Susanne Conrad talks with Dr. Peter Diamandis about the future, longevity, and living with an abundance mindset.
Susanne Conrad, Lightyear Leadership founder and author of Get There Now, sits down for a chat with world-renowned author, investor, and philanthropist Dr. Peter Diamandis. Enjoy this chat about longevity and creating an abundance mindset.
For more information on the work of Dr. Peter Diamandis visit www.diamandis.com.
Conversation Transcript
Susanne Conrad 0:11
All right, everyone. This is Suzanne Conrad with the fabulous Dr. Peter Diamandis and we're gonna be talking today about how to cultivate both a mindset of longevity, but also about living exponentially and, and, and really about having abundance. So if you're, if this is the first time you're meeting, Peter, you should just know, I don't know if there's anybody I know personally, that's more of you. You're a doctor, you're an astrophysicist. You're fascinated with science, longevity, you're the founder of the X PRIZE. Like, I'm going to just say, you have lived a courageous life Peter, like a really admirable kick ass life. And
Peter Diamandis 0:56
I hope it's just the beginning.
Susanne Conrad 0:59
So the people that come to, to study with me or to implement lightyear in their company, often begin by helping people create at least a 10 year vision. And I know when I first started doing this, sometimes people in their 50s would say, Ah, I don't know if I want to talk about another 10 years, and I realized, there's so many people that have an aversion to aging, they have what we'd call an anti vision. So could you just begin by talking a bit about your view on how to sustain a longevity mindset? And why that's why that's important, especially today.
Peter Diamandis 1:40
Yes, great question. And I think when people say, How do you stay healthy? How do you stay, you know, alive longer, what should you be doing now. And there's, of course, the basics of, you know, sleep, exercise, diet, all of those things are fundamental, first and foremost. But mindset is just as critically important, I think you can will yourself to life and will yourself to death. And maintaining a longevity mindset really means a few things. Number one, it means having a bigger vision for yourself ahead of your life than you had looking backwards in the rearview mirror.
So are there things that you're working on that you're excited about, and you don't have to be the CEO, you can be you know, a member of a team, you can be, you know, contributing financially, as a philanthropist, you can be doing anything, but you're excited about that vision, you're not passive, you're involved in that vision going forward. The second thing is, I think people need to realize that the technologies for increasing human health span, right, we're talking about longevity, where you're healthy, you look good, you feel good, you're thinking smart.
The tech for that is truly exploding onto the scene, you know, CRISPR, gene editing technologies, gene therapies, stem cells, senolytics medicines that get rid of senile or called Zombie cells, all of these things are allowing us to get rid of the hallmarks of aging, not in total, but in some. And some of the hallmarks include pain, and loss of energy and vitality, and who wants to, you know, be thinking about another 30 or 40 years, if you're in pain, or you can't get out of bed in the morning, I get that completely.
But what if you had the energy and vitality at 60 7080 that you had when you're in your 30s that's the vision that we're aiming for. So keeping, you know, informed of what's happening. So I, for example, one thing as that's accessible is I've created a platform called longevity insider.org. It's free, and longevity and longevity insider.org. And just give me your name and email. And every day, I have built an AI engine that scours the world, looking for news that is around longevity-related breakthroughs. And I get a feed of 12 to 15 just top-level articles that are their AI-generated summaries of these articles. And it's like, wow, wow, wow. And so if you feel that that is coming, that it's just not going to be the way it always has been.
You start getting excited about the future and you start taking better care of yourself. Right. So these are the elements around a longevity mindset. You know, I'm working on $100 million age reversal X Prize, which I'm excited about, you know, Can we reverse the age of an individual by 20 years, right. So if you're at 60. Can I bring you back to 50? And then you grow again forward, and then maybe it's time to get to 60 or bring it back to 40. Who knows?
But I mean, though, it's is this crazy? Maybe, but you know, there's been a lot of crazy good. Yeah, there's been a lot of crazy that's become true over the decades. So that's my thinking on longevity. I've got a couple of things I'll add, you know, one of the elements of longevity, that's important, I put into the bucket of not dying from something stupid.
