Introduction: Coming up on this week’s episode of the Doctor’s Farmacy,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: 7% to 30%, and there are different studies giving different numbers of your potential. Lifespan is a function of your genetics. The vast majority, 70 to 90% is a function of the choices you make your lifestyle.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Welcome to the Doctor’s Farmacy podcast, a place for conversations that matter. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman, and today we have the privilege of talking to one of the leading thinkers and doers in the world, Dr. Peter Diamandis. If you care about learning the practical steps to increasing your health span and your lifespan, you’re going to love this podcast. Peter is a serial entrepreneur, futurist, technologist, New York Times bestselling author and the founder of over 25 companies. Fortune Magazine has named Peter one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders. He’s the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which has launched over $300 million of incentive competitions driving more than 3.5 billion in r and d, most recently launching the a hundred million Gigaton carbon XPRIZE to combat climate change. Peter’s Venture Fund, bold Capital Partners, is deploying $600 million into exponential technologies and health biotech. The amount this has written four New York Times bestsellers and his life’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to create hopeful, compelling, and an abundant future for humanity.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Now, if you’re a regular, listen, this podcast, one of my main interests is applying the latest science and technology in the field of longevity to not only optimize how long we live, but how vibrant and healthy we are as we age. And Peter and I explore the power of mindset for health and longevity. We dive into the concept of longevity, escape velocity, or how the science is advancing so fast that at some point soon we can escape the decline normally associated with getting older. We also explain why foundational health practices that optimizes your lifestyle are more important than ever before so we can be alive when longevity escape velocity is reached. We also bust the myth that how long we live is mostly dictated by our genes, and we dive into how to turn the latest science into actionable steps and habits that you can use now, the best strategies for what to eat, how to exercise, how to optimize sleep for longevity.
Dr. Mark Hyman: We also explore the most important diagnostic tests to track and measure your rate of aging and health, and how do you use personalized medicine to get ahead of the issues and diseases before they fully develop. We also spend some time talking about ozempic and I share my thoughts about the pitfalls and risks of this drug, and we explore the question of whether Ozempic is also a longevity medicine. You’ll hear about Peter’s personal longevity regimen and how the molecule rapamycin and various peptides and supplements in cutting edge technologies like therapeutic plasma exchange are all coming online. Now, Peter also tells us about his $101 million XPRIZE that he launched to revolutionize the way we approach human aging. Peter is literally the author of the Practical Playbook on Longevity and our conversation today, we’ll leave you with actionable and free tips to set yourself up to benefit from the leading research in the field of longevity as well as a look into the next generation of therapeutics. And now let’s dive into my conversation. Peter Diamandis, welcome back to the podcast. Peter, it’s great to have you and great to see you again looking younger than ever.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Thank you. Mark, is that a requirement? When you’re on a longevity podcast, we’re having a longevity conversation. You have to tell a person, look, you look amazing. Fantastic. What are you doing? You
Dr. Mark Hyman: Got to tell me your first calls. I know it was like three hours of makeup before. So for those of you just listening, you can’t see. But Peter looks beautiful. He’s got purple lipstick and red eyeshadow. It’s amazing. Peter, I’m so glad to have you back because you came out with a book called Life Force with Tony Robbins. It was just amazing, but it was 700 pages and not for the faint of heart. I read every word of it and I actually studied it in depth, which was a great book. But you came out with a new Reader’s Digest version called Longevity, your Practical Playbook on Sleep, diet, exercise and mindset Medications, and not dying from something stupid. So that’s a good idea, not dying from something stupid. And I think it’s beautiful because it’s like the news to use. It’s the nuggets of information that we all want to know.
Dr. Mark Hyman: What do we do? How do I do it? What’s important? What’s noise? What’s signal, and how do we figure out what we need to do to optimize our health? And human life expectancy is one of the most incredible breakthroughs in modern medicine. We’ve seen our life expectancy dramatically go up since the turn of the 19 hundreds. And unfortunately now it’s starting to go down. It’s starting to go down. We see a little pop up this year, I think because of the post covid recovery. But basically we’ve more than doubled the global average lifespan in the last a hundred years. But our healthy life years have not increased at the same rate. There’s a lot more sicker people at the end of their life. So their health span doesn’t equal their lifespan. And what’s happening is our world’s population is growing and our aging population is growing even more.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So people over 60 are expected to double from 12 to 22% between 2015 and 2050. So we got to find solutions to not only improve our lifespan, which is I guess important, but what’s more important is how do we improve our health span? How many years of life that we have that are healthy? And for most people, the last 20 years of their life is spent in poor health, which means let’s say you’re live to be 80, I’m 60 years old, you’ve got some chronic disease or another. So you’ve written this important manual and you’re talking about this health span revolution. So why does it matter? What is it and why now?
