was amazing. And I was like, that was awesome just being able to ask those kinds of questions. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Like, is. Is for my blood glucose control, is berberine better or metformin? And it says berberine for all these reasons and not metformin for all these reasons based upon my physiology. So AI. There was a study done out of Stanford and Harvard that looked at three situations. Here's a bunch of cases. We're going to give these list of cases to a doctor and say, diagnose them. The doctor in this circumstance, I think got 76% of them right. The doctor, using an AI system, was able to increase the accuracy of their diagnostics by 2%. I think it went. It went from 74% to 76%. The AI by itself, without the doctor got it at 92%.
- [32:10]
Dan Buettner
What kind of input do you have to put in for. In order to. Well, what's a good example where you.
- [32:14]
Peter Diamandis
Well, it's. The study gives the rough numbers, doesn't give the exact. But, you know, here's a case history, here's all the information. What does this person have?
- [32:21]
Dan Buettner
We gotta feed that in.
- [32:22]
Peter Diamandis
And the realization is that AI is unbiased. Where human doctors introduce. Like, I just, I think it's this because I happened to see three cases last week of the same similar situation. So the first use of AI, going back to your question is going to be in being able to diagnose patients. And of course, the cost of this is effectively zero. So people are going to, hopefully, because of AI, get diagnosed earlier when they can be better treated.
- [32:53]
Dan Buettner
David Agus was here and he told us about an incident where AI going through data on shingles vaccination, found that. That there was a correlation between shingles vaccination and Alzheimer's. In other words, if you got your two shingle shots, your chances of Alzheimer's went down by about 50%.
- [33:14]
Peter Diamandis
Amazing.
- [33:15]
Dan Buettner
And that's just because AI could metabolize this ocean of data and see the connections where humans would never do that.
- [33:21]
Peter Diamandis
We did some work through all the data. We've collected a fountain and found an interesting study, interesting correlation I'll mention here, because it saves lives. Said, what is the number one factor that correlates highest with heart disease? Is it triglycerides, ldl, hdl, lp, all these cardiovascular factors? And we found it was none of those. It was one thing that correlated maximally with heart disease, and it was your blood sugar.
- [33:52]
Dan Buettner
Glucose.
- [33:52]
Peter Diamandis
Glucose. It was your hemoglobin A1C. And so that was fascinating, right? You want to reduce your chance of heart disease, stop eating sugar.
- [34:02]
Dan Buettner
Amazing. And the worst source of that is typically sugar sweetened beverages.
- [34:07]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, I talk about that in my book. I have a chapter on diet. Very similar to the work that you've seen and done. Right? So minimizing sugar, maximizing whole plants, eating enough protein to maintain muscle and grow muscle. The other area that AI is going to be critically valuable in is helping to understand the massively complex biochemistry of your body. You know, we mentioned like 40 trillion cells, 2 to 5 billion chemical reactions per second per cell. Demis Hassabis at DeepMind, you know, won the Nobel Prize for, for being able to predict the folding of a protein. A very complicated problem. And where he's going and his team is going next is can we take your DNA and based on your DNA, create an accurate model of one of Dan's cells and model it in such accuracy that we understand which medicines or supplements or drugs impact your cell. And then can we go from modeling your cell to modeling tissue and organs and all of you? Right. Can we do in silico trials in this fashion? David Sinclair, I mentioned in the podcast with him, he talks about one of the experiments he did was they built an AI model that would look at a cell under a microscope and based upon the visual of that cell, tell how old the cell was. Right. So not a human able to do it, but an AI was able to say this is a skin cell from a 20 year old or a 90 year old or 50 year old, whatever. And then he was, once he had that tool, he was able then to go through millions of AI generated Molecules to see did that molecule make that cell younger or older. Wow. And then you can run through all of these tests so rapidly that you could say, okay, these are the molecules. This is the bucket of molecules that are reversing aging. Right. This is the kind of stuff that.
- [36:17]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, you can start to get your arms around how this could actually come up with a breakthrough. The way you're breaking down. You mentioned protein folding, which I'm guessing is not meat. Origami what Exactly.
