The Mindset Secrets Of Elite Performers - Peter Diamandis

Peter Diamandis is an engineer, physician, founder of the X Prize Foundation and cofounder of Singularity University. If you got rid of Elon Musk's money, or Steve Jobs' factories, they would likely still end up in a successful place because of their mindset. Peter has incubated some of the fastest growing and most innovative CEOs, businesses and performers and developed a number of rules around how to optimise your mental state. Expect to learn the practises that Peter teaches his students to maximise their mindset's effectiveness, the most important principles of developing a big vision for life, how to overcome negativity and limiting beliefs, whether Peter believes humans are going to be able to live to 120 soon, what's happening with space tourism and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Peter's website - https://www.diamandis.com/ Follow Peter on Twitter - https://twitter.com/PeterDiamandis Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #peterdiamandis #mindset #longevity - 00:00 Intro 01:59 Peter’s Journey to Where He Is Now 08:48 How Technology Will Help Us to Love Life 13:13 The Source of our Culture of Cynicism 19:40 Steps to Having an Abundance Mindset 26:58 How Our Bodies Are Dealing With Complex Lives 40:54 Experience with Stem Cell Treatment 43:58 Peter’s Supplement Routine 47:06 Should We Eat Less Red Meat? 54:38 Biggest Tips for Longevity 56:20 Where to Find Peter - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What was the most important thing in making Steve Jobs and Elon Musk? What made them successful? Was it the money they had, the technology they had, the network they had? Or was it their mindset? What was the most important thing? I think most people would agree it's their mindset. You take away everything, but you retain their mindset. They would regain some level of their success. And so if your mindset is the most important thing you have, what mindset do you have? What mindset do you want? And how are you going to shape it? Most of us get a mindset that we inherit from our parents, that we inherit from the people we hang out with. But we don't take the time to shape our active mindset.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  We were talking just before. I ask all of the guests to count to five so that I can sound check the recording to make sure that everything's working okay. And you counted down from five. Am I right in thinking that there was a period in the past, and it may still be the same now, where they missed the word five in a countdown? Because five sounded too much like fire when it was missiles. So they would go seven, six, four, three, two, one, fire.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  You know, I think that's a great myth to start.

• 1:09Chris Williamson?

  Is it bullshit? Am I talking out of my ass?

• 1:12Speaker 00

  I think if people knew to expect a five after a six, they'd hear a five and not a fire. And they're probably waiting for like, you know, launch versus fire. Anyway, yeah, but I am a space cadet. And counting down to zero, to ignition, is a lot more fun than counting up. Because you count up, you know, it's forever. You get to infinity eventually.

• 1:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, that's the interesting thing when you think about, is it Bill Ackman? He's that guy that does loads of short selling, right?

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:42Chris Williamson?

  The reverse is if you're a short seller, you have a limited amount of money that you can make. If you're going long, then the sky is the limit, depending on what the company is.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  And the bottom is the limit, too.

• 1:54Chris Williamson?

  That's also true. You do have, there is a limited amount of money that you could lose. Okay, so you have a very eclectic history when it comes to the things that you've done.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  That's a nicer way to put it, sure.

• 2:04Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah. Meandering would be another way, perhaps. How would you describe, or how do you describe your background? Someone says, so Peter, tell me, tell me sort of your story. How did you get to the point that you're at? What's the elevator pitch?

• 2:17Speaker 00

  The elevator pitch, both parents born in Greece, on the island of Lesbos, came here. I was born in New York, expected to become a physician. I was born in the 60s and two things happened in the 60s. Number one was the Apollo program and the Apollo program showed us what was possible today. And then there was that scientific documentary called Star Trek that showed us where humanity was going. And between Apollo and Star Trek, I got the space bug very, very hard. And my parents wanted me to become a doctor and I said, yes, mom, yes, dad, I'm going to be an astronaut. And I ended up pursuing both.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  So went to MIT, really studying molecular genetics pre-med. But nights and weekends and the afternoons, I was doing aerospace engineering. Went to Harvard for medical school, promised to complete medical school. You know, got my diploma, sent it to my mom, my dad. I went back to MIT, did aerospace engineering. And throughout all of that, I was an entrepreneur. And I realized for me that I loved starting stuff. I loved creating companies. I thought, I think of companies as the means by which you can impact the world.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  You know, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs are individuals that find big juicy problems and solve them. And my first group ever was a college nonprofit called SED, Students for Exploration and Development in Space. It grew into an international organization. I met Jeff Bezos through that. He was the president of the Princeton chapter. And then started a space university, International Space University, and then went on to start a company called Zero G that does weightless parabolic flights, and then the first X Prize for private spaceflight. And so I was a space cadet for the first 20 years, really pursuing space. I had a rocket company, a satellite company.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  And that was the first 20 years of my entrepreneurial life. I then read a book by Ray Kurzweil called The Singularity is Near, and damn if it didn't make a right-hand turn in my life. So Ray's a dear friend, he's a mentor, he's a collaborator. We started companies together. And Ray wrote this book and talked about how exponential technologies, computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, AR, VR, blockchain, nanotechnology, how all of these technologies are going to literally transform everything. And it really just massively turned me on as to the future.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  And I made a shift from space to really, how do you use these exponential technologies to take on the world's biggest problems? X Prize went from a single prize for private spaceflight to a prize on solving the world's biggest problems. Ray and I co-founded Singularity University. That was really how do you, you know, teaching entrepreneurs and leaders how to impact billion-person problems. And that was my next, you know, 10, 15 years. And then the last decade, I'm still continuing those things. I'm not as involved in space. I'll go back to space, but only when I've got a few hundred million dollars in my pocket that I can really invest in this, because space is not a poor man's game.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  But the last decade has been really focused on longevity, on health span. How do you add 10, 20, 30 healthy years on your life? So Very briefly, I've started about six or seven health and biotech companies. Have a half a billion dollar venture fund that's investing in two thirds in biotech and longevity, one third in exponential tech, written a number of books. And that in four minutes or less is a very quick summary.