Dr. Peter Diamandis: So I think what I’m hoping to do is to impact people’s longevity mindset. I think you can will yourself to live and will yourself to die. I think your mindset is so fundamentally important. And my mission here is for people to realize we’re in the middle of a health span revolution. That the convergence of technologies like AI sensors, networks, gene therapies, epigenetic reprogramming, cellular medicines, all of these things are making and will continue to make a massive dent. There’s a topic we’ve about before, and hopefully folks have heard the term of longevity escape velocity that today for every year that you’re alive, if you’re reasonable, socioeconomic and reasonably taking care of yourself, science is the potential to extend your life for somewhere between a quarter to a third of a year. And there’s going to be a point in the future where for every year that you’re alive, science is extending your life for more than a year. And that idea is called longevity escapee velocity. When I interview my dear friend Ray Kurzweil, with whom I’d started Singularity University, it’s raise expectation is that we’re going to hit longevity escape velocity in just 10 to 12 years. Talking to George Church when I was
Dr. Mark Hyman: In, well, that means you can never die. The theoretical aspect of it is that you keep extending your life, and I’m not so sure about that.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Well, so I think the point is not immortality, but everything that is possible is being made available to you to maximize your health span. So one of the things that hit me when I was in medical school, God knows a few decades back, was just a few, you and I both, you actually became a real doctor. I had two companies going my fourth year in medical school, a space university and a rocket company. Not your typical internship anyway, but I remember learning that Bowhead whales lived 200 years and Greenland sharks glued 500 years. And you’ve heard me say this story a thousand times, and if they could live that long, why can’t we? It’s hardware, software. And so this is the decade that we’re making a dent in understanding human hardware and human software. And we are at the end of the day, a large functioning molecular machine or quantum chemistry at an atomic level, but we’re a large machine that can be repaired and can be upgraded.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: And these are the technologies that are coming our way. And if we do have fundamental breakthroughs in these areas, if you love life like you and I both do, wouldn’t you want to be around long enough to intercept these? You don’t want to be the last person before the new nanotech revolution comes around and says, oh my God, we can reverse all these things that aging and reset. So the idea from this book is, listen, we’re in the midst of a health span revolution. There’s more capital flowing in by 10 x over the last 10 years into longevity. There are more tools and technologies. The cost of genome reading, editing is plummeting. And so because those things are coming, you probably should keep yourself as healthy as you can to intercept these technologies. And there are a number of things Ray ksal talks about, a bridge to a bridge, bridge, one to getting to longevity. Escape velocity is doing certain things around sleep, diet, exercise, mindset, not dying from something stupid. Bridge. Two are technologies accessible to us today like stem cells and perhaps exogenous natural killer cells and other things. And stage three or bridge three is going to be those technologies that are a decade or two away. And so that’s what this book is about. I wanted to make it
Dr. Mark Hyman: Very, you want people to get to live long enough to get to that longevity gain velocity.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: It’s like, listen, do these things. I mean, I’ve read hundreds of books. At the end of the day I try and take notes, but there are certain things which are just fundamental and certain things that depend upon what your genetics are, where you were born, your other situations in life. And so I just wanted to make it super easy. My target was a hundred pages. It turned out to be 120 pages, but I think it’s a practical playbook. That was the goal.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. Yeah, it’s really great. And I think I want to get into the nitty gritty and meat of it. I think everybody knows that there’s some basics that we all have to follow and then we’re going to get into in a kind of rapid fire popcorn way, a lot of the cool things that people may or may not have heard about that are on the horizon that you’re using, optimize your own something. I’m actually using myself very similar. I was shocked at how similar our programs were. I was like, wow, we want space. Dude, I learned
Dr. Peter Diamandis: From you. I learned from the best.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I was like, wait a minute, okay,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’m paying attention.
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s so true. And one of the things that people don’t understand is how much of it is under our control? 90 plus percent I think is under our control.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Can we hit that one second? Because people say, well, my parents died early and so forth. When you look at the numbers and it’s somewhere between 7% to 30%, and there are different studies giving different numbers of your potential. Lifespan is a function of your genetics. The vast majority, 70 to 90% is a function of the choices you make your lifestyle, you do have functional control over this. You don’t have an excuse.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. Well, Peter, it was interesting this morning, I actually had a chance to review my own genetics, and I’ve done my whole genome sequencing, but that’s like 30, 20, 30,000 genes. It’s impossible to get your head around. And I did a subset of about 700 SNPs or variations in my genes, and it was with a company that’s doing an incredible job of actually mapping out the most common SNPs that are actionable. In other words, even if you have genetics that predispose things, for example, I discovered that I had this gene that predisposes to B-cell lymphoma, which my sister had, and it makes you much, much higher risk of getting this particular. But it also was so interesting to see how they looked at all the scientific literature and mapped out what are the interventions that affect this gene and change the gene expression. For example, maybe resveratrol affects this pathway and this gene expression.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Or I had another gene that regulated vitamin D, and I noticed a surprise when I was in my fifties. My bone density was low and I was a runner and I wasn’t lifting weights. I was doing yoga and very athletic, and I shouldn’t have had low bone density, particularly as a guy. And I found out I had this gene that affects osteoporosis and vitamin D receptors, and I was able to see, oh, I know I need to take a lot more vitamin D than the average person, so I figured that on my own, but my genes can give me a guide to how to even optimize my genes. So even though it may not be genetically predetermined, you might have control over it a predilection. And so you actually have control over it. And that’s even more interesting is that even if we have genes that are kind of problematic, we can modify the expression of those genes. So it’s super cool and we do it. Do you
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Remember which company that is by the way?
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, it was called telx, DNA. And it’s really driven through a functional medicine practitioner base because it’s very complicated. Most doctors out the patients are time for it, and you can segment the genes based on mental health, a, d, d, inflammation, nutrition, cardiovascular risk and so forth. So it’s really quite fascinating. So I was just looking at it myself and learning about it and seeing what’s always new on the horizon and applicable for my patients. And I was like, wow, this is a different whole different level of looking at the DNA because it wasn’t really just looking at the SNPs. It was actually telling you not only what they meant and what their risk factors were that were maybe you were predisposed to based on these genes, but actually what you could do to modify that gene expression. But the truth is that most of the things that were included were foods, I know I need to eat two ounces of pomegranate juice because it affects this one gene that puts me at risk for cardiovascular disease. I need to take more curcumin. It was really interesting to see how there’s a lot of data on these things.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: This is fantastic. And even though we’ve sequenced the human genome, we’re continuing to learn about your genome, everybody’s genome every single day as different relationships are discovered. And there’s going to be a time sometime in the next, I would say three years, I don’t think it’s much further than that, that your personal AI that knows all your single nucleotide polymorphisms, your SNPs, if you turn on the function, will be guiding you every minute of the day on what to eat, what to do based upon your current genetics, your blood chemistry, your objectives, and it becomes a super hyper personalized if you want that.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, and I think that’s right. And I think they hadn’t even applied AI to this model. I was like, wow, once you do that, you’re going to get a hierarchical set recommendations that you can implement that are actually doable, and then you can measure the results and see how you feel and what’s going on with your biology. But the basics of changing these gene expressions, which is our epigenetics, is really about our lifestyle. And that’s the foundation of the beginning of your book is what we eat, how we exercise, sleep optimization, and then we get into kind of a bunch of other stuff. So let’s start with just the basics of what are the do’s and don’ts for eating, and let’s start with that. We want to live on
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Time. This is like a lowly priest talking to the pope about what to eat. I’m
Dr. Mark Hyman: Not the Pope. I’m Jewish for God’s sake. Okay,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: For God’s sake. Okay, fine. I’m not sure I understand
Dr. Mark Hyman: The rabbi, the rabbi, what’s the highest rabbi out there?
