EP #29 The Secret to a Long, Healthy Life w/ Dr. Mark Hyman

In this episode, Mark and Peter discuss the principles of longevity, the importance of muscle mass, and why sugar is poison. You will learn about: 18:48 | What Are the principles of longevity: lifestyle, diet, or mindset? 38:17 | Mark Hyman explains the hallmarks of aging. 1:18:23 | Humanity's past may hold the key to healing ourselves today. Dr. Mark Hyman is a leading expert in the field of Functional Medicine. He is a 14-time New York Times bestselling author, the founder, and director of The UltraWellness Center, and the head of strategy and innovation for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. Pre-order Dr. Hyman’s new book today, available on February 21, 2023: Young Forever _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  Based on the science we have now, we understand the basic causes of disease and aging. We understand the basic ingredients for health, the science of creating health, and that Young Forever is simply a roadmap that guides you through how your body works that you were never given. It's like the owner's manual. And, you know, it's like, you know, your car, you don't know all the features, you don't have to use all the things, but the basic stuff to get around, navigate, and do what you gotta do, you gotta learn how to do.

• 0:57Peter Diamandis?

  And a massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm gonna do, this is the dent I'm gonna make in the universe.

• 1:09Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, Peter DeMandis here. Just had the privilege of sitting down with a dear friend of mine here at the Bold Offices for a special episode of Moonshots and Mindsets, talking about one of my favorite subjects and hopefully yours, longevity. My guest was none other than Dr. Mark Pahiman. Mark is one of the leading thinkers on longevity and functional medicine. He's got one of the top podcasts on health called The Doctor's Pharmacy. He's a regular on many TV shows, CBS This Morning, Today Show, Good Morning America, The View, CNN. He just wrote a book that's coming out very shortly called Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life.

• 1:51Peter Diamandis?

  And in this episode, we're gonna talk about the basics: food, diet, exercise, sleep. We're gonna talk about what are the cutting-edge therapeutics that have a chance to extend the healthy lifespan, talk about how a lot of the things that you think might be healthy for you probably are not, and why, in fact, going back... Back to some of the younger, earlier practices of health and the human species is so fundamental. We talk about the nine hallmarks of aging, what they are and how to combat them. So if you want some incredible wisdom from someone who's brilliant, please join me for this next episode of Moon Shots and Mindsets with Dr. Mark Hyman. Hey, Mark. Great to see you, buddy. Welcome to Santa Monica.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  It's great to be here, Peter.

• 2:34Peter Diamandis?

  Last time I saw you, you and I were floating together in zero G.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  We were.

• 2:39Peter Diamandis?

  With your girlfriend back then, now your fiance. Congratulations.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Thank you. Yeah, we were floating high. It was so fun.

• 2:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Did you enjoy your zero G flight?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  It was the most unbelievable experience. I mean, like going to Antarctica, seeing the gorillas in the zero G flight are top of the list.

• 2:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. That's the way to romance a girl off her feet, literally.

• 3:00Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, we're going to dive into the idea of longevity and slowing, stopping, aging. I want to ask you about what you think around the idea of reversing aging. But how long have you been? Well, let me ask you a different question. How long has the conversation about longevity really been vibrant out there in the world? Because it feels relatively new.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  It feels new, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, clearly, everybody's been thinking about the fountain of youth since Methuselah, right?

• 3:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's been a few thousand years.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  The Holy Grail and all that. And everybody's looking for the elixir and all the alchemists of old. We're all looking for the source of longevity. So this is not a new idea. But I think medicine has really ignored the idea that we could do anything about aging. And it's not been a subject of research. It's not been a subject of exploration from any rigorous point of view. And so it sort of was on the back burner as a sort of nonentity until recently, when billions of dollars started pouring into the longevity research field. And we started making discoveries about the root causes and how we begin to think differently about this. So I think we're in this extraordinary moment that we haven't been in before. And I can see, you know, even when I, when I wanted to publish this book, Young Forever, I said to my publisher, I want to write this book.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  This was like, you know, three, four years ago. He said, oh, no, it's not a hot topic. Most of these books don't do well. And I'm like, listen. Listen, I know what's going on and I can tell you that this is going to be very big. And it is.

• 4:26Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, is it fair to say that, I don't know, five years ago, maybe seven, eight, maybe it was ten, that if you were a credible physician or scientist talking about slowing and stopping and even reversing aging, that it would have been a black mark against you?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, even talking about reversing disease is a black mark against you. As can I reverse heart disease? Can you reverse diabetes? Can you reverse dementia? No, but actually, yes.

• 4:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  So I think medicine is really in this cataclysmic change, this paradigm shift, where the old ideas of what we thought were true about disease are shifting. And now we're understanding the underlying mechanisms of things that go wrong that underlie all disease. And so that's the exciting part of aging research is it's pointing to what I've been looking at for a long time, which is the body as a system. It's systems theory, systems biology, systems medicine clinically applied through the lens of functional medicine, but most of practitioners have no education in this and were learned reductionist medicine, which you did and I did in medical school.

• 5:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, so I wanted to find a few things. Functional medicine, what is that?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  What the hell is that?

• 5:31Peter Diamandis?

  And you're credited with being one of the fathers, one of the individuals who have been speaking about that for many years.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Certainly the noisiest.

• 5:43Peter Diamandis?

  Well, and many are following. I mean, we're incorporating that into fountain life. So what is functional medicine?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Well, I always joke, I say it's the opposite of dysfunctional medicine.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  At a high level, it's really about understanding the body as an integrated ecosystem where everything is connected and everything is determining everything all the time. So it's about looking at root causes, it's about treating the system, not the symptoms. It's about understanding the why, not the what, not what disease do you have and what drug do I get, but why is this happening? And how do I understand the biology underneath it? So it's very much. Taking sort of the advances that are happening in systems biology and systems medicine and trying to create a clinically useful methodology to apply these ideas. And that's what it is. And it's not, it's not a new specialty. It's not a new sort of alternative therapy.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  It's basically a new methodology for interpreting data through the lens of the body as an ecosystem where you have to look at root causes and you have to treat the body and create health.

• 6:47Peter Diamandis?

  So it seems kind of obvious.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  It's obvious, right. It's obvious. I mean, it's really the science of creating health as opposed to treating disease.

• 6:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, and that's interesting, right? Because most of medicine, we talk about healthcare, but it's really sick care. And you and I have jammed on this much. It's like the system out there, you know, unfortunately sort of perpetuates chronic disease and only pays attention to you after you're sick, right?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:13Peter Diamandis?

  And one of the things I think that's interesting is the body doesn't a damn good job at hiding disease.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I say, but disease is the body's best attempt to deal with a bad set of circumstances. You release those, you remove those circumstances and the body has this extraordinary powerful innate healing system that repairs or generates, renews. And that's what we learn how to activate in longevity medicine is we're understanding how to activate these ancient longevity switches that are embedded in us that are supposed to keep us alive and healthy as opposed to turning on all the disease switches, which we do through our modern lifestyle.

• 7:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, so let me check this out with you because it seems amazing that people don't realize this. You know, people think when they got sick, it happened that morning.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:56Peter Diamandis?

  Right? So, you know, we, when you have symptoms of cancer, depending which cancer it is, it's really later on, right? Stage three, stage four, that you have a physiological response and you're in pain or you look, you look bad. And you've missed everything at stage zero, stage one, stage two. I remember someone said, if you have Parkinson's, which is a loss of neuronal function in sustentation, that it only gets, you only have the Parkinsonian trembling when like 70% of the neurons are gone.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:28Peter Diamandis?

  So your body is constantly countering this and trying to, but so if you don't look, you don't find.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  You don't find it, right? The Vogelis Heart Study, which looked at kids. And plaque in their arteries, found that kids as young as, you know, 10, eight, nine, were having plaque in their arteries and that predicted their

• 8:46Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Evidence of their heart disease and risk later on. So these diseases start very early. I mean, even in utero, in the epigenetic environment in which the baby is bathed, from what the mother's doing, her diet, her lifestyle, exposure to toxins, all determine the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, even before birth. So we, we actually now know that the exposome, which is the some total of all the things we're exposed to in our life, whether it's our mother's diet, or stress, or traumas, or toxins, or diet, or lack of exercise, all the things that are washing over to our microbiome, are driving the changes that lead to chronic disease. So 90% of chronic disease is caused by the exposome, not the genome. And even single gene disorders can't be modified through lifestyle.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a crazy story. I was in a blue bottle of coffee the other day and I walked in, this guy goes, "Dr. Hyman, Dr. Hyman?" I'm like, "Hi." He's like, "You saved my life." I'm like, "I never met you." He's like, "Yeah, well, I have sickle cell anemia and I started following the changes in diet and cleaning everything up. And I was going from having a sickle cell crisis every month to maybe a mild one once a year."

• 9:50Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  And I'm like, "Wow, that's a sing-" that's like having Down syndrome and like

• 9:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  fixing it. And so even single gene disorders can be modified by the environment.

• 9:58Peter Diamandis?

  That is, that is spectacular. I mean, what, what brings us here together, uh, this moment is your new book. And let me just take a second, uh, to, to shout it out. Young Forever, The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Sounds like a plan.

• 10:15Peter Diamandis?

  It, it, it sounds like, you know, it's like, listen, uh, let me, let me jump in here. How long do you want to live?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  I want to live as long as I can do whatever the frick I want to do. I want to be able to ski, ride horses, make love, hike, do all the things that I love to do. And if it's 120 or 150 or 180, I'll keep going until I'm done. So I, I think realistically, For me, I think 120 is a good target. I think for sure I'm gonna get to 100. I mean, my dad and my mom got to like 90 and they ate crap and they smoked when they were younger. And my mother always used to say, whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down till it goes away.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  I think I got, I've been exercising since 14 and I've been steady at it and I've been eating well, pretty much most of my life. So I think, you know, I might've had two or three cokes in my entire life.

