The Proven Longevity Practices Extending Lifespans w/ Dr. Mark Hyman | EP #80

In this episode, Peter and Mark discuss if aging is a disease, the science behind sugar- a silent killer, stem cell therapy and how relationships impact Longevity. 23:27 | The Toxic Truth About Sugar 35:22 | The Risks of Ozempic Use 1:02:31 | Overcoming the Calorie Myth 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. He is also the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy. Read Dr. Hyman’s latest book: www.youngforeverbook.com Listen to Dr. Hyman’s Podcast: The Doctor’s Farmacy Learn more about my executive summit, Abundance360 Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ _____________ 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:00Peter Diamandis?

  If you could tell somebody one thing to do to make a change in their life right now, what would that be?

• 1:08Speaker 04

  I think if there's one thing that people need to understand is that

• 1:14Speaker 04

  aging as a phenomenon has been ignored. We focus on the diseases that happen as we get older, but we haven't actually studied well the process of aging and if it's something that we can do something about.

• 1:25Peter Diamandis?

  Could you go back to that earlier state of the right genes on and the right genes off?

• 1:31Speaker 04

  If we address those systematically with diet, exercise, sleep, stress management reduction, community relationships, certain biomolecules, whether they're phytochemicals or pharmaceuticals, that we actually have right now, today, I believe we can, most of us, get to in our 90s and 100.

• 1:53Peter Diamandis?

  Hi everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with Dr. Mark Hyman, who is just an extraordinary human being. First and foremost, Mark, a pleasure to see you, pal.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Thanks for having me back.

• 2:08Peter Diamandis?

  You know, you have these people in your life that you just love, and you like hanging out with them. It's just like they can do no evil or harm, but they're just, you know, they lift your spirits and you're one of those individuals for me. And so, when you're in, I know you're to Berkshire's now. When you're back in LA.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  Well, we're moving to LA, Peter, so I'll be bothering you a lot.

• 2:28Peter Diamandis?

  Awesome. Awesome. So are you still in love, my friend?

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Oh my God. Love is the best drug. It's the best drug.

• 2:37Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I was there on one of your first dates with your fiance, I think.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, first of all, you were a huge idol for her. And I remember, you know, you said this thing around about taking a trip on one of your zero-gravity flights. And it was one of her dreams to do that. And you were an idol. And I called you and I said, "Hey, Peter, you know, like, can we go on your thing?" And you're like, "Yeah, we got some space." And I looked there, I said, "You want to go?" And she like, her eyes bugged out of her head. And she's like, it was like two dreams come true at once, meeting you and going into zero-gravity.

• 3:09Peter Diamandis?

  I just, you know.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  And by the way, you should look at her WhatsApp profile, because literally, her WhatsApp picture is her sitting in a meditation posture in the middle of the air while she's in zero-gravity on the plane.

• 3:20Peter Diamandis?

  Oh my God. What I remember was just you, the two of you just were inseparable. It was this level of energy between, you know, that young love. I hope you have that for a century to come, my friend. And yeah, zero G is an amazing experience. I've done, God knows, probably 50, 60 flights on that airplane. And it's the only way to really simulate weightlessness in the atmosphere on the Earth. It's a parabolic arc. And one of my highlights in my life was flying Professor Stephen Hawking into zero G. You know, the world's expert in gravity into zero-gravity. And that was a medical...

• 4:06Peter Diamandis?

  That was a risky maneuver and you know, I've talked about this publicly, but you know, when, when we flew him, the FDA, the FAA said, you know, you can't do that. You can't fly, you can only fly able-bodied humans. And I said, well, who determines whether they're able-bodied? And they said, well, his physician or an aerospace doctor. So I got a few doctors to write letters because he wanted to experience zero G. And we did eight arcs. He had eight 30-second periods of weightlessness. But we had set up an emergency room on the airplane. We had three or four doctors, two nurses, because you know, he was very osteoporotic,

• 4:49Peter Diamandis?

  you know, easily break a bone, puncture a lung. And so we're super gentle with him. But he did it. He loved it. It was a highlight for me and as he and his daughter Lucy has said, a highlight for him as well. So that was fun.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  But it's pretty intense when you're, when you're, when you're stuck on the floor and your gravity is pulling you. It's, it's an intense stress on your body. It's amazing you can handle that.

• 5:13Peter Diamandis?

  It is. You're, you're pulling out, the airplane is basically doing this giant sine wave in the atmosphere. And you begin, you know, straight level flight, and then you do a slight nose down to pick up speed. And then the airplane pulls up at a 45-degree angle. And during that pull-up, you're at 1.8 gravity. So if you weighed 100 pounds, you're now weighing 180 pounds. And then as you push over the top of the arc, centripetal force is pushing your body up, gravity's pulling your body down. And if the pilot is flying the perfect trajectory where the velocity and the radius, I can write out

• 5:57Peter Diamandis?

  the physics for you here, but is perfect, you're in a arc of an orbit and you're weightless inside the middle. So you go from 1.8 gravity to zero gravity. And, and sometimes we do lunar gravities and Martian gravities, which are fun as well. So, um, but you know, one of my reasons for being interested in longevity is so I can be around an extra thirty, fifty, hundred years to see us on the moon, you know, and go to build colonies in the asteroid belt.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  I don't know if you're gonna have to wait that long because Peter, you know, all this, with all this, talking about aliens and all this interesting stuff coming out, there may be an alien spaceship that'll just pop you over, it'll be easy.

• 6:40Peter Diamandis?

  Well, listen, every night when I go to sleep, um, I say my prayer that if they're out there, please come and get me, I'd like to go home.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  They are, trust me, they are, they are. I've talked to people who've literally seen alien spaceships who were astronauts in person, so.

• 6:58Peter Diamandis?

  You have seen them?

• 6:59Speaker 04

  No, I've talked to someone who was a black ops astronaut who went to recover an alien spaceship that was in orbit and saw it himself, like, no joke.

• 7:08Peter Diamandis?

  Well, listen, I.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  And this guy's not kind of a crazy whack job either, he's just kind of.

• 7:12Peter Diamandis?

  That gives me great hope. You know, honestly, I, I think life is ubiquitous in the universe, you know, it's interesting when you, when you stop and think about the numbers, you know, we are so egotistical as human beings, we look at, um, you know, what we have in our town, in our country, on our planet, but I don't know if you know the numbers, you know, how many stars in our galaxy?

• 7:40Speaker 04

  I think I used to know, it was like.

• 7:42Peter Diamandis?

  It's a hundred billion.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  A hundred billions, billion, yeah. I took astronomy with Carl Sagan, but that was like fifty years ago.

• 7:49Peter Diamandis?

  I love Carl, I miss him, I miss him. Um, yeah, a hundred billion galax, uh, stars in our galaxy, and what's fascinating is the number of galaxies in the universe. So, uh, the number used to be a hundred billion galaxies in the universe, it's now up. So somewhere between two and 20 trillion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars. And if you do the math for my physics or chemistry geeks out there, at one point, I saw the numbers and I said, huh, it's about like six times 10 to the 23rd. It's like Avogadro's number worth of stars in the known universe.

• 8:31Peter Diamandis?

  And then, of course, there are those who claim that we're living in a multiverse of an infinite number of universes. So if you're feeling down, don't worry about it. So I do want to go and see what it's like to start a city on the moon or go to the asteroid belt. And one of the questions I ask my abundance members often is what would you do in the next 30 years of life? Because I think we're going to be able, you know, I just launched this $101 million health span prize with X Prize, asking for an extra 20 years of health. And those extra 20 years buy you the next 20 years. So what would you do, Mark, with an extra 20 or 30 healthy years of life?

