New Studies REVEAL How You Can Become Younger & REVERSE YOUR AGE | Peter Diamandis

The question I ask everybody is, if you got the exact same genes, I mean there's small variations and mutations and so forth, but effectively it's the same genes, why do you look different? Well, it turns out it's not your genes. It's which of those genes are on and which of those genes are off. And it's not only all the rage, it's also all the excitement of this idea, can you reverse your epigenome to a younger state? Peter Diamandis, welcome back to the show. Tom, it is a pleasure. It's been way too long, my friend. It has been. COVID really messed up my rhythms and all of that. And then I am super excited that you've published a new book, which we're going to be talking all about. But I want to know, so when you and I first met, it was really all about space. Yes. And exponential technologies. And now we've really shifted into regenerative medicine. Health health tech, biotech, regenerative uh longevity, age reversal, whatever terms you want. Um yeah, I like age reversal. personally. I And we'll talk about that. Yeah, and I've become obsessed with David Sinclair, who you guys talk about in the book. I have found, fundamentally, as I've gotten older, that my mindset and what I focus on has changed in ways that I wouldn't have predicted. So, until I was probably 44, 45, I was I just thought about living forever. All my plans were about living forever, and it really didn't sink in the usefulness of thinking about the fact that I am going to die. And then, at about 45, it switched for me, and it started to feel more useful to think about the fact that we might not hit escape velocity in my lifetime. Oh, we're going to hit it, baby. And And then I had a year where it was like, I I don't think it will happen for me. And then I read David Sinclair's book. Yes. And I thought, this might actually happen. Yeah. And that was the first time in a while where I thought, maybe I was pessimistic for a minute. Why are you so optimistic? Is it regenerative medicine? Like what is it that really clicked for you? My early life, my first 40 years of life, I'm 60 now. You know, for what it's worth, you look amazing. Thank you. I I feel amazing. I feel like, you know, 20 I have an internal mental age of 28 and I've got a, you know, a biological age of 49 and a half, so we'll we can talk about that. Um my first 40 years were space, no question about it. It was like Star Trek and Apollo, we're going there. Then I met Ray Kurzweil, uh read his book The Singularity Is Near. We started Singularity University together and I became enamored with exponential technologies, computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. All those technologies being the tools to solve the world's biggest problems. Right? And so that merged well with the work I do at Xprize. And it was about 8 years ago and this was around the time that you and I were were uh really becoming friends and connecting that I became enamored with the idea of longevity. I'd always been interested in longevity. When I was in medical school, I remember watching a TV show on long-lived sea life. That certain species of whales, like the bowhead whale, could live for 200 years and the Greenland shark can make it to 4 or 500 years and I'm like thinking There's a jellyfish that's basically immortal. Immortal, yes. Yeah. And you know, and sea turtles, you know, are thought to be hundreds of years. And I'm I'm thinking, if they can do it, why can't we? Right? I mean, seriously. That's so you though. Like the the That's one of the things that I love about you is that you just refuse to accept things as they are. It's like, no, I can make this better. Yeah. Well, I was thinking at that moment that it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. And that we're going to get the tools to fix that. And we are. What's happening right now define that for me at the cellular level? So, in my head I was trying to figure out what you consider hardware and what you consider software. the software the genome and the epigenome. So, our DNA. Your your the DNA and the meta structures around the DNA. We'll talk about the epigenome. And the uh hardware I consider the, you know, cellular organelles and uh the structures of the cell. Um and they they sort of have a blurry definition between them. Uh but at the end of the day uh the tech it's it's really the fact that biology has become a a digital tech as well, right? We've digitized biology. We've turned into ones and zeros. We are sequencing. So, when the NIH first sequenced the human genome, we have 3.2 billion letters in our genome. 3.2 from our mom, 3.2 from our dad. And uh the human genome project cost about $3 billion and took a decade to get a sequence. Uh Craig Venter uh it did it in about um 9 months with $100 million. So So crazy. And since then we've seen this precipitous drop. I mean, we're talking five times faster than Moore's law. Whoa. The speed at which computers are getting better, right? Five times faster and we're down now to you can sequence a genome uh in about 7 hours, right? And costs are below a thousand. There's, you know, question of whether And the And the prediction from Illumina, the the major sequencing company out there is that we'll get down to an hour and a hundred bucks. Right? So, I mean, it's the point where enter the hospital and your sequence. Like it's like check your BP, sequence you, you know, see what's going on. It it is. So, how targeted are things getting now? In terms of taking a sequencing, actually knowing something from it, and targeting the whether it's Still early days. Still early days. Where it's having an impact is in cancer therapies. So, being able to to sequence the cancer that someone biopsies and saying, "Okay, this cancer is going to be only radiation you know, affected by radiation therapy. This one can take a chemotherapy." Or, more importantly, we're going to create a specific gene therapy or CRISPR therapy or vaccine therapy against that cancer. Is anybody running AI against the So, when you have the simple mutations where it's like this disease is related to this gene and that's it. There's no complex interactions, but as as we go beyond those things and get into the more complex things, is anybody running AI to start assessing it's actually these 72 different gene interactions that cause whatever And that's the dream. That is the dream. And nobody's doing that yet. Well, it's being done you know, Human Longevity when it was Bob Hariri, Craig Venter and I put that company together and you you know that. The vision was large-scale genome sequencing and at the same time large-scale phenotype assessment, you know, full body MRI, all of that information. And then Sorry, so that people that don't know phenotype Phenotype is the way that your genes express. So, I look at you and what I see that's your phenotype. Yes, phenotype. to get a correlation? to get a correlation between everyone with these active these genes um and this environmental impact ended up with this kind of a cancer. Or everyone, more importantly, who had these genes, eating this kind of diet, lived longer. Or, you know, so there How How do your genes impact uh your workout, your diet, all of those things? And what we're learning is that genes are not your destiny. All right? It's very important to know, and you know this from your own personal work um in in weight loss and diet and mindset. Um it's your obsession. Uh that you can your epigenome, we'll get into that. Epi, from the Greek word above, your epigenome is uh which genes are on and which genes are off. You can think about your 3.2 billion genes or 3.2 billion uh you know, nucleotides, letters in your your DNA alphabet, uh which is tens of thousands of genes, as those genes are sort of the the keys on a piano. I was going to ask you. So, and maybe And And the piano player is your epigenome. Okay, so let me just push on that for a minute. I have my DNA. It's got these four letters. They repeat over and over and over and over and over. Those groupings of letters, which are revealed through methylation, which we'll get into in a minute, but what What is revealed in my very complexly wrapped DNA, yes, will determine what that cell becomes because my DNA strand contains all the genes, all of the genes together um well, so all of the genes have to be broken up into In this place, play this note to go with your piano analogy. And but over here, so in the eye, play the eye notes. In the knee, play the knee notes. In the brain, play the brain notes. Yes. And so, you've got this long-ass string of DNA cuz it for most people, I'll assume because it for me this is how it is, that you get the concept of DNA, you get the concept of genes, but you don't really know how they relate. So, let me let me break it down. Your 3.2 billion letters are broken up into 23 chromosomes. And we sort of remember that from our high school biology, right? And those chromosomes are uh super tightly wrapped and compact, right? If you stretched out the DNA from a chromosome, it would be meters long, but it it's rabbled together. And if it when it's so compact and rabbled in the structure and using these proteins called histones, um the DNA becomes very difficult to read. Now, what do you mean read the DNA? So, the DNA a gene has a start and an end, and typically it is read um with a tran- uh transcription uh process that turns from your DNA to a messenger RNA, and from a messenger RNA to a protein. A protein can be an enzyme, it can be actin and myosin for muscle, it can be all kinds of things. Proteins are sort of the structural building blocks. They're the major operating uh the carrier of operations in the body. And so, if your DNA is so tightly wound that you can't actually read it, then it's inert. Um and