• 11:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that is fascinating. I mean,

• 11:16Speaker 01

  And biologically, I'm 43. So, you know, even though I'm 63 chronologically, according to the DNA methylation test, I'm 43, which means, you know, at least another, you know, 60 years and that gets me to 120.

• 11:27Peter Diamandis?

  So, and we'll get, we'll get into this because, you know, the challenge, the thing that most people don't realize is if you can add 30 healthy years onto where you are today, during those 30 years, the breakthroughs we're gonna see are extraordinary.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:43Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it doesn't like, science isn't like stopped and taken a break for 30 years. It's, it's accelerating. And so the breakthroughs that we'll see in a whole range of things we'll, we'll talk about. So, the book Forever Young.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Young Forever. Bob Dylan was the Forever Young.

• 12:03Peter Diamandis?

  Sorry.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Another Jewish guy, but anyway.

• 12:05Peter Diamandis?

  So, Young Forever is, is out on preorder now and depending when you're listening to this podcast, it may be available on Amazon. And the preorders have shot through the roof.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:16Peter Diamandis?

  What'd you say it was 10, 10-fold?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Every other book I've done, which is, all have done very well.

• 12:21Peter Diamandis?

  That's awesome. Well, I'm, I'm excited to, to be able to support. You're gonna be coming and speaking at Abundance 360 this year, which I'm really excited about. Let's talk about why you wrote this.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, aside from the fact that I'm getting older and I, and I'm, you know, everybody's favorite radio station is WIFM, which is what's in it for me.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  I felt that, you know, it was important to write this book because as I began to look at the field of longevity research and longevity science, I felt like there was something missing. And what's, what, what isn't missing is this reimagination of disease according to the hallmarks of aging, which we can get into what those are, what they mean, and we'll dive into that. But these hallmarks of aging are the things that seem to go wrong as we get older that we can influence and reverse, and literally reverse our biological age. And that are, are the reasons why we see all the diseases from heart disease to diabetes to cancer to dementia, all the age-related diseases are the result of these fundamental biological processes that go awry. Now, what, what, what, what that is, is a huge advance

• 13:28Speaker 01

  in understanding of targets for treatment, whether it's through pharmaceuticals, or lifestyle, or meditation, or stem cells, or whatever. But the, the truth is that what was missing was the question of why? Why do these things go wrong? What is the cause of the hallmarks? So the hallmarks are the cause of disease, and diseases are the cause of aging. What's the cause of the hallmarks? And so functional medicine gives us a way to think about that. And it's really, comes down to really two simple questions that I learned from my mentor, Sid Baker, which is, you know, what do you have too much of that your body's unlikely to get rid of? Toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, poor diet, et cetera. And what are the things you need to thrive? What are the ingredients for health? The right food, nutrients,

• 14:11Speaker 01

  the right balance of hormones, light, air, clean water, exercise, sleep, connection, meaning, love, purpose. All these things are the ingredients for health. So you're either dying of too much of something, or dying of not enough of something. Right? And so that was what I wanted to highlight, was, was take a look at where the longevity field is, what, what actually could be helping it to actually even accelerate further.

• 14:35Peter Diamandis?

  The results that people get from a biological standpoint and how do we not just go back into a reductionist model of treating the hallmarks of aging with reductionist therapies? This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now, glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High prolonged levels of glucose, what's called hyperglycemia, leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to sexual dysfunction to diabetes, and it's not good. The challenge is all of us are different. All of us

• 15:16Peter Diamandis?

  respond to different foods in different ways. Like for me, if I eat bananas, it spikes my blood glucose. If I eat grapes, it doesn't. If I eat bread by itself, I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil, it blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app. So, Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24/7. I wear it all the time. Really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat, remain conscious of the food that I eat, and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology

• 15:58Peter Diamandis?

  and my genetics. You know, on this podcast, I only recommend products and services that I use, that I use not only for myself, but my friends and my family, that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person's life. So, check it out. Levels.link/peter. Give you two additional months of membership, and it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually, this stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine. Today, it's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. So, when I think about why we age, I sort of think go back 100,000 years ago when we were

• 16:42Peter Diamandis?

  getting pregnant at age 12 or 13 and having a baby, and by the time you were 26 or 27, you're a grandparent. And before food was abundant, before, you know, McDonald's was around, the last thing you wanted to do to perpetuate the species was steal food from your grandchildren, right? And so, there was no... Advantage for you being around longer than age thirty at that point. In fact, it might have been a disadvantage. I'm just wondering, you know, and there was never any selective pressure to, I mean, I think if, if we could reproduce into our eighties, nineties, a hundreds, that we would have been living longer.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Mick Jagger had a kid at seventy-five. Picasso had one, I think, at eighty.

• 17:29Peter Diamandis?

  True.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Women is harder.

• 17:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And so it's, it's interesting, you know, you, you refer to the way we currently age, gradual decline, increased illness, chronic disease as abnormal.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:47Peter Diamandis?

  How should we be aging? What is, what would you consider normal?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Well, you know, Peter, I, I, you look around and you go to the average hospital or, you know, see old people, which we kind of hide them in this culture, which is very strange.

• 18:01Peter Diamandis?

  Hospitals are a terrible place, terrible place for old people to be.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Totally. But, but we see decrepitude, frailty, disability, disease, and, and people's health span is far shorter than their lifespan. Maybe the last twenty years of their life are in poor health. That means your health span's, let's say sixty, but you live to eighty. That means you're, you've lost twenty years of, of health span. And, and that's what we've come to think of as normal in this culture. But I've been to places like Sardinia, where people are a hundred years old, or ninety-five years old, and they're still hiking five miles up the mountain, straight up as an arrow, and booming voices and clear minds. And I'm like, this is impressive. So I think, I think we, we come to accept what we see around us as normal, but it's really not. And, and there are many examples around the world where people

• 18:44Speaker 01

  are practicing habits by default, not because they're into longevity, but just by default, their cultures have created an environment that promotes longevity. And as soon as they move to a Western world, they get the same rate of death and disease as we do.

• 18:57Peter Diamandis?

  So these are the blue zones?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  The blue zones, yeah. Like, I've been in Sardinia and Echuria and, you know, And the Nueva Peninsula in Costa Rica, I mean, there's a guy like, who's like riding his horse, straight up and narrow, at 101 years old in Costa Rica. I'm like, man, most people even wouldn't, wouldn't want to walk around the street without a walker at 100 years old. No, let's jump up on a horse.

• 19:16Peter Diamandis?

  And so, is it all about just lifestyle and diet and mindset? What is it, what are the principal elements here? Because, you know, we talk about the hallmarks of aging, which I do want to get into. These feel like cellular, sub-cellular, physiological, elements of, of systems running down, right? Entropy.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but entropy can be accelerated or decelerated, depending on what you do. If you put energy in a system, you can change entropy, right? Entropy happens without putting any energy in a system. And the, and the, the reasons, I think, that we see this sort of acceleration is because of the habits we have and the lifestyle we have. But if we actually change those and look at what are the biggest drivers for these hallmarks of aging? It's food. You know, I think there's the hierarchy, they're not all created equal, these hallmarks. And one of the most important is this deregulated nutrient sensing, which is how we sample the food we're eating and how it influences longevity switches, which there are four. Two of them basically detect too much stuff, and the other detect too

• 20:24Speaker 01

  little. So mTOR and insulin signaling detect too much, you know, protein and sugar and carbs, and insulin does the same. It's mostly sugar and carbs. And AMPK and sirtuins detect not enough, scarcity, and then they get activated. So when the, when these switches are properly managed, and it's not like you can have them all on or on off. I think a lot of people get confused. Oh, mTOR is bad, let's shut off mTOR. Well, no, if you do that, you're going to end up without any muscle or be able to synthesize proteins. So, and food is the biggest driver. And so, when you look at our diet, it's the incredibly high amounts of starch and sugar and processed food.

• 20:59Peter Diamandis?

  So let's, I want to, I want to hit on all of these during the course of this conversation. For folks who are listening and want to take away, you know, real nuggets that can change their life, because it- It doesn't take a lot to make a substantial change in your life. And I've, I'll, I'll share mine, but I want to hear yours and what you're teaching here. So let's, let's hit on food. Let's begin with the food right now, cause you know, the idea of food is medicine. I'll begin with the number one thing I've learned to appreciate is sugar is a poison.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it really is, you know, well, the dose makes the poison, right? So having a little bit of sugar is not going to kill you, but it's the fact that we eat the equivalent of about a pound a day per person of sugar and flour and below the neck, sugar and flour in your body are the same. In fact, the glycemic index of bread is a hundred. That's the gold standard. Sugar is sixty five, which is better than bread. That's because it has fructose, which lowers the, doesn't spike glucose. But that, it basically bread and sugar are the same. And we eat about a hundred and fifty two pounds of sugar and a hundred and thirty three pounds of flour on average per person. That's average. Now, I'm not having that much, so some people are having a lot more. And that's driving the fact that we have, you know, ninety three percent of Americans that are metabolically unhealthy,

• 22:10Speaker 01

  which means they have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, or they're overweight, or they have had a heart attack or a stroke. That's like six percent of us, basically, or six point eight percent of us are in good metabolic health. That's terrifying to me and that's driven by our diet primarily.

• 22:24Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, someone once said that sugar is more addicting than cocaine. Um, and you know, whether that's ever been scientifically proven or whatever.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  In rats, in rats.

• 22:35Peter Diamandis?