Peter Diamandis 5:35
Okay, okay. So it falls into two categories, right, where your seatbelt is one category. The other category is a lot of us. Suzanne is you know, we're optimist about our health. We think we're fine. But we actually don't know what's going on inside our bodies. We don't We wake up. We're fine with you. Okay, that's great. So I've been working on different companies there. Seven, eight years ago, I built a company called Human Longevity down in San Diego with two co-founders, Craig Venter and Bob Hariri. And they've opened a location in San Diego and one in in San Francisco.
And then last three years with Tony Robbins, and an amazing team, including Dr. Bill Capps, the CEO, we started something called fountain life that's got a few locations in Florida, New York, Philadelphia, then opening up in other locations. And when you go to fountain life, or health nucleus, we upload you full do a full imaging of you, we do a full body MRI, a brain MRI brain vasculature, an AI powered coronary CT looking for soft plaque a DEXA scan genome, microbiome, normal blood workup. And I do this every year like clockwork, right? And the notion is that someday I'm going to find something. And that's a good thing.
People say I don't want to know as it bullshit, of course, you want to know because you want to get you want to know as early as you can, so you can do something about it. And so I think that's going to become the normal mode of medicine, the future where your current, you know, instead of once a year for this full digital upload, it's going to be continuous in your home in your office, measuring everything all the time looking for any aberrations, throw the engine check light on your car going off. So that's my wrap around on longevity.
Susanne Conrad 7:38
Yeah. So my husband, Brett is a member of your abundance 360. So I have my long, jagged, my longevity cup here. And we also went and got the workup at fountain life. And I found it really fascinating. And especially just listening to you, Peter, what I love about you is here you've incentivized private space exploration, through the X Prize and have your passion for astrophysics and scanning the universe. And so many of us that are somatically oriented, like people that teach about body awareness and sensation, realize that the body is an inner verse, you know, there's millions of miles of God knows what you know, fast and dirty about it, dude,
Peter Diamandis 8:26
30 trillion cells in your body. Right? trillion cells, and there's more bacteria and viruses and viruses and fungi. I mean, we're not a single living entity. We're a collection of 30 trillion human cells collaborating together to make URI. And our bodies were never designed to live past age 30. They weren't, you know, 100,000 years ago, a million years ago, when we were earlier hominids. Before food was abundant. You'd be you'd go into puberty, age 13. You'd be pregnant by age 14, you'd be a grandparent by age 28. And before, you know, there was Whole Foods and McDonald's when food was scarce, the last thing you wanted to do to perpetuate the species was to take food out of grandchildren's mouths. And so the best thing you could do is die and give your bits back to the environment. So it was never selection factors or pressures to keep us alive longer. So we're just now beginning to understand why we age perhaps why we don't have to how to slow aging, stop aging, even reverse aging. And this is, you know, the conversation occurring at the highest levels of the top researchers and entrepreneurs. I mean, there's been like three major longevity age reversal companies started over the last six months by billionaires clothes It's like, oh, wow, we can actually make a dent in this. And it's the largest business on the planet. So your job is to keep yourself alive as long as you can to intercept these technologies.
Susanne Conrad 10:13
Could you say something, to connect them this mindset of longevity with with the mindset of abundance, you know, because you like, if people could start to see that they could have another 30 or more years beyond what they're currently picturing, you know, which is why I talk to my mom about it all the time. I actually had to tell my Mom Stop picturing your death. She had like a like, it was almost like there was an unseen algorithm that she wouldn't live longer than her mother. Yes. So we decoupled that, but could you like so for the people that have this genius within them this ability to continue to grow and provide wisdom? What does an you know, person living beyond 100 provide in this abundance world to Peter, let's talk about.
Peter Diamandis 11:03
So you mentioned earlier breadths involvement, I run an event called Abundance 360. This is my 10th year, I've committed to run for 25 years, and maybe I'll renew for another 25 At that point, who knows. And every so it's a program we get together and in in Beverly Hills for three days at the beginning of the year. And then every two months, I do a zoom implementation workshop. And my mission there is to help shape people's mindset about what is possible.
