Hi, this is Dan Sullivan, and I'm here with my great... exponential wisdom partner, Peter Diamandis, who is the creator of the worldwide A360 network, both live events and also digital events. Peter, I've had a goal since 1987, so that goes back quite a ways, of living to 156. And everybody was telling me I was outrageous until I met you, and then I found out that you're trying to live to 700. And it made my 156 incredibly reader-friendly, user-friendly, because 700 really stretched the horizons. But I was able, during the summer and the fall, just to put this down in one of my quarterly short books.
I walk through the mindsets that you have to have to think long about your lifetime. And we've had more response to this book than any other book. I've written close to 30 now, 30 books, and this one has really hit a nerve. Amazing, pal. And first of all, just kudos to you for your vision of a book a quarter. For how many quarters?
Well, this is our 16th. The one I'm working on right now is 16 quarters, 16 and 17 quarters because my cartoonist fell off his bike and broke both of his wrists. So we took a 90-day break, but I'll catch up. And I'm going to do it for 100 quarters from age 70 to age 95. I'm 74 now. It's a project. You know, the 25-year framework's a big deal for us here at Strategic Coach. But here's the thing. Before I started this process, Peter, it used to take me 300 hours to write a book, and now it takes me 25 hours to write a book.
Love it. Love it. And you've cracked the code, but I don't want to go there yet. I want to talk about this book. I want to talk about the book and the content because I think one of the most valuable things you can give somebody is a longevity mindset because it changes, you know, you have an infinite, not infinite, but you have tremendous runway. It gives you courage to try new things, courage to try the next version and chapter of your life, purpose and passion. So if you don't mind, Dan, I would love to actually just run down each of the chapters and let's begin with chapter one and let's run down, you know, the interview on it. So, you know, chapter one is a lifetime extender. Let's go there.
This is actually the very first big exercise that people do when they come into Strategic Coach. I usually have a group, and this is all of our workshops because I have 15 other coaches who do this. And the very first thing, we get people to introduce each other, and we say, now on a sheet of paper, I'd just like you to write down a number, and it's the age at which you expect to die. I'm going to shock her. That must be for people. Well, here's the thing. When I was a kid, people said, you know, people never know when they're going to die, and yet I have done this with 20,000 people, and everybody has a number. And it's family history. It's actuarial tables and everything. But I said, write down the number. Let's say it's 85, and I say, well, I don't want to talk.
about 85, I want to talk about 84. Describe yourself, who you're going to be physically, mentally, financially, relationship-wise, and satisfaction with your life at 84. And everybody tells a great story. I've never met anyone who doesn't tell a great story at 84. So I'll have one person that I'm talking to, and he'll say it. And everybody says the same thing. Physically, I'm in great shape, mentally sharp as I am right now, financially, totally independent relationship, lots of supportive, warm, engaging relationships. I'm really proud of what I've done. I said, well, if you were that way at 84, what do you think the chances are you would die at 85? Yep.
And they said, well, I wouldn't. I said, oh, you wouldn't die at 85. So if you were that 84, how many more years beyond 85 would you live? And they said, well, I don't know, 10 or 15. I said, well, which? It makes a difference. They say, well, 15. And I said, well, you've been here for an hour, and I just bought you 15 years. I said, and what are you paying for this program? I just bought you 15 years. And I said, now, here's the thing. I actually have, because during the next quarter, every thought to your brain is actually attached to how much life you think you have left. And because you've given yourself 15 more years, every idea in your brain is going to start shifting. And it does. So I've been doing this for 25 years.
the program. And Peter, it'll have to be 50 years before we really find out that it's had a huge impact on actual life longevity, but I've gotten probably 15, 20,000 entrepreneurs to extend their active entrepreneurial lifetime in their mind by another 20 years. You know, people ask me all the time because of my work in longevity and the companies I've started and the companies I'm invested in. And it's one of my massively transformative purposes, which really is what connects us is adding 20, 30 healthy years this next decade, and then really extending life much greater beyond that. People say, what can I do now?
And there are some things, you know, like going through human longevity and the work that's coming online with cellularity and others. But I say, listen, it's still the basics. It's still sleeping, eating, right? Exercising. And I say, probably there's a fourth that is the most important thing, which is your mindset. If you think you're going to die, the chances are you will. If you have no purpose in life, no passion, if you're not happy, if you're depressed, if all of those things, there's a great correlation. Anybody can go and Google it right now. It's like the correlation between retirement and death is highly correlated, especially for men. It's crazy, right?
