Longevity Escape Velocity with Dr. Peter Diamandis

His unique insights bridge the gap between exponential technologies and extended human lifespan , revealing a future where artificial intelligence , quantum computing and advanced biology converge .

In a narrative that weaves personal passion with pioneering science , peter takes us from his roots in a medical household to the stars of space exploration , all the while focusing on the potential to add vibrant years to our lives . Explore the forefront of regenerative medicine with us , as Peter discusses innovative work with placental derived cells and exosomes .

The potential for these therapies to heal , maintain muscle mass and fight age-related decay sets the stage for a healthier tomorrow .

Peter's optimism and proactive stance towards medical advancements offer a refreshing perspective on the aging process , and his insights into NAD precursors and mitochondrial health underscore the exciting developments on the horizon , from intermittent fasting to the imperative of dietary choices , including the elimination of sugar , of course .

This episode is packed with actionable advice and personal anecdotes that highlight the need for a tailored approach to wellness . Join us on this episode that not only envisions a brighter future , but also equips us all with the knowledge to actively shape our own healthier , extended life .

And before we begin , I wanted to share a short 30-second video that's prepared about our upcoming book , which has now has been running several weeks now at the number one bestseller status on Amazon . Thank you very much for that .

Those of you who are listening on audio , you're going to hear 30 seconds of the soundtrack for this and then we'll get going from here right after that . This episode is brought to you by El Mnutra , maker of the prolonged fasting mimicking diet . If you'd like to try it , use the link in the show notes for 20% off . And now please enjoy this week's episode .

He's the founder and executive chairman of the X Prize Foundation , executive founder of Singularity University and he's the author of four New York Times bestselling books , including the most recent one , life Force , with Tony Robbins . Peter , it's such a pleasure to welcome you to our program .

Star Trek and Apollo really lit me on fire , ended up going to medical school , did a joint program at MIT and Harvard and after I got my diploma I shipped a photocopy to my parents and then when started focusing on my space journeys and started building companies in the space arena launch and satellite and zero gravity company , a space university and pursued space

for 30 years . And it was about 20 years ago that I really started getting focusing in on exponential technologies , how computation sensors , networks , ai , robotics and everything going on in biotech had the potential to reinvent every industry . And , in particular , it hit me that lifespan , health span was a huge opportunity for disruption and it came .

My interest in this area came from two different places . One from my childhood desire to open up space . There's not been enough progress to make me happy . Right , we haven't seen the Star Trek , we haven't been on back to the moon or gone to Mars .

So I figured okay , I need an extra 50 years on this planet to at least see the potential of what I desire to see . The second is just the grand challenge of it all , and I think there's no greater gift you can give than increased health span and no bigger business on the planet For me .

I have a half a billion dollar venture fund called Bold Capital and we had been investing mostly in exponential tech and robotics and AI , but I've shifted the fund mostly two thirds now to biotech with an age and longevity focus , because I think it's one of the biggest markets out there . So those areas . There was one pivotal moment for me , steve .

When I was in medical school I watched this television show on Long Live Sea Life and it was talking about how Bowhead , wales , could live 200 years and Greenland Sharks could live 400 or 500 years , and I remember thinking if they can live that long , why can't we ?

And I said it's either a hardware problem or a software problem , and I think this is the decade where we start to make a dent in those problems .

It's you know , we're all born with 3.2 billion letters from our father and our mother and we have the same genome really throughout our lives , at birth , at 20 , at 50 , at 80 , at 100 . So why do you look different ? Why do you age ? Right , it's not the genes you have , it's which genes are on and which genes are off .

Obviously , david Sinclair is a friend and his theory on , you know , information theory of aging for me has a lot of validity . But it's again , it's the notion of making sure that your epigenetic control of your body , of your genome , is solid . I doch on it , you know .

The other thing that hits me is that when we were evolving on the savannas of Africa , 100,000 years ago , you know , during the time we call cavemen , you go into puberty at age 12 or 13 .

By the time you were 24 , 25 , 26 , you were a grandparent , your babies were having babies , and Back then , before we had an abundance of food , before McDonald's and Whole Foods was around , if nature's mission was to perpetuate our species , to pass on our genome generation to generation .

