moonshots ep34 steven kotler longevity mindset transcript

when something goes wrong the brain notices we get an error signal right if you have a fixed mindset that’s the only signal you get if you have a growth mindset you have a following signal that says oh I’m learning from this mistake and growing from it but if you’ve got a fixed mindset the brain doesn’t even bother spending that energy because it doesn’t believe you can learn you can grow you can change mindset of old functions sort of the same way and a massive transform to purpose is what you’re telling the world it’s like this is who I am this is what I’m going to do this is the dent I’m going to make in the universe okay so I am Dr Tori Higgins I’m the head coach at the flow research Collective and I have the opportunity to moderate what’s sure to be a phenomenal conversation between 11 time best-selling author founder executive director of the flow research Collective and one of the world’s leading experts in human performance Stephen Cotler Stephen hi how’s it going today hi

[00:01:00] everybody we’re also joined tonight with uh by Peter diamandis who’s a world-renowned entrepreneur author founder of various successful companies Peter has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity space Venture capitalism and education including Fountain life cellularity and vaccin he’s also a best-selling author of four books including abundance Bold and the future is faster than you think co-authored with by our very own Stephen Cotler and Peter also holds degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and an MD from Harvard Medical School his quote the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself inspires people around the world to take on Grand challenges Peter thanks for hanging out with us today live long as they would say on a longevity podcast well well put well put so the title of today’s crowdcast is extending human health span so to kick things off Peter can you explain the difference between lifespan and health span and maybe why our Focus today is largely going to be on the ladder yeah abely absolutely so you know I was at

[00:02:02] the Vatican holding this conference or the session on longevity and uh I’m there with about 300 scientists uh with you know members Cardinals and extraordinary group and I asked the question of the group how many of you here would like to live to 120 or older and like a third of the hands went up and I’m like what in the world I mean what what am I not understanding and the challenge is that most people when they think about living to 120 they think about you know sitting in a wheelchair drooling and that’s lifespan it’s how old are you alive and your brain is got some brain waves and your heart is ticking but you may be not there and you may be in pain and suffering Health span is how old are you and feeling great how old are you and have the Vitality the cognition the Aesthetics the mobility that perhaps you have today and that’s Health span you know for most centinary

[00:03:00] people getting to 100 centenarians typically will get to a 100-year lifespan and a 95y year Health span it’s they’re feeling great feeling great and they fall off a cliff unfortunately for most Americans who are making it to 80 they’re healthy towards you know till 65 they have 15 years of degradation and we don’t want that we want to be in vital Health throughout the majority of our lives and you know Stephen I don’t know about you but you know I hope it’s a lot more than 100 years old there’s a lot going on in the world out there I want to see well if you’re sticking around I’m sticking around all right buddy I love that I feel like I just heard like a challenge accepted two of us Last Man Standing so in in both your recent works so you really kind of urged people to rethink aging and how we look at it so you know Peter in life force you talk about how aging is a disease a disease that correlates with every other disease uh and this isn’t really how many people think about AG so what are the

[00:04:00] implications of framing it this way yeah there’s a couple ways to frame this so first of all you know I think most of us listening here know somebody who’s gotten to 100 100 is now an expected life expectancy maybe not a health expectancy but life expectancy but there’s species on this planet like the boohead whale that can live to 200 years old and the Greenland shark that can live to 500 years old um in fact the Greenland shark can have babies at 200 years old and so did you get some of that shark DNA I’m shooting for it I got some of that shark DNA I’m styling so the question is if they can live that long why can’t we right uh and that’s a really important question uh so that’s one way I frame it it’s either a hardware problem or software problem another way that I frame a Tori is you know when you’re born you get 3.2 billion letters from your mother and 3.2 billion letters from your father it’s your genome and your genome doesn’t change as you age your genome is the

[00:05:00] same at Birth at 20 at 40 at 80 at 100 so why don’t you look like you did when you were 20 right why don’t you have that six-pack and you know and ripped muscles and it isn’t what genes you have uh to a large part it’s your epigenome it’s which genes are on and which genes are off what we’re beginning to understand is that you can impact that you know Stephen talks about that uh in his extraordinary work we’ve talked about it uh in in life force and it turns out you know the number Stephen you may know it is either that your genes impact somewhere I’ve heard as low as only 7% of the impact of your life expectancy or as high as 30% it’s not the majority it’s your lifestyle it’s how you live and which is what in our country is to a large degree about yeah even the uh that famous uh the I want to say it’s the Swedish Cardiology study where they where they track this this was where all the Blue Zone work came from sure they were looking at the genetic studies right and they’re like holy crap genetics is only 10 it was 10%

[00:06:03] was their number of of the equation so what’s the 90% that is actually determined our health span our longevity the quality of our lat years all that stuff that’s where all that research started too yeah is I I’ll put one last framing item which I think is important to realize uh we take for granted our life span at Health span today you know when we were evolving as as hominids 100,000 years ago if you look at when were humans Caven and Cave women is about 100,000 years ago the average life expectancy back then was late 20s you know uh you would go into puberty age 13 uh you’d have a baby by the time you were 26 27 your baby was having a baby or a grandparent and and if our mission was to perpetuate the species the last thing you wanted to do was steal food from your grandchildren’s mouths and so you would die so most human history the average human lifespan was 30 and it

[00:07:00] just the last century that everything from antibiotics and pasteurized milk and you know better uh sewage systems have given us additional Health span but I think it’s this decade we can talk about that that real breakthroughs in in stem cells and epigeic reprogramming um in citic medicines could add 10 20 30 healthy years and maybe buy you enough time to get the next 10 20 30 healthy years and I think you know the way that we’re reframing this we’ve opened up the possibility space immensely right when it comes to extending lifespan and health span so I want to take us back for a second Stephen in our country you tell the story of just this radical experiment in Peak Performance aging teaching yourself to park ski at the age of 53 and this seems like an incredible feat uh that would have been unlikely just 20 years ago right exactly and what is Park skiing Stephen Park skiing is the oh right park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves doing uh trick off jumps on Rails on wall rods

[00:08:01] and boxes and for those who were totally unfamiliar theoretically it’s supposed to be incredibly difficult to learn if you’re over 35 by the time you get to like 40 45 it’s moved down to downright impossible and if you’re in your 50s trying to learn Parts G I think you’re [ __ ] crazy is probably the the technical term that sort of gets applied well that that would explain you thank you sir not much has changed on that front um but uh that was that right all the the reason our country was possible the reason I could write a book about it is you know the discoveries that we’ve made over the the past 20 years you know the big one is all the skills we used to think declined over time we now know they use it or lose it skills and this is all of our physical skills this is all of our mental skills as well and what’s getting really cool is also how specific we are at getting like how good we are are getting each of the each of

[00:09:00] the various categories of things that used to Wayne and how effective our tools are for training these things it was getting to be really really interesting not that was appropo of nothing wasn’t I think the answer to your question but it is getting really really interesting well I’m I mean that’s exactly what I was leading into so can you speak to some of the theories that have you know that we’re we’re debunk or you’re debunking in n Country really and how yeah how res changed there’s a bunch of different ones but like we could just go through a handful of the physical skills so um it used to be uh for the past 20 years didn’t really matter what you thought you could train V2 Max which is your upper respiratory capacity was this thing that it starts to decline at 25 at 50 it really starts to fall off and it didn’t matter what you like what argument we made for PR performance agent physiologist would always be like yeah what about BO2 Max it’s a goner and right like and it was it was like this