• 6:24Chris Williamson?

  What do all of those projects have in common?

• 6:26Speaker 00

  My passions. I am driven, I am a passion driven individual. I do not do anything unless it's what wakes me up at, you know, five thirty in the morning. So my passion of, it's, it's grand challenges. It's like, there is no problem we cannot solve, right? We can open the space frontier. The space frontier is the ultimate destiny of humanity. Whatever we evolve to a thousand years from now, you know, we're going to look back at this moment in time when the human race moved off the planet irreversibly. Exponential technology is solving billion person problems. I'm, I believe there is no problem we cannot solve. Right?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  I really fundamentally believe that, that we have the ability to uplift every man, woman and child on the planet and that we will. Technology is the force that takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant. I mean, you talk plenty of examples there. And then the biggest challenge is, and the biggest benefit, there is no greater benefit than giving someone decades of healthy lifespan. All right. There was a study done at Harvard, London School of Business in Oxford that said, if you add one healthy year to the global population, it's worth thirty eight trillion dollars, the global economy. It's massive. So that stuff is all driven by what I, I teach, something called finding your massive transformative

• 7:52Speaker 00

  purpose, your MTP. And I teach this to all the CEOs I mentor. I, I run an abundance three sixty program, which is a year round program. For three hundred and sixty entrepreneurs, CEOs and about twenty five hundred entrepreneurs online. Anyway, finding your MTP that wakes you up and keeps you going, because all this stuff is hard. It's really hard. And unless it's driven by an emotional energy that's your calling in life, you're going to give up before you get there.

• 8:25Chris Williamson?

  There needs to be a reason for you to put up with it being hard. It's going to be difficult. Things are going to get in the way. And purpose, meaning a sense of existential connection between you and what you're doing, is a significantly better motivator than a Jocko Willink motivational video, or some loud rock music, or enough caffeine, or just grit and determination, or whatever it is that you end up relying on. I love the idea of using, are you fired up when you wake up in the morning, as the proxy for are you doing something that you care about? Because it's the easiest heuristic. When you wake up in the morning, are you excited about the day that you have in front of you? Or even if the day is going to start, even if it's back to back meetings and whatever else, is

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  it still, is it still cool? Is it still fun, what you're doing? Do you feel like you're connected to it?

• 9:15Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. And, and it's, I think if you don't have that in your life, your job is to find it. Right? That's ultimately what every person can have. And I think that technologies that are coming online today are able to help you because they can augment you. You may not have had the education in school to pursue the dream that you want, but you know, you can use eventually an AI co-pilot to enable you to do that.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  You know, we're gonna move towards a world in which the stuff that is dull, dangerous, or dirty that people don't want to do will be done by robots and by AI algorithms and so forth. But those who truly, you know, want to be creatives, want to be entrepreneurs, want to have a dream, you know, what did you want to do as a kid before the world told you you couldn't do it? I mean, that's truly magical. You know, Chris, you and I are lucky. We are doing what we love. A lot of parts of the world, they don't have that luxury, you know, they're doing what's possible to put food on their table or get insurance for their family. And, and we're gonna, we're gonna be transforming that.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  That's part of the process of uplifting humanity.

• 10:43Chris Williamson?

  So you're hoping that through technology you can liberate people from doing things that they have to do to allowing them to do things that they want to do?

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so one of the concepts, I wrote my first book with Steven Kotler in 2012 called

• 10:56Chris Williamson?

  Good friend, good, really, really cool guy.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's brilliant. You know, the book is called Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. And I called Steven, I had, Steven had written about me when I was running the X Prize Foundation. And he did a Wired and a GQ article, and I remember thinking, this guy writes really well, I love his writing. And I called him up and I said, will you give me writing lessons? So I took writing lessons from Steven and then I said, I really want to do a book one of these days. So I called him up, I was at Singularity University, it's our second year, and the idea of abundance, that there's nothing truly scarce in the world. What do I mean by that? You know, people talk about water wars and water scarcity, but the reality is, there's water everywhere.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  We live on a water planet, right? We're a blue-green planet, two-thirds of our surface is covered by water. The challenge is to, you know, 97.5% is salt. Two percent is ice and we fight over a half a percent of the fresh water on the planet. But water's there, it's just not in a usable form. And technology, we're getting ready to launch a hundred million dollar, uh, energy efficient desalination prize, right? We did a atmospheric, uh, water extraction prize to pull water out of the atmosphere. Um, so there are technologies that can make water abundant everywhere. You know, energy, we used to kill whales on the ocean to get whale oil to light our nights to read.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Then we ravaged mountainsides for coal, then we drilled kilometers into the ocean for oil and, and natural gas. Um, but the earth is covered in eight thousand times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species. The energy is there, just not in a usable form. And so we see this over and over and over again. And the idea is technology takes, um, takes, uh, what's scarce and turns it into abundance over and over again, right? Abundant access to information on Google, abundant communication on our cellular networks. And so I don't think there's anything truly scarce. And, uh, and part of my mission is to help people see that abundance mindset.