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Listen and tell me where I’m off. But I wanted people to have, it’s 1, 2, 3, 2 many. At the end of the day, if you need to memorize, oh my God, this, that, and the other thing, what are the fundamentals? And the most important fundamental is sugar is a poison, poison, poison. We never evolved to eat as much sugar. And so I really have eliminated not everything but 95, 90 9% of sugar for my diet. I will have a small piece of dark chocolate. If I eat something, I’m going to take the moment in time to actually enjoy it. And I’m not stuffing my face. It’s whole plants as you’ve said so many times. One of the things I wrote about in there that I love is the order in which you eat your food
Dr. Mark Hyman: Can matter. Exactly.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I mean, so you go out to the restaurant and they bring you a basket of bread and wine and it’s like, oh my God, it’s the worst thing they could possibly do for you. We’ll try to kill you. So ask them to bring it back when the main course comes instead of eating it right then and there and then,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, they know that it makes you hungrier and eat more. So they order way more food and dessert to make the request.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: You have to make the request. And I’m at a party and everybody serves dessert and they put the plate in front of you. I have gotten so good at just catching and saying, no, stop. Go away. If it’s sitting in front of me, my willpower will a road going to, if it’s not there, then I’m good. But going back to the order of the food on your plate, you’re going to have veggies, protein and carbs, likely eat your vegetables first, your fiber first. It slows down, digestion your protein next, and then eat your carbs last and your absorption of nutrients and your desire to eat the carbs, everything improves or your lack of desire to eat the carbs. Everything improves when you eat in that order. And then there’s always that glass of water you drink before you consume your meal.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So water, we talked about timing and order of food, cutting out sugar, eating more vegetables and plant food,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Basic stuffs.
Dr. Mark Hyman: What about protein and fat?
Dr. Peter Diamandis: So this is a conversation I want to ask with you. So I’m on a mission to add, right? And so I am on a high protein diet and I’m targeting weigh 150 pounds. I’m targeting 150 grams a day. And I looked at the studies on intermittent fasting and it didn’t look that intermittent fasting actually made a substantial difference other than reducing your total caloric intake. And so getting enough protein in my diet when I’m eating just between one o’clock and six o’clock was difficult. So I cut out my intermittent fasting and increased by protein intake. What are your thoughts on that
Dr. Mark Hyman: And how do you feel and what’s your body? I feel
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Great. I feel great and more muscle. I’ve added five, six pounds of muscle. I’m trying to get to 10 pushing. I’m increasing my workouts from three a week to five a week. My creatine,
Dr. Mark Hyman: I mean the proof is in the pudding. You feel better, you have more muscle. Your body, I always say that your body’s the smartest doctor in the room. So you could have an ideological view that you should be a vegan or you should eat tons of meat or you should whatever. You have to try it out and see what happens because your body’s going to tell you if you feel better, if you look better, if you’re stronger, if you’re building more muscle, if your biomarkers are better, then that’s your answer. I always say, don’t let your ideology run over your biology.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: It’s easy. I love that. That’s
Dr. Mark Hyman: Great. And we’re all different. And some people, I mean I know if I don’t eat enough carbs like sweet potatoes and things like that, I’ll just drop too much weight. And so I don’t want to do that and I need to eat more fat and more protein. So I think it’s really about listening your body. But conceptually, I think as we age, you need more protein to overcome what we call anabolic resistance, which means it’s harder to build muscle as you get older. So you need more workouts, more protein, and you probably need more high quality protein, mainly animal or whey protein. And you need probably something like creatine to help boost it. And you need to exercise usually within an hour or two, take a protein load about 40 to 50 grams an hour or two after your workout. So that’s a great formula.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And I notice when I’m on the road and I can’t do that, I lose muscle when I’m at home and I’m doing the same workouts when I do that, I gain muscle. So it’s pretty reliably there. And I think people are confused about the autophagy. It was like, well, you should inhibit mTOR. And we’ll talk about some of the things about that in a bit. But I think that that’s kind of a big meme in the longevity space, which is you want to inhibit mTOR to increase autophagy and self-cleaning, the way your body accelerates self-cleaning and repair, which is great for longevity, but it also has a dark side, which if you’re too long and too much, you lose muscle. So
Dr. Peter Diamandis: By the way, I don’t know if you recognize this packaging, it’s
Dr. Mark Hyman: Prolong.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’m on day two at my fast. I do a couple times a year.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, that’s great. Okay, so that’s food. What about exercise? We just talked about your muscle mass and when it comes to longevity, I think muscle mass is the unsung hero. It
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Is the numbers, if you’re over 60, the number one thing you can do to maximize your longevity, you can reduce your chance of cancer by threefold. Your overall chance of mortality by twofold is exercise. Get in a couple, at least a couple of days a week of resistant exercise for half an hour if nothing else. For me, I belong to three different gyms. Got there is no excuse, there is zero excuse. You’ve got two different trainers and it’s like I just have everybody just, I pay for all of this. So I don’t give myself the excuses for not working out. And when I’m on the road, I actually have Yani on my team who travels with me. He’s a young PhD and supports me across everything I do. It’s like I’m like, we’re going to the gym at 6:00 AM. He goes, no, I got to get some sleep. I said, no, we’re going to the gym at 6:00 AM get sleep early. And so it’s a priority. I think I have never had exercise this much of a priority in my life than I do at 62 years old. And I feel great. I’ve got two 12-year-old twin boys and they are exercise for me as well. So that’s joyful.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I think that’s important. I think I always say you can drive a Toyota Camry off the lot and drive it for a hundred thousand miles and never touch it. But if you’ve got a 1959 model, what do you 1961 model
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I
Dr. Mark Hyman: 60, 61. Yeah, I’m a 59 model. I mean, you can’t just drive it around and not take care of it and change the oil more and get it tuned up more and make sure everything’s lined up more. And so it just takes a little more effort as you get older. And I think it’s not impossible, but it requires much more focus and