Because your mindset is the single most important attribute you have. It's more important than your relationships, your wealth, the technology, you have your mindset. If you lost everything, and you have to keep your mindset you will regain those those elements. So I focus on a an abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset and a longevity mindset. We talked about longevity mindset.
On the abundance mindset. It's the notion that, you know, we have to realize, again, going back to evolutionary history, humans evolved in a world that was full of massive scarcity. And it was local and linear, meaning nothing, nothing affected you that was not within a day's walk, things did not change decade to decade, Generation to Generation Millennium millennium was pretty much constant. It's only now that we're in this period of massive exponential growth.
And technology is a force that takes what used to be scarce and makes it abundant, and almost everything in our life. Now, let me give you some examples, right, we used to kill whales on the ocean to get whale oil to light our nights. Yeah, then we ravage mountainsides for coal, then we drill Colombia's under the ground. Now we're living at a time where solar photovoltaics are out-competing everything. And then we've got all these fusion energy startups that could out-compete it all to the point where energy becomes so cheap and available. It's just, you know, to squander rubble abundance of energy. If you've got that much energy, you've got all the clean water you want as well. You can desalinate, you can recycle, you can do multiple things have the disease burden on planet Earth is due to unclean drinking water.
So if you if you tackle clean drinking water, it topples that domino, Domino, you know, what would you think of is more scarce than a perfect diamond to four or 510 20 carat diamond? Well, the technology now exists to basically on an atomic level manufacture perfect diamonds out of methane, water and electricity. And in fact, the largest jeweler on the planet Pandora, this past year, I made the decision to stop selling diamonds that are mined from the earth because of all of the environmental and social issues with that and just sell technology human-made diamonds, which are perfect diamonds, right? And so I think about the notion that we have more capital available every year there is more money flowing into venture capital invested in capital than the year before this has been true for over a decade will be true in 21 and 22 again, so the question is what is truly scarce?
There are some things and technology will work on that right we need to be worried about the environment. We need to be worried about the consequences externalities, we you know time well if we add 2030 Healthy years that's adding time, you know, used to be if you were doing a research project and you needed a book, you would run to the library and pray the library had the book that you wanted with X in it. Alright, remember those days I do. And now you Google ads are instantly available, it's buying back time. So abundance mindset is realizing, listen, if we've got a pie, and more people are coming over for dinner, instead of slicing the pie into thinner and thinner slices, which is the scarcity mindset, we're just going to bake more pies.
Susanne Conrad 15:18
Yeah, yeah, I would love for you, you probably haven't been asked this for a while. But I do work with a lot of younger people between like 25 and 35. And many of them, you know, have grown up and have studied environmental science, not to, not to a great depth, but I'll just say that what I run into a lot is like an apocalyptic mindset, people who actually have a dystopic experience of being human, and a lot of what happens when they come to light years, they start to learn that they could be part of this solution. So if there's people that really want to be helping instill these mindsets to kids in school, what would you say about that, you know, from from the beginning to start to have children see that because people in, you know, these elder millennial, some of them I'll just feel really jaded and soured. And it's one of the places where I work right now is 15. Oh,
Peter Diamandis 16:21
listen, I think it's very important for kids to understand the idea of abundance, I think it's important for kids to start to understand the aspect of exponential technology. And where the two of those intersect intersect is the idea of you can solve the problems. You know, the what I really I focus my career to the largest degree on entrepreneurs. Yes, entrepreneurs find their purpose and passion. And then helping them with the steps to implement that purpose and passion those moonshots. And I define an entrepreneur as someone who who finds a problem and solves a problem. And what I really want is a global mindset of a solution oriented world, where when someone sees a problem, it's like, oh, great, fantastic an opportunity to solve something.