The last thing you wanted to do Was steal food from your grandchildren's mouth , so there was a positive bias for an early end of life . There was no selective factors to keep you alive longer , and so we evolved in that direction . Now the question is can we go from Darwinism , evolution by natural selection , to , you know , an evolution by intelligent direction ?

Can we reinvent the software and hardware of our body ? Can we understand the fundamentals and Along this line ? This is where you know , the work that I do in studying exponential technologies really flips my mindset .

The the realization is , we all inherently have a linear bias in how we think we expect Tomorrow and next year to be very much like this year a little bit of progression , maybe not too much , but the fact is and I think this is the work that my colleague and mentor , ray Kurzweil , has spoken about we're gonna see in the next decade as much progress as we've

seen in the past century .

That's how fast technology is accelerating , and so I think that we're gonna see a disproportionate application of artificial intelligence and what's coming just after that that's going to make AI look like it's standing still , which is quantum technologies , quantum computations , sensors and communications , I Enable an understanding of biology which I think at its basis , you

know molecular in nature , is quantum in nature . We're gonna start to understand fundamentals there and I think we're going to start adding additional healthy years into our life .

And that brings about what what Ray and Aubrey de Grey have spoken about as longevity escape velocity the notion that there's going to be a moment in time that for every year that you're alive , science is adding more than a year to your life .

By an interviewed Ray and George Church for my book that I did with Tony Life Force and and I asked Ray when do you think we're gonna reach longevity escape velocity ? And now , ray is not a biologist but he is a technologist and has one of the most accurate predictions Out there . It's , if you Google his name and predictions , it's like 84% accuracy .

And his prediction on when we'll reach longevity escape velocity is the next 10 to 12 years . I , when I asked George , I expected him to be a lot more Conservative and he was , but not by much . You know . It's like 15 to 20 years .

So our job here isn't to live an extra 50 years , it's to live long enough to intercept the new technologies coming in the next 10 to 20 years right , right .

Yeah , there are a couple of directions . I'd like to go with just the first response that you gave me , but one of the things that I know is very important in your perspective is mindset . I I wrote an article recently on purpose , which I did , I said , is the ultimate and use it and loo or lose it , and you talk about mindset as being very important .

How does mindset Impact longevity in your opinion , and what would be the mechanism that that happens in that process ?

You know , if you look at the research , you can effectively will yourself to death . And we all know situations where you know one Spouse dies and then a few days later or a few weeks later , the second spouse dies . You know , and that was not predetermined at birth , it was an impact of losing someone that's that close to you .

So there is a physiological connection between mind and body . There's also a connection of you know , if you're excited about , about life , if you're Vibrant , you know , keeping your mind engaged and your body engaged . All of these things have secondary and tertiary benefits . One of my favorite stories has to do with the founding fathers of our of our country .

I'm trying to remember which two founding fathers it was was , I think was Benjamin Franklin , and I'm blanking on the second who . They both lived exactly to the 50th anniversary of 1776 July 4th 1776 and died on that day . They lived to see the 50th anniversary of the nation that they had started . And again , is that random ? I don't think so .

I think it's like having something to look forward to that keeps you alive . So I think mindset is very important . I think of you know , today , before we have epigenetic reprogramming and gene therapies and stem cell , you know , restoration and all the Sinalika medicines out there , before we have that , we have the basics for Extending the healthy lifespan .

Right , it's diet , exercise , sleep , mindset and not dying from something stupid , which I can talk about in a second .

But in the mindset you have to believe that in fact there are breakthroughs coming , that the technologies to extend your lifespan are on the horizon , that you have something to look forward to so that you have less inflammation , less aches and pains , less you know , you know low energy days .

And one of the things I did , steve , was I built An AI called called Futurescope that searches the world information for and use on any subjects that's , the information for high scientific validity , and then creates a summary of the article with an appropriate image . So I set it free and and and built something called longevity insiderorg .

So every day I get the top 10 breakthroughs in the field of longevity and I read and it's like , oh my god , that's amazing , I had no idea . Because I had no idea , oh my god , that's amazing , I had no idea , because you know , we never see this in I in the news media today , unless you're actively looking for it . So longevity insiderorg is free For me .

It's how I maintain my longevity mindset , because I'm seeing every day the progress being made on all of these technology fronts .