• 13:11Chris Williamson?

  Michael Malice is a cultural commentator, podcaster, writer. He's just released a book called The White Pill, and I sat down with him to talk about that this week. He is railing at the moment against a culture of cynicism, as he calls it. People that tell you that this isn't going to get better, it can't get better, things have always been this way, the bad people are always going to win. Now, he's done it in a slightly different way. Um, he describes in gruesome detail for 300 pages, all of the worst crimes of Soviet era Russia, of the Ukraine, what happened in Romania, famine, prisons, gulags, abuse, nepotism, everything.

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  And then he rounds out the book by saying, and look what happened. The bad people didn't win in the end. The Berlin Wall fell essentially overnight. And he continues to load up many, many more examples like that. And yet, there is still a pervasive culture of cynicism, I think.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  There is. I have some, I have a, I know who does it.

• 14:17Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Who causes that? It's the news media. It's, it's what I call the crisis news network. You know, CNN or I don't know a good acronym for Fox. So the reality is our brains evolved to look for bad news. Right? Because 100,000 years ago, a squiggle on the ground wasn't a stick. It was a snake or rustle in the leaves wasn't, you know, the wind. It was a, you know, a lion. You were dead if you missed that. So we evolved an ancient piece of our temporal lobe of our brain called the amygdala, which is the first place all of our sensory input, eyes, ears, touch and so forth go. And your amygdala puts you on red alert if it senses any potential danger.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  And because of that, we pay 10 times more attention to negative news and positive news. And because what's the news media's business? It's to deliver their advertisers to our eyeballs. And so we pay 10 times more attention to negative news and positive news. And so that's what they feed us constantly. We see every murder in our living room over and over and over and over again. Every crooked politician, every problem on the planet. And I'm not saying it isn't true. I'm saying it is disproportionately 10 to one negative. There's so many amazing things going on in the world that we never hear about, never see.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  And so I, you could not pay me enough money to watch the news.

• 15:48Chris Williamson?

  It's strange when you look at social media and it seems like a state reinforcement, a mainstream media reinforcement army that is packed with gullible volunteers, people who choose to self-generate their own cynical stories and put them out there. Now, the first mover may have been originally that mainstream media was that I have an amazing study that I think you'll love. So the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2020 Boston Marathon bombing, there was a study done on that compared two cohorts of people. The first cohort were runners who were in the actual race and the second cohort were people who had consumed six or more hours

• 16:32Chris Williamson?

  of news media about the race. The people that consumed the six or more hours of news media showed greater signs of PTSD and emotional trauma than the ones who were literally there and actually involved.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so, listen, if you're listening to this, consider buying back 10, 20 hours of your week by shutting off the TV. Don't read the newspaper. Set a few Google alerts for the things that are important to you. If something's really going on in the world and you need to know about, believe me, your friends will tell you. Take back control. Do not let some editor in some newsroom who's showing you every murder over and over again with this dystopian mindset ruin your day. So one of the things I teach, right, and I'm really passionate about this, is your mindset is everything, right? So I teach this

• 17:24Speaker 00

  at Abundance 360. I have programs going on right now for free to help coach people on mindsets. If I said to you, what was the most important thing in making Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and, you know, Mahatma Gandhi, whoever your leader that you, I think is amazing, what made them successful? Was it the money they had, the technology they had, the network they had, or was it their mindset? What was the most important thing? I think most people would agree it's their mindset. You take away everything, but you retain their mindset, they would regain some level of their success. And so if your mindset is the most important thing you have. What mindset do you have? Where did you get it from?

• 18:09Speaker 00

  What mindset do you want? And how are you going to shape it? Right? Most of us get a mindset that we inherit from our parents, that we inherit from the people we hang out with. But we don't take the time to shape our active mindset. And I think this is a real challenge. You know, so what I teach is I focus in on five mindsets. An abundance mindset, which shifts everything. If you see abundance everywhere versus scarcity, you're much more likely to be partnering with people and giving away and getting return. An exponential mindset, understanding how fast exponential tech is moving and understanding that we can transform an entire industry,

• 18:53Speaker 00

  not in 20 years or 10 years, but in five years. I focus on a longevity mindset, that we're going to be able to add 10, 20, 30 healthy years in our lives. And during that time, science is doing more to extend our life beyond that. And it's worth investing in your health today to be able to get ready for those extensions. And then a moonshot mindset, where you really give yourself permission to go 10 times bigger, where everyone else is going 10%. And finally, a curiosity mindset, which feeds all of these things. So I think your mindset, I guard my mindset. I guard it by what I watch, what I read, who I hang out with.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  And it's, I think it's one of the most important things for entrepreneurs today.