Yeah. The thing is that you have a number, but you don't know your number. And one of the things I've realized is that everybody has a number. And it makes all the difference in the world that you know what your number is so that you can ask the question, is that the number I actually want? So what I find is that people have an awareness that all sorts of medical and technological breakthroughs are happening, but they don't have a personal focus to actually make use of any of those. But when you have a number and then you decide to extend your number, all of a sudden, you know, I've got the saying our eyes only see and our ears only hear what our brain is looking for. If your brain is looking for 15 extra years, I'll tell you on a daily basis, you're going to pick up on all sorts of information that wasn't important to you before. Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. So chapter two is everyone's got a number.
And that number in the back of your head is doing a job on you, right? If your parents died in their 60s or 70s and you're entering your 70s, it's like you're beginning a mental wind down process. You're doing less. You're less engaged. You're not taking as good care of yourself. You're not exercising as much because you say, why should I? I've only got a few extra years and it just erodes. Yeah. And I think that time, you know, is very, very negotiable if you have a reason to renegotiate. But I would say in the general setting.
that there's expectations. People are actually talking. I know a lot of people when they're in their 40s and 50s, they're saying, you know, don't have the ambition I used to have, don't have the energy I used to have. You know, if I was 30 years younger, I'd be really interested in this, but it's too late for me now. And I noticed that as people get into the 40s and 50s, they have a massive amount of daily language where they're literally, Peter, talking themselves into the grave. Yeah, I'm totally there with you. Your next chapter is on ignoring others' expectations, which is all part of this, right? We talk about the importance of community.
If you want to be skinny, hang out with skinny people. If you want to be in good shape, hang out with people who are in good shape. If you want to live a long life, hang out with people who have that expectation and not one of 70 and done. Yeah, and I think that we're enormously influenced, and there's a massive amount of research that we live in social networks. And the optimism or pessimism about our particular network, especially around this particular issue, is really crucial to what our own personal expectations are. Peter, the next one, the chapter four, Friends, Money, and Purpose, what I've noticed is that there are three factors, and I've added a fourth one because of the conversations around the book.
that predispose our body to actually die. And one is, if we have the experience that the people closest to us are dying, and there are fewer and fewer of them as we go along, that tells us we don't want to be alone when there's no friends left. That's the first one. The second one is money. Is your money increasing or decreasing? And if you have a perception that the amount of money that you have to kind of do what you want and be independent is decreasing, that also tells you. It's kind of like the, you know, we call them the Inuit now, but in the old days we called them Eskimos, that because there was only so much food for a community, when an elder got to the point where they were no longer doing useful work, one night they just walked out on the ice and died. And I think that there's a lot of, you know, we've been around for hundreds of thousands of years. They're still built into that, that we're living in a world of scarcity, and if you're not producing anymore, you should probably leave.
And one of the things is being dependent. We do not like being dependent upon other people financially. And finally, they don't have a purpose. They had a purpose when they were in their 20s, maybe in their 40s, but they've run out of purpose. And I think that's the main thing. There's just no more meaning that you're getting from your work. And I think this affects men more than it does women because so much of the purpose of men is really tied up with their livelihood. It's tied up with how they make money. I think women are more distributed outward and they have purposes that go way beyond being a parent, way beyond being a mother. And statistically, women outlive men.
I can't agree with you more. The notion of purpose is fundamental more than people know. I mean, I was recently at the Vatican. I was there with Tony Robbins and I asked the gathering of physicians and scientists. It was a conference on longevity. And I asked the question of who here would love to live to 120. And I expected everyone to shoot their hands up into the air. And of course, only about a third did. And I was shocked. And of course, part of it is our perception of what 120 looks like. It's feeble and dependent and so forth. The other is a conversation that I'm still...
