Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #34 The Mindset That Extends Your Life w/ Steven Kotler

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

In this episode, Steven and Peter discuss the importance of a positive mindset in order to live longer, the science behind aging, and the effects of different mindsets on healthspan.  You will learn about: 07:36 | Age Is Just A Number It Can't Define Your Limits.  49:27 | Science Fiction Is Slowly Becoming Science Fact.  1:18:39 | A Growth Mindset Vs. A Fixed Mindset. Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance.  Read his latest book: Gnar Country. _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsor:  Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog. _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maple Syrup, we love you, but Canada is way more. It's poutine mixed with kimchi, maple syrup on Halo Halo, Montreal-style bagels eaten in Brandon, Manitoba. Here, we take the best from one side of the world and mix it with the other. And you can shop that whole world right here in our aisles. Find it all here with more ways to save at Real Canadian Superstore. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH,

the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. 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 bestselling author, founder, executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and one of the world's leading experts in human performance, Stephen Kotler. Stephen, hi, how's it going today? Hi, everybody. We're also joined tonight by Peter Diamandis, who's a world renowned entrepreneur, author, founder of various successful companies. Peter started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capitalism and education, including fountain life, cellularity and vaccinity. Bold and the Future is Faster Than You Think, co-authored by our very own Stephen Kotler. 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 put, well put. So the title of today's crowdcast is Extending Human Healthspan. So to kick things off, Peter, can you explain the difference between lifespan and healthspan and maybe why our focus today is largely going to be on the latter? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I was at the Vatican holding this conference or the session on longevity, and I'm there with about 300 scientists 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 am I not understanding? And the challenge is that most people, when they think about living to 120, they think about sitting in a wheelchair drooling and that's lifespan. It's how old are you alive? And your brain has got some brain waves and your heart is ticking, but you may be not there and you may be in pain and suffering. Healthspan 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 healthspan. Now, for most centenarians, people getting to 100, centenarians typically will get

to a 100-year lifespan and a 95 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. Last man standing. So in in both your recent work, so you've 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. And this isn't really how many people think about aging. So what are the implications of framing it this way? Yeah, there's a couple of 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 are species on this planet like the bowhead whale that can live to 200 years old and the Greenland shark that can live to 500 years old.

In fact, Greenland shark can have babies at 200 years old, and the Greenland shark that can live to 500 years old. In fact, the Greenland shark can have babies at 200 years old. Did you get some of that shark DNA? I'm shooting for it. I got some of that shark DNA. I'm silent. So the question is, if they can live that long, why can't we? And that's a really important question. So that's one way I frame it. It's either a hardware problem or a software problem. Another way that I frame it, 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 same at birth, at 20, at 40, at 80, at 100.

age. Your genome is the 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 ripped muscles? And it isn't what genes you have. 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 in his extraordinary work. We've talked about it in Lifeforce. 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 our country is to a large degree about. Yeah. Even the famous, I want to say it's the Swedish cardiology study where they

tracked 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% was their number of the equation so what's the 90 that has actually determined our health span our longevity the quality of our later years all that stuff that's where all that research started too yeah is i'll put one last framing item which i think is important to realize uh we take for granted our life span and health span today you know when we were evolving as as hominids a hundred thousand years ago if you look at when were humans cavemen and cavewomen is about

a hundred thousand 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 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 for most of human history, the average human lifespan was 30. And it's just the last century that everything from antibiotics and pasteurized milk and better sewage systems have given us additional healthspan. But I think it's this decade, and we can talk about that, that real breakthroughs in stem cells and epigenetic reprogramming

in cellulitic medicines could add 10, 20, 30 healthy years and maybe buy you enough time to get the next 10, 20, 30 healthy years. And buy you enough time to get the next 10, 20, 30 healthy years. And I think the way that we're reframing this, we've opened up the possibility space immensely when it comes to extending lifespan and healthspan. 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 what is park skiing steven park skiing is the oh right park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves doing uh tricks off jumps on rails on wall rides and boxes and

for those who are 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 fifties, trying to learn to arching,