[00:10:00] Hammer that they would beat you with it turns out then they went out and measured the V2 Max and octogenarian triathletes and they found that as a general octogenarian triathletes so you’re in your 80s and you’re on triathlons you’ve got about 30 years of you’re not professional this is just you know a hobby but you got about 30 years of training right you started in your 50s you kept going into your 80s most of them had the V2 Max of healthy 35 year olds the world record is now an 88y old man has got the V2 Max I believe of a 24 year old is what like and that’s just and we don’t measure that often so like saying this guy is the world record it’s not like we went out and did a did a wide study to to find him so that’s just one example I’ll give you um another a weird one so uh risk aversion increases over time and you can fight against a lot of it but part of it is tied to white matter density in the temporal

[00:11:01] parietal Lo in this part of your brain white matter is what wraps around it’s myelination wraps around the neurons the axons and it’s like insulation so when myelination arose and the white matter erods processing speed slows down right when our brains start to process information more slowly anything else every risk aversion increases we’re we’re a step behind right and this is this like there’s a lot of ways to fight against this but one of the interesting things that we’re learning now is that there’s a connection between bone health and white matter density the bones are the mineral stores of the body and all the calcium in the brain which is what the brain uses to do anything it’s coming out of the bones so they used to think oh crap white matter is declining what do we do brain is now we know are starting to know that if you keep up bone density and there’s a lot of ways you can do this if you increase bone density you can slow this natural risk aversion because you slow the attrition

[00:12:00] of the myelination um so like all it’s getting that’s like a like three steps for remove from what you know anybody used to think about so you know Peter was talking about we’re getting better at the epigenetics that’s like you know metaprogramming on our program we’re really starting to figure that out a lot of stuff in the brain is working this way where there’s a a distant connection that we’re just starting to figure out and we’re starting to solve for and it’s leading to really incredible breakthroughs of stuff that we didn’t think can preserve so that’s just two random examples I pretty much we could take whatever skill you want and I can give you a parallel example you know one of the things Stephen that uh that I think about a lot you know when I I feel like I’m in my best shape I’ve ever been I’m 61 now and it’s I measure it by my workouts and how many push-ups I can do and pull-ups what the case might be but for me my number one objective other than cognitive sharpness is muscle right is maintaining muscle mass and there is

[00:13:00] a direct correlation between muscle mass and Longevity as a store of stem cells blood supply keeping yourself from falling and and and breaking so the number pet the number one correlation I don’t know if you know this or not the number one correlation for longevity is thigh muscle mass thigh muscle inversely proportional to mortality like literally is and it’s part of is exactly what you’re talking about part of it is also the bones right when you’re building a th muscle your leg muscle B are the biggest bones in your body right exactly here’s a stat that scare should scar [ __ ] of anybody if you’re over 65 and you break your hip or pelvis you have a 70% chance of dying within a year I mean it’s it’s serious right and it’s you end up in a hospital and you end up with a pneumonia and it’s a very quick spiral uh and so really maintaining balance and muscle mass if you’re in your 70s 80s 90s is one of the the key corelates um but yes I worship I

[00:14:02] worship at the uh at the altar of muscle and sleep these are not bad authors by the Matt in the in the in the comments asked about grip strength and grip strength is another uh indicator it’s not as directly correlated as uh as lug mask but they can they a lot of these skills like they have the numbers on like when D grip strength starts to decline and when you’re going to die but it’s not even just on the physical side so there’s correlations openness to experience this is a great one I there’s a in later adulthood because risk aversion starts to increase we don’t fight against it openness to experience starts to fall off a cliff and there’s a point at which uh where it gets down so small that they know within a year of you losing your openness to experience you cognitive decline shows up almost immediately so it’s not as fast as death but you’re literally you lose your openness to experience and it leads to COG decline within a year yeah and if

[00:15:00] you’re hanging off the edge of a bridge grip strength directly correlates with life expectancy very tight correlation there yeah what you were totally right on that I stand corrected this episode is brought to you by levels one of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my Peak vitality and Longevity is to monitor my blood glucose more importantly the foods that I eat and how they Peak the glucose levels in my blood now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain it’s really important High prolonged levels of glucose what’s called hypoglycemia leads to everything from heart disease to alzheimer’s to sexual dysfunction to diabetes and it’s not good the challenge is all of us are different uh all of us respond to different foods in different ways like for me if I eat bananas it spikes my blood glucose if I eat grapes it doesn’t if I eat bread by itself I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels but if I dip that bread bread and olive oil it blunts it and these are

[00:16:01] things that I’ve learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the levels app so levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what’s going on in your body it’s continuous monitoring 24/7 I wear it all the time really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat remain conscious of the food that I eat and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics you know on this podcast I only recommend products and services that I use that I use not only for myself but my friends and my family that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person’s life so check it out levels. l/ Peter give you two additional months of membership and it’s something that I think everyone should be doing eventually this stuff is going to be in your body on your body part of our future of medicine today it’s a product that I think uh I’m going to be using for the years ahead and hope you’ll

[00:17:00] consider as well you’ve been dancing around risk aversion a little bit here so let’s dive into that um can you speak a little bit more Stephen about how the role risk aversion does play in aging and how we can intentionally push back against it to fully embrace the potential of these extended yeah so I mean what’s cool so you got to start at the beginning with this one is one of the new discoveries uh the past 20 years about about the sort of what happens as as we age is there’s cognitive changes in the brain beneficial ones that start in our 50s epigenetic there’s epigenetic alterations that start turning on certain genes they’re only activated by experience the two halves of the brand start talking together each other and working together like never before and the Brain starts to re recruit underutilized re regions and around in our 50s as a result of this you get access to whole new levels of intelligence empathy wisdom and creativity and I mean really robust really important development this is why the idea that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks is actually totally wrong it

[00:18:00] turns out old dogs as Peter just sort of pointed out are better at learning certain kinds of tricks than young dogs um but but the like a lot of things in adult development and psychology it’s if then you have to do certain things to get these superpowers and you have to do certain things to hang on to them and to hang on to these intellectual benefits you get in their 50s and 60s and Beyond you have to first you have to one you have to train against physical fragility because what if Peter has pointed out a bunch what good is supercharged mind if you lose the body and everything we’ve been talking about on that side second one is you have to train it up risk tolerance right and the reason is as we become more risk averse fear levels increase this is a problem for a bunch of reasons one we can talk about this in a second there are nine known major causes of Aging all of them tie to inflammation inflammation always ties to stress so that’s just sort of first and for for most is why risk aversion is a problem but actually the fear the

[00:19:01] norepinephrine that underpins that fear um will block learning block creativity block empathy block wisdom so the fear we get from the risk aversion actually blocks all the very superpowers um that come on in our 50s and a lot of these powers like Peter talks about being a better athlete now than ever before the same is true for me at 55 a lot of that also comes down to things like expertise and wisdom and things you actually need cognition for one of the reasons I believed Nar country was going to be possible for me meaning I could learn to Parky was because of this added level of wisdom and empathy and you know the em I was hoping for some emotional maturity when that came along with the wisdom maybe temper some of my you know natural tendencies you know things like that a guy can hope right you know I I think part of it as well pal br bringing it into something we both we talked about

[00:20:00] when we wrote abundance and we’ve continued in our other books is the idea around the mindset and purpose-driven mindset here um if if you’re someone whose future is bigger than your past right you’re more excited about the world ahead of you and you’re not lamenting what you’ve missed in the past then you’re in a mindset of wanting to be in great shape and wanting to have the physical capability to go and do what ever you want to do in life and that for me is the foundational underpinning you know it’s it’s jumping out of bed because you’re excited about the day you’re excited about what you’re working on you have a purpose and a passion in life that uh that is driving you to want to see the next 50 or 100 years um and I think that connects directly with the idea of uh being risk philic like being excited about your next job or your next Adventure uh versus scared to change anything in your