  It's, it's addicting. I just, you know, every year, uh, with my abundance community, I do a twenty two day sugar fast. Right? And the entire community goes on in a WhatsApp group and we drop all sugar and high glycemic index foods. No pasta, no rice, no bread and so forth. And it's difficult in the beginning, right? But when you're doing it with others, it's, it's achievable and towards the end, um, you're off the addiction.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  People stop wanting it. Yeah, yeah.

• 23:05Peter Diamandis?

  So I'm in that, I'm in that phase now. I'm cra- you know, for me, it's all about high value protein and plant foods. I mean, so what, if you're not eating bread, pasta, rice, sugar, desserts and so forth, what are you eating?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Well, that's a great question. I think, I think if you look at the science of longevity, there are like many cultures with many different diets, whether the Inuit or the Maasai who eat primarily animal-based diets, or you've got, you know, maybe cultures where they eat more plant-based diets, like in Okinawa, but they still have pork and they still have meat. I think it's really about the, the quality of the information you're putting in, because, you know, as we talked about, the, these, you know, and David, David Sinclair talks about the information theory of aging. Food is information and it's signals. So everything that you do, whether it's what you eat, how you move, how you sleep, your level of stress, toxins, your microbiome, all is washing over your biology and creating inputs. This is

• 24:01Speaker 01

  the exposome that influence everything that's happening. And the, and the remarkable thing is, Peter, the rapidity of change of your biology, when you change those things, is so fast. Like, you could be type 2 diabetic on insulin, and in three days, you're off insulin. You know, in three months, you're, you know, basically your blood sugar's normal, and you've reversed all your diseases. So, that's the power of food. And so, when I think about food, it's about having high amounts of these plant-rich phytochemical diets. And I think some people argue with that, but you should be a carnivore, but I'm not sure that's the best idea. I think high-quality protein is really important. This is a highly debatable subject in longevity, because many longevity experts are talking about you

• 24:40Speaker 01

  being vegan, or actually eliminating animal protein as a way to extend life. And, and that really comes from this whole theory about mTOR being a problem, and that we need to inhibit mTOR, which means mammalian target of rapamycin. We'll get into rapamycin, but the idea is that this, this longevity switch is in every cell in your body. When you over-stimulate it, it creates- Over-stimulate how? mTOR. By eating too much protein. Okay. Or eating all the time protein. Right. That it will cause overgrowth of tissues, and cancers, and heart diseases, and all the, all the problems that we see with aging. The problem is, is like anything else, you know, if you inhibit it all the time, you, you waste away and you're frail and you die.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Like, if you're calorie restriction, which is what this does induce mTOR inhibition, right? Calorie restriction is the thing that actually everybody agrees will lengthen your life by a third, if you eat a third less calories. You'll be miserable, and scrawny, and have no sex drive, and your hair's falling out, but you'll live longer. The question, the big hack is how do we mimic calorie restriction? Well, the idea is if you, you don't, you know, stimulate mTOR with high levels of animal protein, then you can extend your life. And there's some rationale to that, but you also need muscle because muscle is the currency of longevity. And if you don't have muscle.

• 25:57Peter Diamandis?

  And we're going to get to that because I'm on a, right now, for me, my biggest number one objective is muscle growth.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:04Peter Diamandis?

  I am like, I'm like in the gym constantly, um, you know, and I'm taking my creatine, but I'm also, I've also massively increased my protein intake.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:14Peter Diamandis?

  So I want to understand where you are because this is all, you know, I take rapamycin. So there's this like increased animal protein, working out, rapamycin. So this triangle here, how do you, so slow it down and explain it to folks who would understand all those terms, but, and what do you recommend at the end?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  So it's the Goldilocks problem. You want to turn it on so you can build muscle.

• 26:36Peter Diamandis?

  You want to turn on what?

• 26:37Speaker 01

  mTOR.

• 26:37Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  And you also want to give it a break so you can do cleanup and repair. So think about your body has own recycling cleanup mechanism. It's called autophagy, which means self-eating, self-cannibalism. And it's basically like a little Pac-Man that runs around and gobbles up old proteins and parts. And, I mean, think of it, if you're starving, your body still needs to get proteins and it still needs to do stuff and make things. But if you're not eating, what are you going to do? So you basically go around and you recycle all the old parts and you make new stuff, which is basically what your body does. It's brilliant. And the way it does it is this process called autophagy, which is essential to cleanup, repair, renewal, regeneration. And it also activates all these other longevity pathways like reducing inflammation, increasing mitochondrial function. So everything you need to do to survive if you're starving, so you don't die, it kind of turns it on, which is great.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And that's an important thing to do every day. So you can do that by not eating for 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. If you want to go to 14, that's great. So that means eating at six and night and having breakfast at eight in the morning. That's not a hard thing to do, right? Or 10, if you want to do 16 hours. So that's, that's a really simple way every day to induce autophagy. The other is to, um, Activate mTOR in the right way, which means not eating all the time, like not eating, you know, Ben and I have snacks and flooding with all this stuff. And then eating a big load of protein in the morning when you wake up in a fasted state. And that, and my favorite way to do it, because you know, I don't necessarily want a steak for breakfast. I have a, I have my healthy aging shake, which I talk about in the book, Young Forever.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Essentially, it's got regeneratively raised goat way. I use, I sort of use some other pumpkin seed powders, just a little plant proteins in there. And I, and I put in creatine, I put in something called Urolithin A, which is an incredible mitophagy compound that comes from pomegranate and helps build muscle. And a few other things like adaptogenic mushrooms and, you know, some things from my gut. And I kind of make it like a healthy shake. But basically you've got this, you know, 30, 40 grams of protein in the morning.

• 28:36Peter Diamandis?

  To kick you off.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, to kick you off. And then, you know, having 30 at least per meal, usually, you know, this is the problem with protein. If you look at the data, we say, oh, you should eat 0.8 grams per kilo. This is the RDA. Now that, people don't understand what that is. That's the minimum you need to not get protein deficiency. Like how much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy? Like 60 milligrams. How much, you know, how much vitamin D do you need to not get rickets? 30 units. Well, how much vitamin D do you need for optimal health? Maybe 2,000, 4,000.

• 29:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Right? So it's very important to understand what these are. And so when you're, and particularly when you're older, it actually is important for you to eat more protein because there's something called anabolic resistance, meaning it's harder to build muscle. And the worst thing you can do is not exercise throughout your life and then end up, you know, at 65 being the same weight that you were when you were 25, but you're twice as fat because your, all your muscles get marble like a big wagyu ribeye. And then, and then they're metabolically super unhealthy and drive inflammation, low cortisol, no testosterone.

• 29:40Peter Diamandis?

  I'll put a, I'll put a, a fine point on this. We'll come back to it later on, on exercise. But there, the number one correlate between length of life and longevity is your muscle mass.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 29:53Peter Diamandis?

  Right? And so there's a number of reasons thought, first of all, if you are older and you are, you fall and break your hip or your pelvis, it's a, like 70% of people over the age of 65 who have that fall. Die within a year.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:08Peter Diamandis?

  It's crazy. My father passed that way.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Terminal cancer, yeah.

• 30:11Peter Diamandis?

  It's, it's, it's awful. So you need the muscle mass to be able to hold yourself from falling and having that accent. But also muscle mass is a supply of stem cells and, and blood, uh, blood volume.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  It's where your metabolism is.

• 30:25Peter Diamandis?

  And, yeah. And so ultimately you want to maximize your muscle mass. So, um, if you're in your twenties, thirties, forties, go for it. If you're in your fifties, you'd need to put the time in.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. That's true. And I think, I think when I, I just wanna kinda put a point on this. People say, you know, you know, you can do this with plant proteins and, and what I typically found is that people who are vegan, who are jacked, and I've studied this, they actually eat a lot of processed plant protein. So they actually have to supplement with plant protein. And you have to eat enormous amount. I was just in Rwanda and we saw the gorillas. Now gorillas are huge.

• 30:59Peter Diamandis?

  And they're.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  And they're vegans. They're vegans and they're ma- like they're massive. And I'm like, what do they eat? I was like, what do they eat? They get fifty-five pounds of food a day. They can extract from that plenty of protein.

• 31:13Peter Diamandis?

  But they have different digestive systems.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  But they have digestive systems are like ten times longer than ours, like huge. And they're big, you know, like these giant bellies. It's not because they're fat. It's because their, their intestines are enormous, because it takes forever to digest all this stuff and extract the food. And we have, they have much longer, large intestines where you can start to sort of ferment and, and break down these foods and, and start to absorb them. So we, we have shorter, uh, intestines. We have, um, you know, the ability to actually, uh, use animal protein, which they, they don't really. They, they eat insects, but they're massive. And the key about muscle building is you need a certain amount of a particular amino acid called leucine. Now leucine is what we call rate limiting amino acid. It means if you don't have this amino acid, it's hard to turn on muscle synthesis. It's like turning on a light switch.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  So plant proteins are typically low in leucine. So you can get enough by eating tons of plant protein, but you need like a lot more than you could possibly eat. You're not gonna eat 55 pounds of food a day. And so, you know, especially as you get older, you need about the size of your palm, and depending on if you're Shaquille O'Neal, if you're a little old lady, it's gonna be a different palm size of a protein. But basically, you need probably 1.2 to 1.6, even 2 grams per kilo, if you want to build muscle and get stronger. And you need to have high leucine protein. Now, you can take plant proteins and supplement with leucine. You know, I call them like jacked up plant proteins. And that's fine. If you are a committed vegan, you want to do that. But you can't ignore the fact that you're gonna have to eat a lot of processed

• 32:41Speaker 01

  proteins. And that meat has carnecine, and also creatine, and carnitine, which are incredibly helpful compounds that are not in plant proteins that are required for

• 32:52Peter Diamandis?

