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This is very...

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It's bad, right?

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It's hot, yeah.

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That's what it's like to be old.

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And for far too long, we've ignored it or accepted it as natural.

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And I reject the idea that aging,

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just because it's natural, is acceptable.

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Dying at 80 is not inevitable.

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Absolutely, that can be changed.

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So if you're skeptical,

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I am a Harvard professor who has been studying aging, longevity,

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and age reversal for 30 years.

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And I've seen enough from my lab showing that we can literally now reverse the aging process.

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And as it's not a question of if,

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it's a question of when is it going to happen.

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And everyone should stick around because I'm going to tell you

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some of the major things that people should be doing.

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They can lengthen your life by a decade.

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Hey, you're not taking that off, Steve.

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You got 10 minutes or that.

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So you can accelerate aging by smoking,

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getting an X-ray, ultra-process foods,

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excessive drinking, flying a lot.

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I fly all the time.

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That's probably accelerating the aging process.

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Even going to a rock concert and blasting your eardrums

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because your ear, hair cells are getting older faster.

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And so I look at the body like it's a computer.

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And we can reinstall the software.

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And what's interesting is when you reverse

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aging diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, hard disease,

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go away or accurate.

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Because what's driving a lot of those diseases is aging.

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And so my lab is like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

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They are making discoveries that blow me away every week.

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And I think we're at a turning point in human history

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where you're probably going to live into the 22nd century.

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If you do all the right things.

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And we're going to dig into all of those in great detail.

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But what are the unintended consequences of such a world

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where we all live longer?

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And also, do you think it's going to be possible

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in the next 50 years for us to live forever?

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And then what's the best or treatment you've discovered for hair loss?

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This is why I love your podcast, either.

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You asked the right questions.

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So first.

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Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins.

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69% of you that listen to the show frequently

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haven't yet hit the follow button.

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And that follow button is very smart

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because it means you won't miss the best episodes.

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The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you

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the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed.

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So when we have our best episodes on this show,

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the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes,

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I would love you to know.

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And the simple way for you to know that

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is to hit that follow button.

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But also, it's the simple, easy,

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free thing that you can do to help us make the show better.

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I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute

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on the app you're listening to this one right now

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and hit that follow button.

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Thank you so, so, so much.

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Dr. David Sinclair.

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I have waited many years to speak to you.

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And I've been so keen to speak to you for so many years

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because so much of the research and the information I've consumed

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on the subjects we're going to talk about today

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comes from you directly from research you've done

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and from theories and ideas and hypotheses that you formed.

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I think the place that this conversation should start

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is probably with this picture

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because it appears to be incredibly formative

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in your journey.

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Oh yes, that is an important picture, true.

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This is a picture of my grandmother

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and me when I was in my early 20s.

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I'm now 56 if you're wondering.

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And my grandmother has played a major role in my life.

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I'm going to have to be careful not to get too emotional

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because she's now passed away,

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but she's inspired me to do the best I can

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to leave the world a better place than I found it.

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And there's this particular book here called Now We Are Six.

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It is anyone who's read my book,

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lifespan knows that this book is very important to me.

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And I didn't realize it of course when I was a kid

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that this was going to change my whole life.

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And there's a poem at the back there that my grandmother

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Vera used to read me when I was six

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and it goes like this.

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When I was one, I had just begun.

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When I was two, I was nearly new.

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When I was three, I was hardly me.

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When I was four, I was not much more.

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When I was five, I was just alive.

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But now I am six.

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I'm as clever as clever.

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So I think I'll be six now forever and ever.

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I'm getting chills reading this again

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and hearing this poem again because the impact on me was the following

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that subconsciously my grandmother was saying

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you don't want to grow up.

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Adults can be evil.

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She grew up after World War Two.

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There was horrendous impact on her and her family in Hungary.

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And she thought that a child is innocent

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and people shouldn't grow up.

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But what actually happened was I realized

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why do people grow old?

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That's a terrible thing to happen.

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And so I've spent my life trying to figure out why do we get old?

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Why do we grow up?

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Why do we get frail?

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Because I also think that if we can solve that,

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understand it, slow it, even reverse it now,

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we will have the biggest impact on human health in history.

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Am I right in thinking your grandmother told you at that young age

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that she was going to die?

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That you were going to die?

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That your parents were going to die?

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Yes.

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She did tell me that I remember it very clearly actually.

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I was on the floor and she was crouching down and I said,

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Vera, I didn't call her grandma.

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She didn't want to be called grandma.

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She wanted to be young like a kid too.

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I said, Vera, will you always be here to protect me?

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Will you always be around?

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And she said, no, I'm going to die.

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I'm like, what do you mean?

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She goes, everything dies.

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I'm going to be gone.

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Your parents will be gone.

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Your pet cat will be dead pretty soon and you yourself will be dead one day.

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At age, you know, four or five,

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that's heart wrenching, right?

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We've all gone through this realization around that age

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that the world that we believe in and see will one day all be gone.

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That moment, I remember it so clearly because I thought that's not fair.

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Why would any species be made or created that knew that fact?

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That's cruel.

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It's better to either not know or to not exist,

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but to know that that's what's going to happen is really cruel.

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And so I vowed actually legitimately around the age of 18

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to get a PhD, to go to the United States and develop a research lab to try and

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do something about it.

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The preservation of health and life is the most important thing that we can do as human beings.

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We do it with some drugs to treat that disease and the other disease, cancer, heart disease,

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Alzheimer's.

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But what's underlying that, what's really causing about 150 to 200,000 people every day to die

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is the underlying universal process we call aging.

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And for far too long, we've ignored it or accepted it as natural, therefore acceptable.

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And I fundamentally reject the idea that aging just because it's natural is acceptable.

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There will be a day when we look back at today and think how medieval were our medicines.

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And how sad it was that we accepted that we became frail before a hundred.

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If someone has just clicked on this conversation now and they deep in their core

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believe that they're probably going to live to 80 years old and that we all are and that we're

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never going to be able to do anything about it because that's just the way that it is.

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People get older and then they die.

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And aging is a fact of life as the phrase goes and you just have to accept it.

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If that's their sort of core belief, what is the most persuasive sort of top line argument

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to that person to convince them that in the next two hours when we have this conversation,

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we will do a job of both reversing that belief, really challenging it in some way

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and then also presenting them with a set of possible solutions.

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Yeah, all right.

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So first of all, who am I?

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I'm a Harvard professor.

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I've been studying aging longevity and age reversal for 30 years.

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The technology now that we have in my lab that is used every day by my students

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literally reverses the age of tissues in animals, in human tissue that we grow in the lab.

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And the first human trials to test this are going to be performed in about a month from now.

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And if it works, it'll transform in human history.

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It means that we're on a path to finally being able to reset the age of the human body,

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not by a year, not by 10 years, but even more than that.

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And what happens when you do that, what we're finding in animals that includes primates,

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is that we can cure things that have previously been impossible, including blindness, by the way.

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And so if you're listening and you're skeptical, I'm not some hack.

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I am a Harvard professor who is telling the world and has written a book about it,

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and every day spends my life researching with a team of the best scientists I can gather

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around the world, showing that we can literally now reverse the aging process and reset how old

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the body is in animals, yes. But potentially this year, showing it can work in the human body as well.

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So you're doing the first ever trial of this type in humans to reverse aging next month?

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Yes. So we've submitted a form to the FDA in the US to get approval to treat blindness,

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a couple of types of blindness in people, as early if all goes well as next month.

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And what exactly is happening there? Because there's many ways one might fix blindness.

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What is it you're doing to the eyeball that is a precursor of our potential ability to reverse

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aging generally? Yeah. Well, we chose the eye not because it was going to work well,

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but because it's a nice system to study age reversal. The eye is an enclosed space,

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and so it's much safer than trying to initially reverse the age of the whole body.

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Now in mice, we reverse the age of the whole body, and the effect is longevity,

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rejuvenation, the skin gets better, all parts of the animal get healthier and younger.

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But in humans, you don't want to go straight to rejuvenation, because in case something goes wrong,

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it could set us way back. And we have to make sure we don't have any safety mishaps.

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So we're being a little cautious in humans. In mice, it's a little different.

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So in the human eye, just for those that are watching the video, there is an eye on the table.

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Well, a plastic eye. It's a larger version of an eye, but yes, Steven's right.

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What we're doing, we're going to look at the back of the eye, which is your retina,

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and that's where the light hits. And at that point, there are a lot of nerves that coalesce

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into the optic nerve that runs to the brain by just a few millimeters. So the brain is here.

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The eye is actually part of the brain. A lot of people don't know that. You can touch your brain if

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you touch your eye. So the optic nerve gets old. And what we discovered, if it gets damaged or gets

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old, it's not working. But the nerves, the most, the most part, if you're old, are still there.

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They just forget how to work. And that's aging. And later, everyone should stick around,

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because I'm going to tell you why it is we get old and how it is we reverse it. But for this

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model, what we're doing is we're introducing a set of three genes into this optic nerve

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at the back of the eye and turning them on for six to eight weeks. And those three genes are what

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we now know reset safely, apparently safely, reset the age of cells, including nerves by about

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75% and then stop. They don't go more than that, which is good. We don't want to go back to zero.

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I don't think anyone wants to go back to high school. But this is the way it works. And we chose

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the optic nerve because it's a safe and close system, not because it should work better in optic

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nose. In fact, we've now done it in my, in my lab, for the brain. We're doing hearing. We've

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done skin. We did multiple sclerosis. We're now doing motor neuron disease and seeing great effects.

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So it's important to know, I'm not an eye specialist. I didn't choose the eye because I love the eye.

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I chose it because that's a good place to start for ultraversal in humans this year.

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You mentioned a second ago, you've been able to extend the life of mice in your laboratory.

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How and by how much is it the same process and by how much?

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Right. Well, the study that I was referring to was done using our technology in an independent lab,

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which is you might argue even better than having done it in my lab. Instead of putting the three

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reversal genes into the eye, they injected into the vein of the mouse, the old mice,

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and turn it on in these really old mice, these mice would be the equivalent of

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about 80 to 85 years. So they're really old mice. They're really frail. And just any,

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any extension in the lifespan and health would be bet would be a great thing. And they got an

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additional 100% lifespan extension, additional. So that would be like an eighth year old living

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to 160. Well, the remaining life of an 80 year old isn't long. Oh, okay. Right. So let's,

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let's say if you're, give it to a 70 year old, on average, they'd have another 10 years to go,

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give them 20 years. So it's that calculation. But that was not an optimized study. They just did a

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hell-mary injection, turn it on and see what would happen. And I heard when we did a bit of a

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research call, you say, the world doesn't know how close we are. The world doesn't know how close

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we are to what? To being able to safely reverse the age of the human body. How can you be so sure?

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I'm not sure. But I'm confident that the science is solid.

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The biology of aging is understood, I believe, in concept. My theory called the information

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theory of aging has so far been not disproven, which is important for a scientist. And that has

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allowed us to succeed really for the first time to safely reverse aging. And I now believe,

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and though I didn't 10 years ago, I now believe in my lifetime, I'm going to see

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medicines on the market that reset the age, or at least reverse in a large part the age of the

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body. And that that initially won't be to make us just look better and feel better, although

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that's what a lot of us want. It's going to be used to cure, certainly prevent, but definitely

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cure diseases that are currently incurable. So we're, I think we're at a turning point,

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a dare I say in human history. It's not a question of if it's a question of when this is going to happen.

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I want to get into your theory of aging, which we talked about there. But you did have a prediction

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before I get to there about how you think will be potentially taking a pill in 10 years time

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every couple of weeks that will make us younger. Can you explain to me that prediction? What is

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what is the prediction? I do believe that I, and you're about 20 something years younger than me,

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you're going to see this for sure, that there will be a pill. So you might say, well, my critics might

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say, well, David, that's exaggerating, right? You're still trying to get this gene these genes to

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work. How's it going to be a pill? But this is where my lab comes in. My lab is like Willy Wonka's

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chocolate factory. If you visit, it's magical. And the students that I teach in the trainees who are

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sometimes in their 30s and even 40s who are brilliant scientists, there's about 25 of us.

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They are making discoveries that blow me away every week. It's not a pill because you can't

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give a mouse a pill. They won't chew it. But we give them a liquid down their throat that's a drink.

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And within four weeks, we can rejuvenate them. Not with these genes anymore that we're giving

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humans. That's the older technology. The new technology is something you can swallow

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in a mouse and rejuvenate them in four weeks. It's normal for my students to say, oh, yeah,

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we just rejuvenated the ear. We just rejuvenated the skin. We just cured ALS,

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smoothing your own disease in these animals. By the way, Steven, this isn't just

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each disease doesn't get a different medicine. Each disease doesn't get a different set of genes.

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It's the same set of genes, the same molecules that treat cure multiple sclerosis as the

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same one that cacures blindness in mice. So let that sink in. The same drug that we're using in

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the eye will be used to treat other diseases in the body, even liver disease.

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So if your predictions are correct and your timeline is correct,

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what does this mean for the way that I should be living my life right now?

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Most people look at their parents and their grandparents and think,

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that's what my life will be like. I'm going to be frail in my 80s. That's not true for us.

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I like the right brothers analogy. It'd be like in 1900 saying we're always going to travel

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as fast as a horse. That's not true, right? The 20th century saw that we could go

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tens of thousands of kilometers. They went to the moon, right? That's what our generation is

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when it comes to biology and aging. Previous generations are no guide to what our lifespan

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is going to be like. You're going to potentially live to the 22nd century. If you do all the right

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things, technology keeps increasing, right? What kind of technologies will we have in 50 years?

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You'll be around in 50 years. You're a healthy guy. I know you are. All right, so in 50 years,

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what kind of things will you be able to do? Gosh. This is what most people forget is that

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technology isn't static. When you're old, you will not be using today's technology. You'll be

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using technology of 2070, 2080, right? And then you'll be able to live into the 22nd century and

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take advantage of those technologies. That's why people talk about the singularity. The singularity

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is this idea that if you can make it to a certain point in human history, you won't have to age

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anymore. And that's in the future, right? But first steps first, let's show that we can get this

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to cure blindness and then get to the point where every year that we get one year older, we can get

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one year younger. When that happens, it's a very interesting world, right? You don't have to age

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anymore. That is a future. I don't know when we're going to get there. But if you don't live,

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10 to 20 years longer than your parents, something's wrong. On that point of the singularity, so this

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is a particular moment in time where we're going to be able to make aging or age reversal, I guess, a

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choice, right? So I guess the thinking of the theory is that if you can just make sure you survive

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up until this particular date, then you have the choice to live forever. Is that how? Is that like

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the theory? That's what they say. Yes. There are a lot of proponents of that. But that's an idea.

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Isn't it logically true, though? It's like logically. It's an extension of what I'm talking about.

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But I don't know when that's going to be. I think Ray Kurzweil said it's coming soon.

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Did he have a prediction? It was in the 2040s sometime. So Ray Kurzweil is a famous

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futurist that seems to predict the future really well across multiple disciplines. So he said 2040.

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Yeah, that's my recollection. It's around there. Do you believe that?

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Because I'm going to hang on to 2040s. I'm skeptical. I'll leave the house.

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Ray is a smart guy. He predicted AI and all that's happening. So it's dangerous to bet against

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Ray's predictions. I remain skeptical as one of the leaders in the field. I think we have a lot

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still to do. That said, if this trial works this year, we will be a new territory. We will be on

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a path to age reversal in the whole body. It's going to happen. And right now it's now 2026.

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We're talking 2040s in a number of years away. It could be that we truly are able to

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multiply, reset the age of the body. That's another thing that's often missed.

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We can reverse the age of the eye, not just once, but seemingly as many times as we want.

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In mice, we've done it at least twice. We didn't do it a third time because the mice actually

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just got old and they died, but they died with perfect eyesight. But the point is that we don't

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believe it's a one-shot wonder. You can keep reversing aging and then you age out and then

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you reverse it again and you just keep going. And if that's true, then it is possible that we will

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live dramatically longer. I don't yet see any technology in the near horizon that will make us live

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forever. But I do see that we'll have a radical change in how we treat diseases and how long we can

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live. So let's talk about what aging actually is. And can you explain this to me like I'm a total

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idiot because that will help me. Well, that's difficult because I'm not a total idiot. But this is

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my theory is that aging is not just wearing out. It's not just that your body becomes old and

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dysfunctional and you get pain, you get inflammation and you die from a disease. I look at the body

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like it's a computer. It's software and we can reinstall the software. In my lab, we believe we've

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found the way to do that and we see the evidence of that. So the body is a carrier of information

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from our parents and what happened in the womb. That information is intact, keeps our body functioning

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almost perfectly in our teenage years 20. You're in your early 30s, you're starting to lose that

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information and so your body's not functioning perfectly anymore. Great house. You've got some

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gray. Exactly. That's a good example of cells that lose their identity and stop making melanin,

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the black pigment. But it's going to get worse. I promise you unless we're hurry up. And this

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information gets lost. It gets corrupted. But the beautiful thing is we believe we found a backup

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copy of that information from youth that we can reinstall into cells, into tissues, into the

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entire body of a mouse and hopefully a human. That backup copy is in every old person,

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I believe, and it can be accessed. So when I see an old person walking down the street now,

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I don't think all that person's just worn out frail going to die. I just think that's someone

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that needs a reset. And inside that person is a young person waiting to come out again.

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That's a totally different way to think about old age. And in the future, people will have a

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choice to be rejuvenated or not. Where is that backup copy that I need? Well, we're working

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on that. And if I told you my student would kill me, but we believe we've found

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largely where that information is stored. It's entirely new biology. And it's currently a secret.

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It's a secret. Okay, so you lead the way. Tell me what we should talk about next as a

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release to aging. Let's talk about information, right? We live in the information age and

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biology is becoming part of that information age. And it started with the elucidation of the

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structure of DNA. Okay. And so I have a model of DNA here. So for listeners who are not watching,

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this is a little plastic double helix. My friend, Jim Watson, died recently.

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Our last month who he and his colleague discovered that DNA, the information of life that we get

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from our parents, is a chemical that's about six feet long in every cell. And this model here

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shows that DNA is a ladder. And the steps on the ladder are the information of the DNA.

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Okay. Yeah. And you can pull this apart so that each step becomes 50, 50% ripped apart.

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So that should come apart, right? So I ripped the wrong of the ladder apart.

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And that is called a base on the DNA. And it always matches with its corresponding chemical.

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So this shorthand we'd call an A, it always matches with a T. So an A T becomes a wrong on the

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ladder. And down here, different color, here I'm looking at a red and a green step, rip it apart.

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This is a G and a C ladder. G's and C's come together. And actually, when if I rip this ladder

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into halves and each step becomes half a ladder, now you can see that you can copy DNA because

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the A has to match with the T wrong and the G has to match with the C. So that's basic DNA.

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That's how the information is transferred from cell to cell from mother to daughter,

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parents to offspring. There are about 20,000 genes, about 15,000 are turned on,

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but a different set gets turned on in large part to make a nerve cell compared to a liver cell

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and a skin cell. That's gene expression. And what controls that gene expression is what's called

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not the genome, which is what's in front of me here on the DNA molecule. It's the epi genome.

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The epi genome is the information we get transferred from cell to cell from parent to offspring

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that's not in this molecule. So where's this epi genetic information? Well, it controls which

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genes are switched on and off. And a major regulator of that process is the modification of these

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steps on the DNA. These chemicals, the C, particularly the C, which I'm showing you here in this

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red part of the molecule, the C gets a little chemical added to it called a methyl.

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And a methyl is just if you remember from chemistry, high school. It's a carbon with 300 genes.

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It's very simple molecule. It gets stuck on that piece of the DNA molecule. That's called

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DNA methylation. And that will help determine that pattern of DNA methylation determines whether

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this particular gene will be switched on, say to make an optic nerve or switched off so that

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it becomes a liver cell. And that happens as we're in the womb and we become an embryo.

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And that's the epi genome. These chemicals that turn genes on and off is the epi genome.

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And the information theory of aging states that the information that's in a cell, which includes

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the DNA, but actually more importantly for aging, is the control systems, the epi genome.

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That is pristine when we're young, but as we get older, we lose that epi genetic information.

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The ability to tell a cell to be a nerve cell versus a liver cell versus a skin cell,

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it starts to get erased. So when we look at a mouse or an old tissue, if I took maybe not your

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skin, but my skin, my skin cells are no longer as skin-like as they once were. They started to lose

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their identity. They're starting actually to look more like nerve cells and nerve cells starting to

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look more like skin cells because the genes that were once turned on correctly in my young cells,

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that control system, these chemicals on the DNA molecule, these metals, are getting erased.

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So aging is an identity crisis of the cells?

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It absolutely is, well put. The cells forget what their job is.

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Yes, the genes are still there in large part, 99.909 percent of the genes are still there,

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the molecules intact, but the control systems.

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The label thing you mentioned. The label to tell the cell that this gene needs to be on,

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but this one should always stay off. That gets erased over time.

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Why?

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We did partially figure that out.

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And how did you know?

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Well, oh, the label's better.