dealing with which is that what am I going to do? What will I do with my life? if I live that long. It's like, really? It's like, holy shit. It's like the most exciting time ever to be alive. It's like, you know, you could go to the moon, go to Mars. You could like learn about living in all these virtual worlds, play the top video games, you know, whatever it is. It's like, wow. Oh my goodness. Tell them the great line you had. This is one of the all-time great lines that you've come up with. The session that I was on with a rabbi, a cardinal, an elderman, and Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, and myself in the panel was on the morality of immortality. And I said, hold it. We should also discuss the immorality of mortality. And one of the interesting takeaways was the notion that
with the rabbi who opened up, said, listen, in the Bible, you know, yes, humans started with a life of like 700 years. Then humans did something really bad, whatever it was. And God said, you shall have no more than 120 years. So that was... biblically, like the accepted lifespan of 120. I'm going, well, listen, that's a great starting point. Let's begin with 120. And then I'll negotiate after that. I feel like I'm being jiffed by 30 years, typically. There's kind of a, what's it called? You know, the number of times that cells can reproduce. The Hayflick limit. The Hayflick, yeah. And it's around 120, which I find really interesting that the number is only one person we have historically recorded. I mean, we have lots of tales from places where they don't keep records. But a woman in France died about 10 years ago, and she was 122 and a half. But she was the first person to actually, where we have the record of her birth and have evidence of her entire life.
lifetimes, he had 120, 121, 122. But there's a lot more people getting to 110. I think it's like 80,000 in the United States or above 100. So we're starting to get critical mass research on what it is that makes these people anomalies. And so that's one of the big projects that human longevity is really doing. You're able to crunch numbers from all the... Exactly. What are the outliers? What are the anomalies telling us? Not what the average tells us, it's what the anomalies tell us. Well, we don't know yet. But what we're learning is some of the important fundamentals. It's interesting, right? When I was in medical school...
I was taken aback by a show on long-lived sea life that certain species of whales could live hundreds of years and sharks, you know, four or 500 years and turtles, even more. Sponges, 10,000 years. And so the question was, if they can, why can't we? And it's either a hardware or software problem. I think these things are solvable. And when we get to your last chapter, let me dive into some of the age reversing technologies that I'm tracking. But your next chapter here, chapter five, is eliminating the idea of retirement, which I think is so critically important. Talk about that, pal.
Yeah, well, first of all, it's recent. It only goes back to the 1870s, and it was for a political reason. It wasn't for any particular reason. It was Germany, and they were in the early stages of industrialization, and they had a problem with, you know, revolutions in Europe, political revolutions, and they found it was unemployed young men. That's always the problem if you have political revolutions. And they said, well, we have to create a device to get the older workers out of the factories so we can create an opening for the young people to get in. And it was strictly for political reasons. So they gave a payoff, you know, a retirement fund to encourage the older workers to get out. Now, that was 1870s. The U.S. didn't pick up on it until the 1930s. 37, I think, is the start. And I got some statistics from the first 60 years of Social Security in the United States. So it was 1997, 60 years. And the average payout was 29 months. Wow. The average payout was 29 months. So two and a half years. Two and a half years.
half years that people who retired and served taking, they didn't make it through till the third year. It's extended now. It's bigger than that. But my sense is that when you think about retirement, you're sending an email to the universe that sooner or later you should come and pick up the body. I love that. I love that mindset. It's true. At the end of the day, we are purpose-driven animals.
Whether the purpose is caring and feeding for our young or our community or for love. And if we're not doing anything. I will not allow anyone in a strategic coach workshop to actually use what I call the R word. You're not allowed to use the R word. I wish, wish, wish I had understood this when I remember having a debate with my dad about whether he should retire or not. And it was the worst thing ever for him, right? Slowing down and not doing the stuff that is, you know, he was an OBGYN. And so getting up at three or four in the morning to go do a house call, he could have still been a gynecologist and not been in obstetrics.
Those of you listening, do not retire. Do not think about retiring. Find something that's not called a job because you love it so much and differentiate between earning money and doing things that are masterful and useful with your time. Yes. Yeah. You talked about your father. My father completely failed at 60. He was a farmer and the farm failed. And he reinvented himself at 60, became a landscaper and had his best 23 years, 60 to 83, and had his best business year when he was 83, got to Christmas. It was his 83rd birthday. And he said, well, that's it. I'm not going to do it.
Went in, got a medical, I mean, had some ailments, but they were totally under management. And nine months later died of prostate cancer. And I told my mother, I said, you know, the day that dad woke up and there wasn't work to do, he didn't know who he was and he wanted to get out of here as fast as he could. Yeah. Amazing. So important. All right. So next chapter here, ever expanding happiness.
