Our ancestors would consider us as gods. There's a lot coming. We're beginning to understand fundamentally why do we age, what is going on. The man or woman who has their health has a thousand dreams, and the man or woman who does not has but one.
Peter Diamandis is an antidote to the doomsday thinking that permeates our culture. This is a guy who has devoted his life to proving that our future isn't just salvageable, it's potentially extraordinary. Peter, the founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University, and kind of a visionary who for decades has been ambitiously architecting solutions to some of humanity's most intractable challenges, leveraging optimism to transform imagination into reality.
I want people to have that longevity mindset. Exercise is the number one longevity thing you can do for yourself, especially if you're in your late 50s or into your over 60s. You just have to decide whether you want to take control of your own situation or not.
His latest moonshot: extending human lifespan. It's a hot topic, but how much agency do we actually have when it comes to aging and when it comes to extending longevity? What are the factors and habits that actually matter the most, and to what extent is it rational to believe that AI and other technological breakthroughs are actually going to advance our potential to thrive for years beyond what we might currently believe possible? Well, these are but a few of the questions we tackle in today's conversation that attempts to parse actionable guidance from snake oil fantasy, and basically begins and ends with the importance of mindset.
Mindset is the first step. If I don't believe I can, then you won't. This is a very different time than the last 20, 30, 50 years. Most people can figure out what to do with 10 or 20 years, and I say, what about 50 years? And their minds break.
Peter, great to see you. Thanks for coming by today, man.
Thanks for having me back.
When we first sat down, when was that? Like two years ago, a year and a half ago, or something like that. The focus was really on the book that you co-wrote with Tony Robbins, Life Force. We talked about the evolution of medical science from treating disease to this new era of thinking about preventing disease, and then now promoting well-being and this healthspan extension revolution that is the focus of the book and very much top of mind for you as an expert in that field. A lot has happened since then, so I'm interested in what has transpired because everything is moving so quickly. Where is your head in terms of like the evolution that we've seen even in the last like year or two?
Sure, and my hope is for anybody watching this episode that they take away immediately useful things.
Yeah, we're going to be focused on that, and that's really what this new book is really all about. It's kind of like a how-to, practical, like incorporate into your life version of Life Force, which was a very thick book.
Yeah, I mean, Life Force was 700 pages, and I'm like, I don't know how anyone has the time to read a 700-page book and get through it. I said there's so much information, and I wanted to really boil it down to what you can do right now, what each thing can benefit you. And one of the things most importantly is what I call getting a longevity mindset. I think mindset is one of the most important things. We'll talk about mindset impacting your physiology, your health, but a longevity mindset is the idea that you're clear there are so many breakthroughs arriving right now and over the decade ahead that could truly extend your healthspan and lifespan, that you're going to do all that you can do today to be in the best health to intercept these technologies, that they're worth putting the investment of time, energy for going that donut, getting up and doing the exercise, going to bed early enough. And I hope that I'll prove this to you and those watching because I think it's the greatest gift we can give everybody. You know, health is the new wealth, and this is a very different decade, the decade now 2025 to 2035, than we've ever had. It's a decade powered by AI, which is the biggest transformer of this field. It's powered by CRISPR, by gene therapies, by single-cell sequencing, by all these technologies that are helping us understand why people age, how to slow it, stop it, perhaps reverse it.
So there's the low-hanging fruit of like diet, exercise, sleep. You go into detail in the book about that. Then the diagnostic tools that are becoming increasingly available for early detection, which is so huge in terms of staving off disease before it really gets out of the gate. And then there are all these sort of medical interventions and supplements, and you know that kind of leads you into some of these moonshots and where we're kind of headed with all of this. But fundamentally, I'm glad you brought up mindset because none of this matters if you can't get your head around your relationship with yourself, right? Like that you have agency over this process, that you are not on a course that's predetermined by your genetics, and that you have a level of optimism and self-efficacy to exert, you know, some effort towards how you're thinking about how you're entering into these later decades. And I think short of that, if you don't have that, you're just reacting to your environment on this kind of predetermined course.
Absolutely. So I mean, people should realize most folks think that their lifespan... so let me define lifespan as how long your heart's ticking, right? How long you're alive, whether you can think or do anything at all. Healthspan is how long are you in great health where you have the vitality to live and enjoy your life, where you're enjoying your grandkids, you're enjoying what you're doing, and you have that vitality. So that's healthspan. And in the United States today, there's about a 17-year gap between lifespan and healthspan. So lifespan on average is like 79 today, healthspan on average is 63. So you hit... I'm 63 today, right? And I feel like I'm in the best health I've ever been.
You'll be there soon enough.
Soon enough, not yet, but soon enough. And so the notion that it's a slow decline, we'll talk about why that occurs, but saying I refuse to let this decline happen, I'm going to take agency and do what I can. And a lot of people think, well, my mom and dad passed at 70 or 75, and so that's my future. Well, it turns out that your genetics are not your longevity, vitality future. In the whole, there was a study done that showed that your true longevity is only about 7% in your genes at the high end. It's potentially 30% of your genetic, which means at the worst case, 70% of your ability to have a long and healthy life is within your control. And so if you know that first and foremost, you're willing to do what it takes to give yourself access and to do the right things from a lifestyle perspective. But you're right, mindset is the first step. If I don't believe I can, then you won't.
Well, fundamentally, either you believe that your behavior and your habits are either moving you towards health or away from health, or you don't, right? So first of all, you have to flick that switch and say what I eat, how I move, the people I interact with, the environments that I choose to inhabit do impact my well-being and the trajectory of how long I'm going to be able to sustain healthspan, or you don't, right? And if you do, then it's like, okay, well, the onus is on you. Like if you have agency, what are you doing to direct that? Even the way you perceive the world has an impact. There's a study I just want to quote. I marked it here, and I love this. It says in a study of 69,744 women and 1,429 men published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, what, like highest level work, right? It was found that optimistic people live as much as 15% longer than pessimists. And it's a double benefit for being an optimist. Is that a mutable quality, though? I think it is. There's a lot of people who are dour in their lives, and getting the flip over to an optimist, I think it is mutable.