- [36:31]
Peter Diamandis
So your DNA codes for the creation of a protein. Proteins are these structural molecules. They're the most important molecules other than DNA in your body. They are your antibodies, they are your muscle tissue. They are a multitude of different parts. And your proteins are built by a sequence of amino acids. There are these 23amino acids. And the order of these amino acids, basically, as they're manufactured, one amino acid attached to the next, to the next, to the next. As they come, as they're manufactured, they fold into a very precise three dimensional shape, always into that same exact shape. And that shape, the structure, the protein, dictates its function. And we know what the amino acid sequence is. But for 50 years we've never been able to say this amino acid sequence folds into this exact shape. It was such a difficult problem, was called the supercomputing problem. I remember in medical school, when we do that, that will be amazing. Well, it was solved by.
- [37:47]
Dan Buettner
Because we can take amino acids, then these building blocks and create muscle cells.
- [37:53]
Peter Diamandis
Or create, we can create novel proteins which will become medicines, drugs to help cure things. We know that we need a three dimensional structure to block this active site on the surface of a cell. So we can start to actually say this is the structure we need and what amino acid sequence will create that structure. Like hemophilia is a misfolded protein. Right. Sickle cell anemia, you know, all these diseases are from misfolded proteins that have a single error in the genome code.
- [38:28]
Dan Buettner
So if we know how to fold them correctly, we can develop drugs that can facilitate that.
- [38:32]
Peter Diamandis
And so DeepMind under Demis, created something called AlphaFold, which was an AI program that was able to accurately predict the folding of a long chain of amino acids to a perfect structure within a single atomic radius.
- [38:49]
Dan Buettner
Wow.
- [38:50]
Peter Diamandis
And it was unheard, it was thought impossible. And then when it was done, it was, you know, won the Nobel Prize. This was like the first time that we saw AI make a massive dent in increasing this. These infinite options of how AI will be used.
- [39:08]
Dan Buettner
Yes. Our understanding and maybe something we can actually do. People listen to this podcast, Peter, because they want to know what they can do to live longer.
- [39:16]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
- [39:17]
Dan Buettner
So let's talk about you for a second because I, I. What I, I find, you know, in addition to all these fabulous innovations that you fuel and lead, you're you, you're also kind of using your body as an experiment for the rest of us in a way. And I'm just wondering, at the top of the podcast, I listed off the infrared lights you use and the 50 supplements and the 150 grams of protein. I'm wondering, of all the things you've tried on your body, first of all, and you've been doing this for a while, what hasn't worked? You thought was gonna work and hasn't worked, and then tell us what you're doing right now that you think is really working.
- [40:00]
Peter Diamandis
Sure. I'm 64. Let me start there. And I feel like I'm in the best shape. Yeah.
- [40:04]
Dan Buettner
You look like you're maybe 48.
- [40:07]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Okay.
- [40:08]
Dan Buettner
I was going to say 40.
- [40:09]
Peter Diamandis
Okay. But, but in the book, I break these things down and it's what works for me. And while I do this for myself and I write about it in detail and I'm constantly upgrading as I learn and I learn. Right. I have a medical, I have an amazing medical team around me from Fountain Life and a lot of the stuff that I'm doing as a result of this medical team and the research we do.
- [40:34]
Dan Buettner
So you're not just guessing?
- [40:35]
Peter Diamandis
I'm not just. I'm not guessing. Right. I'm accurately constantly iterating. So I, I, you know, I do blood tests probably every month or two months as I modify things. Let me start with some of the, some of the basics. Sleep is fundamental, right. So I am, I strive for eight hours of sleep. More importantly, I strive for over an hour of deep sleep. You know, deep sleep is when your glymphatic system of your brain is cleansing your brain from all of these misholded proteins, the things that cause Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and all of those things. And so deep sleep is very important. So I measure my sleep on my oura ring.
- [41:16]
Dan Buettner
Yeah. Or an apple watch.