Dr. Peter Diamandis: You have to want it. You have to love it. You have to have a purpose for it. And for me, it’s interesting. People say, well, how old do you want to live? My friend Dan Sullivan wants 156. When I was in medical school, I learned that certain species of sea life could live 700 years. So I set a ridiculous number of 700 years. By the way, if you can make it an extra 30 years from now, I think you’re going to intercept so many breakthroughs that bias a century if you want it, what my mission is to arrive at that point of longevity, escape velocity and great health whenever that is.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I think that’s true. And it’s also for me, the definition of health is really simple. It’s being able to get up in the morning and do whatever it’s that I want to do. If I’m visiting my daughter and she lives in Salt Lake City and she says, dad, I want to go on a nine mile hike up to 9,000 feet elevation, can we go? I’m like, sure. And we ran up the hill, I got all the way up and it was actually funny. I actually made fine. And then I realized that I had the time zones wrong and I thought I had a call and there was no service. So I ran down the mountain, which at 64, there’s a lot of stability issues and a lot of risk of falls. And if you don’t maintain your stability as well as your strength and flexibility and cardio, and I was able to just go down like a mountain goat. And it’s not because I’m super human, it’s because I’ve been training for doing the thing. I don’t do my band exercise to do my band exercise. I like to listen to music, listen to podcasts. I’ve gotten to like it, but it’s not like my fun thing to do. I want to play tennis. I want to hike up to the Himalayas. I want to go riding across the Mongolia on a horse. I want to do whatever I want to do and not stop. And I do.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: And by the way, the number one thing for you and I to be concerned about more so than someone who’s in their twenties or even early thirties is injury, right? Injury is the biggest issue. Fall break your pelvis or hip end up in the hospital and with a pneumonia and you’re screwed.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Immortality for someone breaking their hip in a year is 50%. So if you break your hip, you’re 50% likely to die in that year after, which is staggering. It’s worse than getting terminal cancer for
Dr. Peter Diamandis: People over 60. I think the number is. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So got to exercise. I love your routine and you go through exactly what you do in the book. That’s really
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Great. One other thing is your aerobic exercise, right? So zone two training, and I talk about in this, what you want to do is you want to stimulate mitochondrial growth and you want to stimulate it. And there’s something called a zone two training where your heart rate is at a particular band. For me it’s at about 110 to A1 15. I’ll show you how to calculate that. And so I’ve got a stationary bike, a technic gym bike, and there’s absolutely no excuse to take a board meeting or a phone call sitting on your butt. I’m feeling guilty sitting down. I’m doing this with you right
Dr. Mark Hyman: Now. Now, well, the podcast would look funny if we were both bouncing up this,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’d be somewhat out of breath, but I remember tweeting out sitting this thing, you smoking and it really is. I mean, we sit in front of these damn zoom conversations for most of the day and it’s abusive to your body.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So yeah, for sure. Yeah, I just wanted a beautiful hour and a half walk up the mountain this morning and maybe I got a little over zone too, but just keep moving or you, I met this guy who was 95 once Peter, and he was bouncing around like a spry 50-year-old. He had a 20-year-old younger girlfriend. And I’m like, what’s your deal? And he was eating bagels and locks at this thing. I’m like, what’s your story? He’s like, well, whatever I did yesterday, I do today. If I played single tennis yesterday, I do it today. I mean, if you ride your bike 20 miles every day, you’re going to keep being able to ride your bike 20 miles every day as long as you live. So just don’t stop. So now the other thing that’s really important, Peter, you talk about and I think is one of the unappreciated and most important aspects of health is sleep. And a lot of people have sleep issues. There’s 70 million people with sleep issues in America. There’s so many people struggle with falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up early, getting up the middle of the night. What’s your personal story about your transformation of your sleep and your routine?
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Yeah, I love this. So I am lucky to be a reasonably good sleeper. I just came back from Saudi Arabia, so I was 12 time zones away. And so I’m in the middle of shifting myself back. I was up at three 30 this morning, but I went to sleep at eight 30 last night. So it wasn’t too bad. The body needs eight hours of sleep at minimum seven hours of sleep. One of the things I tell people is when you’re sleeping, you’re not reproducing, you’re not hunting for food, you’re not protecting yourself, you’re very vulnerable. If evolution could have done away with that extra hour of sleep, it would have. So the fact that it hasn’t means you need it. And so what do you do? There are certain, I go through the basics here. I’ll tell you the most important things. Number one, it’s going to sleep at the same time every night. It’s consistency of going to bed because typically your body wakes you up at the same time. And so my body, I’m up and awake at five 30 or 6:00 AM in that band, and if I go to sleep at nine 30, I’m good. If I happen to go to sleep at 11 o’clock at night, I’m screwed.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I can control my go to sleep time. The other things are use a Manta mask. I love this mask. It has foam around the eyes and it’s a beautiful mask. It seals it out. I set the temperature in my room to 63 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty damn cold. I use an eight sleep. There’s lots of different cooling mattresses. And then at the end of the day, I also use a mouth guard, which is a mandibular adjustment device. It moves my mandible out a little bit and keeps me from snoring and keeps my open airway and keeps me as a nose breather versus mouth breather.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And you do some other things. You block the light at night, you measure your sleep, you don’t eat before bed, you don’t have caffeine in the afternoon. These are just basic sleep hygiene principles, right?
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Yeah, it is sleep hygiene. I don’t eat two hours before. I’m not drinking water an hour before I am. I’ve given up most all alcohol, maybe a glass of wine every couple of weeks. How about you?
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, well it’s interesting. I wear this aura ring and I track my sleep and I’m like, damn, I drank that wine and my sleep was messed up. My heart rate didn’t go down, my heart plummeted. I’m going to look like I was in some severe stress response. And it’s interesting to get that feedback you wouldn’t have known otherwise. So I really have minimized it. Maybe I’ll have a drink a month if I’m out or a shot of tequila, but that’s about it.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: That’s exactly, exactly the same. And on the sleep, by the way, I use my AAA ring. It doesn’t do anything to get me to sleep or to give me better sleep, but it makes me aware. So if I am deciding whether or not to have something to drink or deciding if I’m going to grab that snack, I am thinking to myself, it’s going to screw with your sleep tonight and you’re going to see it on your data in the morning. So it’s just what you don’t measure, you don’t actually impact. So we measure it that way. I’m curious. My heart rate when I’m sleeping is like 38, 39. It drops down really, really low.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I mean that is low. I mean, what’s your resting heart rate during the day?