  So let's go back to what do you eat right now?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Personally?

• 32:55Peter Diamandis?

  Personally, yes.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Well, my day, if I'm at home, I'll have like my healthy aging shake. I'll usually have a 14 hour fast minimum. I'll usually work out.

• 33:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Do band resistance training, which is great, because I can do anywhere and don't hurt myself. And then I have my healthy aging shake.

• 33:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Well, actually, I do some hormesis practice first, which is essentially steam and then an ice bath. And then I have my shake, and I take my supplements. And then lunch can be a combination of things, but it can be usually a salad with like proteins. I'll put in sardines, or canned salmon, or something like that, nuts and seeds, avocado, pumpkin seeds. So I'll do a lot of fat and protein and veggies. And then dinner will typically be, you know, grass or virginly fed beef, or lamb, or organic chicken, or pasteurized chicken, or different kinds of fish that are low in mercury. And then I'll usually have like, maybe, I'm kind of very low body fat, and I don't do well, I don't eat a little bit of carbohydrates. So I'll have like a Japanese sweet potato, I'll have some side of mushrooms and lots of veggies.

• 33:54Peter Diamandis?

  High quality protein and plant.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, lots of veggies, yeah.

• 33:58Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, and just basics. And again, going back

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Will I have a piece of chocolate occasionally?

• 34:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. But still, it's minimizing sugar intake.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:07Peter Diamandis?

  And it's Uh, you know, let's talk about the impact of sugar. It's an inflammatory agent, right? It like, it, it, it makes all the proteins in your bloodstream sticky.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so let's just walk through it. So when you eat sugar, what happens? Or when I say sugar, I mean, any kind of starch that, that will raise your blood sugar. You produce insulin and insulin is a special kind of hormone that's produced by your pancreas that is designed to put blood sugar into your cells. But, but when you have high levels of sugar, you have to make more insulin. And insulin not only drives the fat into the fat cells to store, but it also shuts off the release valve. So you can't actually burn the fat. So it shuts down lipolysis, which is the burning of fat. It slows your metabolism down and it increases your hunger hormones. So you're hungrier, you're gaining weight, you can't burn the fat and your metabolism is slower. So it totally screws you up.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  And then it produces these special kinds of fat cells in your belly called adipocytokines, adipocytes, which are producing adipocytokines, which are inflammatory compounds. So you're basically have a fire in your belly spewing out all this inflammation throughout your body. It lowers your hormones. So males, their testosterone drops way down. Their sex drive and function goes down. Women get all kinds of other hormonal dysregulation. Affects your brain. You get increased cortisol and adrenaline with sugar. And cortisol causes literally shrinkage of your hippocampus, which is the memory center. So it's just, it's just bad news. And then, and then does this thing which, which we, we, you were just hinting at,

• 35:42Speaker 01

  which it, it kind of, too much sugar goes around and, and forms globs with proteins called glycation products. And when you measure hemoglobin MC, which is what we do to measure how your blood sugar is controlled. If you're diabetic, you get high levels of these glycated hemoglobins. But it happens to all these proteins that happens in your brain. They're called AGES. Literally the name of it is called AGES. Advanced glycation end products. And they bind to receptors called RAGES.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  So you're aging and raging when you eat sugar.

• 36:11Peter Diamandis?

  And it really just driving heart disease and neurogerive disease. It's just, it's just bad stuff. The human body.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  They're called type dimension now, type three diabetes. Most cardiovascular heart disease is driven by metabolic syndrome, prediabetes. The lipid panels that are the worst are the ones that are really driven by too much sugar and starch, not fat. And of course diabetes, you know.

• 36:34Peter Diamandis?

  I think.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  And cancer.

• 36:36Peter Diamandis?

  People just realize, yeah, it's the fuel for cancer. That we never had sugar as we were evolving 100,000 years ago. This is a recent development, as is all the food companies that are pushing on this. So if, if I could say, if you, if you remember nothing else from this podcast, minimize sugar and maximize exercise, which everybody knows already. It's not like, you know, breakthrough science, but it's like reminder, try it.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can take all these supplements, do all these hacks, take all the stem cells you want. But if you're, if you don't have the basics right, you know.

• 37:10Peter Diamandis?

  A brief note from our sponsors. Let's talk about sleep. Sleep has become one of my number one longevity priorities in life. You're getting eight deep uninterrupted hours of sleep is one of the most important things you can do to increase your vitality and energy and increase the health span that you have here on earth. You know, when I was in medical school years ago, I used to pride myself on how little sleep I could get. You know, it used to be five, five and a half hours. Today I pride myself on how much sleep I can get. And I shoot for eight hours every single night. Now, usually I'm great at going to sleep. If I'm exhausted, you know, I've worked a hard day, I'm right out. But if I'm having difficulty, and it occurs, I'm having insomnia or my mind's overactive

• 37:51Peter Diamandis?

  and I need help to get that eight hours, I turn to a supplement product by Life Force called Peak Rest. Now, Peak Rest has been formulated with an extraordinary scientific depth and background. Includes everything from long lasting melatonin to magnesium to L-glycine to rosemary extract, just to name a few. This product is about creating a sense of rest. And really giving you the depth and length of sleep that you need for recovery. It's a product I hope you'll try. It works for me and I'm sure it will work for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforce.com/peter to get a discount from Life Force on this product.

• 38:31Peter Diamandis?

  But you'll also see a whole set of other longevity and vitality related supplements that I use. We'll talk about them some other time. But in terms of sleep, Peak Rest is my go to supplement. Hope you'll enjoy it. Go to mylifeforce.com/peter for your discount. All right, we talked about the hallmarks of aging. How many do you, do you believe there are? I sort of imagine, remember there was like nine hallmarks.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Nine original ones? Yeah, I think I added one.

• 38:57Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Who am I to add one? But I added one.

• 39:01Peter Diamandis?

  Why not?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Called the microbiome. I think the gut plays such a huge role.

• 39:05Peter Diamandis?

  Increasing, wow, we know, that's been another area of explosive knowledge. So let's pick a few of them that are your favorites to talk about them.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Well, I think the deregulated nutrient sensing is so important because, you know.

• 39:17Peter Diamandis?

  So by the way, the nine hallmarks of aging now with 10 with, with Mark's microbiome. These were, what are the underlying causes of why we age?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  That's right. And I just go listen through them quickly so we can talk about it briefly. But there's the nutrient sensing problem, which leads to problems with these four longevity switches, which is insulin, too much insulin, sugar, mTOR, which is overstimulation with too much, you know, food in general and protein. Sirtuins, which are really important in DNA repair, which, which if you're always eating, never get turned on. And, and that's why we're talking about NAD, AMPK, which also is regulating glucose and mitochondrial function. That's what people are taking metformin for to sort of regulate that. So these are really important and I talk a lot about them in the book. Then the next one is. That we see is thing and in no particular order, there's telomere shortening, which are

• 40:08Speaker 01

  little caps at the end of your chromosomes that open up. So you can basically replicate like a copy machine, your DNA and we replicate like, I don't know, some quadrillion amount of times for our life. It's ridiculous, but sometimes that goes wrong and you end up or shortening your telomeres and you end up with a shorter life because you have shorter telomeres and that's highly influenced by your lifestyle, what you do. Senescent cells, also known as zombie cells, zombie cells are produced in part sometimes by this problem at DNA replication that goes wrong and cells instead of being like exploded and dying, we call apoptosis, they turn into these zombie cells that never die and run around your body, spreading inflammation and kind of almost infecting other cells as you get this runaway senescent inflammation. And there's some really cool things that are out there that

• 40:49Speaker 01

  can can regulate those, some compounds like folicetin from strawberries. There's things like hyperbaric oxygen therapy that's been shown to, you know, kill zombie cells. There's all these sort of good things about killing zombie cells. And then we have mitochondrial dysfunction. The mitochondria are the cellular energy powerhouses. And when those go wrong, we just lose energy. Why does a three year old run around like a, you know, jackrabbit? And, you know, 90 year olds like moving super slow? It's because your mitochondria are running at different rates. They're less mitochondria, they're poor functioning mitochondria. So keeping your mitochondria healthy is a key part of healthy aging. There's also proteins that get damaged. And we just talked about that, that the glycated proteins and you get all proteins are three dimensional structures. They're everything.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Have to be, you know, are they not like the information super highway of your body? And there's peptides, there's proteins, and they have to be functioning in the right shape and the right size and in the right kind of amino acid sequence. And when they're not right, they cause all kinds of damage and you get these old funky proteins. And so things like saunas, for example, increase heat shock proteins in your body, which help kind of fix these damaged proteins. Increasing autophagy helps that. And even transfer plasma exchanges where you kind of filter out the old blood and the plasma, you can get rid of a lot of the stuff. So there's all these cool therapies that are coming to vixies. We also see in addition, DNA damage. So DNA damage is something that happens all day.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  You got 100, 100,000 little cuts a day and your body has a whole DNA repair system. Yeah. That. Tied to the sirtuins. It's a sirtuins that are activated by NAD and by the right diet and screwed up by sugar, by the way. And and those mechanisms, you know, might miss a couple here and there to repair. It's amazing it does as well it does, but there's ways of improving that. And then we have also the tiring of your stem cells, your stem cells kind of poop out.