I think you're fucking crazy is probably the technical term that sort of gets applied. Well, that would, that would explain you. Thank you, sir. Not much has changed on that front um but uh that was then right all the the reason our country is 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're user to loser 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 at getting each of the, each of 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. each of the each of the various categories of things that used to wane and how effective our tools are for training these things it was getting to be really really interesting not that was

apropos of nothing it 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 were were debunked or you're debunking in our country really and how yeah how has your resource changed there's a bunch of different ones but like we could just go through a handful of physical skills so um it used to be uh for the past 20 years didn't really matter what you thought you could train vo2 max which is your upper respiratory capacity was this thing that it starts to decline at 25 at 50 it really starts to fall and it didn't matter what you like what argument you made

you'd be performance agent physiologists would always be like yeah what about vo2 max it's a goner and right like and it was it was like this hammer that they would beat you with and it turns out then they went out and measured the VO2 max in octogenarian triathletes. And they found that as a general octogenarian triathlete, so you're in your 80s and you run triathlons, you've got about 30 years of, you're not professional. This is just 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 VO2 max of healthy 35-year-olds. The world record is now an 88-year-old managed at the VO2 max, I believe, of a 24-year-old. And we don't measure that often. So saying this guy has the world record, it's not like we went out and did a wide study to find him. So that's just one example. I'll give you another, a weird one. So 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 parietal lobe. 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 erodes and the white matter erodes, processing speed slows down. When our brains start to process information more slowly, everything else, risk aversion increases. We're a step behind, right?

And this is 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 think oh crap white matter is declining what do we do brain is now we know i was 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 of the myelination um so like all it's getting that's like like three steps

removed 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 meta programming 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 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 over stuff that we didn't think. That's just two random examples. I'm pretty much you can take whatever skill you want and I can give you a parallel. Exactly.

You know, one of the things, Stephen, that that I think about a lot, you know, when 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 pushups 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 a direct correlation between muscle mass and longevity as a store of stem cells blood supply keeping yourself from falling and and breaking so the number p 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 as part of it is also the bones right when you're building up your leg muscles bones are the

biggest bones in your body right exactly here's a stat that scares should have 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 seventies, eighties, nineties is one of the key correlates. Um, but yeah, so I worship, I worship at the at the uh at the altar of muscle and sleep those are not bad others by the way 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 lung mass but they can they a lot of these skills like they have the numbers on like when your 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 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. to experience starts to fall off a cliff. And there's a point at which, where it gets down so small that they know within a year of you losing your openness to experience, your 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 cognitive decline within a year. Yeah. And if you're hanging off the edge of a bridge, grip strength directly correlates with life expectancy. Very tight correlation there. Yeah. And if you're hanging off the edge of a bridge, grip strength directly correlates with life expectancy. Very tight correlation there. Yeah. You are 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 hyperglycemia, leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to sexual dysfunction to diabetes, and it's not good. The challenge is all of us are different. All of us respond to different foods in different ways. Like for me, if I eat bananas it spikes my blood glucose. If I eat grapes it doesn't. If I eat bread by itself I get this

prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil it blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app. So Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24-7. I wear it all the time. It 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.link slash Peter. a person's life. So check it out, levels.link slash Peter. We give you two additional months of membership, and it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually, this stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine today. It's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. You've been dancing around risk aversion a little bit here. So let's dive into that. 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, which is one of the new discoveries in the past 20 years about what happens as we age is there's cognitive changes in the brain, beneficial ones that start in our 50s. There's epigenetic alterations that start turning on certain genes. They're only activated by experience. The two halves of the brain start talking together, each other, and working together like never before. And the brain starts to recruit underutilized regions 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 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 development psychology if that 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 have to, first, you have to, one, you have to train against physical fragility. Because what Peter has pointed out a bunch, what good is a 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 tied to inflammation. Inflammation always ties to stress. So that's just sort of first and foremost is why risk aversion is a problem. But actually, the fear, the 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 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. this added level of wisdom and empathy. I was hoping for some emotional maturity when that came along with the wisdom,

which would maybe temper some of my natural tendencies, things like that a guy can hope, right? I think part of it as well, how bringing it into something we both, we talked about 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 whatever you want to do in life. And that, for me, is the foundational underpinning. You know, 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 is driving you to want to see the next 50 or 100 years. And I think that connects directly with the idea of being risk-philic, like being excited about your next job or your next adventure versus scared to change anything in your 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. This is one of the most well-established facts in peak performance aging is that a positive mindset towards aging

correlates to an extra seven 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 to train down physical fragility and train up risk tolerances in your 50s.