Susanne Conrad 17:19
So really, everyone could be an entrepreneur, you're saying,
Peter Diamandis 17:22
Yes, I got anybody who learns about a problem, and then digs in to figure out okay, what are some crazy ideas and approaches that I could use to solve it? So on the environment, we just launched $100 million carbon capture XPrize that Elon Musk funded to capture carbon at gigaton scale, right, rather than complain about it, let's solve it. We have a we have an XPrize going on right now. And I advise a couple of companies in this field of cellular agriculture. Instead of you know, as people becoming wealthier around the world, they want higher quality food, which they deserve. But you know, 1/3 of the non ice landmass of the planet is used for livestock right now. And you just can't do more of that. We're a planet of chickens and cows and pigs. But what if you instead could grow the meat in a, what's called a cellular agriculture stem cell grown meats. And imagine if the if that meat product was healthier for you, was cheaper and tasted better? That's the goal, not just a little bit better, just like electric cars are not just a little bit, they're
Susanne Conrad 18:39
exponentially better? Yeah.
Peter Diamandis 18:42
I mean, it's like, you know, so that's the vision. How do you do that? So I think, you know, maybe I'll do a series of children's books on the on the subject. But yeah, it's really important.
Susanne Conrad 18:54
It's really important. Well, okay, so you've talked some also about exponential and how those things all work together at longevity, abundance and exponential mindset that anyone can be an entrepreneur. Um, let's just land our conversation. Let's just come back to one of the things that we do in the lightyear community is I have people practice when they're writing their vision, actually, what does it feel like, in your body in the future, so they can start to get that somatic imprint about what is what is my mind like my emotion, my spiritual connection, my physical well being? Could you say if if there's any research, you know, I've never done the research. I just know, it helps me to have somebody be more connected to that entire collaboration that we call the human body, you know, to go and visualize that future where that collaboration is happening more abundantly at an age that's later in a more exponential way.
Peter Diamandis 19:58
I think the mind is the most powerful force in the universe, I think that you, you know, your your vision of yourself in the future and how connected you are to that and how positive you are right coming at it from a, you know, it is positive thinking in that regard people love hanging out with people who are filled with gratitude who are a can do who are excited about the future.
And that mindset brings people to you and having passion about your vision and what you want to do people want to hang out with you people want to invest with you and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Now, you know, if you're five for like me, and you're looking to be a you know, NBA All Star, well, maybe, you know, you need to have some reality checks, but you can be involved in in basketball, you can be you know, you can coach basketball, you can like, you know, whatever you want.
But in other words, there's lots of different ways to be involved with a winning team and envision yourself in that role, I think is is critically important. We, you know, we spend time doing the things sometimes that we have to versus things that we love, what if you could spend time doing the things that you love? And then the other part is how do you build community around that, right? How do you hang out with the people who have the same mindset as you? Right? You're the average of you know, the saying goes, the five people that you spend the most time with? Well, I want
Susanne Conrad 21:35
to just thank you for being one of the people that I've gotten to hang out with some and that my husband has a lot, you've really contributed to our family, and to, you know, our evolving mindsets, and just thank you for taking time to be with us today. And so, where can people find out more about you actually, they can find out about you all over the place, but like, where would you want to?
Peter Diamandis 22:00
Um, you know, I put out a, I put out two blogs a week on these areas on longevity on abundance mindset, exponential mindset, if you go to diamandis.com, dia, Ma, n di s.com, you can sign up for my blog there, I've put a lot of work and energy into those people love them. And so please consider that, you know, abundance. 360 If you're looking for my, you know, sort of executive CEO year round executive program, that's just abundance 360 dot com, or a 360 Calm, and then I mentioned longevity insider.org. And there's lots of others x prize.org. But anyway, a pleasure, my friend, and
Susanne Conrad 22:47
much. Yeah, thank you so much. I hope to be talking to you again in another 30 years.
Peter Diamandis 22:52
Well, again in another three months.
Susanne Conrad 22:56
Okay, thank you, Peter.
Peter Diamandis 22:58
Well, a pleasure Susanne. Take care now. You too.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai