What would you do with 30 extra years?
A lot. Like this future of an extra 20 or 30 healthy years as 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 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, TEDs and Googles for 20 years. And it's been such a joy to watch you evolve. You're largely in technology, now really all in on longevity. And I actually wanna 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 the New Yorker's attention, but this article starts out 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?
That's a conservative estimate. I mean, the New Yorker piece was interesting, right? It gave the writers sort of carte 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 think is the most important conversation to have, by 20, 30 years, and then maybe 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.
And so people listening today, let's just say an average 40-year-old, if these therapies prove to work and if we can get them widespread, what is the value proposition in terms of X years? How long could the average 40-year-old live, you think, if these really work?
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 massive disruption, it's a reinvention of everything. And so we talk about extending health span, and then second to that, lifespan, right? You and I have become friends of late. I love the work that you've done, and your focus on extending health span versus lifespan, sitting drooling in a wheelchair at 120 is of no interest to anybody. But recently, so I spent 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 gonna have the single most outsized impact on longevity. And if you believe folks, which I do, like Ray Kurzweil, right? Ray's been a mentor for me, he's got—
Yeah, Singularity. Brilliant, brilliant man.
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 Hassabis. 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 Amodei, who is the CEO of Anthropic, at the World Economic Forum in January of '25, talking about the 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 health span XPRIZE, trying to reverse the ravages of aging.
Which you're behind as well.
Which I raised the capital and helped create and build. And then there are people like David Sinclair and George Church. And there's enough scientific focus, energy, drive leaning towards this idea that the current increase in life and health expectancy is gonna take an upward lead.
Yes, but 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 in our decade, say you got an extra two and a half years. So three months per year, right?
Yeah, well that acceleration in life expectancy has flattened off. In fact, it went negative. It dipped during COVID.
Dipped during COVID, but it has continued to slow, it's continued to plateau since 1990. The numbers, I saw like they started to pick back up at that rate, but maybe, you know. Jay Olshansky, a demographer from University of Chicago, wrote a very influential paper in Nature showing that we've started to plateau. So the interventions you're thinking of somehow have to overcome the current headwinds that life expectancy have today. And this potential doubling of life expectancy in five years, where's it gonna come from?
Yeah, so first of all, I mean, you and I both agree. I've written my book, 'Longevity Guidebook.' Like the stuff said that.
It's a very good book, by the way. It makes it very simple.
Thank you. 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 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. And in mindset, I include community and love and family and all of that. Those things will get you so far.
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.
Yeah, that's where Blue Zones is, 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 two to five billion calculations or chemical reactions per second per cell. 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 AI will and AI can. I'll tell you my basic thesis here, and I'm always looking to test it out on brilliant people like yourself, which is we do have species on this planet that live routinely well past 100 years. The bowhead whale makes it to 200 years, the Greenland shark.
The Galapagos tortoise, yeah.
Yeah, and the turtles, the Greenland shark makes it to 500 years. And my question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? And 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 gonna happen. These extensions in human health don't happen from eating something different or sleeping an extra hour. They're gonna have to come from a number of biological interventions, which some people will be willing to do and others will not.
And don't you have to come up with an intervention that somehow intervenes to all 40 trillion cells because there's so many, we have our brains and we have heart disease and we have joints that break down. And how does one intervention address the 99 different systems in our bodies?
So there's a few different fundamental beliefs or 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 really in-depth podcast with him on my Moonshots channel, which was one of the most watched that I've done. And in that we talk through what he would call the age reversal strategies right now. And the work that he's been working on, he's published on the, I think it was the cover of Nature in 2020 about age reversal 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 in Japan, backed by Marc 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, a hepatocyte, could be any cell, and take it back to a youthful state of basically a stem cell that can then differentiate.
Isn't the metaphor kind of going back to the factory settings of ourselves?
Exactly. 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?
Exactly. 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 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 gene is on, this gene is 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. 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 Moonshots podcast, is he basically 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 cocktail of three molecules. And those molecules taken as a pill, his words not mine, 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 molecules digested into your circulatory system hit all of the cells in your body. So we'll see.
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.
Just like when you take vitamin D or you take food, the protein, the glucose gets distributed by a circulatory system to all of the cells in your body. When you take a medicine, when you take an antibiotic, or you take whatever, your circulatory system is basically distributing these molecules through all the cells in your body. And they get to all the cells.
This is perhaps oversimplifying, but these three molecules somehow get, they can distribute to all of our cells and they set them back to factory settings more or less.
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 30 years of vitality?
Yeah, it is priceless. We've exchanged these quotes before, but the man or woman who has their health has a thousand dreams. The man or woman who does not has but one, like get my health back. (laughing) 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 the better part of seven years, launching a large-scale, originally Longevity XPRIZE, 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. We think about what do you want to live vibrantly? You wanna 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 wanna have the lights on for as long as you can.
Yeah, you wanna stay sharp till the end.
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.
Is that a 10X in your neighborhood? Or how'd you do that?
Oh my God, pitching a lot of people. So I put in a significant amount for me, some single-digit millions, but I got a group out of Saudi Arabia called Evolv. Think of health and evolution. That is our largest sponsor.