By age 40, you need to basically have a way that you spend most of your time in a way that generates passion, is in line with 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 purpose is a little separate from mindset in how it's impact, right? But also what Peter's point is if you have the right mindset and you've got the right purpose and you're putting them together

and really getting that feel, that's the secret, right? That's really, really what propels you. And you both write extensively about having a massively transformative purpose, having clarity, knowing how your passions and your purpose intertwine. Stephen, I love in our country, you write about chasing big dreams before it's too late to chase down those dreams, right? So can you both speak to what about the people that are listening to this who have maybe given up those dreams, right? So can you both speak to what about the people that are listening to this who have maybe given up their dreams, right? Or they think that 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, it, you know, you either have to be the king, the queen, the robber baron, in some way have enough wealth to go 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 or the owner, but you can be part of it at a minimum. The second thing that's going on is that we all have access to such extraordinary technology.

We're living during the explosive birth 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. Picking a target and then reaching out, finding other people who want to go on that target with you, get access to all of the exponential tech resources that Steve and I wrote about in The Future is Faster Than You Think. 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.

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 emotional connection. And if you've got that, then the rest is just putting the pieces together. Peter said it better than me. And the only thing I want to add- But you would have written it better than me. That's true. It's true. I got to take credit where I can get it. No, the only thing I want to add, and this is stuff that's covered a little bit in the art of impossible.

And if you don't know what your passion is and what your purpose is, right, for the 5% of our listeners, maybe who are still sort of floundering 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 find a place where three or four, five of your curiosities start to intersect and play there with patience. And I want to emphasize the with patience, play there over time. This is where this grows passion, and this is where purpose comes from. But the most important thing is you cannot be impatient with yourself. To really uncover your passion and purpose, your brain has a built-in pattern recognition system. Your brain 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 put too much pressure on yourself, if you want to be there tomorrow, that's, I think, one of the problems where they 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 side 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 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 of passion on a basketball 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 ball through a hoop. That's what it looks like on the front end. We mistake mature passion, mature purpose, and what that looks like or 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 smaller on the front end and something you nurture and you feed slowly over periods of time. And by the way, 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 doesn't mean you can't change it, but something that you really want to fuel you. And it can change over time. Stephen, you and I have developed our passions and our MTPs over time. I'm sort of on my third right now, focused on the longevity space. And space as where you and I met was my earlier one. But these are things that it captures your shower time. You dream about it and you build out of curiosity, a body of knowledge and 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 isn't often talked about, but there's a lot of data on this. In our country, my quest was to learn how to park ski, right? Because I had unfinished business in park ski and I wanted to learn how to park ski. And what's next, Stephen? Well, my point for peak 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 healthspan 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 in the second half of our lives, really crucial to in the second half of our lives really crucial to thriving the second half of our lives so that you want to live with passion purpose and flow um but as as peter really pointed out you you you want to turn that into a long-term mission or a series of them um it's going to help you thrive in your later years however long you have left, right? And if Peter's right, some of you are going to live to be 400. It's exciting. And Stephen, I like how in our country, you do detail out kind of that goal stack that's really helpful in pursuit of your purpose. So having those mission level goals and having high, hard goals and clear goals also strikes me that this is an opportunity because I know people are just

listening 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 interesting. I mean, dynamic is, I said that all of our skills are use it or lose it skills. Everything we use to think declined 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 single word that means strength, stamina, agility, flexibility, and balance. 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 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 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 neural nets.

