The Rich Roll Podcast - Slow, Stop, & Reverse Aging: Peter Diamandis On Longevity Protocols, Lifestyle Medicine, & Optimizing Healthspan

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Peter Diamandis is a renowned physician, futurist, and the founder of XPRIZE, whose paradigm-shifting work transforms our understanding of aging and human potential. This conversation delves into the ...duality of our longevity revolution: the simple, actionable tools accessible to anyone today, and the bold technologies that could reshape our future. From innovative diagnostics to organ regeneration, Peter details why this decade might fundamentally alter our relationship with aging. Along the way, we examine practical health strategies and the philosophical implications of extending human healthspan. Peter is the ultimate optimist. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  Momentous: 20% OFF all of my favorite products  👉livemomentous.com/richroll Go Brewing: Use code Rich Roll for 15% OFF  👉gobrewing.com LMNT: Get a FREE Sample Pack with any drink mix purchase👉drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL OneSkin: Get 15% off with the code RICHROLL 👉oneskin.co Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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Starting point is 00:02:19 For a limited time, Element is offering all of you a free sample pack with any purchase. Just head to www.drinklmnt.com slash richroll to take advantage of this deal. Our ancestors would consider us as gods. There's a lot coming. We're beginning to understand fundamentally, why do we age?
Starting point is 00:02:44 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 is the founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University and kind of a visionary who, for decades,
Starting point is 00:03:09 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 pro-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
Starting point is 00:03:34 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, 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?
Starting point is 00:03:52 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.
Starting point is 00:04:17 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.
Starting point is 00:04:40 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
Starting point is 00:05:00 and then now promoting wellbeing and this health span 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.
Starting point is 00:05:19 Where's 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 gonna be focused on that. And that's really, that's what, you know, this new book is really all about. It's kind of like a how-to practical,
Starting point is 00:05:39 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,
Starting point is 00:05:58 what each thing can benefit you. And one of the things most importantly is what I call getting a longevity mindset. Like getting mindset is one of the most important things. We'll talk about mindset impacting your physiology, your health, but longevity mindset is the idea that you're clear there are so many breakthroughs arriving right now and over the decade ahead
Starting point is 00:06:23 that could truly extend your health span and lifespan, that you're gonna do all that you can do today to be in the best health, to intercept these technologies. Mm-hmm. Right, that they're worth putting the investment of time, energy, forgoing that doughnut, getting up and doing the exercise, going to bed early enough.
Starting point is 00:06:44 And I hope that I'll prove this to you and those watching because I think it's the greatest gift we can ever 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.
Starting point is 00:07:08 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
Starting point is 00:07:34 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 of these sort of medical interventions and supplements. And that kind are all of these sort of medical interventions and supplements. And that kind of leads you into some of these moon shots and where we're kind of headed with all of this. But fundamentally, I'm glad you brought up mindset
Starting point is 00:07:53 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 some effort towards, how you're thinking about how you're entering
Starting point is 00:08:17 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 is how long your heart's ticking,
Starting point is 00:08:34 right? How long you're alive, whether you can think or do anything at all. Health span 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.
Starting point is 00:08:52 So that's health span. And in the United States today, there's about a 17 year gap between lifespan and health span. So lifespan on average is like 79 today, health span 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.
Starting point is 00:09:11 You'll be there soon. Soon, soon enough. Not yet, but soon enough. And so the notion that it's a slow decline, and we'll talk about why that occurs, but saying, no, 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,
Starting point is 00:09:30 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 genetics, which means at the worst case, 70% of your ability
Starting point is 00:10:04 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, you know, 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
Starting point is 00:10:32 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. Like do impact my wellbeing and the trajectory of how long I'm gonna be able to sustain health span or you don't, right?
Starting point is 00:10:53 And if you do, then it's like, okay, well, the onus is on you. Like if you have agency, like what are you doing to direct that? Even the way you perceive the world has an impact. There's a study I just wanna quote, I marked it here. And I love this. It says, in a study of 69,744 women and 1,429 men
Starting point is 00:11:17 published in the prestigious journal proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, like highest level work, right? It was found that optimistic people live as much as 15% longer than pessimists. And it's like a double benefit for being an optimist. Is that a mutable quality though? I think it is. You do?
Starting point is 00:11:36 There's a lot of people who are dour in their lives and getting to the flip over to an optimist. I think it is mutable. So our brains are neural nets, right? We have a hundred billion neurons, a hundred 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?
Starting point is 00:11:59 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 feeds, it shapes its neural net. And the problem is that we're living in a world where most people are bombarded by the news media.
Starting point is 00:12:24 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
Starting point is 00:12:44 and positive news. It's evolutionarily beneficial on the savannas of Africa a hundred thousand years ago, rustling the leaves. If you thought wind and it was a lion, you were screwed. Your genes were out of the gene pool. And so we developed a cognitive bias for negative news. And we pay 10 times more attention to bias for negative news. And we pay 10 times more attention to negative than positive news.
Starting point is 00:13:08 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,
Starting point is 00:13:27 like if you're like 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. It has to be a why. Yeah, so it's very hard to compel somebody who doesn't have a positive mindset to adopt a positive mindset,
Starting point is 00:13:50 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 on 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
Starting point is 00:14:08 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 can begin there. Yeah, agreed.
Starting point is 00:14:27 I mean, I pay as much attention to what I let into my mind as what I eat and let them into my body, right? Those are two things that very much shape you. Part, 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 with an extra 10 years of life, of health, right?
Starting point is 00:14:55 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 a very, it's very challenging for us. But when you can connect to something like, you know, I grew up sort of weaning on Star Trek and Apollo program. And I just, I wanna see humanity become a multi-planetary
Starting point is 00:15:20 species. I wanna be part of that, that endeavor. I wanna meet my great grandkids. I think this is the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I wanna 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.
Starting point is 00:15:41 And we might've 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 and Aubrey DeGray 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.
Starting point is 00:16:01 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.
Starting point is 00:16:22 We also kind of discussed the philosophical implications of what that would mean. You know, what does it mean when suddenly 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 gonna happen with all these children that are now, you know, like there's population issues,
Starting point is 00:16:42 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. And 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 2040.
Starting point is 00:16:57 But that's the way into the mindset shift, basically, whether you believe that's gonna happen or not, it's like a window into like 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 kind of, you know, life and what it means and how you're finding purpose
Starting point is 00:17:18 and what gets you excited out of bed in the morning. Yeah, and it may be that it's not extending your life past a hundred, but what if it's giving you vital health till your nineties? So you've got the aesthetics, the cognition, the mobility to really live a full life with these additional decades. You know, George Church and David Sinclair,
Starting point is 00:17:43 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 for something stupid in the interim and to give yourself the maximum chance to intercept these breakthroughs coming. You don't wanna be the last person to miss it,
Starting point is 00:18:06 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 kinda hoping to like, kind of just slide in, you know, as the clock's ticking out. I'm working hard for you, buddy. What is the original inspiration or spark that got you interested in this field to begin with?