• 9:14Speaker 04

  You know, for me, at this point in my life, Peter, it's a great question. I kind of climbed all the mountains. You know, there's a great book by David Brooks called The Second Mountain, which is once you've had your family, built your career, got your financial stability, then what? Right? I'm in the then what phase, which is basically in service, giving back and providing the value that I've learned over my life back to the world. And for me, it's really, you know, both in terms of the work I'm going to do, which is sort of scaling up the framework of our new understanding of human health and biology, which you could call network medicine, functional medicine, whatever you want to call it, it's just going to be called medicine. And the second is really, you know, deepening

• 9:55Speaker 04

  my own personal development and growth and healing. You know, in the Hindu tradition, there's this whole concept of the householder who then goes through this process of being a householder, which is essentially the first mountain. And then they go and become a sanyasen, which is a wandering kind of wise guy, basically, where they are seeking out the deeper spiritual evolution. And I think for me, that's very important to kind of deepen my sense of self. My sense of relation with myself, with my fiance and partner, with my friends and community and with the people I care and love about. So it's really being more leaning into that. And of course, having a hell of a good time while doing it.

• 10:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  E. B. White said, I think he said, every day wake up determined to make the world a better place and have a hell of a good time. And that makes planning the day very difficult.

• 10:46Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I think bringing joy to life is so important. You know, I've gotten to Elon really well over 20 plus years. And he's absolutely brilliant, but he's his own worst enemy in terms of the level of stress and work. And he puts it on himself. And so, you know, I think about that, you know, what humanity is a beneficiary from SpaceX and from Tesla and from X. But, you know, at what price do you do this? And life work balance is an interesting term. It's part of, it's part of the longevity conversation.

• 11:31Peter Diamandis?

  I remember having this conversation with Tony Robbins on stage. And Tony goes, no, no, no, there's no such thing as life work balance. It's life work integration. And if you love what you do, which you do, and I do, and hopefully those listening to you, then it's not, you're not working, you're playing. And that's, I was looking at a tweet from Vinod Khosla, who said, you know, working 80 hours a week and plan to do that and continue investing for the next 25 years. And I was like, huh, I wonder how much I work. And I either don't work at all, or I work all the time, depending on how your definition is.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:13Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, let's talk, get into the meat of the conversation. I have a number of questions from my, I'm gonna still call it a Twitter audience, but

• 12:24Speaker 04

  Or the vegetables, as it may be.

• 12:29Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, one of the conversations out there is aging a disease, and if so, why? Right? And, you know, I think it would be super convenient to call aging a disease so that we had the ability for it to be funded from government, you know, government research and so forth. Do you have any opinion about this?

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, Peter, what we've seen historically in medicine is that aging as a phenomenon has been ignored. We focus on the diseases that happen as we get older, but we haven't actually studied well the process of aging and if it's something that we can do something about. And I think also we see inevitability as we get older. We see people who are frail and weak and decrepit and declining and loss of function and inability to do the normal things they want to do. But that's not necessarily an inevitable part of getting older. It's a process of decrepitude that is a result of fundamental biological processes that go wrong that we can do something about, just

• 13:32Speaker 04

  like we can treat blood pressure or cholesterol or blood sugar. The phenomena of abnormal aging, which is what I think most of us have in this country and around the world increasingly, is a treatable condition. And I've seen this over and over in my patients, whether they're at end-stage diseases or whether they're just looking for a tune-up. I've seen people both feel and look younger by applying the science of creating health.

• 13:58Peter Diamandis?

  So, I mean, yes. And even though we're doing that, we still are getting older and dying, and there's nobody living past 120 that at least I know of. I mean, there may be some Himalayan monks who claim that.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  A thousand years old, right?

• 14:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, exactly. But so the question I've always asked myself, and I've asked George Church and David Sinclair this question, is there an upper limit to human age? You know, can we make it to 150? Can we make it to 200 or 300? You know, not as we are today, but with the right genetic engineering and the right cellular

• 14:41Peter Diamandis?

  Therapies or or others. I am curious where you come out on that. Do you do you is it religion? Do you hope? Do you have a sense to say, no, it's impossible?

• 14:53Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I, I, first of all, the question of immortality and extending life.

• 14:57Peter Diamandis?

  And immortality.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  I'm not going to go to immortality. That's that's more of like a kind of spiritual philosophical question about like, what? What? What would you do with all that time? But I think in terms of the the the science, I think if we apply to what we know now about the fundamental things that cause damage to what we call the hallmarks of aging and and and drive these biological processes that underlie all of disease, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, all the disease of aging. If if we address those systematically with diet, exercise, sleep, stress management reduction, community relationships, certain biomolecules, whether they're phytochemicals

• 15:39Speaker 04

  or pharmaceuticals, that we actually have right now today in 2023, soon to be 24, I believe we can, most of us get to in our 90s and 100. I don't think that's beyond reach for most people. I do think that getting to 120 or 150 or 180 is a whole different ballgame. And I think there's some regenerative therapies that may help, whether they're things like, you know, exosomes or peptides or stem cells or plasma phoresis, which are really interesting. I don't know if those are going to get us much more runway. They might get a little bit more. They might improve health span more. But I think there are some scientific things coming down the pike that are really interesting and and are not ready for prime time. And I think one of the most important ones is the discovery

• 16:23Speaker 04

  of the aminaka factors, which you write about in Life Force. And and this is this is being studied by David Sinclair and others in animal models and seeing really kind of remarkable results. But the basic idea is that we can reprogram our own cells back to a younger version of themselves in in sort of a simplistic way of looking at it. It's by inserting very various transcription factors into your genome, you can turn them on or off at will. And when you hit, let's say, 50, if you've had these inserted 25, and you say, I'm getting a little flabby, my muscles wasting, my hair is gray, and I don't have the same sex drive, and whatever, you can just turn this on through some molecular switch and then reverse your biological age. Now,

• 17:07Speaker 04

  That's still a TBD, right? I think we don't know if that's-

• 17:11Peter Diamandis?

  It is, you know, the conversation I have with George and David is, and I'm curious to bring that into this conversation because it's important. I mean, people need to have a goal to shoot for. And I think the goal right now is keep yourself with health as you can, intercept the breakthroughs from the Yamanaka factors, epigenetic programming, all of that. I mean, when you are, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 as a guy, and in your 20s and 30s as a woman typically, and you reproduce, that egg is set at a zero age and it can live an entire full life. The data is there for continuation.

• 17:54Peter Diamandis?

  At the same time, you know, I remind people when you're born-

• 17:57Speaker 04

  It's true, just to kind of reemphasize what you're saying. If a 40-year-old man and a 40-year-old woman have sex and they have a 40-year-old sperm and a 40-year-old egg, the baby's not 40 years old when it's born, it's zero.

• 18:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's zero. So the potential is there. And then the other thing I point out at Focus is, listen, you've got the same 3.2 billion letters from your mother and your father when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 80, when you're 100, why do you look different? And it's not the code, it's not your genome, it's which genes are on and which genes are off, it's your epigenome. And if you can, could you go back to that earlier state of the right genes on and the right genes off of earlier? So you get that six-pack when you're, you know, in your 70s or 80s. And so this is the conversation, and then, you know, it's the other idea that is thrown out is, you know, this is my grandfather's old hatchet, it's got four new handles and

• 18:53Peter Diamandis?

  five new heads, but it's my grandfather's old hatchet. You know, can you just keep replacing parts?