Of course , we all know that brain plasticity is a real thing , that you do when you learn , when you and Robert put on this event and you're engaging and you're learning and you're talking . That is really driving you forward , instead of waking up in the morning and deciding whether you're going to make a cup of coffee or not .

So I mean , there is , you know , one of the challenges is this four letter word spelled retirement . You know it's . People retire and lose their will to do anything , and I think retirement is a bad idea for anybody . There's a correlation between when you retire and when you , you know , pass away .

I think retirement is the equivalent , mentally , of telling the universe OK , I'm done making use of my body , it's time to give it back to the ecosystem .

Back to your analogy to the caveman and 100,000 years ago and how we lived , into just our 20s or 30s , and we have the evolutionary sort of baggage or legacy of that in terms of many of our enzymes , hormones beginning to drop off around that age .

That really is a diagnostic side of the equation , a therapeutic side of the equation . On therapeutic side it really is about how do we bring you back to hormone optimization versus just supplementation ? Where should you be ? And then another company I'd started with Tony Robbins called Lifeforce .

That is similarly , with peptides , medicines , hormones , really trying to get you back to a baseline . So do I believe that we need to supplement what we have ? Absolutely . Also a big believer in the power to restore our stem cell populations , our regenerative engine of our body .

It's not legal in the United States other than your own stem cells from fat or bone marrow , but the research will get done . One of the companies I co-founded with Bob Hurrie , who's the chairman CEO of Cellularity I serve as the co-founder and vice chairman is the largest placental facility out there . We have stored hundreds of thousands of placendas .

We desolularize those to bring out the natural killer cells , the T cells , the stem cells and the exosomes that are then really developed as cellular medicines to address everything from immune function to sarcopenia to wound healing , to really the natural killer cells being used to fight a number of different cancers in clinical trials today .

I have used exosomes myself in terms of accelerating wound healing , post-surgical , and I think that this is really giving your body the growth signals and repair signals that it might have done in your 20s but in your 50s , 60s , 70s , no longer has the capability to provide .

So a lot of research still to be done , a lot of work under IRBs and INDs , but I think these are incredibly important tools . There's a company I'm an advisor and an investor to called Immunis .

That has been really is in human clinical trials right now , taking the exudate of stem cells really all of the growth factors and the exosomes and using that as a mechanism to stimulate and maintain muscle mass . And I think most everybody here will know muscle mass is one of the critical factors for longevity .

There's a direct correlation between your muscle mass , and so I'm fighting sarcopenia every day . I'm 61 and I work out . I've increased my protein intake to handle it , but I would love any other technologies that allow me to maintain a significant level of muscle .

We've vetted six or seven different stem cell clinics outside the US and the Caribbean Mexico , panama , costa Rica , other locations and we sent our members to the Regenerative Medicine Institute in Costa Rica , dr Vince G and Papa there , just because the level of service and the science there , we think , is very high .

We've been looking with a cellularity to implement an IND to look at placental derived stem cells . So we're going to see this over the next increasing in capability but under really critically vetted scientific measures and data collection . We need to collect the data to make sure that it is safe and efficacious , under what conditions it is so .

So I think that's this decade . But stem cell exhaustion is definitively one of the hallmarks of aging .

If you look at stem cell populations in a newborn compared to someone in my age , in every different segment of tissues we've seen stem cell reduction by a factor of 100 to 1,000 fold and that's challenging , challenging in your ability to repair and challenging in your ability to maintain functionality and vitality of those tissues and organs .

What's your opinion in terms of when you take these supplements ? Do you believe they're actually going to where ? They have an impact .

Maybe , but I think it's more based on belief than anything else . And there is good science data in animal studies today , not human studies .

There is a study going on right now by a company called Metro Biotech , run by a friend of mine , which is doing a study with the US Special Forces , and they have a very purified form of NMN called MIB626 that they're looking at and they're providing under a clinical study , under a double blind study with Special Forces , looking at increased muscle strength and

cognitive capability , and the early study results were very positive and we'll see where that plays out over the next few years . So am I excited ? Yes , Do I think we really hit the knee of the curve yet ?

