Exclusive: The other "Peter" in the Epstein files, and what that says about the longevity industry
XPrize founder Peter Diamandis asked Jeffrey Epstein "to connect and catch up" while the convicted sex offender was still in jail for procuring a child for prostitution.
Peter Attia isn’t the only notable longevity-wellness industry figure—or the only Peter—who went out his way to cultivate a relationship with registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution.
Peter Diamandis, the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation (slogan: “a future of equity and abundance for all”) and the co-founder of a longevity clinic that charges more than $10,000 for its most basic membership, cultivated a connection to Epstein over several years, Department of Justice documents show.
“It’s been a while since we chatted,” Diamandis, a Harvard-trained doctor and serial entrepreneur with a long interest in extending human lifespan, wrote to Epstein in April 2009, while Epstein was incarcerated in Florida. “I’d love to connect and catch-up,” he added. “Are you in NYC or Florida these days?”
Diamandis’s documented relationship to Epstein, spanning several years, has not been previously reported.
Their mutual interest in meeting continued after Epstein’s prison term ended. “Jeffrey wants you to please contact him whenever you come to New York….he would love to get together,” Epstein’s assistant wrote to Diamandis in May 2013.
Diamandis, who is 67, replied the same day, asking his assistant to “figure out when I’m next in NYC & schedule time with Jeffrey.” In June 2014, Diamandis was scheduled to see Epstein for an hour-long meeting, these documents show. Epstein later wrote to another acquaintance about Diamandis: “know him well.”
Whether that June 2014 meeting took place, and the extent of any relationship the two men may have maintained after that time, is not clear from the Epstein-related emails reviewed by AGING with STRENGTH. Only a fraction of the 268 documents in the government’s Epstein files that include Diamandis’s name are personal correspondences between the men or their assistants. Many of the 268 are versions of the same emails.
Who is Peter Diamandis and why did he cultivate Epstein?
If Peter Attia is the celebrity doctor with long wait list, Peter Diamandis is the opportunistic clinic administrator looking for 100 more Attias.
Unlike Attia, Peter Diamandis doesn’t operate on a clinical level but rather as an investor and platform builder, founding the XPrize Foundation and Singularity University and speaking often about finding a cure for aging. Diamandis entered the longevity space through his 2022 book, Life Force, co-authored by Tony Robbins, with whom he also co-founded the chain of ultra-high-end longevity clinics that offer advanced diagnostics like full-body MRIs and genomic testing to wealthy clients.
What the the Justice Department documents don’t clarify is why Diamandis spent years cultivating, responding to and making himself available to meet with one of the most morally repugnant figures in America. But, as with Attia’s motivations, they aren’t that difficult to imagine.
Epstein’s role in the longevity-wellness industrial complex
Given Attia’s ardent Epstein fanboyism (which Dr. Jen Gunter artfully exposed in her Jan. 31 post) and Diamandis’s clueless attempt to “catch up” with the sex offender and child trafficker while he remained assigned to a Florida jail cell, it doesn’t take an XPrize winner to divine their common purpose: extracting a fraction of Epstein’s extreme wealth, and that of the people in his network, for themselves.
“[L]ongevity as a cultural movement has an uncomfortable history of attracting extreme ideas, obscene wealth, and awful people. “
— Dr. Jen Gunter, The Vajenda, Jan. 31, 2026
A market worth billions, and egomaniacal me-first entrepreneurs
The overall longevity market, encompassing complementary and alternative medicines, gene sequencing, and anti-aging therapies and products, generated $65 billion in revenue in 2023 and is projected to reach $314 billion by 2030.1
The two Peters were hardly the only money- or power-hungry personalities in the booming longevity-wellness industrial complex to sacrifice their integrity by associating with Epstein.
So did Bryan Johnson, the wax-skinned tech bro who’s attempting to reverse aging by spending his life focused on himself, avoiding food and transfusing his son’s blood. So did Katie Couric, who attended (now former) Prince Andrew’s birthday party at Epstein’s New York City home—along with Woody Allen and Charlie Rose—17 months after he was released from prison. So did Deepak Chopra, who met with Epstein at least 12 times between 2016 and late 2018, during which time Chopra published two NYT best-selling self-help books, including “The Healing Self: A Revolutionary New Plan to Supercharge Your Immunity and Stay Well for Life.” So did George Church, a Harvard genetics professor and longevity business entrepreneur who, along with two Harvard colleagues, proposed Epstein fund a “pleasure genome initiative” exploring neural correlates of pleasure, and who shared meals with Epstein as late as 2014.
