PDF Summary:Life Force, by Tony Robbins, Peter H. Diamandis, and Robert Hariri
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1-Page PDF Summary of Life Force
Imagine a world where our lifespans aren’t limited by illness or aging, where people could live for as long as they wanted to. This sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, but according to Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis, and Robert Hariri, such a scenario may be more fact than fiction. In Life Force, the authors explain how ongoing development of new technologies and information in the medical field may extend our lifespans beyond what we ever thought possible. Robbins is a bestselling author and speaker, Diamandis is a bestselling author and scientist, and Hariri is a neurosurgeon and scientist.
In our guide, we’ll explore the lifestyle changes you can make now to increase your lifespan and overall health. We’ll also look at new technologies that are rapidly improving our healthcare and upcoming technologies that have the potential to bring us even closer to the ideal of immortality. We’ll supplement this with elaboration on some of the authors’ more complex ideas, and we’ll contextualize the guide’s information in the fields of science, technology, and sociology.
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A Culture of Sleep Deprivation
A number of societal factors impact people’s ability to get enough sleep at night. The standard American workday that lasts from 9 am to 5 pm restricts people’s potential sleeping hours and requires them to use alarms to get up at times that may be earlier than what’s healthy for them. While this schedule may work well for people over 50, who tend to need less sleep and wake up earlier than those of a younger age, the majority of people don’t feel alert until after 9 am. This has negative consequences not only for people’s individual health, but it can also cost employers nearly $2,000 in productivity costs per year per employee.
School schedules also tend to negatively impact students’ sleep, as they usually start at 8 am, which forces students to get up very early in the morning. This is especially harmful because children and teens need more sleep than adults. Teens are particularly likely to be labeled lazy for their sleep needs, and they also tend to have later circadian rhythms, which causes them to need to go to sleep later and wake up later. Even if they set aside enough time to get a full night’s sleep, they may not be able to fall asleep until late at night. This can cause lower performance in school, a higher likelihood of traffic accidents, and an increased risk of suicidal ideation.
Sleep disorders and differing circadian rhythms can also contribute to sleep deprivation and may be a reason to consult a doctor. People with delayed sleep phase disorder have natural sleeping and waking times that are two or more hours later than what is considered “normal” and often suffer from chronic sleep deprivation as a result.
In fact, some research suggests that the standard of sleeping in one large chunk through the night, or monophasic sleeping, is unnatural for most people. This likely only became the standard as a result of industrialization, which came with artificial lighting and pressure to avoid wasting time. Historical records suggest that the norm used to be having a first sleep followed by a 1-2 hour period of wakefulness, and then a second sleep—a pattern called biphasic sleeping.
The Benefits of Heat and Cold
The authors also advise using heat therapy and cold therapy as a way to prevent the onset of disease and pain.
For heat therapy, they recommend using a sauna for about 20 minutes a few times a week at a temperature of 163 degrees Fahrenheit, noting that it reduces the risk of premature death from all causes by 40%. It also reduces the risk of heart disease, dementia, arthritis, depression, and stroke.
(Shortform note: Not everyone has access to a sauna, but a hot bath can provide some of the same benefits. Research suggests that sitting in a bath at 102 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour can lower blood pressure and blood sugar and have similar cardiovascular benefits as an hour of cycling. It can also help the body fight infections like COVID-19 by artificially inducing a fever.)
For cold therapy, they recommend whole-body cryotherapy, which involves spending just two or three minutes in a chamber filled with gas as cold as negative 240 degrees Fahrenheit with almost no clothing. This provides a shock to the system that dramatically reduces pain and inflammation. The authors also say that you can use ice plunges if you don’t have access to a cryotherapy chamber. This involves submerging your body in ice water for two minutes and achieves some of the same results as whole-body cryotherapy.
(Shortform note: In The Wim Hof Method, Wim Hof describes his approach of using cold exposure to condition and treat the body. Famous for climbing Mount Everest while wearing shorts, Hof recommends cold exposure through ice baths or cold showers to stimulate your body’s circulatory system and lower your heart rate and stress hormones. Cold showers may be a better option for people who don’t have access to cryotherapy chambers or bathtubs large enough for complete submersion in ice water.)
