10/26/2025: On the Brink, Dr. Attia Will See You Now, The Mentalist

0:07Since last month, the US military has been blowing up speedboats in the waters off Venezuela in what what it calls a counter-narcotics operation. But the growing military buildup in the region suggests there may be another target, Venezuela's dictator. If I was a man through, I'd head to Russia or China right now. Because? His days are numbered. Something's going to happen. Tonight, a rare look inside Venezuela. It's not often that 60 Minutes does a story on a physician who has fewer than 75 patients. But Dr. Peter Atiyah is a star in the growing field of longevity medicine who has attracted millions of followers and billionaire patients willing to pay six figures to see him.

0:57That's a lot of money. I mean, what do you get for that? A path to help you achieve your goal of living longer and living better. Tonight, we go inside the mind of mentalist Oz Perlman, who gets into people's heads by telling them exactly what they are thinking. Why would I tell you that on the air? In June, Oz guessed Joe Rogan's ATM pin code, leaving the podcaster befuddled. How'd I do, Joe? Is that your ATM pin code? Yeah. He looked like he wanted to punch you. I think so. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Nora O'Donnell.

1:41I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories and in our last minute, viewer mail tonight on 60 Minutes.

1:54we always recommend shopify it took us from an idea to a real business we got set up i think in less than a day with very little effort we could just focus on the supply chains of the product development shopify gives us the ability to customize without the complexity we can change something without introducing fragility or having to pay a developer we're thirsty turtle and we leveled up our business with Shopify. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash au. Over the past few weeks, the long, frosty relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela reached a boiling point. The United States launched a series of strikes against vessels alleged to be carrying drugs, calling it a counter-narcotics mission.

2:40But the growing military buildup of American forces in the region suggests there may be another target. — President Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator who's been in America's crosshairs for years. This summer, the U.S. Justice Department announced a$50 million reward for information leading to Maduro's arrest, accusing him of being a drug kingpin. On Friday, the Trump administration escalated its military campaign, sending the world's largest aircraft carrier to the region. But not much has been seen or heard from people inside Venezuela. Earlier this month, we obtained a rare visa from the Maduro government, packed our bags for Caracas, and found a country on the brink.

3:26A patchwork of stacked cinderblock homes cling to the hillsides of Caracas. Instability isn't just an architectural feature in Venezuela. It's a way of life. We saw it at a busy market. There was heated haggling over prices and anxious whispers about the American ships off the coast. Are you afraid of the Americans or are you afraid about speaking about it?

3:55One feels nervous and anxious, he said. We don't want anything to happen. This woman chimed in. The Venezuelan people shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of its president. Just then, off camera, a man told her, you can't say that. Who provided you with this space to work? He was wearing a hat with an emblem of the government's civilian military force. What do you think about what's going on off the coast? It's an abusive tactic from America, he said. We're a sovereign country. F-35 fighter jets, eight U.S. warships, and an estimated 10 ,000 U.S. troops are now in the Caribbean with more on the way.

4:40Does it feel like something's about to happen? Yes, she said. It feels very, very heavy. The weight of uncertainty and the rumble of armored vehicles can be felt throughout the country. An estimated 125 ,000 members of Venezuela's military have mobilized. While we were there, the government was holding emergency drills and urging civilians to prepare for combat. It's all a bit of theater and a response to this. Since September, the U.S. military has blown up at least 10 vessels, killing more than three dozen alleged drug smugglers, most of them off the coast of Venezuela. What I can say is that I've used this phrase before.

5:28This is like cooking an egg with a blowtorch. F-35s, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, submarines aren't normally what we need to go after small boats, fishing boats. Ambassador James Story was the last American diplomat at the now-closed U.S. Embassy in Venezuela. He says the show of U.S. force is likely intended to oust Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's dictator. This is a very bad actor sitting on top of the world's largest known reserves of oil, plus the critical minerals that will fuel the 21st century economy, and he's in bed with our strategic competitors. And how has he been able to cling to power for as long as he has?

6:16I mean, let's be very clear. This is a criminal organization masquerading as a government. This is an individual who is under indictment for narcotics trafficking, commits human rights violations. Someone who has used the apparatus of the state to throw people in jail, to torture them, to kill them. In January, the Trump administration briefly engaged with Maduro's government, negotiating a deal for the release of six U.S. prisoners arrested while visiting the country. And for the resumption of flights carrying Venezuelans deported from the United States back to their country. But in August, the olive branch snapped.

6:55Today, the Department of Justice... U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that staggering reward for Maduro's arrest, $50 million. Which is why we were stunned when, after months of negotiations, Maduro agreed to do an interview with us. Maduro's ministers chose the time and place, the ballroom of a busy hotel in Caracas. But minutes before the interview was finally set to begin, it was called off. We were told the president's minister of defense and head of intelligence said it was no longer safe to do the interview. Maduro has been defiant for months, despite the bounty on his head, openly challenging the U.S.