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's the other thing that's coming down the pike, is replacement parts, right? We can 3D print organs, we can, you know, from your own cells basically grow a new heart or grow a new liver, I mean, this is happening. And I think you've been talking about this in many of your conferences and workshops, and I think it's kind of exciting. I mean, I don't want to be the first one to get it, but- It's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna come soon.

• 19:23Peter Diamandis?

  And the reason it's coming even faster, I think, is more capital is coming into this field than ever before, right? There's billions of dollars of private capital coming in because you still can't take it with you, no matter how hard you tried. Because ultimately, there's more people playing in this field. The tools are getting more powerful and cheaper, and AI is coming into the rescue. So, you know, I think we're gonna see some massive, massive changes. If you could tell somebody one thing to do to make a change in their life right now, what would that be?

• 20:00Speaker 04

  I mean, it reminds me of this conference I was at when I asked the same question to a longevity scientist, Leonard Gortier from MIT, who basically came up with David Sinclair with the idea of the Surtuans. And it was this conference with the Dalai Lama on longevity, and it was Western scientists, Blackburn was there, and Lenny was there, and Dalai Lama was there, and all these Tibetan doctors. And I was walking with Lenny, I was like, so what is the secret here? What is the secret with these Surtuans? And what is the deal? He says, what's making us age? And what's the problem? He's like, sugar. And I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, sugar. And I think, I think if there's one thing that people need to understand is that one of the main, I think, meta categories of the hallmarks

• 20:44Speaker 04

  of aging is deregulated nutrient sensing, which has to do with how our bodies sense food. And when that becomes screwed up, because of too much or too little of something, our bodies become dysregulated, and all the hallmarks get accelerated. All. And I think the most important insulin signaling pathway there is the one that's driving a lot of the disease of aging. So if you look at heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, they're all diseases of too much insulin and insulin resistance. And that's all driven by the enormous loads of sugar and starch we eat. You know, I was recently, Peter, in Africa, and I got to visit the Hadzabi tribe, which is the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribe that's protected in Africa. And they continue to hunt, and 20% of their diet is honey. And I'm like, geez, that's a lot of sugar. And what I also learned was that,

• 21:29Speaker 04

  and I went gathering with them, and we hunted and gathered a little bit together, and they were digging up these roots and tubers, and they eat 150 grams of fiber a day. That's compared to about eight, eight grams for the average American.

• 21:43Peter Diamandis?

  Which dulls the uptake and the reaction.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Basically, it's like, yeah, it's basically putting muesle in your Coca-Cola, basically. But it mitigates the effect of the sugar. So I think it's just the enormous amounts of starch and sugar that are driving all these aging pathways. And they drive inflammation, they drive oxidative stress, they damage mitochondria.

• 22:01Peter Diamandis?

  I cannot stress this enough.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  It's the one thing, if you can cut out starch and sugar, or dramatically reduce it, it's going to have a huge impact.

• 22:08Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me, and could actually save your life, or the life of someone that you love. Company's called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins, and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room, and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out.

• 22:51Peter Diamandis?

  So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning, when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.

• 23:35Peter Diamandis?

  We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, it's a chance to really add decades on to

• 24:19Peter Diamandis?

  our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Sugar is a poison. Remove it from your diet. The body was never designed to deal with this much sugar, and we're living in a day and age where unfortunately, our food manufacturers are pumping out, you know, poison the same way our cigarette manufacturers were pumping out poison.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Well, they're the same companies, you know, Peter, like Philip Morris, Kraft, RJR Nabisco. They actually redesigned the foods when they owned those companies. They now have kind of divested, but when the tobacco companies own the food companies, they redesigned the foods to be more addictive.

• 24:59Peter Diamandis?

  That comes to a question that Enos Serak, one of my followers, asked here. He says, "How do you deal with the emotional challenges of sugar addiction?" So to be clear, sugar is, and you get addicted to sugar, and it takes time to get off of that addiction. And I do that, by the way, Enos, with my abundance community. Every year, we do a 22-day no-sugar fast. As a group, we all do it together. We just give it all up. And once you've gone through that process, you have more control. How do you think about it? It's an emotional issue.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  Well, yes and no. I mean, I think people think it is, and sometimes it is.

• 25:50Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, it's a physiological issue, yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  It's complex, right? Because there's genetics involved, and dopamine receptors, and your risk of becoming more addictive when it comes to sugar or other substances. There's the way that sugar hijacks your hormones, your brain chemistry, even your microbiome to regulate your mood, your appetite, your behavior. And a lot of times, people misappropriate their emotional state. To some psychological reason as opposed to a physiological reason. And I think, you know, most of us had the experience like if we're, you know, if our blood sugar low, we're cranky, right? If we're, if we haven't eaten, it's not because we're mean, irritable, cranky people. It's because there's a physiological reason. So I think, I think it's important first to understand that it sometimes there are emotional reasons for eating, it's stress and various kinds of things like that.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Comfort foods, as they call them, right? For sure, for sure. But, but, but what's, what's important to understand is that you need to use science, not willpower to actually overcome this. And I wrote a book in 2014 called The 10 Day Detox Diet, The Blood Sugar Solution 10 Day Detox Diet. And the idea is, you know, if you, you follow a regimented approach to resetting your hormones and brain chemistry and your microbiome, you can get off of it very quickly and not deal with the consequences. It usually takes about two or three days to go through it. But if you, but if you do the right things, you don't suffer as much. So you got to start the day with protein and fat. You got to actually eat plenty of fiber. You've got to have lots of fluids and liquid because when you drop sugar, your body's

• 27:20Speaker 04

  going to dump a lot of fluid and, and because insulin keeps you retaining salt and so you retain a lot of water. And, and then you need to make sure you do things with your nervous system to calm your nervous system down. And I, you know, take an Epsom salt bath and gentle exercise and, you know, really doing simple practices. And, and I've done this with people over and over groups and, and online, thousands of people. And it's remarkable how quickly the body resets. It doesn't take that long. Now, you know, it's like, it's like if you're, if you, you kind of have to go cold turkey. If you don't, you're, you're going to kind of just be constantly just in this dynamic of stimulating the wrong pathways. So it, it, there is emotional aspect, but there's also an understanding.

• 28:03Speaker 04

  And for example, you can look at your genetics and look at dopamine receptor genetics and see if you're one of those people who really needs a lot of extra stimulation for dopamine, which then you can learn how to activate like a cold plunge. If you jump in an ice bath, I guarantee you it's going to wake you right up and it's going to stimulate your dopamine. And, and I love doing that. It's as soon as I forget. How long I'm in there and I come out and I'm like shaking, but uh.

• 28:26Peter Diamandis?

  Definitely feels great after.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  It feels great. Yeah, it feels great. And, and there's really a physiological process to reset. So it's not that hard, but you have to understand what to do and how to do it and how to re-regulate your hormones and brain chemistry. And then you can see where you're at. And then, you know, but if you're, if you're sleep deprived, that's the other thing. If you're sleep deprived, and they've done this in college students where they've looked at, at healthy college students of normal weight. And they gave them basically a normal sleep schedule where they were deprived of like, you know, a couple of extra hours of sleep. So they had eight or six or five hours. And the ones who had sleep deprivation all were craving sugar and carbs. And I remember this from being in the internship and residency and delivering babies up all night, working in the ER. And I'm like, it was like 2:00 AM and I was like, where is the sugar?

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Like, I'm going to McDonald's and, because the only thing open in the hospital, by the way, having McDonald's in the hospital is ridiculous, but it was only, I would get one of those apple turnovers. That was my, that was my thing. So I get the apple turnover and then keep going for the rest of the night. So yeah.

• 29:26Peter Diamandis?