• 19:40Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to applying this, to actually doing something in terms of practices, it's all well and good talking about mindset. You know, just see the abundance in your life. Stop watching the media. These are ingrained habits. And not only are these ingrained habits, they're ingrained habits that are largely invisible to us. I know if there's a cookie there, I can observe my hand go toward it and the cookie go toward my mouth and me. Eat it and then feel ashamed about myself, right? Whereas when it comes to mindset, it's so much more ephemeral and wishy washy and invisible to us. It doesn't galvanize us in the same sort of a way. Someone listens, they say, abundance mindset sounds fantastic. I want to step up. I want to make a change.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:20Chris Williamson?

  What are the steps that make the biggest difference?

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. So here's an interesting way to think about it. If, unless you've been living under a rock, you've been seeing the rise of GPT-3 and Chat GPT and all of these neural net AI systems. And so it turns out that our brain is a neural net, right? And the same way that you train an AI, an AI neural net, you show it in very famous examples that Google did, you show it cat video after cat video after cat video, and it begins to recognize what a cat is. And it's showing in a neural net data sets, and those data sets train the neural net.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  And our brain is a neural net. So if you are watching, I'll use my favorite example again, if you're watching the Crisis News Network over and over and over again, your brain is going to be wired in a sense of PTSD. It's going to be wired of all of this to expect negativism. You're going to see something and it'll scare you, even though it may not be scary, right? You hear the rustle in the leaves and it's, it's the wind, but you think it's someone, you know, with a sniper rifle. And so it's training your neural net by what you read, what you watch, and who you hang out with, right? It's all the data you're letting in. It's how do you train yourself?

• 21:52Speaker 00

  And depending on how your neural net is trained, again, the podcast you listen to, like where we are here, and it's when you have

• 22:06Speaker 00

  An opportunity, a conversation, you can color it negative or positive. And that is a default mechanism based upon your mindsets. So I actually have a 30 day mindset bootcamp that's free. You can Google 30 day mindset bootcamp or go to diamandis.com. You can find it there and it's step by step by step. It's my job when I'm teaching this is to give you undeniable overwhelming evidence of the extraordinary world and how it's getting better and better and better on every

• 22:45Speaker 00

  single level to counter the dystopian news and then to recommend to you, you know, read, you know, books, listen to podcasts, take in information that is going to shape your mind. So when I was starting the International Space University, I'll never forget, my co-founder, Todd Hawley, were in the same same room at a desk opposite each other. And as a joke, he put up Murphy's Law behind him. And so facing my desk and Murphy's Law is if anything can go wrong, it will. And I'm like, I hate that. I kept on just like, just take it down and he wouldn't just to bug me.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  And so I had a whiteboard, I put on it, if anything can go wrong, fix it to hell with Murphy. Right? And that's a flip of that mindset. And then I ended up creating 32 different Peter's Laws in that, you know, when given a choice, take both, start at the top and work your way up. But it's about, it's about shifting the way you think it's a judo move, so to speak.

• 23:53Chris Williamson?

  Reagan, when he came into power and he was told that the Soviet era is going to continue, this is the way that the world is now, you're going to have this permanent sort of armament war, ever escalating nuclear threat. This is the way it is, we need to, you need to learn to work around this. And he said, I have another idea. Some may call my plan simple or even simplistic.

• 24:17Chris Williamson?

  We win, they lose.

• 24:21Chris Williamson?

  That was his plan.

• 24:23Chris Williamson?

  And that's the same as writing on the boards.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Good on him.

• 24:29Chris Williamson?

  So what you've, what you've mentioned here is that you can provide people with relatively undeniable proof about the reduction in climate associated deaths, the increase in child mortality, the increase in what?

• 24:41Speaker 00

  The decrease in child mortality.

• 24:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 24:46Chris Williamson?

  Et cetera, et cetera.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  Somebody that has imbibed a sufficiently cynical mindset will be able to say, well, yeah, that's for them, that's for out there, that's for everybody else. Me, life doesn't seem to work out that way. I have a X, Y, Z reason why that is not the case. What about someone who has fortified themselves inside of a helpless victim mindset or scarcity inside themselves?

• 25:17Speaker 00

  I think ultimately, anybody can, can will themselves to death and can will themselves into that mindset if they, if they so choose.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  I think you have to get up and go to where it's better, meaning hang out with people who see the world differently than you. You know, the old adage, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you're overweight, hang out with skinny people. If you're out of shape, hang out with people who are in shape, in good shape, right? If you think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, if you can, find people who think the world is amazing and that it's the most extraordinary time ever to be alive and get into those conversations. Now, you have to be motivated to do that and something has to kick you in the pants. And maybe you'll be hitting rock bottom. Maybe you will be your husband, wife, boyfriend,

• 26:09Speaker 00

  girlfriend, your parents, whatever the case might be. But it is possible.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  And I mean, I wrote Abundance for that purpose and you know, it's the story behind abundance, where we look at going from scarcity to abundance in every area, food, water, energy, healthcare, education, learning.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Has gotten, the story has gotten incredibly stronger in the last 11 years on every level. You know, the only place it's been a challenge has been in the environment and even then there is a extraordinary tsunami of technologies coming to support that, that change and that repair.

• 26:57Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to your current pet obsession of longevity and health.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  I think we both agree that human life has kind of already been a little overclocked, that we are living to ages now that are pretty much unprecedented. Our bodies largely don't know what to do. When they get to these sorts of ages, we weren't designed to live to 80, 90, you know, having centered generians, having people that live over 100 is insane. It's absolutely insane. So given that, what, what hope have we got that we can continue to extend something which has already been overclocked?