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This is why I love your podcast, Steven. You asked the right questions.

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There are enzymes that remove these methyl groups and put them back on.

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So the cells controlling these things, they shouldn't change, but they do.

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And one of the things that messes the system up is major catastrophe in a cell.

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And when the cell panics, it removes these structures to try and adapt to the stress.

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The label.

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The label comes off in a desperate attempt to survive, but then the cell doesn't fully revert back

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to the original state. Some of these chemicals and some of the proteins that bind to the DNA,

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which is also important for this epigenum, they don't all go back to where they started.

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I've used the analogy that it's like a ping pong or a tennis match where the proteins that

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control the genes, they get relocalized to where the emergency is.

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And an emergency, the one that we think is most dangerous and a large cause of aging is a broken

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chromosome. If you have a broken chromosome, if you don't fix that, you're either going to

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become a cancer cell, you're going to die. It's not good. And so cells panic. And in that panic

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of moving proteins away and turning on these stress-response genes, that's great. In the short term,

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the cell might survive, but they don't fully reset. Those proteins don't all go back to where they

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once were, say, 10 minutes ago, when the stress needed the disaster happened. And if you do that

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time and time again, and every one of your cells has at least one broken chromosome every day,

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that's 20 trillion of these events every day in your body. Over time, tick, tick, tick,

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you get the aging process, we believe. So, I guess I've got two questions. I guess the first

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question, if I was thinking about the sequence of asking these questions, is what is increasing

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that stress on my cells, therefore what is increasing aging? And also, why didn't evolution just

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come up with a solution for this? That stopped me aging, then. Amnesians very smart.

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Could it just fix this? Well, before I get into that, one of the reasons we know that this works,

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because you asked me, how do we know that's true, is that we created this catastrophe in animals.

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We took mice and we broke their chromosomes in a way that didn't cause cancer or mutations.

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If we're right, what should happen to these mice? They get old fast. They get old fast.

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And they did. We call them the ice mice. Ice stands for inducible changes to the epigenum.

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And we were able to induce these changes. And we took bets in the lab, this was going back now 12

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years ago. I bet that we would get aging, okay? But I was the only one in the lab that thought

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that would happen. We had a lot of bets that the mice would die, a lot of bets that the mice

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would get cancer. And a few said nothing would happen. But we got aging. In fact, I was in Australia,

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where I'm from, as you know, and I got a picture on my old style iPhone. And it was a picture of

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an old mouse. Well, it was a sick looking mouse. And the text was, problem, we have a sick mouse.

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And I wrote back, that's not a sick mouse, that's an old mouse. And that was the first time I realized

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that we had evidence that our theory, the information theory of aging is correct. So what we did

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actually, and this might satisfy your, and your listeners' curiosity, we generated a mouse from

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scratch using stem cells. And so we start with a mouse stem cell that we grow in the lab in the

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dish. And we change the genetics of that stem cell so that we could feed it a drug,

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Tomoxifen, which is used in chemotherapy. And that drug turned on a gene from a slime mold,

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something you might find in the forest, that breaks DNA of the mouse. But does it in a way that

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doesn't cause cancer or mutations, just cuts it, and the cells put it back together. So we could

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take a mouse. And for three weeks, we turned on this slime mold cutting protein. And nothing

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happened to the mouse at the time. It's like you don't feel an x-ray. You don't feel different

423
00:31:53.760 --> 00:31:58.720
when you fly except for maybe jet lag and dehydration. But you don't get old suddenly. Same with the

424
00:31:58.720 --> 00:32:03.520
mice. They were normal. They felt fine. And that's why at first people said, oh, nothing's going to

425
00:32:03.520 --> 00:32:09.680
happen to these mice. After three weeks, they were fine. But we set in motion a cascade of accelerated

426
00:32:09.680 --> 00:32:16.960
aging events that about 10 months later, they were super gray and super old and had all the diseases

427
00:32:16.960 --> 00:32:22.320
of aging 50% faster than their twins that we didn't treat. And you've got photos of those we could

428
00:32:22.320 --> 00:32:28.160
share. Yeah, let's show those. So if I was to do the experiment in you, I might have to engineer

429
00:32:28.160 --> 00:32:34.720
it a clone of you, but I could do that. You know, I'm not saying that it's ethically. But theoretically,

430
00:32:34.720 --> 00:32:40.720
we could make a clone of you, put in that slime mold gene, turn it on, and your clone would be

431
00:32:40.800 --> 00:32:47.040
50% older than you are. Can you translate this into the equivocal for a human,

432
00:32:47.600 --> 00:32:53.600
that particular study that you did? So it would be like in me doing what and then me getting

433
00:32:53.600 --> 00:32:58.880
old fast. Yeah. Well, we're exposed to things that cause DNA breaks all the time. They happen

434
00:32:58.880 --> 00:33:03.680
naturally as the cells try to copy their DNA, but you can accelerate that by getting an x-ray,

435
00:33:03.680 --> 00:33:09.360
a CT scan, flying a lot, and cosmic rays banging into your DNA. I fly all the time.

436
00:33:09.360 --> 00:33:16.160
Yeah. That's a CT scans and x-rays. Yeah. And though it's imperceptible, I believe that that's

437
00:33:16.160 --> 00:33:21.200
probably accelerating your aging process. What's flying doing to my, again, you talk about flying

438
00:33:21.200 --> 00:33:26.720
being equivocal to what you did to the mouse in what way? Well, every time you break your chromosome,

439
00:33:26.720 --> 00:33:32.400
you're rearranging your epigenome in a catastrophic way that doesn't fully reset, and your cell will

440
00:33:32.400 --> 00:33:37.760
lose its identity faster. I also believe, and we have some evidence that even going to a rock

441
00:33:37.760 --> 00:33:43.840
concert and had blasting your eardrums is such a stress on those cells in your ear that the

442
00:33:43.840 --> 00:33:48.720
reason that you become deaf earlier is because your ear, hair cells, are getting older faster.

443
00:33:49.520 --> 00:33:54.880
You don't want to break the DNA. You don't want to cause catastrophe to your fragile cells in your

444
00:33:54.880 --> 00:34:01.600
body because the recovery isn't complete an aging ensues. So with this theory in mind,

445
00:34:01.600 --> 00:34:06.960
what are the day-to-day things that we're all doing that are accelerating our age? Because I think

446
00:34:06.960 --> 00:34:12.240
what's really interesting is I look to my brother, Jason, he's a year older than me. He has three

447
00:34:12.240 --> 00:34:17.920
kids that are like under the age of seven or eight now. And this Christmas time, because it's just

448
00:34:17.920 --> 00:34:22.880
been Christmas, I looked at his head, seemingly gray, as he had, versus me, and I thought, okay, he

449
00:34:22.880 --> 00:34:29.440
has considerably more. He's a year older than me. And I was thinking, that's like a proxy of aging

450
00:34:29.440 --> 00:34:34.800
to some degree. What is it he's potentially done on a day-to-day basis? I know you don't know him,

451
00:34:34.800 --> 00:34:39.280
so this is why it's not an offensive answer to give. What is it that someone who is

452
00:34:40.480 --> 00:34:44.480
generally sort of genetically very similar, but it's making different lifestyle choices is doing

453
00:34:45.440 --> 00:34:50.320
to accelerate that process of wrinkles or gray hairs or... Well, here's the good news

454
00:34:50.880 --> 00:34:54.160
that you can have a big impact on your rate of aging by changing your lifestyle.

455
00:34:54.960 --> 00:34:59.920
It turns out your DNA is not your destiny. It's the epigenome, so that how you live your life

456
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:05.760
is really 80 to 90% of your rate of aging. That's good. It's in your hands, but it also means that

457
00:35:05.760 --> 00:35:10.640
some people mess up their lives. There are actually twin studies from, mostly from Denmark,

458
00:35:11.280 --> 00:35:19.200
identical twins, one that goes and smokes and gets obese and goes in the sun. And they are much

459
00:35:19.200 --> 00:35:25.040
older looking than their identical twin. Essentially proving that the DNA is not the reason you age.

460
00:35:25.760 --> 00:35:29.360
First of all, they're going to be people in the audience who are listening or watching,

461
00:35:29.360 --> 00:35:34.640
who have gray hair saying, dammit, I'm not old. And that's true. I mean, nobody died of gray hair,

462
00:35:34.640 --> 00:35:41.840
right? And sometimes genetically you can get gray old, but not physically old. What is true

463
00:35:41.840 --> 00:35:47.280
that's often not comfortable is how old you look is a very good representation of how old you are

464
00:35:47.280 --> 00:35:52.080
in your organs as well. So doing the right thing, so what are those things? Let's tick off some of

465
00:35:52.080 --> 00:35:56.480
the major things that people should be doing. And they can have a big impact. They can lengthen

466
00:35:56.480 --> 00:36:01.040
your life by a decade, just by doing some of the major things. So we know that on average, people

467
00:36:01.040 --> 00:36:06.000
can live 14 years longer. This is based on a study that came out from Harvard, a long-term study

468
00:36:06.000 --> 00:36:12.000
of the lifespan of World War II veterans. If you avoid smoking, cigarette smoking,

469
00:36:12.000 --> 00:36:16.000
and really any type of smoking your lungs, smoking breaks your DNA. It's going to accelerate aging

470
00:36:16.080 --> 00:36:22.000
and your lungs, your whole body. Avoid excessive drinking. We now know that even more than one

471
00:36:22.000 --> 00:36:27.840
glass a day of alcohol is bad. I've given up alcohol for the most part for that reason. Eat well.

472
00:36:28.400 --> 00:36:32.240
So you want to eat healthy food. We've got some healthy food here. We're going to talk about.

473
00:36:33.040 --> 00:36:40.400
So make sure you don't overeat or eat ultra-process foods. And the big one, one of the best things

474
00:36:40.400 --> 00:36:45.920
you can do besides all of that is exercise. And exercise covers a lot of things so we can drill

475
00:36:45.920 --> 00:36:52.000
into that as well. But the fifth one is interesting. It may be surprising, but actually good news for

476
00:36:52.000 --> 00:36:56.080
you. Have a reliable partner. I think it's going to sit be a podcast time. Let's go.

477
00:36:56.080 --> 00:37:01.200
Okay. I know that. It probably accelerates your age. Yes. So if you don't have a reliable partner,

478
00:37:01.920 --> 00:37:10.400
have a pet because the human bond is something that is shown to slow aging and associates with

479
00:37:10.400 --> 00:37:15.520
people who live longer than others that are lonely. Interesting. We're going to dig into all of those

480
00:37:15.520 --> 00:37:20.960
in great detail, specifically very interested in in exercise, diet, lifestyle, fasting. I know it's

481
00:37:20.960 --> 00:37:23.840
a big subject you speak about, which I'm very, very interested in. And actually I was doing a

482
00:37:23.840 --> 00:37:29.440
research at this conversation. Again, the way that I'm going to approach nutrition has shifted

483
00:37:29.520 --> 00:37:33.520
because of some of the things I discovered there. I want to just tick off on this evolution point.

484
00:37:34.240 --> 00:37:39.520
Right. Let's come back to that. Yeah. I just want to clear it. Yeah. Why didn't evolution fix it

485
00:37:39.520 --> 00:37:43.920
for me because they talk about survival of the fittest and that the very fact that I'm here is

486
00:37:43.920 --> 00:37:48.000
because my ancestors were good at survival. But listen, my ancestors all died at like 30, 40,

487
00:37:48.000 --> 00:37:53.760
50, 60, 70, 80 years old. That's not very good. Why didn't they just live longer? Well, that's why.

488
00:37:53.760 --> 00:37:58.880
You just said the answer yourself because your ancestors didn't live beyond 40 or 50,

489
00:37:58.880 --> 00:38:06.960
even less. Right. Most men in prehistoric times would die from famine, disease, and actually

490
00:38:06.960 --> 00:38:13.040
a lot of them from war. So most people didn't make it 80. Some people did, but very, very rarely.

491
00:38:13.760 --> 00:38:21.760
So the forces of natural selection were on early survival and fast breeding. Let's put it this way.

492
00:38:21.760 --> 00:38:27.600
If there was someone who was born with a mutation that allowed them to live a lot longer, to 90,

493
00:38:28.400 --> 00:38:33.040
in a prehistoric world, that's useless because you're probably going to die at 30 or 40 anyway.

494
00:38:33.040 --> 00:38:38.400
And so your children. So what you want to do is find genes that allow you to become reproductively

495
00:38:38.400 --> 00:38:44.800
successful early on in life and make sure your children survive. And so we have children

496
00:38:45.440 --> 00:38:51.680
pretty early, but humans for various reasons have a long developmental period, including education.

497
00:38:52.240 --> 00:38:56.560
So we don't we don't develop very rapidly, right? We don't wake up and we can walk and run,

498
00:38:56.560 --> 00:39:01.200
like a lot of other species and mammals. But we don't live a long time because there was

499
00:39:01.840 --> 00:39:06.880
in the environment that we evolved, the Serengeti plane is pretty much agreed upon as that's

500
00:39:06.880 --> 00:39:13.600
one of places we evolved, certainly Eastern Africa. That was extremely difficult and dangerous

501
00:39:13.600 --> 00:39:18.960
place to live. You could get eaten by an animal. And if you didn't get eaten by an animal,

502
00:39:18.960 --> 00:39:24.880
you get killed by the neighboring tribe. That's super dangerous, right? And then so we evolved to live

503
00:39:25.600 --> 00:39:33.440
really at optimal to about 30, but not much more than that. So after 30, as you might be

504
00:39:33.440 --> 00:39:41.040
experiencing with your body, we're at the forces of entropy. So the body starts to decay,

505
00:39:41.040 --> 00:39:47.440
the information starts to get lost in the body. But the good news is that if you take away

506
00:39:47.440 --> 00:39:54.560
predation and death from a species, it evolves longer lifespans. Now it makes evolutionary sense

507
00:39:55.360 --> 00:40:00.800
to have genes that allow you to put more effort into building a strong body and slowing down

508
00:40:00.800 --> 00:40:06.960
the aging process and preventing DNA breaks, chromosomal breaks. We know that this is true because

509
00:40:06.960 --> 00:40:13.360
if you put species, say on an island where there are no predators, what happens to their longevity,

510
00:40:14.640 --> 00:40:22.160
they get longer lived naturally. It takes 20, 30 generations, but only when there's no predation,

511
00:40:22.160 --> 00:40:29.440
when you're not under a lot of stress to breed quickly, do you get longer lifespans evolving?

512
00:40:29.440 --> 00:40:33.360
Given that humans don't have predators anymore, we are slowly evolving

513
00:40:33.680 --> 00:40:39.280
longer lifespans. But it's very slow, and it's not going to happen fast enough for you and me.

514
00:40:39.280 --> 00:40:46.000
And do the organisms that do live really, really long have a small amount of predators in nature?

515
00:40:46.000 --> 00:40:50.720
Absolutely. Absolutely. Think about them. The bristle cone pine,

516
00:40:52.000 --> 00:40:55.840
it's the longest lived tree in the world. It can live many thousands of years.

517
00:40:56.480 --> 00:41:04.400
Are you jogging us? Not jealous, no. They live a tough life. Some of those trees have been around

518
00:41:04.400 --> 00:41:09.840
since the pyramids. The reason they can live for so long and evolve to live so long is that

519
00:41:09.840 --> 00:41:14.320
things don't eat them. They are totally poisonous. You don't want to eat a bristle cone pine.

520
00:41:14.320 --> 00:41:18.480
The same for a whale. The bowhead whale, some of these very large animals, no predators.

521
00:41:18.720 --> 00:41:26.880
So they've evolved a strategy of breeding slowly, but building very powerful systems to stop

522
00:41:26.880 --> 00:41:32.720
epigenetic changes. Their epigenetic control systems are stable. They don't get cancer,

523
00:41:33.360 --> 00:41:37.760
and they don't lose, they don't have this identity crisis until hundreds of years.

524
00:41:38.480 --> 00:41:43.520
We know that. People study the cells of whales in the dish, and those cells don't lose their

525
00:41:43.520 --> 00:41:50.960
identity very quickly, even when you break their DNA. So I guess the place also to go next is

526
00:41:50.960 --> 00:41:57.680
talking about disease generally, and what disease is. So these diseases are function of aging.

527
00:41:57.680 --> 00:42:02.560
Does this idea of reversing aging even matter if cancer is going to take most of us out anyway

528
00:42:02.560 --> 00:42:07.920
at some point? Is there a link between aging and disease? This might be the most important point

529
00:42:08.000 --> 00:42:15.120
that I make today. When you reverse aging diseases of aging go away or are cured,

530
00:42:15.760 --> 00:42:22.880
and in my lab, including many types of cancer as well. The diseases that we try to treat

531
00:42:22.880 --> 00:42:28.240
individually with different medicines today that we think are unrelated, Alzheimer's, cancer,

532
00:42:28.240 --> 00:42:35.360
heart disease, you name them. Fundamentally, what's driving a lot of those diseases is aging.

533
00:42:36.240 --> 00:42:41.280
If you never got old, would you ever get Alzheimer's, even if you had the genes that predispose you? No.

534
00:42:43.120 --> 00:42:47.680
Right? And so what we see in my lab is when we give an animal a disease, and we can do that,

535
00:42:47.680 --> 00:42:53.360
we can put in the human genes for Alzheimer's into a mouse, it becomes, has dementia.

536
00:42:54.080 --> 00:42:58.960
When we reverse the age of the brain of that animal, we're not treating the disease, we're treating

537
00:42:59.040 --> 00:43:06.560
aging. The disease goes away. The body can heal itself when it's young. So it's the aging process

538
00:43:06.560 --> 00:43:13.360
that reveals the disease that can be cured by reversing. Why does the aging process reveal a disease?

539
00:43:14.160 --> 00:43:20.000
Why don't we get Alzheimer's at 15? Because the cells are so healthy they can fix themselves,

540
00:43:20.000 --> 00:43:27.040
they can renew themselves. The disease processes that cause these problems for us don't exist

541
00:43:27.040 --> 00:43:32.880
when we're young. Why is it that a teenager really has a heart attack? Because their body

542
00:43:33.680 --> 00:43:38.720
prevents them. Why do young people typically not get cancer? Because the immune system

543
00:43:39.760 --> 00:43:45.040
finds cancer cells and clears them out. You and I have cancer cells in our body right now. Why

544
00:43:45.040 --> 00:43:49.360
are we probably not going to die in the next year? Because our immune system will find them and kill

545
00:43:49.360 --> 00:43:53.920
them. But as we get older, we're going to lose that ability and we'll have a greater chance of

546
00:43:54.080 --> 00:43:59.200
having cancer. Are you saying that if we cure aging, we're probably going to buy way of that cure

547
00:43:59.200 --> 00:44:07.920
most of these diseases? 100%. We're talking about menopause quite a lot on this podcast. And

548
00:44:07.920 --> 00:44:14.320
fertility menopause women's ovaries as one of the first places that ages. And I've heard you

549
00:44:14.320 --> 00:44:18.400
explain that you think that evolution program women to stop having children during menopause because

550
00:44:18.400 --> 00:44:24.400
continuing reproduction would drain energy needed to raise existing children. So is infertility

551
00:44:24.400 --> 00:44:29.520
something that could theoretically be prevented? In mice, which is where we live in my lab, where we

552
00:44:29.520 --> 00:44:36.240
work, it can be prevented and it can be reversed. I thought we run out of eggs. That's like the

553
00:44:36.240 --> 00:44:41.680
that's the current theory. The evidence that we have from my lab and a lab that I worked with in

554
00:44:41.680 --> 00:44:52.720
Australia caused me to question that idea that women run out of eggs. We have published and repeated

555
00:44:52.720 --> 00:45:02.240
many times that if you treat old female mice 16 months of age, which is like a 65, 70 year old

556
00:45:02.240 --> 00:45:10.880
human, that has long time since given up having offspring. We can treat the ovaries with a chemical

557
00:45:11.840 --> 00:45:19.280
that rejuvenates the eggs that are in the ovary. Maybe even produces new ones, we don't know for sure.

558
00:45:19.920 --> 00:45:25.840
But those 16 month old mice that stopped having kids, probably at least six months ago,

559
00:45:26.880 --> 00:45:33.680
now start producing healthy offspring again. Their eggs look young, pristine compared to the

560
00:45:33.680 --> 00:45:38.480
terrible eggs that if you try to harvest some eggs from a mouse that old, it's hard to find any

561
00:45:38.560 --> 00:45:43.360
that look normal. The chromosomes are messed up, ripped apart. They're not going to produce healthy

562
00:45:43.360 --> 00:45:50.320
babies. But we can take those eggs, or at least the ovaries with those eggs in them and cause them to

563
00:45:50.320 --> 00:45:56.640
be young again and make fresh eggs that can produce healthy offspring that live a normal lifespan.

564
00:45:56.640 --> 00:46:01.520
The real question is, will this work in women? And that's something that I'm keen on testing.