So our brains are neural nets, right? We have 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections, and we shape our brain, as you very well know, by what's on our walls, the podcast we listen to, right? Here we are, your listeners listening to this, the TV shows you watch, who you hang out with, right? What you read, all these things are constantly shaping your neural net, just like feeding data to Gemini or ChatGPT shapes its neural net. And the problem is that we're living in a world where most people are bombarded by the news media. And the news media, you couldn't pay me enough money to watch the evening news or read the morning paper. They have an agenda, and their agenda isn't to give you dystopian or optimistic news, it's to deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers. That's their business. And at the end of the day, we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. It's evolutionarily beneficial. On the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago, a rustling in the leaves, if you thought wind and it was a lion, you were screwed. Your genes are out of the gene pool. And so we developed a cognitive bias for negative news, and we paid 10 times more attention to negative than positive news. And so for that reason, you know, tomorrow morning, open the newspaper, count the number of negative stories and positive stories. It's at least 10 to one. And is that the way the world truly is, or is that just the way it's being presented to you?
On some level, every behavior change is a function of willingness. And somebody who, like if you're addicted to drugs, you have to have a willingness to explore sobriety. If you're a fundamentally pessimistic person, you have to have some willingness to try to shift that, right? There has to be a why. So it's very hard to compel somebody who doesn't have a positive mindset to adopt a positive mindset short of their willingness on their own. It's an internally generated energy that's required. But anybody who's listening to this podcast probably already has a relationship at some level with a growth mindset. I would imagine your viewers do. I mean, you're like the poster child for a growth mindset with all the things that you've manifested and all the different interests that you've explored. You're a very curious person. But I think like any habit change or behavior change, it's about these tiny little things. Like yes, maybe just don't watch the news or pay more attention to your information diet. Like you could begin there.
Yeah, agreed. I mean, I pay as much attention to what I let into my mind as what I eat and let into my body, right? Those are two things that very much shape you. Part of it's having a why, like why do you want to live an extra 20 or 30 years? You know, I run an experiment with my Abundance members where I'll say, okay, what would you do in the extra 10 years of life, of health? Right? Then I'll ask, okay, how about 20 years? Most people can figure out what to do with 10 or 20 years, and I say, what about 50 years? And their minds break. You know, it's very challenging for us. But when you can connect to something like, you know, I grew up sort of weaned on Star Trek and the Apollo program, and I just, I want to see humanity become a multiplanetary species. I want to be part of that endeavor. I want to meet my great-grandkids. I think this is the most exciting time ever to be alive, and I want to see as much of it as I can, and that inspires me.
There's a concept I talk about in the book, which I think is another part of the inspiration. It's called longevity escape velocity, and we might have talked about it last time, but it's worth recounting. So today, for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for a quarter of a year or thereabouts. Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey talked about this idea that in the future, for every year that you're alive, science is going to extend your life for more than a year, and that's called longevity escape velocity. So when will that happen? Well, Ray Kurzweil believes it will be by 2030 or by the end of the year 2030. He's got an 86% accuracy rate in his predictions.
Pretty damn good. That's a pretty bold proclamation. We did talk about that last time. We also kind of discussed the philosophical implications of what that would mean. You know, what does it mean when everybody has a different relationship with death? How does that impact your relationship with risk, your risk tolerance, what kind of decisions you make? What's going to happen with all these children that are now, you know, like there's population issues, there's employment, there's all kinds of very interesting thought experiments that play into that. You know, 2030, that's coming up pretty quick. You're an optimist. This is where we get into like, you're the moonshot guy, and it's fun to play around with that. Okay, but let's say it's the way into the mindset shift, basically, whether you believe that's going to happen or not. It's like a window into thinking differently about your own life and what might be possible. Whether or not that happens or not almost doesn't matter. It's like your relationship with your own life and what it means and how you're finding purpose and what gets you excited and out of bed in the morning.
Yeah, and it may be that it's not extending your life past 100, but what if it's giving you vital health till your 90s, so you have the aesthetics, the cognition, the mobility to really live a full life with these additional decades? George Church and David Sinclair, both Harvard professors in this field, their prediction is mid to late 2030s. Even if it's 2040, the point I'm making is, okay, that's, you know, call it 15 years from now, your job is not to die from something stupid in the interim and to give yourself the maximum chance to intercept these breakthroughs coming. You don't want to be the last person to miss it, so to speak.
Sometimes I feel like, yeah, I'm right on the edge of that. Like my kids, it will be very different, right? Like I'm kind of hoping to like kind of just slide in, you know. The clock's ticking. For what is the original inspiration or spark that got you interested in this field to begin with? I'm not sure I asked you that last time.
There's a couple of things. When I was in medical school, I watched a television show on long-lived sea life, and I learned that the bowhead whale could live 200 years and the Greenland shark could live 500 years and have babies at 200 years old. And I'm thinking, if they can live that long, why can't I? My answer, which I still believe, is it's either an engineering problem or a software problem, and we're going to have the technology to change that, to solve that. And I think this next decade is that time.
AI is going to have the biggest impact, right? Well, it's certainly an extraordinary moment that we're in right now. It is the most transformation-forward experience in the history of humanity. The rate at which advances are being made is dizzying. It's difficult to even get our heads around it. We become numb to it.
We've become totally numb to it, right? I have a slide in chapter one of my next books called 'Our Ancestors Would Consider Us as Gods.' We have godlike capability with a small g, right? We're omniscient, we're omnipotent, we're omnipresent. I can zoom any place, FaceTime any place, I can know anything. I mean, it's incredible what we take for granted. We don't think about these things when we're using them. In the moment, we're frustrated because my Tesla, you know, autopilot wouldn't let me text currently while I'm driving. It's like, damn it, I've got something, you know, that's awesome at the same time.
