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Welcome to BIOTECH NATION !!! With understandable interviews requiring no background in science, BTN attracts a wide global audience. From everyday people looking for hope in treatments in development, to bioentrepreneurs interested in the experience of their fellow travelers, to venture capitalists looking for possibilities in cutting-edge breakthroughs, to scientists simply interested in the work of others, BioTech Nation is the voice of human endeavor, driving science to new realities for everyone. These interviews are drawn directly from the public radio program, "Tech Nation", which also can be heard in numerous global radio and podcasting venues.
Everyone wants to be healthy. But what does an MD entrepreneur with access to leading edge health science and longevity researchers do to ensure he will live his healthiest and longest life. You likely know doctor Peter Diamandis as the founder of the X Prize in any number of endeavors. He's here today with his book, longevity, your practical playbook to sleep, diet, exercise, mindset medications, and not dying from something stupid. Well, Peter, welcome back to Tech Nation.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:It's great to be back, Moira.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now I've interviewed you so many times from various Xprizes to your work developing a COVID vaccine and much more. But here today, we're gonna talk about your latest book, Longevity. And, frankly, you've been talking about longevity for as long as I've known you. How did you finally come to make a book about it?
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Well, I've had a, you know, a number of passions over my life. Early on, it was opening up the space frontier, and that led to rocket companies, satellite companies, the original Spaceflight XPRIZE. And then from from space, I focused on sort of exponential technologies and grand challenges, and that gave birth to Singularity University and then a whole slew of new XPRIZES. But it's been over the last, really the 12 years since 2012 that I became enamored with with extending the human health span. And that comes from a couple of different places.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:One is I think it's the greatest gift you can give anybody is their health. Right? The old saying the man or woman has their health has a 1,000 dreams, The man or woman who does not has but 1, and that is so true. The second thing is it's the world's biggest business opportunity. You know, when I'm on stages talking to YPO groups, and, you know, CEOs and family offices, and, you know, public in general, I said, listen.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:At you know, you're 70 years old. You're 75. You're 80. How much of your wealth would you give if I could give you an extra 20 or 30 healthy years and give you the vitality that you had when you're in your forties or fifties. And, of course, everybody, if they're honest, would say, you know, I'd give you almost everything I have.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And so in that regard, it's a massive business opportunity. But there's a personal side as well, which is I wanna live to see what happens in the next 50 years, next 100 years. It's we're at the most exciting time ever in human history. We're about to become a multiplanetary species. We're about to connect our neocortex of our brain with the cloud.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:We're giving birth to our AI progeny. There is so much happening. I don't wanna miss any of it.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now while you talk about longevity, and let's remember you're an MD, you prioritize health span, not lifespan. What exactly does that mean, and how does that affect your decision making as you go along?
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Yeah. I think it's important to distinguish, between lifespan and health span. There was a a moment in time I was on the dais at the Vatican, and I was in a session with, with an elder man, a rabbi, a cardinal. It sounds like a joke.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And then Peter walked into the bar. Yeah.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And we're on stage, and we're in a session called the morality of immortality. And and I flipped it to the immorality of mortality. And we're having a conversation, and the audience is filled with probably about 6, 700 medical doctors, researchers, and clergymen of from different faith. And I asked them, you you know, so how many here would like to live to a 120 years old? I raised my hand expecting the entire audience to raise their hand, and, like, 20% of the room raised their hand.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And I'm like, what? It's like, if you don't want that, give it to me. And the realization was when people think about living to a 120, they think about being drooling brainless in a wheelchair. And that's lifespan. That is how long is your heart beating?
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Not even how long is your brain working, how long is your heart beating. And health span is how long do you have the vitality, the longevity, and the vitality, the energy, the cognition to enjoy life. Right? And we have extended lifespan, but we haven't had health span keep up with lifespan. So health span is is lagging by a decade or more.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:So I do want both to be very clear. You know? I want to live as long and as healthy as I can. No one wants to live brain dead in a wheelchair. That's not life.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:But so we need to focus on having health span catch up with lifespan first, and then how do we move the 2 of them forward together from there?