7:38and its accusations against him in front of crowds of supporters. After he bagged our interview, we thought perhaps he was packing his bags. So we just hopped into a taxi cab in Caracas because we were told that President Maduro has just appeared at a rally in central Caracas for an Indigenous People's Day event, which is apparently being held on the middle of a highway. And he is surrounded by hundreds of people. This is two days after he canceled his interview with us. Maduro urged the crowd to defend the republic, but privately he was making concessions. Last week, President Trump confirmed reports that President Maduro offered the U.S.

8:20a stake in the country's oil to avoid conflict. He has offered everything. He's offered everything. You're right. You know why? Because he doesn't want to f*** around with the United States. Maduro has repeatedly called U.S. accusations that he oversees a narco state, quote, disinformation. Most fentanyl is produced in Mexico or China. And according to the DEA, Venezuela is not a major producer of cocaine either. But it is a transit route for it. On Thursday, Maduro appealed for peace in English. Not war. Not war. Not war. Just peace. Just peace. Just peace. As a gesture of goodwill, Venezuela is still accepting planes full of deportees from the U.S.

9:08Maduro frames their return as a triumph, repatriating Venezuelans from harsh conditions in U.S. detention. But most of the deportees we saw told us they felt defeated. We were with this four-year-old girl as she was escorted off a plane by a government minister. And how long have they been apart? Four months. Four months. And taken into a room where a crush of state TV and her family were waiting. Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida says Maduro should hop on a one-way flight himself. If I was Maduro, I'd head to Russia or China right now. Because? His days are numbered. Something's going to happen.

9:47Whether it's internal or external, I think something's going to happen. The firepower that's off the coast, right, this is our armada, this is a lot of U.S. forces. Are we about to invade Venezuela? I don't think so. I mean, if we do, I'd be surprised. Earlier this month, President Trump announced he approved covert CIA operations inside Venezuela. What do you think removing Maduro would signal to other socialist regimes in the end? It'll be the end of Cuba. Cuba relies on subsidized Venezuelan oil to prop up its economy. America is going to take care of the southern hemisphere. And we're going to make sure that there's freedom and democracy.

10:31Freedom isn't the only thing in short supply in Venezuela. Hunger, chronic blackouts, and a scarcity of essential medicines plague the country. Today, more than 70 % of residents live in poverty. It is a stunning reversal of fortune for a nation that was once one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Venezuela's economy was crippled by disastrous socialist policies and mismanagement. A crisis exacerbated by 20 years of U.S. sanctions imposed in direct response to the regime's anti-democratic actions, human rights violations and corruption. That triggered triple-digit inflation and a humanitarian crisis.

11:15Back at the market in Caracas, this woman said the$50 a week that she earns isn't enough to feed her family and courageously answered this question. What do you think would happen if President Maduro was removed from office? Venezuela would change, she said. We would all be free. She told us she has plans to move to Spain in a few months. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the last decade, roughly one-fifth of its population. Most of those who remained hoped last year's presidential election would be a turning point. But even after tallies showed the opposition won nearly 70 percent of the vote, Maduro refused to leave, stealing the presidency.

12:04Protests were met with brutal crackdowns, which the U.N. says included jailing, torturing and even murder. We met Phil Gunson in Caracas. He's lived in Venezuela for 26 years and is a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization. Gunson is a rarity in Venezuela, an expert willing to speak openly about the government and Maduro's odds of surviving the current crisis. The asking price is Maduro's head. I mean, he has to go. And he's still going out to events in front of big crowds. Why is he not in a bunker? I think because the crowds are the defenseman. That's my suspicion.

12:49Once or twice lately, he's done something quite unusual, which is to hold his events in hotels. You know, the U.S. isn't going to kill him in a hotel, obviously. Gunson says even if Maduro steps aside, the transition to democracy would be bumpy at best. Maria Corina Machado, the opposition leader who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, has been in hiding for months, but has said she has a plan. There are reports to the opposition says they have this 100-hour plan with the Trump administration for a peaceful transition. Is there any guarantee that the transition will be peaceful? There's no guarantee at all.

13:29And in fact, one of the things that worries me most is that there's been no apparent negotiation with a key element in all of this story, which is the Venezuelan armed forces. If the Venezuelan armed forces don't go along with this, and by the armed forces, I really you mean the high command, the people who give the orders, then there's a possibility perhaps the armed forces might split. There's a possibility they might oppose a new government coming in. He says well-armed Colombian guerrilla groups that Maduro allows to operate in Venezuela might also resist a change in power. Is there a scenario that the U.S.