At the same time, lifespan is declining. We're pretty unhealthy across the modern developed world, increasingly more and more unhealthy due to environmental reasons, our food, our food environment, etc. Our food companies and pharma companies are killing us. We may be, you know, godlike in certain qualities, but are we healthier? Are we happier? It's an interesting tension or conundrum because there are all of these advances and all these possibilities at the same time we're dealing with a population that's experiencing chronic lifestyle ailments at epidemic levels right now. So it's weird, right? It's weird that we know more than we ever have, we've got tools to advance health in ways we never previously had, and yet we're so unhealthy.
And you know, I'm writing a book for Simon & Schuster with Steffan Cutler called Age of Abundance, which will come out in 2026, and it's a continuation of my 2012 book. And the argument for increasing abundance in the world, access to food, water, energy, healthcare, education, all these things is just up and to the right. But we also have an abundance of microplastics, an abundance of depression, an abundance of obesity and empty calories, and all of these elements which we need to address. And those are very real. Our food system is immoral, and I hope the new administration will transform that. It's the first time I have any hope of that. But today's children's cereals should have black box warnings on them with the amount of sugars in there. It's killing us.
Yeah, even since we last spoke, there's been an increase in receptivity and awareness around these ideas. There's people on social media who are really pushing the outer boundaries of what's possible, sharing their stories about this. At the same time, that always comes with pushback. Like there's increasing kind of dismissiveness or resistance to these ideas. Like how are you seeing the world at large in terms of how receptive they are to kind of what you have to share around this idea?
Listen, I'm sure I'm in my own echo chamber, to be clear, as many of us are. But so far, I think post-COVID, people care a lot more about their health than they ever have. And I'm getting a very positive response to the notion that you can become the CEO of your own health and that there are things that you could and should do right now. And you know, listen, some things are expensive, but a lot of them are free, right? And I think that people just need to know and then have the motivation to implement them.
They have to care about it. They have to feel agency. They have to understand the power this has for them, the benefits it has for them, and that they can move the needle. If you don't believe that, you're not going to do it. Yeah, I mean, you're the moonshot guy. It's fun to talk about like what is it going to look like in 30 years, 50 years. Let's focus on what's exciting now, these emerging protocols with things like NAD+ and rapamycin, and you're deep into all that stuff and can speak fluently about what we should know and understand about these things. But fundamentally, and as you lay out pretty bluntly in the book, most of these things don't cost money. It's like diet, exercise, sleep, mindset, and these are things we all have to deal with.
We've known about this for centuries. You know, there's ancient Greek writings about the importance of these things, and still people haven't done it. There is something coming to support them there besides my longevity guidebook, and it's going to be the power of AI to be your coach, your supporter, to help you remember what you set out to want to do. AI systems, you know, we're not far from Jarvis from Iron Man, where your AI is there saying, 'Don't eat that. First glass of water.' Or there's stairs around the corner, take those instead of the elevator. Or you're at 9,000 steps, take a quick walk before dinner, get to 10,000. This thing is so annoying, you're going to have the option to turn it on or turn it off, but you have to have the motivation. So that's one part. I mean, Arianna Huffington has a program called Thrive Global, which is used inside of companies. These are microsteps. It's remembering, I mean, they're little things like taking a deep breath just before eating to put yourself into parasympathetic. There's like the order in which you eat your food matters, all right? If you eat your veggies first, which is your fiber, it will slow down your digestive tract, allow you to absorb the nutrients, and then eat your protein, and then if you have room still, last, eat your carbs. But every restaurant brings the bread basket, bread, wine, right? And there's a reason they do that. I mean, we're all being manipulated in that fact. The bread and the wine spikes your blood glucose and then spikes your insulin, and then you get hungry and you order more food. You just have to decide whether you want to take control of your own situation or not.
On the diet piece, we don't need to belabor it. I mean, you make it pretty simple. It's basically sugar, whole foods, close to their natural state, mostly plants. You know, you have a whole section on protein and your thoughts on protein, particularly as we age, and why it becomes more important in terms of maintaining and building muscle mass, which becomes increasingly more difficult the older we get. You look pretty good. You look super fit. I know you work out every single day.
Well, at least five days a week.
Like every day, but yeah. How is your ability to recover? Like, what have you learned from your fitness regimen that works and doesn't work? Do you need to take a little bit more time in between the more intense workouts?
No, I know what works for me right now, which is I'll do a 35, 40-minute workout, the same workout every day. I don't follow the experts of, you know, doing upper body and lower body and so forth. When I have time, I execute on my workout. And you know, I've gone from a state of last year focusing on building 10 lbs of muscle mass to this year really maintaining that muscle mass, which by the way has so many different benefits, including helping to minimize your injury, because as we get older, injury is our greatest threat. And so muscle mass helps you to maintain balance and on a fall maintain your skeletal system in place. But I do think that exercise is the number one longevity thing you can do for yourself, especially if you're in your late 50s or into your over 60s. And it's a matter of having the motivation to do it. You know, so I try and prioritize it really first thing in the morning when I've got most control of my schedule and where I have the most willpower. You know, your willpower erodes as you go through the night, which is why, you know, getting your cheesecake at midnight snack is just the opposite thing you're supposed to do.
So it's some combination of strength training, high-intensity training, and zone two.
Yeah, so it's strength, muscle mass, and then the other thing is stimulating mitochondria, right? So one of the things, you know, I'm on too many boards, and when I'm sitting on my butt in a board meeting is like the worst thing. I think of sitting as the new smoking. And so I've got a Technogym bike where I will basically hop on the bike and maintain my heart rate at about 110 beats per minute, and it's my zone two training, and it's meant to stimulate my mitochondria. And then a few times a week I'll do high-intensity interval training where it's like 60 seconds of as fast as I can go, get my heart rate up to 145 beats per minute, 60 seconds of just nothing, and then cycle through that. And again, all of this is about signaling your mitochondria that they're loved, they're needed, please replicate.
Yeah, and it will continue to kind of love you back in kind as long as you keep doing it.