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, you can say, well, hey. I'm fine. I got a plan. But what you don't know and what Peter writes is today, by some estimates, science and medicine are adding about 3 months to your lifespan every year. So the longer you live, the longer you live.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Yeah. There's a concept called longevity escape velocity. In fact, I just wrote a blog about it on longevity escape velocity. And the notion is that, as you said, today's science is extending your life by about, 3 months for every year that you're alive. And as science is accelerating, and we have AI to thank for that to a large degree as well as cellular medicine and gene therapies and other, that there's gonna be a point in the future that the speed of acceleration is such that science will add more than a year of your life because of the breakthroughs that occurred during that year, for every year that you're living, and that's called longevity escape velocity.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And it's a it's a very powerful idea. And, you know, I've interviewed the top scientists in the field. I I run a longevity platinum trip every year. 1 year on the East Coast, 1 year on the West Coast and back and forth, and we meet the top 40, 50 scientists. And, I bring a group of 40 investors and philanthropists with me to meet these people.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And I asked them, you know, when do you think we'll reach longevity? Escape velocity. Ray Kurzweil thinks, we'll hit it by 2030, which is really close. Right? George Church thinks it's probably and when I asked him this 2 years ago, he said probably about 15 years out.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Right? David Sinclair is in the same same ballpark. So what that means is, you know, let's call it 20 years. So the question is, can you live healthy enough for the next 20 years to intercept the breakthroughs that will get you the next 20, 30 plus years. That's that's what I think about, when I think about, like, not dying from something stupid in the interim.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And if you're healthy, then you actually have ways to create wealth. Because so many people say, well, I only planned until such and such.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Yes.
Dr. Moira Gunn:If you're healthy, you're capable of creating sustenance, if you will.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Right. So why do people retire? Why do people stop working? Right? There are three reasons.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:1, they're tired. They don't have the energy anymore. The second is they're in pain. Or the third is they are forced to by regulations. So what happens if instead of at 65 or 70 when you're quote, thinking about retirement, you had the energy and vitality you had when you're in your forties fifties, but you've got all of the relationships and contacts and wisdom that you have, you know, in your sixties seventies, I don't think you would be forced to retire or choose to retire if you're at the top of your game and having fun.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:The other thing is, as you just said, when I speak to wealth managers, you know, as a as a keynote speaker, I'm saying, do not do your clients the service of having them run out of money when when they're feeling well.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now, of course, since all things are XPRIZE around Peter Diamandis, there is a HealthSpan XPRIZE. Let's talk about that.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Sure. So, the XPRIZE Foundation, for those who don't know, we run large scale global incentive competition. So what the heck is an incentive competition? You've all heard of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize. Those are prizes that reward someone for work done historically.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:It's like, congratulations. You you wrote that that book, you know, 2 years ago or you wrote you made that science breakthrough 10 or 20 years ago, we're gonna we've recognized it as significant, here's money. And those are great, but an incentive prize is a prize given to someone who accomplishes a goal that was set in advance. So I read about incentive prizes when I read Charles Lindbergh's autobiography. And in 1927, Lindbergh flies from New York to Paris not on a whim, but to actually win a $25,000 prize offered by the hotelier Raymond Orteig in 1919, just after World War 1.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And a $25,000 prize back offered in 1919 drove 9 teams who spent 400,000 trying to win that $25,000 prize. And it was, like, that's amazing. This guy, Raymond Ortega, didn't pay any of the losers. He only paid Lindbergh, who'd only been flying for 2 years. He was very unlikely as a winner.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:You would never bet on him in advance, But he but he won and opened up today's aviation industry. And so I wrote down in the margins of that book, x prize, $10,000,000. X was I didn't know who was gonna fund my $10,000,000 prize. I didn't have that money at the time. And so I, left it as a variable to be replaced.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:An amazing woman, Anusha Ansari, ended up funding the prize, and we called it the Ansari XPRIZE in her honor. That was a a prize for private space flight, carry 3 people to a 100 kilometers altitude, land, and do it again within 2 weeks. He was won 20 years ago in 2004 by Bert Rutan, backed by Paul Allen. On the heels of that, I was able to get some amazing people on my board of trustees from Elon Musk and Larry Page and James Cameron, and we started designing other incentive prizes saying, hey, where else can we do we need a breakthrough? Where else are things not getting done that need to get done?