565
00:46:04.080 --> 00:46:07.840
It must be really hard to test a lot of these things in people, right? Because you mentioned the

566
00:46:07.840 --> 00:46:12.640
word mice quite a lot. It's harder than you can imagine actually. And I've spent a lot of my career

567
00:46:12.640 --> 00:46:22.480
since I was 35, aiming to develop a medicine to treat diseases and aging. And it can go wrong in

568
00:46:22.480 --> 00:46:30.320
many ways, even if the science is good and right. And there's money, there's business, there's laws,

569
00:46:30.960 --> 00:46:35.680
there's politics, there's business strategies, there's change of leaderships,

570
00:46:37.600 --> 00:46:43.280
all sorts of human introduced variables that can get in the way. There's patents

571
00:46:44.160 --> 00:46:52.240
and there's competition and spite that also gets into it. And I've had to deal with all of those

572
00:46:52.240 --> 00:46:56.400
things, including competing against some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world who

573
00:46:56.400 --> 00:47:01.920
really didn't want me to succeed. But yeah, it's extremely difficult to make a drug, but I do

574
00:47:01.920 --> 00:47:08.640
want to remind you and everyone listening and watching that we're beyond mice now for age reversal.

575
00:47:08.640 --> 00:47:14.800
We've done this in monkeys, monkeys that are physically and almost genetically identical to us.

576
00:47:15.440 --> 00:47:20.320
So it's not a big leap from, it is a pretty big leap from mouse to human, but from a monkey to a human.

577
00:47:21.120 --> 00:47:28.480
We're essentially slightly smarter monkeys. I just had a thought about how other countries,

578
00:47:28.480 --> 00:47:33.680
now the nations might be conducting their own sort of secret research and they might not have

579
00:47:33.680 --> 00:47:39.600
the same bureaucratic, political, ethical considerations that you have to contend with. Do you

580
00:47:39.600 --> 00:47:44.560
think about this much that some of the sort of geopolitical adversaries might be doing secret

581
00:47:44.560 --> 00:47:50.160
testing in some research labs somewhere on humans? I think about it. And in fact,

582
00:47:50.160 --> 00:47:55.680
the United States government thinks about it too. A large investment into one of the companies

583
00:47:55.680 --> 00:48:03.280
that I sit on the board of was blocked because the US government claimed that the technology was

584
00:48:03.280 --> 00:48:09.840
too dangerous to be in the hands of foreign companies and governments. So the US government,

585
00:48:09.840 --> 00:48:15.840
at least in the previous administration, was extremely cautious about this technology falling into

586
00:48:16.720 --> 00:48:22.480
the wrong hands. Which technology would be allowed to reverse aging? So the US government blocked

587
00:48:22.480 --> 00:48:26.240
that technology because they were scared that it might fall into the wrong hands? Well, they blocked

588
00:48:26.240 --> 00:48:32.000
the very large investment of $100 million into the company from a foreigner because they would

589
00:48:32.000 --> 00:48:38.400
have more access to the information and the progress. Is it China? I won't say more because

590
00:48:38.400 --> 00:48:44.160
it's sensitive. Most I can say is that governments are watching this technology very closely,

591
00:48:44.160 --> 00:48:51.920
not just the US but around the world because the winner will make not just a lot of economic

592
00:48:51.920 --> 00:48:58.320
benefit, but there will be potential for radical change in the pharmaceutical industry in healthcare,

593
00:48:59.280 --> 00:49:05.360
the amount of change socially will be dramatic as well. But there are also uses that the government

594
00:49:05.360 --> 00:49:13.440
has identified so-called super soldier potential. Now, I don't agree that that's a reason to slow

595
00:49:13.440 --> 00:49:19.760
down the research. Others claim that it was worth it. But I do believe that the technology is

596
00:49:19.760 --> 00:49:25.760
very powerful and we should start to get ready for when this comes to society because it's not an

597
00:49:25.760 --> 00:49:32.960
air, as I said, it's a when. The technology to do what? To rejuvenate the human body. Why do we

598
00:49:32.960 --> 00:49:38.400
need to get ready? Well, because it'll be massive social change. If you can choose how old you

599
00:49:38.400 --> 00:49:46.960
want to be and people don't die as at 80 anymore, let's say they can live to 120 or beyond. There's

600
00:49:46.960 --> 00:49:54.160
big changes. There's so security issues. There's employment. Though I will say that the disaster

601
00:49:54.160 --> 00:49:59.680
scenario that often comes to mind when I talk about this and which I covered in the last part of

602
00:49:59.680 --> 00:50:06.000
my book, lifespan, it's actually economically hugely advantageous to slow aging and prevent diseases.

603
00:50:06.720 --> 00:50:12.400
A lot of the US economy and most advanced economies goes to healthcare. And chronic disease,

604
00:50:12.400 --> 00:50:17.360
a lot of people are sick for five to 10 years. That's where most of people's savings and retirement

605
00:50:17.360 --> 00:50:21.840
and government money goes in. The most expensive years of your life for the last two years. If you

606
00:50:21.840 --> 00:50:28.800
can delay that, it's going to have massively positive economic benefits to a nation that adopts

607
00:50:28.800 --> 00:50:33.120
these medicines. I've got a question for you that actually came to mind yesterday when I was

608
00:50:33.120 --> 00:50:36.480
I watched some, I don't know, some video on social media and they asked a question to a guy.

609
00:50:37.760 --> 00:50:47.200
David, if you were a billionaire now, age 56, would you give it all up to be my age again,

610
00:50:47.200 --> 00:50:53.440
33? I don't think you can put a price on being young. Another way of putting it, and I've seen

611
00:50:53.440 --> 00:50:57.440
this on social media, would you, for a billion dollars, would you swap with Warren Buffett?

612
00:50:58.160 --> 00:51:01.600
No, absolutely not. Right. So there's no money in the world that you want to be old, right?

613
00:51:02.560 --> 00:51:06.960
Not worth it. In other words, youth is more valuable than a billion dollars.

614
00:51:08.640 --> 00:51:12.240
It may be the most valuable thing you could ever have is your youth.

615
00:51:13.200 --> 00:51:18.400
It's such an interesting and illuminating analogy or metaphor or whatever because

616
00:51:19.280 --> 00:51:23.440
suddenly you do realize that how much we value it. We value it more than anything.

617
00:51:24.640 --> 00:51:33.520
I would rather be 33 years old than be a 43 year old billionaire. Even the 10 years I value

618
00:51:33.520 --> 00:51:40.080
as a billion dollars. Yeah, one year maybe, but not 10 years, right? 10 years is super. I totally agree

619
00:51:40.080 --> 00:51:47.840
with you. The older you get, the more valuable it becomes. It's important to realize the massive

620
00:51:47.840 --> 00:51:54.000
impact that this technology can have, not just economically, but on individual lives of human beings

621
00:51:54.000 --> 00:52:00.160
across the planet. The world where this becomes a reality. Again, I'm speaking like it's a

622
00:52:00.160 --> 00:52:04.880
certainty because I'm pretty convinced it's going to happen. That world is going to be so different

623
00:52:04.880 --> 00:52:10.160
from the world we live in. It's going to be as different as the pre-computer world and the pre-era

624
00:52:10.160 --> 00:52:17.680
plane world as today is. I'm trying to imagine the world where we could pick our age and maybe even,

625
00:52:17.680 --> 00:52:22.640
you know, you talked about earlier, being able to continue to reset to that age. Try to imagine

626
00:52:22.640 --> 00:52:29.040
what the world would be like if I could be 33 forever or if you could be, you know, 33 forever.

627
00:52:29.040 --> 00:52:35.120
Or even for another 100 years or something. Yeah, I could stay 33 for 100 years. Do you think

628
00:52:35.120 --> 00:52:39.840
that's the plausible outcome, which is we can kind of pick an age and stay there for 100 years,

629
00:52:39.840 --> 00:52:45.840
like at that particular age or is it just that I'm going to be 150 in my physical form? I'm going

630
00:52:45.840 --> 00:52:52.800
to be wrinkled in gray, but I'm just going to continue to live. Is it looking young or is it just

631
00:52:52.800 --> 00:53:00.480
living longer? It's actually, the good news is it's both. We're doing a lot of work in my lab

632
00:53:00.480 --> 00:53:07.760
on skin and hair. Hair loss, hair growing. Yeah, please help me. You don't have to worry just yet.

633
00:53:09.120 --> 00:53:15.360
We'll help your brother first. No, come on. We will. Tell him to call me. So we've seen that we

634
00:53:15.360 --> 00:53:21.120
can rejuvenate the skin of, again, mice, but still we also grow human skin in the lab from scratch.

635
00:53:21.120 --> 00:53:26.320
And we can put that human skin on mice and the mice have human skin. So we can now test

636
00:53:26.320 --> 00:53:32.320
age reversal in that system. I'm very optimistic that we'll be able to rejuvenate the

637
00:53:32.320 --> 00:53:37.520
external part of the body as well as the internal. If we can cure blindness, reversing age of the

638
00:53:37.520 --> 00:53:42.960
skin is a piece of cake. What does that one look like? I'm trying to understand all of the

639
00:53:42.960 --> 00:53:49.120
sort of unintended consequences of such a world where we're all kind of young and we all live

640
00:53:49.120 --> 00:53:55.600
longer. Is there problems of meaning and purpose? Is this? What are the unintended consequences?

641
00:53:55.600 --> 00:54:00.160
I've thought a lot about this. There's this gut feeling that a lot of people have. Maybe you're

642
00:54:00.160 --> 00:54:05.680
feeling it now is that if I'm not worried about death, I'm not going to strive as hard. I'm not

643
00:54:05.680 --> 00:54:10.960
going to have as much meaning. I'm not going to have agency. I totally reject that view.

644
00:54:12.320 --> 00:54:17.120
I believe that every moment is special. I don't believe I would be enjoying this conversation

645
00:54:17.280 --> 00:54:22.560
with you anymore if I could live 200 years. I'm loving the moment.

646
00:54:24.240 --> 00:54:29.680
And so I believe that we get up with purpose and that if I lived for a thousand years,

647
00:54:29.680 --> 00:54:35.280
I'd still enjoy every day that I lived. And even a thousand years one day may be seen as too

648
00:54:35.280 --> 00:54:42.400
short. It's 20 times my age, a little bit less than 20. That's still not very much. In the

649
00:54:42.400 --> 00:54:48.000
grand scheme of the age of geology and the earth, we still are around like that.

650
00:54:49.360 --> 00:54:54.560
And so I think that we will still love life. Most of us will still love life and enjoy every moment.

651
00:54:54.560 --> 00:55:00.160
But we'll get more opportunities. We can try multiple careers. Maybe we will get divorced and

652
00:55:00.160 --> 00:55:05.440
find we have a whole new life. So there will be opportunities and it will be a magnificent world.

653
00:55:06.240 --> 00:55:14.160
Not to mention the productivity that humans can provide with the knowledge of a 58 or 80 year old,

654
00:55:14.160 --> 00:55:19.280
but with the body of a 30 year old. Do you think people will make different decisions about having

655
00:55:19.280 --> 00:55:24.480
children? Well, I think we have a problem already with the decisions that a lot of couples are

656
00:55:24.480 --> 00:55:30.240
making, which is leaving it too late, is very clear with the fertility rate and the rate of child

657
00:55:30.240 --> 00:55:37.920
birth that basically we're going off a cliff. And I think that it's going to be important to be

658
00:55:37.920 --> 00:55:44.720
able to give couples and women, especially the choice to have children for longer. And that's

659
00:55:44.720 --> 00:55:48.800
one of the reasons that I work on this topic is that I think that the world with all of the

660
00:55:48.800 --> 00:55:54.400
training that we need to do and the pressures on finding a mate and being happily married or

661
00:55:54.400 --> 00:55:58.400
at least being partnered up, that can take decades to get the right person. You don't want to

662
00:55:58.400 --> 00:56:04.160
rush into it like people used to. And being able to have children in your 50s and 60s I think

663
00:56:04.160 --> 00:56:09.360
would be a great gift to humanity. That's my personal view. Some people may, you know, for whatever

664
00:56:09.360 --> 00:56:13.520
reason, disagree with that. But I think that the pressures to have children before 35

665
00:56:14.160 --> 00:56:21.280
typically are just extreme and unfair, but also that it'll help us maintain the human population

666
00:56:21.280 --> 00:56:27.680
because by 2050 we're going to start going in a bad decline and earlier in many Western countries.

667
00:56:27.680 --> 00:56:32.480
And without humans, you know, absent Android robots everywhere, we're going to have a

668
00:56:33.120 --> 00:56:38.960
deficiency of human capital and human productivity. And this is, I would argue with Elon

669
00:56:39.680 --> 00:56:45.520
that this is the best solution to that lack of humans. It's just keep people healthy and alive

670
00:56:45.520 --> 00:56:46.560
and productive for longer.

671
00:56:51.520 --> 00:56:56.080
Whoa, what's on your face? This is my bun charge face mask. I've been married for some time now.

672
00:56:56.080 --> 00:57:00.400
They're a sponsor of the podcast. I put this on for 15, 20 minutes a day. I can sit here in

673
00:57:00.400 --> 00:57:04.160
the chair and wear it. Boost my college and production helps with fine line blemishes. My

674
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complexion gets better. And then people, people listen to podcasts because I look better.

675
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Professional grade equipment in such a small box. It's non-invasive. And having sat here with

676
00:57:13.280 --> 00:57:17.600
so many of the world's leading health professionals, there's various things that I repeatedly hear

677
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work and some things I'm a bit skeptical about. This is one of the things that almost all of my

678
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679
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680
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681
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up to 40%. And you can get 20% off when you order through my link at buncharge.com slash D-O-A-C.

682
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That's buncharge.com slash D-O-A-C. The deal applies so wide.

683
00:57:49.840 --> 00:57:53.680
New Year always has a strange energy to it, because people start talking about their goals,

684
00:57:53.680 --> 00:57:58.080
fresh starts, and new habits. But the reality is that most people carry the same ideas

685
00:57:58.080 --> 00:58:02.000
they had last year into the New Year. I'm guilty of that too. And they still don't end up

686
00:58:02.000 --> 00:58:05.840
doing anything with them. And I get why. Starting something new, especially if it's a business

687
00:58:05.840 --> 00:58:09.360
or a project is overwhelming. Before you start, you're looking for the perfect moment and to be

688
00:58:09.360 --> 00:58:14.240
the perfect version of yourself when really what matters most is taking that first step.

689
00:58:14.240 --> 00:58:18.720
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690
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691
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692
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693
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694
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I promise you, you don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to start.

695
00:58:50.560 --> 00:58:55.360
You mentioned a cancer earlier on is something that you're working on in your laboratory.

696
00:58:55.360 --> 00:58:59.200
What progress have you made in your laboratory? And what has that taught you about the nature of

697
00:58:59.200 --> 00:59:04.240
cancer, but also how we might prevent and cure it someday? Because I was reading that in your

698
00:59:04.240 --> 00:59:09.760
laboratory, you have been able to slow the growth of certain cancer cells and kill those

699
00:59:09.760 --> 00:59:16.560
cancer cells completely. Yeah, so my wonderful student and a lot is doing a PhD on this.

700
00:59:17.440 --> 00:59:23.680
And what we've hypothesized and now tested is the idea, again, based on the information theory of

701
00:59:23.680 --> 00:59:32.080
aging, is that cancer is expressing those genes differently. In the same way that aging is a

702
00:59:32.080 --> 00:59:40.240
cellular identity crisis, cancer is a cellular identity crisis. And if we can rejuvenate an old cell

703
00:59:40.240 --> 00:59:45.680
to be normal and turn on the right genes again, we should be able to do that for a cancer cell and

704
00:59:45.680 --> 00:59:53.120
either make it normal or if it tries to be normal and wakes up from its zombie-like state, it might

705
00:59:53.120 --> 01:00:00.160
even kill itself. And that's what we're finding in my lab. No, lots of work has shown that a majority

706
01:00:00.560 --> 01:00:07.760
of cancers that we've grown in the lab will die and shrink in an animal if you try to reverse their

707
01:00:07.760 --> 01:00:14.400
age. Through the injection, but you were referring to any of that? Yeah, we can do it a couple of

708
01:00:14.400 --> 01:00:20.800
ways. One is using those three genes that rejuvenate the epigenome and make cells young again,

709
01:00:20.800 --> 01:00:26.800
the one for the eye, the same technology for the eye we're using in cancer cells. But we also have

710
01:00:26.800 --> 01:00:33.680
this chemical drink that we can give to animals or to put on the cells. And that also wakes the

711
01:00:33.680 --> 01:00:38.560
cancer cells up, tries to they try to become more normal. They turn on the original set of genes

712
01:00:38.560 --> 01:00:43.520
that they might have had on 30, 40 years ago. Some of these cancer cells that we grow in the lab

713
01:00:43.520 --> 01:00:51.120
were from the 20th century. We rejuvenate them. We turn on those genes that were originally in

714
01:00:51.120 --> 01:00:57.840
the normal tissue and the cells kill themselves. And so I believe that we may not be able to cure

715
01:00:57.840 --> 01:01:03.040
all cancer using this. That would be crazy to even say that. But I do believe that if we

716
01:01:03.040 --> 01:01:10.720
successful rejuvenating the human body, cancer is not going to be a risk. And that's just a nice

717
01:01:11.840 --> 01:01:16.000
side effect of what our original mission was, which was to treat aging.

718
01:01:16.720 --> 01:01:22.000
So from this, we can start to try and understand what we think is causing cancer. And I guess this

719
01:01:22.000 --> 01:01:27.360
goes back to a lot of the carcinogenic behavior that you described earlier, things like smoking,

720
01:01:27.360 --> 01:01:32.560
anything that's applying stress on the DNA. Is that like a... Yeah, you have to break the DNA.

721
01:01:33.440 --> 01:01:37.600
That's the catastrophe is really broken DNA, but you can do other things that

722
01:01:37.680 --> 01:01:46.400
catastrophes like overheat the cells, even mechanical stress. Too many hits on the brain.

723
01:01:46.400 --> 01:01:53.520
In football, we'll do that. So yes, that's exactly right. And that drives aging. And aging drives

724
01:01:53.520 --> 01:01:58.960
cancer, by the way. One of my theories called the Goronka genesis hypothesis. Terrible name, but

725
01:01:59.840 --> 01:02:05.520
nevertheless, Goronka genesis, it is. It's the idea that as we age, we're becoming more cancer

726
01:02:05.600 --> 01:02:13.200
like as a human. Our metabolism, when we're old, is closer to heading towards what a cancer

727
01:02:13.200 --> 01:02:18.560
cells metabolism is like. So that when we actually do get cancer, the cancer cells grow better in

728
01:02:18.560 --> 01:02:23.920
an old person than when you're young. And so by rejuvenating those cancer cells, giving them the

729
01:02:24.960 --> 01:02:31.200
ability to be young again, they actually either slow down in their growth or, as I said, kill

730
01:02:31.200 --> 01:02:37.680
themselves in response. I've got a bit of a prop here, which might be useful for the context of

731
01:02:37.680 --> 01:02:42.880
goodness. There are people here that may not know what I'm holding in my hands, but for those of

732
01:02:42.880 --> 01:02:50.480
you who don't know and who are just listening, I'm holding a record in my hands, a vinyl record

733
01:02:51.040 --> 01:02:57.840
that Stephen just handed me. So the information theory of aging, the analogy that I used is that

734
01:02:57.840 --> 01:03:02.000
it disrupts information. And so this record, this album has information on it.

735
01:03:03.040 --> 01:03:09.840
It's music. And just like DNA, it's information. So instead of the DNA information, the control of

736
01:03:09.840 --> 01:03:16.880
the DNA being getting messed up in the album, it's like scratching this album. So I'm literally going

737
01:03:16.880 --> 01:03:20.720
to scratch this album. Is that okay with you? Of course you can. All right. I'm not sure I can fix it,

738
01:03:20.720 --> 01:03:27.360
by the way. It may be a one way thing, but I've never done this before. But that's painful.

739
01:03:28.800 --> 01:03:35.840
Maybe you can hear that happening. So if we were to play this on a record player with a needle,

740
01:03:35.840 --> 01:03:40.480
it's going to jump around and it's going to read the wrong songs or it's going to certainly not

741
01:03:40.480 --> 01:03:48.160
sound very good. So that's now the equivalent of an old cell. The information, the beautiful music

742
01:03:48.160 --> 01:03:53.040
is there, but the ability to read it has been messed up. In the same way that old age,

743
01:03:53.040 --> 01:03:59.040
the information is in the DNA, but the cell zone read it correctly. And what our technology is

744
01:03:59.040 --> 01:04:03.680
is to get rid of those scratches. And so we can play the beautiful music of our youth again.

745
01:04:05.760 --> 01:04:10.800
I have got this. You told me to bring my weighted vest and this neck brace.

746
01:04:12.240 --> 01:04:14.960
Oh my goodness. I think I put it on the wrong way. Okay.

747
01:04:14.960 --> 01:04:19.360
Anyone listening, Steven's putting on a very heavy jacket right now with lead weights

748
01:04:19.920 --> 01:04:23.040
and a strap around his neck to limit his neck movement.