Starting point is 00:18:28 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 like thinking, if they can live that long,
Starting point is 00:18:46 why can't I? My answer, which I still believe is it's either an engineering problem or a software problem. And we're gonna have the technology to change that, to solve that. And I think this next decade is that time. AI is gonna have the biggest impact, right? Well, it's certainly an extraordinary moment
Starting point is 00:19:05 that we're in right now. It is the most transition forward experience, you know, in the history of humanity. The rate at which advances are being made is dizzying. It's difficult to even like get our heads around it. We've become numb to it. We've become totally numb to it, right? Where I have a slide in a chapter
Starting point is 00:19:24 when my next book's called our ancestors would consider us as gods. We have God-like 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
Starting point is 00:19:44 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, lifespan is declining. We're pretty unhealthy across the modern developed world, increasingly more and more unhealthy
Starting point is 00:20:07 due to environmental reasons, our food environments, et cetera. Our food companies and pharma companies are killing us. We may be, you know, God-like in certain qualities, but are we healthier? Are we happier? It's an interesting tension or conundrum because there are all of these advances
Starting point is 00:20:24 and all these possibilities. at the same time, we're dealing with a population that's experiencing chronic lifestyle elements 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,
Starting point is 00:20:43 and yet we're so unhealthy. And I just, I'm writing a book for Simon's sister with Steven Kotler 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.
Starting point is 00:21:06 But we also have an abundance of microplastics and abundance of depression and 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.
Starting point is 00:21:31 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.
Starting point is 00:21:47 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 like increasing kind of like dismissiveness or resistance to these ideas. Like how are you seeing the world at large in terms of how receptive they are
Starting point is 00:22:06 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 had. 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
Starting point is 00:22:38 and should do right now. And listen, a lot of 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 motivations to implement them. They have to care about, they have to feel agency. They have to understand the power this has for them,
Starting point is 00:22:59 the benefits it has for them, and that they can move the needle. If you don't believe that, you're not gonna do it. Yeah, I mean, you're the moonshot guy. It's fun to talk about like, what is it gonna look like in 30 years, 50 years? Let's focus on what's exciting now, these kind of emerging protocols with things like,
Starting point is 00:23:21 NAD plus and rapamycin and you're deep into all that stuff. It can speak fluently about what we should know and understand about these things. But fundamentally, like, 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.
Starting point is 00:23:43 Mindset. And these are things we all have to deal with. And we've known about this for centuries. Yeah. 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
Starting point is 00:24:02 besides my longevity guidebook. And it's gonna be the power of AI to be your coach, your supporter, to help you remember what you set out you wanna do. AI systems, we're not far from Jarvis from Ironman, where your AI is there saying, don't eat that, first have a glass of water, or there's stairs around the corner,
Starting point is 00:24:32 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 gonna 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, Ariana Huffington has a program called
Starting point is 00:24:53 Thrive Global, which is used inside of companies. These are micro steps. It's remembering, I mean, there's 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,
Starting point is 00:25:19 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 and wine first. 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.
Starting point is 00:25:44 You just have to decide whether you wanna 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 a whole food. Yeah, no sugar, whole foods, close to their natural state, mostly plants. You know, you have a whole section on protein
Starting point is 00:26:05 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. It's not, I'd like to say every day, but yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:24 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.
Starting point is 00:26:44 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 pounds 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,
Starting point is 00:27:06 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 pro 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.
Starting point is 00:27:38 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.
Starting point is 00:27:59 So it's some combination of strength training, high intensity training and so on too. Yeah, so it's strength, muscle mass. And then the other thing is stimulating mitochondria, right? So one of the things, 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.
Starting point is 00:28:22 And so I've got a technogen 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,
Starting point is 00:28:46 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. 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.
Starting point is 00:29:15 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've 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,
Starting point is 00:30:01 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 get the 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, when we're ready to talk about that,
Starting point is 00:30:25 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
Starting point is 00:30:47 of how important it is. I mean, you just think, oh, well, of course you don't want disease gums or infections and bad breath and the like. You want your teeth to be white, et cetera. But the connection between oral health and cardiovascular disease and neurocognitive disease is like very real.
Starting point is 00:31:03 Yeah, so your mouth is very close to your brain and there are a lot of blood vessels, 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
Starting point is 00:31:33 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, I won't go into all of the elements here and people can read about it,
Starting point is 00:31:57 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 cure-a-tage.
Starting point is 00:32:17 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. Yes, 100%. Yeah. What's cool is that you do in the book, you like, not only do you have like,
Starting point is 00:32:34 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 a friend to tell me- protocol and exactly what I do. This book started as a request from friends to tell me what- Just tell me what to do. Yeah, exactly. I don't wanna read 700 page book. Well, that was the difference.
Starting point is 00:32:52 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, 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 document or document to like 50 pages to 100 pages. Like, screw it. I'm just gonna turn this into a book. We're brought to you today by Momentous.
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Starting point is 00:36:40 Where do you like look at that and say like, 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's 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.
Starting point is 00:37:06 Both he and I got disillusioned with the direction HLI was going, we 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
Starting point is 00:37:27 is fascinating experimentation on himself. And the fact that he's so open to sharing the details and he 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, we live in a number of the areas, which is, we live in a clickbait society and he's generating a lot of clickbait.
Starting point is 00:37:50 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. He's drawn a lot of attention to himself and there's a lot of interest and curiosity around him as a figure, cause he's a very kind of unique expression of humanity. He's an extremist.
Starting point is 00:38:07 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 like, you know, kind of make the video that's gonna get everyone to click on it. And he's sort of like an explorer in this world. And most of this stuff maybe isn't gonna work,
Starting point is 00:38:23 but at least somebody's out there trying it and reporting back, I guess. I went to one of his kind of Jeffersonian dinners where the question is posed. Like you mentioned the AI that's gonna kind of help you make the right decisions. And the question that provides the structure for the discussion is basically
Starting point is 00:38:41 like if there's a super intelligence, would you basically relinquish your agency over to it if it was gonna always make, help you make the decision that's gonna 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 like cancel your membership or whatever. Oh, which is a provocative question
Starting point is 00:39:02 because we wanna think that we 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. Is 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
Starting point is 00:39:24 begin to envision an increasing amount 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 sub zone of privacy, Peter.
Starting point is 00:39:45 I respect you for that. I wanna talk about diagnostics, cause I think this, and I know we talked about this a little bit last time, but to me, this seems like the most kind of powerful set of tools that are, I mean, they're expensive, but like, if you're thinking about like, I don't wanna just treat a disease when I get it,
Starting point is 00:40:04 I wanna 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.
Starting point is 00:40:21 Is it going in that direction? You have found life and you have this clinic, but like, what is the adoption, kind of mentality around this? So, the basic question is, when is the best time to find disease, right? It's at inception, at stage zero. And, I'm in a room of a thousand people,
Starting point is 00:40:40 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 you,
Starting point is 00:41:02 I don't wanna say should know, you need to know. So here's some numbers. 70% of individuals who die from a cancer die from a cancer that is never tested routinely, that we don't routinely test for. They die from a glioblastoma or pancreatic cancer. They don't die from breast or colon or prostate, right? Because we test for that.