so, the DNA needs to be opened up in certain points to be read to have an appropriate translation into proteins. And in the beginning, um when life begins, we have a a pluripotent stem cell. So, a stem cell, and pluripotent means it can become anything. That stem cell can become uh heart, liver, lung, kidney, skin, brain, whatever it might uh cell, and it's super specialized. Um and it's super specialized because, like you said, the part of the DNA that codes for keratin or whatever the right protein is in in hair and skin, uh is revealed. Uh but the other parts that might make a nerve cell are are bound up and hidden. So, that process of uh of which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off is called the epigenome. Now, it gets interesting to our age reversal conversation, which I I think will will sort of dominate our conversation here. Uh is if I said to you, "Tom, you've got the exact same genes at birth, at 20, at 40, at, you know, when you're 80. So, why do you look different? Why don't you have like, you know, you probably do have a ripped six-pack, but why why Why don't you look like you were look like when you were 20?" Um Thank god. Thank god. In your case, my body better, face maybe not so much, but yeah. So, the question I ask everybody is, if you got the exact same genes, I mean, there's small uh variations through mutation and so forth, but effectively it's the same genes, why do you look different? Why don't you look like a baby or like an 80-year-old man? Well, it turns out it's not your genes. It's which of those genes are on and which of those genes are off. And that's called your epigenome, and it's not only all the rage, it's also all the excitement of this idea, can you reverse your epigenome to a younger state? This episode is sponsored by Future. Go to tryfuture.co/impact to get your first month for only $19. You can also click the link at the top of the episode description. Now, enjoy the episode. So, the question is, and this is what I found really interesting about David Sinclair and his work is book called Lifespan and I commend it to everybody. It's absolutely phenomenal. Your book Life Force and Lifespan go together extraordinarily well. one-two punch. For real. Um and what's interesting is I never really understood what was causing aging in the first place. And so walk us through the what methylation should do and then his idea, what does he call it? Dedifferentiation? Exdifferentiation? Exdifferentiation, I think. Where basically a cell should be an eye cell and it starts to break down and maybe it's revealing a little bit of like, here's some of the skin cell, here's a nerve cell, like a fragment of it. And so the Yes. the and and helping people understand what's happening in the cell. That there actually little things, proteins moving around like reading this stuff and The cell when you look into the cell, it is insane. The level of complexity within complexity within complexity. It's literally miraculous that we are alive and what is going on. You know, we have 40 trillion cells in our body. That's pretty Right? 40 trillion cells. And each of them is a living organism. And we don't think about the fact that we're this massive collection of cells collaborating to have this conversation. And then within our body, we won't get into it, but are all of the bacteria and viri and all of that which outstrip the number of human cells in us. Okay, back to the original point. So you're born uh uh you're in the womb, your placenta is actually the organ that generates all the stem cells uh that manufacture the baby. I think of the placenta as a 3D printer that manufactures the manufactures the baby. And you're born and um you your body goes through a pre-programmed uh process that uh allows you to mature into adulthood. Now, uh there's a series of seven genes um called the sirtuin genes. And these genes are producing these sirtuin proteins. And these are the linchpin uh of aging. It's the work that David Sinclair and George Church have done so beautifully. And it turns out that your sirtuin genes and proteins have um a dual function that are critical for your uh for your life. And they're competing functions. So, let me take this uh step at a time. So, your sirtuin genes, one function is they're in control of your epigenome. They're controlling which genes are on and which genes are off. And we'll get to methylation a little bit. But, that's a really important function for them. Is keeping uh your genes, your eye genes and eye gene, your skin genes a skin gene and and so forth. So, the epigenome is controlled. And they do that by detecting damage in the DNA and repairing it. Well, so that's the second function. No, they're they're doing this by controlling certain methylation proteins and and hide or reveal which hide or reveal. So, the sirtuin genes are uh have a function of of controlling the epigenome to make sure that the right genes are are being ex- opened uh to be read and the right genes are being closed. do they use for that in this first part? It is controlling the methylation of the DNA. Okay. So, the DNA, let's go there. The DNA um is methylated at different locations. A methyl group is a is a carbon with three hydrogens. And when you methylated it, hides the ability for that piece of DNA to be read. It it will stop it from from being read. And when you demethylated it, it can open it up. And there methylation transcription factors that the sirtuin genes are impacting here. Um So, if they're doing their job, they're controlling the epigenome appropriately in that cell. But the sirtuin genes have a competitive job, which is they're in charge of DNA repair at the same time. And so, as we are experiencing life, I won't say aging, but experiencing life, we are constantly being hit by cosmic rays, uh especially when we're flying at 48,000 ft in the upper atmosphere, uh second-hand smoke, uh other chemical mutant uh mutagens. And so, we're accumulating DNA damage in our cells. And the number I heard was like it's between 1,000 to a million um mutations a day per cell. I mean, it's a lot. So, there's a lot of work. Per cell? Per cell. Jeez. It's crazy. Okay. Um But what does that damage look like? Well, a G gets knocked off in the first place. a few things. It could be a single strand break. It can be a double strand break. It can be a And so, it's breaking of the DNA. And that is happening from from oxidation. It's happening from, you know, free electrons, if you would, hitting the DNA. And it's it's nicking the the DNA. And then, what happens is you've got all you've incredible repair mechanisms that are there. And if you have a double strand break, right? DNA is double stranded if it breaks, you've got a one system that will fix double strand breaks. And you have another system that will fix a single strand break and there's a number of different repair systems there, which frankly I have forgotten since medical school. But just amazing what what able to do. And sometimes when they make the repair, they'll instead of a a G they'll put a T and that's when you have a a permanent mutation that can lead to a cancer. Now Because that's effectively created a new gene at that point, right? modified a gene. Okay. And that that you have four letters A, T, C, and G and those letters in groups of three code for an amino acid as part of a protein. And um long story short, the sirtuins are helping you maintain your genes in a proper working order. It's helping you repair your genes. Now here's the challenge. Sirtuins are powered by NAD+ nicotinamide adenine diphosphate dinucleotide. NAD is easier. NAD Uh and NAD is sort of the energy currency in your cells. Uh how does that relate to ATP? So it is ATP and NAD are in the same in the same cycle. Okay. Right? And they're you're using ATP to activate your NAD. Um NAD powers the sirtuins. The challenge is that your NAD levels inside your cells drop precipitously after 40. Interesting. Right? More than half. So you're you're slowing your ability to repair. I want you to Let's use the piano player analogy. Um uh the genes that you're playing uh as the epigenome you're playing the proper piano at the same time as a sirtuin, you're over here fixing something. So, you're going from playing the piano to fixing something, and playing the piano to fixing something, and you need food to keep yourself going. But, all of a sudden you're spending more and more time fixing something because the DNA damage is accumulating, and the amount of food you have, or in my case coffee, to to drink is reducing. And so, I'm getting less energy, and I'm being distracted and having to fix the DNA, and I'm losing control of playing the piano. Right? So, all of a sudden your epigenome is becoming confused. Uh your skin's skin is not making the right proteins to keep it elastic and and smooth, and it's it's falling apart. And so, that from David Sinclair's book, and we talk We have an entire chapter on David. In fact, one of the things we do is we uh Tony and I in the book uh have a number of heroes that we go deep into. And And David, who's a professor of genomics at uh at Harvard Medical School, he's brilliant. He's one of the top brilliant thinkers. Long story short, that's what's going on. This competition between repairing DNA and controlling your epigenome, and having your NAD levels fall over time uh is what's driving us to look older at age 80 or 90 or 100. Are you supplementing NAD? I am. I'm not so uh that's one of the one of the elements. So, it turns out that um you want you want to boost your NAD levels in your cell. And there are you know, people go and get uh NAD uh IVs. The problem is at least according to David and a few other uh uh scientists who I who I believe their their work N- there's not a carrier to take the NAD from in the bloodstream into the cells. And