  Oh my God. Yeah, no, it's, listen, in medical school, by the way, those of you who are thinking about going to medical school, those who had been in medical school, it is like the worst possible set of, of operating protocols for help. I mean, doctors are terrible in terms of sleepless diets we eat, taking a stress that levels that you have. Yeah. So, you know, let's take a second to explain to folks why glucose is such an inflammatory molecule, right? How it's glycosylating and how it's, you know, in, in the brain, in the heart. Would you, would you walk through that a second?

• 30:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so the couple of things happen, like it's just a whole cascade. So, you know, when you, when you have high insulin levels, it drives your glucose into your cells and also any, every, every extra calorie. So it drives free fatty acids and other things into your fat cells and particularly your belly fat. And those are the dangerous fat cells. And, and those fat cells aren't like normal fat cells on your butt or your legs. They're, they're metabolically active. They're hormonal factories. They're neurotransmitter factories. They're. Immune factories and they're spewing out all this nasty stuff, including cytokines and hormones that dysregulate your appetite. And so they make you hungry. They make you put on more weight and they prevent what we call lipolysis, which is the breakdown of fat. So it's like a

• 30:48Speaker 04

  one-way turnstile on the subway. You can get in, but you can't get out. And, and essentially, that's what's going on with insulin. And then, once you start this, this visceral fat

• 30:59Speaker 04

  factory of bad stuff, that bad stuff drives inflammation and you get high levels of inflammation, cytokines, and inflammation is, is kind of the final common pathway of all age-related diseases, whether it's dementia, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obviously autoimmune disease. Aging itself has been called the inflomaging. And so it drives a lot of that process. And the secondary things that happen is that it is part of that. You get damage to proteins. And one of the, one of the main phenomena in terms of the hallmarks of aging is something called proteostasis, which is damage to our proteins. And proteins have to be particularly shape, size, and, and in three-dimensional structure to work. And what happens is you

• 31:42Speaker 04

  get glomming on of sugar and proteins together when there's too much sugar, and it causes the thing called glycation, which is basically like a crispy skin on a chicken, or a crust on a bread, or a creme brulee, that crispy thing on the top. That's stuff that you love to eat. Yeah, yeah. Now, those are called advanced glycation end products, and are ages. And it's good terminology because they age you. And they bind to rages, which makes you rage and, and basically get aged. And that leads to, again, the secondary phenomena of more inflammation. And so, one, you have damaged proteins that don't work. Two, it creates a cascade of more inflammation and you end up in this vicious cycle. And the way we measure, for example, people with diabetes is something called hemoglobin A1C. That's like cosylated hemoglobin.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  It means hemoglobin, your basically oxygen-carrying molecule in your red cells, gets sugar on it and forms a crust. And that crust basically makes it not work well. And then you get into all these secondary problems. And, and that really is, is a huge phenomenon of aging. And then we can avoid ages in our food too, by not microwaving, by, you know, not over, overcooking stuff, by not having the crispy stuff, which we love. I mean, I still eat it occasionally. I make a roast chicken and I, I go after the skin. I get to cut it up because I cooked it and I get the little crispy skin. You're making me hungry, dude.

• 33:03Peter Diamandis?

  So I just want people to realize, you know, sugar is a, it's a very, you know, as it is glazing onto the, to the proteins and your immune system recognizes that as a foreign entity and you hit an inflammatory cascade, it's, it hits the heart, it hits the brain, it hits the body in general. And it's just, do yourself the favor of breaking that sugar addiction if at all possible. Your, your book on that subject, the name of it again?

• 33:34Speaker 04

  10 Day Detox Diet.

• 33:36Peter Diamandis?

  10 Day. And, and, you know, the beautiful, the beautiful thing is it, you know, probably hasn't changed since, in the last, in the last decade. So it's relevant, go get it and, and try it. You owe yourself getting yourself off sugar. You know, one thing that I-

• 33:52Speaker 04

  What I want to say is, Peter, just to emphasize that, people don't realize how bad they feel until they start feeling good. And, and I have people fill out a questionnaire, it's in the book, where they, they give a qualitative score to all their symptoms, you know, headaches, digestive issues, sleep problems, depression, snotty nose, whatever. And you get a score. And then after 10 days, you redo it. The average reduction in the score was 70% from all symptoms from all diseases. And I do this over and over when I do workshops. I'm doing a longevity workshop in Ibiza in May, another one in, in Bodrum in Turkey, in May at Six Senses. And, and, and I do the same diet there. And it's, it's just remarkable what happens. People walk away feeling amazing and they didn't realize how quickly it can happen.

• 34:36Peter Diamandis?

  And guess what? It's all within your control. It doesn't cost anything, anything you're going to save money on the process. One of the things I, I put in, in my recent book, Longevity, A Practical Playbook, and we've talked about this before, is even the order which you eat your food matters, right? Eating your fiber first, eating your veggies first, so that it slows down digestion, eating your protein next, and then saving any high glycemic carbs for the end, if you have room. And just doing that alone causes your digestive system to uptake the nutritious

• 35:16Peter Diamandis?

  molecules first and minimizes your insulin spike from, you know, the white rice or the bread that you're going to be, or the, God forbid, the dessert you're going to eat at the end.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:27Peter Diamandis?

  Hey, everybody, Peter Diamandis here. I've been asked over and over again, what do I do for my own health? Well, I put it down in this book called Peter's Longevity Practices. It's very readable in just an hour. In the book, I cover longevity diet, exercise, sleep, my annual found upload, meds and supplements, longevity mindset. It's literally consumable in just an hour's time, hopefully to incentivize you to make a difference in your life, to intercept the technologies coming our way. If you want this, just check out the link below and download it right now. A lot of people are dealing with this with Ozempic, GLP-1 inhibitors and such.

• 36:08Peter Diamandis?

  I'm curious what you're hearing about Ozempic, you know, it's like everybody I know is on Ozempic and it's like, you know, the most, all of a sudden it became the most popular drug out there.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's the biggest part of the GDP of Denmark right now is Ozempic because it's a Danish company. Yeah, I know, Peter, it can help certain people and I'm not opposed to its appropriate use in the appropriate person for the appropriate amount of time in the right way. But I think like many, many drugs, the New England Journal basically came out with a great article once, they said, make sure you use new drugs as soon as they come on the market before the side effects develop. And I think that's kind of the situation we're starting to see now, we're seeing, you know, benefits for people who struggle, but I've seen people who are, you know, 10, 20, 15 pounds overweight starting to use this. I think it's risky. One, it causes a significant amount of muscle loss as you lose weight and you already lose muscle when you lose weight, but it seems to be worse.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  And then you end up actually with a lower muscle mass at a lower weight, which actually means your metabolism is slower. So often what happens, and with Ozempic, we see this 65% or more of the weight is gained back if you stop it, you will end up having a slower metabolism. At the end of the process than when you started. So let's say you started to 20 pounds, you lost 30 pounds, then you gained back a bunch of pounds. You're gonna have a slower metabolism and have to eat less to just maintain that 20 pounds at the end. Second, it seems to increase the risk of certain GI problems, which really concerns me. And it's not just an incremental

• 37:46Speaker 04

  increase. We've talked about this before, but essentially, when we see a change in a result in a scientific study of 20, 30%, so statins reduce the risk of heart attack by 20 or 30%. That sounds like a lot, okay? That's not that much. When you look at the effect of these Ozempic drugs, we're seeing a 900% increase in pancreatitis, a 450% increase in small bowel obstruction, which is a very serious disease. This is a problem where you need surgery or hospitalization to deal with the bowel obstruction because it thickens the wall of your bowel. And it happens when you've been taking it for a longer period of time. So you might see rapid results, but I think it just kind of misses the point

• 38:31Speaker 04

  of why are we struggling in the first place? You know, again, I mentioned I went to Africa, and I didn't see anybody who was overweight in these hunter-gather tribes. There was nobody, not a single person. You know, when you look at pictures of America, and I remember seeing this Aretha Franklin movie, it was from 1970, it was in Oakland where she filmed it. It was an incredible film about, I think it was called Amazing Grace or something. And it was in a black church in Oakland. There was not one overweight person, including Aretha, in that movie who was in the church. And this was 1970. And now, you know, 85% of African women are overweight.