Starting point is 00:41:26 Well, that's great, but guess what? You die from the other ones. When you have a cancer, God forbid, you don't feel 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,
Starting point is 00:41:51 one of my closest high school friends has metastatic pancreatic cancer with like a week left to live. And I was in tears yesterday hearing about this. And it's like, we don't know what's going on in our bodies, but you can, you know, 70% of people have a heart attack, don't have any precedence, no shortness of breath. Even nothing, a calcium score is meaningless
Starting point is 00:42:22 because it's the soft plaque that can kill you, that can evolve, erupt in the middle of the night, block coronary artery, deprive the muscle tissue of your heart from oxygen and glucose, and then that tissue's 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.
Starting point is 00:42:48 But we know more about our cars and our refrigerators than we do inside our bodies, but you can know. And if you can know, I think you wanna know, people go, oh, no, no, I don't wanna know. That's the thing, there is a fear around it. Like, if I go do that, I'm gonna find something out. I feel okay, like, you know, no thank you. And the reality is you're gonna find out eventually.
Starting point is 00:43:12 You wanna 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, Bill Cap, Bob Hurley and I
Starting point is 00:43:32 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 in ours in Phoenix, in Houston, and then there's one more location probably in England.
Starting point is 00:44:01 And then we've got a runway of 25 more. And it's a membership model where people come and it's not just a 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 lung 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 noble about you
Starting point is 00:44:41 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 five, 6,000 members, 2% of them have a cancer they don't know about.
Starting point is 00:45:04 2.5% have an aneur 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,
Starting point is 00:45:27 maybe you don't have any identifiable cancer, but hey, listen, there's some heart disease on the horizon here. We see these plaques, et cetera. 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 wanna do is get a data dump
Starting point is 00:45:48 and then just say goodbye, right? I mean, 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, a concierge care around that. So besides the upload, which takes about four and a half, five hours,
Starting point is 00:46:13 you get a functional medicine longevity physician, right? And functional medicine is really important. For me, it's the highest level. It's the root cause training that physicians get. It's very rare. It's gonna be increasing. It's understanding at a molecular level. Why is there a disease?
Starting point is 00:46:33 You don't look at the organ. Well, it's what's going on 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, I got texted by Mona, my Fountain Life doctor this morning,
Starting point is 00:46:56 how are you feeling, what's going on? Are you feeling excellent? I said, well, I got this and this and 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.
Starting point is 00:47:16 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 bloods biomarkers and everything
Starting point is 00:47:39 at least 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. I'm 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.
Starting point is 00:48:05 It's a curious thing though, this like focus on self optimization. I have concerns around like the obsessiveness with which a lot of people kind of like 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. If you're so focused on like metrics all the time
Starting point is 00:48:27 and there's something that's a cross purposes with true health span, 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,
Starting point is 00:48:49 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 X-Prize Foundation and Singularity
Starting point is 00:49:15 and Abundance 360 in 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 aura ring, an Apple watch,
Starting point is 00:49:46 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 gonna become your health partner to help you achieve your goals.
Starting point is 00:50:13 Set your goals and I'm gonna tell you what to take. You know, listen, lay off the red meat this week. If you want, if you want, I mean, people take a decision, are they happy with the 80 years they've got? Would they like a hundred years? That's up to everybody individually. What are your boys, your twins think about all this?
Starting point is 00:50:39 Are they into it? I mean, listen, 13 year old boys are gonna make fun of their dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, so I tell them, I mean, we will 13 year old boys are gonna make fun of their dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 wanna be there to enjoy you when you're 100. Well, we'll see if I'm still around.
Starting point is 00:50:59 Like how does the traditional mainstream medical establishment like 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?
Starting point is 00:51:22 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, it's kind of strange.
Starting point is 00:51:47 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 OMA. Like something that- Like a relic, a shadow of something that you misinterpret.
Starting point is 00:52:13 Yeah, and it's like, oh, you're gonna find it, you're gonna 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 your, we do a Grail gallery test, which is a blood test looking for free-floating
Starting point is 00:52:34 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?
Starting point is 00:52:59 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? That's a great version. It goes back to mindset. Like what is your mindset around this? Like why is your reflex like don't test
Starting point is 00:53:13 unless there's something wrong. Like test early and often. But the time there's something wrong, it's maybe too late. But I think it's a mindset that's a reflection of a paradigm that's slowly eroding as we kind of enter this new paradigm. And I would suspect that at least among
Starting point is 00:53:27 the younger generation of doctors, they're the ones who are peering over the fence and interested in these things. Like you don't go into medicine unless you wanna like promote health and you're interested in the wellbeing 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.
Starting point is 00:53:48 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, it's like seven minutes these days. Is it seven?
Starting point is 00:54:04 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.
Starting point is 00:54:25 I mean, that's what really is gonna shift it. And that is only gonna 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. Robin, she has a series of clinics called Parsley Health
Starting point is 00:54:45 and she has gotten its functional medicine. She's in New York, but there's clinics and a lot of it is 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.
Starting point is 00:55:02 Yeah, it's expensive. Yeah, the fountain apex membership is 19,500 bucks. It's expensive, right? A year, right? Most people, per year, per year. To be a member of this thing, it's like out of reach for- Yeah, for majority of all people, I fully know that. You know, it's not just the testing, right?
Starting point is 00:55:19 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 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.
Starting point is 00:55:45 So we're gonna 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, listen, I teach this. Most people may know me as a technologist as a, you know, sort of AI tech entrepreneur. And I teach the idea of the six D's of exponentials
Starting point is 00:56:13 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 dematerialized the phone into your handset here and demonetized and democratized access. But in the beginning, it's deceptively slow change.
Starting point is 00:56:40 It took like 20 years for the digital camera to go from something in the lab to something that was disrupting Kodak. And then it becomes disruptive. And so we're gonna see that level of change. We're gonna see AIs in your home and sensors on your body. In fact, we have at Fountain, we have a program called Fountain at Home,
Starting point is 00:57:05 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
Starting point is 00:57:29 and how complicated and how expensive was it like map the genome at the beginning. It's $3 billion for the first genome. Then Craig Venter did it for a hundred 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?
Starting point is 00:57:49 You go in for dental checkup and they'll sequence your genome to decide which is the best anesthetic for your mouth. Or every kid born, my niece just had a baby today. 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.
Starting point is 00:58:11 I mean, there's a lot, the world's about to change in that medical health realm. Imagine you suddenly became surgeon general or you had some like role of power where you could kind of like, make these things happen at scale. Like what would that look like, like right now with the technology that is currently available
Starting point is 00:58:32 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 food system is killing us. Ultra processed food, sugar, salts, all of these things, the stuff that's cheap and tasty, it's destroying Americans' lives. And I'm clear about that.
Starting point is 00:58:56 That's the first and foremost. There might be educational programs we put in place, but then it's, what we're finding has the most impact is MRI imaging to find aneurysms and cancer. There are programs under development that will take an MRI from an hour
Starting point is 00:59:21 and effectively, you know, a couple of thousand dollars down to 10 minutes and a couple of 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 their healthcare and on lost days of work
Starting point is 00:59:52 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 wanna do, so as you know, I run this X prize foundation for 30 years now. I'm chairman of it, Anusha Ansari,
Starting point is 01:00:17 who's our CEO runs it. We just launched a 101 million dollar 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 Ariana runs does similar things, but without the easy access to data.