so what you want to do is supplement it and there are two precursors to NAD. One is NMN and the other one is NR. Um And those we can transport into the cells. get into the cell and in higher levels in the cell they drive higher levels of NAD. So I take a gram of NAD of NMN every morning um and then I take uh uh another supplement uh basis that has nicotinamide riboside NR in it. And between those two uh for me it's working to maintain. Now, do I know that they're increasing or is this on faith? It's on on faith. We're you know, I hope that the ability to measure it intracellularly will become easier cuz it's not easy today. But theoretically it should be supporting it and I feel great and I've got more energy than I've ever had. Um and there's a few other supplements. In the book we talk about something called MIB-626 which is an NMN analog that is in trials right now and it's going to go through not So NMN and NR are supplements. You can buy them on the web. There's a hundred different versions. The challenge is that a lot of them are not in a crystallized form and they break down easily in any kind of heat on shipping. They may last 30 days and so just you know, please look into it. We write about it in in Life Force about uh that that fact that they're not all the same. Do you guys have a resource on Fountain Life to see that? if you go to life force.com, there are two you can order the book there, but then there are a number of resources there. One is for Fountain Life, the other one is for my my life force where there are a number of recommended supplements that you can get access to there. But that's not that's not the purpose here. When it really get into the book's mission is to give people hope and to give people a game plan of what they can do. MIB-626 comes out of a company called Eden Rock. The founder of Eden Rock, Ed Schultze, attended one of my SU executive programs 10 years ago after selling his, you know, exiting with tens of millions from one of his companies and got so enamored with biotech that he's built this multi-billion dollar biotech company that is extraordinary. And one of the things working with David Sinclair is they've created a a NMN analog molecule that they're taking through FDA approval right now and it's been secret for a while. It was just revealed that the special forces have been doing a trial with them using the special molecule MIB-626 to increase the special forces ability for energy and working out in long duration and to increase cognitive capabilities. And so, you know, I can't say too much more, but there's the potential of SWAT would break in and Yeah, there's a potential for having truly pharmacological agents that are available to us that increase our ability to have muscle and strength and cognition. Say it for me one more time. MIB626 does exactly what? So, right now from there was an article written it was leaked out of US special forces that they're using it to increase endurance and strength. And is it playing on the NAD pathway? It it's it is. It is supplementing more effectively NAD in the cells. Interesting. And also is it out? Like are you supplementing not available yet. No, it's in it's in very strict trials. Instead of going a supplement route, they're going an FDA trial route. Which will enable them to make specific claims because they'll have the data. And you know, hopefully in in 2 years, 3 at the utmost, it will become something that your physician can can order for you. I love the story that that Ed Shulock told me about one of his friends who was a world champion chess player in his 50s and early 60s. He now he's in his 70s, but he's supplementing with this molecule and he's now back up to world championship chess play. So, I mean, we all want to live into our 80s, 90s, hundreds. The question is you don't want to be drooling in a wheelchair. Yeah. You I mean, cognitive function is one of the most important things. The the supplement that the chess master is taking, is that uh the MIB626? Yes, that's the one. And I I'm I'm excited to get my hands on it as soon as I can, but I haven't But does that So, if if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly about the NAD pathway and I'm basically giving the energy to the sirtuins that they're going to need to both play and repair, so that'll make sense. But if if taking that is improving my cognition, is is it that the cells are actually being repaired better? I I know other than to say your brain is one of you know is is using 30% of your body's energy output at any one time. It's disproportionate, right? Thinking is might just be feeding it better. Maybe. Yeah. And of course the brain is is Interesting. Yeah, it is. It is fascinating. You keep giving me the chills. Like this is So this is why I'm so excited about it, right? So I've I've switched my venture fund Bold Capital to instead of all exponentials, we're like 70% into biotech and health. It's like the biggest business out there. I've started four companies in the last couple of years in the biotech, health tech, longevity space. I just think there's no bigger market. It's like for me, I want to make as much capital as I can in that space and then I'll go back to the space space. Right. Yeah. God, this is so intriguing. So the more I have forced myself to understand the mechanisms that are happening, Yes. the one more intrigued I have become, but two it's really beginning to influence the things that I'm doing. So I'd love to talk to you about diet. Yes. And it's funny how slow I am to actually change my diet, but that I start talking about it long before I do. Um So I have historically been way heavy on meat. And it makes me feel so good. I just could not wrap my head around when I have tried a heavier plant-based diet, I haven't felt as good as I do with meat. Then exploring the ideas that you guys talk about very eloquently in the book. And beginning to understand that okay, if red meat is triggering mTOR and mTOR is triggering growth and growth is giving my body the signal everything is abundant, all is well. Um but the very thing that makes you live a long time is sending the body the signal, "Yo, yo, things may not be like going as well in the environment as we think. You better like, you know, kind of constrict a little bit." hibernation. Right, exactly. Which is why um caloric restriction is the only thing they've seen work across every species they've ever tried it on in terms of longevity. Yes. And when I heard that, I was like, "Oh, man. So, that would explain why I feel good. I'm, you know, I can add muscle mass. I feel phenomenal, but I'm not giving my body the signal for longevity. Walk me through like So, we're going to talk about uh four things that I or five things that I think are important for longevity that are the basics. And we can start with diet first. You talk about sleep. You need to talk about exercise. You need to talk about mindset. And then the the fifth one for me is and uh daily annual uploads. It's not dying from something stupid. And and uh it's really really important to talk about the diagnostic side of the equation. Not every diet is right for every person. Your diet is really impacted by your genetics and also by your gut flora. Um and just to be clear, if you had to guess, and I know this is a guess, but if you had to guess, is it weighted more towards your microbiome or weighted more towards your genetics? I am actually going to guess it's more towards your microbiome. Yeah, that's my gut instinct. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. As well. Okay. Uh so, the there's certain things that are true. And you know, the single most fundamental part of your diet is sugar is poison. Right? Sugar is causes neuroinflammation, absolutely clear. It causes uh uh cardiac disease, absolutely clear. Right? Sugar feeds cancers. Um and so, getting rid of sugar is is the most important move anybody can make. And do you consider that just like actual refined sugar as an ingredient or are you looking at carbohydrates? Well, I'm also talking about, you know, uh low high glycemic index carbs as well. Stuff that becomes sugar in your bloodstream. Bread, pasta, white rice. So, um I am Where do you fall on fruit? I eat a lot of blackberries and blueberries because they've got additional benefits, all right? I sort of stay away from melons and orange juice and and things that become instantly become sugar in your bloodstream. I I've gone hardcore vegan and then I've gone hardcore keto and I've gone back to a Mediterranean. So, I will typically eat as much veggies as I can. I mean, I'm pounding salads, uh peppers, uh you know, you just as much greens as I can and I love a great Greek salad, tons of olive oil, right? Do you put cheese on it? I put feta cheese on it. I do. I enjoy It's the only cheese I actually eat is feta cheese. Because it's a harder cheese? Because um I'm lactose intolerant, thank god. Uh and that makes me because I think um I think cow milk today is detrimental. There's a a number of studies that show that cow milk is uh in particular the type of cow milk that's dominant in the US is is not good for you and I don't have enough uh science on the tip of my tongue to back that up, but go and and Google and take a look around. I will supplement that with typically fish, uh salmon when I can. Uh do I love a piece of bacon now and then? 100%. It's, you know, it's breakfast candy. Uh but I try and minimize. I don't eat any red meat. I don't uh or, you know, any uh any beef. Uh I'll eat some chicken, uh some and some fish and but it's 80 90% uh diving into veggies. Mhm. Um and that works for me. It doesn't work for everybody. And is any of that So, obviously some of it's just experimental. You've tried it. Is any of that driven by this idea of mTOR and not wanting to trigger that pathway? So, what's