• 39:10Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, so let's dive there one second. What is the cause? Is it our food system? Is it a lack of? What has changed in the last 40 years here?

• 39:21Speaker 04

  Well, I think we never had the degree of ultra-processed foods. And I think it's becoming clear and clear that this phenomenon of ultra-processed foods is at the root of so much of what's going on. Of course, our lifestyles become more sedentary. We've had more stress. There's more environmental toxins. Our microbiomes change. There's a lot of variables. But I think the fundamental biggest change is the introduction of ultra-processed food. There's over 600,000 of these on the market now. And what they are are not really foods. They're deconstructed food-like products. Essentially, when you take a soybean or a corn cob or a wheat berry, you eat those, you're fine. It's fine. But if you take them into a factory and you deconstruct them into their molecular

• 40:06Speaker 04

  parts and then you reorganize the molecular structure so they're not even recognizable in their original form, and then you reassemble them into all kinds of sizes, colors, and shapes of chemilextruded food-like substances that look like food but aren't food, they actually don't regulate your body in the same way. And Kevin Hall did this really impressive study, he's from the NIH, looking at ultra-processed food. It was a crossover trial where he took people and fed them as much as they want of regular whole foods. They just eat as much as you want, no limit, go for it. And then he said, here's ultra-processed food. Eat as much as you want, no limit, go for it. The people who had the ultra-processed food ate 500 calories more a day. Now, in a week, that's 3,500 calories.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  3,500 calories is what it takes to gain a pound. So in a year, that's 52 pounds of weight gain just from eating, if you eat your ultra-processed food.

• 41:00Peter Diamandis?

  Oversize me, baby.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so it's really been a problem. And then we know the mortality risk is high. It causes depression. It causes mood destabilization, inflammation. It changes your microbiome. And I think we've seen this horrific change in our food system and supply. And of course, there's the, you know, just the overabundance of calories in our system as well. I mean, we've seen, you know, in 1970s, President Nixon was afraid of not getting reelected because the price of milk and meat were going up. So he told his ag secretary to fix it. And basically, what he did was incentivize farmers to grow mass amounts by giving subsidies and essentially created a model of accelerated industrial agriculture and high fructose corn syrup. And now we produce 500 calories more.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  Of corn essentially turned into corn, sugar and syrup than we did before. So there's another 500 calories a day in the food supply per person.

• 41:52Peter Diamandis?

  Captain Crunch. Captain Crunch is here to save us. I mean, it's like, I have two 12-year-old boys and I think about the food that they eat and it's like, oh my God, oh my God. So listen, I was just on, I saw on Twitter yesterday, a gentleman whose ID was kept confidential, who's experimented with a follow statin CRISPR edit and someone in their 40s, 50s and all of a sudden gained a huge amount of muscle, right? So have you seen any of this work going on?

• 42:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I've been reading about it. I think it's a little bit sci-fi and there's been studies, for example, in muscular dystrophy that improves, for example, ambulation and muscle strength and function. So for certain conditions, I think, you know, if you have muscular dystrophy and you're going to put in a wheelchair and die, I think it's, go for it, you know? But I think I'm not ready to start taking it yet. I think we need, I think, a lot more human trials for it, but it basically-

• 42:56Peter Diamandis?

  It hasn't even started really in that regard, but I'm, I am interested in, in the concept of beginning to engineer ourselves. You know, someone who I've known for a long time, haven't been in touch lately is, is Brian Johnson. I knew him from, he was an investor in my companies early on. Have you been followed what he's doing with the blueprint?

• 43:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very fascinating. I mean, he's just basically measuring and tracking every single thing he can possibly think of and then seeing the effects of various changes in his lifestyle, diet, supplements, behaviors, and how those impact his, his biology. And I, I would give him credit because he's basically taken one for the team. He's like, I want to be a human experiment and I want to see how far I can push this and how long I can live and, and basically- Do do science a favor by spending my own millions of dollars with an N of one experiment on myself. And I think I think we're going to learn a lot from that. I do think it makes for a pretty dull guy to be around. I mean, his last meal is 11 o'clock at night and the

• 44:08Speaker 04

  morning. I mean, he goes to bed at 8 o'clock at night. And I'm like, okay, and you know, he says, well, sometimes I break out and I'm kind of, you know, just don't want to be socially kind of weird. So I'll, I'll go out to dinner and I'll eat some steamed vegetables. And I'm like, well, I don't know if that does the trick.

• 44:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a

• 44:28Speaker 04

  It's like, I can't have anybody sleep in bed with me, you know, I can't, I can't be in a relationship. I can't like, you know, it's like, well, those are things that are really important, you know, if you're in a relationship and you have good social connections, it's probably one of the things that impacts longevity the most. So I wouldn't miss on that one.

• 44:46Peter Diamandis?

  You know, he, one of the things he's famously done is received transfusions from his son and offered transfusions, you know, the whole young blood experiment work out there. Thoughts on that?

• 45:00Speaker 04

  Well, this is really, you know, kind of an extrapolation of research that was done on mice called parabiosis, where they basically wired up the old mice and the young mice circulation to see what would happen. And they found that the old mice became young. Now, they weren't sure.

• 45:17Peter Diamandis?

  And the young mice became old.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  Old, right. And so they weren't sure what it was. So they actually followed up on some of these studies and they actually did a plasma exchange where they basically did a filtering of the old mouse blood. So instead of just getting young blood, they just took out all the old plasma, which has all the inflammatory molecules, damaged proteins, things that, you know, are kind of accelerating aging, and then just remove them. And it had the same benefit. Now, this is not a new thing.

• 45:42Peter Diamandis?

  I want to make this very clear. The, the, just taking out the old plasma and putting in instead albumin and saline, which is the, you know, the fluid segment of the plasma.

• 45:57Peter Diamandis?

  Had the rejuvenative effect of a plasma exchange.

• 46:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. And then they've done some interesting studies like that are on humans and Alzheimer's patients and seen remarkable results and improvements of their cognition and activities of daily living. And by the way, there's no drug that can do what the plasma does. I mean, it's quite, it's quite amazing that we're seeing these sort of level of results that are in a pretty advanced disease.

• 46:22Peter Diamandis?

  Dr. Zbrot, yeah, Dr. Zbrot, I guess, has the, has the protocols there. And at Fountain, we've just installed this therapeutic plasma exchange technology. So our members can go and start doing that.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:37Peter Diamandis?

  I've done it. You've done it as well. How often do you recommend doing it?