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And we've launched about $600,000,000 in x prizes, and these prizes, drive 20 or 30 fold the prize money spent by all the teams in r and d to try and win. We've had prizes for mapping the ocean floor, for autonomous cars for, you know, around the COVID vaccine. Elon Musk funded a $100,000,000 gigaton carbon removal prize. We launched a $120,000,000 prize for desalination funded by the president of the UAE. And recently, we announced a $101,000,000 HealthSpan XPRIZE.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And this was a prize it's been a conversation for a long time. Like, could we do a longevity prize? And a dear friend of mine, Sergei Young, said, we gotta do that. I said, Sergei, we can't do an a longevity prize. I mean, honestly, we're not gonna wait 30 years to find out if someone's solution 1, 1.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:How do you do that? He said, there's gotta be a way. And he put up a half $1,000,000 of seed money for us to investigate this. And I had this this conversation with doctor George Church at Harvard, who's one of the most extraordinary prolific scientist entrepreneurs at Harvard Med School. And he said, Peter, you're not gonna do it as a longevity prize.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:We should look at this as an age reversal prize. Can we reverse the aging process that occurs? And then we narrowed it even further and said, can we reverse the functional loss due to aging? So as we get older, and I'll come back to this later, but our bodies were never designed to lift past age 30, and there's a lot of historical evolutionary reasons for that. But after age 30, your hormonal levels go down, your immune system begins to degrade, your muscular system begins to, you lose muscle at a consistent rate called sarcopenia, your cognitive function degrades.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:There's a whole bunch of things that occur, and that's we call aging. And so we said, can teams deliver a therapeutic in a year's time? So to win this XPRIZE, and it's a $101,000,000, a team has to deliver a group of subjects, a therapeutic in under a year, that can reverse the functional loss of muscle, immune, and cognition by at least 10 years and as many as 20 years. So imagine having the muscular strength, the cognitive capabilities, and the immune capabilities of you 20 years younger. That's the goal of this competition.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And we announced it November 29, 2023 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, it was funded a large chunk of it. About a third was funded by Hevolution, a large foundation under the, ruler. About a third was given to us by Chip Wilson, who is the founder of Lululemon. I'm a contributor as well as a number of other amazing members of my abundance community. It was interesting because when we were Chip Wilson was the first donor.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And in a conversation, he said, you know, listen. I know Elon has a $100,000,000 prize. I'd like ours to be bigger than Elon's. I said, what do you have in mind? He goes, how about a 101?
Dr. Peter Diamandis:I said, okay. If you put up the extra million, we'll do a 101. So yeah.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So there you have it. You never know.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:You never know. You never
Dr. Moira Gunn:know how this is gonna come out. You're listening to TECHNATION. I'm Moira Gatton. My guest today is doctor Peter Diamandis. You likely know him best as the founder of the X Prize where he remains the executive chair of the X Prize Foundation or from his moonshots podcast or his books including The Future is Faster Than You Think.
Dr. Moira Gunn:We're here today with longevity, your practical playbook on sleep, Diet, exercise, mindset, medications, and not dying from something stupid, which which might be the entire title as far as I'm concerned in this book. What is something stupid to die from?
Dr. Peter Diamandis:So great question. If I were to ask you or people listening, are you sure there's nothing going on inside your body that you need to know about? Most people have no clue. You know more about what's going on in your refrigerator or in your car than you do what's going on in your body. And here are some of the facts.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease, which is a good thing, I mean, to some degree. But, you know, 70% of all heart attacks have no precedent, no shortness of breath, nothing on a CT, nothing. And we all know people who, you know, died in the middle of the night. It didn't happen. You know, there had been something that had been building up, an aneurysm or a heart attack, and so, you know, you don't feel anything from a cancer until it's at a stage 3 or stage 4.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:You don't feel it at the inception at stage 1 or stage 2. You don't have a Parkinsonian tremor until 70% of the substantia nigra neurons are gone. So, again, the body's really great at hiding disease until you look. And people say, well, I don't wanna look. I don't wanna know.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And I'm like, of course, you wanna know. You're gonna find out eventually. Do you wanna find out when you can do something about it or when it's too late? The other things that that fall into the dying from something stupid is texting while driving, not wearing a helmet while skiing, not wearing your seat belt and so forth. But, you know, for me, sci mountain science can catch stuff early.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Eventually, we're gonna have an we're gonna have all of our wearables. Right? I've gotten my Apple Watch, my Oura Ring, a continuous glucose monitor. Eventually, there'll be dozens of wearables and sidables, consumables that are uploading data to your AI, not on an annual or quarterly basis, but on a moment by moment basis. And that will help you know exactly what's going on in your body so you can optimize it.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And yet, reading your book, there's a lot of poor man regimens in here.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:There is. There's a lot of basics. I mean, you know, people need to know there's things that you can do that cost you nothing. And, but it's a choice. You know, I people used to say, how long do you wanna live, Peter?
Dr. Peter Diamandis:And I would give a ridiculous number. You know, when I was I I talk about in the book there that when I was in medical school, I read that bowhead whales could or I watched a TV show on bowhead whales living 200 years and Greenland sharks living 500 years. And I was like, if they can live that long, why can't I? I said, it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. And I said, there's gonna be a time when we can repair that hardware and software, and I think it's this decade.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:It's the convergence of AI and gene therapies and epigenetic reprogramming, CRISPR and cell therapies, all these things. And so I'm doing everything I can to make sure I am in the best health I can as long as I can to intercept that longevity escape velocity.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And yet you are every man. You have high cholesterol, which you acknowledged in the book. Yep. You have, you used to use a CPAP machine.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:I I did.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So many people out there.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:I I take a blood pressure med. Yeah.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Yeah. I mean, this is every man. Yeah.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Yeah. Yeah. As we grow older, I'll be 63 next month, and I am, you know, I feel I'll knock on the laws of physics here, not wood, but I feel, in the best shape I've ever been. I'm as got as much energy, you know, and just to hit on what it takes, to be clear about this, let me just hit on some of the basics if I could. Right?