driven there is uh my intermittent fasting. So, I will uh get up. I will not eat lunch until about 2:00. And then I will have a late lunch and an early dinner. Um and try not to overeat. And I'll hope to be done by dinner by 7:00. And then I will fast till the next day at 2:00. David Sinclair does one meal a day at dinner. And then he's he's fasting. And so, I'm carrying with me, you know, this is my uh What on earth is that? It's Athletic Greens and Fiji water. Right? So, this will be what I drink. So, do you think that you're not getting enough uh of I assume you do the Athletic Greens for the micronutrients. Are you worried you're not getting enough in all the salads that you're pounding? No, um I this adds probably certain ones that I'm not getting, but it also makes it uh more enjoyable to drink than just plain water. does get a bit boring. I will give you that. Where's your What's your take on uh carbonated water? Interesting, right? So, I've been all over the place. I I enjoy carbonated water. And the question is, is it acidifying your your bloodstream or not? So, I just Listen, if if I were someday to get cancer, I'd be going all alkaline. I'd be zero sugar, you know, it's just like I'm going to fight it on every front. Until then, I will uh I'm probably 80% flat and 20% carbonated. At dinner, it's like a bottle of of Pellegrino of uh what you call it? Um Yeah, Pellegrino. Pellegrino, Perrier. Perrier, yeah, exactly. Very interesting. So, I I don't know what it is. I whatever is best for me, I'm always like to the right of that. So, I drink uh basically every ounce of water that I intake is carbonated. Yeah. So, I don't drink sodas or anything like that, but again, phosphoric acid and sugar, you know, just say no. Mhm. So, going back to red meat for a second. So, do you avoid red meat because of the um the correlative studies on um Increased cancer, increased inflammation. Yes. And I've I've just I've learned to just not like it as well. After time, it just is, you know, it's not what I'm going to eat. You know, if I if I'm going to eat anything other than uh fish, a little bit of chicken, and a little bit of pork. Mhm. But, that's my personal, you know, and again, it's really maximizing the amount of of greens, of uh colorful greens, you know, uh broccoli uh with olive oil and lemon is awesome. Uh you know, who would have thunk I love Brussels sprouts? Do Brussels sprouts are delicious. I'm not sure if they're cooked well, obviously. I'm not sure what people's beef are, but I will say that I like Brussels sprouts with bacon. Yes, I do love Brussels sprouts with bacon, yeah. so good. Yeah, for sure. Uh yeah, I I am surprised when you get something cooked well, just how delicious um vegetarian items can be, vegan items can be. And and I I will set aside all the stuff that just, you know, puts a ton of sugar in it. Have you heard of Shroomu? I have not. So, Rich Roll, who I think you know, to see him later today. Amazing guy, phenomenal podcast. His wife created this vegan cheese, which after the whole So, my thing, I am still eating a ton of red meat, I want everybody to be very clear. But, I am going through this intellectual exercise of exploring this idea of mTOR and like if if red meat is triggering that and you need to put your body in a totally different state in order to um get the longevity. So, I'm like, okay, well, are there vegan things that I can try? So, Rich ends up sending me some of his wife's cheese. It is so good. I I literally freaked out. I was texting him like, "Homie, this is freakish." And so, uh yeah, I'm always a little tense when something's highly processed, but nonetheless, this stuff is amazing. The ingredient list is really short. I see him, I'm going to ask him for some. Dude, it's so good. You are going to love it. I I literally can't believe how delicious they've made this stuff. And that's where I'm like, okay, like if if there are things that I can do that are really delicious and I can measure, and this is where this gets interesting, I can measure its effect on whether it's my telomeres or I forget what the InsideTracker, what's it called? InsideTracker is is one, yes. What is it they're looking for in that? Is it methylation? So, they're they have uh an epigenetic clock Cuz when you say that you're you're 49 biologically. it turns out that going back to our epigenome and the methylation sequence, um uh there is a methylation pattern that changes over time. And you can measure it. And uh there is a uh a number of methylation clocks. And so, InsideTracker uses one uh Fountain Life I give some blood and they do not the DNA sequence, but they look at the methylation and they say, "You have the methylation pattern of a 49-year-old even though you're 60. And so David Sinclair, who when the time we wrote the book was 53 and had a methylation pattern of someone who was 33. Oh. Right? And so that's my goal, 20 years. It's amazing. And So do you do things and then do the tracker and look at it and go, "Okay, cool." I am constantly varying my supplements, my exercise, my diet uh in directions that are pro age reversal. Mhm. And let's let's talk about some of the other ones. So on the diet side, just to summarize, you know, the recommendation is intermittent fasting. You know, at a minimum, you know, eat an early dinner. You're like 19 hours? I'm Yeah, I'm I'm roughly 7:00 p.m. till uh till 1:00. So yeah, that's uh what is that? 6 - 24 18 hours. Right? On the extreme, I'll do one meal a day, but typically it's eight, you know, six on, 18 off. Uh the second thing uh is I'll try and you know, bring in at least 2 L of water a day, right? If on a great day I can do three. Just pounding water. We are constantly dehydrated. We don't drink enough water. I'm going to ask about that and I don't I we have more, so let's put a pin in that lose where we were, but every time somebody says to drink that much water, there is a skeptical part of my brain that's just like from an evolutionary standpoint, there is no way we had access to water that consistent. a really great point. Um So uh in the book we provide some of the studies in the background on on water intake. I'm taking this on gospel truth. I don't have the science behind it. Um Putting that aside, minimizing sugar, that's clear. Plant-based diet, maximizing my plants intake, and then adding supplementing it with, you know, I do eat eggs, I do eat fish. And so, that's more of a Mediterranean diet, which is, you know, genetically and, you know, historically my background. Let's go to the next subject, sleep. Uh evolutionarily, if our species could have evolved to sleep less, it would have been such a boon to get extra hours in the day for finding food, protecting yourself, mating, that we would have slept less. But, the fact that we don't, that we need 8 hours of sleep, uh is a fundamental fact. Your brain needs it. And I remember when I was in medical school, I used to pride myself on like, I can get by with 5 hours, 5 and 1/2, and that was a stable point for me. And now I pride myself on getting 8 hours. I got my Aura Ring. I set the temperature in the room to 65 degrees. I have a cooling blanket. I've got these great Manta eye shades that are so comfortable. I you know, and I go to sleep, I try and be asleep by 9:30, so I can get up at 5:30, and I'm like, did I make 8 hours? It's like, I'm I'm trying to I'm trying to hit that. And I think that's really important. Have you set a goal to work out more, but don't know which exercises to start with? Future is here to help. Future is a new fitness app that connects you with an online personal trainer who will send you workouts each week, monitor your performance, and message you to keep you motivated. If you don't already have one, Future will send you an Apple Watch to borrow for the duration of your membership, which is amazing, and your trainer will use that to monitor your progress, tracking your heart rate and activity data while you work out. Your phone, your watch, and your trainer all work seamlessly together. So, if you want a workout plan that's built for you, not the masses, that will keep you focused and motivated, then go to tryfuture.co/impact to try your first month for just $19. That's cheaper than most gym memberships. Once again, go to tryfuture.co/impact to try your first month for just $19. You can also click the link at the top of the episode description. All right, guys, take care and be legendary. How about you? How are you doing on sleep? Dude, I'm freakish about sleep. So, I one thing that I will say I'm very proud cuz I'm definitely a hustle porn guy, like telling people go hard, uh but I've always told people get sleep, and that is a priority in my life. So, I'm in bed at 9:00 p.m. like it's a religion. Yes. I don't set an alarm, so I wake up when I wake up. Now, I will say that there are times in my life where I'm so intense on something that I end up not getting a ton of s- I just wake up. Yeah. But I know that if I were to back off and do to have less stress in my life that I would sleep more. So, even though I'm not waking up to an alarm, I am doing things mentally that end up reducing my sleep. So, I'm not thrilled with that. If you were to track right now, my average per night is between 6 and 6 and 1/2. Okay. I'm I'm hitting minimum seven, and I'm routinely hitting 8 hours, which I'm really happy about. Uh but it's really getting up and having the energy in in the morning, right? So, I do my best writing early. Same. Yeah, it's like I used to be in I remember medical school and graduate school, I was uh you know, I'd be pounding at 2:00 a.m. and and 3:00 a.m. and and like that was my and I my schedule was flipped where I'm mental clarity in the first 2 hours of the day. Yeah, so I don't know how much credence to give to chronotype, but when I was young, so