• 46:40Speaker 04

  Well, I don't think we know the frequency yet, but I, I probably would like to do it every quarter. I think there's a sort of a just a tune up, you know, it's like an oil filter change, right? And I actually, one time I did it, you know, if you feel good, you know, I say, if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do much. So, you know, might, might do something sub clinically or sub perceptually, but it's not going to affect you, right? So I've had plasma exchange when I feel fine. I definitely feel a boost of energy and well being and, you know, more subjective things. But once I had COVID and I was really sick and I, and I, it was the worst COVID I'd had. I had it like three times and I, and I developed arthritis after my hands swelled up. I had severe fatigue. I was just

• 47:20Speaker 04

  really incapacitated. And I was worried, you know, and I ended up going, having plasma frisus and literally within hours, my swelling went away in my hand, my joints became normal. The next morning I felt like a million bucks. And I was like, wow, there's something to this, you know, because it, we use it in medicine already. We use it for people with autoimmune diseases, with inflammatory diseases, with neurologic diseases, with Guillain-Barre syndrome, with vaccine injury. So it's used a lot for people who have, and by the way, I've seen people with COVID vaccine injury and I'm sending for plasma resuscitation, they do remarkably well. So it takes out all the inflammatory gout, basically in your system. Gout is a medical word, right, Peter?

• 47:58Peter Diamandis?

  Gout, yes, we learned about that. Yeah. So a lot of people have desired.

• 48:09Peter Diamandis?

  To go get stem cells after reading Life Force. And of course, in the United States, stem cell from placental stem cells or cord stem cells, allergenic from somebody else is not legal today. And what you need to do is get, you can get stem cells from your own bone marrow, your own fat, and you can concentrate them and give them back to yourself. And/or you can go down to Costa Rica, RMI is down there, or, you know, Mexico, there's a number of different locations south of the border, you can go and get stem cells. What's your thinking today on stem cells?

• 48:49Speaker 04

  Well, full disclosure, I'm going down in nine days to RMI for a full stem cell treatment. So what I'm doing is IV stem cells. I'm doing orthopedic stem cells in my back and my knee. I jumped off a golf cart trying to save my girlfriend, she fell off and banged her head, and I twisted my knee and got a little meniscal thing. I'm doing my knee. I'm gonna do the sexual enhancement one, because I'm 64, why not? And do the skin rejuvenation, and so just do the whole thing. And I'll give you a report afterwards. But I've done systemic stem cells, I think, three times. I've done once in my knee for a knee injury. And I found it incredibly helpful. I think-

• 49:28Peter Diamandis?

  You felt a visceral change?

• 49:29Speaker 04

  I did.

• 49:30Peter Diamandis?

  You felt functional change?

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I definitely felt overall more energy, more clarity, improvement on my overall, you know, fitness. So I did notice certain things. Now, they're subjective, I didn't have any objective metrics. And I'm going to do this again. I'm gonna recheck my biological age after. So I've been tracking it, and I'm getting some biomarkers done before and after. I'm curious about it. I think, you know, we definitely need more data. I'm like you, Peter, I'm definitely on the bleeding edge of things, and I wouldn't recommend the things that I'm doing to myself, to my patients sometimes. But I'm willing to take one for the team.

• 50:04Peter Diamandis?

  Chief guinea pig, yes.

• 50:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So I think I study it, I think about it, and it sounds that there's scientific basis. If the risks are low, and it's something that I can afford, I'll do it. And that's kind of how I play the game. But I think it's really about your risk tolerance. And I think what we need is a large infusion of capital into a research and clinical trials using stem cells from everything from- You know, longevity to autoimmune diseases to, you know, orthopedic issues. I mean, we just, we just have so many applications for these and I think we're unfortunately just so behind on this.

• 50:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, no, it's, it is unfortunate. It's not something that the FDA has the proper guidelines to regulate yet. And so it is sort of just kept in the don't do it category. We are standing up at Fountain under a investigation new drug protocol, placental derived stem cells. The other area that we're standing up with our sister company, Cellulare, that Bob Hury, who's my dear friend, is natural killer cell supplementation. So, and people should know, you know, natural killer cells are your innate immune system that detects cancer, detects senile cells, detects infected cells.

• 51:27Peter Diamandis?

  And as we age-

• 51:28Speaker 04

  They're like your body's Pac-Man.

• 51:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. As we age, our immune system goes, becomes, you know, dysfunctional, dysregulated. And so the results we've seen early on with natural killer cells, where you can give it as a exo, from an exogenous source, placental derived source, looks super promising. So I think that's going to be another IND where we give people natural killer cells to help address building up of senescent cells in the body.

• 52:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've done that too. I've done it actually for my own cells. I drew off 20 miles of blood, sent it to a lab that was cultured, had to go to a different country to do it. But, but basically I did the infusion of my own natural killer cells as well. So, you know, I think it's hard to kind of say what these things do. And again, this is sort of experimental, but I think that these things are all, all things that need to be more rigorously studied and that there is-

• 52:29Peter Diamandis?

  There is data, it's just, it's just slow and plodding and I think we need to put capital into this because it can, it can help people with so many different conditions. Hey everyone, I want to take a quick break from this episode to tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day. In fact, I use it twice a day. It's Seed's DSO1 Daily Symbiotic. Hopefully by now you understand that your microbiome and your gut health are one of the most important modifiable parts of your health. You know, your gut microbiome is connected to everything, your brain health, your cardiac health, your metabolic health. So the question is, what are you doing to optimize your gut? Let me take a moment to tell you about what I'm doing. Every day I take two capsules of Seed's DSO1 Daily Symbiotic.

• 53:13Peter Diamandis?

  It's a two-in-one probiotic and prebiotic formulation that supports digestive health, gut health, skin health, heart health, and more. It contains 24 clinically and scientifically proven probiotic strains that are delivered in a patented capsule that actually protects the contents from your stomach acid and ensures that 100% of it is survivable, reaching your colon. Now, if you want to try Seed's DSO1 Daily Symbiotic for yourself, you can get 25% off your first month's supply by using the code PETER25 at checkout. Just go to seed.com/moonshots and enter the code PETER25 at checkout. That's seed.com/moonshots and use the code PETER25

• 53:58Peter Diamandis?

  to get your 25% off the first month of Seed's Daily Symbiotic. Trust me, your gut will thank you. All right, let's go back to the episode. Yeah, I mean, sarcopenia is, you know, whenever I, I have a venture fund, Bold Capital, I'm actually in their offices right now, and I tell people, if you've got a, we're now probably two-thirds biotech, health tech. I say, if you've got a, a company that addresses sarcopenia, I want to hear about it. Right? I think it's one of the biggest challenges we have, the loss of functional muscle tissue and muscle strength as we, as we grow old. You know the

• 54:38Peter Diamandis?

  numbers even better than I. If you, if you fall and fracture your hip, there's a damn good chance you're not going to make it out of the hospital. And so, you know, having the ability to regain and/or maintain muscle mass in your 70s, 80s, 90s is super critical.

• 54:58Peter Diamandis?

  What do you do, what do you think about, besides a CRISPR gene edit, what do you recommend for somebody, what's your protocol for maintaining and growing muscle mass?

• 55:10Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I think I've doubled down on that as I've got older. And essentially, I focused on a regular strength training routine, three or four, sometimes five times a week with bands and weights if I have them available. I then focus on my protein intake, which is basically a gram of protein per pound. For me, that's about 175 to 180 grams.

• 55:33Peter Diamandis?

  So that's what I do as well?

• 55:34Speaker 04

  And then I make sure that I, and this is really important to understand for people, is that, you know, people talk intermittent fasting. Well, okay, you probably should not eat for 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. That's just called breakfast. You know, I can eat dinner at six, you can eat breakfast at six. It's not exactly fasting, right? If you eat dinner at eight, you can eat breakfast at eight. Maybe 14 hours. But when you're fasted, and it's important, I think, to do at least a 12-hour overnight fast, the first meal really matters. Because it's not just the fasting that's important, that induces activation of mTOR or inhibition of mTOR and autophagy or self-cleaning, like your self-cleaning oven.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  It's the first meal that you have after you do that that's critical. Because that first meal determines what happens next. And what happens next, if you do it right, meaning right being having 40 to 50 grams of protein. When you do that, then it activates mTOR, but it also does it in a way that synthesizes muscle protein or muscle protein synthesis, and it activates your stem cells. It activates all these longevity pathways. So it's got a sort of, kind of a dual benefit. So it's both the fasting and the feeding that matter. And the feeding has to be right.