Yeah. One of the things that I equate to longevity is a fundamental sense of gratitude. Okay. And gratitude has two meanings. You know, even in the English language, we have gratitude, but we also have appreciation. And appreciation has an economic sense that value appreciates. So my feeling is, if you have an attitude as you get older, calendar-wise, you get older, that you're appreciating more and more the life you're living, you're appreciating more and more the world that you're living. That tells the brain, and that's the next chapter too, that you're always making a future that's bigger than your past. Things are getting bigger. And it fits in directly with...
the whole concept of abundance. I think people actually die of a scarcity of meaning, a scarcity of friends, scarcity of money, scarcity of friends. But the big thing is they just die of a scarcity of appreciating the world that they're living in. Well, I think at the end of the day, if you think about what it's like to be a child with childhood wonder and just happiness and carefree and learning and adventure, and then why does that have to end? We all know people who are like that. You're very much like that with a sense of childhood wonder of like, wow, that's amazing and constantly wanting to learn.
I think that is fundamentally critical to longevity. It goes back again to mindset. It goes back again to friends and purpose, you know, ever expanding happiness and gratitude in life and living a life bigger than yourself. And of course, one of the things that gives us the greatest amount of happiness is not the things that we have. It's the things that we're grateful for, the people that we help. It's not about money at the end of the day.
Yeah, and how transformational we are in other people's lives, I think. You're saying, Peter, I just wanted to do chapter number four. And this has come up simply because I put the book out. And that is, there's a fourth one that really encourages you to live on. And that is novelty, that you're continually excited about new things that are coming along. And I hadn't realized the importance of novelty. And what I notice is when people lose friends' money and purpose, they also say, well, you know, there's nothing new that's interesting. None of the new stuff that people are doing have any interest in me whatsoever. And I have to tell you. Which is kind of ridiculous, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's a mindset.
So unlike yourself, one of us has to do it. And I volunteered 100% for this. I spend two hours a day on the internet just looking for things I didn't know before I found them. And people say, well, why don't you have an algorithm that finds what you're looking for? I said, well, that would defeat my purpose. I'm not looking for what I'm looking for. I'm looking for what I didn't know I was looking for. So true. And one of the things that I want to thank you for is just that small little flip of a phrase of I'm doing Abundance 360 for 25 years, knowing that you're doing something for the next 25 years and then the next 25 years after that and so forth.
Like, yeah, of course, my next 25 years, I know what I'm doing. I'm doing this. I'm spending the entire year thinking this through, plotting out what's most important. What am I going to deliver? How am I going to outdo last year? What is the novelty I'm bringing to the table? By the way, we're going to have an amazing, amazing year at A360 this year. But yeah, novelty and purpose so beautifully intertwined there.
One of the things I want to say, just observing from a distance, that what you've created is a 365-year repeating cycle of greater alertness, greater curiosity, greater responsiveness, and greater resourcefulness. So it's built right into the 365. So every year, you have more reason to live longer. Exactly. All right, number seven here is the future bigger than the past. Yeah.
And one of the things I've observed is that if you are not a self reinventing person, probably your life starts to shift from future to past right around 40, about 40 years old. People now have a past that's bigger than their future. Okay. Fascinating. And what I noticed is from that point forward, they become more nostalgic. They now start going back to reunions, you know, family reunions, high school reunions, college reunions. I don't think I've ever gone to a single reunion. I went to my 30th high school. So I was 48. And I told the strategic coach workshops that I was going back for my 30th reunion. So the next quarter I came in, they said, well, how was it? And I said, nobody showed up. They sent a bunch of old people in their place. Right. Interesting. And I said, there's a reason why I haven't talked to any of them for 30 years. Oh my God. But that's interesting, right? Because
I mean, I'm clear in my own mind, and hopefully it's infectious with others, that I'm so incredibly excited about what the next 25, 30 years have to offer. We're living during the most exciting time ever in human history, and the only time more exciting than today is tomorrow. And being able to realize that we're going to see permanent... bases on the moon. We're going to fill some of those lava tunnels with atmosphere and give people wings that are flying through the caves of the moon or establishing colonies and cities on Mars. I just heard the first wind from Mars. Yes, yes. And you know, I was sitting there and I had several people listen and say, well, it's just wind. I said, this is the first sound we've ever had from outer space. We've never had any sound from outer space. I said, and this is just the opening. We're going to have lots of things coming in from outer space. Yeah, amazing. Yeah. So my feeling is that this is a capability. It's like a muscle. You know, if you don't go to the gym, you don't develop the muscle. And my feeling is in order
to have a past, all you have to do is keep breathing. That's the only skill really involved in having a past is just keep breathing. But the future has to be from the inside and it has to be intentional. You have to create the future. Every day. And it requires work. And when something new comes in from the future, you have to reinvent who you are in the present. And quite frankly, you have to go back and change your past too. But you know, the conversation you were having, Peter, go back 50 years and two people talking to each other aren't having this conversation. Yeah. Even if you describe this conversation and the way we were holding it right now.