that I went through a period where I was unemployed, and in that period, my my sleep time I kept getting pushed later and later and later, And I realized I had a problem when I had to set an alarm to make a 10:00 p.m. movie. And I was like, "Whoa, all right." So, and you just start to feel weird. One, you're not seeing the sun. Two, you're not really seeing other people. Yeah. Because, you know, when you go to the grocery store, it's 1:00 in the morning, and so there's two other people in the store. I was like, "Something doesn't feel right here." And so, I forced myself to get back onto a normal schedule. But, um but now I'm like, "Man, when 8:00 comes around, I'm like, 'Can I go to bed yet? Can I go to bed yet?'" So, it's not like somebody has to convince me to go to bed at 9:00. I'm ready to go to bed. And uh yeah, that's Yeah, I know. I got I want to feel good in the morning. Yeah, I got 10 and 1/2 year old boys that are typically in bed at 7:30 and asleep by 8:00, and I'm like ready to go to sleep then, too. Yep. It's like I'm like, "Uh God, please go to sleep so I can go to sleep." Yeah. Um so, uh sleep is critical. Uh 8 hours. Um Let's go to exercise next, right? I mean, it's still the fundamentals of diet, sleep, exercise. Uh for me, I try and get in my 10,000 steps a day. I'll take my meetings, as many meetings as I can, walking. Uh I'll take my phone calls walking. I'll take my Zoom calls on my phone walking, just to get that in. And then, I do a heavy weight workout twice a week, and light weights, uh you know, every day. How about you? And uh so, I work out four to five days a week, and I do basically exclusively lifting. I won't call it heavy, cuz I used to lift heavy, and I definitely don't do that anymore. But, I lift things that I can do, say, five to six reps. Mhm. Um unless I'm doing something for deadlifts. Deadlifts I do ultra high reps. So, like 15 to 20-plus reps. Yeah. Uh and I do that because I had I just kept injuring my back. And so, don't want to play with that anymore, but I find if I don't deadlift my back starts to hurt. So, I've kept it in there, but I keep it ultra high rep. Now, one thing you guys talk about the book is and I'm forgetting the name, but where you're not trying to move the weight. You're actually trying to push against the almost immovable object. Yeah, so that's a and there's OsteoStrong is one of the companies that enables that, but it's it's when you've got a a weight even in you know, if you're doing curls and you've exhausted your muscles and you can bring it up and just hold it until it it goes down. It's that that point of maximum contraction and maximum force and it's signaling the muscles at at that point. You're just trying to signal them uh it's I think the molecule is AMP adenosine monophosphate that that triggers muscle growth. One of the things I think it's important for people to know is muscle mass is an indicator of longevity. There is a direct correlation and there's a couple of reasons thought. Number one, uh your muscles store blood and stem cells in them and the second is a lot of people die post falls. You know, uh you break your hip, you break your pelvis is how my dad passed, you know, ends up in the hospital and then there's a pneumonia and I just hear the story over and over again. I just you know, got my mom a trainer. God bless her. She's 86 um and I it's like I have the dedication of the book to her saying, "Mom, you're going to make it over 100, please." And it's like get a trainer to keep her muscles toned as much as possible. Yeah. Yeah, muscle is a a very big deal. Um how do you think about like when you're So, I guess you intake some meat, you intake eggs, so not a big deal, but that's one thing that I when I hear that I start sketching out between okay, wait, I'm going to need to trigger mTOR to build the muscle mass, but mTOR is also I won't say directly shortening. I'm Yeah, I don't know enough to make the statement, so people check me up on this, but this is what I think that mTOR is effectively shortening my life compared to what it could be if I wasn't constantly living in mTOR. So, it's this weird balance of needing the muscle mass, which my understanding of one of the reasons that muscle mass is so effective to your point is that it's a storage mechanism. So, it's storing uh you just talked about stem cells, blood, but also amino acids. And so, um oh god, I'm forgetting his name. There's this guy back at Quest we used to talk to all the time, very accomplished scientist, and he was like, you would see like a burn victim and if they had muscle and within like 3 weeks, their muscle would just be gone because the body was just stripping it of the amino acids so it could repair and rebuild the skin. And I was like, "Whoa, that is cuz I'd never thought about that there cuz when you lift, you realize you guys talked about this in the book that you it does feel a little sisyphusion in that if you stop working out, you're going to lose that muscle mass distressingly quickly." Yeah. And so, my thing is, okay, hold on. If if the body is like, "You're going to have to put me in like an adapter diet state for me to put the muscle on, and then if you stop putting me in that state, I'm going to strip you of the muscle." Muscle's clearly very expensive. The body is nervous, in my words, to hold on to muscle. So, the question becomes, okay, one, why is it expensive? And then, two what is it if it's correlated with all-cause mortality, what is it doing that makes it valuable enough that you do want to keep some but that it does get thrashed? Here's the a couple of really important data points here. So, your body is constantly remodeling itself, and you know this, right? Bone and muscle remodel based upon your needs. If you don't need it, um you lose it. And so, if you're in bed rest, bone density and and muscle uh disappears. Um and the challenge is that our bodies were never evolved to live past age 30. So, if we go back sort of to evolutionary biology, 100,000 years ago on the savannas of Africa, you'd go into puberty at age 12 or 13. And before birth control, you were pregnant. And by the time you're now 27, 28 years old, your baby's having a baby. And back then, before McDonald's and Whole Foods, before, you know, we had abundant amount of food available 24/7, uh the last thing you wanted to do to perpetuate the species was steal food from your grandchildren's mouths. And the best thing you could do was die. Right? And give your bits back to the environment and not hold back your tribe. And so, the average human lifespan 100,000 years ago was, you know, 30-ish. And even 100 years ago it was just 40. Um not that you couldn't live longer, but the average lifespan uh from childhood mortality and early deaths and everything was was 40. Um and so, genetically, everything that would kill you after 30, after reproductive age, was never selected against. So, all the stuff in your, you know, cardiac disease in your 50s and cancer in your 60s and 70s and uh dementia in your 80s and 90s was never biologically selected against, and even retaining muscle mass and bone mass was never advantageously selected again. If we had If we could reproduce into our hundreds, then the people who had the most muscle, the the most, you know, cognition, the the the most the least disease, their genes would perpetuate, and that would be a positive feedback loop, but that just hasn't been the case. Muscle is critically important. I'll talk about one of my companies that I just took public this year called Vaccinity. Um and it's a super cool company. Uh it is a company that creates what are called peptide vaccines, right? So, a peptide is a small sequence of amino acids. It's a piece of a protein, and it's We do these specially designed vaccines. I'm a co-founder and vice chairman of the company. The The brilliant individuals are May May Who, who's the CEO, and Lou Reese, who's the executive chairman. They built this vaccine company. It's got a COVID-19 vaccine, which we just got data yesterday. We just announced today that it's three times more effective as a booster than the Pfizer vaccine, Wow. which I'm super excited about, and What mechanism is it using? So, peptides work in what way? what we do is we create um a peptide sequence in the shape of part of the COVID virus, but it's not the You're not putting mRNA to create the spike that is then shed and then picked up. We We generate um part of the shape of the spike, and it's attached to a very I'll call it a very provocative uh protein that is um seen by the by the body as dangerous. And those two combinations cause your immune system to form antibodies against the portion of the COVID vaccine. But it is uh super mellow. There's very low reactogenicity uh to the vaccine. So I'm hopeful it'll become sort of the safer booster vaccine, and that's great. But that's not what I'm talking about here. We've been able to also create vaccines uh against targets in the body uh against Alzheimer's, against Parkinson's, against uh hypercholesterolemia, which is stroke and uh heart disease. And we're developing against bone loss and muscle loss. How does that work? Like if people are So let's take Alzheimer's, which I imagine is one of the harder ones. What is it they're targeting? Cuz isn't that still a big question mark as to what's going on? the beta amyloid, which is build up. And so if you can target that, what happens is your body starts creating antibodies, which goes attaches to the beta amyloid in these these uh short-chain beta amyloid, and then extracts them out before they build up. Obviously, I am not an expert on Alzheimer's, but the idea of beta amyloid plaques being the ambulance at the uh scene of the accident rather than the actual causative problem. And so if we end up removing all of the amyloid plaques, and it's