It will. And there's incredible work being done in the lab right now to stimulate all of these things. You know, I think one thing I write about in the book that's very, that's an important frame for me is that we're all born with 3.2 billion letters from your mom and from your dad, and that's your software you're running. And you got the same software when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 50, when you're 100. Why do you look different? And it turns out it's not the genes you have, it's your epigenome. Epi from the Greek word for above, and it's which genes are on and which genes are off. And as we age, the right genes turn off, they get silenced, the wrong genes get turned on, and we have this genetic drift. And so the question is, when we talk about reversing aging, it's can you bring back your epigenome so the right genes stay on and turned on? And there's so many drugs and cellular medicines in development right now to help you do that, and that's exciting of what's coming.
There's one in particular that I find fascinating.
Yeah, let's put a pin on that for now.
Just kind of staying with the top-level stuff that is accessible to everyone, I love the fact that you drew conscious attention to oral health. I think that this is really overlooked and not discussed enough in the context of how important it is. I mean, you just think, oh, well, of course you don't want diseased gums or, you know, infections and bad breath and the like. You want your teeth to be white, etc. But the connection between oral health and cardiovascular disease and neurocognitive disease is like very real.
Yeah, so your mouth is very close to your brain, and there are a lot of blood vessels, you know, very blood vessel rich, and you have constantly organisms that are moving into your bloodstream from your mouth. And if you've got gum disease, gingivitis and such, that protective layer erodes, and you're at increased risk for cardiovascular and neurocognitive disease. And I have really tripled down on it, and I have a section in the book that talks about oral health, but also in my routines, and I have increased that because as you get older, you're more vulnerable there. So yeah, I won't go into all of the elements here, and people can read about it, but it's not just brushing your teeth twice a day, which is a minimum, right? And if you're a smoker, obviously don't smoke. That really causes havoc in your dental and oral situation.
Yeah, the link with heart disease is something that I learned like when I was a teenager. I had all these periodontal problems, and I had to have like curettage, and like I used to have massive infections in my mouth all the time. And those infections like get into your system and lead directly towards like arterial damage around the heart. Yeah, what's cool is that you do in the book, you like not only do you have like here's, you know, here's what the science says about all these various things, you're like here's what I do, and you go through like your whole day and like here's my protocol and exactly what I do.
This book started as a request from friends to tell me what, just tell me what to do. I don't want to read a 700-page book.
Well, that was the, it was, Life Force was a big book with beautiful stories, and Tony's amazing, and he and I worked on it for like 18 months and interviewed so many people. But at the end of the day, people like, just what do you do? Like what do you take? What pills do you take? What's your routines? And it grew from a 10-page Word document to like 50 pages to 100 pages. Like, screw it, I'm just going to turn this into a book.
Yeah, here's where I keep all of my supply of Momentous supplements. This is for sleep, this is on the daily, or things that I rotate in and out of. But for post-workout, all you need is the Momentous 100% plant-based protein. A scoop and a half is 30 grams. I put it in my morning smoothie every day, supplemented also by Momentous creatine, just one scoop, which is 5 grams of creatine. And when you're on the go, just grab a few of these travel packs. I have a couple in my car, so I always have my protein needs met. Listen, there's a lot of BS in the supplement world, which is why I trust Momentous' industry-leading quality standards. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to try Momentous for yourself by immediately, right in this moment, going to livemomentous.com/rr or click the link in the description below, where you will be rewarded with a full 20% off all their top-of-the-line products. Transform your home fitness space with NordicTrack and a next-level workout experience. Having recently upgraded my home gym with NordicTrack equipment, I can attest to its insanely high quality and functionality. There's a reason NordicTrack has been a key player in the home fitness industry for almost 50 years, and it's because they offer this incredible lineup that includes top-tier treadmills, bikes, rowers, and more. NordicTrack's treadmills feature SmartAdjust technology, automatically adjusting incline up to 40%, decline up to 6%, and speed based on your workout history. ActivePulse heart rate training ensures effortless maintenance of your optimal heart rate zone. As a bonus, every new NordicTrack equipment purchase comes with a 30-day iFit membership, granting access to a library of expert-led workouts. Whether using the equipment or the iFit mobile app, NordicTrack's iFit syncs with fitness apps like Apple Health, Garmin Connect, Google Fit, and Strava. Go to nordictrack.com to learn more and check out their incredible machines.
On the subject of what exactly should I be doing, what is your perspective on Brian Johnson and his Blueprint protocol? Like, where do you agree with him? Where do you look at that and say, no, no, no?
So I've known Brian for a decade. I was one of the very first phone calls he made when he sold Braintree, his company, and he became an investor in one of my companies called Human Longevity Inc. And he became an investor, joined the board, became very involved there. Both he and I got disillusioned with the direction HLI was going, won't go into the details, but broke off. And then he ended up going into the brain-computer interface space, and it was fascinating to see him get back into the longevity space. So I think a lot of the stuff he's doing is fascinating experimentation on himself, and the fact that he's so open to sharing the details is awesome. I honestly don't want to hear about his erections. I think he's just gone overboard in a number of the areas, which is, you know, we live in a clickbait society, and he's generating a lot of clickbait.
Yeah, I mean, he knows how to get attention. He knows how to get people engaged. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know. Like, he's drawn a lot of attention to himself, and there's a lot of interest and curiosity around him as a figure because he's a very kind of unique expression of... he's an extremist. Yeah, and like, I'm kind of glad he's out doing all that kind of stuff, and the transparency with which he shares it. I mean, he knows how to make the video that's going to get everyone to click on it. And he's sort of like an explorer in this world, and most of the stuff maybe isn't going to work, but at least somebody's out there trying it and reporting back. Yeah, I guess I went to one of his Jeffersonian dinners where the question is posed, like you mentioned the AI that's going to kind of help you make the right decisions, and the question that provides the structure for the discussion is basically like, if there's a superintelligence, would you basically relinquish your agency over to it if it was going to always help you make the decision that's going to drive the optimal health outcome, with the caveat that you can't opt out, like you have to do what it says and you can't cancel your membership or whatever? Which is a provocative question because we want to think that, you know, what makes me human is my agency and our instinct that we do make good decisions on our own behalf, which we don't. It's confronting because we actually don't, right? And so it sort of provokes an interesting conversation.