it would be considered crazy and insane and impossible. Okay, so my chapter eight, I'd like to put in your hands because you're every day out there discovering new things about age reversing technology. Not age keeping you the way you are technology, but actually age reversing technology. And again, if you don't have the purpose, this information is not really interesting. But if you have an extension goal, you've taken your life to a further extension. You're at 85 and now you're thinking 120. All of a sudden your eyes and ears are really out there looking for this and your brain is interested. Yep.
And there's a lot, there's a lot going on. And so just to give a quick overview on sort of what's in the lab or what's in FDA clinical trials and phase one, phase two and entering phase three clinical trials right now, people should be excited about the idea of a healthy extended lifespan. So a few different things. First of all, we have to realize that for most of us, it isn't healthcare, it's sick care. That most of us are actually, you end up going to hospital when you have a pain or a problem. And by that time, it could be too late.
I fly a couple of airplanes. I have a Model S and a Model X Tesla. All those vehicles have hundreds of processors, hundreds of microsensors, measuring everything. And I don't take off or drive off. If the red lights are on, I get it fixed. And then for most of us, we don't actually know what's going on in our body. So one of the companies I co-founded called Human Longevity has a facility in San Diego. We're about to expand it nationwide. We're opening at the end of December.
in Naples, Florida, and in other locations, these virtual health nucleuses. We're effectively digitizing, dematerializing, demonetizing, democratizing the health nucleus on the 60s formula basis. But it's a notion that if you asked 100 people, are you worried about anything going on inside your body? Most people say, no, I think I'm fine. But we don't actually know. So the health nucleus is a facility where we digitize you. We do a full genome sequence, a microbiome. We look at 11-year chemicals in your bloodstream. We do a full body MRI. We do a coronary CT, a lung CT, brain vasculature, brain MRI. And incredibly,
The numbers are pretty incredible that in 14.4% of patients who come in, we find something that they need to take immediate action on, which is an amazingly large number. In 40%, we find something that is of long-term importance to your healthcare. So in 2% of people, we find aortic or brain aneurysms. Two out of 100 people have an aneurysm they don't know about. 2% have tumors or high-grade cancer. 3.4% have a cardiovascular issue bundle.
branch block or atrial fib or something like that. Anyway, and so the goal is people say, well, I don't want to know, and that's bullshit. Of course you want to know, and you want to deal with it immediately. Obviously, we don't catch everything, but for a large percentage of people, we do find something that they need to take immediate action on. So it used to be $25,000 a person. We've dropped it down to $5,500 for the first visit and then $2,950 for each subsequent visit. Anybody's interested in that, just email. I have a team who receives these emails and responds. Just write an email to vip at healthnucleus.com, vip at healthnucleus.com. And that's really about...
Not dying an untimely death, catching something at the beginning and solving it when it's solvable. The next area is there's a whole series of technologies coming out in what's called synolytic medicines. It turns out that our cells divide 50 times and then they stop. And that's called the Hayflick limit. If they don't stop dividing, they become cancers. If they do stop dividing, a lot of them will sit there and generate this inflammatory response. And it's very problematic. Again, the body was never intended to live past 30. We would live long enough to give birth and have our children give birth. And then we were a downside limit in a time of food scarcity.