actually there to, I don't know, trap a virus or whatever. Um So so far, we're we're entering phase three of the you know, phase one is safe is safety, and it's very safe. How long have they been going down this road? Doesn't this take a long time? Seven years. Jesus. Yeah, seven years. Um phase two is efficacy, and phase three is efficacy at scale, right? So uh we've completed our phase two, we're getting ready to enter our phase three. Uh we're entering phase two on Parkinson's. Uh We uh which is amazing. It's um alpha synuclein is what the target is there. So, here's in in hypercholesterolemia, I find it fascinating. I have I have hypercholesterolemia, high LDL, right? It's genetic. My dad had a lot of heart disease and atrial fibrillation. Do you take a statin? I do not take a statin. I hate statins. Super curious to hear more about that, but finish this. Yeah, okay. So, what I have been taking is a monoclonal antibody uh called Repatha um that I inject 5 ml every 2 weeks Wow. into my belly fat or my my my uh my thigh muscle. And that monoclonal antibody, so it's an antibody, right? That targets a protein in my liver called PCSK9. And that protein in my liver is what generates LDL, the bad cholesterol. And so, this monoclonal antibody uh that's very expensive. It's $14,000 a year. Wow. Right? Not not cheap. It's not It's not the first, second, or third line of defense. It's like the last line of defense cuz people can't afford it. And so, the monoclonal antibody is manufactured in a vat in this in this uh Regeneron's manufacturing facility. I get it. I inject it. Goes to my liver and uh and blocks the PCSK9 protein. The antibody attaches and blocks it from manufacturing LDL. So, what we're doing is we are manufacturing uh a vaccine that you give yourself every 6 months. And the vaccine activates your own immune system to create that same antibody for free. Wow. So, your immune system creates this antibody against the PCSK9, goes to the liver, and blocks it. Except instead of $14,000 a year, the cost is maybe 100 bucks a year. Wow. Right? And so, now all of a sudden, it can become a first line of defense. Mhm. And it attacks the root cause of the LDL production. Which is then So, the idea is can you preventatively give vaccinate everybody so you don't produce the heart disease or the stroke from that from that LDL. And that it becomes exciting. Now, how I got to the Vaccinity story was that we are also um in development of a vaccine against bone loss and muscle loss. Mhm. And so, imagine imagine if when she's targeting? Um I am I should it's in the book, and I apologize from uh not remembering the exact uh targets, but it's basically it's going to be blocking the osteoclasts, which are the cells in the bone that break down the bone. Right? So, bone is dynamic. It's built up by osteoblasts, and it's broken down by osteoclasts. It's just the way the if you're a skier and you're stressing your bones, osteoblasts are building up bones where that stress is. If you're in bed rest for a month, it's breaking it down. And in in muscle, um you're you know, the sarcopenia, which is the technical term for for for uh muscle loss, uh you can block the muscle breakdown as well. So, imagine if you when you build your muscle up and you build your bone up that it it just stays at mass. Um one of the things that's exciting uh that I share with my my dear brother Lou Reese, who's executive chairman of this company, is passionate about space. So, imagine being able to go and vaccinate the astronauts before they go to Mars or before they go to the moon, so they don't have the muscle loss and the bone loss and they can retain it when they're coming back. And of course, the real business opportunity is in the aging population, where that's a real issue. So, it's just another powerful tool that we talk about in the book that vaccines are becoming extraordinary as a tool. And And whether you hate the COVID vaccine or love of COVID vaccine, it's a technology that has saved, you know, tens, if not hundreds, of millions of lives. And so, Stéphane Bancel, who's the CEO of Moderna, is uh is a friend. And the work that they've done is unbelievable, right? We went from uh the Wuhan virus sequence sent by email to labs around the world from Wuhan, uh to a Moderna vaccine designed in 24 hours. Woah. And then from that design to being put into production and approved for distribution in under a year. Now, this is something normally takes 7 to 10 years to do. We did it all in under a year and built the manufacturing at scale. I mean, that was shows us what's possible, right? This is the exponential age that we're living in. So, where is Moderna going next? They're producing vaccines against all the viruses we accumulate throughout life. So, we have cytomegalovirus, herpes virus, uh HIV viruses, all kinds of things. And it turns out that when you have these viruses in your bloodstream, they your immune system is constantly battling to keep them in check. And there's something called immuno-depletion or immuno-exhaustion, which is if your immune system is being used to exhaust is being exhausted by constantly fighting these endo these viruses that are in your system never wiped out then your immune system's not there to fight cancer. Right? And one of the things that people should know is we're always developing cancers. The body's always developing cancers. It's just that your immune system finds them and zaps them. And so the idea of what Moderna is going to go next is to develop vaccines against all of these um that generate the antibodies that keep these in check versus your T cells keeping them in check. And it's an amazing vision of where they're going. And so I just think we're going to start to see these brand new sets of tools. Remember I said we need to learn how to modify our software or hardware. And this is modifying our our hardware in this regard. Yeah. It's really incredible. What So regenerative medicine is a big part of the book and that's a big part of the focus. That's something I'm super excited about. Where where is the state of it now and and maybe even so everyone will understand the words regenerative and medicine. But what is regenerative medicine and what's the most exciting stuff happening? Yeah, sure. Uh and there's a lot. It's amazing. It's insane. So hold on. This is where we have some fun. So uh our body Remember I said the placenta is a 3D printer that manufactures all the cells that create the fetus and the the newborn, right? It's a 3D printer that manufactures a baby. And then as we grow in our body, we have stem cells all over the place. And stem cells in our bones, in our brain, in our muscles. And they're there as the uh as the repairman. Um and you can think of the body, there's a great analogy uh that uh that Bob Hariri and Aubrey de Grey have have used of if your body is a beautiful mansion like this incredible place that we are right now. And uh and you have the designs for the place and you have an army of re- of repair repairmen and women who are fixing the place. And uh anything goes wrong, they fix it. Anything goes wrong, they fix it. But over time, imagine that uh your repair staff are getting older and dying off and more senile and damage starts accumulating. And that's effectively what's going on inside the body. So, one of the nine hallmarks of aging is is stem cell depletion. So, between uh you know, a child at birth and someone who is in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, you can see a hundredfold to a thousandfold less stem cells in your body. Oof. And and so, the repair mechanisms uh you know, are super weakened. Uh regenerative medicine is how do you revitalize your stem cell populations? How do you augment them? So, uh Bob Hariri, who's also part of the book, the book was principally written by by Tony and myself and Bob helped uh guide a lot of the the content as well. Uh he's my brother from another mother. He's a great dude. Yeah, he's amazing. Uh so, Bob was a uh a trauma neurotrauma surgeon, amazing. And one day, when his daughter was being born, he realized that the placenta was growing very large ahead of the fetus growing. Like, the fetus was a bean and the placenta was really fully formed. And when he and I were in medical school, it was always a placenta it a support organism for the for the fetus, but if that was the case, why wasn't it growing at the same rate as as the embryo? Well, it turns out it's not. It's generating the the the stem cells and the cells that are manufacturing the the embryo. And he's the first person to realize how powerful the the placenta is as a source of uh of pluripotent stem cells and uh and immunological cells. So, he built a company within Celgene that's now part of Bristol-Myers uh called uh so, Celgene was a hundred billion-dollar company. He was in charge of cellular medicine. About three years, four years ago, I helped him spin that out and we formed a new company called Cellularity, which also just went public this year. It's the uh company that is mines the placenta. So, we we store hundreds of thousands of placentas. I had my two boys 10 years ago were stored. The company, anybody who's listening, if your kids are if you're if you're pregnant or you know someone who's pregnant, it's uh Lifebank USA. Instead of us just storing the cord blood, you can store the placental cells. Woah. And so, it's like having the original boot disk to go back to early days of computers or the original computer code of your child stored eventually to be able to manufacture backup organs and manufacture whatever you might need for that child. And so, out of the placenta, we extract stem cells. We extract exosomes, which exosomes are are the So, stem cells are generating these growth factors. And the growth factors are released by from the stem cells in