Listen, I think anything that helps society as a whole begin to envision an increasing control over their health, over their longevity, is a good thing. I do that work through my books, my podcasts, my Fountain Life. I just don't talk about my erections.
Yeah, you have to have a zone of privacy, Peter. I respect you for that. I want to talk about diagnostics because I think this, and I know we talked about this a little bit last time, but to me, this seems like the most powerful set of tools that are... I mean, they're expensive, but like if you're thinking about, I don't want to just treat a disease when I get it, I want to prevent it. Like early detection with the advances that we're seeing in these diagnostic tools that can literally identify diseases in their very early stages when they actually can be treated, I think is really the future of where healthcare should be going, is going in that direction. You have Fountain Life and you have this clinic, but like what is the adoption mentality around this?
So, you know, the basic question is, when is the best time to find disease, right? It's at inception, at stage zero. And, you know, I'm in a room of a thousand people giving a keynote on longevity or AI, and I'll ask, how many of you here are absolutely sure there's nothing going on inside your body you need to know about? And no one raises their hand, right? Because when you stop and you think about it, you honestly have no idea what's going on inside your body. But you can know, and I don't want to say should know, you need to know. So here are some numbers. 70% of individuals who die from a cancer die from a cancer that we don't routinely test for. They die from ovarian...
blastoma or pancreatic cancer, they don't die from breast or colon or prostate, right? Because we test for that. Well, that's great, but guess what? You die from the other ones. When you have a cancer, God forbid, you don't feel a cancer until stage three or stage four. You don't feel anything at the very beginning, and you go into the hospital with a pain in your side, and the doctor says, 'I'm sorry to tell you this, but you've got so and so.' I just found out this week that a dear friend of mine, one of my closest high school friends, has, you know, metastatic pancreatic cancer with like a week left to live, and I was in tears yesterday hearing about this. Wow. And it's like we don't know what's going on in our bodies, but you can, you know, 70% of people who have a heart attack don't have any precedent, no shortness of breath, even nothing. A calcium score is meaningless because it's a soft plaque that can kill you, that can erupt in the middle of the night, block a coronary artery, deprive the muscle tissue of your heart from oxygen and glucose, and then that tissue is dead. So the realization is, you know, I'm a pilot, I fly a couple of planes, and before I get into the airplane, I check all the systems, I look at all the gauges, making sure everything is working well. But we know more about our cars and our refrigerators than about our bodies. But you can know, and if you can know, I think you want to know.
People will go, 'Oh no, no, I don't want to know.' That's the thing, there is a fear around it, like, 'I don't, if I go do that, I'm going to find something out. I feel okay, like, you know, no thank you.'
And the reality is you're going to find out eventually. You want to find out when you can do something about it, or when it's too late. You know, the person who walks into the hospital with a pain and the doctor says, 'I'm sorry to tell you, you have this, this, and this' — they didn't get it that morning. It's been going on for some time. So Tony Robbins, Bob Hurry, and I started an organization, a company called Fountain Life. And Fountain is — we have four centers today. We'll be adding in New York, our headquarters in Orlando, Naples, Florida, Dallas. We'll be adding four more: LA next year, which I'm excited about, at the Fairmont Hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, and ours in Phoenix, in Houston, and then there's one more location probably in England. And then we've got a runway of 25 more, and it's a membership model where people come, and it's not just an upload. We basically extract 200 gigabytes of data about you. It's a full-body MRI, a brain, brain vasculature MRI, a coronary CT of your heart with an AI overlay — look, I'm sorry, of your heart looking for soft plaque, low-dose lung CT, DEXA scan, iris scan, skin scan, metabolomics, blood chemistries, your microbiome, your full genome. It's everything knowable about you to answer two questions: Is there anything going on inside you right now that you need to know about? And I'll tell you what the data is right now. And then the second is, what's likely to happen to you, and how do we optimize you and prevent it? Of our first 5,000–6,000 members, 2% of them have a cancer they don't know about, 2.5% have an aneurysm they don't know about, and 14.4% have either metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease. It's like we're all optimists about our health.
So when that person comes in, you do this battery of tests, you have all of this data. Let's say you fall into that category of, you know, maybe you don't have any identifiable cancer, but hey, listen, there's some heart disease on the horizon here. We see these plaques, etc. You know, how do you then develop a protocol to, like, move them away from that? So that's really important. One of the things you don't want to do is get a data dump and then just say goodbye, right? I mean, like, there are companies out there that will do an MRI scan for you, they'll give you a printout, and you're on your own.
So what we did with Fountain Life is we created a wraparound medical care, concierge care around that. So besides the upload, which takes about four and a half, five hours, you get a functional medicine longevity physician, right? And functional medicine is really important. It's, for me, it's the highest level. It's the root cause training that physicians get. It's very rare. It's going to be increasing. It's understanding at a molecular level why is there disease. You don't look at the organ, what's going on at a cellular level that's causing that situation. So you get a functional medicine doctor, you get a nurse, you get a dietician, and a health coach that are with you for the entire year. And the goal is — here's our — I mean, I just got texted by Mona, my Fountain Life doctor, this morning: 'How are you feeling? What's going on? Are you feeling excellent?' I said, 'Well, I got this and this,' and you say, 'Okay, I'm on it,' right? So you've got a support team, and then you're testing through the year. So I take 75, 80 supplements right now.
Medicines, I mean, which is a ridiculous number.
Ridiculous, I know, I know. And in the book I talk about what I take and exactly why. And I didn't start with 80, I got up there. My mom keeps on saying, 'Peter, how do you know these things don't, like, interfere with each other?' And I say, 'Mom, I don't actually, but we will know.' But I measure my blood biomarkers and everything at least on a quarterly basis, and I modify everything — like, okay, I want to increase this, decrease this — and I do publish that data, and I'm learning, learning about my body. Eventually an AI will be doing this for me autonomously and just constantly optimizing, and I think that's within the next three years, that's coming.