Starting point is 01:01:00 So I think sensors and AI are gonna 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 in
Starting point is 01:01:23 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 kind of move the needle in the right direction. Cause right now we have lots of sensors. I'm wearing a whoop, you've got an aura, whether it's levels or whatever patch you have on
Starting point is 01:01:48 that's monitoring your glucose levels. We have sleep metrics. 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 in 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.
Starting point is 01:02:08 And none of these things are talking to each other. So we're not treating any of these things holistically, right? We're kind of picking and choosing, 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,
Starting point is 01:02:27 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 what we could do through the day to increase our HRV or prepare ourselves for sleep. And I do think we're gonna have these AI health coaches. And I think they are going to be something which ultimately is free
Starting point is 01:02:50 because your company will pay for it because it increases your productivity, your energy levels, you reduce healthcare 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. Yeah, maybe, I mean, maybe you can opt out, but do you remember progressive car insurance
Starting point is 01:03:11 had a box they could put in your car that would monitor the acceleration of like, did you brake hard, do you accelerate fast, 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.
Starting point is 01:03:30 Do I want the lower insurance rate? Sure. Yeah. And is it gonna make me a safer- 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 think, you know, one of my favorite sayings is the man or woman
Starting point is 01:03:44 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 day and it was easy for you, why not? I mean, maybe you don't, maybe you kind of death wish, that's fine, but that's not all of us. I think it's important to realize that
Starting point is 01:04:09 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
Starting point is 01:04:36 and actually measurably do this. You know, I've got this 101 million dollar health span prize that's focused on reversing the functional loss in muscle immune cognition. 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 were 20 years younger,
Starting point is 01:05:01 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
Starting point is 01:05:30 at no cost and part of a phase two FDA trial. And Hans Kirsteid is the CEO. He's developed a product which is 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 of growth factors, mRNAs, exosomes, and that's the drug.
Starting point is 01:06:04 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
Starting point is 01:06:30 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.
Starting point is 01:06:56 Hulled, constant. Checked, what was the sample size on that? 18. 18, yeah. 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, what was that? Over three months. Three months.
Starting point is 01:07:11 Yeah. 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 these young 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
Starting point is 01:07:40 that gives me tremendous hope, right? 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 take care of myself, right? And I write about those in the book, I can intercept these coming technologies.
Starting point is 01:08:08 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 health span 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,
Starting point is 01:08:30 it's like, where do I find my footing in this? Like, what do I really need to know? You know, people with products, et cetera. And it's just, it's really hard to know, like what's efficacious here, you know? Who's giving me the straight story about the most important things and maybe, you know, a couple of cherries on top because it's fun
Starting point is 01:08:47 and I have some disposable income versus somebody who's over extrapolating from weak data sets to make claims that are a little bit, they're a little bit over their skis on. Yeah, for sure. You need to look at the data. You need to look at the scientists. You need to look at the scientists. You need to look at all of that, right?
Starting point is 01:09:07 So I try in Longevity Guidebook to provide the data that I've been using to make my own decisions, right? And so it's, 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 50, I was alive 50 years ago, but you know what I mean.
Starting point is 01:09:38 As was I. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. eye. The new year is upon us. Everybody's thinking about how to get healthier, how to lose weight,
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Starting point is 01:10:43 year, a new you, and everybody needs inspiration in the kitchen. The Plant Power Meal Planner is absolutely extraordinary in supporting you in achieving your health and fitness goals. So to learn more and to sign up go to meals.richroll.com and use code POWER20 for $20 off your annual membership. So diet, sleep, exercise, stress levels, things like that, things that we all kind of like already understand. There's still the fundamentals
Starting point is 01:11:20 that are critically important for us. But like beyond that, when we start to, we talked about diagnostics and as we kind of move into 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 hormone therapy and all the like, like what are some of the top level things that you think,
Starting point is 01:11:46 move the needle are important for people to understand and worthy of their own exploration. It's always like for whom and when, like in the book, you're always like, look, you could see everything I'm doing, but like, everybody's different. I say that over and over again. But here's the thing, Peter, like,
Starting point is 01:12:04 Brian does the same thing, but people just wanna do Brian's blueprint protocol exactly the way he does it, like, cause 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
Starting point is 01:12:20 and exercise is the number one pro longevity thing. It reduces all cause mortality by threefold, your chance of cancer by 50% if you're over 16 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.
Starting point is 01:12:44 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. It's during sleep that you clear proteins from your brain. And if you're someone who's not sleeping, who's routinely, you know, just has regular shift work
Starting point is 01:13:12 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 it is, you have to remember our physiology,
Starting point is 01:13:39 our genetics maps against our evolution 200,000 years ago. And 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 sugar cane, none of this stuff. We went from like a hundred years ago, like a couple of kilograms of sugar per person per year. So I think it's like a hundred kilograms per person per year right now.
Starting point is 01:14:03 And sugar is a neuroinflammatory, it's a cardiac inflammatory, it gloms on to proteins. Let me put it this way. We just did a study at a fountain looking at cardiovascular disease. And what was the highest thing that correlates with cardiovascular disease? Was it LDL or HDL or LP little A or triglycerides?
Starting point is 01:14:32 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,
Starting point is 01:14:53 what else are they doing? What are they having? I'm sure there is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's interesting. What do you say to the carnivore enthusiasts? Cause you're pretty clear on saturated fat and you're kind of like a Dan Ornish guy.
Starting point is 01:15:05 Yeah, I will tend towards, 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's a choice again, from an inflammation standpoint. But, you know, I put on my muscle mass
Starting point is 01:15:32 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 host podcast, and he tells you, look, this is, everything you've ever heard about saturated fat is wrong, I've never been healthier, this is the way to go.
Starting point is 01:15:57 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, depends on where your family's origin is.
Starting point is 01:16:18 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. All of this is to a large degree impacted by the microbes, the 100 trillion microbes in your gut. And so all of these things affect, it's not as simple.
Starting point is 01:16:45 I do know that you, I feel like I can't go wrong on the diet I'm on, because it's my family is a Mediterranean family for generations back. Where's the science in terms of what we can extrapolate from the gut microbiome in terms of kind of lifestyle guidance. Like you can take a sample of the gut microbiome is the information that you're looking for in that.
Starting point is 01:17:14 Like, do we have the technology to learn from that and say, this is somebody who should be doing this and that and avoiding these foods and focusing more on these foods? I believe it is there and getting stronger. Are you familiar with a company called Viome? Yeah. Yeah. So Naveen Jain runs Viome and they have a million plus samples
Starting point is 01:17:39 where they take a blood stool and oral sample and they're looking at microbiome in your stool take a blood stool and oral sample. And they're looking at microbiome in your stool in your mouth, and they're looking at the transcriptome. So one of the things that they did the work on, which I'm very proud of them for, is your DNA is one thing, your RNA is another. So if you, you can, your DNA doesn't change over time. You get the same DNA as you were when you were a kid.
Starting point is 01:18:09 But what changes is which genes are being transcribed. And so the DNA is there, 22,000 genes and 3.2 billion letters of your life. And then as you grow older or you change your diet or you change your environment, some genes are turned off and some genes are turned on. The genes that are turned on get transcribed, they get turned into RNA.