- [41:18]
Peter Diamandis
Or an apple watch. Or a whoop. But I measure it. And I measure it not because it's going to cause me to get better sleep, but I gamify it. I care about my sleep. That's fun, right? And so a good night's sleep begins by when I go to sleep. So my ideal sleep time is I'm in bed at 9 and I'm asleep by 9:30. And then my brain wakes up at 5:30. It's when it just, it turns on. So if I go to sleep at instead of 9:30, I go sleep at 11:30. I'm still wake up at 5:30. Just means I got two hours less sleep. So I'm aiming my day at getting to bed now. It sucks when I'm at one of my own, you know, summits at abundance summit, whatever. And keeps you up abundantly. Everybody's partying and I'm like walking out there. Come on, Peter. Everybody knows. I'm like, good night, Peter. I'm going to sleep.
- [42:11]
Dan Buettner
By the way, we did a bike ride with Richard Branson and we have these dinners every night that went on to 11 or 12. Richard Branson, he could be mid sentence at 9 o', clock, he gets up and goes to bed.
- [42:22]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, it's the same for me.
- [42:23]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, it's a strong indicator.
- [42:26]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Of your commitment. So sleep is number one maximizing deep sleep within that. And, and people should realize, listen, if evolution could have done away with an hour less sleep, if like one subspecies of Homo sapiens could get by on seven hours versus eight hours, that would have dominated everything. Right. I mean, you would be more productive. You'd be more productive. I mean, it's like 5%.
- [42:51]
Dan Buettner
What can the people listening here do in general to increase that deep sleep?
- [42:56]
Peter Diamandis
It's a number of things. First of all, it's not eating within two hours of going to sleep. You want to have your digestive system processed properly. For me, it's not drinking too much water because otherwise I'm getting up in the middle of the night to go pee. Yeah, right.
- [43:13]
Dan Buettner
It is all nighter at my age, by the way. Is not getting up and going peel used to be a different thing.
- [43:20]
Peter Diamandis
That's funny. I wear blue light blocking glasses for like the last half hour or hour, depending where I am. So not looking at your phone, does.
- [43:32]
Dan Buettner
That really make a difference?
- [43:33]
Peter Diamandis
It does. So you know, the opposite is also true. Waking up early in the morning and getting out to see first light is resetting your circadian rhythm and hitting your melatonin levels. I was telling my boys this, who are my twin boys, are 14. And I'm like, listen, if you're on your computer and trying to go to sleep, it's gonna make it more difficult to sleep. And also it will reduce your pituitary, your growth hormone. Right. They're in their peak growth phase right now. Long story short, I wear a mask. I wear a manta mask to Block out all the light. I wear a dental device called a mandibular adjustment device, which causes me to not grind my teeth but also juts my jaw out a little bit. Keeps me from having any kind of apnea type of events. The single most important thing is consistency of when you go to sleep. Getting eight hours between midnight and 8am is not the same as getting eight hours between 10am and 6am well, it's.
- [44:35]
Dan Buettner
Hard when you're jetting off to Saudi Arabia and Europe.
- [44:37]
Peter Diamandis
It is. I, I'm lucky my. I tend to snap into time zones, but I'm really just focused on that time. So sleep is, is one. We talked about diet, it's minimized sugar. I, I've given up alcohol. I talk about in the book. Listen, alcohol for a social lubricant is fine, but you know, my alcohol is. I'll sip some wine just to taste it.
- [45:02]
Dan Buettner
Talk more about your diet. What's breakfast for?
- [45:04]
Peter Diamandis
The breakfast for me. So I'll have a couple cups of coffee in the morning. I have black.
- [45:10]
Dan Buettner
Or do you put some black?
- [45:11]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, just black. I put cinnamon in it sometimes. I'll do typically a protein powder shake, plant protein shake called cachava and I'll put in flaxseed into that, 5 grams of creatine. I'll put in almond milk, put in half an avocado and ice. And I'll enjoy that with my, my workout. Right. Just to get the protein, protein load. Otherwise I'll have eggs pretty much, you know, two or three soft boiled eggs every day. Not every day. I'll. I'll basically do the protein shake every morning. And then two or three days a week I'll do eggs instead. So just to shake it up a little bit, I'm in the morning. I do do about 20 to 30 minutes of red light. I have these red light panels and red light is good for skin elasticity, also mitochondrial activation. And during that time I'll have a red light cap on my hair, on my head for hair growth.