And actually something that's not talked about nearly as much, angiogenesis, the birth of new vasculature to support those new neurons to form new neural nets and actually something that's not talking about nearly as much angiogenesis the birth of new vasculature to support those new neurons right dynamic movement when it's strength stem when all these things are together actually promotes neurogenesis and angiogenesis which is very no other kind of physical training does that but 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 moment. 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 a classical violinistist 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 get it a little bit better, I'm just improv-ing. I'm freestyling. It's literally, on instead of trying to get it a little bit better, I'm just improv-ing. I'm pre-styling.

And it's literally, on a certain level, play is just way more fun. We're self-conscious. It amplifies learning. It amplifies motivation. It amplifies progression. But from a peak performance agent standpoint, there's like seven or eight auxiliary benefits to play 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 unfolded in your life in a way that really works? Dynamic, deliberate play.

And I think Peter and I would both agree because we've done this together and we've done this individually. We've done a lot of... We've shepherded a lot of long-term projects that most people thought were impossible or very very difficult in the world we've seen them all the way through and um and what the other and both of us have tried very hard to create playful environments around our like crazy ass moonshots because it's too fucking much work if you're just heavy lifting all the time, you're miserable. You're never going to get there. Let me,

let me add a couple of things here. I think it's really, uh, important. Uh, first of all, uh, if you're going to take on a big ass moonshot,

it's really important to do with people you love. It's 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 a band of crazy moonshot artists than you are your family so you better really point out hold on peter i'm interrupting you point of fact peter what's your wife's nickname for me yeah you're 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 Steven at 5 a.m. in the morning and 6 a.m. in the morning. I would wake up with him every morning. And yeah, it's crazy. So listen, if you're doing something

that is a big ass goal, it's a true moonshot, do it with people that you really love. If you don't like them, your moonshot is going to fall apart because you don't like spending time with these people as much. The second thing is we are emotional human beings. And Stephen can go into the neurochemistry even better than I can. I've given him an honorary MD and PhD, I think, over the years. But 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. 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 grandchildren getting married whatever the case having a purpose for that beyond just, I got to do it. Got to go make. And the other thing people forget when it comes to like exercise, Peter's totally right. You gotta, like if you can bring in a training partner,

you could 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 happier you are, much better you feel, right? Because at a certain point, the drug known as exercise is going to start functioning like the drug. It's an amazing drug, right? It's phenomenal. So all you got to do is get over the hump and into 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, let me ask you a question,

because when I think about the secrets of healthy aging or of health extension, one of the secrets for me, there are two parts here, is don't die from something stupid. We've talked about this, about really doing the full body checkups and so forth that we offer 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 accident and is bedridden and all the secondary and tertiary impacts of that. How do you think about that? So I think about it in a bunch of different ways.

It's a great question. So one, this is one of the reasons why leg strength is so important, right? One of the reasons of preserving leg strength is to preserve your balance. But two, like, so I work with a woman named Eve House who does a movement system known as Revolution in Motion. And of all the things we train, proprioception and balance are at the heart of it. And it's interesting because that's one of the things she's most known for is this kind of 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 mats on bosew balls and exercises balls, like that kind of, but we're not in the wild. But I now, when I go into the ski mountains, I see lines like ways down the mountain that before I'd never seen. Before I would look at the thing and I'd think, oh, I can't ski that. It's totally impossible. And it's not that my skiing has improved. My balance and proprioception has 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 proprioception training so people what is the world like oh uh i'll give you a standing on a bosu ball which is that half shell one foot with like a kettlebell in one hand doing quarter 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 you derailed me where was i already no it's all right it's all right um oh the other the other thing i wanted to mention on on balance the other side of it is also the World Health Organization is really clear on this. They say that once you're over 65, you should be training balance, flexibility, and agility three times a week to prevent this. Right. So they're really clear on like 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 stretching and flexibility starts to really matter 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 muscles ligaments and bones we can't regrow cartilage yet that i think is we'll come and maybe we can and i'm 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've seen it indirectly, but I also like

where stem cells, exosomes, placental matrix, all the toolkits 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 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 way that it's really viable and interesting. There's a bunch of work going on right now 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 wind pathway manipulations and synolytic medicines right um uh now the problem is if you have it 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 able to start, you know, there's a few different approaches to, to solving both sarcopenia and osteopenia. Uh, in fact, one of my company's vaccinities is looking at- You're going to have to define those. That's the loss of bone density.