these little uh vacuoles, these little fat-contained microcells that have no DNA, no organelles. It's just sort of a exide structure. It's an bi-lipid structure with these growth factor chemicals in them, and those are called exosomes. And so it's how they're excreted from stem cells, and they're in the milieu, and you can extract them. Uh and and it's so you can So I when I go to Fountain of Life every time, I get uh I get these exosomes injected into my bloodstream versus the stem cells. And they're growth factors going into my bloodstream. ones that are Match? No. No. Really? You don't have to worry about blood type, nothing? Nothing. The exosomes are just the growth factors, and I'll talk about why even placental cells don't require matching um because they're they're immunoprivileged. If you think about a surrogate mother who's carrying a baby that she's not genetically related to, Yeah. she doesn't reject the baby, and the baby doesn't reject her. And so there's an immunoprivileged structure there, which is fascinating and very advantageous. Wow. Yeah. I I It's before the cells are are given an identity of self by the thymus gland. Anyway, long story short, um the question has been, can stem cells help you regenerate and repair? This entire book got started when Tony was skiing down, you know, snowboarding down a hill, uh trying to follow a 22-year-old professional. Uh he has this crazy fall, uh and he, as he says, he has 9.99 pain out of 10 as he had really damaged his rotator cuff. He thought he'd broken his neck. And he's going to uh all of his surgeons, he's going to his friends, what do I do? It's surgery, surgery, surgery, surgery. And he called me up, and I said to him, "Tony, listen, before you have surgery, I think you should really go and try stem cells." And he goes like, "What should I do?" And I said, "Go talk to Bob." Uh Bob and I set him up at a at a clinic uh down in Panama. He went down. Uh he had stem cell treatments in the joint and intravenously over the course of 3 days. And as he explains it, uh on the third day, for the first time in in years, he stands up and he's got no pain in his back. And he an unrelated injury. Unrelated. And uh and his shoulder is uh beginning to feel better and months later on MRI, it's completely healed without any any surgery. Now, results will vary. To be clear, uh Tony is a is a is a miracle unto himself. And I think his mind over matter is is extraordinary. But he got religion. Uh I invited him to a conference uh uh an X Prize event we were having at the Vatican. We were piggybacking on the uh Cure conference that the Pope hosts every every 2 years. And uh he came and he got so excited about this. And that's when this book was born. And the book opens up with the story of the Vatican conference and um his injuries and such. And regenerative medicine is the notion that we can use uh stem cells and exosomes and growth factors to help regenerate our body. To help regenerate muscle, brain, all of the tissues of our body. Um a few other areas. So, uh you might have heard about the young blood uh experiments. It's a fun uh Dracula myth here. So, years ago, in fact, Bob Hurry did a lot of this early work and it was repeated in Amy Wagers lab in, uh, at Harvard. If you take the circulatory system of a young mouse and an old mouse and you combine them, it's called parabiosis, the old mouse gets younger and the young mouse gets older and it's like, what what up? You know, why is this happening? And so, what Amy Wager, uh, did was she identified a particular molecule that is decreasing as we age. Um, and then it's called GDF11. And she started giving that to the old mice and they became younger. Woah. And so, uh, there is a company called Elevian that's, uh, been designed to turn that into a a drug. They're entering human trials just now, finished with animal trials and it's being used in certain conditions. Um, uh, but, you know, you always and when you're doing an FDA trial, you can't just say it's going to affect everything. You have to pick a particular point and say, we're going to look at, uh, uh, neuroinflammation or cardiac conditions, whatever the case might be and we're going to measure this, uh, this disease and these molecule these, uh, you know, markers and see if they get modified. And so, that's exciting. Um, could that, you know, What have they decided to target? Um, uh, they are desig- they're targeting the cardiovascular system in particular. Uh, and there's again, uh, we talk about Mark Allen, who's the CEO of that company, who's, uh, a friend, uh, full disclosure, Bold is an investor in in Elevian, uh, as is Tony. Um, and uh, we'll see. I'm excited about that. I'm always look I think, you know, the biggest business opportunities on the planet are going to be age reversal and health tech and biotech and so forth. You You still can't take it with you, right? Uh so there's that's one area. Another area of regenerative medicine that is blow-your-mind level stuff is building organs. This is nuts. We're heading towards a organ abundance. So today there are hundreds of thousands of people on an organ donor list. A lot for kidneys, which is the number one needed, and then heart and liver and lung. You know, I once wrote a screenplay about a guy whose wife is dying and he has to go harvest the organs of bad guys. Uh That's great. to work her up the UNOS list. That's That's crazy. Um So right now if you need an organ transplant you're hoping that someone with an HLA match in other words a a match to your surface antigens dies and is an organ donor, right? So I'm an organ donor. I think that's the right thing to do. I checked it on the form. Uh encourage others to consider as well. Um I hope not to die anytime soon, but just you know, just putting that out there. Um and uh you're waiting for that and then the transplants uh if you're in good enough shape and the organ's good enough shape but we're we're transplanting a fraction of the list. But imagine a future in which you have a backup set of organs on hold for you, right? Like in the deep freeze ready to go. So there are two approaches going on right now. One by an incredible entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt who you know. Martine uh is uh is brilliant. I've known her for 40 years. I uh Martine is on her seventh moonshot right now. Wow. she used to be Martin. Uh, and uh, when when she was Martin, she was the co-founder of XM radio and Sirius radio. She was an uh, an F uh, an FCC regulatory lawyer and an aerospace engineer and amazing brilliant person. Not done much with her life, yeah. Yeah, and and uh, she had uh, a uh, a sex change operation, remain married to Bina who's brilliant. Uh, a number of kids. One of her one of her kids, one of Martine's uh, changed name to Martine. One of Martine's kids um, by name of Genesis uh, when she when Martine was now still in XM radio and Sirius radio uh, is discovered to have a fatal disease called pulmonary fibrosis. And what does Martine do? She quits her job, she sells her shares and sets out to cure her daughter's disease. Damn. With no background in biology. Starts with a high school biology book and camps out the medical library and is reading everything on pulmonary fibrosis. Wow. And is tracking down and talking to the doctors and just, you know, monomaniacally like I love this Joseph Campbell quote like a a man whose hair is on fire seeks water. Right. Isn't that a great quote? good. It gives me the chills again. Yeah, and uh, goes after that and tracks down a potential drug that could stay the course of pulmonary fibrosis for her daughter who's only got a couple years of life left. And uh, the drug company refuses to provide it to her. And so uh, Martine goes and grabs a whole bunch of great scientists and advisers and brings it into her orbit and they go and they lobby and finally get the uh the drug company to agree to give them access to that orphan drug, which they had no intention to develop, but didn't want the risk. And what Martine gets is a little baggy of white powder. Woah. And she has to go from there to a manufacturable drug, to uh trials. And lo and behold, it works. And it saves her daughter's life. Wow. the course of that, she builds a back then $6 billion company called United Therapeutics that she's the chairwoman and and CEO. Now, it doesn't stop there. Cuz Martine realizes that this drug will stay the course of pulmonary fibrosis, but it doesn't cure pulmonary fibrosis. And now the question is, how do I manufacture lungs? And so she sets out on three different approaches to manufacture replacement lungs. And her primary one, she hooks up uh with Craig Venter. I'm very proud to have made that connection. And the idea is, can you take a pig that happens to have the same size heart, kidney, lungs as humans? And can you modify the surface proteins of that pig to humanize it? Make it human-like. So crazy. And then engineer out it's got endogenous retroviruses that if you put that pig organ into a human, the retroviruses can pop out and infect the person. So it is zap all the retroviruses, modify 10 surface genes on that pig. And it was done. And how do they modify the genes? CRISPR? CRISPR. This is insane. Insane. Totally insane. And now what happens next? Uh they modified it uh about uh 6 months ago when we're getting ready to publish and doing last-minute changes in the book. I asked Martine, "So, when is this likely to happen?" He says, "Well, by the time your book is coming out, it's going to be real." Right on cue, uh they do a kidney transplant uh into as the first one into a man who was on life support, but uh their family allowed them to do this as a test, and it went great. Uh and then just recently, I think about 2 months ago, they did a heart transplant into a a recipient who's doing well. And so, the I on. We