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 muscular dystrophy, 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.
That's kind of a philanthropic.
Yeah, all philanthropic. The whole thing here is philanthropic. But there's no greater value to society or to a nation state. People talk about how do we balance the budget? We have all these deficits. You wanna balance the budget? You wanna get rid of your deficits? Extend people's health span by a decade.
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 at airbnb.com/host.
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 gonna help fuel that. But in the meantime, there's so much low-hanging fruit that can add to healthy life expectancy. I've found three areas in the world, I don't wanna 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. What we do is complementary. And a lot of times people who do different things are competitive with each other. And I love how we're, I think we really admire each other's work. But to go back to...
Except you get to go a lot cooler places than I do.
I do get to go a lot cooler places.
You get to enjoy yourself a little more than I do right now.
I'm not as hard worked as...
You're ridden hard and put away wet.
And 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.
Yeah, it's fascinating. It's very true. And evolution teaches us a lot. And we often sort of blindly think that technology is going to solve our problems. And I'm thinking specifically now about connecting with other humans. The desire to connect to humans, other humans, is a fundamental almost need. And we've now defaulted to, first it's 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 the table. I'm so happy we're doing this in person and not on Zoom.
Yeah, and I wish everybody listening to us right now could be sitting here with us right now. And then we go have a glass of wine afterwards. But you can't really beat your programming. And I know enough about you that this is your purpose. This is your calling. And this is 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.
It's my nature, you're right. I tried to retire five years ago. I think I 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.
The most dangerous year of your adult life is the year you retire. There's a spike in mortality that year. You can't explain it any other way than retirement. Yes, if you're listening to this conversation, I'm talking to the camera, you listen to this conversation, you think about retiring, think about finding your passion and joy in life and making that your new career. That's eight years of life expectancy right there.
AI, everybody's talking about AI. How, if you can put this in simple terms, your best guess, how AI is gonna accelerate this leap in life expectancy for humans? How's it gonna help?
So there's a number of different ways. And so 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 diagnostician. You're familiar, I co-founded with Tony Robbins, Bob Hariri, Bill Kapp called Fountain Life.
Fountain Life, yeah. It's all the talk down in Miami.
Yeah, we have four centers right now, New York, Dallas, Orlando, our headquarters, and 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 to have it soft versus calcified plaque, low-dose lung CT.
Soft plaque is the killer. 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 evolve, can break off and block an artery, and then you're dead.
Yeah, it ruptures and it dilates your arteries and then causes sort of an internal scab over time that causes the block. 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 the Clearly scan, and 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 this 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 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, dietician, 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 or any symptoms until the very end. You don't feel a stage, a 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 or ovarian cancer. The cancers that are not routinely screened for. Just, I'm a pilot, I would not fly my plane unless it had its 100-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.
I remember when at Lake Nona, you gave this presentation, very well attended, that you showed a patient where you actually caught a cancer.
Yeah, we've caught, I mean, 3% of the members going through Fountain, 3% of our first like I think 6,000 that came through have a cancer they don't know about.
That's gonna kill them or benign or you don't need someone to—
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—2.5% 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.
Oh good, I'll be there then. (both laughing) But come through and understand what's going on. I would not miss a year, period, 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 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 I'm an 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. What was that? 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. And 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 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 gonna 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 from 74% to 76%. The AI by itself without the doctor got it at 92%.
What kind of input do you have to put in for an order to... Well, what's a good example where you...
Well, the study gives the rough numbers, doesn't give the exact, but here's the case history. Here's all the information. What does this person have?
Okay, you have to be able to feed that in.
And the realization is that AI is unbiased where human doctors introduce like, 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 gonna be in being able to diagnose patients. And of course, the cost of this is effectively zero. So people are gonna, hopefully because of AI, get diagnosed earlier when they can be better treated. David Agus was here and he told us about an incident where AI going through data on shingles vaccination found that there was a correlation between shingles vaccination and Alzheimer's. In other words, if you got your two shingles shots, your chances of Alzheimer's went down by about 50%. And that's just because AI could metabolize this ocean of data and see the connections where humans would never do that.
We did some work through all the data we've collected at Fountain Life and found an interesting study, an 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(a), 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. Glucose, it was your hemoglobin A1C. And so that was fascinating, right? You wanna reduce your temperature and you wanna reduce your chance of heart disease, stop eating sugar. And the worst source of that is typically sugar-sweetened beverages.
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 gonna be critically valuable in is helping to understand the massively complex biochemistry of your body. We mentioned like 40 trillion cells, two to five billion chemical reactions per second per cell. Demis Hassabis at DeepMind won the Nobel Prize 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. I mean, 20 year old or 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? 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 AI will make. And it's hard to get your arms around how this could actually come up with a breakthrough and the way you're breaking down. You mentioned protein folding, which I'm guessing is not meat origami. Well, what exactly?
So your DNA codes for the creation of a protein. Proteins are these structural molecules. They are 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 23 amino acids and the order of these amino acids, basically as they come on, 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. They're 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. It was called the supercomputing problem.
I remember in medical school, when we do that, that will be amazing. Because we can take amino acids, then, these building blocks and create muscle cells 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?