So companies like Unity Biosciences, which was backed by Jeff Bezos and others, basically have created the ability to find these dead cells in your body and destroy them and make room for new cells to emerge and keep yourself youthful. Another company that I'm involved with called Cellularity is using stem cells from placentas to rejuvenate the regenerative engine of our body. And this is the notion that stem cells were really the original repairman of the body that would go through if there was a damage in place, would fix the damage, would be able to differentiate into muscle, bone, cartilage, brain, whatever it would be, and repair the damage. But as we go older, the number of stem cells in our body reduce orders of magnitude, and they also undergo epigenetic changes. They become effectively senile in their own right. So can you rejuvenate that? Can you give back cells from newborn placentas, which have a whole slew of benefits and they're not immunologically activated? And there's another company, which we'll talk about in the future sometime, Dan, called Fountain that Bob Hurry and Tony Robbins and I are working on. And then there's a miraculous company I bring to A360 each year called Samumed that is working on these Wnt.
WNT pathway manipulators that is simply magical. You'll hear a lot more about these, but there's enough in the lab right now, the convergence of AI and molecular genetics and genome sequencing and CRISPR technologies and so forth, that it's a brilliant time. It's a great time to be alive. And as I like to say to people, don't die from something stupid or silly in the interim. There's a lot of upside ahead of us. Yeah. It's so funny because Babs and I, of course, are subscribers to HLI. And then we do a lot of other things, you know, that are very specialized. I remember the first time I came back from HLI and we had our genetic testing, we had our biome testing.
And I was talking to a 30-year-old. So at that time, I was approximately 40 years older than this person. And he said, you know, I wouldn't want to know that stuff. And I said, well, you wouldn't want to know it right now. When would you like to know it? I said, because you will know it. And I said, that's like, you don't want to know your financial situation in case the news is bad. And I said, well, how do you want your bad in life? I'd like to get it in early warnings, you know, that I can actually take action on. So again, it comes back to the overall mindsets about this, Peter. And I just want to say anybody who would like our book.
My Plan for Living to 156. You can download this as an e-book simply by going to strategiccoach.com forward slash go, G-O, forward slash 156, and it'll be yours. Give it to me again. Go to. Yeah, so it's strategiccoach.com, and then it's forward slash go, G-O, forward slash 156. And there's two hours of audio with us, and there's 45 minutes of video with it. And there's also our lifetime extender exercise that's in PDF, writable PDF form, so you can actually.
go through that. And I describe in the book exactly how to walk through and extend your life, your notion of your life. But this is a great topic. Super fun. If you're optimistic about it, it's not a great topic. If you're pessimistic about it, then that's a function of mindset. But you know, we've talked about this from day one, and it actually showed up in your book, Abundance, before I ever met you.
We have an abundance of everything else that's taking place day by day just because of the convergence forces that you talk about all the time. But the one greatest scarcity that most people have is the scarcity of life. Yes. Scarcity of lifetime. Scarcity of lifetime. And we're all born with the same 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week, 365 days in a year. And it's how we use that time that gives us time abundance. Instead of going to the library, you can Google and get back an hour of your day. Instead of if you want to fly privately, you can save your time going through LAX.
GFK airport, which slays me. And the ultimate time addition in time multiplier is going to be adding an extra 20, 30 healthy years. And by the way, when you add those extra 20 or 30 healthy years, what you're actually doing is you're buying yourself another 20 or 30 years of research and development by top scientists around the world who will learn how to add another 20 or 30 years on top of that. And our mutual friend, Ray Kurzweil, Robert E. Gray calls that longevity escape velocity that for every day you're alive after a certain point, science is adding more than a day to your life. Well, pal, I love this subject. There is another subject I want to talk to you about, which I find
extremely compelling, which is, you know, one of the things that makes life full of joy and full of gratitude is hanging out with great people in your business. If you've got lousy people you don't enjoy working with, there's no way you want to extend your life. That might also be true for your spouse. So one of the things to think about is how do you hire amazing people? I'm blessed by my team at Abundance 360. I see your team at Coach as amazing as an aspirational goal. These individuals who've been with you for 10, 20, 30 years. So if you don't mind, maybe we do a dive into how to hire amazing people as a next topic.
That's a great topic. And actually, the last six months have been a huge breakthrough for us. So we've developed some entirely new concepts and tools that really make the process much more certain at the beginning and makes it much faster to have people, great people, attract great people and have them hit the ground running. Great. All right. See you on the next adventure. Take care.