• 42:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, stem cell exhaustion.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, that that also has to do with our lifestyle and so forth. So many ways to sort of activate your stem cells. There's some really cool things looking at, you know, I'm not going to get into this kind of wacky, but like using different kinds of light and stuff in your pineal gland to activate different stem cells and harvest them and they're doing the stuff in Costa Rica. It's kind of wacky, but that there's ways of dealing with that. And then we also have the the problem of inflammaging, which is in a sense, the final common pathway for that either causes or is a consequence of almost all these things. So inflammation, the body is is driving almost all the chronic diseases of aging, whether it's arthritis or dementia or cancer or heart disease or diabetes, or all these are inflammatory problems.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  And and so we we have to understand the cause of inflammation. We have to become an inflammologist. And if you fix a lot of these other things like, you know, and some things we can't do anything about, right? We we live in a sea of toxins, like, you know, 200 years ago, we didn't have all the crap we make, all the petrochemical toxins. What was in the graduate? He says, "Plastic, that's the thing, right? Plastic." So that's my favorite petrochemicals and, you know, heavy metals are more in the ocean because of coal and lead. I mean, so I see a lot of these things that aren't people's fault that are the result of environmental stresses, but we can deal with those. And so thinking and and the last hallmark I talked about is the is the microbiome. I think I got all 10. I don't know if I did. The microbiome is is this whole ecosystem of bugs in your gut

• 44:10Speaker 01

  that's so critical for regulating immunity, for regulating cancer risk, heart disease risk, diabetes, even dementia, your mood, everything is controlled by the microbiome. And it and, you know, we may be just carrying a carrying vessel for this kind of glob of bacteria that live in us that is 10, almost 100 times as much DNA as their own DNA, or maybe more.

• 44:34Peter Diamandis?

  You're 40 trillion human cells. You know, 100 trillion bacteria, viroid and fungi are on you.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's quite amazing. And what's interesting is that we're now measuring your metabolome, which is some total of all the metabolites in your blood. And a huge portion of these come from the microbiome and they're regulating everything. So like one of the cool things in the book I talk about is how if you eat pomegranate and you have the right bacteria, the metabolite of pomegranate is called urolithin A. And this compound, which you have to have the right gut bacteria, which most of us don't, actually is an anti-aging compound. It enhances fitness, VO2 max, muscle building and fitness, fitness and also mitophagy without even exercising.

• 45:18Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, what's not alike?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Did I miss any?

• 45:24Peter Diamandis?

  I know, I think you hit them all.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I know. Epigenetic changes. That was the one I missed.

• 45:29Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, that was Dr. Sinclair.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  That's a really important one.

• 45:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Because that, can I just finish?

• 45:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, please. Yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  So the epigenetic one is, is, is really a way we're now understanding that aging occurs at a mental level, that your genome is basically fixed. And you've talked about this with Tony in your book, the genome is fixed, you've got a certain amount of genes that doesn't change. But what genes get turned on or off, which gets expressed, is determined by everything washing over those genes, your exposome. Like you talk about the piano player and how the piano player can play, you know, ragtime jazz, classical rock on the same genes, right? And so we, we have to understand that most of the insults that we do to ourselves, you know, too much stress, lack of sleep, poor diet, lack of exercise, exposure to toxins, all these things influence our epigenome. And we'll put little, little tags and determine which genes get rid

• 46:20Speaker 01

  or not. But those are changeable.

• 46:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I like, I like to say, listen, you've got the same 3.2 billion letters from your mom and your dad when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 60, when you're 80, when you're 100. So why don't you look like you're ripped when you're 20, when you're 80, right? What is different? If your genes are the same. And it's not the genes you have, it's which genes are on and off.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:39Peter Diamandis?

  And that's epi from the Greek word above, is that control. And what we're seeing is a lot of science, this is coming from David Sinclair's lab, it's coming from George Church's lab, it's coming from Salk Institute, about being able to potentially slow, stop and reverse aging, maybe go back to those earlier epigenetic markers.

• 47:02Peter Diamandis?

  Do you believe that's gonna happen?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, look, we now, for the first time, and clearly needs to be refined, but we have a biomarker that we didn't have to track influences of whatever we want to do, whether it's our diet or lifestyle or medication, on our biological age. So our biological age is different than our chronological age. I'm 63, I was born in 1959, nothing I can do about that.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Let's say go out into outer space and whatever, I think Einstein would help with that. But basically, that's what I got. But biologically, I'm 43, according to DNA methylation testing. So DNA methylation is how our epigenome is regulated, and mostly, there's a few other ways, but essentially, that's how our epigenome is determined. And so we can now do an intervention and see what happens. And so in the book, I talk about some of the early studies, whether giving corsetin or dastinib, or whether using vitamin D, or whether using a Mediterranean diet, and they're all seeing changes from months to years. And one of the studies that was most impressive was a functional medicine study, looking at a very aggressive functional medicine diet, which is way more than just like a Mediterranean diet, but it's super anti-inflammatory, it's very rich in phytochemicals,

• 48:12Speaker 01

  very rich in methylating compounds, combined with a simple lifestyle of things. And they found within eight weeks, they were able to change their DNA methylation patterns, reverse their biological clock in eight weeks by three years.

• 48:25Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  So, you know, there's this guy who's like, this was, I might have read about this, who spent $2 million.

• 48:32Peter Diamandis?

  I know.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  And you know, like, you know, he got, he got five years, I got like 20 years. I think, I think we have the ability to really influence these things and then track what we're doing over time. So that's what's exciting to me. You can use intermediate biomarkers, you know, like inflammation markers, cholesterol, and those things which are helpful, and insulin levels, and hormone levels, and all this stuff. And I think that's important, but, but, you know, that's variable, and you don't really know what's happening to your epigenome with that. But you can now measure directly the epigenome, and that's what's so exciting.

• 49:03Peter Diamandis?

  It is an exciting time. I mean, there's this concept called longevity escape velocity, which you know of, right about in the book. I first heard it from. Curzwell and Aubrey to Gray.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:15Peter Diamandis?

  It's the idea that today, science is extending your life for a quarter, quarter of a year for every year of your life. And that it may be possible at some time in the future that science will extend your life for more than a year for every year of your life. So it becomes divergent. And I asked Ray when he thinks it's gonna be. I asked, I asked George Church when he thinks it's gonna be.

• 49:39Peter Diamandis?

  Do you know what they, what they said?

• 49:40Speaker 01

  I, I think, I think, I think Ray was like 10, 15 years.

• 49:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  I think George was kind of squishy about it.

• 49:46Peter Diamandis?

  He was about 15 to 20 years.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:48Peter Diamandis?

  Do you ever say, do you, do you believe we're gonna reach that point? Do you think that science can actually add meaningful decades onto our life?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, meaningful decades, healthy decades is the, is the key descriptor. But I, I do think that there's some things coming down the road that you talked about that, that are kind of weird and wacky things that are more sci-fi. They're not the basics that we're talking about that I think are, are saving effective. And that has to do with, with genetic manipulation, like the Yamanaka factors. And I think that, that stuff's really interesting to me. I mean, it's still not ready for prime time, but basically this is discovery by this guy Yamanaka from Japan, who won the Nobel Prize for understanding that these four transcription factors that seem to help embryonic cells differentiate into their mature cells. So how does your nose become a nose or your kidney become a kidney or your brain become a gray?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Like there's a thing, and then it stops. It doesn't just keep developing, right? And so if you can go back and somehow modify or insert these transcription factors into the body, and then have a switch externally that you turn them on. So let's say you're 50 and your hair's a little gray, your joints are good, your erections aren't so good, your muscle wasting a little bit. You go, oh, I'm gonna just take this thing and switch it on. I'm gonna turn back to 25. That, that's not out of the realm of possibility.

• 51:06Peter Diamandis?

  That's the, the holy grail.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  But it's, it's like, I think, you know, it has a lot more mice and other animals have to try and.

• 51:14Peter Diamandis?

  So let's be clear, there are the basics today. It is diet, it is exercise, it is sleep. It is mindset is important, right?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Huge.

• 51:24Peter Diamandis?

  Huge, right.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Huge.

• 51:25Peter Diamandis?

  You know, if, if, I think if you, you can will yourself to death and you can will yourself to life.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:30Peter Diamandis?

  And we've all seen examples about that.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  And one of the most exciting things that I've seen is the data on meaning and purpose. If you look at, if we cured heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, we might extend life by five to seven years. Like if we got rid of all of it from everywhere. And there was, and these are the number one and two killers.

• 51:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  If you have meaning and purpose in life, your life extension is seven years.

• 51:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  If you play tennis, it's X seven years too.

• 51:55Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, good. I'm, I'm, I'm playing once a week. And God knows I'm filled, as are you, with, with meaning and purpose. And that's what I teach. It's like the most important thing you can have is be, have a purpose driven life.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:06Peter Diamandis?

  But I do think there's also the idea of a longevity mindset. That, and I'm just curious if you have, how you think about that terminology of longevity mindset?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like I have it. I mean, I, I, most of my friends are now in their thirties and forties. And I do all the same things they do.

• 52:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, sure.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Bomb down the mountain at, you know, stupid miles an hour. Or ski or, you know, ride my bike or whatever. I, I feel like it's really an idea. The, the concept of, of slowing down, of aging's idea. Now, things happen, like, you know, I have more, I've had back injuries and I have more little aches and pains. But, but those, but I've used regenerative medicine to help me deal with those, which we can talk about. And I, I think for me, I'm, feel like I'm just beginning my life. I mean, honestly, Peter, I feel like, now I'm 63 and I finally figured my shit out. I figured out what it takes to be happy. I'm like, kind of not struggling and suffering and figuring out what, how to love properly.

• 53:03Peter Diamandis?

  When I saw you with your fiance, I was like, there is a happy man. And a happy couple, she was equally glowing. But it's, it's interesting, right? Because if you have that mindset.

• 53:16Peter Diamandis?

  It's the most exciting time ever to be alive.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  It is, yeah.

• 53:21Peter Diamandis?