Starting point is 01:18:35 And so if you measure the RNA, you then know which genes are active. And so that's what they've done and they have like trillions of samples and they've got a really strong AI team correlating that. They will give you a result of that based upon what's in your gut. These are the foods that are your superfoods.
Starting point is 01:18:58 These are the foods that you should avoid. These are the foods that are okay. And again, it's the beginning of this journey, but it's definitely where we're going. Given the fact that obesity is driving so many of these chronic lifestyle ailments, what are your thoughts on Ozempic and GLP-1s? Wow.
Starting point is 01:19:19 I'm frustrated by it. People want a get rich quick pill or get thin quickly pill. And for certain people who are morbidly obese, it's an important thing. But one of the things if you're on Ozempic, this is your chance to use that relief from constant hunger to change your habits. When you lose your weight on Ozempic, I know you know this, you lose not only fat, but
Starting point is 01:19:54 you lose muscle. And then when you go off Ozempic, you gain back mostly fat. And so if you're on Ozempic, there are two things you need to be doing. One is you need to be exercising on a regular basis. You need to maintain your muscle mass the best of your ability. The second thing you'd be doing is using it to change the habits around your eating. And so that if you go off Ozempic,
Starting point is 01:20:21 you were able to hopefully maintain those habits you got. What do you think about it? I mean, I'm of a similar mind. I'm certainly not shunning it. I think there's tremendous benefits for people who have really struggled to lose weight and have tried lots of things and for whatever reason, haven't been able to make it stick.
Starting point is 01:20:44 Certainly if you're morbidly obese, but even if you're kind of just less than morbidly obese, but overweight and have not been able to like crack the code, I do see a path to better health, given that obesity is driving all of these other downstream chronic lifestyle elements. It is a big deal. You can't dismiss that.
Starting point is 01:21:06 The concern of course is exactly what you said. Like I had Johan Hari on here, who just wrote a whole book about this. And he looks great, he's lost a tremendous amount of weight, but he's basically like, I'm staying on this thing. Like he has no intention of going off it. And he also sort of hasn't really done that piece of like trying to change his habits.
Starting point is 01:21:28 Like I'll just go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and eat less or only go once in a while. And it's like, if you're still stuck in those bad habits you're never going to reach escape velocity from Ozempic. And do we know what the long-term, you know kind of risks of this are? I mean, I know there are already like, aren't there- Yeah, I mean, I write about it in the book.
Starting point is 01:21:50 And I say- Pancreas issues or something like that with this. Yes, and there's also the ability to become, what's it called, a hedonic, it's like lose pleasure. And there is pancreatic risk. So there are things you can do to activate the same similar pathway and it's pretty well known.
Starting point is 01:22:10 I mean, number one is like chewing your food for like every bite 20 times. That will begin to activate, slowing down your eating. Yeah, we are all, well, we are all, I have historically been someone who's shoveling food in my mouth as I'm on a phone call or on a Zoom or, you know, reading email.
Starting point is 01:22:36 It's like, we don't take the time to sit and relax and enjoy a meal. You know, I'm having a friend's giving tonight and you know, it's gonna be, I'm looking forward to slowing it down, right? So I come to the dinner table and drink a glass of water first off, take a few deep breaths,
Starting point is 01:22:59 maybe do a gratitude circle. And this is what we used to do culturally, decades ago before CNN hijacked our brains. And that puts you in a parasympathetic mode where you're in the best position to consume your foods. And then that idea of food sequencing, of your veggies first, your protein next, and your carbs last.
Starting point is 01:23:26 And there are little things you can do like that. And then remembering to just chew your food 20 times. I mean, if you take nothing else away from this conversation we're having for your listeners, I think those small things make a huge difference. You'll lose weight just by sequencing your food differently. Mindfulness, mindful eating. Yes, mindful eating.
Starting point is 01:23:46 So challenging in this rapid period. We were talking a little bit about the fear that some people have of getting these diagnostic tests. Like, I don't really wanna know. I think a close cousin of that is this idea like it's kind of too late for me. You know, I've been living my life a certain way, pretty stuck in my ways.
Starting point is 01:24:10 At this point, you know, I'm 45, I'm 55, I'm 65, whatever it is, it goes back to mindset. But this idea of like, is any of this really gonna make a difference at this point? Like I've been living my life for 50 years in a certain way. The answer is absolutely yes. Yeah, I can always lose weight, but like, why should I, you know,
Starting point is 01:24:27 like go deep into all of this stuff at this point? Yeah, there are lots of studies preclinical, which means animal model studies that show intervention even in the last decade of life can deliver additional healthy years to you. And part of what you want to do is remember that health span gap of 17 years between age 63 and 80. You want to enjoy those years.
Starting point is 01:24:59 You know what I mean? We spend an inordinate amount of money in hospital care and medical care in the last year or two years of your life, which is a ridiculous thing to do compared to having spent it earlier in your life. And I just think that if you love life, love yourself, these are the actions to take. The prevention piece is something we can all kind of understand when we start talking about the reversal piece
Starting point is 01:25:29 and it's like, whoa, is that really possible? It's related to the, is it too late piece? Cause it's sort of like, all right, well, kind of I'm where I'm at. Like, what do we know about things that can be reversed and other things where it's like, well, let's just stop it in its track and like not, and make sure it doesn't progress any further.
Starting point is 01:25:49 Yeah. I mentioned immunists and their product, Immuna earlier, which in my mind is a definitive reversal of your physiological age. Let's, you know, data will come out further. What is the kind of mechanistic aspect of that? Like what is it actually doing? So it is when you're injecting this product,
Starting point is 01:26:12 these 440 factors from the stem cells into your body, into your muscle, it is signaling your cells to revert to an earlier stage that you are vital. I mean, one of the things that's important is a hundred thousand, 200,000 years ago, I go back to the evolutionary history here. You were pregnant by age 12 or 13, no birth control.
Starting point is 01:26:43 And by the time you're 27 or 28, you're a grandparent. After the age of 30, there was a measurable consistent decline. Your stem cells throughout your body reduced by a hundred to a thousand fold in different compartments. Your hormone levels, pituitary, thyroid, your thymus is almost gone after age 30, which is what is educating your T cells.
Starting point is 01:27:10 Your muscle tissue begins to, you have sarcopenia begins to erode. It's because the body was never designed to live past age 30. And it doesn't have the signals that I am a vital individual and we should keep all of these systems up and operating. So this particular product and there are others, cellularity has these stem cells and natural killer cells and there are other companies that we're investigating.
Starting point is 01:27:39 It's about giving your body the signal that I'm in a more youthful state. And the genes should switch back to how they were operating in a more youthful state. I'm an entrepreneur, yeah, I'm a moonshot guy, but I'm also someone who is willing to fight for what I want. And people have to make that choice. For whatever reason, the longevity space is sort of bro-y, you know, it's kind of like
Starting point is 01:28:10 a Silicon Valley, galaxy brain, you know, environment for whatever reason. But I love the fact that you- Can I tell you the reason, I think? Yeah, what is it? Because you've got like megalomaniacs who want to live forever? I don't think it's that. That's the sort of narrative. Yeah, I'm sure.