No , I think we're going to see massive data sets being analyzed by AI in the next one to four years and then quantum technologies really making a huge dent in this in the next four to six years . That's quite quite something else for us to look forward to it is , and I think having something to look forward to is part of that mindset element .

It's a company I serve as executive chairman of , and co-founded with , tony Robbins and Mark Benioff , and Fountain Life has built these 10,000 square foot diagnostic centers where we do full body MRI , brain brain imaging , brain vasculature and AI , coronary CT , dexascan , genomics , 150 gigabits of data , and the reality is we are always in a state of some level of

degradation , degeneration , as you said . After 30 , our thymus starts shrinking , our hormonal levels start going down , our growth hormone levels start going down , and so we're in a slow decline . And the other thing going on is that we start to develop diseases that were never pre-selected against , because you had reproduced by the age of 30 .

And so these diseases would occur later on in life , and we're all developing cancers all the time . Hopefully , our immune system , our natural killer cells , are finding those cancers and zapping them , but there's another thing called immunoxasin . As we get viral burdens in our body , our NK cells are focused on viruses and not cancers , and that's a challenge .

So one of the things that we do at Fountain Life is we do an annual upload where you're fully digitized , and then quarterly additional testing and the goal is to find disease at inception and zap it at the beginning . Our bodies are incredibly good at hiding problems . You know you don't feel a cancer at stage one or stage two .

You experience at stage three or stage four , many times when it's too late . Right For Parkinson's , you don't really have the tremor until like 70% of the neurons are gone and your body compensates for all these things and unless you're looking , you do not know .

So in our first , I think , like 45,000 patients going through all this testing , our members going through this testing , we've discovered 2% have a cancer they don't know about . 2.5% have an aneurysm they don't know about . 14.4% have a significant finding that is , could impact their lifespan , that they need to know about .

And so I call this category of not dying from something stupid , in other words , looking and understanding and then when you find something , taking action right away . You know in , like in the wildfire world , do you want to try and put out the wildfire after it's a conflagration or at the first spark ? Right ? And the same thing here .

You know you're going to find out eventually . When do you want to know the beginning or later ? So that's what we built with fountain life .

We also built an insurance company called fountain health insurance , which I'm very proud of , where , for your current health insurance for self insured company at 1000 bucks a month , we give your employees all of the testing for free . So the health insurance instead of paying you after you're sick and have had your surgery .

The goal of the health insurance is to keep you from getting sick in the first place . So , again , there are lots of things that can be done in that regard .

You can trigger the process after 1412 , 1416 hours . What's your perspective on that ?

The second through fifth day is 800 calories and it's the prolon diet , is what it is and it I found it very easy to do . According to them , that diet is better than just a water diet , meaning the impact on under physiology and and knocking out your senile cells and get in stimulating autophagy is is higher than if you did nothing .

So I found it sufficient enough that I'm . I'm going to probably do it once a quarter , at least twice a year , but I hope for

once a quarter . The second thing I've just started doing in my abundance 360 community , steve , at the beginning of the year and we just did these back to back I'm going to do a 22 day , no sugar challenge and if there is one recommendation on diet over fasting , over intermittent fasting , over plants , over anything , it's eliminating sugar .

You know , glycation of proteins , of cholesterol is a root cause for much cardiovascular and neurological disease and so I'm wearing my CGM , I've got my levels patch on my arm over here and let's see what my level is here right now . See , okay , I'm at 90 , 90 milligrams per deciliter .

And so I , you know , I look to make sure I have zero spikes during the day and trying to get my you know , my hemoglobin a one C is been at 5.3 . I'm trying to get it down to five . We'll see if I can .

If I can do that , I can grab a metformin near virtualize a friend , I believe the data that he has , and so , and then I'm also taking rapamycin . The data is reasonably good . Again , in animal studies . There is a rapamycin study that has just been initiated , I believe , to look at its impact , and right now it's a lot of trial and error for people .

It's what do you feel is got enough upside and is safe enough for you and what makes you actually feel good . I know that I feel better on a no sugar diet . It's difficult , for sure , but after a few weeks you can break the habit . It's , it is . It's addicting . Sugar is addicting .

And again , going back to our hominid ancestors , 100,000 years ago , they didn't have sugar . It was no sugar cane plantations and you know M&Ms and snicker bars , I mean it . Just we never evolved for that .