Diagnostic Testing: Catching Illnesses Early
In addition to their tips for a healthy lifestyle, the authors explain how diagnostic testing can help you prevent illnesses or catch them at the early stages when they are most treatable. They recommend several tests, including one for heart disease and one for cancer, and they also recommend testing your hormones and levels of heavy metals in your blood. Let’s look at these different tests.
The authors recommend you get a coronary computed tomography angiography, or CCTA, a type of heart scan that shows plaque in your arteries. A new method of this testing created by a company called Cleerly uses artificial intelligence to distinguish between types of plaque, some of which are more harmful than others and can be early indicators of heart disease.
(Shortform note: Other tests are being designed that use AI to analyze CCTA scans to predict heart attacks: Researchers at the University of Oxford have created a test that uses heart scans to create a “fingerprint” of the space around your heart that can then be analyzed to identify potential signs of a heart attack. This test can predict heart attacks up to five years before they occur.)
The authors also recommend a yearly full-body MRI combined with a comprehensive blood test to detect cancer, noting that the survival rate for early-detected cancer is nearly 90% while the survival rate for late-detected cancer is just over 20%. The blood test they recommend is called Galleri, developed by a company called GRAIL. Prior to the development of this test, we were only able to detect a few types of cancer before they began causing problems in a patient’s system, but this test can detect more than 50 different types of cancer, and the handful of types it can’t detect—such as brain or kidney cancer—can be detected with a full-body MRI.
(Shortform note: While the Galleri test can often successfully detect cancer, recent data has shown a high rate of false positives for the test. Fewer than half of those who received positive results in 2021 actually had cancer. In the majority of these cases, follow-up tests confirmed a lack of cancer before any treatment began, but about a third of those with false positive results had invasive treatments before it was discovered that they were already cancer-free.)
You should also get your blood tested to assess your hormone levels and the presence of heavy metals in your blood. Testing your hormones annually can help you identify and compensate for irregularities through hormone replacement therapy or hormone optimization therapy.
(Shortform note: You can also help balance your hormones through lifestyle changes. Eating plenty of protein, fiber, and healthy fats, exercising regularly, maintaining a healthy weight, and keeping your stress levels low can all contribute to better hormone levels.)
Hormones are key to numerous bodily functions, but hormone levels begin to drop in early middle age. This negatively impacts your energy levels, your muscle mass, your fertility, your physical appearance, your blood sugar, your body’s inflammatory response, and your ability to concentrate, among many other things.
(Shortform note: Major hormonal changes inconsistent with aging can be an indicator of other conditions such as tumors that form on your hormonal glands, damage to endocrine glands from surgery or illness, or autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s disease or Graves’ disease. If you notice a significant shift in your hormones that can’t be explained by aging or other factors, consider speaking to your doctor about other causes.)
Finally, you should test your blood for toxic metals such as mercury, which can cause memory issues, exhaustion, and ultimately death. Fish often contain mercury, and if you have a diet high in fish you may be at increased risk for mercury poisoning.
(Shortform note: The authors mainly discuss mercury poisoning, but other metals that can cause poisoning include lead, arsenic, chromium, aluminum, cobalt, copper, and thallium. Some metals like iron, zinc, and manganese are found naturally in your body and are necessary for its functioning, but they can become toxic if you accumulate too much.)
Tapping Into Your Body’s Defenses With Medical Technologies
Your body is born with an array of natural defenses against illness and injury, but these defenses can weaken with age or as a result of mutations. Making healthy lifestyle choices helps keep these defenses strong, but our advancing technology offers other ways to enhance them as well. Let’s look at some of these technologies.
Immunotherapy to Target Cancer Cells
The authors explain that a new immunotherapy treatment called CAR T cell therapy helps our immune systems better target cancer cells. Your body’s immune system is your number one defense against illness. A young, healthy immune system uses T cells to detect and fight off viruses, infections, and precancerous cells, but as we age our immune systems become weaker and more susceptible to these attackers. This can lead to increased susceptibility to illness in general, but it especially increases the risk for autoimmune diseases like leukemia.