Starting point is 01:28:26 But certainly where the money, that's where the money is also for these innovations. Yes, but I think there's a different reason. People in the tech field who have come in and revolutionized industries, they've come in and reinvented rockets and reinvented cars. They're predisposed to think differently
Starting point is 01:28:48 outside the box. And they're willing to take on hard problems. Yeah, I get that. I haven't gotten Elon interested in longevity yet. He and I have texted back and forth and he just, he pokes at me and says, I love donuts in the morning. I said, well, when you reach 60,
Starting point is 01:29:03 let's have that conversation again. I say all that only to kind of presage the fact that you have a whole section in here for women's health and what's different about women's health and what we need to understand about those differences in the context of longevity. I mean, I had, do you know Dr. Lisa Moscone? I know her. Wonderful, fantastic.
Starting point is 01:29:24 She came in here and talked all about this. So I love that section. So what can you say about what's different about women's physiology that's important to know in this longevity conversation? Just to call it out, our chief medical officer at Fountain Life, Dr. Helen Messier, who is an MD and a PhD,
Starting point is 01:29:43 and she is one of the great functional medicine physicians. And when I was able to capture her with Bill Capp and myself bring her in, that was like one of the most important days in this company to really imbue it. And then Mona Izzat-Villanoff, who's my fountain life physician who works with me directly. So two amazing women. We actually have a lot of women physicians in the company.
Starting point is 01:30:07 I think what she says that's important is women are not little men. There is a different physiology and biology going on. And it needs to be looked at uniquely. There's a section in here from Dr. Jennifer Garrison as well in that women's chapter who runs a center for, I've changed her name recently, it's not if it's reproductive health, but she's done an incredible amount of work
Starting point is 01:30:39 on what happens after menopause and how do we extend, do you know that humans are only one of five species and what happens after menopause and how do we extend? Do you know that humans are only one of five species that go through menopause? I didn't know that. Yeah, it's humans, it's the narwhal and three species of whales. And then the millions of other species. I just assumed, I guess in my mind
Starting point is 01:31:03 that it was a mammalian thing. No, no, it's not, it's other species. I just assumed, I guess in my mind that it was a mammalian thing. No, no, it's not. It's five species. Another interesting fact is that a woman has the most number of eggs in her ovaries when she is 28 weeks old as an embryo in her mom. Just trying to understand. Yeah, I know, I know.
Starting point is 01:31:28 It's a little mind bender. So your mom, when she was in your grandma's womb and she was only 28 weeks in, in her 40 week pregnancy, that was when she had the maximum number. So you were inside your grandma. I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:31:49 I mean, it's amazing. So why is that meaningful? It's that the number of our ovaries have two functions. There's reproductive organs, but they're also a hormonal set. And we forget about that. And women have a completely different set of medical physiological needs because of that.
Starting point is 01:32:14 There's no correlation that the later you're, if you have a sister, the later she went through menopause, the longer you as the brother are likely to live. Interesting correlation. So the book, the chapter walks through from a food, diet, exercise, supplements, your hormonal level, how women should think about it. Yeah, it's obviously like diet, exercise,
Starting point is 01:32:40 all these other things like apply equally, but it's the hormonal piece where things get complicated and it does need its own kind of treatment and understanding. I didn't wanna, it is very different for 50% of the world, 50, 51% of the world, whatever it is. And I really wanted to have two incredible women lead that conversation in the book.
Starting point is 01:33:06 So I'm 58. If I came into Fountain Life prior to doing all the tests, what are some things that you think like I should be thinking about that maybe I didn't need to think about five or 10 years ago? So your cardiovascular health is number one, right? It is still the number one killer for women and for men.
Starting point is 01:33:26 And we think we're fine. And a lot of folks, years over the last decade or decades would go for a calcium score. And you'd go, you'd take a CT of your heart, you're looking for calcified plaque on the arteries and you get a calcium score, which is like zero and like 3000, whatever it is. And if you zero, oh, I'm fine.
Starting point is 01:33:48 If it's a thousand, oh my God, I'm worried about this. Well, it turns out your calcium score is immaterial. And people just now in these last few years are waking up to that. Unless your coronary artery, again, is the artery that feeds oxygen and glucose to your heart muscle and If your heart muscle isn't getting oxygen and glucose it dies and that's called a heart attack
Starting point is 01:34:12 if the coronary artery is blocked By calcium you need to do something. It's a stent or bypass whatever But if you have a zero calcium score and you say, oh, great, I'm fine. You're not, not necessarily. So what we've learned is that it's soft plaque that's on the outside of the arteries that can evolve,
Starting point is 01:34:41 can break off in the middle of the night and block a coronary artery. And so what we do is we do something called a clearly scan. It's a AI enabled technology that's able to recognize soft plaque differentially from calcium, from calcified plaque. And you get a score. And now as part of found your ongoing membership,
Starting point is 01:35:09 now we're gonna identify how do we convert that either to calcified plaques. So I think of calcified plaque as like cement on the side of the wall of a pipe, or how do we reduce it? And there's lots of different approaches and medicines and supplements and everything for that. But most people have no knowledge of that. And it's a ticking time bomb if you do.
Starting point is 01:35:33 And again, you may have a perfectly good, triglyceride and LDL and HDL and still have a soft plank burden. Is this form of testing new technology? It is. It is. It's a new way of interpreting the CT, the tomography of your heart. I see, so it's not the scan,
Starting point is 01:35:59 it's the interpretation of the scan. It's the AI overlay. I see, I understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, given that, you know, heart disease is the number one killer and this is how most people are gonna die. It feels like, you know, appointment number one
Starting point is 01:36:12 and a test that should be kind of integrated into, you know, every general practitioner's rotation. So the next thing after you've gotten clarity there is understanding what's going on in your biochemistry, your mitochondria, understanding your microbiome, understanding the blood biomarkers. Other things that we do at Fountain, and this is really important for me, is toxin testing.
Starting point is 01:36:44 We're living in a very toxic world. Everything from water bottles that you're drinking out of to the environment you're in, mold. So most people just have no idea what their toxic load is. And if you don't know, you can't do anything about it. Then it's food allergies. Are you gluten intolerant? Do you have allergies to other foods?
Starting point is 01:37:09 Should you be eating? I won't go in the list, but I've discovered like, oh my God, I should not be eating that food. So it's all of these things. We have the power to know now, to give you the option to make the choice. What is your experience as somebody who deeply understands mindset?
Starting point is 01:37:30 What is your understanding around behavior change when it comes to putting that knowledge into action, right? Like anybody who comes into one of your clinics costs a lot of money, they're gonna be highly motivated, they're gonna receive all this information, they're probably going to be in that cohort that's actually gonna adopt the new behaviors. But what is the key distinguishing factor
Starting point is 01:37:54 between the person who can hear news about how to change their life and then actually take the action versus the person who same information and yet just is like, can't do it, doesn't wanna do it. Do they have a support system that keeps this alive in their life? So it's different if you go through with your spouse
Starting point is 01:38:21 or someone you love and you guys share your information and you're supporting each other. In lieu of that, we've got a medical team who will text me like, have you done that test? Have you done the ProLon diet yet? I want you to do that once every quarter. Accountability, accountability. Yes, all those things.