[00:21:02] life I think there’s two things I got to add to that because they’re just so important the first is in general Peter’s describing is what is technically called positive mindset towards aging right my best days are ahead of me there this is one of the most well established facts in in Peak Performance aging is that a positive mindset towards aging correlates to an extra uh 7 and a half years of healthy longevity so if you are morbidly obese and have a shitty mindset towards aging it is more important that you change your mindset than you lose weight um if you’re just going by the scientific numbers the second thing I want to talk about this is sort of a little bit this isn’t even Peak Performance aging this is literally just healthy aging or adaptive aging or successful aging whatever so we talked a second ago about moderators in your 50s you need train down physical a pH physical fragility and train up uh risk tolerances in your 50s in your by age 40 you need to basically have a way that you spend most of your time that in a way that

[00:22:01] generates passion is line of passion purpose and produces flow otherwise you have real problems in your 50s and Beyond this is just standard adult development stuff so you like if you really want to be successful certainly anytime after after 40 there’s copious amounts of literature that say if you’re not living in such a way to generate a lot of flow live with passion live with purpose you’re just going to have tremendous problems afterward mindset would feed into that but you know purpose is a little separate from mindset in this in how its impact right but also what Peter’s point is if you have the right mindset and you got the right purpose and you’re putting them together and really getting that fuel that’s the secret right that’s really really what what propels you and you both write extensively about having a massively transformative purpose having Clarity knowing how your passions and your purpose intertwine um Stephen I love in in our country you write about chasing Big Dreams before it’s too late

[00:23:00] to chase down those dreams right so can you both speak to what are what about the people that are listening to this who have maybe given up their dreams right or they think that dream certain dreams are too audacious for the second half of their life what are the recommendations on how they can approach maybe developing more clarity around that massively transformative purpose really going there and then setting goals so first of all there is no dream that’s too big and I really want to you know you don’t have to actually do the entire thing yourself but you can find the right people to partner with so if you wanted to do something big and bold in days of old rhyme it out uh it you know you either had to be the king the Queen the robber baron uh in some way have enough wealth to go do it do that today you can be anywhere on the planet and be part of a big bold Mission you don’t have to be the CEO you don’t have to be the financier the owner but you can be part of it at a minimum the second thing that’s going on is that we have all have access to such extraordinary technology right we’re

[00:24:01] living during the explosive birth of of AI generative Ai and what does that mean it means that all of a sudden within the next couple of years it’s not 10 years 20 years the next two three four years we’re going to have access to such extraordinary power that what is it you want to do you’re going to have the tools and the skills what you need more than anything else is that passionate driven mind to say that’s where I’m going that you know picking a Target and then reaching out finding other people want to go on that Target with you uh get access to all of the exponential Tech resources that Steve and I wrote about in the future is faster than you think so I don’t think there’s any dream too big you can be part of a Mars mission if you want you don’t have to actually go to Mars but you can be part of Designing it thinking about it writing about it uh so what is it you really want to do the single most important thing is connecting to that childlike awe and excitement it’s an

[00:25:02] emotional connection and if you’ve got that then the rest is just putting the pieces together Peter said it better than me um and the only the only thing I want to add you would have written you would have written it better than me it’s true it’s true I got to take credit where I can get it um no the only thing I want to add and this is you know this is stuff that that sort of covered a little bit in in in the art of impossible and um if you don’t know what your passion is and what your purpose is right for the for the 5% of our or listeners maybe who are still sort of fering around you know one the passion recipe.com which is something that’s free online that I put together for this but passion is built out of curiosity it’s the intersection of multiple Curiosities that’s how passion is built biologically one curiosity is great but it just doesn’t have enough energy over the Long Haul but if you can find a place with three or four five of your kids curiosi start to intersect and play there with

[00:26:01] patience and I want to emphasize the with patience play there over time this is what this is where this is grows passion and this is where purpose comes from but the most important thing is you cannot be impatient with yourself you’re you’re to really uncover your passion and your purpose your brain is a built-in pattern recognition system you’re want your brain has to do has to do this finding for you right it’s your job to show up and explore and play at the intersection of these Curiosities it’s your brain’s job to figure it out it will automatically figure it out that’s what pattern recognition systems do right but if you’re put too much pressure on yourself if you want to be there tomorrow that’s I think one of the problems with I see people who are hunting for their passion hunting for their purpose and they think it’s going to show up overnight they think it’s going to feel totally different like they’re going to wake up one day and oh I got a totally different inside and these are slow builds right I always say that like if I if I ask somebody for a description of passion on a basketball

[00:27:01] court they’re going to talk to me about Steph Curry or Lebron James whirling in for a windmill dunk but the truth of the matter is that’s mature passion what passion looks like on the front end is just like a little kid in a driveway trying to get a basketball to fall through a hoop that’s what it looks like on the front end we mistake mature passion mature purpose and and what that looks like or what we think it’s going to look like and feel like in our own lives for what it actually looks like on the front end and it’s a lot it’s a lot smaller on the front end it’s something you nurture and you feed slowly over over periods of time and by the way that that slow build also means it’s got endurance right doing anything significant in the world is not a quick hit uh you know true moonshots true massive transformative purposes are decadal long Investments of your time so it’s got to be something that’s going to be with you for a decade or more it

[00:28:03] doesn’t mean you can’t change it but something that you really you know want to fuel you and it can change over time you know Stephen you and I have developed our our our passions and our our our uh our mtps over time I’m sort of on my third right now um you know focused on the longevity space and space as as where where you and I met was my earlier one but the these are things that uh it captures your shower time it’s you dream about it and you build out of curiosity a body of knowledge and a a level of expertise that makes you more and more fulfilled over time and brings people to you and attract a tribe around that and it takes time one other thing I want to say because there’s a Peak Performance aging sort of message here that that isn’t often talked about but there’s a lot of data on this I our our country my quest was to learn how to park ski right because I had unfinished business and part and I wanted

[00:29:00] imposible and what’s next Stephen well the my point in for PE performance aging is this kind of really seemingly difficult challenge is really important one of the things that we know about older adults is they perform really and older can be over 30 here right but they perform really well with long-term goals long-term missions actually feed Health span and longevity in really important ways there’s a bunch of neurobiology underneath it there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t think we quite understand underneath it because there’s a lot of evidence here and the evidence seems to outpace some of the science and some of what we’ve learned but having these kinds of long-term missions um in the second half of our lives really crucial to thriving the second half of our lives so like you want to live with passion purpose and flow um but is as Peter really pointed out you you you want to turn that into a longterm Mission or a ser series of them um it’s going to help you thrive in your later years however

[00:30:01] long you have left right um and if Peter’s right some of you are gonna live to be 400 it’s exciting and Stephen I like how in in our country you do detail out kind of that goal stack that’s really helpful in pursuit of your purpose so having those those mission level goals than having high hard goals and clear goals also strikes me that this is an opportunity because I know people just listen to you and are like okay but how how do I do this in my life and one of the vehicles that you talk about extensively in the book is through Dynamic deliberate play it’s a tremendous opportunity to systematically pursue your purpose so can you can you speak to that a little bit Yeah so it’s it’s it’s interest I mean Dynamic is I said that all of our skills are use it or L it skills everything we use to think the client over time right so let’s say you want to hold on to physical fragility physical ability that’s what dynamic is dynamic is a is a single word that means means strength stamina agility flexibility and balance

[00:31:02] these are the five physical skills that need to be trained over time um to really preserve physical functionality as long as we want um saying all those five skills out loud and you know it’s a long list so people call them D that’s Dynamic that’s what dynamic means one of the things that’s really interesting about Dynamic movement is also when we this is cool when you pair like power and strength with coordination at the same time something about that if you really want to hold on to cognitive function what you want is neurogenesis the birth of new neurons synaptic plasticity you want those new neurons to form new neuron Nets and actually something that’s not talking about nearly as much angiogenesis the birth of new vascul to support those new neurons right Dynamic movement when it’s Str St when all these things are together actually promotes neurogenesis and angiogenesis which is very no other kind of physical training does that but