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Probably 55.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, that’s good. I mean that’s good. I mean, if your heart rate was 70 and dropped at 30, I would worry about some kind of heart block or something like that. But you probably shouldn’t have an eek G, but I’m sure it’s fine.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’ve had so many from Fountain. Yeah, I think cardiovascular, I’m okay. But it was interesting. It was like, okay, don’t go any lower. A certain number of heartbeats in your life. I’m going to keep
Dr. Mark Hyman: Them. Although, although I did a podcast with Deepak Chopper yesterday and he was basically the ancient Hindus and the yogis who live to be like they say 180 or whatever, he said they measure their life not in years, but in heartbeats and breath. So you kind of have to go slow the idea. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds good. Alright, so one of the things that you’re involved in is, and by the way, there’s so much more we’re going to talk about in a minute, but I want to touch base on not dying of something stupid because that’s basically the subtitle of your book and what do you mean by that? And I think you’re referring to basically tracking your biomarkers and your biology and your imaging tests, so where you’re at and that you don’t die of something that’s totally preventable. And we do. I mean, one of the things that shocked me was reading. If you’re 35 and you smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, your risk of getting cancer is far lower than if you’re a 7-year-old and you don’t smoke at all, right? Just age is one of the biggest risks. And same thing with heart attacks. And
Dr. Peter Diamandis: So here’s how I think about not texting something stupid. First of all, wear your seatbelt in the car. Don’t text while you’re driving. Wear a helmet while you’re going skiing. Those are the basics. But here’s the other part, and it really bothers me how few people understand this. Your body is amazing at hiding disease. You don’t feel anything until you have a stage three or stage four cancer. 70% of heart attacks have no precedent, no shortness of breath, nothing on imaging. It’s a soft plaque that uls and kills you. The
Dr. Mark Hyman: First symptom of heart attacks for 50% of people is sudden death.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: And it’s like, that sucks.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: So you don’t have Parkinsonian tremor until 70% of the substantial nigra neurons are gone. So again, your body’s really great at hiding any symptoms of something wrong going on. And so when you ask people, are you in good health? Is there anything you need to worry about? Most people say, yeah, I’m fine. But you don’t actually know until you look. And then people say, well, I don’t want to know. It’s like, of course you want to know. I mean, you’re going to know. Do you want to know when it’s too late to do something? All you wanted to know when you can do something about it. Peter,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Before you go to the next thing, I just want to emphasize something, is what you’re saying is really important in medicine. We are trained in medical school to not look until something’s wrong except for a very few things like screening for cholesterol, screening for breast cancer, mammograms, colonoscopy, pap test, but very few things. And we’re taught we don’t want to over test. We don’t want to over-diagnose, we’re going to pick up things that are going to be red herrings. It’s bad medicine. And you only want to do a test when you want to confirm a diagnosis, which means that you’re not picking stuff up until very late. Like you said, it’s like a glass you’re filling up that doesn’t spill over until the very end. And by the way though, you’re filling it up the whole way. And that’s really what’s happening in medicine. And so there’s a chance really now with our technologies and what you’ve developed with Fountain life to really dig deep and to look at your body in a way that we’ve never
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Heard
Dr. Mark Hyman: Before and not be that. It just reminds me of this one patient who said, Dr. Hyman, I want to get a check. I’m like, okay. And we checked his blood sugar was like 110. I’m like, wow, this is if you talked to your doctor about it. He is like, well, yeah, but he says, come back when it’s higher and I’ll give you some medication. So I think how is found life different than that?
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Listen, at the end of the day, it is possible to answer two questions. Is there anything going on inside your body that you need to know about it? And the second question is question, what are you likely to come down with? What’s likely to cause you medical problems down the line? And what can you do to slow it down or prevent it? And that’s fundamentally the diagnostic side of fountain life. And then there’s the therapeutic side. So here’s what happens. You come through Fountain Life. We have centers in New York, Orlando, Naples, Dallas, Texas. We’re opening up in LA next year we have 40 centers that were planned around the world. And you come in for a day, typically an overnight stay if you can do it in a day, but we recommend overnight and we’re going to digitize you. We’re going to do a full body, MRIA brain, MRI, brain vasculature, brain blood flow, a coronary CT with an AI overlay, not looking for calcified plaque, but soft plaque.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: If it’s calcified and it’s in the walls of the artery and it’s not blocking your coronaries, you’re fine. If it’s soft plaque, that can just break off in AULs, right? If it’s calcified, it’s like cemented there in place. It’s the soft plaque in the walls. It can uls that can block a coronary artery and then you’re dead. We do dexascan, we do your full genomics, your metabolomics, your microbiome, retinal scans, strength and balance, all of those things, 150 gigabytes of data. It’s the most exhaustive upload we provided. All that data gets uploaded, there’s AI overlays on everything, and then there is a convergence of the data to provide a return and a review of those results. Understand, again, those two questions. What’s going on inside your body that you need to know about and what’s likely to happen? So here’s the data of the first 5,000 members going through it.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: 2% of people have a cancer they don’t know about, which is blows me away. Two and a half percent have an aneurysm they don’t know about. And then 14.4% have either cardiovascular neurodegenerative or metabolic disease or the aneurysm or cancer. And so that’s a significant number of people. And I’ve had in the last month, two friends who’ve gone through Fountain Life and we’ve discovered and we’ve saved their lives. And then we’ve had hundreds of people. One of my friends who we’re doing business with, he’s a massive developer hotel developer, and he was coming through because we’re starting to work together. We discovered two, not one, two aneurysms in his head that were just paper thin. He was in surgery a few days later and now he’s out. The doctor said, you caught it just in time. And these were significant aneurysms. Another friend of mine, 50% occlusions in his LAD and his coronary.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: So we’ve saved hundreds of lives, and I think at the end of the day, if you’re able to afford this, and it’s not cheap, we have a 12 K offering, a 20 K offering it. It is the cheapest money you will spend. And it’s a chance for you to actually feel confidence like I’m actually okay. So every year I go through this, I go through an upload every single, it’s a lifelong long life membership, so to speak. And at the end of the day, I am anxious until I go through my upload and then I feel relief and I’ll find something someday, but I’m going to find it at the very beginning. When’s the best time to catch a fire at the start at Ignition? When’s the best time to find cancer at stage one? So that’s the, yeah. And
Dr. Mark Hyman: You also do liquid biopsies too, not just the imaging, right? We
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Do liquid biopsies. We do 120 blood biomarkers. We do, it is the most exhaust. I mean, Dr. Helen Messier, she like you, is a functional medicine doctor. I
