Our bodies were never designed to live past age 30. Our muscle mass starts decreasing after the age of 30, our hormone levels, our muscles begin to atrophy.
I don't think that the majority of Americans even think of muscle as an organ. They don't think of it as being our metabolic currency.
There's a direct correlation between the amount of skeletal muscle you have and your longevity. Fundamentally, it comes back down to diet, sleep, exercise, and mindset. And the way that you do those things is to wrap routine around them.
Sort of the discipline over motivation approach. We've actually gotten away from the basics, the basics that you just talked about.
Most people are healthy till 63, and our goal here is: can we at least move your health span up to that 80-year mark? This is the decade of a health span revolution, and the biggest impact is going to be coming from AI.
When you have artificial intelligence that can take 700 trillion independent variables and create an actionable result, and no human can understand all that, but AI can take it all in, process it, and help you.
Ultimately, it's about being in the best health I can in order to intercept these breakthroughs.
We're both on the same journey, you know, this childlike fascination with longevity. What are just the basic building blocks of somebody who wants to live a long, healthy life?
Yeah, one of the best pro-longevity things I've ever done is...
Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And as you just heard, today's guest is probably one of the most iconic guests that we've had on the podcast in a long time, if not the most iconic guest. I'm an enormous fan of his. We were actually just fanboying over each other, and he's like, 'I'm a fan of yours.' I'm like, 'Well, I'm actually a fan of yours. I've been following you for longer.' But welcome to the podcast, Dr. Peter Diamandis.
My pleasure, Gary. It's amazing to be here with you in beautiful Miami and in your incredible environment here. You walk the talk, you live it, and so proud of what you built.
Thank you so much. I mean, that is a very high compliment coming from someone like yourself. You know, I've actually been following your trajectory from afar for several years now. I kind of find it fascinating how I think you're one of those rare kind of left-brain, right-brain kind of entrepreneurs that's able to get deeply embedded in the science but also see how it can have a practical application to humanity. And we're both on the same journey, you know, this fascination, this childlike fascination with longevity and the extension of life. And you know, I want to go down that road with you a little bit because, you know, as I've traveled around the world and met with some of the brightest minds and seen all the biohacking equipment in the world, and we're going to talk about some of the things that I think are fascinating both of us in the space of longevity. The one thing that seems to stick with me is that we need to get back to the basics and then advance to the fancy stuff. And what is your feeling on that? I mean, what are just the basic building blocks of somebody who wants to live a long, healthy life?
I think about that a lot, and I'm clear that fundamentally there are a whole slew of things that cost you nothing, right, that have a huge impact. Right now, a lot of people know me as a technologist or investor in biotech or AI and building companies in that field, but what I really want to gift in this conversation with you is like what you can do right now that moves the needle for you. And it's not spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. You can do that as well, but fundamentally, it comes back down to diet, sleep, exercise, and mindset.
Yes, those are the elements that if you don't have those dialed in, you know, forget about the other stuff.
Right, let's dial those in. And you know, we're here discussing my latest book, Longevity Guidebook: How to Slow, Stop, Reverse Aging and Not Die from Something Stupid.
I love that, not die from something stupid.
Well, it's important because I kind of think that should have been the title of the book. It's such a great line.
Thank you. But you know, there's a chapter on diet, a chapter on sleep, a chapter on exercise, a chapter on mindset, and importantly this time, a chapter on routines. Because I think the single greatest innovation... I'm 63 right now. I feel like I'm in the best health I've ever been in my life.
Amazing. By the way, you're a lot more jacked than you look on camera.
I added 10 pounds of muscle last year.
Really? I went down... you know, muscle is your longevity organ, and I went full on. Did you do full stem cell and gene therapy?
What? No, no, no. It was working out in the gym with weights every day, five days a week. It was 150 grams because I weigh 150 pounds of protein every day, and it was doing the work.
Yeah, it was doing the work.
Now, it doesn't mean... and we can talk about this, some amazing biotechnology coming in the future that will make it a lot easier. My job now is to maintain that. But lots of studies around the world show that there's a direct correlation between the amount of skeletal muscle you have and your longevity. So again, the chapter on diet, a chapter on sleep, a chapter on muscle, a chapter on mindset, those are things that we should be doing now. And the way that you do those things is to wrap routine around them.
You know what is routine? It's not negotiating with yourself over and over again, right? It's like waking up in the morning and like, this is who I am.
Sort of the discipline over motivation approach.
That's a good point, a good way to put it. And it's like, it's creating that person who you want to be and who you are. So it's like, I am the person who gets up at this time and does these things. And when you identify with that, it helps you not negotiate and say, well, you know, I want to stay in the cuddly bed a little bit longer, or that dessert, I can rationalize eating that dessert right now.