It's a curious thing, though, this focus on self-optimization. You know, I have concerns around, like, the obsessiveness with which a lot of people kind of interact with these ideas in a way that they're kind of missing life. It's a way to distract you from living your life. Like, if you're so focused on, like, metrics all the time, and there's something that's at cross purposes with true healthspan, which is kind of making your life about something bigger than yourself and investing in other people and all of that, and all of this inward gaze, you know, I think sometimes I think moves people away from other aspects of life that are important in order to kind of, you know, enjoy the fullness of this experience.
I get it, I get it. But the reality is my number one pro-longevity activity is my two 13-year-old boys, right? Just love spending time with them, and they keep me young. I had kids when I was 50. And, you know, the work that I do is very fulfilling for me with the XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity and Abundance 360, and the books that I write, and I have a very rich community. But I'm exploring and I'm building businesses in this area, and it's going to become something eventually — if it's three years, five years — where the systems are in place where this happens in the background mode, right? So I'm wearing an Oura ring, an Apple Watch, I've got a Dexcom, and this is going to my phone right now. I have on my phone my Fountain Life AI, where all of my data from all of my scans and all my blood tests are constantly downloaded, and I can talk to my AI and ask it, like, what happened recently and so forth. Eventually your AI is going to become your health partner to help you achieve your goals, set your goals, and I'm going to tell you what to take, you know, listen, lean on — you know, lay off the red meat this week if you want. I mean, people have to make a decision: are they happy with the 80 years they've got? Would they like 100 years? That's up to everybody individually.
What do your boys, your twins, think about all this? Are they into it?
I mean, listen, 13-year-old boys are going to make fun of their dad, you know. So I tell them, I mean, we will always be 50 years apart. I said, when you're 50 and you've got kids, I want to be there to enjoy you when you're 100. Well, we'll see if I'm still around.
Like, how does the traditional mainstream medical establishment respond to you and what you're doing, and, like, what you're doing at Fountain? Like, do you see movement? Is it changing? Is it evolving into a more kind of, like, functional embrace of all of these ideas, or is it still entrenched and stuck in its ways?
Listen, there are those on the edge of the system that are peering over, super curious and seeing, 'Wow, I'd like to learn more.' There are those who say — and we see this all the time with our members — 'My doc told me not to do this because you'll find something.' And it's like, okay, that's kind of strange. I mean, we've saved hundreds and hundreds of lives, and I'm very proud of what our teams have done. What's strange is that, you know, it used to be that the resolution of a lot of these tests were not very high, and you would discover through an MRI or CT what was called an incidental — like something, like a relic, a shadow, something. 'Oh, you're going to find it, you're going to go pursue it.' Guess what? You know what we're doing now at Fountain is what I call multimodal diagnostics. It's not just the image; it's the image plus your blood chemistries plus your genetics plus — we do a Grail Gallery test, which is a blood test looking for free-floating DNA from potential cancer cells, and you get signal information from multiple different places, and it's the integration of all of that that gives you a high likelihood that something is going on that we need to dig into deeper. It's not the way it was 20 years ago. There's a lot of progress that's been made.
Yeah, I mean, this idea that you don't do a test unless there's something wrong, right? It's sort of like, don't take so many pictures with your camera because there's only 24 frames on a roll. Like, we're not in that world anymore, you know what I mean? Like, it goes back to mindset. Like, what is your mindset around this? Like, why is your reflex like, don't test unless there's something wrong? Like, something wrong, it may be too late. But I think it's a mindset that's a reflex of a paradigm that's slowly eroding as we kind of enter this new paradigm. And I would suspect that at least among, you know, the younger generation of doctors, you know, they're the ones who are peering over the fence and interested in these things. Like, you don't go into medicine unless you want to, like, you know, promote health and you're interested in the well-being of the patients you're going to be treating. But they're stuck in a business model that prevents them from being able to do that. And I think, you know, what is happening is people like yourself are creating viable business models out there that show a different way of practicing medicine where you don't have to restrict yourself to that 15-minute period and, you know, get out seven minutes these days.
Yeah, it's like, I got seven minutes to see this patient and move them through. It's awful.
And then on top of that, you've got the fact that it's not a healthcare system, it's a sick care system. It's...
Waiting for things to break before you address them. The problem is getting buy-in from the insurance companies. I mean, that's what really is going to shift it, and that is only going to be accomplished when you can convince these conglomerates that they're going to save money by covering the procedures that are going on in your clinic. I had, you know, Robin Berzin, Dr. Rob, she has a series of clinics called Parsley Health, and she has gotten its functional medicine. She's in New York, but there's clinics and a lot of it virtual, online. But she's getting real buy-in from the big players in insurance, and I think that's the real kind of like paradigm shifter here.
Yeah, I mean, this has been private pay, expensive. Yeah, the Fountain Apex membership is 19,500 bucks. It's expensive, right? Yeah, right. Most per year to be a member of this thing, it's like out of reach for, yeah, for the majority of all people. I fully know that, you know, it's not just the testing, right? The most expensive part is the wraparound medical care. It's the humans in the loop, and we're going to demonetize that. We're going to get, you know, the new imaging systems are becoming cheaper, where AI radiologists are actually going to become, are probably and will maintain being better than human radiologists, and then the human in the loop will be partially in the loop, but AIs will be that. So we're going to see a cost reduction over time. We've just announced something called a core membership, which is $6,500, trying to make it more affordable, and it's for companies to provide to their employees. So, you know, listen, I teach this. You, most people may know me as a technologist, as a, you know, sort of AI tech entrepreneur, and I teach the idea of the 6Ds of exponentials, that when you can digitize something, you dematerialize, demonetize, and democratize those things, right? So the cell phone, the original camera, digital camera was from Kodak. When you digitized it, it, you know, dematerialized the phone into your handset here and demonetized and democratized access. But in the beginning, it's deceptively slow change, right? It took like 20 years for the digital camera to go from something in the lab to something that was, you know, disrupting Kodak, and then it becomes disruptive. And so we're going to see that level of change. We're going to see AIs in your home and sensors on your body. In fact, we have at Fountain, we have a program called Fountain at Home, which is how do we move all of this into your home, so into your bed, your chair, your urinal, so you're constantly uploading data to your AI at little to no cost, so that you're constantly being monitored to find the disease at the very beginning. These changes are coming.