[00:32:00] Dynamic movements do that and so you’re not just getting new neurons and they’re forming new neural networks getting the new blood vessels to support those neurons at a dynamic movement deliberate play is the opposite we’ve heard about deliberate practice you want to become an expert deliberate practice repetition with incremental advancement and it turns out that’s great for expertise but in a very narrow range of subjects if you’re trying to become an classical violinist or you’re trying to become a world class mathematician there are certain things where the deliberate practice is going to work for you but in general deliberate play which is literally translated as repetition without repetition or repetition with improvisation I’m doing the same thing I just did but instead of trying to like get it a little bit better I’m just improving I’m freestyling I’m and it’s literally on a certain level play is just way more fun where self-conscious it it amplifies learning it amplifies motivation amplifies progression but from a Peak Performance aging standpoint there’s like seven or eight auxiliary

[00:33:01] benefits to play that are that are really also important so Dynamic deliberate play is an approach to your passion or your we’ve been talking about mindset passion purpose how does this stuff get like unfolded in your life in a way that really works Dynamic deliberate play and and I think Peter and I will both agree because we both we’ve done this together and we’ve done this individually we’ve done a lot of we’ve shephered a lot of long-term projects that most people thought were impossible they’re very very difficult into the world we’ve seen them all the way through and um and watch the other and both of us have tried very hard to create playful environments around our like crazy ass moonshots because it’s too [ __ ] much work if you’re just heavy lifting all the time you’re miserable you’re never gonna get there let me let me add a couple things here I think is is really uh important uh first of all uh if you’re going to take on a a big ass moonshot it’s really important to do it with people you love it’s

[00:34:01] important to do with people you care about you’re going to spend more time with your business partners and Associates and and you know band of of crazy moonshot artists than you are your family so you better really Point hold on Peter I’m interrupting you point of fact Peter what’s your wife’s nickname for me yeah you’re my uh you’re my secret lover yeah because during the times we were writing our books I was spending more time with Stephen at 5:00 am. in the morning and 6:00 a. in the morning I would wake up with him every morning and yeah it’s like it’s crazy so listen if you’re doing something that is a big ass goal it’s a you know a true moonshot do it with people that you really love uh if you don’t like them your your moonshots going to fall apart because you don’t like spending time with these people as much uh the second thing is all we are emotional human beings and and Stephen can go into the neurochemistry even uh better than I can

[00:35:01] um I’ve given him an honorary MD and PhD I think over the years uh but uh because the emotional energy is what’s going to carry us through for a decade loving what you do or hating the existence of a wrong that you have to fix connecting with that emotional energy is what’s going to fuel you uh and to Daniel’s question here about how do we motivate older adults to do repetitive exercises it’s making it fun so again it’s who do they do the exercises with right so going out and exercising with a friend is a hell of a lot easier than doing it on your own and making it fun where it’s part of sports versus just part of you know Pumping Iron so it’s the setting uh who you’re with um and ultimately it’s having an emotional purpose for doing the exercise like you know connecting with the fact that I want to live another 20 years to see my

[00:36:01] grandchildren getting married whatever the case having a purpose for that Beyond just uh I got to do it got to go make and the the other thing people forget when it comes to like EXC Peter’s totally right you gotta like if you can bring in a training partner if you can do something that makes it fun you only have to keep that up until you start to realize how much benefit the exercise brings to your brain like how much calmer you are how much happy you are much better you feel right because at a certain point the drug known as exercise is g to start functioning like the drug I mean it’s an amazing drug right it’s phenomenal so all you got to do is get over the hump and into you know the point that your habit Machinery takes over and that’s 28 days to three months depending what you’re trying to onboard so you’re not saying I need a training partner for the rest of my life you’re saying I need somebody to walk into the room with me and help me set this habit up until I can take it on my own Stephen

[00:37:01] let me ask you a question because when I think about you know the secrets of healthy aging or of Health extension um one of the secrets for me there are two parts here is don’t die from something stupid right we’ve talked about this about really doing the full body checkups and so forth that we offer it at Fountain life for example the other is avoiding accidents because a lot of the downside is the spiral that occurs when someone has an accent um and is bedridden and all the secondary inter tertiary impacts of that how do you think about that so I think about it in a bunch of different ways a great question so one um this is one of the reasons why leg strength is so important right one of the reasons of preserving leg strength is to it preserves your balance but two like I I so I work with a woman named e house and who does a movement system known as Revolution andem motion and of all the things we train propri setion and balance are uh

[00:38:02] the the at the heart of it and it’s interesting because that’s one of the things she’s most known for is this kind training I will tell you something really weird this is just a random thing that I didn’t even know was going to happen but after a year of working with Edith and we’re working like in you know on maths on bosu balls and exercises balls like that kind of we’re not in the wild but I now when I into the ski mountains I see lines like ways down the mountain that before I had never seen before I would look at the thing and I think oh I can’t ski that it’s totally impossible and it’s not that my skiing is improved my balance and proprioception is improved so much that I can look at the line and I know how my body is going to stay upright to do it so my vision has changed as a result of balance and propri deception training so people what is it oh uh I’ll give you a standing on a bosu ball which is that half shell ball with one foot with like a kabell in one hand doing quarter

[00:39:01] squats on one leg um with different foot positions and doing different things with my eyes very stuff like that is is an example but what’s uh what I want to uh oh you derailed me where was I Sor buddy no it’s all right it’s all right um oh the other the other thing I wanted to mention on on on balance the other side of it is also um the World Health Organization is really clear on this they say that once you’re over 65 you should be training balance flexibility to agility three times a week to prevent this right so they’re really clear on like that there’s a training schedule to prevent this the other side of it is and where people also sleep is on the recovery side right when like one of the one of the ways to preserve your balance is not let your muscles lock up and so so stretching and flexibility starts to really matter

[00:40:00] Epsom salt bath sauna is like the what we’re doing after we work out so our muscles stay life and don’t clamp down on us that also really starts to matter yeah I totally get that let me take it one step further because I want to take it into something you know a bunch about Peter which is the cool thing about the all these stats that we’re talking about is we are getting much better at muscle ligaments and bones we can’t regrow cartilage yet that I think is we’re coming maybe we can not sure about that I haven’t seen it well I’ve seen so I’ve seen stuff uh where we can increase bone density and and regrow it that way so I’ve seen it indirectly but I also like where stem cells exom placental Matrix all the tool kits are we’re good with tendons and ligaments muscles and bone is what’s next so like a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about there’s a

[00:41:00] window where this is like next five years this stuff is killing you and then that window is going to close because you may fall down and break a hip but we’re going to be able to regrow that hip in a in a way that that’s really s viable and interesting there’s there’s a there’s a bunch of uh of work going on right now uh uh by two or three different approaches to regrow cartilage on your knees right um and they have shown definitive increase in cartilage uh depth uh and this is from uh wi pathway manipulations and cytic medicines right um uh now the problem is if you have a if you have a total knee replacement you can’t regrow it on the metal right it’s uh so there’s a window I I mean I think in the next five years we are going to regrow hair we are going to regrow cartilage we are going to be to able to start you know there a a few different approaches to to solving both sarcopenia and osteopenia

[00:42:01] in fact one of my company vaccin is look G have to define those that’s the loss of bone density yes osteopenia is reduced bone density and sarcopenia has reduced muscle and sarcopenia sucks it really is hard as you get older to build muscle mass right so I have like tripled my protein intake I’ve tripled my workouts um using a number of of supplements and I’m just like pounding at that muscle and it’s just a number one priority for me uh but there is a couple of approaches from stem cell derived medicines and then another thing is uh a vaccine we’re developing for space flight to stop muscle loss and bone loss which could be used by octogenarians to stop muscle loss and bone loss which would be amazing that is amazing I didn’t know that was going on yeah so the went pathway stuff is uh because I’ve been paying a lot of