Yeah, you know, I talk about this a lot too. You know, in some of my workshops, I talk to a lot of folks, and it's interesting how people think that self-care is very selfish, right? So, you know, I've developed this philosophy that, and I apply it every day: the first 90 minutes of every day belongs to me.
Yeah, it's just my golden hour, and it doesn't belong to my spouse or my employees or my clients or my partners or even to, you know, my podcast. It belongs only to me. And it sounds very selfish, but then I just give the rest of my day away. I'm very intentional with my children, my spouse, with my team, you know, with their clients. I'm able to be very present with them. And for me, it's been an absolute game-changer. And then I put some non-negotiables, simple non-negotiables into my schedule. You know, where I schedule all of my meetings and travel around sleep and exercise. And I'm not the fittest person in the world, and get some nights where I don't get good sleep, but by and large, you know, my sleep scores are 96% plus. And I don't go a day without doing some kind of physical exercise. It has had the most dramatic change on the amount of enjoyment that I get out of doing what I do.
Yeah, I agree with you 100%. So I have the same philosophy. I'm up typically at 5:30 in the morning, and that starts by being in bed by 9:30 the night before. So I'm at my Abundance Summit, I've got 600 CEOs, people from around the world, they're partying hearty, and they watch me... Peter, come... sorry, it's bedtime. So I'm out of my own events at 9:30, you know, at 9:00 to be in bed by 9:30. And then when I get up at 5:30, that first, really it's the first 90 minutes, it is my golden time. And I love writing during that time. So I'm writing every day. I've got three books in production. This is the first of the three. I'm very excited about this. And thank you. And, you know, I put out two blogs a week, but I'm in the gym doing red light therapy, meditating, and it's that period of time that, like you said, it's selfish, it's mine, and it allows me to perform at a much higher level. Now, to be clear, I wasn't always that way, right? And it doesn't mean you go from zero to infinity. I got there over time, right? I wasn't that way a decade ago. I got into longevity. I'd started Human Longevity with Craig Venter, Bob Hariri back in 2012.
That makes you a great-grandfather of longevity.
Yeah, I got Brian Johnson into longevity.
Yeah, well, he definitely caught the bug.
He did, yeah. We were talking about this before. I think he's showing us what's possible, maybe not what's practical. And I say somewhere between the intersection of a Brian Johnson and, you know, and here. I think that's really important because there are very practical things. It really is an 80/20 rule. You know, if you feel like you have to do it all to get that additional health span, right, let's upfront say it's not really lifespan we're talking about, it really is health span. You know, today the average lifespan in the United States is, call it 79, but the average health span is 63, meaning you're living till 79. Hopefully everybody here is going to have a vision of... my listeners are going to live to 120.
But the average... I'm offended by what you just said.
I'm sorry, I'm just kidding. Apologies.
But the reality is that most people are healthy till 63, then there's a 16-year gap. And our goal here is, can we at least move your health span up to that 80-year mark? And yeah, I believe that this is the decade of a health span revolution, of a lifespan revolution as well. And you know, half my life is in the longevity world, half my life is in the AI world, and the biggest impact is going to be coming from AI.
I agree with you, right? We're a collection of 40 trillion cells. Every cell is running one to two billion chemical reactions per second, and there's no way for any human to understand the vastness of that, but AI can. And we're going to be making discovery after discovery after discovery.
But it all begins with sleep, diet, exercise, and mindset. Dial those in first, and then get ready for an extraordinary ride in the decade ahead.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think that about every half decade, we're going to see three centuries of medical advancement. And what I mean by that is when you have artificial intelligence that can take 700 trillion independent variables and create an actionable result, when you stop doing clinical trials where you study things in isolation, you know, you take a cell out of the body, you look how it behaves in a petri dish, and then you assume that when you put it back into its community, that's going to behave the same way. I think, you know, you're talking about leaps and bounds. And you know, I mean, I think the old, arcane, in my opinion, you know, randomized clinical trial, placebo-controlled trial that takes, you know, eight or 10 years and then comes out with a compound that, let's say, gets FDA approved and then goes into the market for 10 years and gets data. So, and by the way, it only works for 20% of the people who it's created for, right? And you don't figure that out for 20 years, you know, until you get really large data. And they go, well, we made a mistake, and we either pay a fine or take something off the market or change it up. I mean, those cycles are so long. And then I think we also have the inhibition, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but the regulatory environment just doesn't have the capacity to keep up, I mean, with the pace of innovation. So I think that stalls a lot of what people have available to them. So, you know, a lot of treatments that I believe can really extend life or at least extend health span: stem cells, exosomes, natural killer cell treatments, blood filtration, and we can talk about all of those.