• 27:40Speaker 00

  So, great question. I'll give you a couple of thoughts there. And, and you're right, our, our bodies were never really designed to live past age 30. I'll use that number. You know, 100,000 years ago, early hominids would be getting puberty at age 12, 13. And by the time you were 13 or 14, you were pregnant. By the time you were 26, 27, 28, you were a grandparent. And before food was abundant everywhere, before McDonald's and Whole Foods existed, the last thing you wanted to do, if you wanted to perpetuate the species, was to take food out of the mouths of your grandchildren. And so you, you die. And there was never any selective pressure.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  After reproduction to keep us alive longer. So, very true, our average human lifespan was late twenties and then a hundred years ago was late thirties into forty and then has grown now to call it eighty.

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  Is that where it was a hundred years ago, it was thirty into forties?

• 28:43Speaker 00

  It was, it was late thirties into early forties, yes.

• 28:45Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea what happens if you take deaths under five out of that equation?

• 28:49Speaker 00

  It goes up.

• 28:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Um, it is, uh, there's no question, it was the average lifespan. But what increased it substantially was, uh, better sanitation, antibiotics, better calories and all of that.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  So that's the first point in terms of, uh, the second point is there are species on this planet of, uh, bowhead whales that live two hundred years, uh, Greenland sharks that live four or five hundred years. And I remember when I was in medical school, I asked the question, if they can live that long, why can't we? And I said, it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. And I am clear that it's this decade that we're going to understand the root cause of that. So just because we were never engineered to live past our reproductive age does not mean that the systems could not be engineered to do that.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  And so the work that I'm doing right now, uh, that I'm funding through my fund, that we are working on through X Prize and through some of my companies, uh, and supporting some of the top thinkers like George Church and David Sinclair, is really around the notion of how do we get consistently to a hundred, to a hundred and twenty? And then can we in fact actually get, uh, you know, further? Can we get to a hundred and fifty years old? Um, and so, uh, I don't think, uh, the answer is, um,

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Impossible. I think we're going to get there. I think AI is going to enable us to understand the, you know, 3.2 billion letters and what is going on there. I think quantum technologies that are coming online and in this decade is going to be the big push. It's going to help us understand what's going on to model the human life form in great detail. The other thing to note that's super interesting is, you know, we have 3.2 billion letters from our mother and from our father, and that genome is set when you're born, and it's the same exact genome when you're 20, when you're 40, when you're 80, when you're 100. So if you've got the same instruction set, why do you look different?

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Well, it's not your genome. It's what genes are on and what genes are off. It's your epigenome. It's the control of that symphony of genes. And as we grow older, we accumulate some amount of DNA damage, true. But what goes awry is the silencing of genes and the wrong genes are on, the wrong genes are off. And so the work that's exciting right now is in epigenetic reprogramming. Can we set back the clock? And so in animal models and in human cellular models, we've been able to do that. So I, for one, am doing everything

• 31:55Speaker 00

  I can to remain in the best possible shape and backing the research to move that forward. Because I think we can add healthy decades onto our life. And those healthy decades will buy us additional decades of breakthrough in science and technology to add more decades into our life. That concept is called longevity escape velocity, and we'll see.

• 32:22Chris Williamson?

  I think up until this decade, for every generation that you were born, you gained about an extra eight years on average.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  I think, yeah, the number has been a quarter of a year per year. You know, we've seen some setbacks in the COVID years, these last two years. And I'll be interesting to see post-COVID, do we retain, do we return to that situation?

• 32:50Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that we didn't inject any new gene editing CRISPR, you know, how would you say, like power law advances? What do you think is the, I'm using the word very loosely, natural upper limit?

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, listen, we have, we know from history that the very rare oldest lived individuals are 120, 121, 122, 123, I think is the longest accurately documented living individual. Then we have supercentenarians who are, you know, get to 105 years old. Now, the difference between normal individuals and supercentenarians is the difference between health span and lifespan. So you can be alive at 100, brainless, in a wheelchair, drooling,

• 33:48Speaker 00

  or you can be alive at 100, playing golf, having, going to work every day, having, being a sharp, contributing individual. And, and that's being, that's health span versus lifespan. And in supercentenarians, you know, in, in, normal individuals will have a health span till 65, and then a slow, or a slow decrease from 65 to 80, and then die.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  Superscenarian, you know, so you have 15 years of ailments, aches, pains, in and out of the hospital, not feeling well, not enjoying life, forced into retirement. Superscenarians may have 95 years of great health and then they fall off a cliff of two years of illness and then die, right? So the goal is extend health span as long as possible. And, you know, that's great. And I think that is possible with exercise, with sleep, with diet, with mindset, with not dying from something stupid. So I'll give you a few examples there because I think they're important. On diet, I'm in the middle right now.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Every year with my Abundance 360 group, I do a 22-day no-sugar challenge. And so we're on a WhatsApp group, there's 150 of us right now on this, and we share what we're eating and doing. And for 22 days, you, it's no carbs, no sugar, no high glycemic, and it's night and day going through a group along with that. But it turns out, in diet, if there's one thing you want to do, it's eliminate high glycemic index foods, and in particular, sugar. Sugar is a poison for the body. It's a neurotoxin, it's a cardiovascular toxin, and it's just, we never evolved, right?