14:06has to put boots on the ground to keep order? I can't see a scenario in which they wouldn't have to put boots on the ground. I mean, if the U.S. is responsible, it's kind of the pottery barn principle, isn't it? If you break it, you own it. You have to protect the government that you just put in power. And that means, I think, thousands of troops. But Senator Rick Scott doesn't think it will get to that point. If it all goes to hell, is the U.S. willing to put boots on the ground in Venezuela? Well, I think the American public is tired of forever wars right now. So I think it's very difficult for us to make a commitment that we're going to do something like that.

14:43But I do believe that internationally there would be troops that would go in if they needed to. In Washington, lawmakers are debating the legality of the U.S. military action. Some say the strikes amount to extrajudicial killings. The Trump administration insists they are lawful and self-defense. At the same time, Admiral Alvin Halsey, the head of U.S. Southern Command and the officer in charge of all Caribbean activity, suddenly announced his retirement, two years ahead of schedule, offering no public explanation and raising more questions about the Trump administration's plan. If the administration were to turn around all those warships and said, OK, we've done everything we need to do here, what would that mean for President Maduro?

15:30It would be an enormous political triumph for Maduro because he'd be able to say forever afterwards, you know, I stood up to the U.S. I stood up to the empire, as they call it, and the empire retreated.

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16:17Dr. Peter Atiyah spends a lot of time thinking about the last years of his life and yours, too. He's declared war on what he calls the marginal decade, the final years of life that are plagued by sickness and immobility. It's not often that 60 Minutes does a story on a physician who has fewer than 75 patients, but the Stanford-trained Atiyah has become both a pioneer and a star in the growing field of longevity medicine. His stark diagnosis and advice on what to do about it have attracted millions of followers and billionaire patients who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to hear the words, Dr.

17:00Atiyah, we'll see you now. At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff. At 75. At the population level, it's unmistakable what happens at the age of 75. That's what we're up against. That's what I'm thinking about in the practice, is how do I create an escape velocity that gets somebody another 15 years there. And so is your goal to minimize or essentially erase that marginal decade? The marginal decade is not going anywhere. We will all have a final decade of life. My goal is to make the marginal decade as enjoyable as possible. The way I explain it to my patients is that last 10 to 15 of your years, if you don't do anything about it, you will fall to a level of about 50 % of your total capacity, cognitively, physically.

17:48And when people hear that, you're like, I don't want to be that. That's not how I want to spend the last decade of my life. A lot of people respond that way as though they're hearing this for the first time. Although if you ask them, haven't you seen people in this state, they'll say, well, yeah, I guess I have. Right. Likely their own relatives. Sure. Their own parents even. So do you consider yourself a new kind of doctor? No, I don't think so. What we're doing is creating a framework that fits directly into this idea of how to train for the marginal decade. That training begins here in Austin, Texas, where Atiyah is based.

18:22This is where his patients go through two days of physical evaluation, and where we found, after just a few hours, how intense the 52-year-old doctor and his methods are. Just show me what you got. Just show me what you got. I think this is the neglected part of medical testing, is how fit are you? How strong are you? All right. How well do you move? And up overhead. And in many ways, these tests are even more predictive of how long you're going to live than what I might get out of your blood work. How do we know that? The data are pretty clear. When you look at things like cardiorespiratory fitness, when you look at muscle mass, when you look at strength, they have a much higher association than things like even cholesterol and blood pressure.

19:06Dr. Atiyah and his team say the key indicator of overall health and longevity… It's starting to roll now. VO2 in the mid-20s. is a test called VO2 max. Everything you got, everything you got. It sounds like the name of a sports car, but essentially it's a measurement of the size of someone's engine. Really good maximal test here. And their capacity to use oxygen to generate power with their muscles, heart, and lungs. There you go. That's the hardest part of your day done. Even though you say I scored fairly well on my VO2 max. There we go, 42.1. Okay, that's good. You said it's still not good enough for Dr.

19:48Peter Atiyah. Yes, your VO2 max was going to place you at the 85th percentile for women your age, and I think it's worth taking a victory lap. But tomorrow, we should come back and plan on what we're going to do. You think anyone, whether they're 45 or 65, should be training like athletes, not for the Olympics, but essentially for advanced age. Absolutely. Life is a sport. Dr. Atiyah says the best drug to delay physical and cognitive decline is exercise, and he takes it in large doses. He aims for about 10 hours a week, cardio to burn fat, intense intervals for VO2 max, and weightlifting to maintain strength and muscle mass.

20:38He developed his program after turning his back on the medical establishment nearly 20 years ago. While training to be a cancer surgeon at Johns Hopkins, he got burnt out caring for so many terminal patients. He quit his residency and became a management consultant. After becoming a father and discovering he was at risk of developing diabetes, he made big changes, personally and professionally. After my daughter was born, all I could think about was, oh my God, like, I want to have as much time as possible on this planet with this baby. That's when he decided to become his own first patient in a new specialty, longevity medicine.