Yes. Osteopenia is reduced bone density and sarcopenia is reduced muscle. Sarcopenia sucks. It really is hard as you get older to build muscle mass. I have tripled my protein intake. I've tripled my workouts using a number of supplements. I'm just pounding at that muscle. It's just a number one priority for me. There is a couple of approaches from stem cell-derived medicines. Then another thing is 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 Wendt pathway stuff is, because I've been paying a lot of attention to it because it's all arthritis. Anytime there's arthritis, that's Wendt pathway stuff. You know, I 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 most of the way i've gotten most of the pain to go away and i've healed 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 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. Hang in there. Well, Stephen, you, you experiment directly with some regenerative medicine in the book. And I like your standard that you look for stuff that works like ice. So what'd you find out with this experiment?

You know, it's a lot of what Peter and I've 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 do 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 over 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 of 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 covid and like like those kinds of things no are we talking about are

we talking about the same 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 enriched plasma um it was totally cutting edge totally regenerative medicine there were a handful of doctors who were doing it it was ten to twenty thousand dollars it 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 matt's prp massive dosing um and it seems to be doing really cool stuff as well um i just think that when it comes to like you have to be when it comes to organ regeneration and things like that we're not quite there yet and 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 re-replacement as peter pointed out because you can't grow stem cells on metal pretty much everything is fixable at this point with exosomes with placenta major it's still very expensive right and you know if you want to try to heal something like a broken back you could put a college education into your back it will fix it but you right it'll 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 a point like we're talking about these one 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 science fiction becoming science fact, right? And we are 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 just just i know your folks have probably heard about it but why don't you tell everybody where martine rothblatt

is at with her regrowth lungs project. This is all the organ printing going on her work. I mean, we wrote about it at faster. Her work still wins as far as the most sci-fi thing going on. And I know she's getting a lot closer. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece

of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of

news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go tomandis.com backslash blog and learn more now back to the episode yeah so martine's daughter genesis had a fatal disease of pulmonary hypertension and uh martine was the founder of xm radio and uh in serious radio and quit all of that, started with a high school textbook. She had been a FCC lawyer in the satellite business, started with a high school textbook, learned biology, and set out to cure her daughter's disease. Over the course of many years, finally found a treatment, got a hold of this, built the capability to manufacture it, started a company called United Therapeutics, which created a drug to treat her daughter's disease, not cure the disease, but treat it, postpone death. And that company, United Therapeutics,

became a five, now $12 billion public company. But in the interim, Martine 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. And after going after lungs, decided to go after kidneys and other organs, hearts as well. And the approach that Martine has taken, as any good entrepreneur takes, is approaching it from four, five, six different ways. The way that is gotten the most advances is it turns out that pig organs have the rough same size as human organs, same size lung, kidney, livers, hearts. And so if you could transplant an organ from a pig into a 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 geneticists, Martine re-engineered a pig, humanized a pig to create the surface antigens that are more human-like 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. But then she's taken an 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 pluripotent stem cell and then grow that stem cell to lung tissue and have it basically populate on the scaffolding of this lung.

And there's a few other approaches that she's taken. So it's pretty cool. By the end of this decade, we should have backup organs for you, right? That's just an amazing thought. It's the crazy, yeah, that's why Martinez we're talking about is, it's also like what's 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 long. Ray Kurzweil talks about it in one of his earlier books, 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 that we've been talking about. Then there are a number of new technologies coming, whether they're epigenetic reprogramming or senolytic medicines or stem cells. Those will buy you the next 10 or 20 years. Then there's a new generation of technologies, nanotechnology, the impacts of AI and quantum computing. So we talk about this idea called longevity escape velocity. We talked about it in Futures 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 die from something stupid. Peter, we just got 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 som 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 vacuoles uh these little packages of signaling packages. These are called exosomes. And today exosomes are in the gray area from an FDA standpoint. You can get them.