Dr. Mark Hyman: Recommending her to you guys.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I know you did, and thank you. I knew her from years back from HLI, but she’s now our chief medical and chief scientific officer, and she’s amazing. And it’s the most exhaustive functional medicine upload possible. And that’s half the other half of the business is therapeutics. It’s like you’re on our medical advisory board, thank you. Along with a number of other incredible individuals. And our mission is what is a therapeutic out there that is safe enough but has outsized potential gains? And then we make that available to our members. So like therapeutic plasma exchange, we can talk about that or access to rapamycin or natural killer cells or stem cells. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, let’s talk about that. I think that’s the other thing you talked about in your guide, which is really great. So function health, if you can’t afford it, what do you do? Is there a way to get around it or,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: So first of all, you can go to fountain life.com/peter and you can get the information about it. We will have a lower end digital membership, but the imaging is really important. And we have stood up an insurance company, a health benefits company on the insurance side where self-insured companies can buy this for their employees. And what happens is those employees are getting a series of blood tests and then if the blood test gets to a particular point and triggers the need for a CT or an MRI, so that it’s escalating level of testing. But the problem is most health insurance pays you after you’re sick, after you’ve had the problem. And that’s the problem. It’s not preventative at all. It is basically, I hate this. Fire insurance pays you after house burns down. Life insurance pays your next tokin after you’re dead. Health insurance pays you after you’re sick,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Right? It’s crazy. So some of these other technologies and techniques are things that are kind of on the margin, but that are interesting and that you’re doing that you outline in your wonderful manual. And there are things that are around managing the risk factors, whether it’s prescription medications for managing cholesterol, whether it’s off-label uses of medications and things like rapamycin and peptides. Can you walk us through what you’re doing? And remember, everybody list is personalized for Peter. This is Peter’s map based on Peter’s biology, his tests, his own things. But there are some things that are,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I put that as a disclosure in the book and also in my PDF that everybody can download for free at dm addis.com/longevity. It’s a 30 page summary of the book is a summary of books out there. The PDF is a summary of the book itself. So it’s a summary of a summary which is available for free for anybody. You need to have the data. You can read all you want. If you’ve got a physician, go over it with them. I’m much more of an experimentalist. Tony Robbins, who’s a co-founder of Fountain along with me, same thing. And in Lifeforce, we talk about a lot of the experimental elements we’re doing. So this is what’s going on right now. We’ve just stood up therapeutic plasma exchange at Fountain, and this is, you’re familiar, you’ve done it
Dr. Mark Hyman: Many times
Dr. Peter Diamandis: And it’s basically getting an oil change for your body, right? It’s basically in one arm come as a intravenous pulling blood out. It goes through basically a separation filtration system. It separates out your red blood cells, your white blood cells, and then the remainder, the plasma, which is mostly albumin or saline, gets thrown away and replaced with fresh oil, fresh albumin and saline mixed backing with your cells and put it back in your body and you accumulate waste products in your bloodstream. And this is a mechanism for getting rid of that. One of the things that we’re standing up under an F-D-A-I-N-D protocol, which I’m excited about, it’s it’s not ready yet. It’ll be available in the first quarter. We’re doing it with cellularity.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: The first thing we do is we give the individual a deep tissue massage and that deep tissue massage liberates stem cells triples number of stem cells in the peripheral blood system. So we then do the TPE, the therapeutic plasma exchange, and we separate out the stem cells for banking purposes. And then when we give you back your albumin and saline, we are going to be introducing umbilical cord plasma. So we’ve all heard about Youngblood. This is the youngest possible growth. Turns out cellularity is the largest storage facility for placentas on the planet, both cord blood and also cell products and tissue products from placenta. And it’s got a large supply of umbilical cord blood. So this will be understudy and it’s for those people who want to be part of experimental protocols. And there are people out there who want it like me, maybe you
Dr. Mark Hyman: Exactly. Yeah, I’ve done it. I think it’s going to come down in price like everything else. But there’s other things you can do that are really helpful that you’re doing, that you’re doing may be cheaper. For example, I’d love to know your thoughts on rapamycin and the peptides you’re using because you talk about those as part of your regimen.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’m on a rapamycin protocol, probably the same. It’s a function of your body weight. For me, it’s six milligrams once a week, and it’s basically three months on and a month off. Are you on rapamycin now?
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, I’ve started it based on the literature and looking at it, I think it’s one of the most promising molecules out there from a pharmaceutical perspective. And it’s basically derived from rapanui from the dirt. And it was a molecule they found in there that was on Easter Island. It turned out to have a lot of benefits in moduling, not only immunity, but also mTOR, which is one of the key regulators of autophagy. So it’s sort of a way of mimicking fasting. So instead of fasting, you can take mTOR and it seems to have effect, which is really remarkable because even at later dates in your life when you started, it seemed to have an effect like when
Dr. Peter Diamandis: You sixties.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. If you don’t start exercising until you’re 60, it’s probably not a great thing. But if you start this even when you’re 60, it actually can work in even extend life in animal models. So there’s not a human trials yet, but it’s something that’s used as an FDA approved drug for other indications.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: I agree with you that it’s one of the most promising and most meaningful longevity meds out there. I mean, a lot of stuff is hearsay, but this has the strongest body evidence, and there are studies that have either been funded or will soon be funded to actually demonstrate the efficacy in humans.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, that’s what I’m excited about. So before that, we’re kind of Guinea pigs, but we’re very cute Guinea pigs.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Yeah, I mean, one of the things I’m excited, but that fountain is doing is it’s got a massive amount of data. So we know every single member who’s on rapamycin, and we’re uploading every member every year. So we have a vast amount of data on these individuals. So we’re effectively doing large scale studies with the member’s permission and we’ll publish results as we get them.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So I think tracking the data is important. That’s one of the things I love about Fountain Life is that you have rigorous science behind it. You’re looking at not just doing stuff but tracking the outcomes on your patients, which matters. And I think in a way, this is how we learn. Yes, it’s very expensive and it’s not available to everyone, but it’s giving us insights into what will be effective
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Most. And the prices will come down. The
Dr. Mark Hyman: Prices will come down.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: That’s the case in technology stuff is when in the beginning when it doesn’t work perfectly, it’s expensive. And then as it starts to work better and better, the price comes down and becomes available to everybody.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Like a full body MRI would’ve been 10, $20,000 years ago. Now it’s 2,500. It’s probably coming down to three 400. Our whole genome sequence you could have done for, was it a hundred million
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Million or something when the US government did it for 3 billion? Craig Venture did it for a hundred million, and it’s been dropping at five times. Moore’s Law, and depending on who you talk to, it’s 200 to $500,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Which
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Is crazy. Seven hours.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. Anyway, so 500 bucks from 3 billion, that’s pretty good. So I think we’ll get there for everybody, but this is how medicine and science works. What about cognitive enhancement? You’re talking about nootropics and modafinil cardio of regimen. Talk to me about that. I most people know about these things
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Was going to ask you about that as well. So
Dr. Mark Hyman: Listen, am I interviewing you? Are you interviewing me?