• 35:46Speaker 00

  Sugarcane was not part of our diet 1,000 or 100,000 years ago. And so it's an inflammatory. So that's diet in its simplest. You know, I have a Mediterranean diet. I do get enough protein to try and keep up muscle. Second thing, exercise. I think muscle mass is one of the most important elements in the body. It has the highest correlation to longevity. So I will try and get my 7,000 minimum, 10,000 target steps in a day, and then try and get in two, three workouts a week. Um, sleep, uh, unclear. Eight hours of sleep is my target every day. I used to like be proud

• 36:27Speaker 00

  of getting five hours when I was in medical school. Now I'm proud of like when I hit eight hours on my Oura ring.

• 36:33Chris Williamson?

  That's eight hours tracked, so probably closer to eight and a half, nine hours in bed. Is that right?

• 36:38Speaker 00

  It is. I'm typically in bed at nine thirty, uh, and up at five thirty, six the latest.

• 36:46Chris Williamson?

  And you're, so what, your sleep efficiency must be very high, if that's the case?

• 36:49Speaker 00

  It, it, it is. It is. I do get, uh, I, I'm, I fall asleep very easily. I'm lucky in that regard. Um, so, but, uh, you know, there's a whole bunch of hacks on sleep. I use an eye mask that I love, a Manta eye mask. I have a cooling blanket. I set the temperature outside at sixty-five degrees. I don't eat within the last couple of hours of, uh, of going to sleep. And it's all basic stuff. Um, uh, there's a great book called Why, uh, Why We Sleep, um, which is amazing. Uh, and then, um, not dying from something stupid is very important. Uh, it's, I jokingly about it, but very few of us know what's actually going on inside our body. Like if I said to you, do you know that there's nothing going on

• 37:34Speaker 00

  inside your body that, that you need to know, that you know about, that you're concerned about? You say, I feel fine. But here's the fact, the body is incredibly good at hiding problems. Like you don't go to the doctor with pains and aches and so forth until it's a stage three or stage four cancer. Um, if you have Parkinson's, the tremors don't show up until seventy percent of the neurons are gone. And so I built a company called Fountain Life. It's operational in four centers right now, and we're growing to twenty centers around the world.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  And we do, in fact, I'm going tonight, or tomorrow, I'm going to Naples, Florida, where our lead center is for my annual upload. And so I'll go there. It's about five hours. It's a full-body MRI, head to toe, a brain imaging, brain blood flow. I do a coronary CT using an AI overlay, looking for soft plaque, not calcified plaque. Soft plaque is what can kill you. A DEXA scan, genomics, a GRAIL cancer test. Anyway, it's 150 gigabytes of data.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  And I, after that scan, I'm clear about what's going on in every nook and cranny in my body. And I've been doing this now for eight years. And I have a baseline, and I'm looking for any variation. And someday, something's gonna happen, it's gonna show up. But I will have caught it at stage zero or stage one, when it's the best chance of doing something about it.

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  How frequently are you doing this?

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Once a year. And then the Fountain Life program, it's just fountainlife.com, is a once-a-year upload, then a quarterly follow-up blood test. And it's really, it's the fiduciary for your health. And then, part of Fountain Life is the most advanced diagnostics. The other half is the most advanced therapeutics. So we are looking around the world for any breakthroughs, any new science, any new technologies that extend the health span of the individual. We make that available at the Fountain Life Centers. So I like to say, listen, you know more about what's going on inside your car than you do your body.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  And so if you can afford it, it's not cheap, it's 20K a year, but you get a concierge doctor along with it. One thing we did do last year to make it more available is we launched Fountain Health Insurance. And Fountain Health is companies of 50 employees or more. For the same price you're paying for your current health insurance for your employees, Fountain Health gives all the testing for free. Our mission is to find the disease in the beginning where it's cheap to handle versus at the end where it's expensive.

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say it's not healthcare, it's sickness care.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  It is. It's ridiculous, right? So like, I hate the fact that health insurance pays you after you're sick. Life insurance pays your next of kin after you're dead, right? Fire insurance pays you after your house burned down. It's perverse.

• 40:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Speaking of some, how would you say, progressive treatments? I'm going to Columbia in a month's time to get some stem cell treatments over there. What have been your experiences so far? I haven't done.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  The country of Columbia?

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  Yes, correct.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Okay, versus Columbia University.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  Ah, yes, I'm going down to Medellin. What should I expect? What have your experience been with it?

• 41:13Speaker 00

  So, let's talk about stem cells a second. And unfortunately, stem cell treatments, exogenous stem cells, stem cells from a newborn, placental or cord blood stem cells are not legally administrable in the United States. They have not been approved by the FDA.

• 41:30Chris Williamson?