Yeah, and I actually want to go down that road. First of all, I'm glad that we agree on the foundation because I think that the greatest shift in humanity... like when you... I was a mortality expert for many decades.
That must have been a great line for opening up your dating conversations.
Don't chicks... chicks love mortality experts. They love... I mean, you can predict death to the month, man. That's... it's a great party trick. You know, here, give me your wrist, let me feel your pulse, and I'll tell you. But, you know, I think my wife would probably disagree with that.
But you know what's really interesting is, you know, there's so many people that are fascinated by this life extension, you know, extending our lifespan. And I believe that there's evidence-based modalities and things that we can do, but they're just not available in the United States. You're going to travel outside, but... and hopefully that will change in the new administration, right, under RFK.
Yes, and there's so much... it's a disservice that some of my closest friends, some of our members at Fountain Life to get advanced therapeutics need to travel outside the US to, you know, to Costa Rica or Mexico or other places. And that is all going to change. The data is going to materialize as well as regulatory reform to support that.
You know, and so having been a mortality expert, we studied mortality and lifespan, and the greatest advances in life expectancy weren't like major medical breakthroughs or specific tinctures. They were sewers, sanitation, you know, these vaccines, pasteurization of milk. I mean, these were... there were massive jumps in life expectancy. And I think now what's happened, because I think that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort and people don't want to challenge themselves anymore, is we've actually gotten away from the basics, the basics that you just talked about. And I don't think that the majority of Americans even think of muscle as an organ, right? I mean, they don't think of it as being our metabolic currency. And so I want to talk a little bit about that, and then I want to get right into some of the things that are really exciting, like blood filtration, stem cells, exosomes, some amazing things coming. I mean, should we hit some of the basics so that coming out of this podcast, people have some actionable items right away?
Yeah, I mean, most people aren't going to go, hey, I'm going to Panama and getting a $25,000 stem cell IV. But let's break them down. First, on diet, it is... if you think about your body, your genetics, what powers you evolved 200,000 years ago on the savannas of Africa, and our DNA has not changed very much in 200,000 years. And back then, two things were true. Number one, there was no sugar in the environment. You had some small amount of natural fruits, there was no refined sugar. And the second was, feeding was intermittent. There was no defined gluttony of food consistently. We didn't have Whole Foods or McDonald's. And so today, what I tell people, if you want to go on the diet front, what you can do for yourself: number one, it's cut out this poison called sugar. Sugar, refined sugar, is a neuroinflammatory, a cardiac inflammatory. We just did a study at Fountain Life in which we looked at cardiac disease as a function of a bunch of things like LDL, HDL, triglycerides, Lp(a), all these things you hear about, and the number one correlate to heart disease was none of those things. It was your hemoglobin A1c. It was what was your average blood glucose levels over the last three months. And so sugar correlates with heart disease, it also correlates with obviously diabetes, and correlates with neurodegenerative disease. So can you minimize that first and foremost? And it takes a while, sugar is addictive, but I've trained myself to minimize that in my diet. We actually ran a no-sugar challenge for 22 days that a friend of mine, Gwynne Shotwell, ran for my Abundance community. And if you do it as a group, it's a lot easier to do.
Whole plants, of course, everybody talks about whole plants, it is true. I'm not going to go, you know, plant versus animal protein. I mean, minimizing sugar, whole plants, even the order in which you eat your food, right? So when you're sitting down at your plate at lunch or dinner, eat the vegetables first, which is the fiber going through your stomach and small intestines, it slows it down, it allows you to absorb nutrients. Eat your protein next, and then eat your carbs last, if you have room. Just doing that alone will flatten your insulin curve and help you lose weight. Anyway, I mean, those are just a few. You know, and I think when you look at Blue Zone diets, there was no really specific continuity between diets other than that they were all whole foods. I mean, Sardinia was very different from the Mediterranean, very different from Singapore. You'd have very high meat consumptions with long life expectancies, very high carbohydrate consumptions with long life expectancies, and then you had very high fat consumptions with long life expectancies. But they were all whole foods, and none of those people were eating a processed diet. You didn't find the herbicides, pesticides, insecticides...
GLP-1 drugs, you can induce that same impact by just chewing your food slow.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think most people realize that the GLP-1s, the semaglutides, tirzepatides, these are just mimicking hormones that we produce in our gut, and they respond to... they create satiety based on nutrient density. And so when you're eating highly processed foods, they're not nutrient-dense, you're hungry more frequently, and you have a tendency to overeat. It's crazy. I've been saying, you know, our kids' cereals should have black box warnings on them like a cigarette.