Dr. Peter Diamandis: But listen, so it’s interesting, right? I think about this cognitive, at the end of the day, people want a few things. They want to be sharp, they want to move well, they want to look good and cognitive enhancement. So it’s interesting, a study done years ago looked at hundreds of molecules to determine what actually increased college students’ performance on exams. And they found two molecules in particular. I know you know what they are. It was sugar, glucose and caffeine,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Caffeine, sugar.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Basically Coca-Cola, no dose. Anyway, for me, the one particular drug I will use, especially if I’m hopping off a jet and need to go on stage and be sharp, is modafinil. And you should look it up. It has had zero side effects for me, and I’ve spoken to a slew of neurologists on it, and it’ll list a number of potential downsides. But it is, when I use provigil or modafinil, I feel like all of a sudden if I had four cylinders firing, all of a sudden it’s eight cylinders firing. It’s the closest thing to, what was that movie? You took a pill and all of a sudden your intelligence increased multifold.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I know. I want that pill. Yeah, so you’re right. I think the compounds out there like drugs, that means people take Adderall or speed or other things. Cocaine. I
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Don’t like Adderall for the other side effects. And modafinil was actually developed for fighter pilots to be awake for long periods of time. If you use it, you don’t want to take alcohol along with it,
Dr. Mark Hyman: And you probably don’t want to take it late in the day. So it can be very effective. But there are other substances that are nootropic, which basically means enhancing cognitive performance, right? Neuro means brain and TRPA means growth. So there are things like lions, Maine, and even things like fish oil or choline or vitamin D, other compounds that you can actually take as supplements. It can be quite effective. I do them all. Yeah, I think they’re important.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: That’s interesting, right? Because a lot of these drugs, these medicine supplements we take, we’re taking them out of faith because some study said something. But I’ll tell you the question is do you have a visceral benefit? Do you actually feel so caffeine? You’ll feel a visceral nicotine is a neurotropic as well, for sure. Not one I want to engage in, but it truly is.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, people are taking nicotine things in their cheek or their nicotine sprays only from smoking. So I had a friend who gave me that once. I was like, wow, little much for me, a little much for me. What about your peptide regimen? Because peptides are things that people don’t understand, but they’re essentially these small mini proteins that are used to regulate information signaling through the body, and they’re regulating almost everything. There’s thousands and thousands of them. Not exactly like hormones, but they’re kind of the same concept. They’re little tiny proteins that are messenger molecules that regulate every biological function. And they’ve gotten an increasing use over the last
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Five years, an increasing FDA scrutiny at the same time.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Although FDA tends to want to shut down anything that works, it’s not a drug. Like ozempic is a peptide and they’re like, oh my god, Ozempic, what a gravy train. Let’s lock this all stuff up so nobody else can use it and charge 10 times what it actually costs.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Let me ask you, before we jump into the peptides I have in my longevity practices, let’s talk about GLP one drugs and ozempic, because the evidence is coming out that it looks like it is also a longevity medicine
Dr. Mark Hyman: Really. Well, what are you learning about that? I haven’t seen that. I’ve seen a lot of other things that concern me a lot, but I’d love to hear your perspective.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Just I guess the, it’s triggering reduced appetite and reduced caloric intake, which over, it’s interesting, when you look at what extends life in humans, there are a few things you can become a eunuch,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Not happening,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Not happening. You can minimize your caloric intake down to a bare minimum, not happening like 1200 calories per day
Dr. Mark Hyman: Next.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: And then you could exercise, you can eat whole plants, you can get rid of sugar and all those other things, right? I’m down. And so caloric reduction is one of the things that causes enhanced health span. You may not enjoy it, those of us who enjoy enjoyable meal. So I think ozempic having a longevity impact, increased health impact because of its caloric, its reduction. People just don’t eat because they get nauseous.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, I mean I think that’s interesting. I don’t think it works mechanistically like rapamycin, which inhibits mTOR, which induces the same phenomenon of caloric restriction. In other words, mTOR is shut down when you’re starving and you can mimic starvation by taking this drug rapamycin. And if you take it properly, and I think the way it’s being studied, it’s going to be very effective. It’s very different than say, taking a drug that makes you nauseous and not want to eat and lowering your appetite. So there was a great study, Peter, where they took people who were obese and they were very obese and diabetic, and one group got a gastric bypass. And the other group, the control group, got the same diet that people who had a gastric bypass had to eat after they had a bypass. There was no difference in the, oh my god,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Exactly
Dr. Mark Hyman: The same result.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: And I had a friend of mine die during a gastric bypass. It’s a dangerous surgery, especially when you’re morbidly obese.
Dr. Mark Hyman: But the point of that is it’s not the surgery, it wasn’t the drug. I think it’s just not eating the bad food. Now, I do think that I’m concerned about ozempic for other reasons. One, it seems to have a dramatic increase in pancreatitis in small bowel obstruction and things that are quite serious. So normally when we see an increase in a phenomenon in medicine, we said, oh my God, eating processed meat increases your risk of colon cancer by 20%. That means your risk goes up from five to 6% by 20% a relative increase.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: And they use marketing lingo, right?