Starting point is 01:38:43 Your social environment. One example is, I have my abundance summit. I mentor about 500 CEOs every March. And one of the things we've done after the summit every year is we have done a 21 day no sugar challenge where those who want to opt in get into a WhatsApp group. There is a incredible physician scientist
Starting point is 01:39:09 who supports that for us. And he provides you sort of menus and everybody shares, and it's mostly going into a ketogenic environment, but there's a vegan version of it as well. And it's getting you off the sugar addiction. And it takes about three plus weeks to get there. But because you're going through it as a group,
Starting point is 01:39:34 it's a lot easier. You're always sharing photographs of what they're eating and sharing their experience and we'll give people a glucose meter and a ketone meter so they can measure what's going on. And it becomes a group activity and it gives you the strength to power through. And then it gives you the confidence afterwards
Starting point is 01:39:54 that you can do that. Assuming you have friends, everybody can create their own WhatsApp group, right? Yes, you can. You can. There are power in numbers when you're trying to, adopt a new habit. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:40:10 What are some of the moonshots that are seemingly coming to fruition? Like, what are you excited about that's on the horizon? Like there's all kinds of crazy stuff. I'm sure you see it all. So much. Growing new ears and like all kinds of stuff. So let me give you a couple of these things.
Starting point is 01:40:27 And let's couch it in some version of reality. I'll give you exactly where they are. Why are some of these grounded and why are these some of these are more ungrounded. So one of them is the technology to regrow your organs. Okay, so- I think we talked a little bit about this last time. We probably did.
Starting point is 01:40:51 That was a couple of years ago, so. So it's moved tremendously forward. You know, Dean came in in New Hampshire, has building a Regen Valley, Regenerative Medicine Valley, and he's built production lines to go from a skin cell you have to what's called an induced pluripotent stem cell using the four Yamenaka factors. And then growing, you know, heart, lung, liver, kidney,
Starting point is 01:41:17 thymus, pancreas. And so we're moving towards a world where rather than the waiting for someone to die, you're gonna have the ability to regrow an organ for you. That's your organ. Where is it today? They're creating large supplies of pancreatic eyelid cells for diabetics.
Starting point is 01:41:38 They're creating bone, ligament, bone. They're working on a pediatric heart. They're working on a pediatric heart, they're working on liver. So on some level, my sense is that this isn't, this is sort of an extrapolation of the science that's going into cultivated meat, like you're brewing cells, but you're taking these pluripotent stem cells,
Starting point is 01:42:00 which are basically the cells that have all the information to grow the organ. And when you can kind of activate the right genes within that, it will just, it will grow the thing. Is that the idea? Well, you are growing these generic pluripotent stem cells and then you're triggering them to differentiate into heart cells. Into what you want it to become.
Starting point is 01:42:21 Because the pluripotent ones, they could become anything. Yes, exactly. Martin Rothblatt and George Church have companies that have edited the genomes of pigs to make them more human-like. And when you grow a pig to full size, the size of its heart, liver, lung, and kidneys are very much the same as a human.
Starting point is 01:42:41 And so you can transplant that in. So these are moonshots. I cut you off though on Dean Kamen's thing. So how, like what is the timeline horizon on that? And what are the obstacles that have to be overcome? Yeah, so every two years, so every year I take a group of my abundance members on what I call longevity platinum trip.
Starting point is 01:43:02 One year it's the West coast, one year it's the East coast. This coming West Coast, when you're at the East Coast, this coming end of September will be on the East Coast and will be in Boston and Cambridge, which is a super hotbed of this area. And then in New Hampshire, visiting Dean, and they have hundreds of thousands of square feet of manufacturing space built out.
Starting point is 01:43:24 And they are funded by a couple of hundred million dollars in DOD grants, because the Defense Department wants to be able to provide our veterans who have had organ damage replacement organs. Dean is the guy who created the Luke arm, a electromechanical arm that replaces a lost arm from a veteran and he created the Segway and the Ibot. And he's one of the most incredible 150,
Starting point is 01:43:54 1500 patents that he's done. He's brilliant. 1500. 1500 patent. Yeah, I mean, he's sort of best known for the Segway now, but like prior to the Segway, like that was sort of a weird tension in, you know, kind of this modern day Edison figure. He is beautiful man.
Starting point is 01:44:11 He's also the creator of first robotics, the high school robotics competitions that occur around the world. Other moonshots, the whole brain computer interface world, being able to plug in chips, if you would, into your neocortex, the outer layer of the brain, to enable you to feel and move things, right? Neuralink, Elon's company is best known,
Starting point is 01:44:39 but there's some other ones coming, which are amazing. I don't know where you wanna go. There's another company that I'm gonna have at the Abundance Summit this year. So it turns out we just recently mapped the connect dome of a fruit fly. What does that mean? We were able to take a fruit fly's brain
Starting point is 01:45:00 and slice it into thin, thin, thin, thin slices and using AI to image all the neurons, like 150,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections and create a perfect computer model of that brain. And then we're able to say, okay, what should the fruit fly? We would able to like put an input into this in silico brain,
Starting point is 01:45:28 this brain in the computer model and say, what would happen if we gave the fruit fly this input, it would move like this. And then for the real fly, you did the same thing and it moved like this. So we're able to take their brain and upload that brain. And what's coming next is a mouse. And then I've got a company presenting this year
Starting point is 01:45:50 that thinks for about $50 million, it's gonna be able to do a human upload. So you're extrapolating in complexity as you move up these neural networks, right? And you're developing an understanding of how it actually functions and basically creating like a programming language for it. Is that like, how does this impact like us?
Starting point is 01:46:13 Like what is the use case? This is the age of brain science. Why do some people get easily addicted? Why do some people get easily addicted? Why do some people develop depression? What's going on when someone's schizophrenic, right? We've been for the last hundred years, just like using a blunt hammer to try and solve things. This is gonna get us to the point of understanding
Starting point is 01:46:44 at a root cause what's going on. So we can begin to address these problems. And then we can hack into these systems and automate people and control them. You can go dystopian there. It's a curious thing though, Peter, cause it's sort of like, like we were both at that Google conference, right?
Starting point is 01:47:03 And it's very, you know, rainbows and Pollyanna about AI. And I know you're an AI optimist, very much so. But then I sit down with you've all know Harari and it's like, it's, you know, it's like, yeah, it's dude. So it's like, I'm just a dude who's like trying to get my footing, you know, amidst all of this. And I can see both sides of it. I mean, there's no question that this technology
Starting point is 01:47:24 is gonna give birth to breakthroughs that we can't even possibly imagine. But there are dangers and there are risks. Every day, just getting on the 405 here. The story of humanity is basically like we break things and then we figure it out as we go, right? So there's no slowing this down. There's no one off switch.
Starting point is 01:47:42 And we're giving lip service to like, oh, we need to like, you know, study this. And it's like, okay, yeah, I know there's really smart people that are, you know, that are looking at it and how we can, you know, like sort of move forward as rationally as possible and clear minded as possible with all this, but make no mistake, we're moving forward, you know?