We have taken pig organs, Yes. humanized them, and for people that don't know what CRISPR Cas9 is, you basically go in and edit the DNA. Yes. Insert something else? Like, do you give it the bit of DNA to insert? So, yes, you can do that, or you can just uh you can just cut out a particular gene, and like a a piece that does something that works in pigs, but does not work in humans. And and We cut that bit out. And you can then put in the proper bit. Uh now, I don't actually know what the exact modifications they made, so I don't want to venture humanized it? We humanized it. It was 10 genes that were modified in the pig. This is bananas. It's bananas. It gets even more bananas. So, that's the work that United Therapeutics is doing, and you know, uh if you sacrifice like 1% of the pigs that we eat every year, there'd be enough organs for everybody on the planet. Right? I mean, it's crazy stuff. Uh the second thing is one of my favorite heroes, a guy named Dean Kamen, right? Dean Dean is brilliant. Um people know him for creating the Segway, which is the last thing on the list that he's done that's amazing. Uh he uh created the you know uh the implantable insulin pump. He's created uh the Luke arm for people who have lost their arms. He's created arm? The Luke arm. Um it's a robotic arm that allows you to, you know, basically after Luke Skywalker. Yes. that. Uh yeah. Anyway, uh but uh the slingshot machine that makes purified water from anything wet um including sewage. I mean, it's he's incredible, all right? I won't go I won't go down that path. Uh 3 years ago, he sets out on a journey um backed by the Defense Department to build a machine that in one end goes induced pluripotent stem cells. You take a skin cell, you modify it, you dedifferentiate it to a stem cell, you put that in, and then over the course of 1 to 3 months, you manufacture an organ. This is so like this is yeah, like Yeah. And and guess what? They've done it for bone ligament bone segments. So, if you need uh a knee operation or an ankle operation, you take some skin cell, you differ you differentiate it, you put in machine, and you get out of it bone ligament bone with your genetic code in it. Where they're going next is going after pediatric hearts. Wow. And so, their goal is by 2023, next 18 months, you'll put a child's skin cell, dedifferentiate to an induced pluripotent stem cell, and I think it's about a 3-month period of time, your manufactured heart comes out for transplant. It's insane. So, So that people understand how this is already happening now, what have we done in animal models with hearts in particular? Because I know the punchline, but for people that don't, I think this will be it. Cuz hearing that oh in 18 months we'll be making human organs, I'm like, no way. But if you hear some of the stuff that's already being done, it starts to seem pretty real. Tony Atala's lab at Wake Forest, Tony's been manufacturing stem cell derived simple organs for some time. He's manufactured bladders. The skin is an organ, so full thickness skin with the epidermis and dermis for transplant. Like if you're a burn victim, right? Being able to go from your skin stem cells and manufacture sheets of your skin that you could then transplant in They manufactured micro beating hearts. You know, few centimeters in size. Um One of the things there's a friend Deepak Srivastava who's the president of the Gladstone Institute up up in Northern California. And the work that he's done again blows me away. I call it cellular alchemy. Your heart is made up of myocytes, muscle cells, beating cardiac myocytes that you know, beat on a regular rhythm. And connective tissue, fibroblasts. And when you have a heart attack the muscle tissue dies and the connective tissue replaces it, but it's all of a sudden it's not beating and so your cardiac output can be significantly reduced. And what Srivastava has done is been able to use gene therapy to convert those fibroblasts into myo myocytes. So, you turn the connective tissue into beating heart once again. Right? Because the genes are there, they're just differentiated as connective tissue and not as heart muscle cells. Dude, people are finding ways to tell a cell to be something different. Yes. That's so like sci-fi. It is. I I love cellular alchemy cuz that's my favorite I I I I gave it that name cuz I love it cuz it describes what we're talking about. Literally. Like the idea So, alchemy, if anybody's not familiar, the I the pursuit of turning lead into gold, right? So, taking one thing and making it another. But, at the cellular level, because the cells contain the full DNA, if you know the sequence of chemicals, I'm not sure what the actual thing is, but whatever that Yeah. thing that I the alchemy part is, it actually works. Like this is nuts. to talk about one more thing before out of time. Uh which is the revolution in diagnostics. So, I said uh for living as long as you can, uh it's food, exercise, sleep, mindset is so critically important, I'll come to that next, and then not dying from something stupid. So, it turns out most everyone out there is an optimist. If you go up to someone in the street and say, "Do you have cancer growing in you? Do you have an aneurysm? Do you have any problems that you should know about?" It's like they pause and they go, "No, I feel great." Right? And I don't want to go to the doctor cuz I don't want to know, which is Of course, you want to know because you can do something about it. So, um one of the companies that we built uh uh Fountain Life, and there's a a sister company uh uh The Health Nucleus at Human Longevity down in San Diego. Fountain Life is in uh four cities and will be in a dozen cities in the next uh in the next 18 months. Um I just went there 2 days down in the facility in Naples. And I get uploaded every year. And that upload involves about 5 hours of my time. I go and I get a full body MRI, uh, brain MRI, brain vasculature, coronary MRI. Uh, I then uh, and it's looking for any sign of any cancer, it's looking for a sign of any aneurysms or any aberration. And then I did what's called an AI-enabled clearly coronary CT. Long story, what it's doing is it's a it's a CT of your heart, um, using artificial intelligence to analyze the blood vessels. Uh, you probably heard about calcium scores, right? Uh, is your heart are your heart vessels calcified? And you're like, "Oh my god, you have a calcium score of a thousand. That's terrible." Or calcium score of zero, that's great. Calcification actually doesn't matter because if your if your plaque in your coronary artery is calcified, if it's hard, you're fine. It's not going to rupture. It's only if if it's occluded that you're concerned. What the clearly CT does is it's looking for soft plaque that isn't calcified yet, that could rupture. And that's what really truly matters. And so it's changed completely how we look at cardiac disease. Uh, we do a DEXA scan looking at muscle and bone, uh, we do your genome, your gut microbiome, uh, all of your omics. It's about 150 gigabytes of data. Wow. And I go every year, I feel naked until I go through it. And then I, you know, if I'm going to find something, it's okay, I'm going to attack it and fix it. So, we're all optimistic about our health. And you everyone knows about someone who went to the hospital and oh my god, you've got stage three or stage four cancer. It didn't happen that morning. Yeah. Right? If you detect cancer at stage three or stage four, your chance of a cure is like 10%. If you detect it at stage zero or stage one, it's like 99%. Right? So, it's not it varies for different cancers, but the idea is we're all developing cancers, your immune system hopefully catches it, but otherwise, we give people a Grail test as well. So, for me, Fountain Life is like one of the the most important uh reinventing how we do how we do health care. And one of the things we just launched, which I'm so proud of, is Fountain Health. And it's a So, I wrote my last book, um The Future is Faster than You Think, that the insurance industry is perverted. When you get when you get fire insurance, it pays you after your house burns down. Life insurance pays you after or pays your next of kin after you're dead. Health insurance pays you after you're sick. So, we created Fountain Health as a health insurance. It's available for companies right now 50 employees or more, and then it'll it'll grow from there. But, when you get Fountain Health insurance, which is the same price as regular health insurance, you get all the tests included at no additional cost. Because our goal is to uh to catch any disease first before uh it becomes something that's expensive to treat later on. Dude, this is amazing. I'm very sad that we have a hard stop today, and we have reached it. But, dude, the book is phenomenal. I loved it, and this catch-up was absolutely amazing. Where can people find you and learn more about all this incredible stuff? So, Twitter and Instagram, it's @peterdiamandis, Fountain and My Life Force, which are the products that uh we support. And then I created something called longevityinsider.org. It's an AI engine that scans the world's news looking for exponential technologies impacting vitality and longevity. And it generates a a newsletter of the top 15 breakthroughs every day on longevity. And it's free and you can unsubscribe if you don't like it, but it just keeps me in this positive mindset. So, the other place is longevityinsider.org. I love it. Yeah. Dude, thank you so much for coming on the show. It is always so good to spend some time with you. I love it. Everybody, read the book Life Force. It's incredible. It will blow your mind what is already possible and what's coming in the future. And speaking of things that'll blow your mind, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.