• 56:53Peter Diamandis?

  So what's your breakfast?

• 56:54Speaker 04

  So, for example, this morning... I woke up early. I was kind of up early. I did some meditation and wrote my journal for a bit. Then I went for about an hour and a half hike up mountain behind my house, came back, did a 30 minute rigorous band workout, did some stretching and then took a quick steam and ice bath. And then I had my shake and I call my healthy aging shake. I'm happy to give you the recipe. It's in my book, actually, Young Forever, and you can check it out. But essentially, I take goat whey and whey protein is more tolerated by most people. Some of the dairy is a little hard. It's regeneratively raised goat whey. And it's about 40, 50 grams. I put in Mitopure, which is urolithin A.

• 57:38Peter Diamandis?

  I use Mitopure as well, yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 04

  I use 1,000 milligrams. And urolithin A, the data on this is really impressive. It induces mitochondrial synthesis, mitochondrial biogenesis, induces mitophagy, improves, reduces sarcopenia, and improves muscle synthesis, as well as also reducing inflammation and many, many other really impressive things. I also add in five grams of creatine to help muscle building. And I put a bunch of other stuff in there, which isn't necessarily for muscle building, but I'll put in adaptogenic mushrooms. I'll put in my gut food product, which essentially has pre and probiotics and polyphenols. What else I put in there? I sometimes put in other immunoglobulins for my gut and gut healing, probiotics. And so

• 58:24Speaker 04

  that's kind of my morning shake. And I'll put in some almond milk or maybe macadamia milk and some frozen berries. And that's basically my shake. And I don't have, it's not sweetened, it doesn't have any sugar. And the berries give it a nice flavor and make it like a milkshake.

• 58:38Peter Diamandis?

  Love it. That is so close to what I do. Do you, I've enjoyed kachava as well as a protein drink.

• 58:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. The thing that's important is make sure, you know, plant-based proteins can be great, but you have to make sure that they're the right ratio of amino acids. And as you get older, You get anabolic resistance, meaning it's harder to build muscle. And the great limiting amino acid for activating mTOR, which builds muscle, is leucine. So if you don't have two and a half grams of leucine in a serving of protein that you're having, you're not actually switching on the switch to build the muscle. So you can add leucine, you can add, you know, you can actually add a scoop of branched chain amino acids, or you can take something called the amino acid complex by Thorne. I don't have any relation with them or any financial thing with them at all. But this has been well studied.

• 59:33Speaker 04

  It was actually a product that they bought from a European company that was used to treat sarcopenia in elderly. And it's basically an amino acid complex that has high levels of leucine. So you can throw it in your shake if you want. But I would be careful to make sure you look at the amino acid composition and at least has two and a half grams.

• 59:50Peter Diamandis?

  And goat way versus grass fed beef?

• 59:54Speaker 04

  Well, you know, if you have, you know, the thing is if it's grass fed, grass finished, okay, that's fine. But what kind of cow is it? Is it an A2 cow or is it an A1 cow? So A2 casein is less inflammatory. It's like Guernsey and Jersey cows and other heirloom cows. Whereas most cows in America are Holstein cows and they're all A1 casein, which is super inflammatory, creates a lot of risk issues that I'm concerned about. And most way doesn't have that much casein, but it'll have a little. And I think I noticed, for example, when I have, because I'm sensitive to dairy. It's one of the foods I'm just sensitive to.

• 1:00:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I do not, I do not eat dairy.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  If, yeah, if I have like whey protein, like somewhere, I'll be somewhere. I just want to think I'll have a whey protein. I'll notice my nose gets all congested and I have, I'm phlegmy and if I do a podcast, it's terrible. But, but, but if I have the goat way, I don't have any of that. So I know there's something going on where it's triggering some immune inflammatory response when I have regular, regular whey.

• 1:00:49Peter Diamandis?

  You said, you know, 12 hours, you should, you should fast these 12 hours. I am curious your views on intermittent fasting because, you know, it was, you know, there's so much conversation around, you know, 18 hours off, you know, six hours on, you know, 20 hours off, four hours on. And, you know, I was reading that the studies actually don't show that that makes a difference. And what really matters is your total caloric intake.

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:01:23Peter Diamandis?

  Can you speak to that?

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. Well, it does give you a little bit of time more for autophagy. And I think, I think having at least 12 hours is, is minimum. Uh, and that's not, that's not really a fast, it's just normal. It's like you shouldn't, you shouldn't eat before bed and you can eat when you wake up. It's basically in America, we just keep eating until we have dinner and then we have your dinner snacks. Then we have a snack before bed.

• 1:01:45Peter Diamandis?

  We have a second dinner.

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  That's, that's just terrible for you. It's really bad. Uh, it'll make you gain weight. Basically, it's, I call it the sumo wrestler diet is what I wrote about in one of my first books called Ultra Metabolism. How do the sumo wrestlers gain so much weight? They're normal little Japanese guys. Well, they, they basically feed them in enormous calorie dense food. And then they make them go take a nap and then they wake them up and they do exercise and they have another huge meal. And then they take another nap. So basically then they go to sleep. So it's basically you eat on full stomach is the way to gain weight. But I think intermittent fasting can be challenging because if you do it, you can lose muscle. And then you end up, you know, in a kind of a counterproductive state.

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  So I think it's really individual. If you're very overweight and you want to use it as a strategy to drop a bunch of weight, I think it's great. I think if you're, for someone like, you know, you and I who are mostly metabolically optimized. I, I think extended, extended fasting probably is not a great idea.

• 1:02:41Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, because the reason I, the reason I stopped as well is because I'm trying to, you can't load all of your protein at one sitting.

• 1:02:51Peter Diamandis?

  Your body is not going to absorb it. And so I like to spread, you know, my 150 grams, uh, including a, you know, a breakfast. When I, because I work out first thing in the morning. So it helps me make sure I get protein, breakfast, lunch and, and dinner.

• 1:03:07Peter Diamandis?

  I'm curious, total calories, what's your view on caloric intake?

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  I think it's really important. I think, you know, we, we, excess calories are not good. And

• 1:03:16Peter Diamandis?

  How much do you suggest a person eat?

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  How much do you eat? It depends, right? So it depends on your metabolic engine, right? Someone's been on Ozempic and you've lost all this muscle and you're, you know, 180 pounds like me, you're probably going to need far less calories than I do because, you know, my VO2 max is high. I have high muscle mass. I have very low body fat. So I need a lot of calories. I need like almost 3,000 calories a day. But, but if, if you are someone who's not as active, if you're someone who's, you know, not metabolically tuned up, then you may need less calories. So it really depends on your body type and you can do measurements of your basal metabolic rate

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  with various kinds of devices now. You can do it in a lab now where they measure oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange. We used to do that when I worked at Kenya Ranch and you can see, you know, it's usually basically the way to figure it out is, is 10 times your body weight in calories. So if you're 180 pounds like me, my basal metabolic rate is 1,800 calories. And then for your activities of daily living, you usually add on another 30%, right? So 30% on top of that would be like 2,400 calories. So that's basically my basic needs. Now, if I'm like going for a five hour bike ride, right? Or I'm climbing up the Everest Base Camp where I was, you know, like,

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  like I did this summer and was hiking, you know, 10 miles at 14,000 feet straight up. I might need more. So it depends on what you're doing, but that's basically kind of how you figure it out. And by the way, calories as a way of thinking about looking at your food just is kind of a hopeless endeavor. If you take the top nutritional scientists who study calories and you tell them, okay, I want you to determine the calorie count of the food you ate without actually like measuring it and weighing it and everything, they won't be able to do it. And, and if you're off by 100 calories a day, like just 100 calories a day, which is not very much, it's like a bite of food, you're going to gain like 20 pounds in a year.