- [46:10]
Dan Buettner
Your hair's looking nice tonight.
- [46:11]
Peter Diamandis
Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that.
- [46:13]
Dan Buettner
Got a nice wave to it.
- [46:16]
Peter Diamandis
I'll meditate during that time as well. And then one of the things I love doing is sauna as much as I can. So if I can, I'll do four or five days. I just bought a sauna called, it's called Health Sauna and it's an amazing device. It's a chair and it's like a little tent that goes around you. Your head is outside of it and it's got armholes. Right. And so you're getting the sauna inside your body. And I can type on my computer. That's funny. I can do a zoom call. And I'm getting so it's like I'm always looking at how do I stack stuff and get things, multiple things going and then I'll work out. I mean, the number one thing is weightlifting is muscle. For me. It's maintaining muscle. And I just recently added a vibration plate so that I'll do deep knee bends for 10 minutes on a vibration plate to really stimulate my bones because.
- [47:22]
Dan Buettner
Sounds like those old hotels where you put a quarter in the bed vibrates. We're talking about something different here.
- [47:28]
Peter Diamandis
We are. We're talking about something that is about, is about stimulating your bone growth and your hips and your pelvis and your long bones. Just because one of the dominant mechanisms for end of life is a fall leading to a hip or pelvis fracture, you end up in a hospital pneumonia and you're out. That's how my dad died.
- [47:54]
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Well, hi everybody, it's Julia Louis Dreyfus from the Wiser Than Me podcast. And I'm not going to talk about food waste this time. I'm going to talk about food resources. All that uneaten food rotting in the landfill. It could be enriching our soil or feeding our chickens because it's still food. And the easiest and frankly, way coolest way to put all its nutrients to work is with the mill food recycler. It looks like an art house garbage can. You can just toss your scraps in it like a garbage can, but it is definitely not a garbage can. I mean, it's true. I'm pretty obsessed with this thing. I even invested in this thing. But I'm not alone. I any mill owner just might corner you at a party and rhapsodize about how it's completely odorless and it's fully automated and how you can keep filling it for weeks. But the clincher is that you can depend on it for years. Mill is a serious machine. Think about a dishwasher, not a toaster. It's built by hand in North America and it's engineered by the guy who did your iPhone. But you have to kind of live with mill to understand all the love. That's why they offer a risk free trial. Go to mill.com wiser for an exclusive offer.
- [49:23]
Dan Buettner
75% of Americans don't even get 20 minutes of physical activity.
- [49:28]
Peter Diamandis
Drives me nuts.
- [49:29]
Dan Buettner
So what do you say to those? And people perceive they're busy people. Most of us are overweight. What do you do to start? Yeah, what, what, what should the exercise regimen be for, you know, the 40 or 50 year old dad or mom so who's just not doing anything right. Or not doing much.
- [49:51]
Peter Diamandis
So first of all, listen, I get it. People have jobs, they're trying to make ends meet. They may have two or three kids at home that are clamoring for, for their attention. And the idea of getting out to the gym or even getting someone to come into the house, there's a number of things you can do. So I have in my place, I've got a stationary bike and I do my zoom calls and my phone calls. I'm either on the stationary bike or in the sauna. You know, sitting is the new smoking. Yep. Right. And we spend all this time sitting. So taking your phone and your ear pods and taking a phone call on a walk. Right. During COVID that was one of the things that was fascinating. I took all my meetings outside walking.
- [50:50]
Dan Buettner
I love that.
- [50:51]
Peter Diamandis
Right. And it's great. I find that the only way to make it work is this has to be your priority first thing in the morning. Otherwise the day, for me at least, otherwise the day gets away from me. So when I get up at 5:30, those first, you know, 5:30 till 7:30, those two hours are my time where I can do the, my longevity activities and I mix stuff in. I'm listening to a book on tape. Right. I'm responding to emails. When I'm in front of the red light or in the sauna, I'm not being, you know, I'm not sitting here, feel like I'm wasting time. I'm being productive, but I'm also getting additional benefits. One other thing is, listen, it's who you're with that makes the biggest difference. And you know this. Right. So find people that are your friends and make a pact with them that you guys are going to have a morning walk. You guys are going to go and hang out instead of at the coffee shop, grab the coffee and walk.