(Shortform note: Autoimmune diseases are conditions where the body fails to distinguish between its own healthy cells and foreign cells, resulting in an immune response that attacks the body itself. Approximately 20% of Americans suffer from an autoimmune disorder, three-quarters of whom are women. Factors that may increase the risk of developing an autoimmune disease include smoking, obesity, and certain medications.)
CAR T cell therapy allows us to reinforce our immune systems through personalized medicines that direct the body’s defenses to attack cancer cells with a precision that other cancer treatments like chemotherapy don’t have. CAR—or chimeric antigen receptor—T cells are modified immune cells made from a patient’s own tissues. CAR T cell therapy is extremely effective in fighting leukemia—a liquid cancer—but it has little impact on solid cancers, which are the cause of nine out of ten deaths from cancer in the US.
(Shortform note: The difference between liquid and solid cancers is that liquid cancers affect bone marrow and are circulated throughout the body via your bloodstream, while solid cancers are masses of tissue that don’t circulate through the body. Unlike solid cancers, liquid cancers like leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma can’t be treated with surgery and require treatments such as chemotherapy or T cell therapy.)
Gene Therapy to Cure Genetic Diseases
The authors also discuss a cure for genetic diseases called gene therapy. Gene therapy is a process that uses viruses to replace mutated, illness-causing DNA in the body’s cells with healthy DNA. The injected virus containing the healthy DNA attaches itself to the patient’s cells and causes them to start replicating that healthy DNA, eliminating the mutation that was causing the disease.
Another type of treatment using genes is gene editing, which allows scientists to edit DNA within cells. An editing protein called CRISPR-Cas9 locates the DNA that needs to be edited and snips out the portion of it that’s causing problems. Its ability to locate the affected DNA also makes it an excellent diagnostic tool for rapidly detecting diseases, including cancer and viral infections such as COVID-19. Gene editing is a newer technology than gene therapy, and research is underway to discover more editing proteins to expand our options in what diseases we treat and how.
Challenges and Advances in Gene Therapy
Breakthroughs continue to be made in the fields of gene therapy and gene editing, but the high costs of research are placing a bottleneck on development. While it already costs, on average, over $2.5 billion to bring a new drug to market, the unique nature of gene therapy treatments raises the average cost to $5 billion.
These high development costs translate into extremely high costs for treatment as well. In nations with nationalized healthcare, governments are struggling to foot the bills of these therapies that can cost millions of dollars per treatment. In America, gene therapies are often covered by insurance but the free market nature of the healthcare industry leaves insurers unable to negotiate for lower prices.
Despite the costs, gene therapy continues to advance, with recent developments including cures for spinal muscular atrophy, inherited retinal disease, and large B-cell lymphoma. Further research may yield cures for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and hemophilia. Gene editing recently saw a breakthrough that could rapidly accelerate further research: Human-derived proteins called zinc fingers may provide a safer alternative to CRISPR treatment, which uses bacteria-derived proteins that run the risk of triggering an immune response.
Stem Cell Therapy to Reverse Aging
The authors explain that we can use stem cell therapy to essentially rebuild our bodies. Stem cells are cells that can turn into any type of cell according to the body’s needs and can then continue to replicate themselves. They can repair damaged tissue and strengthen your immune system. As we age, we begin to exhaust our supply of stem cells. When injected, stem cells can replace older, damaged cells and reduce our biological age.
(Shortform note: Stem cell exhaustion is considered by some experts to be one of the nine reasons we age. They suggest that reframing our medical treatment model away from one that focuses on infectious disease and toward one that focuses on aging will be more effective at preventing both infectious and age-related disease and extending people’s lifespans.)
One method of stem cell therapy involves extracting a patient’s own stem cells from their adipose tissue or bone marrow. However, the authors explain that this method is invasive and unreliable. They instead highlight placental stem cells, those derived from fresh placentas after a healthy birth. These cells are of the highest quality because they haven’t been exposed to toxins or damage from UV rays or tobacco and because they include supercharged immune cells that fight cancer. Unfortunately, they have yet to receive FDA approval. Robbins explains how three days of treatment with stem cells from umbilical cords—which he describes as second-best to placental stem cells—cured him of back pain that had plagued him for 14 years.