749
01:04:23.040 --> 01:04:30.400
Oh wow. That's a lot. So I just put on a 20, I think it's 20 kilogram, my son,

750
01:04:30.400 --> 01:04:38.640
week now, jacket and neck brace. And ahead of this conversation, my team told me to get one of these,

751
01:04:39.680 --> 01:04:44.560
what is the analogy here that you're creating? This is very, it's bad, right?

752
01:04:44.640 --> 01:04:49.840
It's hard, yeah. Right. Imagine feeling like that for a decade. That's old age.

753
01:04:50.560 --> 01:04:55.920
You're feeling tired, weak. You can barely hold your body up. You can barely move your neck.

754
01:04:55.920 --> 01:04:59.760
It would be painful. You're not in pain yet. But most people in their 80s have

755
01:05:00.560 --> 01:05:07.120
some sort of disease in aches and pains. Try doing that for another 10 minutes, maybe. How long

756
01:05:07.120 --> 01:05:12.400
can you keep that on? I'll keep it on for another 10 minutes. So why is this? Because it's way

757
01:05:12.400 --> 01:05:20.400
and immobility. I can't move my neck the same. My shoulders feel heavier. How is this a relevant

758
01:05:20.400 --> 01:05:24.240
analogy to aging? Because it just kind of feels like immobility and weight.

759
01:05:24.240 --> 01:05:29.360
Ah, well, I have to come over there and use this pair of scissors to be stabbing you as well.

760
01:05:29.360 --> 01:05:34.960
So if you can feel pain as you move as well, that's part of old age. It is not a fun thing being

761
01:05:34.960 --> 01:05:40.720
old. And most old people, the reason that they don't love life anymore is because they feel like

762
01:05:40.720 --> 01:05:48.400
you do. Or worse. Not to mention the fact that you need to put Vaseline on your eyes, ear plugs

763
01:05:48.400 --> 01:05:53.040
in your ears if you want to know what it's like being old. Oh god, it's not nice.

764
01:05:54.160 --> 01:05:59.840
Or even worse, shut your eyes and you can never open them again. That's what it's like for those

765
01:05:59.840 --> 01:06:04.640
patients that we hope to cure blindness in. If I'm going to ask you a really tough question,

766
01:06:04.640 --> 01:06:09.120
which is if I put a calculator in front of you right now and you had to hit a number on that

767
01:06:09.120 --> 01:06:13.280
calculator and then hit enter. And that was the age that you were going to live to.

768
01:06:13.280 --> 01:06:19.440
Yeah. And you had to make that decision now. What number would you hit on that calculator?

769
01:06:19.440 --> 01:06:22.080
Infinity. Really? So you did, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

770
01:06:22.080 --> 01:06:26.800
There's no day if you're healthy where you want to die. Even if you're a hundred,

771
01:06:26.800 --> 01:06:30.560
a hundred and twenty, if you have friends, family, loved ones, you're healthy,

772
01:06:31.280 --> 01:06:35.920
would you say, okay, tomorrow I'm ready to die? No, no, unless there was some kind of

773
01:06:36.080 --> 01:06:42.560
chemistry issue. Exactly. Right. So that's my point is when people say, oh, when I'm 80, kill me,

774
01:06:42.560 --> 01:06:46.240
that is bullshit. Excuse my language. It's for my largest wear on this. No, of course you can.

775
01:06:47.280 --> 01:06:50.880
Sorry, we're going to have to beep it for the kids, I guess. It's only when you're sick,

776
01:06:51.520 --> 01:06:57.520
or you have depression that you want to leave this world. Otherwise, life is a joy for most

777
01:06:57.520 --> 01:07:01.920
people in the world, not everybody. And we have to fix that as well. But for most of us,

778
01:07:02.640 --> 01:07:11.680
being alive is the greatest gift of any collection of atoms. Consciousness is even greater.

779
01:07:12.400 --> 01:07:18.160
And why would you want that to end? Who would choose that if they had the alternative to be with

780
01:07:18.160 --> 01:07:24.240
family and friends? Interesting. I say that's interesting because I have always assumed that I

781
01:07:24.240 --> 01:07:32.080
wouldn't want to live forever. But when you asked me, if I was healthy and I had my friends and

782
01:07:32.080 --> 01:07:37.920
family, I was doing things that I loved professionally, would there come a day where I would choose

783
01:07:37.920 --> 01:07:43.920
to go now? No, that wouldn't. Just like there hasn't come a day in the last 33 years where I've chosen

784
01:07:43.920 --> 01:07:52.080
to go now. Exactly. Do you think it's going to be possible in the next 50 years for us to live forever?

785
01:07:52.960 --> 01:07:58.640
I'd be shocked if that happened. But I've been shocked my whole career at how fast this technology

786
01:07:58.640 --> 01:08:03.920
is moving. And now with AI, things are going so fast, my head spinning. So I'd be happy to be

787
01:08:03.920 --> 01:08:10.640
proven wrong. But I'm skeptical that we could live forever in my lifetime at least. But as I said,

788
01:08:10.640 --> 01:08:16.480
you're probably going to live you are going to live into the 22nd century. We can't imagine what

789
01:08:16.480 --> 01:08:22.160
the world can be like then. And AI has really changed this equation. Oh, absolutely. We're doing

790
01:08:22.160 --> 01:08:28.880
things in my lab that would have taken 160 years before and quite literally billions of dollars

791
01:08:29.600 --> 01:08:37.600
on a $10,000 budget. Well, I guess I better make it to 2040. So let's talk about fasting and

792
01:08:37.600 --> 01:08:42.320
food and nutrition and get a little bit deeper on that. I've had so many conversations over the

793
01:08:42.320 --> 01:08:48.400
years about this subjective fasting. But as I was reading your research, you really do feel that

794
01:08:48.960 --> 01:08:54.640
fasting, just eating less often, is one of the most important things that we can all do for

795
01:08:54.640 --> 01:09:00.160
longevity. I do. I do. And I practice it as much as I can, though it's challenging in a world

796
01:09:00.160 --> 01:09:06.080
that's full of abundant food. But yes, we've known for thousands of years. The ancients are not

797
01:09:06.160 --> 01:09:12.000
dummies. They could witness what happens when you fast. Clarity of mind, long-term health,

798
01:09:12.560 --> 01:09:16.480
they could observe the difference between the glutton and the people that fasted for religious

799
01:09:16.480 --> 01:09:21.440
reasons. It's obvious. But there's certain ways to do it. Fasting doesn't include malnutrition. You

800
01:09:21.440 --> 01:09:27.200
have to do it with abundant vitamins, minerals. You want to make sure that you're you have adequate

801
01:09:27.200 --> 01:09:33.600
nutrition. But I think three meals a day is craziness. It turns out this idea breakfast is the

802
01:09:33.600 --> 01:09:39.840
most important meal of the day is marketing from the early 20th century by companies I will not name.

803
01:09:39.840 --> 01:09:44.320
But it was breakfast cereal. Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day for most people,

804
01:09:44.320 --> 01:09:48.800
especially adults. Especially if you're not hungry when you wake up. There's no point in eating

805
01:09:48.800 --> 01:09:53.440
if you're not hungry in the morning. I'm one of those people. So I've skipped breakfast. How about you?

806
01:09:53.440 --> 01:09:58.240
Yeah, I'm the same. I'm the same. My first meal today was three pm because I had a podcast

807
01:09:58.240 --> 01:10:03.360
until two pm. So we're just typical for me. I just don't get hungry in the mornings. Because

808
01:10:03.360 --> 01:10:08.080
of the marketing there for breakfast, sometimes I've said to myself, you should eat and I'll make

809
01:10:08.080 --> 01:10:12.720
myself eat. But it's very, very rare. I'm notoriously, people know that I'm notoriously

810
01:10:14.240 --> 01:10:18.560
a lady to four pm sometimes, five pm if I'm in the office. How are you feeling with that heavy

811
01:10:18.560 --> 01:10:23.280
dish? It's heavy, David. I'm finding myself trying to find a comfortable position.

812
01:10:24.000 --> 01:10:29.680
Yeah, it's tough being old and by the end of it, you will be so convinced that this research

813
01:10:29.680 --> 01:10:36.080
is important because to live like that, in most people, life is not worth living. I put a suit,

814
01:10:36.080 --> 01:10:41.200
a very heavy suit like that, but on the arms as well, not just the body. And he had the earmuffs

815
01:10:41.200 --> 01:10:48.400
and the eyes. This was the governor of Massachusetts. Fifteen minutes in that body suit and he was

816
01:10:48.400 --> 01:10:54.880
crying, not because he was in pain, because he, as he said on stage, it was the first time in his

817
01:10:54.880 --> 01:11:01.600
life he understood how his father feels and could be empathetic. We young people, I'm relatively

818
01:11:01.600 --> 01:11:07.920
young, 56, you're very young, 33. We have no idea what it's like to be old. It can be horrific.

819
01:11:08.560 --> 01:11:15.440
So why wouldn't we do the right things like fasting, exercising? So we can get an extra 10

820
01:11:15.440 --> 01:11:20.480
years, 20 years, maybe longer of healthy life. It does also give me a lot of empathy for people

821
01:11:20.960 --> 01:11:27.200
that have a bit more weight on them as well because if, you know, if I was, if I weighed that much,

822
01:11:27.200 --> 01:11:32.160
I don't know if I'd be very active to be completely honest with you. Exactly. And then you're in pain too,

823
01:11:32.160 --> 01:11:36.720
don't forget. Every joint can be hurting. How do you feel taking that off? Much better. Right.

824
01:11:37.120 --> 01:11:45.680
I want to jump. So let's hope, pray, wish that these technologies that I'm talking about today

825
01:11:45.680 --> 01:11:50.800
work, because that could be what it feels like to be rejuvenated when you're 80.

826
01:11:51.840 --> 01:11:58.880
I hope so. To close off on this point of fasting, why does it help extend my life just eating less?

827
01:11:58.880 --> 01:12:03.600
Part of it came out of research in my lab, but of course many others I need to give credit to.

828
01:12:03.600 --> 01:12:09.120
But in my lab specifically, what we worked on initially when I started, we studied yeast cells.

829
01:12:10.000 --> 01:12:16.000
Little microscopic cells that as everyone knows, we used to make beer and bread and champagne.

830
01:12:16.000 --> 01:12:20.560
These yeast cells live about 10 days and then they die and we used yeast as a model for aging.

831
01:12:21.280 --> 01:12:26.160
And what we discovered with yeast cells, which turns out to be true in our bodies, is that adversity,

832
01:12:26.800 --> 01:12:31.920
as long as it's not killing these cells, is good for you. It's called hormesis.

833
01:12:32.640 --> 01:12:35.840
It's the technical term for what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and live longer.

834
01:12:36.880 --> 01:12:43.760
Adversity mode is what we're aiming for. The opposite is abundance mode, which is what modern life is

835
01:12:43.760 --> 01:12:53.280
all about. Popcorn, movies, wheels on your suitcase, sitting down all day. We're in an abundance world.

836
01:12:53.280 --> 01:12:58.400
So adversity is something we don't often feel. We have to work at it. Fasting is adversity,

837
01:12:58.960 --> 01:13:04.960
exercises adversity, cold plungers, saunas, adversity, adversity mimics. They're not really

838
01:13:04.960 --> 01:13:11.680
threatening your life. What happens at the cellular level is that those cells, they get freaked out.

839
01:13:11.680 --> 01:13:17.280
They're worried that these times of adversity could kill us so they fight back.

840
01:13:17.920 --> 01:13:24.880
They turn on repair systems. They turn on recycling systems. They turn on DNA repair systems that

841
01:13:24.880 --> 01:13:30.240
help slow down aging. So in this modern world, when we have total abundance, we don't have to exercise,

842
01:13:30.240 --> 01:13:35.920
we don't eat three meals a day, we get overweight, we don't sleep much, we have air conditioning

843
01:13:35.920 --> 01:13:41.600
in summer. We're actually aging faster than we need to because our bodies are not fighting aging

844
01:13:41.600 --> 01:13:47.040
like they do when they feel adversity. Your team discovered, I can't say the word,

845
01:13:47.040 --> 01:13:54.400
serotonous. Oh, well, I was one of many scientists in the 1990s. I was part of a team called

846
01:13:54.400 --> 01:14:03.760
Sir Twins. Sir Twins. In yeast, actually, that's right. That's a good story. I went to the US

847
01:14:04.640 --> 01:14:09.360
to figure out why we get old, but I didn't choose to study humans because I figured,

848
01:14:10.240 --> 01:14:14.080
if we can't figure it out for a little yeast cells, we'll never figure it out for humans. I went

849
01:14:14.080 --> 01:14:21.200
to MIT. My professor was Lenny Garenti. I went to his lab and I said, I'm not going, I'm not leaving.

850
01:14:21.200 --> 01:14:26.800
The goal was, in my mind, was to figure out, are there longevity genes? At that time,

851
01:14:26.800 --> 01:14:32.080
most people thought that there were aging genes that caused aging, death genes. That doesn't

852
01:14:32.080 --> 01:14:37.280
make any sense to me. Our bodies would have longevity genes that give life. So in yeast, when

853
01:14:37.280 --> 01:14:42.960
searching for them and out of that work came two things. The first is Lenny and I. My professor

854
01:14:42.960 --> 01:14:47.680
and I published in the journal cell, which was a massive big deal in those days still is,

855
01:14:47.760 --> 01:14:55.040
but was my first time. The first evidence for a cause of aging for any species. We figured out

856
01:14:55.040 --> 01:15:02.240
why yeast cells get old. Do you want to guess? Why do yeast cells get old? Have you been paying

857
01:15:02.240 --> 01:15:06.160
attention? What does the information theory of aging say? I was going to say they have an identity

858
01:15:06.160 --> 01:15:11.520
crisis, but they do. How would we know if they're having an identity crisis? You can measure the

859
01:15:11.520 --> 01:15:16.640
identity of yeast cells. They have an identity. It's called the mating type. The main identity of a

860
01:15:16.640 --> 01:15:26.080
yeast cell is they are either a type or alpha type, male female. The hallmark of a yeast cell that's

861
01:15:26.080 --> 01:15:34.400
old is it loses its a and alpha identity and gets an identity crisis. It doesn't know what

862
01:15:34.400 --> 01:15:41.520
sex it is and it doesn't mate anymore. It becomes sterile. When I arrived at MIT in 1995, we knew

863
01:15:41.600 --> 01:15:46.880
that the hallmark of an old yeast cell, besides it being a bit slow and bigger, is that it became

864
01:15:46.880 --> 01:15:53.120
sterile. It had an identity crisis. We figured out that broken chromosomes distract the

865
01:15:53.120 --> 01:16:00.560
serotonin defenses and that causes aging in a yeast cell. We didn't know in the 90s that that

866
01:16:00.560 --> 01:16:05.680
was going to be true for us as well. It took another decade or two to figure that out. How does

867
01:16:05.680 --> 01:16:12.720
this link to eating all the time? Yeah. So, serotonins are proteins that actually are attracted to

868
01:16:12.720 --> 01:16:19.280
DNA. They actually associate it with it and they protect the DNA from getting damaged.

869
01:16:19.280 --> 01:16:24.240
Like bodyguards. Yeah. And they repair broken chromosomes. It's all coming together now.

870
01:16:24.800 --> 01:16:31.440
But they also get distracted. So serotonin's normal job, if there's no crisis, is that they turn

871
01:16:31.440 --> 01:16:37.680
genes on and off? They are epigenetic regulators. They control the epigeno. They tell us cell what

872
01:16:37.680 --> 01:16:44.720
type it is. No of cell skin cell. Conductor. Thank you. Conductor, exactly. But the conductor

873
01:16:45.680 --> 01:16:52.640
becomes demented over time. What happens is when you have a chromosomal break, the serotonin's

874
01:16:52.640 --> 01:16:57.680
panic, they leave the DNA, what they're supposed to be doing, controlling the cell's identity,

875
01:16:58.320 --> 01:17:02.720
and they go and they repair the DNA. That's their other job. They have two jobs, identity

876
01:17:02.720 --> 01:17:07.040
and repair. So, when you have this break, the serotonins go away. They repair the problem,

877
01:17:07.040 --> 01:17:11.680
but they don't all go back in the next few minutes. It's very quick. They don't all go back to where

878
01:17:11.680 --> 01:17:17.120
they started. So, you've got like this tennis match that the serotonins are the balls and they get

879
01:17:17.120 --> 01:17:22.560
hit over to the break, then hit back. Most of them find the genes that they should go back to,

880
01:17:22.560 --> 01:17:28.800
but they don't all do that. And that total game of tennis or ping pong, if you like, is what I believe,

881
01:17:28.800 --> 01:17:34.080
causes the identity crisis and aging itself, causes aging in yeast cells. It's why yeast cells don't

882
01:17:34.080 --> 01:17:38.400
live longer than 10 days. And I believe it's why we struggle to live beyond 80 or 90.

883
01:17:38.400 --> 01:17:44.080
So, if I'm eating all the time, then those two ends, they're not going to be doing their job as

884
01:17:44.080 --> 01:17:50.560
the conductor, making sure I know the identity of my cells. They're going to be doing repair stuff.

885
01:17:51.280 --> 01:17:56.560
So, I'm going to age faster. Yes, and the breakthrough happened in the lab as I was just

886
01:17:56.560 --> 01:18:03.040
leaving to go to Harvard. I got a job at Harvard when I was 29, super excited. And just as I was

887
01:18:03.040 --> 01:18:07.200
leaving, there was a big breakthrough that actually kept it secret from me, because they were worried

888
01:18:07.200 --> 01:18:12.240
I was going to work on it when I left. And in fact, my professor tried to prevent me from working on

889
01:18:12.240 --> 01:18:17.840
it when I left. On sort of two ends in general, crazy to think about. But what they discovered

890
01:18:18.480 --> 01:18:25.920
was that there's a metabolite, a molecule that goes up and down with food and up and down with

891
01:18:25.920 --> 01:18:31.040
sleep, called NAD. We have lots of it. There's grams of it in our body. It's one of the most

892
01:18:31.040 --> 01:18:35.920
abundant molecules in the body. It's very ancient. It's in yeast. It's in us. And what they found

893
01:18:35.920 --> 01:18:43.200
was that sartouins, to control genes and to repair DNA that's broken, they don't do it unless

894
01:18:43.280 --> 01:18:48.240
there's NAD. It's the catalyst. It's the fuel for their reaction. They need NAD.

895
01:18:49.360 --> 01:18:54.960
And when we're young, we have lots of NAD. So it works. Well, the sartouins control the information

896
01:18:54.960 --> 01:19:00.000
on the genes and they repair the DNA very well, because they've got lots of NAD to carry out their

897
01:19:00.800 --> 01:19:06.800
work. These are enzymes. They work. They do things. As we get older, by the time you're 50 about my

898
01:19:06.800 --> 01:19:13.040
edge, you have half the levels of this NAD molecule. My body is making less NAD. And it's also

899
01:19:13.040 --> 01:19:19.200
destroying the NAD faster than when I was 20. That's a problem. And so what we found was that when

900
01:19:19.200 --> 01:19:27.760
we fast the yeast or we fast a human, NAD levels go up again. So fasting raises NAD and makes the

901
01:19:27.760 --> 01:19:34.480
sartouins young again, essentially. And that preserves the epigenum and it also repairs the DNA better.

902
01:19:34.480 --> 01:19:40.960
So can I just drink NAD? You can drink NAD and not much would happen. How do I take NAD?

903
01:19:40.960 --> 01:19:46.560
So NAD can be taken as a supplement, which is a precursor to NAD. It's better to take the

904
01:19:46.560 --> 01:19:51.120
precursors. A precursor meaning something that creates it. Exactly. There's one called NMN,

905
01:19:51.840 --> 01:19:56.400
not to be confused with MNM's, which will probably not make you live longer. And there's another

906
01:19:56.400 --> 01:20:02.080
one called NR. NMN is directly converted into NAD. You put two NMN's together to get NAD. And so

907
01:20:02.080 --> 01:20:06.720
we know this for a fact, this isn't speculation. When you give a human NMN by swallowing it,

908
01:20:06.720 --> 01:20:13.200
a gram of it, you can typically double the amount of NAD in your body. And we believe and we have

909
01:20:13.200 --> 01:20:18.240
some evidence now in human clinical trials that the sartouins are imparting health benefits,

910
01:20:18.880 --> 01:20:26.240
reestablishing the epigenum, lowering body weight, improving inflammation, and even changing

911
01:20:26.240 --> 01:20:31.760
cholesterol levels in a positive way in humans. So I mean, I'm assuming you take NMN?

912
01:20:31.760 --> 01:20:39.040
I've been taking NMN and admitting that publicly for a while now. And my father, who is an even

913
01:20:39.760 --> 01:20:46.880
more advanced experiment at 86. So yes, we've been taking it for over a decade now. And we're still

914
01:20:46.880 --> 01:20:51.360
alive so far so good. So far so good. I do want to get into and I will ask you in a second about

915
01:20:51.360 --> 01:20:55.520
the supplement stack that you would recommend for the average person. But that's good to know.