  My dear friend Dan Sullivan says it's important to have a future that's bigger than your past.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a very important statement because most of us, you know, I can see it in some of my friends are like winding down. And I'm like, why are you winding down? I'm winding up.

• 53:36Peter Diamandis?

  I've had some people say they're bored. It's like, really? Oh, my God. Bored with what? Do you not realize the incredible world we're living into, this incredible video game that we're part of? So, you know, I think about, again, the basics, food, diet, sleep, exercise, mindset. The other thing I put on the list is not dying from something stupid, right? Wear your helmet when you're skiing, put on your seatbelt. You've been an advisor for Fountain Life, go and have yourself digitally uploaded every year. Look and see if there's anything going on because most of us are optimists about what's going inside our bodies. But we don't actually have an idea what's going on inside our bodies. By the time you feel something, it's too late.

• 54:17Peter Diamandis?

  Another stat we wrote about, Tony and I wrote about in Life Force, I'm curious your thinking on it because it feels barbaric. Is that the delay between there being a breakthrough and it showing up in your physician's office is like 17 years.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, yeah, it's terrible. That was from, I think, a Bill Friss article in the New England Journal years ago. And I, I agree. I mean, I think it may be even more. I mean, you know, I took Semmelweis, who basically was this Austrian physician who decided, you know, he's watching all these women give birth and seeing all the people who are, women who are taken care by doctors were dying of childbirth fever. But all the women who were taken care by midwives weren't. And he noticed the midwives washed their hands. And he was like, maybe we should wash our hands. And the doctors, the medical committee was, you know, up in arms. They thought this was just heresy. They banished him. They got rid of him. How could you ever imply that doctors be causing their patients harm? And turned out he was right. We have to wash our hands before surgery. You know, that took 50 years. So I think, I think we are unfortunately.

• 55:16Peter Diamandis?

  But why does it take so long? What is the mindset that is, that is inherent that stops this progression?

• 55:24Speaker 01

  I think, you know, Thomas Kuhn talked about this whole idea of normal science, which is in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And he talked about this term, the paradigm shift, and how hard it is to change paradigms from Newtonian physics to quantum physics, from, you know, kind of creation theory to, you know, evolution, from, you know, Galileo saying, hey, guys, the earth is not the center of the universe, and got put in jail for that. You know, like, it's really tough to change all ideas. And then, you know, my daughter's in medical school now, and they're learning good stuff, but it's still the old paradigm.

• 56:02Peter Diamandis?

  It's all sick care.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  It's like the old paradigm of disease-based paradigm. And now, with these hallmarks, it's an opportunity to go, wait a minute, this whole framework of disease is wrong. We cannot be studying diseases. We need to be studying mechanisms and causes, and then we need to be working on those. Because if we're just dealing with, basically dealing with the downstream effects of all these causes that we can just think about, we're just, like, people are, I'm gonna, let's find a drug for Alzheimer's. Good luck with that. Let's find a drug to cure heart disease. Good luck with that. We're better managing it, we're maybe reducing deaths, we're having better treatments. I mean, look at, look at this whole treatment for diabetes with Ozempic. This is like, makes me so crazy, Peter. Like, yes, these GLP-1 agonists are helpful, and if you, you know, help you lose weight and help if you're a really advanced diabetic, but I can take someone who's got a human

• 56:47Speaker 01

  globulin A of 11, and in a few, six weeks, get them to five with no drugs.

• 56:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  With food. If that's the best treatment, we should be using it.

• 56:54Peter Diamandis?

  I love this cartoon that we've all seen. On one side, there's a line of people, and the window says, you know, sign up for surgery. On the other side, there's a window with no one in line that says, you know, lifestyle change.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 57:11Peter Diamandis?

  It's like, we all want the pill or the, um...

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which is why people are taking rapamycin, metformin, and enamin, and all these compounds for longevity, but if you're not dealing with the basics, it's a waste of time.

• 57:21Peter Diamandis?

  Hey, everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. You know, I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world. Is the only real news out there worth consuming? I don't watch the crisis news network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity,

• 58:04Peter Diamandis?

  age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now, back to the episode. All right, so let's actually go to some of those longevity therapeutics because there are a number of them people may have read about, heard about, a number I'm using and doing. And I'm curious what your thinking is. So you listed some. Let's begin with mitformin.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Okay, so mitformin is a drug that was found in 1957. It's been used for diabetes forever. It helps with improving insulin sensitivity. It has some side effects, some GI side effects, which sometimes are temporary, but also some long-term mitochondrial issues. There's a large trial going on called the TAME trial, targeting aging with mitformin. And the idea is that if we can use this drug to optimize the AMPK function, AMPK, when it's properly activated, will induce autophagy, will help with DNA repair, will stimulate sort of two ends, will cause the improvement in glucose regulation, all these things we want to happen with aging. But does that mean it's the right treatment? You know, like that joke about the farm, the Vermont farmer, he says, how's your wife?

• 59:32Speaker 01

  He goes, compared to what? You know, so isn't it forming compared to nothing? Yeah, but is it better than lifestyle? I don't think so. And here's why. There was a big trial. It's hard to do randomized controlled trials in medicine and people with large amounts of people, you know, with lifestyle. It's just hard. But they did this trial called the diabetes prevention trial. Back in the nineties, when the food pyramid was big and we were told to eat six to eleven servings of bread, rice, cereal and pasta a day. And that was the best diet, which is a low-fat diet. So it was not the optimized diet for diabetes. But they took these prediabetics and they basically said, okay, you're gonna get lifestyle, or you're gonna get Metformin, or you're gonna get nothing. So nothing, you know, basically was whatever. And then Metformin reduced the risk to progression of diabetes by thirty-one percent.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Lifestyle was fifty-eight percent.

• 1:00:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  And that was, in my view, the wrong diet. And so if a crappy diet was work better than this drug, shouldn't we be like doubling down on the sugar stuff and the lifestyle stuff?

• 1:00:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Because i- i- is it gonna add, is it, if you optimize your insulin, your insulin level's under two and you're exercising and you're low on the car- carbohydrates and stuff, isn't Metformin gonna create added value? I don't know. I don't, I, my gut feeling is no. And so that's one I'm, I'm on a respectful pause with, and I don't recommend it. I'm, I'm, I'm waiting to hear what the TAME trial says, but I, I kinda have a, a more of a bias against it because of some of this data.

• 1:00:54Peter Diamandis?

  Do you, how do you come out on calorie restriction? Not severe, but limiting your calories per day. Uh, let's say your calories are coming from, uh, from high-quality protein and plants, um, and you're avoiding high glycemic index foods. Do you still think you need to limit your, your caloric intake?

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I met this guy once and he was from the Calorie Restriction Society and he wanted to live a long time. And I was like, hanging out with this guy, I'm like, so what do you have for breakfast? He's like, I have five pounds of celery. And I'm like, uh, no thanks. And I think, you know, the, the, the idea that we can restrict our calories to extend our life is a good one, but the question is what else happens? You know, what happens to your hormones? What happens to your muscle mass? What happens to your mood? What happens to your sex drive? What happens to a lot of things? And they did those biosphere experiments where they, where they showed.

• 1:01:45Peter Diamandis?

  I was there. I was, and my, my friends were in the biosphere.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they did the calorie restriction and they had improvements in their cholesterol, all these biomarkers, everything. But they also were not very happy and they were miserable and it was not great in many ways for their health. So I think it's a mixed bag. The real question is, how do we, how do we find the Goldilocks solution, which is how do we mimic or hack calorie restriction without actually starving ourselves? So it could be time restricted eating. It could be periodic fasting.

• 1:02:12Peter Diamandis?

  Have you tried the fasting mimicking diet, Prolon?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Prolon is great. And Prolon is a way to eat 800 calories a day for five days.

• 1:02:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it makes it very manageable.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Makes it very easy to do and the data is really impressive and Walter is doing great work on this. And I think it's just showing how when we over stimulate our, all of these pathways that are longevity switches by food, our bodies don't like it and it needs a break. So yes, whether you do fasting mimicking diet, or whether you, you don't eat for 24 hours once a week, or you do a three day fast once a quarter, like there's lots of ways to do it. But the easiest way is just to, you know, have something called breakfast, which means you're baking your fast, which means you don't eat for 12 to 14 hours every night. That, that's just a no brainer for everybody. And I think in terms of, you know, the, the amount, I don't think we should be overeating for sure. And

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  I think we need to be, you know, lean and muscular is the best strategy for longevity. And if you're gaining belly fat, that's, that's the death knell. I mean,

• 1:03:16Peter Diamandis?

  That's the indication that you're

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Peter Diamandis?

  Eating too much of the wrong thing.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Peter Diamandis?

  Let's go to rapamycin next.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  So rapamycin is, you know, this compound that was found in Rapa Nui, the Easter Island. And basically in the 60s, these scientists went and they scraped the stuff off the back of one of the statues that were delivered by aliens or something. I don't know why. And, and they found, oh, maybe this is going to be a good drug compound. It was kind of a shitty antifungal. And then they, they found it maybe has some immune modulating properties. So it's been used in transplant medicine. It's not an immune suppressive, but it, but it does, it does have benefits in reducing inflammation. And then people started researching around longevity and finding that it inhibits mTOR. In fact, this pathway mTOR, which already talks about longevity, means mammalian target of rapamycin. So literally it's named after this drug from Rapa Nui.

• 1:04:03Peter Diamandis?

  It's hilarious.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  It's great. And I think, you know, the animal studies are very promising. The mechanism is really interesting. So instead of calorie restriction, this is a drug that could induce calorie. A restriction without actually starving yourself. So it induces the benefits like autophagy. So I think taking it at night, there's different people experimenting with it, you know. I mean, I just talked to Deepak Chopra, he takes, you know, six milligrams once a week. There's people who take it two milligrams, three times a week for five weeks, eight weeks off. There's a million different regimens. We're all guessing.