[00:43:00] attention to it because it’s all arthritis anytime there’s arthritis that’s went pathway stuff you know I’ve got because I’ve broken my back and most of the other places I’ve broken I’ve healed completely but I’ve got on one side of my back I’ve got like lingering arthritis I can most of the I most of the way I’ve gotten most of the pain to go away and I’ve he reheal most of the bone but it’s very slow over time so I’ve been keeping my eye on some of those went pathway stuff we’re supposed to see the knee stuff doesn’t it get through phase three trials in the next year or two yeah it’s really soon it’s really soon and and there’s also of course stem cell work it’s still a little bit the wild west but it’s this decade it’s not like 20 years from now 10 years from now it’s like next five years I think we’re really going to have some incredible breakthroughs and the other thing that’s going on is the you know the whole AI of it all right being able to really model this and understand this so it’s a good time to be alive so stay alive live hang in there well Stephen you you experiment directly with

[00:44:01] some regenerative medicine in the book and I like your standard that you look for stuff that works like ice so what’ you find out with this experiment you know it’s a lot of what Peter and I have been talking about and it’s I think so one let me just point this out Peter May disagree or agree with me I think you may actually back me up on this most of the people who doing regenerative medicine are functional medical doctors and functional medical doctors are um a ridiculously optimistic group of people as far as I’m concerned and I find that they’re a little let’s be let’s be nice and say ere exuberant about what they actually can fix and what they can’t fix and what works and what doesn’t and what I what I’ve found in my experience with most the functional medicine docs that I’ve worked with um is tendons ligaments bone even at the bones like um can I do I think we’ve got cures for Co and like like those kinds of things no are we talking about are we talking about the same

[00:45:02] person um I but what I do think is that if you’re healing tendons ligaments and Bones whether it’s you know affordable medicine that you can now like PRP 2015 when I was using PRP plasma uh platelets enrich plasma um it was totally Cutting Edge totally regenerative medicine there were a handful of doctors who were doing it was 10 to 20,000 was super whatever and now my mother just had shoulder PRP PRP injections in her shoulder and her insurance covered it right and so like this stuff is is getting mainstreamed really really quickly The Cutting Edge of PRP now is they are using massive quantities of your plasma so it started out with small quantities of your plasma and they got right the new versions like this m PRP massive dosing um and seems to be doing really cool stuff as well I just think that when it comes to like you have to be when it comes to organ regeneration

[00:46:00] and things like that we’re not quite there yet Peter and I could talk about you know all this stuff going on there and it’s so some of it’s really it’s a lot closer than you think it is for something that sounds like a total Star Trek technology but we’re not there yet and and so like when it comes to Peter was talking about accidents and like don’t die from something stupid right I think it’s also important to sort of have an understanding of what we can fix and what we can’t fix right and uh that’s worthwhile but like you know in skiing and snowboarding people are terrified about knee stuff right and as long as you don’t totally blow out your knee right and need a total as Peter pointed out because you can’t grow stamp cells on metal pretty much everything is fixable at this point with Exon with placental M it’s still very expensive right and you know if you want to try to heal something like a broke back you could put a college education into your back it will fix it but you right it’ll

[00:47:01] still cost you that much at this point so like some of it’s Financial it’s not just affordable for the everybody at this point some of it is the tech isn’t there but some of it is it’s Advanced a ton um and most people don’t actually realize how far it’s come and also like as I pointed like we’re talking about these went signal and pathway drugs for knee arthritis um this is this year right and there’s a bunch of them I think it’s just four or five different drugs that are in development with different companies so you know there’s multiple approaches to the same Target and they’re all getting closer I mean it’s it’s science fiction becoming science fact right and we are in the on the verge from three or four different approaches to regrowing Heart liver lung kidney um even even thymus so uh your job like I said so so to just just I know your folks have probably heard about it but why don’t you tell everybody where Martine rothblat is at

[00:48:01] with her regrow lungs project this is all the organ printing going on her work I mean we wrote about it in Faster her work uh still wins as far as the most sci-fi thing going on and um I know she’s getting a lot closer everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you I’m a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are transforming our world so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at

[00:49:00] the future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of use you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com back/ blog and learn more now back to the episode yeah so Martin’s daughter Genesis had a fatal disease of pulmonary hypertension and uh Martin was the founder of XM radio and uh and serious radio and quit all of that started with a high school textbook uh she had been a FCC lawyer in the satellite business start with the high school textbook learn biology and set out to cure her daughter’s disease uh over the course of many years uh

[00:50:01] finally found a treatment got a hold of this built the capability to manufacture it started a company called the United Therapeutics which created a drug uh to treat her daughter’s disease not cure the disease but treat it to postpone death and that company I Therapeutics became a five now 12 billion public company but in the interim Mar te set the goal of being able to create lungs to provide a total lung replacement which is the only true cure for her daughter’s disease uh and after going after lungs decided to go after kidneys and other organs Hearts as well and the approach that Martin has taken as any good entrepreneur takes is approaching it from four five six different ways uh the way that is gotten the most advances is it turns out that pig organ or an have the rough same size as human organs same size lung kidney livers um hearts

[00:51:03] and so if you could transplant a uh organ from a pig into the human that’d be great the problem is your body will reject it for a number of reasons the surface antigens on the pig is not human and then pigs have a large number of these retroviruses which can infect you so working with some of the top geneticist Martin re-engineered a pig humanized a pig uh to create the surface antigens that are more humanlike to get rid of those retroviruses and the first transplants have started occurring over the last couple of years in heart and liver I’m sorry heart and kidney it’s still early days uh but then she’s taken approach to 3D printing the scaffolding of lungs and then being able to go from a skin cell taken from you to create an induced Pur potent stem cell uh and then grow that stem cell to lung tissue and have it basically populate on the scaffolding of this lung and there’s a

[00:52:00] few other approaches that she’s taken so it’s it’s pretty cool by the end of this decade we should have backup organs for you right that’s just an amazing thought that’s it’s the crazy yeah that’s why Martine worth talking about is is it’s also like what you the window of what you sort of have to hang on for until we start getting really crazy medical advances isn’t all that that long Ray cwell talks about it in one of his earlier books um Fantastic Voyage and he talks about really a bridge to a bridge to a bridge your bridge right now to get healthfully into your 90s to 100 is Diet exercise sleep mindset it’s the fundamentals right that we’ve been talking about uh and then there a number of new technologies coming whether they’re epigenetic reprogramming or cytic medicines or stem cells and those will buy you the next 10 or 20 years and

[00:53:00] then there’s a new generation of Technologies nano technology the impacts of AI and Quantum Computing so we we talk about this idea called Longevity escape velocity we talked about it in future is faster than you think that there’s going to be a point in time that for every year that you’re alive science is extending your life for greater than a year and once that happens you know you’re in a pretty good shape as long as you don’t you know die from something stupid Peter we just got a a question in the chat about exosomes do you think they’re a big deal I do think exosomes are a big deal so what’s an exosome an exosome EXO from the Greek word outside and some from the word body so when stem cells are uh doing their thing they’re creating these growth factors uh these signaling factors and what they do is they just don’t pump them out into the outer extracellular Matrix they they put them into these little uh vacul uh these

[00:54:00] little packages of signaling packages these are called exosomes and um today exosomes are in the gray area from an FDA standpoint you can get them uh they’re not fully authorized uh I have had exosome treatments when I I’ve had both shoulders reconstructed I did my right shoulder I don’t know 10 years ago and then two years ago I did my left shoulder and I had exosome injections posts surgery a few times I can tell you the speed of repair was massively better on my on my left shoulder and it just it’s signaling growth and repair for uh the muscular skeletal system so I think they’re very important um and I think we’re going to start to see a lot of science wrapped around it to get FDA approvals that’s what’s G to happen the next three or four years to get the science done so Tori I used exosomes for