Dr. Peter Diamandis:So let's talk about diet first. There is no one diet for everybody. Just to be crystal clear, you know, it depends on what your genetics are, but there are a few things which are a 100% true for everybody. And I hate to say it, the first one is that sugar is a poison. Our bodies were never evolved to take in as much high glycemic index in sugar that we do today.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:There should be a black box warning on kids' cereal, the amount of sugar they take in. Sugar is a is a, neuroinflammatory or cardiac inflammatory. It it's addictive, and it's a problem. And then I'll get in my 4 goal of 5 workouts a week, plenty of water, protein. And then sleep, you know, our bodies need 8 hours of sleep.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:I hate to say it. I I used to you know, when I was in medical school, I would pride myself on getting by with 5 hours of sleep. But 8 hours of sleep, we would have evolutionary gotten rid of sleep if we didn't need it.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, yeah. And it still takes 9 months to have a baby. You don't think we would have been working on that?
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Exactly. Come on.
Dr. Moira Gunn:You really talk about what are the things that happen while you sleep. Yeah. I think people need to hear that.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Yeah. Your brain gets rid of toxins. Your brain forms long term memories. There is a absolute function to sleep, and it is restoring. Your brain is the most energy intense organ in your body.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Right? By some counts, you know, your brain, which is a, you know, a couple of percent of your body mass is using 25% of the glucose, that you consume in a day. And, if you wanna retain cognitive capabilities, you want your brain in good schlei good shape, and it's and it's minimizing sugar, and it's maximizing sleep, and exercise.
Dr. Moira Gunn:For those people who say I wanna talk about this one last point. It's like, hey, I come from long lived people. Yeah. Long lived. And, before there was any of this medication, apparently, genetics has a very little to do.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:It it's amazing. You would think it's more. Right? So here's the numbers. There was a study done, large population study on genomics, and that study determined that your genetics had 7% impact on your health span, on your longevity.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:7%. The the study done that had the most was 30% impact. So somewhere between 7% and and, and, and 30% is your genetics. You can if you have good genetics, you can really screw it up by lifestyle. So, it's really important to to focus on your lifestyle.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:There's one other thing, and I just wanna read a quote here, from the book. And it's about your mindset. And I found this absolutely fascinating. By the way, in the book, there is a a chapter on women's health that I did not write. An amazing woman, Helen Messier, who's the chief medical officer at Fountain Life, wrote it.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:She's a MD PhD. Okay. So here's the study. Actually, I'll get a I'm gonna read you, a couple of things and then the study. Alright.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:So one of my favorite stories illustrating, the impact of mindset comes from American history. As it turns out, in an extraordinary demonstration of the will to live, 2 of America's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both willed themselves to live long enough to see the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Even though in the early 1800, the average life expectancy was only 44 years old, Jefferson, who was 83, and Adams, who was 90, both made it to July 4th, dying on that exact date, the 50th anniversary of the nation they had founded. Isn't that amazing? And then here's the study.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:In a study of 69,744 women and 1429 men, published in the prestigious journal proceedings in the National Academy of Science, It was found that optimistic people live as much as 15% longer than pessimists.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Mindset. Mindset. Mindset.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Mindset. Mindset. Mindset. Yes. A 100%.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:100%.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, you might as well have named this book No Trick Unturned. It's all in there. It's all in there.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:People are saying, well, what's the summary? What are you doing? So I wrote longevity, your practical playbook. My goal was a 100 pages. I got it to 120 pages, and it was like, this is this is what I do and why I do it.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:This is definitively, like, these things are good for everybody. Everything else, go see your doctor. But I tried to just here's the the tips and tricks, and at minimum, try these things, and there again, there's a chapter on diet, on mindset, on sleep, on exercise, on meds and supplements, women's health. I'm proud of it, and I wanna get the word out. So, you know, diamandis.com/longevity.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:There's a, a summary version of it. Instead of a 120 pages, it's, I think, 40 pages without the photos. Please use it. It's impactful.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, Peter, thank you so much for coming. We hope you hope to see you again.
Dr. Peter Diamandis:Thank you, Moira. It's a pleasure to be back.
Dr. Moira Gunn:My guest today is XPRIZE Foundation executive chair doctor Peter Diamandis. His book is Longevity, your practical playbook on sleep, diet, exercise, mindset, medications, and not dying from something stupid.