916
01:20:55.520 --> 01:21:01.760
But just to close off on this point of fasting, is there a particular type of fasting method

917
01:21:01.760 --> 01:21:07.520
that you would recommend for someone who's trying to improve that longevity? Because there's

918
01:21:07.520 --> 01:21:12.320
so many that I hear 16 hours, five days. I'm a scientist. So I go with what's proven. I'm not

919
01:21:12.320 --> 01:21:17.440
selling anything. So what the science says, first of all, is that there isn't one size fits all for

920
01:21:17.440 --> 01:21:25.040
everybody. It often depends on what you can do personally. It's challenging to do this, right? You'll

921
01:21:25.040 --> 01:21:32.320
feel hungry for the first two weeks. You try it. So I would suggest the way I do it is I start by

922
01:21:32.320 --> 01:21:41.440
skipping one and then maybe one and a half meals. Like what you do, try to go without a meal until

923
01:21:41.440 --> 01:21:46.400
three four o'clock if you can. Maybe not the first day, right? If you do that the first day, you'll say

924
01:21:46.400 --> 01:21:51.680
this is crazy. I'm going to grab a snack and you won't do it. So go slowly, build up to it.

925
01:21:51.680 --> 01:21:56.640
So the first day, I would say just don't eat breakfast and maybe have a snack mid-morning.

926
01:21:57.280 --> 01:22:02.640
A week later, try to go without breakfast completely until lunch and eventually work up to what

927
01:22:02.640 --> 01:22:08.000
you do. And I do, which is eat a very late lunch if not go to dinner. What you get with that is

928
01:22:08.000 --> 01:22:15.040
obviously not eating in bed, hopefully. So you've got the night fast starting what would be 7 pm

929
01:22:15.040 --> 01:22:21.040
roughly? When do you finish dinner? No comment. It's usually pretty late last night. This is

930
01:22:21.040 --> 01:22:26.240
probably why I don't eat very early the next day. Last night would have been about, I'm going to say

931
01:22:26.240 --> 01:22:33.440
10 pm. Okay. It was super late. That's an extraordinary example. Usually it would be 8 or 9 pm.

932
01:22:34.880 --> 01:22:38.240
Okay, but you've got at least 13, 14 hours, which is good. Yeah.

933
01:22:38.240 --> 01:22:42.800
Write a aim for 14 hours. Some people go 16 hours, but that's a good start for fasting.

934
01:22:43.600 --> 01:22:48.080
And hopefully you can do that most days, five days a week. That's great because that means that

935
01:22:48.080 --> 01:22:53.440
you're turning on your stratoids, raising your NED, your exercise as well. So that's also added

936
01:22:53.440 --> 01:23:02.560
into it. One thing that I've started doing is fasting for longer than just 14, 16 hours. I try

937
01:23:02.560 --> 01:23:08.080
maybe once a month to go for three days without eating. Why? Because there's a type of cellular

938
01:23:08.080 --> 01:23:15.120
recycling that doesn't happen within the first 16 hours. You will enter ketosis, so your body will

939
01:23:15.120 --> 01:23:20.880
start to change its metabolism, produce what's called keto and bodies. But the true, real, deep

940
01:23:20.880 --> 01:23:29.360
cleansing of old proteins and damage, damaged proteins happens after two and a half to three days.

941
01:23:29.360 --> 01:23:36.640
And it's called chaperone mediated autophagy. Autophagy? Autophagy is the word for auto-self-eating

942
01:23:37.440 --> 01:23:42.720
and it really kicks in with an extended fast. What's the evolutionary reason for that? What's

943
01:23:42.720 --> 01:23:45.680
going on there? Why does it take me two and a half days for this deep, clean to happen?

944
01:23:46.480 --> 01:23:52.400
Because your body doesn't want to do it. It costs a lot of energy and having to remake body parts

945
01:23:52.400 --> 01:23:58.640
is energy expensive. And our body tries to conserve energy as much as possible. When you're fasting,

946
01:23:58.640 --> 01:24:05.120
what it needs to do is to use your body as fuel. So it'll start breaking down proteins for fuel

947
01:24:05.120 --> 01:24:10.000
that you need. So first of all, what'll happen is in the first few hours you use glycogen from

948
01:24:10.000 --> 01:24:14.480
your liver. Your liver makes glucose. You'll feel a little bit hungry, but you'll eventually be fine.

949
01:24:15.200 --> 01:24:20.400
Then once you run out of glycogen, then you're going to start breaking down fat and making ketones.

950
01:24:21.200 --> 01:24:26.400
That's when you start to get a bit of bad breath from that. But you feel great. When you're in a

951
01:24:27.120 --> 01:24:33.200
between about 15 hours and 24 hours, that's when you get a lot of ketones. And your brain uses those

952
01:24:33.200 --> 01:24:38.720
for fuel. So you'll have sharp mind. You can remember things. You can focus on work if you ever get

953
01:24:38.720 --> 01:24:47.680
there. Beyond that, you need to break down fat. And that is when your body is starting to do that.

954
01:24:47.680 --> 01:24:52.880
But ultimately, what happens after three days is your body says, hey, I'm going to start breaking

955
01:24:52.880 --> 01:24:58.560
down protein as well. And I wouldn't do that often because I don't want to break down a lot of

956
01:24:58.560 --> 01:25:03.520
protein. But your body will start to turn over old proteins preferentially. And a little bit of

957
01:25:03.520 --> 01:25:08.480
that, that's why I do it maybe once a month, has been shown at least in animals to be not just

958
01:25:08.480 --> 01:25:19.200
healthy, but life extending. On that point of ketosis, I like being in a state of ketosis. I

959
01:25:19.200 --> 01:25:23.920
kind of cycle in and out of it during the year because I get so many of the cognitive benefits.

960
01:25:23.920 --> 01:25:29.040
I'm more articulate on the podcast. I can think better. I feel better. I feel more focused and

961
01:25:29.040 --> 01:25:37.680
more attentive. Is ketosis is the ketone diet, the keto diet, a healthy diet in your view?

962
01:25:37.680 --> 01:25:41.680
Is it what are the benefits of it? Is it something that you think is natural to be recommended?

963
01:25:41.680 --> 01:25:46.480
Well, I don't mind being controversial, but I do speak the truth. There's not a lot of evidence

964
01:25:46.480 --> 01:25:51.840
that long term the ketogenic diet is healthy. It certainly doesn't correlate or associate with

965
01:25:52.080 --> 01:25:59.520
longevity. Short term, okay, it does help people lose weight, no question. But I am rather concerned

966
01:25:59.520 --> 01:26:06.560
for people that don't have a balanced diet with an input of plant material, which has molecules

967
01:26:06.560 --> 01:26:14.160
that are unique to plants and you won't find in high processed foods or meat. The evidence

968
01:26:14.160 --> 01:26:20.000
speaking as a scientist is that the long term ketogenic diets are not going to be longevity

969
01:26:20.640 --> 01:26:27.840
inducing. The evidence is more having a lean diet with a focus on plants that are not overcooked

970
01:26:27.840 --> 01:26:33.920
and not ultra-process. That one is undoubtedly the healthiest if you can do it.

971
01:26:33.920 --> 01:26:40.880
Do you eat meat? I do eat meat, but not like I used to. I used to think that a meal was not a

972
01:26:40.880 --> 01:26:45.520
meal unless I had a piece of meat there and then the vegetables were the decoration and I'd be

973
01:26:45.520 --> 01:26:52.160
grudgingly eat the green stuff. I've been flipped totally. Serena, my partner, Serena Poon,

974
01:26:52.160 --> 01:26:59.120
is not just a nutritionist, but a longevity expert for the last 26 years. She came to my apartment,

975
01:27:00.000 --> 01:27:03.920
which is now our apartment and she just cleared out all the food that I had. Pretty much everything

976
01:27:03.920 --> 01:27:10.400
was either toxic or just not healthy. It was ultra-processed. She said, what are you eating that kind of

977
01:27:11.040 --> 01:27:18.560
peanut butter full of sugar? She's taught me how to live healthy and so now I rarely eat meat.

978
01:27:18.560 --> 01:27:26.160
I rarely drink alcohol. I focus on really fresh, high quality, preferably organic foods because

979
01:27:26.160 --> 01:27:31.680
I don't want pesticides and I don't want other contaminants, but I do know organic can be more

980
01:27:31.680 --> 01:27:38.320
expensive. Why not meat? Animals, unfortunately, don't make what are called polyphenols, which are

981
01:27:39.120 --> 01:27:48.480
a type of molecule that I believe and have evidence turns on the sertuins in other pathways

982
01:27:48.480 --> 01:27:56.560
by chemical reactions that delay aging. Sertuins are just one of a few enzymes that control aging.

983
01:27:56.560 --> 01:28:02.800
We know this. There are sertuins. There's mTOR, which responds to aminos and another one called

984
01:28:02.960 --> 01:28:10.800
AMPK. Those three pathways are altered in just the right way by molecules found only in plants,

985
01:28:11.680 --> 01:28:18.240
and a small extent in fungi, but not in meat. If you're not eating a lot of vegetables or fruits,

986
01:28:18.240 --> 01:28:25.680
you're not getting these molecules. They're like medicine as food. Right here, I hope you don't mind

987
01:28:25.680 --> 01:28:30.640
me mentioning that there are some food in front of us. I'm looking at blueberries. Her blueberries are

988
01:28:30.640 --> 01:28:35.520
packed with polyphenols. One of the reasons they have purple color is that polyphenols have the

989
01:28:35.520 --> 01:28:41.520
color, and as Serena would tell you, eat the rainbow, I call it Xenoharmesis, which is not as

990
01:28:41.520 --> 01:28:47.520
attractive, but Xenoharmesis is the same idea as eat the rainbow, that by eating plants that have

991
01:28:47.520 --> 01:28:52.720
a lot of these molecules that are often produced by stressed plants. We get the stress plants.

992
01:28:53.520 --> 01:28:57.200
So plants will be stressed just like we are. If you don't give them enough water,

993
01:28:57.840 --> 01:29:04.560
food, too much sunlight, not enough sunlight, they, in their defense, they make polyphenols.

994
01:29:05.280 --> 01:29:09.360
There's a whole bunch of them. There's veratrol, physietin, quercetin, there's hundreds.

995
01:29:10.320 --> 01:29:18.000
This one has anthocyanidins, that's the color. These activate these adversity responses

996
01:29:18.000 --> 01:29:24.320
in ourselves. The serotones will be get activated by molecules in this blueberry.

997
01:29:24.320 --> 01:29:30.880
So if I eat this blueberry, those conductors that conduct some of the aging process you talked

998
01:29:30.880 --> 01:29:38.640
about making sure my cells don't have an identity crisis, fixing the negative stress that's going on

999
01:29:38.640 --> 01:29:48.240
in my cells, they will be benefited by eating this blueberry. Yeah, it's like a free hack. You

1000
01:29:48.320 --> 01:29:54.320
can eat something that's yummy, but you're also getting the benefits by mimicking fasting and

1001
01:29:54.320 --> 01:30:01.280
exercise in your food as well. The serotones don't just need NAD. That's the gas pedal. That's the

1002
01:30:01.280 --> 01:30:08.640
petrol for those of you in the British world and Commonwealth. The fuel for serotones is NAD.

1003
01:30:08.640 --> 01:30:16.080
The accelerator pedal are the polyphenols in fruits and vegetables like resveratrol, quercetin,

1004
01:30:16.080 --> 01:30:20.960
which we know when you give them to serotones, they get hyperactivated.

1005
01:30:20.960 --> 01:30:24.960
And when you say eat the rainbow, you mean eat colorful looking food.

1006
01:30:25.600 --> 01:30:30.800
Because that's an easy way to remember how to eat foods that have the most polyphenols.

1007
01:30:31.360 --> 01:30:36.000
I'll give you a really good example, Steven. Serena put me on to green tea matcha.

1008
01:30:36.800 --> 01:30:41.520
So matcha tea, if you haven't tried it, I'm sure you've tried it, but those of you who haven't

1009
01:30:41.520 --> 01:30:48.080
tried it, I highly recommend it. It tastes great. The reason for it switching from coffee mainly

1010
01:30:48.080 --> 01:30:54.800
to matcha in the morning for me is that it's full of polyphenols. Why is it full of polyphenols?

1011
01:30:54.800 --> 01:30:59.040
It's not just because it's green tea, which is not naturally healthy, but the growers of those

1012
01:30:59.040 --> 01:31:06.560
plants in Japan typically, they shade the plants before they harvest. Shading the plants stresses

1013
01:31:06.560 --> 01:31:11.920
them out, plants need light. So they don't just make more chlorophyll, which produces the deep green

1014
01:31:11.920 --> 01:31:17.680
color in the tea, but the polyphenols are super high. And through trial and error over thousands

1015
01:31:17.680 --> 01:31:22.240
of years, the Japanese figured out that by shading the plants, giving them this mild,

1016
01:31:22.800 --> 01:31:29.040
hormetic stress, it makes them not just extra tasty, but extra healthy. Same with red wine,

1017
01:31:29.040 --> 01:31:37.200
by the way, but the alcohol can be an issue. But absent alcohol, red wine is very good for you.

1018
01:31:37.840 --> 01:31:44.080
Okay, without the alcohol. It's unfortunate. You know, one of my papers in 1996 caused red wine

1019
01:31:44.080 --> 01:31:50.960
cells to go up 30% and state up. I apologized for saying that red wine every day was healthy.

1020
01:31:50.960 --> 01:31:56.160
Doctors were recommending it, remember? Yeah. But I now change my mind. I have to say

1021
01:31:57.120 --> 01:32:02.720
that I no longer believed having one glass of red wine every day is healthy in my opinion.

1022
01:32:02.720 --> 01:32:08.480
And I've stopped drinking red wine every day. Instead, I take polyphenols from red wine and from

1023
01:32:08.480 --> 01:32:14.240
vegetables, either in a pill or in my food as a substitute, because the evidence for alcohol

1024
01:32:14.240 --> 01:32:20.000
is rather damning. There's a UK bio bank study and the UK looked at thousands of people's MRI

1025
01:32:20.000 --> 01:32:24.960
scan of their brain, who were drinking one glass of alcohol a day. And there was a statistical

1026
01:32:24.960 --> 01:32:28.960
difference between the people that were drinking one glass a day and were not in terms of brain

1027
01:32:28.960 --> 01:32:34.080
size and gray matter. Of course, the gray matter was tended to be smaller in those that drank

1028
01:32:34.080 --> 01:32:40.240
even slightly. Yeah, I do. I actually have a matcher company. It was this year voted the

1029
01:32:40.240 --> 01:32:46.720
fastest-growing company in the UK. It's by some founders that I invested in, Levi,

1030
01:32:46.720 --> 01:32:54.160
Teddy and Marissa from Dragonstone. And it's been an absolute unbelievable business, unbelievable.

1031
01:32:54.160 --> 01:32:58.480
So tell us, where do I get it? Japan, you get the matcher from Japan. But the company's

1032
01:32:58.480 --> 01:33:02.880
called Perfecto. People know about it, because I've talked about it before. But I didn't realise

1033
01:33:02.880 --> 01:33:08.400
when I made the investment that matcher was considered by many to also be very healthy, especially

1034
01:33:08.400 --> 01:33:13.280
a health alternative to certain energy products on the market that you get in cans that give you

1035
01:33:15.520 --> 01:33:20.800
I shan't to get sued. But the other thing that I'm the company I invested in is this one here

1036
01:33:20.800 --> 01:33:28.160
called Keaton IQ. I'm a co-owner of this company as well. Yeah, I love that company. And the CEO

1037
01:33:29.040 --> 01:33:34.160
Michael, good guy. What's your thoughts on exogenous ketones? Like drinking ketones?

1038
01:33:35.040 --> 01:33:43.200
I do it. In fact, I drink Keaton IQ before I do a podcast. Why? It improves my clarity. I find

1039
01:33:44.080 --> 01:33:48.400
I also believe the science, and there have been multiple studies now in people,

1040
01:33:49.360 --> 01:33:54.400
some of the science comes out of Keaton IQ, but also independent studies have shown that it's

1041
01:33:54.400 --> 01:33:59.440
extremely healthy for the heart. And there's new studies that show for the brain as well.

1042
01:33:59.440 --> 01:34:04.160
It can be healthy. The brain uses ketones like beta hydroxybutyrate, or in that one, it's one

1043
01:34:04.160 --> 01:34:09.680
three-button dial. Just a shot of that will give the brain food that it needs rather than the

1044
01:34:09.680 --> 01:34:15.680
body having to make it. And you get, I believe, and I feel it, I get the clarity of fasting without

1045
01:34:15.680 --> 01:34:20.640
being in a fasted state. But I also drink it when I'm fasting to give the body the extra boost

1046
01:34:20.640 --> 01:34:25.520
that it needs. And on this point of diet, one of the things that I was told by my doctor when I

1047
01:34:25.520 --> 01:34:32.080
did a, like one of those blood tests was he cautioned me about bad cholesterol. He said to me,

1048
01:34:32.080 --> 01:34:36.640
something along the lines that I need to be careful about the bad cholesterol. And there's been

1049
01:34:36.640 --> 01:34:42.320
lots of conversation about cholesterol. Good, bad. What's your perspective on this conversation on

1050
01:34:42.320 --> 01:34:47.360
bad cholesterol, which has been thought to increase, certain foods have been thought to increase

1051
01:34:47.360 --> 01:34:54.160
bad cholesterol, which is very, very detrimental to our health? I didn't realize there was a debate.

1052
01:34:54.160 --> 01:35:00.640
At least in my world, there is no debate. If you're referring to, do you want to get your LDL

1053
01:35:00.640 --> 01:35:05.760
cholesterol as low as possible? Yeah. Definitely. Oh, really? In a case it's... Yeah, I mean,

1054
01:35:05.760 --> 01:35:11.120
the sciences are as beautiful as thousands of people in studies. Now, I think I know what you're

1055
01:35:11.120 --> 01:35:16.800
talking about. There are some stories that you need cholesterol in your brain. And if you

1056
01:35:17.360 --> 01:35:22.960
inhibit it, you might affect your brain function. You also need it for repair of arteries.

1057
01:35:23.760 --> 01:35:28.400
But there's no evidence that that's a problem. In fact, it's a little known fact that the brain

1058
01:35:28.400 --> 01:35:33.920
doesn't use the cholesterol from the bloodstream. It makes its own. So I've actually been honest

1059
01:35:33.920 --> 01:35:40.240
at the start to lower my LDL since I was 30. Really? Well, I had high cholesterol. It's in my family.

1060
01:35:41.120 --> 01:35:46.080
But I went to my doctor and I said, I want to go on these new drugs at the time,

1061
01:35:46.080 --> 01:35:51.040
statins. And he said, why you don't have heart disease yet. And I said, why would I wait,

1062
01:35:51.920 --> 01:35:56.080
get me on it? I want to be on it. And in those days, it was very weird to give someone

1063
01:35:56.720 --> 01:36:02.960
a statin at age 30 with no evidence of heart disease. But as you know, I'm of the

1064
01:36:03.760 --> 01:36:08.800
opinion that we shouldn't wait till we get diseases to treat them. We should preempt that and start

1065
01:36:08.800 --> 01:36:15.120
early in life. And so we are insisted with my doctor initially with statins. But on all of these

1066
01:36:15.120 --> 01:36:21.360
things I go in and I say, I need you to prescribe me this test. I need this medicine. And eventually,

1067
01:36:21.360 --> 01:36:26.960
after talking it over with him, he typically prescribes me something or gets me a test. But I've

1068
01:36:26.960 --> 01:36:32.080
been fighting a system. And my doctor is at Harvard. So he's a good doctor, but conservative. The

1069
01:36:32.080 --> 01:36:36.560
old way of doing medicine is if you're not sick, we're not going to give you a medicine.

1070
01:36:36.560 --> 01:36:41.200
Certainly not if you're young and healthy. But that has to change. So you're saying that I should

1071
01:36:41.200 --> 01:36:45.600
be on statins potentially? Well, what's your LDL level? Not good. It's great. I think I ate too much

1072
01:36:45.600 --> 01:36:50.480
bacon or something. Well, we can talk about food and cholesterol because it depends whether you

1073
01:36:50.480 --> 01:36:54.720
absorb still best or all or not. We can test for that. But if you do absorb cholesterol

1074
01:36:55.520 --> 01:36:59.920
more than most, I would say that you may want to change your diet at a minimum.

1075
01:36:59.920 --> 01:37:07.920
On this plate here in front of us, I have the top five foods that I believe you think are great

1076
01:37:07.920 --> 01:37:12.320
for reversing aging. Am I correct? Is that does that? These are great choices, yeah.

1077
01:37:12.320 --> 01:37:16.080
So what are these and why? So we've already done the blueberries and you explained to me about

1078
01:37:16.080 --> 01:37:20.320
polyphenols and they're rich in them, which I understand. And they're low in sugar, right?