[00:55:01] both shoulders both of my knees and my back uh and I all all pretty much super successfully the thing the the thing that most people don’t know the exms are essentially a stem cell secrete right yes and the issue with stem cells is all the early work we were injecting okay your knee is a problem let’s inject stem cells or whatever the problem is stem cells don’t stay in one place they migrate so you can inject them at the knee and they’ll within a week they’re all over the body exosomes which are what stem cells secrete are actually built to stay in place so when you inject the exosomes they stay in place and Peter pointed out they recruit not only do they do healing work but they recruit all of the bodies other healing properties and as Peter pointed out if this stuff isn’t a gray are right so there’s not the level of it the results are undeniable with exomes at this point

[00:56:00] but there’s still a bunch of questions and and and be and because in a sense good news bad news it’s not big farmer yet so the cost has stayed somewhat down right the concern is that it’s kind of become big farmer and get very expensive or covered by insurance but um the point is that there’s not been the level of research there could be so we’re really at the front end of seeing what they can do and already what we know is pretty amazing the other thing to mention is uh stem cells come with surface antigens and uh and DNA they are cells and if they are coming from another human being right if they’re placental or Cord Blood stem cells um there is the potential for having a reaction to someone else’s uh nuclear material so exosomes don’t have that and they’re typically perceiv much safer not saying that stem cells aren’t safe but the work hasn’t been finished yet I want to go back to recovering like

[00:57:02] a pro Peter I would love to hear some of your go-to recovery strategies wow so first of all uh in this area I put Steve as the pro so I’d want to recover like Steve um for me it’s uh a lot of it is mindset a lot of it is I my recovery becomes the most important thing for me it’s not something that’s secondary or tertiary right when I fell and injured my shoulder a few years back um it was massively inconvenient I was just starting to get my my uh exercise routine and it was I’m going to do everything I can to get back on top of this it became my primary Mission uh and so I think that’s critically important people who it’s inconvenience I’m going to still continue doing my work I’m going to put it off um that’s not a good recipe in my my mind um uh that plus the use of regenerative medicine stem cells

[00:58:01] exosomes uh placental Matrix and so forth are the only real go-to things that I would say Stephen what about you well I you know I there’s there’s levels of recovery and levels of recovery right you started with the the most important thing which is sleep as it just like as a recovery tool right like um and for pre-performance AG perspective if you want to preserve mental function expertise and wisdom are your two best defenses against Alzheimer’s and Dementia and cognitive decline because expertise and wisdom form very very vibrant and robust neural networks all across the prefrontal cortex which is the area that’s most vulnerable to cognitive deine most cognitive decline is the prefrontal cortex the newest structure in the brand from an evolutionary perspective the most vulnerable right very rarely do we have you met of a stroke to deep B brain structures but it they don’t tend to erode where like the more recent

[00:59:01] structures and expertise and wisdom is redundancy across sort of the prefrontal cortex you can’t learn a damn thing without sleep so like I mean from a recovery standpoint if you don’t have deep Del seven eight hours of deep Del the way of sleep at night doesn’t matter what you learn during the day you’re it’s not going into long-term memory it’s not going into storage it’s not neuroprotective against cognitive decline you haven’t like you haven’t done anything other than fill your day with an activity because you’re not sleeping enough and then you can go into more active recovery saunas Epsom salt baths long walks that sort of stuff and F and where Peter went is like and when those tools don’t work there’s regenerative medicine right like I think it’s it’s a gradi and there’s stuff you want to do every day and there’s the tools you reach for when when the [ __ ] you’re doing every day isn’t working or things break down further Gloria asked a question uh that I think is important which is what is your best suggestions for insomnia um because sleep is so

[01:00:00] important and I I’d love to share what I do first of all it’s important to realize that uh eight hours of sleep is what your body needs uh it isn’t 6 hours 5 hours when I was in medical school used to pride myself on uh on getting away with five hours of sleep but if the body if the human being could have evolved to get away with five hours of sleep we would have right during those three hours between five and eight hours you’re not reproducing you’re not hunting you’re not protecting yourself you are it’s a waste of time otherwise if you could got rid of it we would have we can’t eight hours is the is the target you know seven is my minimum eight is my target so what do I do uh first of all the single most important thing is getting asleep at the same time every night it’s it’s I try and get in bed by 9:30 at night because I know I’m going to be up at 5:30 right my eyes pop open at that time it’s just I used to be

[01:01:01] a late night owl but now I do my best writing and thinking in the morning so uh I get the temperature of the room down to 63 64 degrees uh cold I have a cooling blanket on my bed uh I use a manta eye mask um and between those those things and like slowing it down so I just don’t go from like you know I don’t watch TV first of all I think watching TV in bed is like one of the worst things for getting to sleep um but I don’t go from like you know exercising or pounding on the computer and try to go to sleep I have a a wind down period I’ll actually probably listen to a audible book for 15 minutes set it to a timer to go off on its own it’s like being read a bedtime story so those are the things that work for me yeah I want to just respond to Don’s comment which is about food boo booze and sleep is tricky because uh they’re now if you go into the Blue Zone literature you’ll

[01:02:00] find that that they in certain Blue Zone communities long lived communities they drink a lot of they drink wine one of the things that’s predominantly for as veritol you can go down the David Sinclair rabbit hole if you’re interested in that but the problem with alcohol is once you depending on your body weight once you’re at one to two uh glasses of of whatever pretty much anything over two two glasses will impact sleep so there’s a sleep penalty for booze and it’s one of the it’s one of the problems with booze as a way to wind down is it’ll wind you down and then four hours later all the sugar in the booze is going to wake you back up and it’s going to interrupt your sleep so um as a general rule booze is is is not a is not a go-to if you actually uh want to get good night sleep yeah and and uh uh let’s see Brad here uh surfaced why we sleep sleep by Matthew Walker which is one of the best books on the subject it’s a quick read or great audible uh once you read it you’re going

[01:03:01] to like you know like I do pray at the altar of sleep I want to call out another question from the chat here too because this is a question as a coach who teaches people to sleep all the time I get it regularly so I’m curious to hear what both of you have to say so Daniel’s asking why do some people like Tony Robbins I also hear Elon Musk in this case a lot exist and deliver on little sleep I know Tony well I know Elon a reasonable amount they don’t prefer that uh and you can get away with it but it will wreak havoc on your health there’s also a to I want to take it one step further there’s a flow penalty so it is a lack of sleep it’s really hard to get into flow for a number of reasons but the first is that you produce a lot of norepinephrine you might notice when you’re your startle response is really jacked up um among other things and it’s your edgier and

[01:04:00] that edgier that edginess is norepinephrine and nor too much norepinephrine blocks flow blocks Learning Blocks creativity blocks empathy like we can go on there’s a big list of penalties so Downstream from like I said besides all the physical stuff is a is a bunch of of of emotional stuff that is also really detrial but like you’re blocking Peak Performance yeah again I would say having written a book with with Tony on this subject he’s not happy with his sleep he doesn’t like sleeping that little he really wants to sleep more uh and he is working on it and again um can you survive on it sure can you thrive on it no well the other thing I want to point out with Tony is and this is so when you are on stage you get Tony spends a lot of time on stage and there’s a huge amount of dopamine that comes your way free of charge on