They're not fully authorized. I have had exosome treatments when 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 post-surgery a few times. I can tell you the speed of repair was massively better on my left shoulder. And it's signaling growth and repair for the musculoskeletal system. So I think they're very important. 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 going to happen the next three or four years to get the science done. So, Tori, I used exosomes for both shoulders, 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 exosomes are essentially those stem cells 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 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 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 body's other healing properties. And as Peter pointed out, if the stuff is in a gray area, right? So there's not the level of it. The results are undeniable with exosomes at this point, but there's still a bunch of questions. And because in a sense, good news, bad news, it's not big pharma yet. So the cost has stayed somewhat down, right? The concern is that it's

going to become big pharma and get very expensive or covered by insurance. But 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 stem cells come with surface antigens and DNA. They are cells. And if they are coming from another human being, right, if they're placental or cord blood stem cells, there is the potential for having a reaction to someone else's nuclear material. So exosomes don't have that, and they're typically perceived 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 a pro. Peter, I would love to hear some of your go-to recovery strategies. Wow. So first of all, in this area, I put Steve as the pro, so I'd want to recover like Steve. For me, a lot of it is mindset. A lot of it is my recovery becomes the most important thing for me. 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. And so I think that's

critically important. People who, it's an inconvenience, I'm going to still continue doing my work, I'm going to put it off. That's not a good recipe in my mind. That plus the use of regenerative medicine, stem cells, exosomes, placental matrix, and so forth, are the only real go-to things that i would say steven 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 aging 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 decline. Most cognitive decline is the prefrontal cortex. The newest structure in the brain from an evolutionary perspective is the most vulnerable, right? Very rarely do we have, we may have a stroke to deep brain structures, but they don't tend to erode where like the more recent 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, seven, eight hours of deep delta wave sleep at night, it 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.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 fine where peter went is like and when those tools don't work there there's regenerative medicine, right?

Like, I think it's a gradient. There's stuff you want to do every day. And then there's the tools you reach for when the shit you're doing every day isn't working or things break down further. Gloria asked a question that I think is important, which is what is your best suggestions for insomnia? Because sleep is so important. And I'd love to share what I do.

First of all, it's important to realize that eight hours of sleep is what your body needs. It isn't six hours, five hours. When I was in medical school, I used to pride myself 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. It's a waste of time otherwise. If you got rid of it, we would have. We can't.

Eight hours is the target. Seven is my minimum. Eight is my target. So what do I do? First of all, the single most important thing is getting to sleep at the same time every night. I try and get in bed by 9.30 at night because I know I'm going to be up at 5.30. My eyes pop open at that time. I used to be a late night owl, but now i do my best writing and thinking in

the morning so 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 and go to sleep i have 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 booze. Booze and sleep is tricky because if you go into the Blue Zone literature, you'll find that in certain Blue Zone communities, long long-lived communities they drink a lot of they drink wine one of the things that's predominantly for resveratrol 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 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 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 as a general rule, booze is not a go-to if you actually want to get a good night's sleep. Yeah. And let's see, Brad here surfaced Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, which is one of the best books on the subject. It's a quick read or a great audible. Once you read it, you're going 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. And you can get away with it, but it will wreak havoc on your health. There's also, I want to take it one step further. There's a flow penalty. So it is a lack of sleep. 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 tired, your startle

response is really jacked up, among other things. And it's you're edgier. And that edginess is norepinephrine. And 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 bunch of emotional stuff that is also really detrimental. But like you're blocking peak performance. Yeah. stuff that is also really detrimental, but you're blocking peak performance.

Yeah. Again, I would say, having written a book 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, and he is working on it. And again, 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, Tony spends a lot of time on stage and there's a huge amount of dopamine that comes your way free of charge on 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 will add about three o'clock and just simply from being

like in front of a, in front of a crowd through a zoom that pushes dopamine into my system. I have to go. I'm no, 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 flow high, the dopamine high to get over for not sleeping. Like you'll bet you can fuel yourself for a while on that until you burn out and fall apart, which,

you know, I, you know, and i know about tony vicariously through you and i know that's a common thing for him that he pushes himself he rides his flow high from his 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 gears for a second because Peter, you mentioned mindset in terms of recovery, Steven, in the book, you talk about old being a mindset.