Yeah, I agree with that. I totally agree with that. There's a big movement to get Kellogg's to take, you know, the food dyes out of the cereals. I'm like, why don't we just get rid of the cereal? I mean, you know, taking the food dye from red dye number 40 to a beet juice dye is great. I mean, honestly, we're marketing this to our kids.
Yeah, it should be. I think this has... I mean, this is a whole different conversation, but this has to do with, you know, the corruption in our research institutions and the stranglehold that big food and pharma has on our public policy research. And that research needs to be independent. I mean, NIH needs to be, in my opinion, it needs to be a publicly funded, taxpayer-funded, independent... I hope under RFK that this will make some significant changes. Whatever your politics, make America healthy again. Fundamental stuff.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to disagree with the statistics. You know, the highest rates of childhood cancer in recorded history. We just now, as of December 6th, I just saw this article in the Daily Mail, as of December 6th, we're ranked 66th in the world in life expectancy. Four and a half trillion dollars a year we spend on healthcare, and we're ranked... I mean, our ROI on healthcare is horrible, it's negative. So in the category of diet, it's not that difficult, right? It is drink enough water, I don't do sodas. Caffeine, it depends on what your genetics are, if you're a slow or fast metabolizer. I minimized alcohol to half a glass of wine socially a week, but you know, it's a good lubricant for social, but don't abuse it. It is another form of sugar. But minimizing sugar, eating whole plants, if you do just those two things and slow it down when you're eating your food, really, and don't watch the Crisis News Network while you're eating your food, don't be in a sympathetic state while you're trying to eat your food.
All right, let's get into the good stuff, because I think we are...
Can I hit one more thing, which is mindset? I think people don't recognize how powerful mindset is on your health. And there's a study I just want to quote in here that I write about in the book.
By the way, I'm going to put a link to the Longevity Guidebook in the show notes below. I mean, this is available now. Before you sent me a pre...
Yes, it is available. I am donating 100% of all profits to the XPRIZE Foundation. We've got a large health span prize I'll mention. I also... you can order on Amazon, 26, 27 bucks. I have it available if you go to longevityguidebook.com, it's like $12 cheaper. And it's basically, I do it at break-even. I want to get this out there. For me, making, you know, a few bucks on a book is not the goal. It's how do I get this out there. People should be empowered. This is the most extraordinary time ever in human history. I want to watch and see and participate in as much of it as possible. And I want people to have that vitality, that love, that life, that health.
All right, so here's two data points on mindset, because I think mindset is one of the most important things that people don't connect to your longevity. So this is in a study of 69,744 women and 1,429 men, so it's a large-powered study, many more women than men, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You don't get higher level than that. It was found that optimistic people live as much as 15% longer than pessimists. It's like a double dividend. And if you're not optimistic, get around people who are optimistic. Here's another fun one, and this is the power of mind over death. So it's one of my favorite stories coming from the annals of American history. So as it turns out, in an extraordinary demonstration of the will to live, two of America's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both willed themselves to live long enough to see the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, even though the average life expectancy was only 44 years old in the early 1800s. Jefferson, who was 83, and Adams, who was 90, made it to July 4th, 1826, both dying on that exact date, the 50th anniversary of the nation they had founded. Wow, isn't that powerful?
Wow. I mean, another friend, you know, Sullivan says, make sure that your future is bigger than your past. Having a purpose to live for is so important. That actually came out in the Blue Zones research too, the sense of purpose, sense of community, mobility into later in life. You know, we know from the mortality research that the group I was a part of, that sedentary lifestyle is now the leading cause of all-cause mortality. Sitting is the new smoking.
Yeah, it really is. It's the new smoking.
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We both have that childlike curiosity and fascination with the extension of life, and I think the majority of the really promising research has gone into the serum of the blood, through the wall of the cell, through the cytoplasm, and into the mitochondria. And I think we know mitochondria are not just the powerhouse of the cell, but they are the key, in my opinion, the opinion of many, to longevity. So what are some of the things that are really exciting you? I asked you this question the other day when we were on a Zoom call, and I really enjoyed your answer. But what are some of the things that are really waking you up in the morning and exciting you about the field of longevity?