Starting point is 01:48:01 And to the extent that people are like, we need to put the brakes on here, that's not really happening. No, there's no on-off switch. There's no velocity switch. The best we can do is steer or guide. How do you think about the potential downsides of these things and how we can put in place stop gaps
Starting point is 01:48:21 to make sure that we're at least doing what we can to prevent these dystopic outcomes. In the AI world? Yeah. The advances are happening so quickly. Yeah, I'm not concerned about 10 years from now. My concern is the next five years. It's not artificial intelligence that worries me,
Starting point is 01:48:41 it's human stupidity. It's humans using this tech. I'm the optimist, right and I believe that Digital super intelligence, right is Going to be pro-life pro-abundance. I think there's zero reason for AI to be You know trying to decimate Humanity I'm more like the movie her where it will get bored with us and take off and so We'll find out I you know, I interviewed Elon a month ago. I was in Saudi Arabia I run there the FII future investment initiatives AI
Starting point is 01:49:20 Council and I interviewed Elon there as well as Eric Schmidt and a bunch of other folks. And I said, what's the probability of disaster versus the probability of success? When I spoke to Elon a year ago at the Abundance Summit, he said it was 80% success, 20% disaster. He's updated it to 90% success, 10% disaster, but we still, that's different from, I mean, he was early
Starting point is 01:49:45 in kind of being a cautionary voice and Schmidt is, you know, coming from a cautionary place as well as any more so than Elon. Yeah, and then we had Jeffrey Hinton, who I spoke to you about this. And so listen, we're on rails. This stuff is moving faster, there's more capital flowing in.
Starting point is 01:50:09 Every government realizes that this is fundamental to the success of their people. AI will be our educators, it will be our healthcare providers, it will be our decision makers, it'll be helping us grow our food, purify our water, create new energy methodologies. It's the greatest potential uplifting of humanity. And yes, there are downsides and worries.
Starting point is 01:50:39 And I think, again, it's the use of AI by despots and tyrants and such that concerns me. It's not really a story around artificial general intelligence as much as it is around the relinquishment of agency. Like we're all like in all these different areas of our life, we're kind of turning over our agency to all these different AIs.
Starting point is 01:51:05 And then how can those be leveraged by organizations or people who don't have your best interest at heart to kind of drive their own agenda? Let me ask you a question. Would you rather have a world with digital super intelligence in it or a world without? That was our question we asked at the Abundance Summit last year. As humanity is growing and its tools are getting more powerful and our chances to use those tools for dystopian objectives.
Starting point is 01:51:47 I, for one, would rather have a world that has this super powerful digital super intelligence rather than not. I think humans need a lot of maturation still. Yeah, I don't think you get one without the other, right? Like if you want this super intelligence that's gonna help you figure out how to create renewable energy sources, it comes with this other side.
Starting point is 01:52:17 It's almost, you know, it's like baked into reality. It's the history of humanity. It's the duality of everything. It's fire. And so we're gonna, we will find out because we are going to play this experiment. It's right here. It's my-
Starting point is 01:52:32 It's like you're asking that question. I'm like, how could I answer that? Like I would have to cast myself 10, 30, 40, 50 years in the future in order to be able to answer that. Just 10. Right. You know, this is why I'm so clear we're living in a simulation. It's like the most exciting time ever to answer that. It's done. Right. You know, this is why I'm so clear we're living in a simulation.
Starting point is 01:52:45 It's like the most exciting time ever to be alive. Right. All right, well, we gotta end this. So I wanna like leave people with some actionable takeaways. Like if you're watching this or listening to this, you probably already are kind of, you know, immersed in this world to some degree, but to the extent that somebody is new to these ideas,
Starting point is 01:53:03 like what do you want them to like take away as a kind of precursor to, you know, picking up the book and digging into, you know, the nuts and bolts of the whole thing? Yeah, first of all, I just wanna say, the book is available on Amazon, but I've also made it available at my cost to folks on the website, on longevityguidebook.com and any profits I'm making,
Starting point is 01:53:27 I'm donating to the XPRIZE on this book. My goal is get the information out there, make it available for folks. I think that people need to remember you have agency and your health and longevity is not written in your genes. It is to a small amount, 7% to 30%. your health and longevity is not written in your genes. It is to so small amount, 7% to 30%. The majority of it is your lifestyle. It's the actions that you take.
Starting point is 01:53:54 So I want you to feel empowered by that. A lot of the things you can do right now are things that don't cost you anything. It costs you time and it costs you fortitude or the willingness to do that. Figure out why you want those extra years of life. That understanding of the why, like what you wanna do with those extra decades,
Starting point is 01:54:22 what's exciting for you. If you're in pain and you're suffering and you hate your life, there's no way you're gonna spend the time doing this. But if you love life and you are excited about what's coming and you wanna see your grandkids or whoever it is, connect to that why, because that is the emotional energy that fuels you to do these things.
Starting point is 01:54:42 There's a cost for getting out of your bed at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. out of the warm blankets to go and work out. There's a cost in not eating that extra scoop of ice cream. So the why is very important. If you have the means, I think going through a program like Fountain Life, and there are others out there,
Starting point is 01:55:06 but you can find more at fountainlife.com. If you have the means, understand where your body is. I think we have the ability, it's like, like I said, it's like flying, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed. Yeah, you can't fix what you're not measuring basically. Yeah, so I mean, those are the fundamentals. And then finally, a longevity mindset.
Starting point is 01:55:32 And I talk about that a bunch, which is there's an amazing world coming, incredible world of health extension, of longevity extension. And if you get that mindset, that in part connected to your why is what's going to enable you to enjoy this and be part of it.
Starting point is 01:55:57 Again, I think this is the most exciting time ever to be alive. Yeah, it is pretty exciting. When are you gonna open that LA? Mid 25. Oh yeah. Mid 2025. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:56:09 It's a little bit away. Yeah. Otherwise you can go to Orlando headquarters, Dallas, wherever you want. I mean, seriously, if you wanna go, please take as my guest. Yeah, I'm gonna think about it. I'm gonna think about it.
Starting point is 01:56:18 Well, I appreciate you, man. You're a fascinating figure. I have so much respect and admiration for your curiosity and your ability to kind of like manifest things out of that curiosity. You have a rich imagination that you explore. You create these businesses out of it
Starting point is 01:56:37 and entire sectors emerge from this. It's like really a remarkable thing, man. You're like a really incredible guy. So I appreciate you spending time with me today. Longevity guidebook. You can see exactly what Peter does. He lays it all out. He's got the red light therapy hat
Starting point is 01:56:51 and like all the stuff, right? Like you wanna know, it's all in here, but it's really easy to read. You can go right to the pages of the things that you're interested in and you lay it out like very simplistically. It's very simplistic. It's meant to be easy.
Starting point is 01:57:03 It's a reference. It's like a syllabus basically. But hopefully written with some nice words. Yeah, nice words in there. Thanks, man, I appreciate it. And come back and fill me in when we can grow our own organs and all that kind of stuff, all right? Thank you, buddy. Cheers, peace. including links and resources related to everything discussed today.
Starting point is 01:57:45 Visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, finding ultra, voicing change and the plant power way, as well as the plant power meal planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do
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