• 1:04:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  We're all guessing.

• 1:04:34Peter Diamandis?

  It's all a giant experiment.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  It's all a giant experiment and depending on your adventurousness and your willing for risk tolerance. You know, you might be willing to try it. Maybe you want to try it. I try it.

• 1:04:43Peter Diamandis?

  I'm on six once a week.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's an interesting thing and it's, it's, uh, it kind of makes sense, but I, I wonder why six once a week? Why not more intermittent, shorter doses? What, you know, what, what actually are we kind of basing on? I think we need more data. We need more human study.

• 1:04:58Peter Diamandis?

  And the trials are just beginning now.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, I think we need to pour money into that and I, you know, I think there are, there are maybe other compounds that have modulating effects that inhibit mTOR and there are a lot in the plant kingdom. So there are a lot of compounds in the plant kingdom that do this as well.

• 1:05:12Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So we've covered Metformin and Raptamycin. Uh, let's go next to, uh, to exogenous stem cells.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:05:20Peter Diamandis?

  So, uh, you know, one of the things that is very true when, you know, when we're born in, in utero, uh, we are basically the, the placenta is generating stem cells and populating your body and all of the tissues differentiating. When you're born, you have the highest percentage of stem cells in your body that you have. And then as you grow older, your stem cell population is all downhill. In fact, for those wondering, you know, it's pretty clear that after your mid to late twenties, it's downhill across almost all systems. Your thymus, your stem cell populations, your growth hormone, everything. So we really were designed to live till age 30 to get our, uh, our children up to reproductive age.

• 1:06:03Peter Diamandis?

  And then, yeah, anyway, but having said that, our stem cell populations drop by a hundred to a thousand fold uh, as we get older and the idea is could we supplement it? To regenerate repair.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there are, there are interesting, some interesting early data on certain therapies that can induce stem cell production, whether it's hyperbaric oxygen therapy or ozone therapy. So there are exogenous treatments that without getting a stem cell transplant, which is stupidly expensive, you could, you could actually stimulate your own. And there may be more and more data on how we do that through lifestyle. And I think there's some really interesting things around how we can make that happen. I do, I do think that, that, you know, there are intermediate steps like exosomes, which may be the active components in stem cells that are much cheaper, that are easily available. They don't, you don't have to suck your bone marrow to your fat cells and you don't have to like go to Panama to do it. And so I think those are.

• 1:07:02Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, is this going to be like, you know, leeches were, you know, back in the old days, like, do you think they, they really used to do that? Oh, my God, that's great.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Maybe, yeah, you know, I don't know. I think, I think that the exosomes are interesting. I've had a few experiences with exosomes. One was, I had colitis from getting C. diff, which is caused by a bacteria that I got after taking antibiotic for a root canal that was bad. And I was a mess. And then I got C. diff and then I got severe ulcerative colitis afterwards. And through a different, my usual tricks weren't working and then I tried exosomes. You okay?

• 1:07:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Okay. I tried my usual tricks and then I tried exosomes and it literally sort of got rid of it and.

• 1:07:47Peter Diamandis?

  This is IV exosomes?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Intravenous exosomes.

• 1:07:50Peter Diamandis?

  So exosomes for everybody is the product that comes out of a stem cell. A stem cell is, is a little, think of it as a, a factory of growth factors and.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Healing factors, repair factors, regenerative factors, like.

• 1:08:03Peter Diamandis?

  RNA, micro RNAs, and it just pumps it out in little vacuoles of materials.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, think of it like, think of like.

• 1:08:11Peter Diamandis?

  Messengers.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Think of like, you know, think of like the, the, the, the stem cells as like a big aircraft carrier and then they bring in all the, like the special forces and then they, the special forces go out and do all the work.

• 1:08:21Peter Diamandis?

  Or the FedEx truck and the FedEx packages coming out.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Exactly, whatever. You want to call it exactly and and exosomes it's great because you can basically take the placenta. You make sure it's all clean, no disease or anything, and you can culture the lab, you can grow the stem cells in there. And then you can extract the exosomes and you can get billions and billions and billions. There's no limit to the amount you can get. Another thing I had with exosomes was when I had a back issue and had back surgery that went bad and I was having tons of inflammation in my spine because I had bleeding in my spine, bad news. And my friend Matt Cook injected thirty cc's of exosomes right up my spinal cord. And it was amazing. The pain went away immediately. And then I had COVID. And of course, these are all anecdotal, but and I've used these with patients as well and seen the results.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  And I had severe brain fog, depression, like I don't get depressed. I'm like, wow, now I get why people get depressed like, you know, I had depression in my time from like divorce or things like that, but like I just felt like physiologically depressed. And inflamed and COVID affects the brain and causes tons of inflammation in the brain. And so I kind of got a shipment to my house and I gave myself an IV because I'm a doctor. And it was like boom, the lights turned on and my brain fog went away, my brain came back. So I think they have a real value and

• 1:09:38Peter Diamandis?

  And again, this is the early, one of my companies that, you know, Cylarity, Bob Hury. We are producing placental derived stem cells and exosomes and just now entering the scientific studies to look at. Can we prove the impact it has?

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Peter Diamandis?

  You know, you have a choice of where you get your stem cells from. You can either get it from your own fat, your own bone marrow. Or you can get it from a placenta or umbilical cord in the afterbirth. But end of the day, that's getting it from a placenta or from a umbilical cord is not legal in the United States because the science isn't there. So right now, when I hear someone's looking for stem cell therapies. I'm sending them down to Costa Rica to a genetic medicine institute down, down there with with Vince G and Papa.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:25Peter Diamandis?

  And but the science will

• 1:10:29Peter Diamandis?

  Will bear out the data over the next few years, hopefully within this decade, so we can have it available domestically safely with the science behind it.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's pretty exciting and it's being used in orthopedic medicine a lot. It's being used by athletes.

• 1:10:45Peter Diamandis?

  I know when I had, I had a reconstruction of my right shoulder and my left shoulder about 10 years apart, my left shoulder, after I had done the reconstruction, I had two different exosome injections and it healed so much faster.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  So fast, right? Yeah. I mean, I had back pain for 30 years after surgery when I was 30 and, you know, Matt put all this stuff in my placental matrix with healing factors and exosomes and I'm like sitting here really with no pain, which I couldn't even sit before without being, I managed it, I just dealt with it, I massaged, I yoga'd and everything, but it's like now, I was sort of shocked to believe that this field of regenerative medicine has these solutions that, you know, most orthopedic doctors don't know about or scoff at, but when I was told I needed back surgery and I needed to have like metal rods put in and a whole spinal fusion and reconstruction, I'd be in bed for a year and I'm like, you know, I just got back from skiing in Switzerland, you know, going full blast down the mountain, you know,

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  so I, I didn't do that.

• 1:11:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, very good. I mean, right now, one of the things that I'm proud of that we're doing at Fountain Life is we're searching the world for anything that sounds promising and then vetting it to identify, is it safe? Is it low risk? Is it high efficacy? And then trying to make that available to our members and so hopefully it will be, the exosomes are available, the stem cells are not yet domestically.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Peter Diamandis?

  A few other things, total plasma exchange, TPE.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  This is fascinating and.

• 1:12:19Peter Diamandis?

  Oil changes.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Somebody might have heard of like, you know, that's right, that TV show Silicon Valley and they had this one episode called Blood Boy.

• 1:12:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I love that.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Where this Silicon Valley entrepreneur was like getting some young guy and getting his blood and making him younger, you know, Maltz at the Tongue used to take the blood of young Red Army soldiers and transfuse it into himself for longevity, you know, so, but, but there's this bunch of studies that were done on animals that are called parabiosis. And essentially what they did was they took old mice and young mice and they kind of wired their circulations together and they watched what happened and the old mice became young.

• 1:12:52Peter Diamandis?

  And the young mice became old.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the question was, what was it? Was it the old mice's blood that was bad, that was? You know, they were giving to the young like, well, what was going on? So they kind of reverse engineered the study a little bit and, and they found that if they just did plasma cleaning of the old mice, that they would get the same longevity benefits. Now plasma freezes is a medical treatment that's been around for a long, long time. It's used in autoimmune diseases. It's used in various neurologic conditions. It's, it's really a well-established medical treatment, but it's being explored as a longevity therapy and, and can be done in, in ways that aren't as aggressive. Like you don't have to take your whole plasma out, but you can take a liter or two out. Essentially the idea is you're filtering your blood. You're filtering out all these old proteins and all these

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  inflammatory compounds and who knows what else in there. And

• 1:13:41Peter Diamandis?

  Whatever you're putting there.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  And you either throw back some albumin, which is going to reconstitute your blood.

• 1:13:45Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way, your plasma is mostly this protein albumin and some saline and some

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's all this other gunk in there that seems that we get rid of.

• 1:13:53Peter Diamandis?

  Oil change.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  And I, I'll tell you another story. I, I had COVID second time and I, it was kind of rougher than the first and I had a terrible post-COVID syndrome of like arthritis. So I developed, my hand blew up and I was really swollen and painful. I couldn't make a fist and I felt like crap. Again, I went to see Matt Cook and he got this plasma freezes and they oxygenated the blood when it went in.

• 1:14:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  And literally the next day I was good as new. My hand was normal, had full energy and I went and like

• 1:14:22Peter Diamandis?

