Peter Diamandis, a futurist with degrees from both MIT and Harvard, has spent much of the past two decades evangelizing a vision of an “abundant future” driven by exponential technologies that will lengthen our lives. The serial entrepreneur and founder of organizations like the XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University has also cultivated close ties with some of the world’s most influential business minds, including Elon Musk.
Admirers subscribe to his optimistic forecasts and data-backed arguments that technology has already lifted billions out of poverty and improved global living standards. They also buy his books. Critics argue that his techno-utopian vision overlooks growing inequality and systemic imbalances, including in the U.S., where the bottom 50% of households hold less than 4% of national wealth, while the top 10% command over two-thirds.
No matter their views on Diamandis, many find him an intriguing modern figure, and when we had a chance to talk with him recently about abundance and longevity – including what he thinks of Byran Johnson, a former acquaintance of his who is trying to reverse the aging process – we seized it. (Diamandis, now 63, says he is “biologically 39.”)
You can hear that conversation here; meanwhile, you’ll find excerpts, edited for length, below.
Recently, you tweeted, “We’re so close to longevity escape velocity that I urge you to remember that your sole responsibility right now is to avoid dying from something stupid.” What inspired that specifically?
I feel like we’re in the midst of a healthspan revolution. And this is not by chance. It’s the impact of mostly AI, computation, sensors, single-cell sequencing, cellular medicines — a whole slew of converging technologies [that] are helping us understand why we age, how to slow it, stop it, potentially reverse it. There’s a concept called longevity escape velocity, and it’s the notion that today, for every year that you’re alive, science and medicine are extending your lifespan by a certain amount of time, between a quarter of a year per year to a third of a year per year. But there will be a point at which, for every year that you’re alive, science extends your life for more than a year. Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil pioneered the idea, I’ve researched it, I’ve invested in it. And the current thinking is that we’re going to hit longevity escape velocity — if you’re of reasonable means and in good health — sometime in the next decade. And if that’s the case, you don’t want to miss it. You know, you want to be in good enough health, and you want to be here.
What does “reasonable means” mean? Because obviously there’s a lot of concern about what’s been happening in our society [regarding access to healthcare], let alone around the world. The numbers have been moving in the wrong direction.
Is longevity only for the wealthy? Is that what you’re asking? First of all, the things that you can do right now are free. First and foremost, it is your diet. What you eat is fundamentally important, right? Our bodies were never designed to consume as much sugar as we take. Sugar is a poison in the quantities that we’re ingesting. We used to ingest on the order of a couple of pounds per year of sugar 200 years ago. Today, we’re intaking, like, 60 pounds a year of sugar. It’s a neuroinflammatory, it’s a cardiac inflammatory… at the end of the day, your diet is critical. Sleep is fundamental. You need to get seven to eight hours of quality sleep, which means deep sleep and REM; the lack of that will cause you to develop a neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer’s, whatever it might be. [And] exercise is the number one pro-longevity thing you can do. I’m in the gym five days out of the week, lifting weights, maintaining muscle mass. It’s key. Again, none of these things cost me any money. The cheapest thing, which is very powerful, is your mindset… Optimists live 15% longer than pessimists… So when people say, oh my God, longevity is only for the wealthy, I cry foul. No, it’s for people who care about longevity and want to focus on this.
So that’s the base layer…
There’s a next tier of things that begin to cost you access to money, and these include medications and supplements. I take a ridiculous number of meds and supplements every day, but I built up to that over time. And then there’s advanced testing to catch disease early; the testing ranges in price from 500 bucks to 50,000 bucks, depending on how deep you want to go.
But there’s one last important thing. One of the hottest areas of longevity research is called epigenetic reprogramming. So we are all born with 3.2 billion letters from our mom and 3.2 billion letters from our dad. It’s our genome. It’s our software… and you have the same genome when you’re born, when you’re 20, when you’re 50, when you’re 100. So why do you look different? It’s what genes are on and what genes are off. It’s sort of the control mechanism for turning on and off the genes in different tissues of the body as we age. So the hottest area of investment — and I’m invested in some of these companies as well — is epigenetic reprogramming. Can I reprogram your epigenome to take you back to a more youthful state?… In the beginning, when it’s risky and it doesn’t work well, yeah, the billionaires will take the risks. But once it begins working well, and we’re talking single-digit years, it’ll become cheap and available to most everybody.
Is there a company that you’ve invested in that really exemplifies your approach to longevity?
Over the last 30 years [as the founder of the XPRIZE Foundation], we’ve launched about $600 million in prizes, driving $10 billion in R&D. And a year and a half ago, I raised $157 million and launched a Healthspan XPRIZE. So it’s $111 million of prize money. The rest of it is to run the competition and do all the testing. And in this XPRIZE, teams have to demonstrate the ability to reverse the functional aging in cognition, immune, and muscle, meaning in populations 60 to 80 years old, if I give you this therapy from the winning team, are you now thinking as clearly and capable as you were 20 years ago? Is your ability to mount an immune reaction that of you 20 years younger? Is your ability to build and maintain muscle that of you 20 years younger? And we have like 620 teams enter that XPRIZE. It’ll be awarded by 2030. We’re about to give away $10 million of the money to the top 40 teams; they’re getting a quarter million dollars each in May of this year. So I’m super excited. There are all kinds of approaches you can imagine with 620 teams in the competition.
How would you differentiate your thinking about longevity with what Bryan Johnson is doing at Blueprint?
I’ve known Bryan for 10 years. I got him into the longevity business when he sold Braintree and he moved to L.A. I had [co-founded] a company called Human Longevity… down in San Diego, and Bryan became an investor in that and a board member in the company, and we parted ways. So how do I put this? You know, what Bryan is doing is n-of-one experimentation. I’m super happy he’s doing it. He’s sort of a pioneer, and we’ll see what happens there. I don’t necessarily think I’d be talking about my erections at night as much as he does, but I guess he gets a lot of attention in the media. The approach I’m taking here through the XPRIZE Foundation is a large-scale global competition where we’re trying hundreds of different approaches. It is all being precisely measured. Every team competing has got to statistically treat enough individuals in the right age range to demonstrate that they’re able to do what they say they do. So it’s a massive scientifically backed, experimentally normalized competition.
You can hear much more from Diamandis here, including how he came to know Musk, why he started a health scanning company with Tony Robbins, and how he navigates around what might sometimes look to outsiders like conflicts of interest.
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