[01:05:00] stage so like for those of us who do anything in the public eye I when I do a podcast like my day ends in a podcast or even today because this one all out about three o’clock and just simply from being like in front of a in front of a crowd through a zoom that pushes dub me into my system I have to go I know I’m going for a walk I’m going up the mountain behind my house with a dog after this is over because otherwise it’ll mess with my sleep so if you’re on stage a lot you can use the flo High the dopamine High to get over for not sleeping like you that you can fuel yourself for a while on that um until you you burn out and fall apart which you know I you know through I know about Tony vicariously through you and I know that’s a common thing for him that he pushes himself he rides his Flo high from these public events and he freaking collapses afterwards um so you know you have the illusion of somebody functioning without a lot of sleep and what you’re not seeing is the collapse yep let’s change

[01:06:02] gears for a second because Peter you mentioned mindset in terms of recovery Stephen in the book you talk about old being a mindset can you talk a little bit how the language we use with ourselves our selft talk around aging right can impact how we actually do it yeah let me uh let me just jump in with a handful of facts and then let Peter on them because the facts are really freaky so we talked about mindset towards aging you get an extra seven and a half years if you got a positive mindset towards aging so what about the negative right what happens you got a shitty mindset towards aging what happens there haven’t EXA but where they have been studies is on if you’re subjected to somebody else’s negative mindset on Ag and we call that agism right it’s the most socially acceptable stereotype in the world which is wild because you think about today if I walk outside my house and I to display any Prejudice in the world I’m going to get canceled by the time I’m on my mailbox I don’t even make

[01:07:00] it to the end of the driveway right but I can walk outside and I can look at Peter and be like dude you are too old for that [ __ ] put that down and that’s totally fine everybody laughs it’s cute but here’s the thing if you spend your 30s and 40s and 50s being exposed to negative mindset towards aging when you’re 60 if they measure your memory you’re going to exhibit 30% greater memory decline than people who are not to negative stereotypes around aging there is a really tight correlation between mindset and Health and Longevity and it’s impacting things like where our memory is at by the time we’re 60 forget about like by the time we’re 80 you know what I mean so if you look at like the negga and and the other thing about the negative mindset towards aging is it’s a bi it’s biological right as soon as we have stuff we want to hold on to right that we want to protect conserve it’s all the youthful mindsets are about seeking out who am I in the world how I’m going to make my living right as soon as we set up and this is oh I’ve

[01:08:00] got this job I want to keep I’ve got this spouse I want to keep I’ve got this car I want to keep right that’s the mindset of old we’re switching our addictions from being addicted to like the dopamine and excitement you get from seeking to serotonin oxytocin these protect Safety and Security Systems and it’s it’s a drug addiction right and healthy aging demands all of our neurochemical systems at once um old people in a sense are addicted to the wrong drugs but it’s just endogenous neurochemistry not exogenous chemistry all I shut up there Peter you’re laugh all right all right no no it’s it’s it’s great and I funny man no nothing nothing just funny looking just kidding so listen I I I I think mindset is like is as important as anything else and people forget it uh so what do I mean by that first of all how old do you feel inside right so I’m I feel like I’m in my early early 30s late 20s that’s how I feel that’s how I relate to people you know I don’t I think about the next 50 years I

[01:09:01] talk about the next 100 years I talk about um you know what businesses I’m going to be creating in the 2030s and 2040s uh as soon as you shut that down uh you begin to you know tell the Universe I want to give my bits back to the environment the worst four-letter word around this is the idea of retirement there’s no thing as Retirement you know it’s like what am I doing next what’s my next career my next career after that one of the things I think it’s very important is who do you hang out with right uh you are the average of the people you spend the most time with if you’re hanging out with people that feel old that are talking about aches and pains and you know that RW it’s going to have a negative impact so I have I feel very lucky I’ve got an extraordinary tribe around me in my abundance Comm Community my Singularity Community my ex prise Community you know on this longevity Journey with me and

[01:10:00] it’s uh you know we routinely talk about what’s your target lifespan Health span right and and is it 120 150 are you going for 200 what is it you’re going for and it’s like Judo you’re punching through your Target and a lot of this is having the longevity mindset what does that mindset mean it means I’m not sure how I’m going to get there but I am confident that the rate of change the converging exponential Technologies are going to transform this and I have some mental proof models right remember I mentioned about the boohead whale and the Greenland shark I know that large mammals can live hundreds of years if they can why can’t I it’s a software or Hardware problem and the tools to modify those things are coming our way so I’ll ask you to think about from a mindset perspective what are you reading who you hanging out with what’s on your walls you know uh you it’s I I’ll give you one last thing I had my

[01:11:01] two boys and and Stephen was there in not there but we were Partners at that time I had my two boys when I was 50 I’m 61 now and having kids later in your life is definitely part of the longevity recipe uh they keep me young and um you know having a blast with him can you both speak a little bit more to because you both have these tribes right well Peter you called a tribe Peter and Stephen I think you just called us your crew of Misfit Toys but you know same goal right that you have a tribe of people to help you extend your health span right so can you talk about what do those tribes look like what do you looking for I’m looking for people who are not dead before they’re dead really right like I like I honest to God first and foremost I don’t care what age you are right I mean I my I like Peter and I like to say we like smart kind funny weirdos Peter and I like the same kind of people right we share a lot of friends in common and um

[01:12:00] we’ve been part of a lot of the same drives and built the same kind of drives we like smart kind funny weirdos that’s that’s across the board but I really I look for people who are not dead before they’re dead I call it getting gezer getting gizzard is else gets your they get their oh you’re too old for this [ __ ] juice all over youer and it like it’s amazing how of if you start noticing it and you’re over 40 in your life how often that happens to you and I so I look for people who would never ever do that I look for people who are not dead before they’re dead right I look for people who are going to be like dragged Kicking and Screaming from this life because they’ve got so much they want to do um the term buddy is individuals whose future is Bigg Bigg ger than their past right that’s a powerful a powerful idea from Dan from Dan suvin yeah you know one other thing I would love to

[01:13:01] just mention here if I could Tori uh the category of not dying from something stupid um which I think is is uh is funny but not so what does that mean uh most of us are optimists about our health we don’t actually know what’s going on inside our body right so the human body is extraordinarily uh good at hiding disease so if you got Parkinson’s for example you don’t get a Tremor until like 70% of your substanti [ __ ] uh neurons are dead um if you have cancer you don’t notice a cancer at stage zero or stage one or stage two it’s at stage three or four when it’s having an impact and you’re in some kind of pain or discomfort whatever is you go into the doctor and the doctor says I’m sorry to tell you this and and so one of the things that I’ve done and and Stephen knows about this we’ve written about it in our books I wrote about extensively in life force is started a

[01:14:01] company called Fountain life and Fountain has facilities today in New York in Orlando Naples Dallas Texas we’re opening facilities around around the country and around the world uh where uh you go for a full body upload and over the course of six hours we digitize you it’s a full body MRI um a brain a brain vasculature it’s an AI enabled coronary CT it’s a dexus scan it’s genomics Executive Health it’s a Grail blood test that looks for 50 different uh blood uh cancer biomarkers and if there’s anything going on inside your body we find it at Inception because it’s pretty a couple of scary facts here um 70% of the cancers that kill people are not routinely tested for you know it’s not breast canc cancer uh it’s not prostate cancer it’s something else and because you’re not tested for that’s what gets Advanced and and and

[01:15:02] kills you another scary fact 70% of heart attacks have no precedent there was no shortness of breath there was no blockage it was what’s called um soft plaque that evses in a coronary artery and blocks it and gives you a heart attack and so unless you check you don’t find these things and so we built Fountain Life as a means to find disease at the earliest stages like my my question is like when do you want to know you’re going to find out like when do you want to know uh and one of the things that we did because it’s still expensive Fountain life’s you know $199,500 with the concierge doctor and your annual upload and quarterly testing it’s still a bunch of money that not a lot of people can afford if you can you go to Fountain life and and and and uh and get information but we start something I’m very uh proud of Stephen we we started something called Fountain health insurance um where for the same