  Good old Matt. I love Matt Cook. He's awesome.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm like, God, this stuff is amazing. So I, I mean, honestly, I, if I had my perfect world, I'd get like a plasma freezes once a month. I do ozone every month. I do hyperbarics once a year for 30, 40 treatments. I mean, I would, I kind of

• 1:14:37Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Let's talk, let's go to the hyperbarics next. So I, all of the experiments in Israel that show if you're, uh, if you're spending like three hours a day for how many days, like

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  What they did was they took, uh, people who, who were about, I think it was 60 people or so. They gave them, uh, I think, uh, 60 to 90 minute treatment at about two atmospheres.

• 1:14:57Peter Diamandis?

  Of a hundred percent oxygen?

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Hundred percent oxygen, but actually the protocol was kind of questionable because they I know somebody who knows the Israeli scientists and he was telling me what they did and they basically would would kind of raise and lower the pressure, the oxygenation. So it was not just steady, but basically the idea is you go in this pressure chamber that they use for scuba divers who, you know, come up too fast and it hyperoxygenates your tissues. Now it's being used in wound repair. People can't heal a wound or a diabetic ulcer.

• 1:15:28Peter Diamandis?

  Strokes.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  And I've had incredible results in stroke patients, although it's not really approved for that, but but it's being researched, used for autism, for Alzheimer's, for all kinds of stuff, Lyme disease. And when you hyperoxygenate the body and you do it under pressure, it seems to be very healing for a lot of things. And so what they do is they measured telomeres and they measured zombie cells. And it had a bigger impact on lengthening telomeres and killing zombie cells than any other known treatment. So I think it's very promising.

• 1:16:00Peter Diamandis?

  I just was with in Dubai with a gentleman who's the chairman of DP World and has a hyperbaric chamber facility there. And he's, I try and remember exactly the numbers, but you have to go.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Was this Aviv?

• 1:16:16Peter Diamandis?

  No, it, the facility name, it might, it might have, it might have been.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  It's based on this Israeli guy's work.

• 1:16:23Peter Diamandis?

  It's based on the Israeli.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is called Aviv and they have one in Dubai and one in Florida.

• 1:16:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, exactly. That's right. And so I gather you go five days a week for like six weeks for like.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  It's 90 sessions. It's 90 days over three months. You do like.

• 1:16:39Peter Diamandis?

  And so you're in, you're in there for like, how long a procession?

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  An hour, an hour and a half.

• 1:16:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's a lot of time.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  It's a lot of time.

• 1:16:46Peter Diamandis?

  It's a lot of time. I mean, and you're not sitting there sleeping or reading or working.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  No, you could, they actually have masks and you can like read and you can.

• 1:16:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, but you're supposed to be like actually doing.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Mental exercises.

• 1:16:57Peter Diamandis?

  Mental exercises to to drive things, right? So you're you're assigned work while you're in there. And what he was saying apparently was that it brings your neuronal oxygenation level expectations up to a point that when you're outside of the hyperbaric chambers, your brain is, is, is creating more, a larger vascular supply. Do you know what the cause of it is?

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Why has more from the mechanism hyperbarics?

• 1:17:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  Brain exercises.

• 1:17:29Peter Diamandis?

  No, no, I'm just, one of the, one of the concerns I had is, you know, hyperoxygenation is also bad for you.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:36Peter Diamandis?

  It's, I mean, it's oxidative stress on your, on your body.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Peter Diamandis?

  So I, I feel like the, like the, uh, we may, haven't heard the full story.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think that's a very important point you bring up because in our minds, we think antioxidants, health, longevity, oxidation, bad, right? And I think it depends on how much and when and with what. So, so yes, you're getting potentially an increase in oxidative stress, but your body, in order to heal stuff and kill stuff, has its own oxidative stress mechanisms. When your white blood cells want to kill something, they make hydrogen peroxide. They make ozone, like literally. And so we have our own, like, kind of chemical warfare.

• 1:18:17Peter Diamandis?

  Weapon systems, yeah.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, these, these help us stay healthy and young and kill all kinds of infections. So infections are really not happy about the high oxygen. A lot of low-grade infections, we can have a chronic inflammation, whether viruses or whether, you have HSV1, which is herpes in the brain for dementia. So I think there's something about the, the infection rate. I also think that the, the, um, the dose and the length of time matters, right? If you're at high, 100% oxygen for a long time, it's super dangerous.

• 1:18:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  But if you have a pulsed amount for a short time, it kicks in the body's own healing system. And this is, I wanted to talk about hormesis. We have a few minutes left, but I think it's such a, this is, this is a hormetic therapy. So basically, the idea of hormesis is what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And so when, when we now live in this perfectly regulated environment, it's 68 degrees, we never have to deal with any stresses, we always have food. And so we don't, we're not starving, we're not, we're not to use our bodies, which is a stress. We don't have to run from tigers anymore. We, we, we know we, we are, have, uh.

• 1:19:19Peter Diamandis?

  It's a cush lifestyle.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Cush lifestyle. And so the truth is, as human beings, we, we are, learn to live in tough environments and we have great systems for dealing with that. So. Hormesis is like cold therapy, or you know, saunas, or cold plunges, or ozone, or hyperbaric oxygen, or exercise, or calorie restriction, or time restricted eating. These are all different forms of hormesis. Low oxygen states, hypoxia states, which are really a whole nother interesting therapy for longevity. And so we have all these potential tools to use, and I try to incorporate them as much as I can. Exercise, obviously, time restricted eating is easy. I do hot and cold therapies whenever I can. I did hot yoga yesterday, like, and it was like, really hot.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  But I felt so good after.

• 1:20:06Peter Diamandis?

  I take a cold shower every morning, and it's painful at first, and then I get used to it.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, cold shower is great.

• 1:20:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but ice bath is just tough for me right now.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, it's better if you go from sauna to cold plunge, it's better. But I think, I think these, these, you know, Wim Hof does these whole training programs, and a lot, you know, breath, breath work, these are different kinds of hormetic therapies. And we can induce these in our modern lifestyle in a way that activate these ancient healing systems. So at the bottom line, the message here is that we're doing everything to screw up our ancient healing systems. There's so much we can do to activate our body's own innate healing, longevity, repair, and healing systems.

• 1:20:44Peter Diamandis?

  There's one last on the list for me, it's senolytic medicine. So you talked about, you know, the notion that we have these zombie cells, grouchy old men cells, you know, cells, there's something called the Haflich limit, as you know, that cells will replicate a certain number of times, and then they should have the decency to die.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:01Peter Diamandis?

  Sometimes they become cancer, or sometimes they stick around and pump out inflammatory. And there are a variety of these senolytics that are meant to kill these senile cells.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Peter Diamandis?

  You mentioned quercetin and dastinab as, as one, there are others. Do you use any of them?

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, I, I take fysetin, I take quercetin, I take extract of Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which has all 132 different phytochemicals and bioflavonoids, quercetin, roots, and aspirin, all these compounds that...

• 1:21:32Peter Diamandis?

  How many pills a day do you take?

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, it's a good handful.

• 1:21:37Peter Diamandis?

  I think I'm around six.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  It's not a bowl full, but it's a handful.

• 1:21:41Peter Diamandis?

  I remember talking to Ray Kurzweil's wife, and she said, "Yeah, Ray has a superpower, pill taking."

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm good, I can like, I mean, I'll take one at a time, if I had to do that, I would.

• 1:21:50Peter Diamandis?

  No, I take a whole bag full, yes, I'm up to about 60 right now, which is crazy. So...

• 1:21:57Peter Diamandis?

  A lot. And I think to summarize, you know, what you've been preaching is there's certain things that you can do that are basic and are really going back to what it is to live a healthy lifestyle.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, you know, we talked about a lot about a lot of crazy esoteric stuff that is coming down the pike. But the truth is, the 80/20 on this is stuff that is free, accessible. It's literally understanding how your bodies were designed and working with them, and basically getting rid of the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff. And that's really why I wrote Young Forever, was a roadmap. It's not, you know, you know, deep dives into all the science, although the science is there. It's really about taking the science and, and creating an interpretive map for people to design their lives and include what they like and leave what they don't, but build these practices on a daily level that keep you feeling better and younger longer. I mean, my goal is to die young as late as possible.

• 1:22:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I love that. I love that. Let me ask you for a summation here at the end. So, those of you who are gonna go out there and buy Young Forever, please do. Those of you who are going to eventually go and buy it, please do. But in the meantime, all right, buddy, what's, what's your summation here? What do you remember?

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  I think the key thing to remember is that, is that it's not that hard. That, based on the science we have now, we understand the basic causes of disease and aging. We understand the basic ingredients for health, the science of creating health, and that Young Forever is simply a roadmap that guides you through how your body works that you were never given. It's like the owner's manual. And, you know, it's like, you know, your car, you don't know all the features, you don't have to use it, all the things. But the basic stuff to get around, navigate, and do what you gotta do, you gotta learn how to do. And, and it maps out what to eat, how to exercise, how to hack your sleep, how to discharge stress, how to deal with trauma, what the latest and, you know, most sort of useful

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  nutraceuticals are and supplements are, what's coming down the pike, the hormesis therapies that are easy to use. So it's, it's really a practical user's guide to your body.

• 1:24:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. That's great. Where can people find you?

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Anywhere and everywhere.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Just go to all the social medias, Dr. Mark Hyman, that's D R Mark Hyman. My website's drhyman.com. It won't be hard to find me.

• 1:24:19Peter Diamandis?

  All right, buddy. Thank you so much for what you do. It's a pleasure to call you a friend. And thanks for joining me on Moon Shots and Mindsets.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  My pleasure. It's great. Let's do it again. I feel like we just scratched the surface.

• 1:24:29Peter Diamandis?

  We did. We've got another five or six years of work to report back on soon. Take care.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

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