And the list goes on. But before we move on, let’s contemplate for one more moment the mindset, values and emotional intelligence of three Harvard scientists who apparently believed that asking a convicted sex offender to underwrite a pleasure genome project was a winning idea.
(Each of the above names has a unique, professionally vetted excuse for why his or her interaction with Epstein wasn’t that big of a deal.)
A few thoughts on Peter Attia’s relationship to Epstein
What distinguishes Attia’s relationship with Epstein from all the others is that:
his name is found throughout the Justice Department’s latest data dump—more than 1,700 times, far more than Diamandis or Chopra.
he wrote to Epstein with classless chauvinism (“pussy is, indeed, low carb”)
he has wrestled with deep emotional issues that he described with admirable candor in his best-selling 2023 book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
Yesterday, Attia, who is 52, posted a lengthy statement on X (fitting, considering Elon owns the often vile, increasingly toxic platform and is also featured in Epstein’s emails) to his staff, explaining his relationship with Epstein and not attempting to defend his crude sexualized remarks. You can read Attia’s statement here.
The cancellations begin
Attia, who CBS News just hired a week ago as a special health-wellness-longevity guru-slash-correspondent, is not expected to hold that job for much longer. For many people, the Epstein revelations were the disappointing icing on the proverbial cake—a layer cake of Attia product affiliations (like the idiotically overpriced David protein bar, which until Monday had paid Attia to be its chief science officer) and business ventures (like his high-end longevity clinic chain, Biograph, which he launched from stealth with a venture capitalist a year ago) that create irredeemable conflicts of interest.
The heartbreaking failure
Then there’s the most damning, heartbreaking Attia failure of all, which he himself disclosed on page 379 of his book, in a chapter titled “Work in Progress”: In July 2017, during a business trip to New York, Attia received a panicked call from his wife: their one-month-old son had stopped breathing and nearly died before being revived with CPR, and was in an ambulance to the ICU. His wife pleaded with him to come home. But instead, Attia wrote, he stayed in New York—for another 10 days—because of what he called “important” (his quotes) work.
That work, it turns out, involved a few meetings with Epstein, according to the time stamps on Attia’s emails released by the government. He chose that work over his family—his desperate, fragile family in a world of pain. It’s hard to fathom.
What happens next?
Peter Attia is almost certainly now in the process of disappearing, voluntarily or otherwise, from our collective longevity consciousness. At least for the time being. (Peter Diamandis may lose a few speaking engagements but, unfortunately, is not likely to disappear, is my guess.) Does that mean that Attia’s book, Outlive, which contains a lot of objectively valuable explanatory and clinical information about living better for longer, should no longer be read or discussed, due to the extreme failures of its author?
At a time when the United States is governed by an intentionally deceitful, thuggishly violent regime that is willing to lie to its constituents to preserve its prestige, time will tell.
https://apexleaders.com/trend-reports/the-fast-growing-longevity-industry-holds-strong-promise-for-investors/
Excellent reporting and analysis, Paul. The Epstein affair is a profound and ongoing moral failure. Those who sought proximity to him for status or advantage bear responsibility for enabling that environment and should be judged accordingly. But the conduct of physicians who associated with him is particularly troubling, given the ethical obligations of our profession. I deeply appreciated @erictopol's response to Peter Attia which addressed this issue directly and explicitly challenged Attia's hucksterism. It's just one more example of the ongoing decay in pubic trust.
I found Attia about 3 years ago, just before Outlive was published. As a 77 year old at that time, I found a lot of good info which inspired me to improve my fitness. I also found stuff that made no sense. As with everything I read on the health space and other areas, I took what made sense and used it. The rest I discarded. Because of his disgusting Epstein entanglement, especially the family issues with his son, does that mean I should be discard what is of value? Unfortunately he and lots of other longevity gurus have achieved almost God like stature. Perhaps this will cause some to question their undying loyalty to those on the pedestal. But in our 30 second tik Tok world, I have my doubts as tomorrow we'll be on to the next worst thing. Great article as usual, much appreciated.