Dr. Mark Hyman: Okay. But we said that’s a big result. But what we’re seeing with Ozempic is not a 20%, but like a 900% increase in pancreatitis, like a 450% increase in small bowel obstruction. And the longer you take it, the worse it is. So I think there’s some challenges also with muscle loss and weight, muscle muscle
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Wasting. I agree. We’ve seen at Fountain those on ozempic, we’ve seen a reduction in significant, the weight loss comes more from muscle than other parts, which is a problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And there maybe we to mitigate that by rigorous strength training and lots of protein, but I don’t think it’s a easy fix. And I literally, I just had a patient email the other day said, I just lost 200 pounds following your program. You don’t need do ozempic. Now, there’s other issues with brain regulation, and I think I’m working on a whole series of articles around how our brain has been hijacked by food and have the addicted properties of food. So that’s another conversation by
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Can we put warning labels on the side of most consumer foods? I mean, I’m working
Dr. Mark Hyman: On it, Peter, nonprofit. I’m working on,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Oh my God. I mean, it’s like the crap that kids eat and that’s passed off as nutritionist, nutritional food. I mean, cereals. It’s criminal. It is fundamentally criminal.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, it is. When you go to Europe, you got the cigarette packs and it says, this will kill. You can barely see the brand on it. Literally, this will kill you, but it should be like that other stuff we’re eating
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Here on Cheerios or the Apple jacks or whatever. It’s sugar and sugar on the peptides. I’ll just mention real quick, a peptide I love is in the skin cream I use, it’s called One Skin. It’s a 10 amino acid peptide that’s a lytic, so it’s killing dead cells in your skin. And then others, I list them in detail. CGC 1295, which is for Muscle and BPC 1 57 for reduced inflammation, so forth. I won’t go into it. It’s in, again, if you go to d addis.com/longevity, you get a free download, 30 pages of all of this. Let me mention for your viewing audience, if I could, something that I’m very proud of that we did last week. And I was in Riyadh with a group of longevity scientists announcing the largest prize ever in human history. And so this is called XPRIZE Health Span. It’s $101 million prize, and it’s actually, I raised 141 million. I’m a significant contributor to this. It’s my largest contribution I’ve ever made. 40 million came from Evolution, which is now a foundation in Riyadh in Boston. It’s the largest funder of age and health related research on the planet. And then a quarter of the prize came from Chip Wilson, the founder. Lululemon.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Oh yeah, I know
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Chip. Yeah. He has a muscular dystrophy called FSHD. And in addition to the 101 million, we put a $10 million bonus prize on FSHD. So to win this prize, all you have to do is reverse functional loss in muscle immune and cognition by a minimum of 10 years, a goal of 20 years. So this is a request for teams around the world to run massively parallel experiments. So far, after one week, we have 80 teams registered. I think we’ll get to north of 500 teams around the world in this competition. And we’re going to be, teams have to recruit their own subjects. There’ll probably be cohort sizes of 50 to 200 people when they’re ready. If they’re a serious team, we send our judges there to measure that cohort. We measure their muscular strength, their cognitive ability, their immune function functionally. In other words, I don’t care what your clock says, I care how functionally can you climb those stairs.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Can you remember these numbers? Can you mount an immune reaction to a influenza vaccine? And you get to treat that subject group for up to a year. You can treat them for a day, six months or up to a year. And at the end of that, we’re going to measure function again. And did we bring you back in time? At least 10 years? My goal is 20 or more years, and competition’s going to run for seven years. And so if you want more information, anybody listening wants to put a team together, if you go to xprize.org/, it’s X-P-R-I-Z-E, do org slash and you can register for a team. I’ve had friends of mine like, oh my God, this is amazing. I’m going to register. I’m excited to see what comes out of this competition.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I mean, that’s so important, Peter, because what I want to point out about this that’s so unique is that most of medicine and most of medical science has been focused on the study of diseases, not on the study of health. And it’s a fundamental frame shift that’s going to change everything. If we can really reframe our conception of the body from focusing on just diseases and their origins and their treatments to understanding the biology of health and the laws of nature that govern the biology of health, it’s going to revolutionize everything in medicine. And I think it’s just one of those cataclysmic events. If we can actually do what you’re saying we can do, and I believe it’s going to happen, I think it’s going to change everybody’s mindset. And for functional medicine and what I do, it’s essentially what that is. It’s a science of health, of understanding how to study health, create health, understand deviations from health. It’s not about treating diseases. I never treat disease. I look at what’s going on in the body and where’s out of balance and then tweak it and tune it up. I literally just did a podcast or interview with a guy who’s going to be skiing solo to break the world record to go from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole, carrying a 500 pound sled by himself unsupported. Now, we did testing. He’s 39 years old. He’s incredibly fed. He’s already climbed every
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Major peak. I thought he’s 95 years old. No,
Dr. Mark Hyman: No. He’s climbed every peak on every continent. At the highest peak, he’s rode his boat across the Drake passage, 10 Antarctica. He’s crazy. And I’m like, this guy’s going to be healthy. I’m not going to find a single thing. But I found he had a number of things were really fascinating and significant that nobody really knew that were not diseases, but he had methylation issues, so he wasn’t able to properly detoxify and he wasn’t able to, when he put his body under stress into a thousand mile bike ride, his liver conked out. His B vitamins were low, his vitamin D was low, his iron was low. And I’m like, wow, this is really interesting. So he had a whole bunch of different things that weren’t diseases, but they were just things that weren’t optimally tuned. And so I think by giving him a program to optimize his health, which is really what you’re talking about with this XPRIZE and the moonshot for the health span, is really getting people to think about this problem, to look at this problem, to solve this problem, which has never really been done before. No, I mean, it’s a joke. We have the National Institute of Health. It’s not, it’s the National Institutes of Diseases. Really, it’s not anything to do with health. Yeah,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: You treat a disease at a time, you treat an organ at a time. And the origin of this competition is a few different things. Conversations with Aubrey de Gray and with Sergey Young and George Church, and I’ve spoken to you about this and gotten your advice on this competition over the last four plus years. At the end of the day, our hope is that what an individual develops here is something, a therapeutic that actually targets fundamentals of aging versus just one particular tissue type. And if that’s true, if the therapeutic actually is targeting aging, then not only will you improve cognition, muscle and immune, you’ll improve every organ, every tissue in the body. And that’s the objective here. At the end of the day, can we address aging fundamentally and health fundamentally here? So excited about this. I hope you and I will talk about this over the years to come and follow these teams as they,
Dr. Mark Hyman: Maybe I’m going to work on it. I want to win the a hundred
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Million fight. You’re totally able to register for it. Yeah, it’s interesting. Have some idea, have idea. I’m on the board. So full disclosure, there will be a separate set of judges who judge this, and the judges will have no conflicts, nothing. But I had my company Cellularity, which is up in New Jersey, Bob Ri, doing natural killer cells and stem cells, and he goes, can I register for this? I said, yeah, I guess I’m going. I’m going to win this thing. I had my team at Vicinity, which is doing vaccines against neurocog diseases and muscle loss, and can we register for this? Said yes, well go for it. So we’re going to see a lot of teams, a lot of different approaches.
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s amazing. Well, it’s so exciting, Peter, what you’re doing, and you’re just sort of tirelessly trying to improve humanity in every aspect. Thank you, buddy. I mean, it’s not just through health, but really all your X prizes. If people don’t know you, Peter, they should find out about you. They can go to xprize healthspan, I think.com. Is that the
Dr. Peter Diamandis: Xprize.org/healthspan for information about the competition, dand.com/longevity. If you want a free download of the PDF or on Amazon Longevity or Practical Playbook. And as always, pal, grateful for you. Love your heart and your spirit.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Thank you. Whenever I go to LA and visit Peter, he’s like, let’s have a meeting. He’s like, okay, how about we meet at five o’clock on Venice speech and we walk for as fast as we can for two hours, and then that’s our meeting. I’m like, okay, well,
Dr. Peter Diamandis: You’re coming to LA so call me.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Let’s do that. Okay. Alright, man. Well have a great rest of the day. I’m so excited to see this xpr come in shape and your book is just phenomenal. It’s just all the nuggets and none of the noise. So everybody get a copy and check it out. And thanks for being on the show, Peter.
Dr. Peter Diamandis: My pleasure, as always. Take care, Al.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I’m the Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. It’s not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you’re looking for helping in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. Now, if you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