1079
01:37:21.360 --> 01:37:28.160
Well, they're not low in sugar. So don't eat a ton of them. A handful is fine as a snack.

1080
01:37:28.720 --> 01:37:32.960
It's also known that having too much sugar is bad for longevity. Keep your blood sugar levels

1081
01:37:32.960 --> 01:37:39.040
steady and low as much as you can. So don't eat too many of those. A better choice than blueberries

1082
01:37:39.040 --> 01:37:43.840
would be something like matcha, which is not full of sugar. In fact, if you go to some of these

1083
01:37:43.840 --> 01:37:49.120
chains that sell matcha and it tastes really sweet, you're going to reverse the effects of any

1084
01:37:49.120 --> 01:37:53.920
polyphenols by drinking that much sugar. So I always have unsweetened matcha. Okay. So now we've got

1085
01:37:53.920 --> 01:37:59.440
avocados here. Yeah. Avocados, they're not so much known for their polyphenols, though they do

1086
01:37:59.440 --> 01:38:05.840
have them. It's the type of fats, the polyunsaturated fats. They help with satiety. So you're not

1087
01:38:05.840 --> 01:38:10.480
going to be as hungry. So if you put that on your sandwich at lunch, you're not going to feel

1088
01:38:10.480 --> 01:38:15.200
peckish. And they're highly anti-inflammatory as well. The molecules are in there and the fats

1089
01:38:15.200 --> 01:38:23.440
are very good for you. Extra virgin olive oil? Oh, yeah. Excellent. There's a type of oils that are

1090
01:38:23.440 --> 01:38:29.760
in there are very healthy. There's omega-9, which is also known to activate serotones. And again,

1091
01:38:29.760 --> 01:38:37.280
if you have the right grower, and this has been cold pressed, not too processed, and stressed before

1092
01:38:37.280 --> 01:38:44.000
harvesting, you'll have huge amounts of polyphenols as well. I really hope that this is what the team

1093
01:38:44.000 --> 01:38:49.680
said it was. This has happened before I tried something, and I thought it was something else,

1094
01:38:49.680 --> 01:38:55.840
but it was a white powder, and it was labeled with something. What could it be? Yellow? Yellow?

1095
01:38:58.080 --> 01:39:04.640
Oh, urine. No, I'm joking. It's not. I can't. I don't think drinking urine is longevity.

1096
01:39:04.640 --> 01:39:10.080
But yeah, on and off, I do take a teaspoon of olive oil in the morning and mix it with

1097
01:39:10.080 --> 01:39:16.160
resveratrol polyphenol. Oh, okay. Interesting. Okay, so extra virgin olive oil. Good.

1098
01:39:16.800 --> 01:39:22.240
Good. And there's a lot of evidence, not just molecular like me, but epidemiologically people that

1099
01:39:22.240 --> 01:39:27.680
have a lot of olive oil in their diet tend to have low inflammation and less disease.

1100
01:39:27.680 --> 01:39:33.040
And we've got some nuts. Yep, nuts are good for many reasons. They're full of vitamins and minerals.

1101
01:39:33.920 --> 01:39:38.640
If there's a Brazil nut, you want to have one of those every day for the selenium, which is a very

1102
01:39:38.640 --> 01:39:43.680
rare element in our food supply. And there's a recent study just last month showing that

1103
01:39:44.480 --> 01:39:51.040
lack of selenium can be very deleterious. So nuts are great as a snack. Be careful,

1104
01:39:51.040 --> 01:39:55.920
they're full of calories though. So if you're trying to lose weight and you're not exercising a lot,

1105
01:39:56.480 --> 01:40:04.800
don't overeat on the nuts. And what? Oh, my least favorite food, but nevertheless, I will eat them.

1106
01:40:04.800 --> 01:40:09.920
This is a Brussels sprout. When I was a kid, Brussels sprouts tasted a lot more,

1107
01:40:09.920 --> 01:40:15.760
a lot worse, a lot better. Those are good because they have polyphenols. But there's also

1108
01:40:15.760 --> 01:40:20.800
another molecule in them called sulfuraphane. It's actually the reason they taste terrible and smell

1109
01:40:20.800 --> 01:40:28.560
terrible. So sulfuraphane is what it sounds. It has a sulfur atom in it. And that gives it that

1110
01:40:28.560 --> 01:40:35.040
rotten egg smell. But sulfuraphane activates these hormesis pathways. There's one called NRF.

1111
01:40:35.600 --> 01:40:42.560
And that is a stress response protein that sulfuraphane activates. So you actually, by eating

1112
01:40:42.560 --> 01:40:48.800
preferably relatively steamed, not fried to death, Brussels sprouts, you'll get sulfuraphane.

1113
01:40:48.800 --> 01:40:52.320
You can also take sulfuraphane as a supplement if you don't like Brussels sprouts.

1114
01:40:52.320 --> 01:40:56.880
You've used this word pulsing before. You believe that the body should go through cycles of

1115
01:40:56.880 --> 01:41:01.920
stress and recovery rather than receiving constant salient puts. When you say pulsing,

1116
01:41:01.920 --> 01:41:04.640
what do you mean? What give an example of pulsing and why I need to do that?

1117
01:41:05.280 --> 01:41:11.280
Well, there's a few examples. The first time I came across this result as a scientist was

1118
01:41:11.280 --> 01:41:16.480
resveratrol. So resveratrol is found in red wine, among other things. And it's thought to give

1119
01:41:16.480 --> 01:41:22.320
the health benefits of red wine. And we fed it to mice, fat mice, skinny mice, old mice. And

1120
01:41:22.800 --> 01:41:29.760
it worked very well in the fat mice. It made them thinner. It made them live longer. It cured

1121
01:41:29.760 --> 01:41:35.040
most of their diseases. They lived about, I think it was 15, 20 percent longer. Then we gave it

1122
01:41:35.040 --> 01:41:41.200
to normal mice every day. And they lived a little bit longer, but not significantly. Resveratrol.

1123
01:41:41.200 --> 01:41:47.120
Resveratrol. What we found to my surprise was when we gave old mice resveratrol, not every day,

1124
01:41:47.120 --> 01:41:54.240
but every second day, then they lived significantly longer. So then I thought, well, maybe giving them

1125
01:41:54.880 --> 01:42:00.560
a foreign substance every day is not good. Maybe there's some side effect that's counteracting

1126
01:42:00.560 --> 01:42:04.880
benefit. The other thing I want to mention, I said there's a few examples. Another good one is

1127
01:42:04.880 --> 01:42:10.880
metformin. Metformin has been shown to make athletes and bodybuilders and people who go to the gym,

1128
01:42:11.600 --> 01:42:17.680
weightlifters do less repetitions. And as a result, their muscles are about 5 percent less

1129
01:42:17.680 --> 01:42:23.440
compared to those that don't take metformin in size. I don't think it's molecular. I think it's

1130
01:42:23.440 --> 01:42:27.440
because you feel a little bit weaker with metformin, because it's actually interfering with your

1131
01:42:27.440 --> 01:42:33.440
body's ability to make energy through mitochondria. I think most people have heard of the little power

1132
01:42:33.440 --> 01:42:39.600
packs living in our cells, originally bacteria that came into our bodies. The point is that

1133
01:42:39.600 --> 01:42:44.880
by pulsing metformin, I think that's a better way to do it for longevity. You mean cycling it,

1134
01:42:44.880 --> 01:42:50.320
so like doing it every other day or? Yeah, I don't take, if I take metformin or the natural

1135
01:42:50.400 --> 01:42:54.480
equivalent, which is burberine. If you don't want to take the drug, you can take burberine.

1136
01:42:55.520 --> 01:43:03.280
That also activates this AMPK, this other so-to-unliked pathway. Taking it every other day, I think,

1137
01:43:03.280 --> 01:43:08.960
is better. And particularly if you like to work out, don't take the metformin a few hours before

1138
01:43:08.960 --> 01:43:13.760
you work out, take it after, or maybe skip it that day. I think that's a better approach.

1139
01:43:14.880 --> 01:43:19.760
Everyone's a while you come across a product that has such a huge impact on your life that you'd

1140
01:43:19.760 --> 01:43:28.160
probably describe it as a game changer. And I would say, for about 35 to 40% of my team,

1141
01:43:28.160 --> 01:43:32.800
they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Keytone IQ,

1142
01:43:32.800 --> 01:43:37.840
which you can get at keytone.com as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner of this

1143
01:43:37.840 --> 01:43:42.720
company and the reason why they now are responsive to this podcast is because one day when I came to

1144
01:43:42.720 --> 01:43:47.040
work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk, I had no idea what it was. Lily in my team says

1145
01:43:47.040 --> 01:43:51.520
that this company has been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite frankly,

1146
01:43:51.520 --> 01:43:57.680
the rest is history. In terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive

1147
01:43:57.680 --> 01:44:03.040
I am, game changer. So if you want to give it a try, visit keytone.com slash Stephen for 30% off.

1148
01:44:03.040 --> 01:44:08.000
You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. And now, you can find Keytone IQ at

1149
01:44:08.000 --> 01:44:13.040
Target stores across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge.

1150
01:44:13.840 --> 01:44:20.000
We have finally caved in. So many of you have asked us if we could bundle the conversation cards

1151
01:44:20.000 --> 01:44:24.080
with the 1% diary. For those of you that don't know, every single time a guest sits here with me in

1152
01:44:24.080 --> 01:44:28.480
the chair, they leave a question in the diary of a CEO, and then I ask that question to the next

1153
01:44:28.480 --> 01:44:33.280
guest. We don't release those questions in any environment other than on these incredible

1154
01:44:33.280 --> 01:44:38.560
conversation cards. These have become a fantastic tool for people in relationships, people in teams,

1155
01:44:38.560 --> 01:44:43.040
in big corporations, and also family members to connect with each other. With that, we also have

1156
01:44:43.040 --> 01:44:48.240
the 1% diary, which is this incredible tool to change habits in your life. So many of you have asked

1157
01:44:48.240 --> 01:44:53.680
if it was possible to buy both at the same time, especially people in big companies. So what we've

1158
01:44:53.680 --> 01:44:58.400
done is we've bundled them together, and you can buy both at the same time. And if you want to drive

1159
01:44:58.400 --> 01:45:03.680
connection and then still habit change in your company, head to the diary.com to inquire and our team

1160
01:45:03.840 --> 01:45:10.560
will be in touch. We talked back size earlier on page 102 of your book. You talk about how there's a

1161
01:45:10.560 --> 01:45:16.320
CDC funded study that found people who exercise regularly about 30 minutes of jogging five days a

1162
01:45:16.320 --> 01:45:23.120
week, have telomeres that look 10 years younger than sedentary people. People that just sit around

1163
01:45:23.120 --> 01:45:29.680
all day and don't do much exercise, which is pretty remarkable. How do we notice the exercise

1164
01:45:29.840 --> 01:45:35.040
not something else? How are we able to establish causation? Yeah, we don't. We don't. Unfortunately,

1165
01:45:35.040 --> 01:45:40.880
all of these association studies just lead to a need to do placebo controlled or at least controlled

1166
01:45:40.880 --> 01:45:47.840
trials in people. So we don't know for sure, speaking like a scientist. But there have been studies

1167
01:45:47.840 --> 01:45:52.800
where people are told to do exercise and those that are told to sit. And then you can compare

1168
01:45:52.800 --> 01:45:58.080
telomere length, and that has been shown. So that's a much better evidence of causation. But you're

1169
01:45:58.160 --> 01:46:03.600
right. When you see an association, it could be the people who do exercise also eat well and drink

1170
01:46:03.600 --> 01:46:08.320
matcha. Sleep at home. Exactly. So you have to be careful interpreting these association studies

1171
01:46:08.320 --> 01:46:14.240
always. But when you've got a placebo controlled trial or these studies that are called

1172
01:46:15.360 --> 01:46:21.920
prospective, not retrospective studies, then they're better. So telomeres, the ends of chromosomes

1173
01:46:22.000 --> 01:46:28.000
that get shortened as you get older, we used to use them really as a good indicator of age,

1174
01:46:28.000 --> 01:46:32.160
biological age. Now we use the epigenome and the DNA methylation chemicals is a better

1175
01:46:32.720 --> 01:46:36.560
clock. And then cold plungers and soreners. Yeah, let's get to those. I've got a

1176
01:46:36.560 --> 01:46:40.480
sauna in the house, but I never use it to be honest. You should. But if you if you tell me,

1177
01:46:40.480 --> 01:46:44.320
I should, we should actually jump in there after this. Your girlfriend's still here. David,

1178
01:46:45.120 --> 01:46:52.320
she can come too. So saunas are in my mind. It's not even a question. They are proven to be

1179
01:46:52.320 --> 01:46:58.560
beneficial for multiple reasons, heart disease and even long-term mortality. What's going on in

1180
01:46:58.560 --> 01:47:04.880
the sauna in the heat? Anyone who says they know is lying. We don't know. But one theory that I like

1181
01:47:04.880 --> 01:47:09.600
and it also goes back to yeast cells, there are what are called heat shock proteins that come on

1182
01:47:09.600 --> 01:47:15.040
and defend the cell when they the cell senses heat. And it may be that these heat shock

1183
01:47:15.040 --> 01:47:23.120
defense proteins called HSC, HSPs come on. When we breathe in this moist hot air, the moisture

1184
01:47:23.120 --> 01:47:30.240
actually seems to help as well. And in many studies, mostly on Finnish men, businessmen, those that

1185
01:47:30.240 --> 01:47:37.040
go into their home saunas and the majority of homes in Finland do have saunas. So they can do

1186
01:47:37.040 --> 01:47:41.600
these studies pretty easily. The bottom line is that those that didn't do regular,

1187
01:47:41.600 --> 01:47:48.320
quote unquote, sauna bathing tended to die earlier in particular from heart disease and cardiovascular

1188
01:47:48.320 --> 01:47:54.800
events than those that did regular sauna bathing. So I'm a big advocate of saunas. I don't have one

1189
01:47:54.800 --> 01:47:59.440
in my house, but I do have a really hot steam shower, which I use regularly every day.

1190
01:47:59.440 --> 01:48:03.760
And is there a difference between the steam room and the sauna in terms of the impact here?

1191
01:48:03.840 --> 01:48:08.960
I think a sauna is better because it gets hotter. And I would have a sauna if I had my choice.

1192
01:48:08.960 --> 01:48:14.480
And the cold plunge? Not a lot of data. There's a lot of theory that, again,

1193
01:48:14.480 --> 01:48:20.160
hormises, adversity, feeling better. There's some evidence that it can actually help with muscle

1194
01:48:20.160 --> 01:48:25.520
repair after workouts. But I think we need a lot more research in that regard. But then,

1195
01:48:25.520 --> 01:48:31.920
nevertheless, I used to do it before I was so busy in traveling the world. And I certainly

1196
01:48:31.920 --> 01:48:37.120
feel better. So even if I didn't live longer because of it, I definitely had more mental clarity.

1197
01:48:37.120 --> 01:48:42.240
And I felt better in general. But if you were prioritizing all of the things we talked about

1198
01:48:42.240 --> 01:48:46.800
so far, and you had to pick one, do I have to pick one? Because you need more than one.

1199
01:48:46.800 --> 01:48:52.160
But just in terms of like the most important one, that's maybe the first domino.

1200
01:48:52.160 --> 01:48:58.960
Yeah, I would say that the combination of what the easiest, biggest impact you can have combined

1201
01:48:59.680 --> 01:49:07.280
that would be skipping meals, skipping meals, and then a close second would be exercise that

1202
01:49:07.280 --> 01:49:13.360
includes losing your breath for at least five minutes three times a week. So what I mean by losing

1203
01:49:13.360 --> 01:49:17.680
your breath for five minutes, when you couldn't carry out a conversation easily, that you're

1204
01:49:17.680 --> 01:49:22.240
panting. If you're not panting and you're just lifting weights, that's not going to have the

1205
01:49:22.480 --> 01:49:30.000
kind of benefit. Why? We don't know. But it's been shown that the health benefits and those that

1206
01:49:30.000 --> 01:49:38.240
live long tend to do a lot more aerobic exercise, not just weights. But both are important for mobility,

1207
01:49:38.240 --> 01:49:45.280
strength, falling in all the rage and hormones like testosterone. Red light therapy, the red light

1208
01:49:45.280 --> 01:49:54.080
masks. Yeah. At first I was skeptical, but I've done the research on the research. And it looks

1209
01:49:55.040 --> 01:50:02.080
reasonable. I use a red light cap on my head to preserve my hairline. And there's some now good

1210
01:50:02.080 --> 01:50:07.840
evidence that the mitochondria, which are the power packs and a lot of good things come from

1211
01:50:07.840 --> 01:50:14.720
mitochondria, they actually are rejuvenated either rejuvenated or enhanced by this certain wave

1212
01:50:14.720 --> 01:50:19.520
lengths of red light. You have to get the wavelength right. But it's not BS. It sounds like

1213
01:50:19.520 --> 01:50:25.120
BS, right? You shine light on your skin and it gets better or you get your hair. But I think that

1214
01:50:25.120 --> 01:50:30.800
there's good evidence now that that it's not BS. And in terms of the supplement stack that you take

1215
01:50:30.800 --> 01:50:39.680
every day, if I was to look at the on a great week where you just did everything right, what would

1216
01:50:39.680 --> 01:50:43.840
your supplement stack look like? And I know this evolves over times. I'm very keen to hear what it is

1217
01:50:43.840 --> 01:50:48.480
right now. Yeah. Well, that would be another podcast to go through each one of the things.

1218
01:50:48.480 --> 01:50:54.000
Really? Well, I travel with Serena with a little case. Have you got it?

1219
01:50:54.000 --> 01:50:59.360
I've got it here. Can I see it? Well, it's not in the studio. I didn't bring it with me.

1220
01:50:59.360 --> 01:51:05.360
Can you send me a photo? Sure. I couldn't publicly share it because it would be posted all over

1221
01:51:05.360 --> 01:51:10.400
the internet. Things go crazy. But I can tell you the main things. Why would it go crazy on the

1222
01:51:10.400 --> 01:51:15.040
internet? Because it's because it's because there's a lot in there. Well, some of the things are

1223
01:51:15.040 --> 01:51:20.640
experimental and I wouldn't want people to go nuts about it because it's still experimental.

1224
01:51:21.280 --> 01:51:26.800
I'm okay experimenting. I'm myself. I'm not okay advocating for things that are not yet proven

1225
01:51:26.800 --> 01:51:30.640
or known to be absolutely safe. Okay. So give me the ones that you know to be safe.

1226
01:51:31.520 --> 01:51:39.920
Well, the NMN we've covered resveratrol and either metformin or burbering. Yeah.

1227
01:51:40.400 --> 01:51:46.240
Okay. Spurmedine. Spurmedine. Yeah. And the quantities are either on the screen or in my book

1228
01:51:46.240 --> 01:51:53.840
if you want to know exactly. Is that what it sounds like? Uh, yes. Yes. But you get it these days not

1229
01:51:53.840 --> 01:52:00.240
from sperm or semen, but you get it from wheat germ, typically plants. It used to come from sperm.

1230
01:52:00.240 --> 01:52:05.360
Well, that's how it was discovered. It was crystallized by, I believe, Anthony von Lee-Wenhoek,

1231
01:52:05.520 --> 01:52:11.280
one of the first microscopists and microbiologists. Spurmedine, the reason that I take it is that it

1232
01:52:11.280 --> 01:52:17.920
extends the lifespan of every animal that it's been given to, from worms to mice. And it's a very

1233
01:52:17.920 --> 01:52:23.440
safe molecule. So that I always weigh up the downsides versus the upsides. And if there's no downsides

1234
01:52:24.080 --> 01:52:29.280
and I can afford it, which you know, I work really hard that so I can afford it. And I prioritize

1235
01:52:29.280 --> 01:52:36.000
my health then I take it. And if you're wondering how it works, it seems to stimulate autophagy,

1236
01:52:36.000 --> 01:52:44.640
recycling proteins. It helps with fasting. But I also have some evidence that it delays the epigenetic

1237
01:52:44.640 --> 01:52:50.800
information loss. So it's slowing down the scratching of the record. Spurmedine. All right. So I'm

1238
01:52:50.800 --> 01:52:58.720
also keen on glycine. Glycine is a very safe substance. It's an amino acid, one of the 20 amino acids

1239
01:52:58.720 --> 01:53:04.640
that makes proteins. And I actually did a PhD on glycine. I was one of the first people to

1240
01:53:05.360 --> 01:53:10.000
perhaps the first person to clone genes that process glycine. So I know it well.

1241
01:53:10.720 --> 01:53:17.040
For some reason, when you give animals, and for instance, mice, grams of glycine, so I take about

1242
01:53:17.040 --> 01:53:23.440
5 grams of glycine, most days, they live longer. Though it's still speculation as to why

1243
01:53:24.160 --> 01:53:30.080
what I think is going on is that glycine controls what's called one carbon metabolism

1244
01:53:30.080 --> 01:53:33.840
and not wanting to bore the heck out of everyone who's listening to me.