[01:16:03] price as normal health insurance we do all of the testing for free for employees so we actually save money Downstream from treating someone with stage three or four whatever and we put that money into advance testing and so everybody gets the MRI the AI enabled coronary CT the gr blood test uh you know continuous glucose monitoring and we find disease before it hits people and that’s the future it’s it’s preventative personalized health I just want to get that message out because I think it’s so important it strikes me that your your mindset around aging has to play a role in your in in seeking that type of opportunity right what you’re describing is a a truly proactive approach to extending Health span do you do you see that interplay of mindset and and pursuit of these kind of

[01:17:01] cuttingedge Technologies yeah if you believe that we have a potential to live an extra 20 or 30 healthy years in your health span then you’re going to seek it out and be there early right so when there is a medical breakthrough it takes 17 years to get from the Breakthrough to your physician on average your doctor is not the most advanced person out there they’re you know they’re turning the crank they’re doing what they do they still use a stethoscope and it’s not going to be that way in 10 or 20 years but there are Medical Systems today Fountain life is one there are others human longevity is another um that are these Advanced Diagnostics and then the Advanced Therapeutics that are there and of course all of that is secondary to what Stephen writes about in our country because you need your Basics first you need that mindset you need sleep you

[01:18:01] need exercise you need repair you need all of those things uh it’s like if there’s one thing you can do is exercise if there’s two things you can do it’s exercise and sleep if there’s three things you can do it’s exercise sleep and getting rid of sugar in your diet right do you agree with those Stephen I so I was wondering so the the the the question is where do you put in maintaining robust social connection um is is the all I mean like it’s got to it’s got to be sort of really high up there um there probably a couple others but yeah I mean like that’s the the the these are non-negotiables I think and Stephen we haven’t really dove into any of Jason moser’s work too about you know can you talk a little bit about his work with Erp and how that’s related yeah so he was Jason uh Jason was one of they were looking they wanted to look at the impact of mindset his work was really on the difference between a growth and a fixed mindset but it’s really important because the mindset of old is

[01:19:01] essentially a fixed mindset also about your future and it it has the same kind of impact so what Jason figured out is that when you when you have a fixed mindset so when something goes wrong the brain notices we get an error signal right if you have a fixed mindset that’s the only signal you get if you have a growth mindset you have a following signal that says oh I’m learning from this mistake and growing from it but if you’ve got to fix mindset the brain doesn’t even bother spending that energy because it doesn’t believe you can learn you can grow you can change mindset of old functions sort of the same way and what all of this means is the reason that Peter and I keep going back to mindset um I have to put it in Peak Performance language if you have an external locus of control control meaning life happens to me I’m a victim versus I have an internal o control I’m in power I can control my destiny etc

[01:20:00] etc B performance is not even possible with an external locus of control you’ve given away so much of your power and the reason is it’s because the brain and the body efficiency is the number one job that’s what they’re going for they never want to don’t burn calories unless you have to burn calories and if you don’t believe you can learn grow change benefit your brain will not get up for the fight it won’t even do the basic work it needs to do to actually like get you get you in there um so it starts to get really you know I think you can you can be I mean I don’t think you can be flexible with your with mindset work at any age but um it’s a luxury of Youth that you can have a crappy mindset if you have a crappy mindset Golding into old age it’s going to kill you it’s like you don’t get to be you don’t get to be super old you don’t get long not that’s not in your guards you’ve literally like that’s what you’re costing yourself so having a mindset at any at any age is is probably

[01:21:02] problematic but later in life it’s especially problematic and Peter talked about a bunch of ways to tune your mindset I want to add in a couple more that are important um especially around aging because they they’re they’re obvious but they’re a little one obvious the other one’s a little more counterintuitive the first is um watch your language right selft talk yes right selft talk is super super critical so Ellen Langer did a lot of the early work on my on mindset her original thought on Aging was that aging might be the result of language priming a lot of what we call aging is the result of language priming so like one I’m 28 I’m 28 I’m 28 watch how you talk to yourself watch you talk to others the second one is this and this is really actually kind of interesting so our brain deceives us into like we sort of oh I I feel like I’m the same person I was yesterday and the day before and the day before we believe stasis and we perceive stasis but the

[01:22:02] actual Everything Has Changed we’re always constantly changing so another way to actually have a successful mindset towards aging is to notice first of all be mindfulness in general right matters but that means mindfulness really means like being curious and paying attention to the present but for a successful mindset of Aging they say pay attention to the that changes the foundation of everything and that change and the the Natural Evolution of things is for them to change um not to stay the same if you’re trying to keep things the same you’re actually fighting against How the Universe works and it has an impact on mindset so that’s another one and I think the third one um I’m holding up in our country because I think there is something to be said for a Nar style quest for exploding your mindset if you pick an a semi impossible challenge and go after it and you know what I mean as as you start to succeed it tends to what

[01:23:00] I said in our country is like whatever my mindset was towards aging when I started to learn how to do 360s and 180s and nose but and all like it went like it went out the window because suddenly I was doing things that I didn’t think were going to be physically possible for me ever and I was like learning thing after thing after thing after thing that exploded that mindset and the last thing I want to say about mindset is and Peter talk talked about this earlier when he said he doesn’t like watch TV in bed watch your screen time cell phones are terrible for mindset cell phones create a mobile mindset that means we are narciss we won we think we’re safer than we are but it makes us very very narcissistic and it destroys a growth mindset and it destroys a positive mindset towards agent so putting down your smartphone is also a really great way to improve your mindset Stephen who is n country for if you were going to say uh who the ideal reader is who’s going to get the most benefit from it would that be so it’s it’s interesting

[01:24:00] Peter I I mean like you have to flat out say anybody in and around 50 and Beyond but I like the point I make in the book is and we know this and I mean you could speak to part of the Peak Performance aging starts young like there’s stuff psychologically and physically that you want to start doing in your 20s and your 30s in your 40s in your 50s what we also know is that intervention at any age there are studies showing that interventions even in your late 80s and early 90s can make a big difference at any level so interventions in any age Peak Performance aging starts young but I you know I I I don’t know who the who the book is for because in a certain level that shakes out in the reader like I find that out now right as people are reading sure but um I think it’s you know anybody who wants more out of the second half of their lives that’s what I wanted to that’s what I wanted to hear I mean if so if you’re in your late 40s or 50s or 60s and and you sort of have this

[01:25:00] traditional mindset that you’re on a downward slope and you want to say no uh I want more um I want to be able to like step up and be the best I’ve ever been uh this is a book that gives you tools and motivations to believe that you can and the means to actually pull it off I think that’s true I think that’s absolutely true I mean the you know I cover everything but like the stuff that you and Tony looked at in lifespan or or David Sinclair looks at and his where I you know I did everything but the like longevity science because there’s a lot of people working on that stuff nobody’s working on on the stuff we were I went into and like the P performance aging stuff or not enough people are and for those of you joining my moonshots and mindset podcast uh Stephen is one of the most brilliant thinkers uh and extraordinary writers and I hope that you’ll pick up a copy of in our country uh as I have I have to say I got mine for free but I still may buy 10 copies to give it away no I will buy 10 copies

[01:26:01] and give it away to all my friends so uh Stephen I I love spending time with you brother thank you for being in my universe and thank you for being one of my younger friends in my universe oh I see I see well you know the cross generational friendships are the foundation of any age friendly Society so there you have it we not cross generational but uh you know as my wise Elder um I’m the one who’s G I’m grayer than you though yeah but my biological age is younger than you so we we’ll get there oh I see it’s very thank you so much for doing this thank you for joining me um mik anytime I get to hang with you it’s wonderful it is a beautiful thing all right everybody thank you for joining us thanks to both of you thank you thank you everybody [Music]