(Shortform note: Some critics have noted that Robbins’s description of his stem cell therapy as a total cure for his back pain fails to account for the other pain-reduction techniques he was using. They also propose that adipose-derived stem cells are more effective and accessible than Robbins suggests and that their efficacy as a treatment shouldn’t be dismissed. Currently, stem cells derived from umbilical cords are the only FDA-approved stem cell treatment, and they’re only approved for treatment of blood disorders.)
Methods to Eliminate and Manage Pain
The authors discuss several methods of pain management, some of which helped Robbins deal with his own pain, which included decades of back and spinal issues, a torn rotator cuff, and intense growth pains from an overactive pituitary gland.
Robbins explains one of the most effective techniques he found for pain relief is a technology called pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, or PEMF. This involves delivering electrical pulses to the body using a specialized machine to stimulate the body’s natural healing abilities. Robbins says the machine also helps with his sleep and energy levels, and he found it so beneficial that he purchased his own machine to use every day.
(Shortform note: PEMF treatment is considered to be generally safe, though side effects may include a temporary increase in pain, lowered blood pressure, and dizziness. Experts don’t recommend it for people with conditions like pregnancy, heart disease, or epilepsy. Alternative treatments that can provide similar benefits include acupuncture, massage therapy, and yoga.)
The authors also recommend postural therapy, a type of physical therapy designed to restore alignment to the body as a way to treat injuries and chronic pain. They specifically discuss the Egoscue Method, a set of exercises developed by Vietnam War veteran Pete Egoscue to treat the severe nerve pain he incurred from his combat wounds. These exercises take just a few minutes and focus on keeping your body balanced and your posture in alignment.
(Shortform note: Postural therapy works off the premise that the way we hold our bodies determines how we feel. Treatment involves identifying problem areas and implementing exercises that, over the course of two to four months, train the body to maintain optimal posture and alignment. Postural therapy is intended to be a long-term or permanent solution to pain, and it is considered to be safe for people of all ages, including children.)
Additionally, the authors discuss a therapy called counterstrain that involves repositioning the body to target inflammation and relax the body’s overactive protective reflexes. This therapy can treat not only inflamed muscle, but also organs, nerves, and even bone. It’s performed by a practitioner who massages the body to find trigger points, then manually stimulates those trigger points to release inflammation. It differs from massage in that it focuses on the source of the inflammation instead of just the muscle pain that results from inflammation.
(Shortform note: Counterstrain therapy, also known as postural release therapy, works in the opposite way that stretching does. While both stretching and counterstrain are focused on releasing kinks or knots in the body’s tissues, stretching does so by lengthening the tissue, which can inadvertently cause muscles to stiffen and the pain to worsen. Counterstrain instead induces a position that shortens the tissue, gently allowing it to relax and loosening the knots in the tissue.)
Ongoing Innovations in Regenerative Medicine
Robbins, Diamandis, and Hariri also investigate some innovations that are currently underway that could revolutionize the medical field and help reverse aging. This includes technology that uses the body’s pathways to direct cell production, a company that’s working towards growing human organs for transplantation, artificial intelligence technology that could create personalized drugs, and microscopic robots that can be deployed into a person’s body to fight disease head-on.
Using the Body’s Wnt Pathway
The authors explain how a company called Biosplice is working on using a natural biochemical pathway in the body called the Wnt signaling pathway to essentially reverse aging by restoring any part of the body that’s damaged. This pathway tells your stem cells to make new cells and tissue that physically replenish your body. As we age, our Wnt signaling pathway becomes distorted by toxins and poor lifestyle choices, and our stem cells start producing too much of some tissues and too little of others, resulting in illness.
Biosplice is creating medicinal molecules that interact with this pathway to tell specific stem cells to create more or less tissue based on what the body needs and restore the body’s natural balance. Phase 3 trials for their drug Lorecivivint as treatment for osteoarthritis are currently underway.