  So I'm going to Medellin, yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Right, and so we send people to typically a facility in Costa Rica. They're in Columbia, they're in Mexico, they're in Panama. And so, listen, our bodies, when we're born, have stem cells in every tissue. And those stem cells are the regenerative and reparative engines of those tissues, right? So, stem cells in your skin are replenishing skin. Stem cells in your muscle, in your brain, in your kidney, in your liver, in your fat is replenishing those organs and tissues.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  And the problem is, again, because we were never evolved to live past age 30, as we grow older, the stem cell populations reduce by a hundredfold or a thousandfold.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  And the question is, can you supplement them? Can you rejuvenate and regenerate the stem cell populations? And so I have, believe it or not, my first stem cell treatments coming up this spring. I've been doing exosomes, which are the information packets that stem cells put out. But the other thing I'm doing is I'm extracting my own stem cells, fat stem cells and and bone marrow stem cells and storing them for a future infusion. So I have thousands of friends who have gone through this.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  And I think people have everything from, I didn't notice anything, to it was amazing. I'm renewed and rejuvenated. So it's something which is not consistent for everybody. I think stem cells typically traffic to areas where there's damage and you need need repair, whether it's joints or muscles. I think we're going to discover a lot about stem cells, but they're one of, you know, the hundred to a thousand X reduction in stem cells is one of the hallmarks of aging. And I think it is possible to rejuvenate that.

• 43:58Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to your suite of tools that you're using in order to extend longevity?

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:04Chris Williamson?

  Diet, sleep, exercise, don't do anything stupid mindset?

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:10Chris Williamson?

  Why are you not bringing up sunlight or heat or cold exposure? Why does that not factor in as a primary for you?

• 44:15Speaker 00

  It does. So I do, I do a cold shower every morning. I do a hot shower first and then I'll turn on the freezing and I'll last as long as I can. I just don't have a cold plunge setup, but I love, love it. And saunas are great. They're an important part. I just need to pull it in to my current living environment, which I have not done yet. But where I can do it, I definitively do that. There's a whole bunch of different supplements and meds that I do take. I don't want to be, you know, practice medicine. I can say what I do, right? I take about a gram of metformin every day, right? Which reduces blood glucose levels.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  I supplement my testosterone to bring it up to, you know, optimal levels. I'm taking six gram, micro, uh, milligrams of rapamycin right now. And then a whole slew of supplements. And again, I think on my diamandis.com, there's all of my longevity protocols. Everything I'm doing accessible there.

• 45:25Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to your use of supplementation in terms of TRT, I have read and heard a number of concerns around higher testosterone levels being associated with lower longevity. Is that a concern for you that the therapeutic levels of TRT are potentially lowering lifespan?

• 45:46Speaker 00

  I haven't, I have not seen that, that science. And I'm not, I'm basically supplementing to get to normal rates. I'm not looking to get to super normal rates. Yeah. And there's, you know, it's interesting. The level of complexity of the human body and our biochemistry and our cellular chemistry is extraordinary. And one of the things that is coming is finally the amount of data science that can look at everything, look at all. So, you know, we have this 150 gigabytes of data that we get about of all of our members

• 46:31Speaker 00

  that go through Abundance 360. We know what they're taking. We know what their complaints are. We know what everything. And what will fall out of all that data is correlations. Like for this genetic situation, for these supplements. And it's, it's still the early days, but the decade ahead is going to be amazing.

• 46:53Chris Williamson?

  That's the longevity escape velocity that you're talking about. Stick about, keep your health as good as it can be because at some point in the future, we're going to be able to add more than a year for every year that you stay alive. One of the things I was interested, looking at your approach to diet, which is quite plant heavy, which is quite Mediterranean, how do you square the circle of the paleo and carnivore community being so popular and having so many people that extol it as a virtue with your view of leaning heavily on plants and of actually a quite heavy reduction in red meat?

• 47:26Speaker 00

  So listen, I eat as much fish as I can. I eat as many eggs as I can. So I do believe in a high protein intake, but also a high plant intake. I stay away from red meats. Doesn't mean I don't enjoy some bacon once in a while or some pork once in a while. You know, there's an old Greek saying, my dad used to say, upon metronadiston, which is everything in moderation. So I lean heavily, I attack vegetables, right? And put on olive oil and everything that I could possibly put olive oil on.

• 48:02Chris Williamson?

  Like a good Greek man.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, good Greek, yes. And, and I will, if I have a choice, I'll be eating salmon wherever I can and, and, you know, three or four eggs in a day. So, you know, and then the reality is all diets are not made for everybody. Your, your ethnic background does affect what diet's right for you. And I think the other thing that we're discovering right now is your microbiome is plays such a huge role in everything. Again, it's every time we learn about something in the microbiome, like, oh my God, where'd that come from? That's crazy. And it's.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  It's we're collecting data. I'm doing what in summary, I think, gives me the best shot at I feel like I'm in better shape and have more energy and more, you know, desire to, you know, to go out there and make my dent universe than I ever had. And that's great. And my goal is, you know, I'm 61. Can I keep it going for the next 30 years? Intercept a 30 years of of technology change and I'll be blown away if that we're not adding another 30 years during that time.

• 49:23Chris Williamson?

  I know that you're a user of Athletic Greens. I have been for a very long time as well. Is that you're gonna lean over and pull out? There it is. There it is. Travel packs. So, one of the things that I had read, again, this is coming out of the paleo carnivore community, is a concern of overconsumption of leafy greens, which is what I my favorite vegetable, if I could dial it in all the time, would be spinach.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Yes, agreed.

• 49:48Chris Williamson?

  It's just great. But oxalates, is that what I mean? Yeah. And Athletic Greens and stuff, which is a hyper condensed, very potent delivery of this sort of stuff. How concerned should I be about oxalates? Can I tell all of my friends that have prodded me about it that they need to go away?