So it takes us back to the , to the mindset issue , because really we have to be very incentivized and intentional in really following through with a lot of what would be good for us .

You know this 20 22 day , no sugar fast or no sugar diet .

It's hard to do on your own , but we have a WhatsApp group with 140 of my of my 360 abundance 360 members , and every morning people are sharing their experiences , their weight loss , their energy levels , their tricks and trades and what they're eating , what they don't , and doing things in community settings is much better .

So , unlike a vaccine that trains up your immune system to attack a foreign virus , this is looking at endo , you know , endogenous proteins in your body , and I have hypercholesteroemia my dad had it and I handle my , my high LDL levels by taking something called repatha , which is a monoclonal antibody , and it's monoclonal antibody against an enzyme in the liver called

PCSK nine , and PCSK nine in the liver produces low density lipoproteins , which is the bad cholesterol , and so if you block the PCSK nine enzyme , you can reduce your LDL levels and it does it very effectively .

And so in a vat , wherever they produce it let's say New York there's these clones of B cells producing these antibodies and the antibodies get delivered to me in a self injecting five ml syringe and I inject myself every two weeks in my thigh and it's great , but it's 1000 bucks in injection . It's , it's expensive .

Right , I say five , I'm sorry , it's 1000 bucks a month , 500 bucks in injection and it's twice a week . So it's inconvenient at twice a month and expensive and I can afford it . But it's a third line defense , but if you can reduce your LDL levels , it is one of the greatest combatants against heart disease and stroke .

So a year or two ago we started an internal program to see can we develop a vaccine to stimulate your immune system to create the same antibodies produced by that vat of B cell clones ? In other words , can you get your immune system to generate antibodies with high specificity against the PCSK nine enzyme ? And in fact we can .

We just finished our studies in primates and it was exceptional at or above anything else we've seen out there , and there is a very high conservation between primates and humans .

So we're now entering human trials and unlike the $12,000 a year , this and injection you know , 24 injections a year this would be two injections a year every six months and cost 50 bucks .

So because these , these vaccines are very low in cost to produce and so what we have is the ability to do preemptive vaccination of individuals against developing heart disease and stroke . And there's evidence in lots of different societies that you know you can start to see cholesterol build up . Again . This is not just cholesterol by itself itself , it's all .

It's glycated cholesterol , right sugar sticking to the cholesterol and sticking to the side and and generating soft cracks that can evolve and and cause a heart attack . So yeah , so this vaccine from vaccinity is super excited about it .

We have a COVID-19 booster that has outperformed everything else that is looking for is in its registrational trial right now , but we also have a vaccine against Alzheimer's , against A beta . We have a vaccine against CGRP , for migraines , and one against Parkinson's too .

So the system has been in humans and is safe and we just need to get the efficacious data to be able to go to registrational trial for that .

So Rob and I are so very interested in not only finding what might work , but also what's safe , and it seems like that's also something that we should always take into consideration the safety of what we're doing .

I think what makes me the most excited is we have , in medicine , been flying for the most part blind since its inception , and it's just now really , with the emergence of sensors that we wear , that we inject , that we consume , that are in our environment , and then the massive power of AI , we're going to see a fundamental revolution , not in 10 years or five

years , in the next two or three years , in which we're moving medicine out of the hospital , out of the doctor's office , into the home . I've got an Apple Watch .

It's continuous glucose minor and aura ring , and there will be many others and all of my data will flow to an AI that knows what I ate for breakfast , lunch and dinner , how much I exercise , knows my genetics , understands my blood chemistries and , as a result of all of those things coming together , is able to reach conclusions , analyzing the data that no human

ever could . And so this is the magic that's before us and what makes it exciting to be alive right now .

I'd have a program on finding your massive transformative purpose , and then on social media , I'm just at Peter Diamandus for Twitter and Instagram and I have a podcast called Moonshots and Mindsets , available wherever you get your podcasts , and it's really focused on what are the amazing moonshots that we're taking right now , and one of the biggest ones is adding 10 ,

20 , 30 healthy years on your life . That bridges you to get the next 10 , 20 , 30 healthy years after that .

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You should say that no , that's good , I'm gonna say that you like it .