The Wnt Pathway and Synthetic Molecules
The Wnt signaling pathway has been biologically conserved over many millennia and is present in all animals. It’s activated by naturally occurring molecules called Wnt proteins that produce different effects—including the formation of organs, changes to the behavior of cells, and the patterning of neurons—depending on which of the 19 Wnt proteins are secreted and which branches of the pathway are activated. Because they are highly hydrophobic (unable to be mixed with or dissolved in water), it’s difficult to manufacture synthetic Wnt proteins.
However, Lorecivivint’s phase 3 trials continue to show promise for long-term osteoarthritis relief, though they have yet to receive FDA approval. The company is also working to develop a drug called cirtuvivint, a cancer treatment that would target solid tumors. It is currently in phase 1 trials. Additionally, Biosplice is working on a novel type of drug that would fight liquid cancers.
Growing Human Organs
According to the authors, a company called United Therapeutics is working toward the ability to grow and 3D-print organs for transplantation. They note that there are over 100,000 people in America currently waiting for an organ transplant and that most of them will never get one. Scientists are currently working on using pigs—a species whose organs happen to be of similar size and shape to humans’—to replicate organs for humans, and they’re using CRISPR gene editing technology to edit the organs’ genes so that they won’t be rejected if transplanted into a human host.
(Shortform note: United Therapeutics received FDA approval to use their genetically altered pigs for potential therapeutic purposes in 2020. In 2021, they achieved the first successful transplant of a genetically altered pig’s heart into a human without the heart being immediately rejected by the host. While some experts doubt pig organs will ever be as effective as human organs, they suggest that the greater availability of organs will at least make it easier to get on organ transplant lists, which are currently reserved for people with the highest likelihood of recovery.)
However, since organs can still be rejected long after transplantation—resulting in recipients having to take immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives—the company is also working toward growing organs from scratch from a patient’s own cells so there would be no risk of rejection and no need for immunosuppressants.
(Shortform note: Organ transplant rejection occurs because the body recognizes foreign antigens—proteins present in toxic substances—and triggers the immune system to fight them. Doctors already have to take measures to mitigate the risk of organ transplant rejection, including matching patients with donors whose tissues are as similar to the recipient’s as possible. No two people’s tissues will match perfectly except in identical twins. While all organ recipients experience some degree of transplant rejection, immunosuppressants can keep the rejection from becoming so severe that the organ fails or has to be removed.)
Creating Personalized Drugs With AI
The authors describe how artificial intelligence technology could be used in the near future to create personalized drugs for any given illness. Researchers are developing generative adversarial networks (GANs), technologies designed to take a description of a drug (for example, "a compound that does X") and come up with a molecule that would fit those characteristics. It currently takes billions of dollars and many years to bring new drugs to the market, but using GANs could revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry and allow researchers to bring drugs to market much more quickly than the traditional method. AI’s predictive algorithms could even be used to predict the results of clinical trials, reducing the need for these costly and time-consuming tests as well.
Other Applications of GANs
Generative adversarial networks have created a new wave of innovation in generative AI, or what’s now known as artificial imagination. AI is capable of creating realistic images and text. Here’s how this works: GANs consist of two neural networks, each of which performs a distinct function. One is a generator, which is fed real data. It analyzes that data and generates new, fake data samples. These samples are then processed by the second network, a discriminator, which is responsible for filtering out examples that are clearly fake. The samples it doesn’t filter out are accurate enough to appear real.
This is what enables art AI generators, for example, to take a text description (original data) and turn it into generated images that look real enough to have been created by a human.
Repairing the Body With Microbots
Finally, the authors describe a new technology that uses remote-controlled microbots to travel to specific locations in the body to release targeted drug treatments with surgical precision. This could eliminate the need for treatments like chemotherapy, which attacks the entire body. Researchers are hoping to use these bots in the near future to detect and treat illnesses like degenerative brain diseases. Further in the future, these bots may become small enough to manipulate the body at the atomic level.
(Shortform note: A recent breakthrough in the production of microbots may greatly accelerate the technology’s development. A recently devised new production method allows scientists to produce over 100 microbots per minute, which is 10,000 times faster than they were able to produce them previously. In addition to delivering medicines, scientists have also developed a method of using microbots to deliver stem cells to a specific part of the body, where the microbot would then dissolve and the stem cell would stay in place and begin performing its intended function.)
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