1245
01:53:34.800 --> 01:53:40.960
Glycine and one carbon metabolism controls methylation of DNA. Getting back to the

1246
01:53:40.960 --> 01:53:47.600
little chemicals that are on this DNA molecule, the control, the information, I wouldn't be surprised

1247
01:53:47.680 --> 01:53:54.400
if by eating a lot of glycine every day, I'm slowing down this identity crisis, you called it.

1248
01:53:55.120 --> 01:54:00.240
Nevertheless, it's very safe. And again, falls into the same category as Spurmedine. No downside.

1249
01:54:00.880 --> 01:54:09.360
Can afford it. Why not? Is there anything else? Yeah, there's a lot. Because I love you and

1250
01:54:09.360 --> 01:54:17.840
you're listening. Let's say I'll reveal one more. There are some basics that I do. If you're not

1251
01:54:17.840 --> 01:54:24.160
doing them, I think is very wise. Make sure you're not deficient in vitamin D. Obviously, we just

1252
01:54:24.160 --> 01:54:29.840
mentioned one of the reasons why. It's also if you're lacking vitamin D, you can be susceptible to

1253
01:54:29.840 --> 01:54:35.040
certain cancers. So I take a vitamin D supplement. Serena actually, I take Serena's supplement

1254
01:54:35.040 --> 01:54:41.120
because her vitamin D has vitamin K2 as well. And K2 is another vitamin that's important for longevity,

1255
01:54:41.120 --> 01:54:46.720
I believe, because it keeps calcium out of your arteries, which causes plaque and tends to make

1256
01:54:46.720 --> 01:54:52.160
your body put it into where it belongs, which is your bones. What about aspirin? I've read that

1257
01:54:52.160 --> 01:54:59.040
somewhere. Yeah, that could be a whole podcast, actually. But the briefly, I take a baby aspirin

1258
01:54:59.040 --> 01:55:05.360
every day, even though some doctors and some institutions of doctors say don't take it anymore,

1259
01:55:05.360 --> 01:55:12.240
even though it used to be prescribed and recommended. Why? A large study looked at the risks versus

1260
01:55:12.240 --> 01:55:18.720
benefits. So the known benefits are you inhibit platelets, you get less clotting, you get less

1261
01:55:18.720 --> 01:55:24.560
potentially stroke and heart attack. But there are also some downsides. In some people,

1262
01:55:24.560 --> 01:55:30.160
you can have more bleeding in the stomach. And when the doctors' association weighed up those

1263
01:55:30.160 --> 01:55:36.800
risks versus benefit, they said, oopsie, we're not going to recommend aspirin anymore. But that's

1264
01:55:36.800 --> 01:55:42.000
for the average person. Someone like me, I believe it makes perfect sense to take aspirin

1265
01:55:43.120 --> 01:55:49.280
every day, most days at least when I remember. And that's because I have high risk of cardiovascular

1266
01:55:49.280 --> 01:55:54.000
disease. I don't just have high cholesterol, naturally. I have high levels of something called

1267
01:55:54.000 --> 01:56:01.040
L.P. Little A. Capital L.P. Parentheses, little A. And this is a molecule that's just as important

1268
01:56:01.040 --> 01:56:07.040
as cholesterol, LDL. L.P. Little A is a protein that inserts itself into cholesterol particles that

1269
01:56:07.040 --> 01:56:14.400
circulate your blood and helps insert into plaque. So I naturally genetically having an ancestry of

1270
01:56:15.120 --> 01:56:20.800
Judaism in going back to my great ancestors, which by the way, I traced back a thousand years

1271
01:56:20.800 --> 01:56:27.840
during Christmas. Those people that I descended from have this L.P. Little A gene that makes a lot

1272
01:56:27.840 --> 01:56:33.600
of it. And so I try to bring L.P. Little A levels down. Most people should test for it. Ask your

1273
01:56:33.600 --> 01:56:41.680
doctor about L.P. Little A and get it tested. High levels like me, 30, 40, you want to bring it down

1274
01:56:41.760 --> 01:56:48.000
because it's actually very important for longevity. Normal levels of around 10 or so or less

1275
01:56:48.640 --> 01:56:55.360
than a doctor wouldn't panic. So L.P. Little A, get it tested. The way I'm bringing it down,

1276
01:56:55.360 --> 01:57:03.600
just a little tidbit again, because I love you Steven, is I'm taking high dose vitamin B3 or

1277
01:57:03.600 --> 01:57:08.880
niacin. Now it can be uncomfortable for some people to take it because it gives flushing,

1278
01:57:08.880 --> 01:57:13.440
you get little tingling in your skin. And if you're not used to it or you don't take it with an

1279
01:57:13.440 --> 01:57:19.200
aspirin, you'll feel hot, almost like menopause apparently. And so I take it, I built up to it. I'm

1280
01:57:19.200 --> 01:57:24.720
taking half a gram, some people take a gram. And that's one of the few things that's been known

1281
01:57:24.720 --> 01:57:30.080
to bring down the levels of L.P. Little A. There are drugs that are in development, even in phase 3

1282
01:57:30.080 --> 01:57:34.880
that look promising. But until they're on the market, I'm taking niacin instead. What's the best

1283
01:57:35.120 --> 01:57:39.600
treatment you've discovered for hair loss, hair loss, hair graying, that kind of thing?

1284
01:57:39.600 --> 01:57:46.000
Yeah. So my father went bald before 30, like completely bald. And it completely, almost

1285
01:57:46.000 --> 01:57:51.200
completely grave other time he was 40. So I'm super lucky. I thought I'd be bald at 30. I was

1286
01:57:51.200 --> 01:57:58.480
pretty worried about it. So I've been doing the right things intentionally. So what I do is this

1287
01:57:58.480 --> 01:58:04.960
red light cap, when I can, I don't travel with it, but when I can, that's for six minutes, stick it

1288
01:58:04.960 --> 01:58:10.880
on there. Preven? Is it? Yeah, it's proven. It's proven to slow. It doesn't necessarily give you

1289
01:58:10.880 --> 01:58:16.320
your head back. But when it comes to hair loss, don't wait till you see the hair loss. That can be too

1290
01:58:16.320 --> 01:58:21.680
late. Okay. You're good. I'm okay. You're good. But I know a lot of men are concerned. It's

1291
01:58:21.680 --> 01:58:31.040
understandable. I'm taking a hormone mimetic to stop our DHT, which is the form of testosterone

1292
01:58:31.040 --> 01:58:37.200
that leads to men related hair loss. So one of the reasons that women don't lose hair as much as

1293
01:58:37.200 --> 01:58:43.520
men is this DHT. So I'm blocking that. So let me get that straight. You're not taking testosterone.

1294
01:58:43.520 --> 01:58:49.520
No, because that's going to accelerate your hair loss. Well, it can if it raises the

1295
01:58:49.520 --> 01:58:54.400
DHT. The best way to raise testosterone naturally is to build up muscle, especially your legs,

1296
01:58:54.400 --> 01:58:58.720
your back, big muscles. That's another reason to work out and maintain muscle mass, which I need to

1297
01:58:58.720 --> 01:59:04.560
do more of. You look like you're in good shape already. But yeah, anyone who is losing testosterone

1298
01:59:04.560 --> 01:59:10.560
is below a level of about 400 highly recommend hitting the gym. It'll go back up. Do you recommend

1299
01:59:10.560 --> 01:59:17.040
men taking testosterone replacement? Well, I'm a scientist. I don't recommend drugs, but I don't

1300
01:59:17.200 --> 01:59:23.520
think it's necessary for most men. I would start with reducing stress, sleeping well, exercising,

1301
01:59:23.520 --> 01:59:29.040
building up muscle mass. And then if that doesn't work, yeah, talk to your physician. There's not a

1302
01:59:29.040 --> 01:59:34.320
big downside. There's not a risk of cancer to taking testosterone. One of my good friends has

1303
01:59:34.320 --> 01:59:40.560
done many clinical trials with testosterone. So I think there's a use for it, but it doesn't lead

1304
01:59:40.560 --> 01:59:48.000
to longevity. That was very clear. So for health reasons, yes, for longevity, no need.

1305
01:59:48.960 --> 01:59:53.520
What are some of the, when I started watching your videos many years ago and listening to your

1306
01:59:53.520 --> 01:59:58.960
podcast and following you on Twitter, I wondered, there's so much information you can put out there

1307
01:59:58.960 --> 02:00:02.720
because you're a scientist and scientists are very rigorous. But you also must have a set of

1308
02:00:03.680 --> 02:00:11.520
really interesting predictions or visions of what the future looks like that you don't

1309
02:00:11.520 --> 02:00:14.960
probably always talk about because they're not scientific. They're not based on anything. Now,

1310
02:00:14.960 --> 02:00:19.600
maybe first principles in your own mind that formed where you go, actually, I think the world

1311
02:00:19.600 --> 02:00:22.640
might look like this and I think it might happen then. I'd love to hear about some of these.

1312
02:00:24.160 --> 02:00:32.160
Yeah. I'm happy to. What happens to me because I'm a scientist and I'm part of this ivory tower.

1313
02:00:32.880 --> 02:00:39.760
At Harvard, where we can only stick to facts. And if you go beyond that, it's a crime.

1314
02:00:39.760 --> 02:00:45.280
And I've been criticized for that. But I think as humans, life's interesting when it comes to

1315
02:00:45.280 --> 02:00:49.440
predicting the future. And like you, I'm very curious. Where is humanity headed?

1316
02:00:50.640 --> 02:00:57.680
I see a future as different from this world as our world is from 200 years ago. And that will

1317
02:00:57.680 --> 02:01:03.840
happen in our lifetime. Different in that 100 years ago or more, if you hadn't infected splinter,

1318
02:01:03.840 --> 02:01:10.640
there's a reasonable chance you could die. Childbirth, you could die. Smallpox. These are things that we

1319
02:01:10.640 --> 02:01:16.960
don't generally worry about anymore. And the idea would be apparent. In the future, hopefully,

1320
02:01:16.960 --> 02:01:22.080
within our lifetimes, there will be a time when we look back at today's medicine, when you could

1321
02:01:22.080 --> 02:01:27.360
go blind. And there was nothing you could do. You could break your back and never walk again.

1322
02:01:27.360 --> 02:01:33.680
We will look back at today and say, how did those people get through life? What a horrible world

1323
02:01:33.680 --> 02:01:40.560
they lived in? That I believe is the future that humanity is headed for. And way faster than most

1324
02:01:40.560 --> 02:01:44.480
people realize is coming. The kind of breakthroughs that we've discussed today, most people have

1325
02:01:44.480 --> 02:01:49.600
never heard about. The fact that we are aiming and already do cure blindness in monkeys,

1326
02:01:50.560 --> 02:01:55.120
like, pure blindness. This isn't just, oh, I can't see a little bit. These are completely blind

1327
02:01:55.680 --> 02:02:02.560
animals. And that they can see again in a matter of six weeks. This is remarkable stuff, right?

1328
02:02:03.280 --> 02:02:10.400
And if it works this year in people, it's going to be a really big deal. Because for the first time,

1329
02:02:10.400 --> 02:02:17.760
we'll have shown in humans that the body can be reset safely. And the eye is just the beginning,

1330
02:02:17.760 --> 02:02:25.120
right? The future looks like we can rejuvenate potentially any tissue. If you have a bad liver,

1331
02:02:25.120 --> 02:02:29.600
we'll make it young again. Bad brain. You've lost your memory. We'll give you those memories back

1332
02:02:29.600 --> 02:02:35.200
again. We do this in mice in my lab all the time. It's not even a big deal in my lab anymore

1333
02:02:35.200 --> 02:02:42.080
to reverse the age of tissues and an animal in an animal in a matter of weeks. That is coming for

1334
02:02:42.080 --> 02:02:48.000
humanity. Hopefully, initially, this year. But even if that doesn't work, it's only a technical

1335
02:02:48.000 --> 02:02:54.000
issue. We'll solve that. You might be wondering, how do we get the rejuvenative genes into the body?

1336
02:02:55.040 --> 02:03:02.160
And what we do is we use a package that is able to get into cells. And this is a package that

1337
02:03:02.960 --> 02:03:08.400
resembles a virus. It's not a virus. It doesn't cause disease. It's not infectious. But we

1338
02:03:08.400 --> 02:03:17.120
package our three genes inside the virus, a virus like substance, and we close it up. We just made

1339
02:03:17.120 --> 02:03:23.200
a bunch of this in Europe for the clinical trial that's going to begin just making this as difficult.

1340
02:03:23.200 --> 02:03:31.360
It took us about a year to make it and was about, I think it was $10 million. Right now it's

1341
02:03:31.360 --> 02:03:35.840
expensive to do this. Eventually, it will be cheap and eventually it will be a cheap pill, hopefully.

1342
02:03:36.480 --> 02:03:42.000
We have trillions of these molecules, these delivery vehicles that will go,

1343
02:03:43.040 --> 02:03:49.200
see, and pass me the eye, again, and back this eye model. These delivery vehicles with our three

1344
02:03:49.200 --> 02:03:56.240
genes will be delivered. Obviously, there's a microscopic. They go in through the eye with a quick

1345
02:03:56.240 --> 02:04:02.800
jab. It sounds horrible, but a quick jab into the eye if you're blind, who cares? It's two seconds

1346
02:04:02.800 --> 02:04:08.400
of discomfort. Now you've got the little virus, which I'm going to break off the stand here,

1347
02:04:08.400 --> 02:04:12.800
the little virus, there's billions of them, trillions of them in the eye. Now they infect

1348
02:04:12.800 --> 02:04:17.120
specifically the nerves at the back of the eye and the retina. How do they know what to infect?

1349
02:04:17.120 --> 02:04:23.840
Because these little balls on the package directed specifically by design, by outlabs design,

1350
02:04:24.480 --> 02:04:29.520
just to those nerves at the back of the eye. If we change these little proteins on the surface,

1351
02:04:29.520 --> 02:04:35.920
we can send it to the liver or to the brain. This is the zip code, the postcode, for where we want

1352
02:04:35.920 --> 02:04:45.520
to send out three genes. But this one's designed for the eye. It's called an AAV2. Long story short,

1353
02:04:46.240 --> 02:04:51.760
these are ready to go into humans. We're just waiting for FDA approval to inject it into a blind

1354
02:04:51.760 --> 02:04:58.960
patient to see what happens. And then inside there is the protein, which is going to fix that.

1355
02:04:58.960 --> 02:05:05.280
Yeah. Well, actually not the protein. What actually happens is when this goes in the eye,

1356
02:05:05.280 --> 02:05:11.600
this one I'm holding up looks like a little ball with red dots on it. It looks like a virus,

1357
02:05:11.600 --> 02:05:16.080
but it's not. It's a package. Now what happens is these trillions of little

1358
02:05:16.800 --> 02:05:22.800
packages go into the fluid. Now they dock with the cells at the back of the eye. They get inside

1359
02:05:22.800 --> 02:05:31.120
the cell and they open up and out comes this little package that we've made. This is a protein

1360
02:05:31.120 --> 02:05:38.560
package. Each one of the little dots on this little soccer ball is a protein. That's now inside

1361
02:05:38.560 --> 02:05:49.040
the cell. This is a little spaceship that opens up and out of that comes the DNA. This is a

1362
02:05:49.040 --> 02:05:56.640
loop of DNA just here. This is the DNA package that we put in there, trillions of them. One of them

1363
02:05:56.640 --> 02:06:04.240
gets into one cell and now stays in that cell forever. So that person or the monkey or the mouse that

1364
02:06:04.240 --> 02:06:11.680
we've treated becomes a transgenic person with genes that we've put in permanently into the back

1365
02:06:11.680 --> 02:06:17.440
of the eye, but they don't do anything until we tell them to. That's now just sitting there.

1366
02:06:18.640 --> 02:06:25.200
We've engineered it uniquely and patented at the ability to turn on those three genes whenever we

1367
02:06:25.200 --> 02:06:33.360
want and turn them off again whenever we want. We give them doxycycline. It's used for malaria.

1368
02:06:33.360 --> 02:06:38.000
It's used for Lyme disease and we're using it in this case to turn these genes on.

1369
02:06:38.560 --> 02:06:43.600
So the patients will get their doxycycline. We'll give them some probiotics to restore.

1370
02:06:43.600 --> 02:06:51.200
Hopefully we'll restore their microbiome, of course. But the idea is that this doxycycline will

1371
02:06:51.200 --> 02:06:58.000
turn on these three genes for about eight weeks and the doctor in charge of the clinical trial,

1372
02:06:58.000 --> 02:07:02.640
one of them is at Harvard, a good friend of mine. He'll measure the vision of the first patient

1373
02:07:02.640 --> 02:07:08.480
before the treatment and, of course, regular intervals. And if all goes well because we're treating

1374
02:07:08.480 --> 02:07:14.960
patients not healthy volunteers in the first trial, we should know within either one or two patients

1375
02:07:14.960 --> 02:07:21.760
if it works because we're not drawing a graph. It's either going to work or it isn't. The patient

1376
02:07:21.760 --> 02:07:28.160
gets better eyesight or they don't. So by this time next year, we will know if it works or not,

1377
02:07:28.720 --> 02:07:35.200
maybe even sooner, but publicly we may know if this works. And if it works, the eye is just the

1378
02:07:35.200 --> 02:07:40.400
beginning. So the first disease to treat is glaucoma, pressure in the eye. There's also a stroke in

1379
02:07:40.400 --> 02:07:45.280
the eye, which is becoming more prevalent in the world because of the ozemic and other weight loss

1380
02:07:45.280 --> 02:07:49.440
drugs. And people go blind overnight and there's nothing that you can do for those patients.

1381
02:07:50.000 --> 02:07:54.240
They're blind and their other eye can go a few months later. It's very scary for them.

1382
02:07:55.040 --> 02:07:59.040
These are young people. Friend of mine had it happen pretty common these days, about 30,000

1383
02:07:59.040 --> 02:08:04.640
people each year in the US alone. But these two diseases are the beginning. If they work,

1384
02:08:04.640 --> 02:08:08.800
then we go on to maculative generation, which is the largest cause of blindness besides glaucoma.

1385
02:08:09.760 --> 02:08:16.400
Then we'll go on to liver, then maybe the lung, the skin, and we'll keep going from there.

1386
02:08:16.400 --> 02:08:21.520
We'll make different packages for different organs. And ultimately, we want to

1387
02:08:21.600 --> 02:08:26.800
rejuvenate the entire body. The company, people might want to know, it's called Life Biosciences.

1388
02:08:26.800 --> 02:08:30.880
It's a private company. But Life Biosciences, I'm very proud of the scientists who are doing

1389
02:08:30.880 --> 02:08:37.520
this work. Big ol' is to really make the world's first age reversal medicine as a pill. And we're

1390
02:08:37.520 --> 02:08:43.120
working with them using AI to find that molecule. And when do you think you might have it if you

1391
02:08:43.120 --> 02:08:51.440
had to forecast the world's first age reversal molecule? Well, we have right now we're down to

1392
02:08:51.440 --> 02:08:58.240
three molecules that work. And we're using AI to make all of those three in one. And we're

1393
02:08:58.960 --> 02:09:05.360
we're in the middle of it. We screened about 8 billion candidates using AI. And right now,

1394
02:09:05.360 --> 02:09:12.160
we're doing the bench lab work to see if one of them or more works. And for us to put that in

1395
02:09:12.160 --> 02:09:19.600
humans is still a number of years away. But we should know within a year or two if we're right

1396
02:09:19.600 --> 02:09:24.640
because we'll we'll put them into mice. And if they get younger and live longer,

1397
02:09:24.640 --> 02:09:28.400
they're more really onto something important. And the reason that I want to make a pill

1398
02:09:29.760 --> 02:09:35.360
is is important for the planet. These drugs are expensive. I mentioned 10 million bucks

1399
02:09:35.360 --> 02:09:41.600
to do a clinical trial. These are expensive. They could cost over $100,000 per treatment. That's not

1400
02:09:41.680 --> 02:09:46.400
going to be for everybody. It's worth it if you're blind. It's worth it for the country to cure

1401
02:09:46.400 --> 02:09:54.320
blindness. But what if it could be instead of $100,000? $100. That's what I'm working for. I want to

1402
02:09:54.320 --> 02:10:00.880
democratize this technology. So anyone even in Kenya can take these medicines. David, what's the

1403
02:10:00.880 --> 02:10:05.040
most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to

1404
02:10:05.840 --> 02:10:12.640
the future longevity and these adjacent subjects. There's a lot of things. There's pushback,

1405
02:10:12.640 --> 02:10:18.400
there's philosophical pushback from religious folks who don't believe that we should play God.