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  So you know, what you have to understand is it's really about regulating your metabolic system so that your brain chemistry, your hormones and your metabolism are all working in synergy so that you're going to self-regulate and do it in a way that is your body is smart and knows what to do. Because if you try to count calories, it's kind of forget it.

• 1:05:46Peter Diamandis?

  A question from my Twitter audience here is what real-time metrics do you look at to track longevity? And you know, it's interesting. I wish there were good metrics. I mean, true age as a, you know, your methylation clock, interesting. And since it's the only real thing I think there is out there, I measure that. But I measure percent, you know, fat and muscle mass and things like that. What do you measure?

• 1:06:16Speaker 04

  Well, there's a more to think of like, what are the risk factors? And then what are the, what are the actual measurements of biological age? And I'll send you a paper after we get off that kind of looks at all the different biological age clocks. And there's a number of them. And there's a number of inferential ones. For example, Maureen Leving has, you know, used a number of different epigenetic markers than, for example, the Horvath clock, which is more or less what's used for true age.

• 1:06:39Peter Diamandis?

  And they vary minute to minute, day to day, in the same person?

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  And they can vary decade to decade by different tests, even with the same person and the same time. So she's calculated based on some simple blood biomarkers, whether it's albumin, you know, red cell distribution of width, CRP, glucose, Alkphos, which a lot of markers that don't exactly make sense to me for biological age. But apparently it pretty reliably calculated to correlate with a lot of the epigenetic marks. So it's sort of a, it's sort of an, you know, uses large data sets to come up with a kind of a surrogate way of measuring these epigenetic marks using regular blood tests. And I think it's interesting. But the question is,

• 1:07:27Speaker 04

  What do you do with those? Well, you have to find one and or you can use multiple and then change your lifestyle or habits or supplements and then check it again as a way of sort of being your own control. But but the real the real things I look at are blood biomarkers, imaging biomarkers to see what's really going on in the body. And and from a functional medicine perspective, I'm actually giving a talk on Friday at the Buck Institute of Aging on longevity diagnostics. And it's really about what are the things we we should be looking at? And from a functional medicine perspective, I think about how do we assess health, not just what we're looking for disease? And I do that, too. But but I do the gallery screen to look for cancer biomarkers and liquid biopsy, or I'll do the clearly heart scan to look at atherosclerotic plaque, whether it's

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  soft or hard plaque, and that's all looking for actual disease. But I'm also looking for where the trajectory of people are from from from wellness to illness, right? There's a there's a it's not it's not like a on or off phenomena. It's a continuum of shifts and change in your biological systems. So we look at the your bio your your microbiome in your gut and the health of that. We look at the various immune biomarkers. We look at your mitochondrial function. We look at detoxification and toxic load. We look at the health of your your vascular and lymphatic system, your communication networks from the hormones, you know, transmitters to peptides to cytokines. And we look at your structural system. And there's various biomarkers.

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  You can look at all those. And then we look at the fundamental things like nutritional status, you know, we look at muscle mass and fat mass, we look at VO2 max testing, we look at inflammatory markers. And so we can get a real sense of what's going on in the body. And I co founded a company called Function Health, which gives you access to over 110 biomarkers for five less than 500 bucks that you can get checked twice a year. It's a membership model. And and it's amazing, people, what we found, we had over 20,000 people go through. We've had over a million biomarkers tested. And the things we're finding are just shocking because this is a health forward population. And we're seeing, you know, 95% with LDL particle number problems, 89% with small LDL, we're seeing

• 1:09:37Speaker 04

  Fifty one percent with high ApoB, which is a big risk factor for heart disease. We're seeing thirty percent with high ANA, which is an autoimmune marker, forty six percent with high CRP.

• 1:09:46Peter Diamandis?

  It's amazing.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  Like twenty percent with severe vitamin D deficiency. It's like amazing, right?

• 1:09:51Peter Diamandis?

  If you don't look, you don't see it. And by the way, you know, functional medicine, what Function Health is doing, what Fountain is doing, both of them based on functional medicine, is, you know, root cause, it is nothing I ever learned about in medical school, but it is the most important, you know, basis for me for choosing a physician.

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I mean, they're the only ones thinking about the network effect of everything that's happening in your body. I mean, the body is a network and when you go to the doctor, they're focused on a reductionist disease-based model. And so you're such a super specialist and it's amazing to me how limited training is. When you're an X, Y, or Z specialist, you really have no clue about anything else. And it's just like, I'm like, wow, well, the body's a system. So how do you treat one thing without thinking of everything? I just can't do that. My brain doesn't work that way. I see everything together. I'm like, okay, well, here's the hierarchy of problems. Here's the hierarchy of solutions. Let's get going, you know?

• 1:10:54Peter Diamandis?

  Well, buddy, listen, first of all, I take great, great joy and confidence in knowing that our diet, our sleep plan, our exercise plan, our supplement plan, our med plan is very similar.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  It's very similar.

• 1:11:09Peter Diamandis?

  I love that. I love that. And I'm also excited you're moving to LA.

• 1:11:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Peter Diamandis?

  And third, when you get here, I'm open for a sunrise walk on the beach here.

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  All right, down.

• 1:11:20Peter Diamandis?

  Awesome, awesome. Well, listen, pal, thank you so much for joining me on Moonshots again, and as always, grateful for you in my life.

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  And me too, and thanks for what you're doing, Peter, just to make the world a better place. You're a big force for good.

• 1:11:35Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, buddy. Be well. I want to take a moment to tell you about Abundance 360, my year-round leadership mastermind for people who want to go big, create wealth, and impact the world. It's also Singularity University's highest-level program. A key focus of Abundance 360 is helping my members develop their Massive Transformative Purpose, or MTP, and also to define and execute on their moonshots. You're listening to the Moonshot Podcast, so the question is, do you have an MTP? Do you have your own moonshot? For example, my Massive Transformative Purpose, my MTP, is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs

• 1:12:16Peter Diamandis?

  just like you to help you create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity. My MTP drives everything I do. It guides me. It inspires me. My books, my companies, the X prizes we launch, it's all born out of that MTP. As an entrepreneur, you need to have an MTP. It's your highest-level aspiration. It connects your emotional drive with the moonshots you take on. Your MTP drives the direction of your moonshot. It allows you to pursue your grandest dreams. It fuels you to go 10x bigger and impact the world. So the question is, where do you go to discover your MTP, to hone your moonshot?

• 1:12:59Peter Diamandis?

  Join me at Abundance 360. It's a global community of world changers, entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, all of whom have an MTP and a moonshot. We support each other in making a dent in the universe to positively uplift humanity. Our mission at A360 is to give you the tools, the network, and the inspiration to go big, again, to create wealth and to uplift humanity. If hearing this has you thinking, "I want to be part of that. I need someone to help support my MTP and moonshot," then consider joining us. Submit your application at A360.com. That's A360.com. See you there. Now, back to our podcast.

• 1:13:54Speaker 05

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