- [51:56]
Dan Buettner
I want to quickly go through a list of typical longevity remedies or approaches and have you rated it on a scale? Sure.
- [52:05]
Peter Diamandis
Can I add one more thing? I've got a whole chapter on there on mindset.
- [52:08]
Dan Buettner
Can add two.
- [52:08]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
- [52:10]
Dan Buettner
It's a longevity guidebook by the way.
- [52:12]
Peter Diamandis
And I, I, I give it away effectively.
- [52:16]
Dan Buettner
I, I know everybody at the concert conference.
- [52:18]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. I mean I just want to get it out there. Right. So you can buy it on Amazon. That's great. But you can buy it cheaper. If you go to longevityguidebook.com, you get a book with a whole bunch of other stuff, basically at my print cost. So it should, you know, the nine or ten bucks should not be the reason you don't learn about this stuff. But mindset. One of the things I love as a massive positive on healthspan is your mindset. So one of the things I quote in there is a study done and published by the National Academy of Sciences in which it looked at 69,000 women and 1500 guys. One of the only studies with more women than guys. And it was normalized for socioeconomic status. And it looked at your mindset. And the study outcome was that optimists live 15% longer than pessimists. And I love that. The idea that if you have an optimistic point of view about the life, your future and so forth, you're going to live longer. It's like a double dividend.
- [53:24]
Dan Buettner
It feels to me, though, that there's a genetic component to that. Like you, I think people are often born optimistic or pessimistic.
- [53:33]
Peter Diamandis
So I, I, I talk about mindset a lot in my work and I think about AI models. You train neural nets and AI models by showing them evidence after evidence, after you show them cats and cats and cats, and they learn what a cat looks like. You're constantly training your mindset and your brain by what podcast you listen to, who you hang out with, what's on your walls, what you read.
- [53:59]
Dan Buettner
Basically, all you need is Moonshot and the Dan Buettner podcast and you're set.
- [54:03]
Peter Diamandis
But it's like you said, who you hang out with if you pick your friends carefully.
- [54:07]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, but here I'm going to push back.
- [54:09]
Peter Diamandis
Don't watch the evening news.
- [54:10]
Dan Buettner
A little thing. Yeah. And that goes to. My central thesis is changing your environment. You get rid of screens for the most part, or reduce the number of screens, which will reduce the number of hours you watch. But I would love to see an intervention. I'm going to a mindset change intervention that happens on year one and we get to check in on these people on year five and see if they're more optimistic.
- [54:35]
Peter Diamandis
Sure. Do they have a set point that it can't be moved, is your question right?
- [54:39]
Dan Buettner
Yeah, I've not, I looked all over for it.
- [54:42]
Peter Diamandis
Well, my experience about that is I run this Abundance360 program. Right. For CEOs. I have 500 CEOs that I mentor through the year. And we are.
- [54:55]
Dan Buettner
That's kind of a selection bias.
- [54:57]
Peter Diamandis
Well, but except a lot of, a lot of people come in saying they were much more pessimistic. And I spend a lot of time with them through the year and at the event helping them get an abundance mindset, you know, a gratitude mindset, a longevity mindset, an exponential mindset. We can change our beliefs by the evidence we're given. Like as you give people evidence over and over and over again, they start to challenge, right? If you're watching the Crisis News Network, which is my name for CNN every night, right? And every murder is coming into you over and over again at 6 o', clock, at 6:30, at 7 o', clock, you think the world is screwed. And it's like, you know, it's going to give you this dystopian view of the future, right? That's our amygdala. This goes back to, you know, our evolutionary drivers.
- [55:52]
Dan Buettner
Almost everybody knows that exercise and eating healthy will keep your weight in check and help you live longer. Yet 70% of Americans are obese. So I agree with you and I love it. I just like to find something that works for most people.
- [56:07]
Peter Diamandis
Electroshock therapy.