Can you talk a little bit about how the language we use with ourselves, our self-talk around aging, right. Can impact how we actually do it. Yeah. Let me, let me just jump in with a handful of facts and then let Peter build 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've got a positive mindset towards aging so what about the negative right what happens you've got a shitty mindset towards aging what happens there there haven't been exact studies but where they have been studies is on if you're subjected to somebody else's negative mindset on aging we call that ageism right it's the most socially acceptable stereotype in the world which is wild because we think about today if i walk outside my house and i to display any prejudice in the world i'm gonna get canceled by the time i'm on my mailbox i don't even make 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 shit. 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 exposed 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 by the time we're 80. You know what I mean? So if you look at the negative... And the other thing about the negative mindset towards aging is it's a it's biological. Right. As soon as we have stuff we want to hold on to. Right. Then we want to protect, conserve. It's all the youthful mindsets are about seeking out.

Who am I in the world? How am I going to make my living? Right. As soon as we set up and this is, oh, I've got this job I want to keep. I've got this spouse 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 and oxytocin, these protect safety and security systems.

And it's a drug addiction, right? And healthy aging demands all of our neurochemical systems at once. Old people, in a sense sense are addicted to the wrong drugs but it's just endogenous neurochemistry not exogenous chemistry all right i'll shut up there peter you're laughing all right all right no no it's it's it's great and i what's funny man no nothing nothing just funny looking just kidding uh so listen i i i think mindset is like is as important as anything else and people forget it.

So what do I mean by that? First of all, how old do you feel inside? So I feel like I'm in my early 30s, late 20s. That's how I feel. That's how I relate to people. I think about the next 50 years. I talk about the next 100 years. I talk about what businesses I'm going 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 such 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 is very important is who do you hang out with, right? 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 R word, 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 community, my singularity community, my XPRIZE community, you know, on this longevity journey with me. And it's, you know, we routinely talk about what's your target lifespan, healthspan, right? And is it 120, 150? Are you going for 200? What is it you're going for? And it's like, Judah, 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 bowhead 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 are you hanging out with what's on your walls you know uh you know it's i i'll give you one last thing i had my two boys and and and Steven was there in not there, but we were

partners at the 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. They keep me young and I'm, you know, having a blast with them. Can you both speak a little bit more to, because you both have these tribes, right? Well, Peter, you called a tribe, Peter and Steven, I think you just called us your crew of misfit toys, but you know, same goal, right? You have a tribe of people to help you extend your health span, right? So can you talk about what are those tribes look like? What are you looking for? I'm looking for people who are not dead before they're dead right like i like i'm honest to god first and foremost i don't care what age you are right i mean i my true 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 we've been part of a lot of the same drives and built the same kind of drives we like like smart, kind, funny weirdos. That's across the board. But I really, I look for people who are not dead before they're dead. I call it getting geezered. Getting geezered is when somebody else gets your, they get their, oh, you're too old for this shit juice all over you. over you and it like it's amazing how off if you start noticing and you're over 40 in your life how often that happens to you and 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 drag, kicky and screaming from this life because they've got so much they want to do. The term, buddy, is individuals whose future is bigger than their past, right? That's a powerful idea from Dan Sullivan. Yeah. One other thing I would love to just mention here, if I could, Tori,

the category of not dying from something stupid, which I think is funny, but not. So what does that mean? Most of us are optimists about our health. We don't actually know what's going on inside our body. So the human body is extraordinarily good at hiding disease. So if you've got Parkinson's, for example, you don't get a tremor until like 70% of your substantia nigra neurons are dead. 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 or whatever it is, and you go into the doctor and the doctor says, I'm sorry to tell you this. And so one of the things that I've done, and Stephen knows about this, we've written about it in our books, I wrote about extensively in Lifeforce, is started a company called Fountain Life. Fountain has facilities today in New York, in Orlando, Naples, Dallas, Texas. We're opening facilities around the country and around the world where you go for a full-body upload. Over the course of six hours, we digitize you. It's a full-body MRI, a brain vascul vasculature it's an ai enabled coronary ct

