Richard Rossi, DaVinci 50: Why People Say No to a Longer Life

Ask most people whether they would want to live to 200 and they say no almost before you finish the sentence. Richard Rossi has heard that answer enough times to know what is actually underneath it, and he breaks it into three fears: running out of money, running out of purpose, and running out of friends.

Not one of those is a fear of living. They are all fears of outliving.

That is where this conversation went, and it is not where I expected it to go when I sat down with the man who built the longevity group Kathy and I ended up joining.

Who Is Richard Rossi?

Richard is the founder of DaVinci 50, which everyone inside it just calls D50. It is a private longevity mastermind capped at fifty individuals or couples. He started it in 2020, after roughly thirty-five years of putting high achievers in rooms together. Before longevity, he co-founded InVision EMI in 1986, which grew into one of the largest providers of live leadership and career programs for high-achieving students in the country. He sold that business in 2011.

He is also exactly my age. Seventy-one. That mattered to me more than anything on his resume, because it means the two of us are making the same bet with the same amount of time left on the clock.

D50 runs as a family operation. His daughter organizes the events. His wife handles the relationships in the room. I was introduced to Richard by Paul Colgan, an old podcasting friend, and Kathy and I joined not long after. I wrote about that when it happened.

The Three Reasons People Do Not Want to Live Longer

This is the part of the interview I keep coming back to.

Running out of money. Nobody wants another forty years if they are forty years of being broke. Extra time is only appealing if you can pay for it.
Running out of purpose. Most people build a life around a career and then retire out of it. Take away the reason to get up and a longer life sounds like a longer wait.
Running out of friends. Live long enough and you start burying the people you know. Richard's answer to this one is deliberate and I have adopted it: keep making friends who are younger than you are, on purpose, forever.

None of those three is a medical problem. That is the thing worth sitting with. We spend all our attention on the biology of staying alive and almost none on whether the life waiting at the other end is one anybody would want.

No Hammer and No Nail

Richard's phrase for how D50 handles protocols, and it is the reason I trust the room. If your whole career is stem cells, stem cells fix everything. If it is peptides, peptides fix everything. Specialists arrive holding a hammer and the world obligingly turns into nails.

D50 takes no position on any single modality. It brings in the people doing the work, lets them present, and lets the members argue about it. For someone like me, running experiments on myself and writing down what happens, that is worth more than any one guru would be.

What a D50 Event Actually Looks Like

I have been to a lot of conferences over forty years in business, and this is the best-run format I have seen. I attended in Sundance, Utah.

Individual desks instead of banquet rounds, with treadmill desks available if you ask.
Your name lit up on your desk, and a personal microphone at every seat, so asking a question does not involve chasing a runner around the room.
Long breaks between speakers, which is where the actual value is.
Speakers who stay for the whole event instead of presenting and leaving.
Evening socials, so the conversations that start at the break get to finish.

Here is the measure that convinced me. I have never been anywhere else where every single person I asked to come on the show handed me a personal phone number.

What We Cover in This Episode

Why Richard started D50 in the first place: the group he wanted to join did not exist.
The three fears that make people say no to a longer life, and what to do about each one.
Why he deliberately builds friendships with people decades younger.
The no hammer and no nail principle, and why a mastermind should not have a house doctrine.
How the events are structured, and why the breaks matter as much as the speakers.
Who D50 is actually for, and why he cheerfully says it is right for almost nobody.
Running a longevity business as a family, with his daughter and wife both in it.

Can You Join?

Mostly by referral, and always with a conversation first. Richard calls it the mastermind that is right for almost no one, and he means it as a filter rather than a boast. It takes time, money, and force of will, and if you are short on any of the three it will not work for you.

The site is d50.fyi. He also sends out a weekly email with the five biggest longevity stories of the week, and he gives it to anyone who asks, member or not. On the show he said to just email him at richard@d50.live and ask for it. I read mine every week.

Go Deeper

Two previous guests connect to this one. Dr. Bill Andrews told me D50 was one of the best things a person could join, and that he had thought about joining himself. And Elizabeth Parrish, whose gene therapy episode is still the most watched thing I have made, is someone I met at a D50 event in the first place. That is what the room does.

The Part About Falling

Balance came up before almost anything else, and Richard puts it in the same bucket as the things your doctor would tell you. His own drill is standing on one foot with his eyes closed and stretching out the seconds. He also noted that Mick Jagger does ballet three times a week to keep his.

Then he said the thing I keep repeating to people. He hired a judo expert to teach him how to fall — because much of the damage comes from not knowing how to land, and there is a way to drop and roll that turns a broken hip into a bruise. Learn to prevent the fall, and learn to fall.

I had my own reasons for pushing on this one. Last August I could not walk a straight line for four feet without falling over. I now do fifty feet of it every morning. The drill is heel-to-toe walking, and it takes about a minute.

Want to see the rest of what I do? Here is my full protocol list, my fitness routine, and every biomarker I track.

Another D50 speaker is heading my way: Dr. Michael Roizen, who invented the RealAge test, is coming on the show next. I am collecting reader questions for him now.

Stay sovereign, stay healthy,

Gary

A note from Gary: I am not a doctor, and I am definitely not your doctor. I am a 71-year-old running a 129-year experiment on myself and publishing the results as they come. Talk to your physician before changing anything about your own health.

Applications Are Open

The 200 Year Life Mastermind

If you would rather do this alongside other people than alone, I am opening a small group. One year, live on Zoom, working through the protocols together.

See the Details →