Yeah, so when I wake up in the morning, the very first thing I do is gratitude, right? It's like my instant reaction. Thank you for the ability to live another amazing day, and can I contribute the maximum I can? And I just... it's like being excited to see what's going to... you know, there's infinite possibilities we're living in, and just excitement for the day. And a lot of the breakthroughs coming are across everything. So I have a $600 million venture fund in biotech called Bold Capital, and Bold Longevity Growth. And we're in our fourth fund now, and so I see a lot of deals. And then I run something called the Longevity Platinum Trip. Dr. Yannis and I scan through 500 companies, and we pick 50. And every year it's a new crop of 50, and we spend five days. I bring my Abundance 360 members in who want to be part of it, and we meet with the CEOs of all these companies. And a lot of the people there are to invest or just learn. And this year, or last year, 2024 was the first year we're starting to see, instead of theory, actual therapeutics, actual things becoming available. I mean, I can jump into some of them.
No, I want to hear about some. I mean, in my audience, this is right up their alley.
So one of them that I love is a company called Immunis. Dr. Hans Keirstead, this is his fifth company. He's had four increasingly bigger exits. He's brilliant in stem cells. And what he identified was he created an iPSC-derived and an embryonic cell-derived stem cell that he can grow, and it puts out 450 discrete molecules and exosomes consistently. The Muse cell... it's not a Muse cell, but it is a... and I'll let him define it when he's ready to release it. They just completed... so what they've done is that those 440, actually 440 secretome that comes out of these cells, he's been able to characterize it, consistently produce it, and turn it into a drug. And the FDA has allowed him to use that as a drug. So they just completed their Phase 1/2a study in which they were injecting IM twice a week for three months. And he's figuring out whether once a week or whatever the protocol will be. But his first 18 patients were 50 to 75 years old. They were severe osteoarthritis, meaning they couldn't walk, they were in pain. And he did this for a three-month period. And here's the results. Number one, these people who were effectively on bed rest, right, because of pain, because they couldn't walk, their skeletal muscle mass increased 66% without exercise, zero exercise. Number two, their pain reduced as much as 70%. They were able to reverse their immune age by 30 years and reduce their inflammatory markers by 50%. And there were no other interventions, consistent across everybody, no adverse reactions. And so he's doing an expanded trial. I have signed up to be...
I mean, we're going to talk about me signing up as soon as this podcast is over.
So we've cut a deal between him and Fountain Life. So Fountain Life is my diagnostic and therapeutic centers. Tony Robbins and I and Bill Kapp started this a couple years ago. We have four centers today in New York, in Naples, where you started, in Orlando, and in Houston. We're adding next year Phoenix, Dallas, and probably Miami. And then we've got a growth path for another 25. Anyway, we're making this therapeutic available at no cost to our Fountain Life members as part of the expanded trial he's doing. So very, very excited about that. Because our members are fully characterized, and we know they're healthy, we know what shape they're in, all their data.
For folks that are not exceedingly familiar with stem cells, and I don't want to put words in Peter's mouth, but these cells that you harvest either from Wharton's jelly or these cells or placentas, very often you can put these cells in a specific type of media and they react in different ways. You know, these secretomes you're talking about or exosomes are a reaction to the cell's media, what its environment is, and then it's pumping these factors out based upon the environment it finds itself in. And you can get high molecular weight hyaluronic acid, you can get growth factors. So you can manipulate the cell to secrete these exosomes or secretomes that are specific to the outcome that you want. Maybe it's joint repair, or it's collagen, elastin, and fibrin, or if it's inflammation reduction. And again, I don't purport to be a stem cell scientist, but I'm fascinated by how they can take this one pluripotent cell and they can bathe it in different media, and it literally is like a chemical factory. And depending on its environment, like a human being, it can have hundreds if not thousands of different reactions. And then you can capture the byproduct of that stem cell's reaction and use it to treat specific conditions. There's a lot coming in that realm.
I'm the co-founder and vice chair of a company called Cellularity, which I love. Bob Hariri, who is an MD, PhD, Tony Robbins and I, and Bob wrote a book called...
Yeah, Tony's a dear, dear friend, and we started a few companies. Nothing but love for him. But Bob would be a great guest.
So Bob figured out early on that the placenta is really the 3D printer that manufactures the baby. And at the end of childbirth, most people don't know this, but you're paying the hospital to incinerate and get rid of the placenta, which is like if your baby was born with an extra set of lungs, kidney, heart, liver, would you throw them away? And so one of the things that Cellularity has is a division called First Bank USA, in which you can save your child's placenta, you decellularize it, you pull out the stem cells, the natural killer cells, the T cells, the exosomes, and so forth, and it's cryopreserved so that your child for the rest of its life has a day-zero set of its own stem cells forever. So both of my boys, who are now 13, when I go visit Cellularity's headquarters, I go say hello to the nitrogen dewar that has their stem cells in it.
That's awesome. But you know, we talk about Wharton's jelly, we talk about umbilical cord, the cord stem cells are probably the most powerful.