• 50:07Speaker 00

  If I had any true knowledge, I would give it to you, but I don't. So best to not say anything. I'll look into it, but I love the product and it sort of gets me through my early morning fasting.

• 50:23Chris Williamson?

  The bottom line is, and I think that you use this as a good heuristic, how do you feel? Do you feel better? And I've just had this morning, my first full blood panel done by Marek Health, which meant that I had to stay off anything that's got biotin, because that can sometimes skew the results. I didn't even know what biotin was, but I haven't used Athletic Greens for probably In fact, I didn't use it because I was at home and I ran out in the UK. I mustn't have used it for two weeks. I don't feel as good. My digestion doesn't feel as good. I can tell that there's something just not quite right. And then I had to do the thing today. And as soon as I've got it out of the way, I'm like, I'm back on that. And it's the same as you eat

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  some awful fast food from a motorway services. How do you feel after you've eaten it? Your body knows, you know.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you regret you ate it. Yeah. One of the things that's going on, it's one of the benefits of intermittent fasting and having something light and energy dense and vibrant is if it doesn't pull all of the blood out of your brain into your digestive tract, you know, so you feel slow and sluggish. One of the benefits, I remember the first time I ever started doing intermittent fasting and wouldn't eat until like one o'clock. I was like bouncing off the walls with energy. And I was like, that's crazy. Why do I have so much energy? It's because my, my blood is not drawn to my digestive tract. If you have a heavy breakfast.

• 51:54Chris Williamson?

  And also your system is thinking, you need to be, you need to be focused here. We might, we might need to look around for an antelope, or we need to be, we need to be on the lookout for a good bush.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Um, it is very interesting, man. I've very much been enjoying taking a more, I'm such a bro, right? So my inception into the health and fitness world was playing a sport as a kid at a pretty high level until about the age of 18. And then as soon as I got to university, all that I wanted to do was look jacked. So for, and this was the advent, the absolute cusp of the if it fits your macros movement, which is you can get shredded eating Haribo and cheesecake as long as it hits the macronutrient profile that you need to. Micros, that's kind of lame. No one cares. That's for pussies. You don't need to care about sunlight. You don't need to care about, it was just. The most transactional approach to health, right?

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  Optimized, you know, my aesthetic physique was, and that says a lot that you can look absolutely fantastic on the outside. Also, I mean, I was 20, whatever, in my twenties, which means you can probably do pretty much anything and you're still going to look pretty good. But now, you know, I'm 34 and I'm genuinely taking more care about this. I'm thinking like, how many steps am I getting in per day? Am I going for a little walk to reduce insulin sensitivity after each meal? How much sunlight am I getting exposed to? How much time am I spending in nature? Am I getting enough heat? Am I getting enough cold? What's my water content like? Not only is how much am I drinking, but what is the quality of the water that I'm getting like? We've got a reverse osmosis filter that's just arrived in the living room, which I'm excited to start using. Bing, bing, bing, all the way down. Is that reverse osmosis water as well?

• 53:28Speaker 00

  It is.

• 53:29Chris Williamson?

  What do you use? Do you use an Aqua True or something else?

• 53:31Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a system we put into the house, so.

• 53:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you've plugged it right in. Well, yeah, that would be absolutely fantastic. My point being, I have, I think mostly my age, the age that I was at, moved along with most of the developments. It feels to me like people have started talking about the things that I've started doing at the time when I needed to start doing them. Now, that might just be as a byproduct that you start searching for those sorts of things. But certainly this push towards sunlight, heat, cold, a more holistic view of health, you know, that is you need to look good, but you need to actually operate well too. If you're crumbling on the inside, but shiny on the outside, it's not very useful.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. And, and remember, this is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. Only time more exciting than now is tomorrow. And it's like, you want to be, look good, you know, think clearly, move well, be able to enjoy the life ahead. And one of my friends says, you want a future that's bigger than your past. If you've got that, then you're going to live into that extraordinary future.

• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  If there was a bunch of headlines of things that you wish you could tell people to stop taking or stop doing in service of their longevity, what are the biggest wastes that don't move the needle that you wish people wouldn't focus on?

• 54:53Speaker 00

  I start with one, don't waste your time watching the news. Become, become selective on what you let into your mind. This is an extraordinary time.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  So guard your, what shapes your neural net the best. On the food side, it's get rid of sodas. Fruit juices are, you know, insane. But it's sugary substances and carbs. Can you, can you reduce your, your glucose intake?

• 55:24Chris Williamson?

  Have you got an issue with diet drinks?

• 55:28Speaker 00

  You know, the phosphoric acid in, in, in diet drinks. So I just don't do sodas. Listen, I, I may do a Coke Zero once a year, but it's not like, you know. And then, you know, it's, it really is about, it's, it's not any one thing. But it's make a few small, don't try and do everything. Make a few small changes in your life in these areas. I think sleep is one of the biggest changes people can make. That changes everything because it fuels you.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  So it's nothing, there's no other stop doing that I would, I would list.

• 56:18Chris Williamson?

  Peter Diamandis, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go?

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. So my podcast is called Moon Shots and Mindsets. And it's really a deep focus on all of these areas. I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Peter Diamandis. And then Diamandis.com is all of my blogs and all of the tools and all the products that I provide folks. So listen, I'm on a mission to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, abundant and compelling future. And that's what I love doing. And Chris, thank you very much for having me on the show today.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.