Yeah, all you have to do is think about the CRISPR example and how complicated and what, how expensive was it to like, you know, map the genome at the beginning. And $3 billion for the first genome. Craig Venter did it for 100 million, and it's down below 500 bucks now. I just saw a company report that they think they can do a $10 genome, and then the world changes, right? You go in for a dental checkup and they'll sequence your genome to decide which, which is the best anesthetic for your mouth. Or you, every kid born, my niece just had a baby today, you know, it's like it isn't routine to sequence the genome, but every child should be sequenced because it will tell you about their early years before they can communicate. I mean, there's a lot. The world's about to change in a medical health realm. Imagine you, you suddenly became Surgeon General or you had some like role of power where you could kind of like, you know, make these things happen at scale. Like what, what would that look like? Like right now with a technology that is currently available, without thinking about like what's on the horizon.
Yeah, the very first thing is what RFK is working on is reinvent our food system because our, our food system is killing us. Ultra-processed foods, sugar, salts, all of these things, the stuff that's cheap and tasty, it's destroying Americans' lives, and I'm clear about that. That's the first and foremost. You know, there might be educational programs we put in place, but then it's, you know, what we're finding has the most impact is, is MRI imaging to find aneurysms and cancer. There are programs under development that will take an MRI from an hour and effectively, you know, couple of thousand dollar down to 10 minutes and a couple hundred bucks. I've seen the tech, so helping that move along and then putting that where it's accessible to everybody. And you know, a lot of companies, companies don't realize how much money they could save on, on their health care and on lost days of work and on replacing employees if they just put a sliver of money into helping your employee feel better and be in a better health. So I think those things, I mean, one of the X Prizes I want to do, so as you know, I, I run this XPRIZE Foundation for 30 years now. I'm chairman of it, and Anousheh Ansari, who's our CEO, runs it. We just launched a $101 million prize for extending the healthy human lifespan by 20 years. But another prize I want is we should be able to create a suite of sensors that is on your body that's measuring five or six key parameters into an AI, and then the AI providing feedback to optimize your health, your practices. You know, Thrive Global that Arianna runs does similar things, but without the easy access to data. So I think sensors and AI are going to give us a way to really, in background mode, make sure we're healthy, we're developing healthy habits, we're putting ourselves into a parasympathetic mode where when we're stressed, we're doing the right things to reduce that stress. I think all of these things are coming and should be implemented.
I think that the real opportunity is in the synthesis of all the data to help us really understand what's important, along with kind of guidance around how to, you know, kind of move the needle in the right direction. Because right now we have lots of sensors. I'm wearing a Whoop, you've got an Oura, you know, whether it's Levels or whatever patch you have on that's monitoring your glucose levels. We have sleep metrics. We have, we have a lot of data already at this point, and I think the average consumer kind of looks at it and tries to draw conclusions, and these apps sort of provide some kind of feedback, but it's very general, and I don't know that it's necessarily all that helpful yet. And none of these things are, are talking to each other, so we're not treating any of these things holistically, right? We're kind of picking and choosing, and, and we're kind of making up our own minds about the inferences that we're making from these data sets. Like we're not qualified to like really understand like the nuances of what HRV means and how and the variations, you know, when we wake up and we see what it is, what we're supposed to do with that, you know what I mean? And, and what we could do through the day to increase our HRV or prepare ourselves for sleep.
And I do think we're going to have these AI health coaches, and I think they are going to be something which ultimately is free because your company will pay for it because it increases your productivity, your energy levels, it reduces health care costs and so forth, and the economics will be strongly in favor of giving it to your employee.
There's a little like Orwellian overtone to that.
Maybe, maybe. I mean, maybe you can opt out. But do you remember Progressive car insurance had a box they could put in your car that would monitor the acceleration of like, did you brake hard, do you accelerate fast and all of that, did you have an accident? And if you put this in your car, they gave you a much lower insurance rate. Now is that Orwellian? Maybe. Do I want the lower insurance rate? Sure, yeah.
And is it going, are they reporting that to your employer though?
But is it making you a safer driver? Is it making you a healthier person? I mean, listen, I, I think, you know, one of my favorite sayings is the man or woman who has their health has a thousand dreams, and the man or woman who does not has but one. And so don't you want your health? If there was little things you could do through the, through the day and it was easy for you, why not? I mean, maybe you don't. Maybe you have a death wish. That's fine, but that's not all of us. I think it's important to realize that this is a very different time than the last 20, 30, 50 years. We're beginning to understand fundamentally why do we age, what is going on. And so one of the things we do at Fountain is we're searching the world for high-reward, low-risk therapeutics, things that can make you feel better, younger, and actually measurably do this. You know, I've got this, this $101 million health span prize that's focused on reversing the functional loss in muscle, immune, cognition. So, so that with a year of therapy, a year of therapeutic, if the winning team pulls it off, you've got your ability to build muscle you had when you're 20 years younger, you've got the ability to mount an immune reaction like you did 20 years younger, and your span of memory and such is what it was. So we have 460 teams in that competition, and the stuff that we're seeing is amazing. Some of those will flow into centers like Fountain Life. One of the ones I'm excited about is a company called Immunis. We've just announced a partnership with them. We're going to make this available to our members at no cost in part of a phase two FDA trial. And Hans Keirstead is the CEO, and he's developed a product which is, it's the exosomes and growth factors being put out by a specific kind of young stem cell, and he's characterized it and he's been able to reproduce this consistently. It has 440 parts that it puts out, growth factors, mRNAs, exosomes, and that's the drug. And he gives it on a weekly basis. His phase one trial of 18 patients, I think it was age like 55 to 75, these are people who have severe osteoarthritis, they're in pain, they can't walk. Here are the results from their phase one trial: no negative side effects at all. The members had a reduction in pain between 50 to 70% consistently. They had an increase in muscle mass, and remember these people are effectively bedridden or chair-ridden, an increase in muscle mass by 6%, a reduction in their immune age by 30 years, and a reduction in whole body inflammation by 50%, all other variables controlled.