21:23Today, he considers himself neither a primary care physician nor a provider of concierge care. We could quantify how that lowers your risk of cancer or heart disease. What Dr. Atiyah is prescribing is a radical change in how Americans think about their own health care, driven by the patient, focused on prevention, a practice he calls Medicine 3.0. We're dying of heart disease, we're dying from stroke, cancer, dementia, type 2 diabetes. And we, I think, have sort of come to realize that, hey, the playbook of Medicine 2.0, which is treat a disease when a disease is present, doesn't seem to work as well.

22:03And so the first principle of Medicine 3.0 is you have to take a much longer arc on the prevention of chronic disease. That means using existing diagnostic tools in novel ways. I'm going to have you lay down with your head facing that way, feet facing this way for me. Like the DEXA scan that checks bone density as well as muscle mass and body fat. It typically costs under$300, and Atiyah says it's, quote, almost criminal negligence. Most women don't get one until they're 65. Another scan he employs is more costly and not covered by insurance. There are certain things that you recommend that are controversial, like regular, preventive, full-body MRIs.

22:49Early detection matters. The earlier you can treat a cancer, the smaller the burden of the tumor at the time of treatment, the greater your odds of success. Now let's talk about the flip side of that, because it is going to detect a lot of things that are not cancer. That means you have a lot of false positives. If you're not willing to go through that experience, as traumatic as it is, you should not engage in this level of screening. Do you get them? I do. He also suggests patients get tested for the APOE gene, related to risk for Alzheimer's. In 2019, Dr. Atiyah oversaw genetic testing for actor Chris Hemsworth, who learned he was 8 to 10 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's than the average person.

23:39In total, Dr. Atiyah sees fewer than 75 patients, and there's a long waiting list. And how much does it cost? It is a six-figure program. Like$100 ,000 or$500 ,000 or$800 ,000? Because there's a big range. Much closer to$100 ,000 than$500 ,000. That's a lot of money. I mean, what do you get for that? You don't live forever. Nope. You're getting access to me, a team of a couple other physicians, a strength and conditioning team, a nutrition team. And what you're really getting is a path to help you achieve your goal of living longer and living better. Welcome, Dr. Peter Atiyah and Dr. Peter Atiyah.

24:21The pitch has proved extremely popular. This is kind of a turning point. His book, Outlive, part memoir, part medical manifesto, has sold nearly 3 million copies and made him a top draw at longevity medicine events like this one. When you give women information about how their bodies work, they make great decisions for themselves. And his podcast, that's been downloaded over 100 million times, tackles a wide range of topics, including menopause and nutrition. Let's talk about protein. Dr. Atiyah wants his patients to eat a lot of protein, more than double what the current nutritional guidelines recommend.

25:03The doctor and a handful of his patients have also taken a drug called rapamycin that's FDA-approved for use by transplant recipients. The drug has extended the lifespan of mice, but Dr. Atiyah stopped taking it for now because it gave him mouth sores, which can be a side effect. There are physicians, including a respected professor of public health we spoke to, who are skeptical that his extraordinary regimen will result in an extra decade of healthy life. When a fellow physician calls some of what you're talking about hocus pocus. People are entitled to think what they want. And just because someone is a physician doesn't mean they're even remotely equipped to evaluate the merits of exercise physiology.

25:52Remember, I went to Stanford Medical School, right? How many hours of education do you think I received on exercise? Probably a few hours? Zero hours. And how many hours did I receive on nutrition? Zero hours. It was 25 years ago, so maybe things have changed, but I'm pretty sure that if you're talking to other esteemed physicians, they're in the same bucket as me. So, you know, they might not be the ones that are best equipped to be my critics. Our last morning in Austin, Dr. Atiyah took us for a ruck, a hike with weighted backpacks. This to me is as much about mental health and socialization, being in nature, and rucking is simply a vehicle to get that.

26:32How much work do you do on your emotional and mental health? A lot. I mean, it's as much a practice as what I put into exercise or, you know, blood work and cancer screening and all the other things that make up physical health. Atiyah has been open about dealing with depression and anger stemming from abuse he suffered as a child. Through therapy, including two stays at inpatient care facilities, he says he turned a corner about five years ago. By working hard on our physical health, we can reduce the rate of decline. But if we're being deliberate and active on our emotional health, it can actually improve.

27:15He says progress was only possible because his wife of more than 20 years, Jill, stood by him. There is plenty of data on longevity and people living long that have very strong relationships. Yes, just like the exercise data, I don't think this is just a correlation. I really think that there is also some causality that flows from the end of having great relationships to living a longer life. What's the point of living long if you don't have people to share it with? What's the purpose of living longer if you're unhappy? Dr. Atiyah plans on launching a new digital health app next year. He says that 80 % of his program does not require a physician and is adamant it's never too late to begin delaying the inevitable.