it's a dexa 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 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 kills you another, 70% of heart attacks have no precedent. There was no shortness of breath. There was no blockage. It was what's called soft plaque that evulses 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. My question is like, when do you want to know? You're going to find out, like, when do you want to know? And one of the things that we did, because it's still expensive, Fountain Life's, you know, $19, dollars with a 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 uh and get information but we started something i'm very proud of steven we we started something called fountain health insurance um where for the same 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 or whatever. And we put that money into advanced testing.

And so everybody gets the MRI, the AI-enabled coronary CT, the Grail blood test, continuous glucose monitoring, and we find disease before it hits people. And that's the future. 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 mindset around aging has to play a role in seeking that type of opportunity, right? What you're describing is a truly proactive approach to extending health span. Do you see that interplay of mindset and pursuit of these kind of cutting-edge

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 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,

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 need exercise. You need repair. You need all of those things um it's like if there's one thing you can do it's 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 all right do you agree with those steven i so i was wondering so that the the question is where do you put in maintaining robust social connection um is is the all i mean like it's gotta it's gotta be sort of really high up there um to probably a couple others but yeah

i mean like that's the the these are non-negotiables i think and steven 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 to it? So he was, 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 essentially a fixed mindset also about your future. And it has the same kind of impact.

So what Jason figured out is that 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 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. sort of the same way. And what all of this means is the reason that Peter and I keep going back to mindset, I have to put it in peak performance language.

If you have an external locus of control, meaning life happens to me, I'm a victim versus I have an internal locus of control, I'm in power, I can control my destiny, et cetera, et cetera. Peak 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 going 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-term that's not that's not in your cards you've literally like that's what you're costing yourself so having a mindset at any at any age is probably problematic

but later in life it 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, especially around aging, because they're obvious, but one is obvious. The other one's a little more counterintuitive. The first is watch your language, right? Self-talk, yes. Right. Self-talk, yes. Right. Self-talk is super, super critical.

So Ellen Langer did a lot of the early work 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- I'm 28. I'm 28. I'm 28. Watch how you talk to yourself.

Watch how you talk to others. The second one is 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 on the day before we believe stasis and we perceive stasis but the 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, mindfulness in general, right, matters. 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 fact that change is the foundation of everything.

And that change and the natural evolution of things is for them to change, 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 was something to be said for a NAR style quest for exploding your mindset. If you pick a semi-impossible challenge and go after it, and you know what I mean? As, as you start to succeed, it tends to, I mean, what 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 butters, 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 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 narcissists. We want, we think we're safer than we are, but it makes us very, very narcissistic and it destroys a growth mindset and destroys a positive mindset

towards aging so putting down your smartphone is also a really great way to improve your mindset steven who is nar country for if you were going to say uh who the ideal reader is who's going to get the most benefit from it i would that be so it's it's interesting peter i i mean like you have to flat out say anybody in around 50 and beyond. But 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 and your 40s and your 50s. what we also know is that interventions 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 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 okay 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 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, I think that's true. I think that's absolutely true. I mean, you know, I cover everything, but like the stuff that you and Tony looked at in Lifespan or David Sinclair looks at in his work, you know, I did everything but the longevity science because there's a lot of people working on that stuff. Nobody's working on the stuff I wanted to do in our peak performance agent stuff, but not enough people are. And for those of you joining my moonshots and mindset podcast,

uh, uh, Steven is one of the most brilliant thinkers, uh, and, uh, extraordinary writers. And I hope that you'll pick up a copy of 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 and give it away to all my friends. So, uh,

Steven, 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. so there you have it we're not cross-generational but you know as my wise elder

I'm the one who's gray I'm grayer than you though yeah but my biological age is younger than you so we'll get there oh I see thank you so much for doing this thank you for joining me anytime I get to hang with you it's wonderful it is a beautiful thing alright everybody thank you for joining me. 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 Beth and you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.