What was the sample size on that?
So it's small, but it was consistent across all of them, and they're doing a large-scale study next.
What was the timeline? How long?
Three months, okay. So it was a weekly injection over that period of time.
And then the six-minute walk test increased by like 150% or something like that. The point is, it was like, this is incredible that this, these young cell, stem cell growth factors were signaling the body to reverse its functional age. And so it's stuff like that that's in the lab right now that gives me tremendous hope, right? And there's a number of other similar type situations coming out of...
stem cells and in other areas. So there's a lot coming and I think I want people to have that longevity mindset, like, wow, if I can, if I take care of myself right, and I write about those in the book, I can intercept these coming technologies.
I'm interested in parsing, you know, fact not necessarily from fiction, but maybe fact from overeagerness. Like there's a lot of, you know, interest in healthspan extension right now and longevity. There's a lot of kind of quote-unquote experts out there saying lots of things, and I think for the average consumer it's like, where do I find my footing in this? Like, what do I really need to know? You know, people with products, etc. It's just, it's really hard to know like what is, what's efficacious here. You know, who's giving me the straight story about the most important things, and maybe, you know, a couple cherries on top because it's fun and I have some disposable income, versus somebody who's overextrapolating from weak data sets to make claims that are a little bit, you know, they're a little bit out over their skis on.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. You need to look at the data, you need to look at the scientists, you need to look at all of that, right? So I try in Longevity Guidebook to provide the data that I've been using to make my own decisions, right? And so the references are all there and the study sizes are all quoted and so forth. And we're going to see a lot more in the years ahead. Is it still early days? Sure. But I would rather be alive today than, you know, than 50... I was alive 50 years ago, but you know what I mean.
As was I.
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So diet, sleep, exercise, you know, stress levels, things like that, things that we all kind of like already, there's still the fundamentals that are critically important for us. But like beyond that, when we start to, you know, we talked about diagnostics and as we kind of move into, you know, the sort of newer frontiers of what we're seeing and understanding and things that you're experimenting with with respective medical interventions, supplements and, you know, hormone therapy and all the like, like what is, you know, what are some of the top-level things that you think, you know, move the needle, are important for people to understand and worthy of their own exploration? It's always like for whom and when. Like, you know, in the book you're always like, look, this is, you could see everything I'm doing, but like, you know, everybody's different. I say that over and over again. But here's the thing, Peter, like, you know, Bryan does the same thing, but people just want to do Bryan's blueprint protocol exactly the way he does it, like, because it just makes it easy. So anyway, go ahead.
Well, I mean, listen, it's not rocket science right now, to be clear. It is exercise. Just get your butt out of bed and exercise is the number one pro-longevity thing. It reduces all-cause mortality threefold, your chance of cancer by 50% if you're over 60. Exercising, just get those muscles moving, resistance exercise, right? Lift some weights, go and walk. I mean, I can't say it more clearly. Get eight hours of sleep. Our body needs sleep. If we were able to get away with less time, evolution would have gotten rid of sleep. You are open for predation, you are not being productive. It is the most wasted time in the world, but it's not. You know, it's during sleep that you clear protein from your brain. And if you're someone who's not sleeping, who's routinely, you know, just has regular shift work and you're shortchanging yourself, we're the only species on the planet that actively shortchanges the amount of sleep we get. You have a massively increased chance of Alzheimer's or other neurocognitive diseases. And then I can't stress this enough, I love sugar just like everybody else, but you have to remember our physiology, our genetics maps against our evolution 200,000 years ago. And 200,000 years ago there wasn't sugar in our diet. There was a little bit of fruit, there wasn't like sugarcane, none of this stuff. We went from like 100 years ago, like a couple of kilograms of sugar per person per year, I think it's like 100 kilograms per person per year right now. And sugar is a neuroinflammatory, it's a cardiac inflammatory, it gloms onto proteins. Let me put it this way, we just did a study at Fountain looking at cardiovascular disease, and what was the highest thing that correlates with cardiovascular disease? Was it LDL or HDL or Lp(a) or triglycerides? No, it was your hemoglobin A1c, which correlates to the amount of glucose in your bloodstream more than ApoB, even more than everything. It was the number one correlate to cardiovascular disease.
There has to be confounding variables with that, right? If somebody's eating a lot of sugar, what else are they doing? What are their habits like?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting.
What do you say to the carnivore enthusiast? Because you're pretty clear on saturated fat and you're kind of like a Dean Ornish guy.
Yeah, I will tend towards, yeah, and I think Dean is brilliant. If you haven't read his books, you should. But I tend towards a whole plant diet and fish, so I guess a pescatarian one would say, more Mediterranean than anything else. I stay away from red meat, and that's a choice, again, from an inflammation standpoint. But, you know, I put on my muscle mass by taking in 150 grams of protein and creatine and then working out five days a week and just doing it viciously, consistently. Now my job is to maintain it.
So when you sit down and do a carnivore diet podcast and he tells you, look, this is, you know, everything you've ever heard about saturated fat is wrong, I've never been healthier, this is the way to go.
So I have been on a hard keto diet and I have been for about a year and a bit, and I did a vegan diet for a year and a bit. Each have their advantages. Each have their advantages, but guess what? We are not all the same. It depends on your genetics, it depends on where your family's origin is. Are you from Alaska? Are you from Africa? Are you from the Mediterranean? That will affect very much. It also depends upon what gut flora you're carrying, right? All of this is to a large degree impacted by the microbes, right? The 100 trillion microbes in your gut. And so all these things affect it. It's not as simple.