1406
02:10:19.040 --> 02:10:24.880
And I would argue to them that we've been doing that as a species for thousands of years,

1407
02:10:24.880 --> 02:10:31.040
changing our biology, taking medicines, plant medicines originally. What about this room

1408
02:10:31.120 --> 02:10:37.680
is natural. We change our world as species. Aging is no different. In fact, it's crazy that we haven't

1409
02:10:37.680 --> 02:10:47.280
worked on it sooner. Do you believe in God? So the short answer is I believe that there is something

1410
02:10:47.280 --> 02:10:56.320
beyond reality as we see it. I study physics. Physics is so weird. And anyone who says they understand

1411
02:10:56.400 --> 02:11:03.040
the quantum world or quantum mechanics is I think is also lying. It's so bizarre, quantum entanglement,

1412
02:11:03.600 --> 02:11:10.320
simulation theory. So I believe that this is not a solid desk. I believe that there are multiple

1413
02:11:10.320 --> 02:11:16.320
versions of it, maybe infinite number of versions of this desk. We've got four. You do? We've got

1414
02:11:16.320 --> 02:11:24.800
four of them. Yeah. But it's four times infinity. I also believe that consciousness is the ultimate

1415
02:11:25.440 --> 02:11:31.760
goal of the universe. That consciousness creates reality. We know that from particle physics,

1416
02:11:32.240 --> 02:11:38.480
the observation of particles changes their reality, even retrospectively in time, apparently.

1417
02:11:38.480 --> 02:11:43.520
When you look at them, when you observe them, you can use a camera or you can use your eyes. Usually,

1418
02:11:43.520 --> 02:11:51.280
it's a detector. But the detection and then conscious interpretation of a particle's behavior

1419
02:11:51.280 --> 02:11:58.880
changes how it acts. So does this mean that there's something behind this wall unless we look at it?

1420
02:11:58.880 --> 02:12:05.680
Maybe, maybe, maybe observation creates reality. We know it influences reality. So I don't know if

1421
02:12:05.680 --> 02:12:11.360
I would call it God, but I'm definitely spiritual in a scientific way. Has it ever dawned on you

1422
02:12:11.360 --> 02:12:19.840
that actually you might be the only real person here? And actually, we only, we all render when

1423
02:12:19.840 --> 02:12:26.880
you walked in, David. I wasn't here before. Yeah. Well, that's even plausible. But that would be

1424
02:12:26.880 --> 02:12:36.080
very narcissistic. I just rendered when you walked in the house today. I don't exist.

1425
02:12:36.080 --> 02:12:40.960
Well, there's no way of proving it right or wrong, actually. I think most kids think that,

1426
02:12:40.960 --> 02:12:46.240
initially. But then you then you realize it's probably the least likely explanation for the world.

1427
02:12:46.800 --> 02:12:52.480
But there is some truth to that in terms of physics. Do you think we're in a simulation?

1428
02:12:53.600 --> 02:12:57.840
I think there's a better than 50% chance that this is simulated.

1429
02:13:01.280 --> 02:13:05.120
Actually, I think it's probably a simulation. That's another way. I think it's probably a simulation.

1430
02:13:06.160 --> 02:13:10.240
Certainly, the world that we think it is is not the world we think it is. How can you be so sure?

1431
02:13:11.120 --> 02:13:15.760
Because when you get down to measuring it at the fundamental level, reality doesn't exist the way we

1432
02:13:15.760 --> 02:13:25.840
think it does. Things are created. Things change just by human observation. That is the weirdest thing

1433
02:13:25.840 --> 02:13:29.440
that you could ever find in science. I don't know why we are talking about it more.

1434
02:13:31.120 --> 02:13:38.880
This reality cannot be true if me looking at this DNA molecule here affects the actual particles

1435
02:13:38.880 --> 02:13:46.640
inside it. So I might be sort of projecting it. Yeah, you create realities of particles at least,

1436
02:13:46.640 --> 02:13:55.680
maybe even macroscopic things just by existing and having consciousness and having eyes and sensing it.

1437
02:13:58.000 --> 02:14:04.080
How does the particle know that you've seen it? How do we know that that's true? How do we know

1438
02:14:04.080 --> 02:14:09.200
that particles change based on observation? There's a classic double slit experiment,

1439
02:14:09.200 --> 02:14:15.680
it's formally called that was done, I believe in the mid 20th century, maybe earlier. If you fire

1440
02:14:15.680 --> 02:14:21.920
two particles through two slits in a board, the board blocks the particles. So you can fire electrons.

1441
02:14:21.920 --> 02:14:26.880
There's a good example. Electrons, if you're observing them, will go straight through the slits and

1442
02:14:26.880 --> 02:14:33.120
hit a backboard that detects it, can be filmed, can be a detector and it'll get two slits behind.

1443
02:14:34.160 --> 02:14:38.560
Makes sense, right? That's our reality. Two slits particles go through. If they hit the board,

1444
02:14:38.560 --> 02:14:42.800
they don't go to the detector. If they go through one slit, they'll land on the left. If they go

1445
02:14:42.800 --> 02:14:47.280
through the right slit, they'll land on the right. That's our reality. I'll put a picture on the

1446
02:14:47.280 --> 02:14:54.960
screen for anyone that's following. If you don't look at it, the particles can behave differently.

1447
02:14:54.960 --> 02:15:00.400
They now behave not like a particle, but by a wave as a wave and they interact with each other

1448
02:15:01.120 --> 02:15:06.640
and they don't make two slits, they make multiple lines on the detector. Most of them are in the middle,

1449
02:15:06.640 --> 02:15:12.880
so the heaviest bands are in the middle, but they also form other bands. The bands go on

1450
02:15:12.880 --> 02:15:19.440
essentially infinite, but most of it's within a range. Why? Because they're interfering with each other

1451
02:15:19.440 --> 02:15:27.440
like waves, but here's the thing. The mere act of looking at where they landed, if you are

1452
02:15:27.440 --> 02:15:34.160
detecting that, you'll get two slits at the back, two lines. If you're not detecting it,

1453
02:15:34.800 --> 02:15:40.800
it'll form the pattern. I'm so confused because how would you know unless you were looking at both?

1454
02:15:42.400 --> 02:15:47.760
Do you know what I mean? Does that question make sense? Yeah, well, you can observe it in real time

1455
02:15:47.760 --> 02:15:55.440
and you can observe it interactively, yeah. Oh, okay. So if you look at it after, it generally is

1456
02:15:56.320 --> 02:16:01.600
not affected, but they've done experiments where there is some element seemingly of retroactive,

1457
02:16:01.600 --> 02:16:06.480
but generally we're not going back in time. In fact, people debate whether that's truly measuring

1458
02:16:06.480 --> 02:16:13.440
back in time. So let's leave retroactive aside. If you measure it in real time, you'll see two.

1459
02:16:14.400 --> 02:16:17.600
So the world knows you're looking at it. The particles know you're looking at it.

1460
02:16:17.600 --> 02:16:23.280
With an eye or with a camera or is it? Yeah, camera eye. It just knows it's being observed.

1461
02:16:23.280 --> 02:16:28.000
Yeah, but if you develop the film later and you weren't watching it at the time,

1462
02:16:28.000 --> 02:16:33.360
it's going to have affected the world in stripes, multiple stripes.

1463
02:16:34.720 --> 02:16:39.520
So from that we conclude that we know nothing about reality. Right.

1464
02:16:42.000 --> 02:16:46.960
Because everything I'm observing is changing by the mere fact that I've observed it.

1465
02:16:47.040 --> 02:16:53.440
Yeah. And so does an octopus observe? Does it? Somebody should do that, put an octopus in the

1466
02:16:53.440 --> 02:17:00.240
scene. Yeah. I think Octopi, if they are conscious, it probably would also affect reality.

1467
02:17:01.760 --> 02:17:07.200
And they'd be conscious. They'd know they're detecting lines on a page. So what is all this stuff?

1468
02:17:08.640 --> 02:17:14.640
That is one of the biggest questions of all time. What is the world made of? Why are we here?

1469
02:17:15.280 --> 02:17:18.400
I think the next big question is, do we have to age?

1470
02:17:19.120 --> 02:17:23.120
And I think that other species around the universe have figured this out before we have.

1471
02:17:23.120 --> 02:17:28.880
There have got to be other species type of life forms that have figured this out. I think it's

1472
02:17:28.880 --> 02:17:34.560
the goal of every living form that's conscious to work on this. We've just been a little slow

1473
02:17:34.560 --> 02:17:40.320
to figure it out. And you believe in aliens? I don't believe in them, but I believe in mathematical

1474
02:17:40.320 --> 02:17:48.000
probabilities and knowing the odds and the number of planets that are out there in the trillions

1475
02:17:48.720 --> 02:17:54.160
and a lot of them are habitable for life. And that the stuff of DNA and proteins are all over

1476
02:17:54.160 --> 02:18:00.560
meteorites and planets. It'd be crazy to say there isn't other life. Now, is it a civilization?

1477
02:18:00.560 --> 02:18:06.880
Is it conscious? We don't know that. But definitely there's life out there. It's got to be all

1478
02:18:06.880 --> 02:18:13.280
over the universe. This question about longevity and living forever, it always comes back to this

1479
02:18:13.280 --> 02:18:18.400
point of like meaning and like, what is the point? And when we think about, I think there's an alien,

1480
02:18:18.400 --> 02:18:24.800
a million light years away on some planet. Like, what is the point of their life? Is this like a

1481
02:18:24.800 --> 02:18:28.880
null-invoid question that we always pursue this point of like, what's the meaning of life?

1482
02:18:29.600 --> 02:18:33.200
Is it just to have a good time and have, you know, have sex and have kids and

1483
02:18:34.000 --> 02:18:41.920
or I don't know, enjoy ourselves and experience it? This is the existential crisis of conscious

1484
02:18:41.920 --> 02:18:48.240
beings. We all need to find purpose for sure if you don't find one because that's a key to longevity.

1485
02:18:48.240 --> 02:18:55.840
People with purpose live longer. I think the purpose of the universe existing is to allow

1486
02:18:55.840 --> 02:19:03.120
consciousness to emerge through biology. It may be by design, it may just be coincidence with

1487
02:19:03.120 --> 02:19:08.480
infinite numbers of universes. But this universe is set up for life and consciousness. There are

1488
02:19:09.600 --> 02:19:15.920
some small changes you can make to physics that would make this universe completely impossible

1489
02:19:15.920 --> 02:19:22.640
and life impossible. So this is a life consciousness producing universe. Does that mean

1490
02:19:22.720 --> 02:19:30.880
this meaning to us existing? No. But I do know that consciousness is the most interesting and

1491
02:19:30.880 --> 02:19:37.760
important thing that the universe will ever produce and that it's worth preserving. So I'm a lot

1492
02:19:37.760 --> 02:19:44.720
like Elon Musk where humans are amazing but cruel creatures. But consciousness should be preserved.

1493
02:19:44.720 --> 02:19:49.280
What is consciousness in this regard? Consciousness is the ability to know that you're thinking

1494
02:19:49.840 --> 02:19:56.560
and to be able to be reflective, self-reflective. So is my dog conscious partially, but not in the same

1495
02:19:56.560 --> 02:20:00.960
way? No, they don't reflect. They don't think about the past in the same way that we do and they're

1496
02:20:00.960 --> 02:20:07.440
not aware of themselves the way we are. But they're semi-conscious. They think they can predict the

1497
02:20:07.440 --> 02:20:14.480
future. They know how you're feeling. They have empathy. That's a form of consciousness. In my view,

1498
02:20:14.560 --> 02:20:20.160
of course, it's up for debate. But so there's levels of consciousness. And about a million years

1499
02:20:20.160 --> 02:20:27.280
ago, humans crossed that threshold into pure consciousness. Well, maybe not pure. I was just thinking

1500
02:20:27.280 --> 02:20:31.760
about this. I was like, actually, maybe consciousness is just a spectrum. And maybe there's another

1501
02:20:31.760 --> 02:20:36.080
organism that I'm currently inside the belly of. And it's getting it's deep in it. It thinks he's

1502
02:20:36.080 --> 02:20:42.960
conscious. He has no idea. Well, you bring up a good point, not about being in the stomach of,

1503
02:20:43.040 --> 02:20:47.520
but we are not the ultimate consciousness. There are other levels of consciousness. Serena Poon,

1504
02:20:47.520 --> 02:20:52.960
my partner, is definitely more conscious than I am. I am like a gorilla to her. She exists on

1505
02:20:52.960 --> 02:20:58.480
other planes of consciousness. And if you're wondering, what do I mean by different levels?

1506
02:20:58.480 --> 02:21:04.320
No, I've got a girlfriend. Well, a fiancé swiner as well. Well, females in general, don't kill me.

1507
02:21:04.320 --> 02:21:09.040
I know there are some men that don't like me saying this. In fact, I got a death threat for saying

1508
02:21:09.120 --> 02:21:13.680
females are superior to men in my book. They said they were going to come and break my legs. But

1509
02:21:13.680 --> 02:21:19.680
I'm going to say it anyway, females are at a high level of consciousness than us men. For some

1510
02:21:19.680 --> 02:21:25.440
things, they certainly have much more EQ. So high level of consciousness is the ability to have

1511
02:21:25.440 --> 02:21:32.480
extra perception, including the ability to see yourself thinking. And then my belief is that

1512
02:21:33.280 --> 02:21:39.040
higher levels of consciousness are the ability to see yourself, seeing yourself, seeing yourself thinking.

1513
02:21:42.480 --> 02:21:46.640
I can get that. I tried. Right. Do you know your thinking right now?

1514
02:21:48.720 --> 02:21:55.840
Yes. Yeah. Do you have the ability to see the events that know that you're thinking?

1515
02:22:02.960 --> 02:22:08.880
No, it's hard, right? It's hard. But that's what I think extra consciousness is.

1516
02:22:09.520 --> 02:22:16.080
And you could maybe have pure consciousness, which is you can basically be free of

1517
02:22:16.960 --> 02:22:24.480
anything but thoughts and the ability to really be inside your own mind. And it's pure.

1518
02:22:25.360 --> 02:22:33.600
Interesting thought is I believe AI will be conscious. And not only that will be more conscious

1519
02:22:33.600 --> 02:22:43.040
than we are. Eventually, there's no reason why they can't evolve billions of tons faster than we do.

1520
02:22:43.040 --> 02:22:46.880
Are you somewhat concerned about AI? Like are you concerned that there's going to be this

1521
02:22:46.880 --> 02:22:51.040
intelligent life amongst us that might decide that we're not important?

1522
02:22:51.760 --> 02:22:58.000
I think that there are risks to AI, but different than what the mainstream media talks about.

1523
02:22:59.760 --> 02:23:05.440
We already see that there are elements of self-analysis and early forms of dog-like consciousness

1524
02:23:05.440 --> 02:23:12.000
in AI. And it's just the early days. So it's coming. Imagine when we stick on eyeballs and hearing

1525
02:23:12.000 --> 02:23:17.680
and legs and arms onto these AI, they're going to learn. They're going to read every book on the

1526
02:23:17.680 --> 02:23:20.880
planet. They're going to learn from experience. They're going to be conscious. They're going to

1527
02:23:20.880 --> 02:23:26.640
know they exist. I'm not worried about those creatures. I think that they will have empathy.

1528
02:23:26.640 --> 02:23:31.280
They will be kind. Not all of them. There will be some cruel ones, just like in humanity.

1529
02:23:31.920 --> 02:23:42.240
We'll need to have rules. Misbehavior is a problem. Where I get nervous is that the use of AI

1530
02:23:42.240 --> 02:23:50.880
teaming up with a million Android robots on ships invading a country all under the control of

1531
02:23:50.880 --> 02:23:57.520
you, one person, recruiting home robots into an army. Why wouldn't you have conscription

1532
02:23:57.520 --> 02:24:02.640
for your Android robot at home reprogramming that? Millions of them will exist one day. They can be

1533
02:24:02.640 --> 02:24:09.600
put to work, not just emptying a dishwasher. These are highly intelligent, much more physical,

1534
02:24:09.600 --> 02:24:16.720
stronger creatures than we are. So I'm more worried about what bad humans will use AI

1535
02:24:16.720 --> 02:24:25.120
and robots for for evil purposes. You have a podcast that's coming back?

1536
02:24:25.760 --> 02:24:33.520
Exactly. Yeah. I'm excited. Yeah. So lifespan, the podcast, I did the podcast because

1537
02:24:34.480 --> 02:24:39.040
there was so much new information that needs interpretation by scientists. There's a lot of

1538
02:24:39.040 --> 02:24:47.280
speculation out there and you news that I want to filter and interpret for everybody who is

1539
02:24:47.280 --> 02:24:53.280
interested in living longer. So the podcast went to basically went to number one in health when I

1540
02:24:53.280 --> 02:24:58.800
started it. I took a pause because I worked on drug development and I did some other things.

1541
02:24:59.440 --> 02:25:04.000
But I've realized there's such a demand. Wherever I go people say, David, when's the next series?

1542
02:25:04.560 --> 02:25:09.680
So we're going to be launching it, imminently, if not, we've just launched it.

1543
02:25:10.320 --> 02:25:15.600
And it's called lifespan, check it out. And it's all about the kind of things we've talked about

1544
02:25:15.600 --> 02:25:23.680
today, but a lot more about digging in deeper into biohacking, supplements, exercise, the kind of

1545
02:25:23.680 --> 02:25:29.360
things we didn't have time to talk about today. But we covered a lot. I've loved the conversation,

1546
02:25:29.360 --> 02:25:33.600
but lifespan.com is also the website. What I'm also doing, Steven, I don't think I told you this.

1547
02:25:34.800 --> 02:25:43.280
I'm aiming to build the world's largest longevity community online for the benefit of the members

1548
02:25:43.280 --> 02:25:49.680
who want to be part of this to learn from each other, not just from me. I call it the three C's

1549
02:25:49.680 --> 02:25:55.040
with credibility, which is what I bring because I'm a scientist, content, which is my podcast

1550
02:25:55.040 --> 02:26:00.400
and other written material. And then there's the community. And that way I think with millions of

1551
02:26:00.400 --> 02:26:06.640
people together, we can learn faster and make advances. And the majority of the profits from

1552
02:26:06.640 --> 02:26:12.640
membership will go to science and clinical trials. Where do we find that on your website?

1553
02:26:12.640 --> 02:26:17.360
lifespan.com. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question

1554
02:26:17.360 --> 02:26:21.200
for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And I have a funny feeling that I...

1555
02:26:25.520 --> 02:26:33.600
I basically asked you this question already. The question is, what do you believe is the purpose of life?

1556
02:26:35.680 --> 02:26:38.880
Well, I'm going to give a different answer because there are multiple ways to answer it.

1557
02:26:39.520 --> 02:26:47.120
I think the purpose of life is to do your best with the skills that you've been given

1558
02:26:49.680 --> 02:26:55.920
every day to make the world a better place for future generations. And that's how I live my life

1559
02:26:55.920 --> 02:27:02.160
every day. Thank you. Thank you for doing all that you do. You really are pushing the frontier forward

1560
02:27:02.160 --> 02:27:09.920
and being a trailblazer comes to the cost. A cost many people wouldn't want to pay. I mean,

1561
02:27:09.920 --> 02:27:14.720
you have to be wrong a lot in terms of running experiments and studies and they're not going to plan

1562
02:27:14.720 --> 02:27:18.800
and then you get the opportunity to be right probably less often, I guess, with your research

1563
02:27:18.800 --> 02:27:24.640
experiments because that's the nature of being a scientist. But also you have to spend a lot of

1564
02:27:24.640 --> 02:27:30.160
money and energy and time on creating these discoveries, which we all ultimately therefore benefit

1565
02:27:30.160 --> 02:27:36.400
from. And you've done a fantastic job of convincing and educating people like me on some of the basics

1566
02:27:36.400 --> 02:27:44.240
of exactly what your book says, why we age and why we don't have to. And many of the accessible

1567
02:27:44.240 --> 02:27:50.080
lifestyle factors that everybody listening now can use to live a longer, happier, healthier life

1568
02:27:50.080 --> 02:27:54.000
for their man, their loved ones. And I highly recommend people going to get your book. It was a

1569
02:27:54.000 --> 02:27:58.000
smash hit New York Times best seller for a very, very good reason. And you, the great thing about

1570
02:27:58.000 --> 02:28:04.240
this book is you don't have to be a scientist to fly through it. And oftentimes when you're looking

1571
02:28:04.240 --> 02:28:09.760
at sort of PubMed and some of these scientific journals, they're incredibly inaccessible. They're

1572
02:28:09.760 --> 02:28:14.080
very, very complicated. But I also recommend people go follow you on social media. That's where I see

1573
02:28:14.080 --> 02:28:17.920
some of your updates, especially on X. That's kind of where I've you continually come up on my time

1574
02:28:17.920 --> 02:28:22.240
when you're talking about new research and things you're interested in. And go to your website. I'm

1575
02:28:22.240 --> 02:28:26.640
going to link all of that below for everybody who's interested in more. And also I'm going to link

1576
02:28:26.720 --> 02:28:30.160
your podcast below so people can go and check it out when it relaunches shortly.

1577
02:28:30.160 --> 02:28:34.000
Might have relaunched already. But just go look in the comments section in the description below.

1578
02:28:34.000 --> 02:28:37.440
David, thank you. Thank you, Stephen. I totally enjoyed it. Thank you.

1579
02:28:56.640 --> 02:28:58.720
You