- [56:10]
Dan Buettner
Okay. I wrote down just a number of sort of popular longevity interventions and hacks. And I'd like you to rate on scale 1 to 10. 10 being great.
- [56:22]
Peter Diamandis
Okay.
- [56:22]
Dan Buettner
Resveratrol, 4 rapamycin, I used to use.
- [56:28]
Peter Diamandis
It, now I'm you know, at a zero. Beans, 9 or 10. Metformin, depends on your biology. But you know, for the general public. Seven, eight, a group of five close.
- [56:43]
Dan Buettner
Friends, 10 stem cell treatments in the.
- [56:48]
Peter Diamandis
Proper medical settings, nine or 10 high intensity workouts. A 10 running marathons. For me at three or four, walking.
- [56:59]
Dan Buettner
To a coffee shop.
- [57:01]
Peter Diamandis
Like eight.
- [57:03]
Dan Buettner
Vegan diet, whole food, vegan.
- [57:06]
Peter Diamandis
So I would say it's high. But for some people, animal protein. So 7. I used to be on a vegan, I'm no longer on that. I'm on, on fish. I'm just trying to increase my protein intake. Yeah, carnivore diet, all carnivore. I would say a three.
- [57:25]
Dan Buettner
Hyperbaric chamber therapy.
- [57:28]
Peter Diamandis
Wow, these are hard to make. I mean first of all a 2 atmosphere versus 1.3 atmosphere, right? And you need to be, if you're doing it for a long enough time for a specific purpose, it can be a 7 or 8. But one off, it's not useful. Infrared light treatments, I'd probably say a seven or eight.
- [57:49]
Dan Buettner
Sauna.
- [57:50]
Peter Diamandis
I would say a nine.
- [57:52]
Dan Buettner
Cold plunge.
- [57:53]
Peter Diamandis
Oh God, I hate cold plunges. I take a cold shower. I mean, I think I'm sure it's eight or nine, but yeah, I'm a cold shower, not a cold plunge.
- [58:05]
Dan Buettner
Fountain life.
- [58:08]
Peter Diamandis
It'S expensive. Fountain life is not cheap. Right. Just to be clear, it's not for everybody. It's the normal membership with the annual upload and the medical team throughout the years is 21,000 bucks. If you can afford it, it'll save lives and extend healthspan.
- [58:25]
Dan Buettner
What's more valuable for those of us who can afford it?
- [58:29]
Peter Diamandis
Understanding what's going on physiologically in you like doing normal blood testing. There's a company called Lifeforce that Tony and I started. It's much more affordable. It's under a thousand bucks a year for a number of tasks that you can do. There's function, health, there's viome, there's other which are in the hundreds of dollars to a thousand dollars. Doing something to understand, not driving blind, right? Getting. Getting clues. And if you get the clues, understanding what they mean and how do you modify what you do.
- [59:03]
Dan Buettner
It's very easy to tell a population what to do to be healthier. It's very hard to tell an individual because we are to a certain extent very different from.
- [59:12]
Peter Diamandis
You have to care. First of all, the things I start with people is like, what would you do with 30 extra years?
- [59:19]
Dan Buettner
A lot.
- [59:20]
Peter Diamandis
Right? And it's like if you can connect with the motivation and you get this longevity mindset that in fact this is possible, this future of an extra 20 or 30 healthy years is possible. You just need to keep yourself in the best health. To get there, you've got to make trades, right? It's like not eating the chocolate cake at night before going to sleep. It's actually getting to sleep. It's getting out of the bed in the morning and working out. So why would you do those things? You have to have a reason to do those. You have to believe that it's going to make you feel better, it's going to give you more time with your family. It's going to allow you to intercept the breakthroughs that are coming. Because if you don't have that belief, you're not going to do it. You're going to take the easy way out.
- [60:06]
Dan Buettner
Peter, thank you for being the prophet and bringing. You're so good at metabolizing the science, making it simple, and you're on the vanguard of putting it to work in people's lives.
- [60:16]
Peter Diamandis
Thanks, buddy.
- [60:17]
Dan Buettner
Yes, if I could nominate you for the Nobel Prize, I would listen.
- [60:21]
Peter Diamandis
Thank you for your work, pal.