I'm Charisa and my experiences in all entrepreneurs
start a shopping trip with Shopify.
I want to look at the first day, and the platform makes me no problem.
I have many problems, but the platform is not one of them. I have the feeling that Shopify is able to continue their platform. Everything is super, easy to integrate and balance. And the time and the money that I can't invest in at that time. For all of you, in Waksthum.
Yet the cost in Los Testin, I'll Shopify point to the E. That's what it's like to be old. And for far too long, we've ignored it or accepted it as natural. And I reject the idea that aging just because it's natural is acceptable. Dying at 80 is not inevitable.
Absolutely, that can be changed. So if a skeptical, I am a hovered professor who has been studying aging longevity in age reversal for 30 years.
And I've seen enough from my lab showing that we can literally now reverse the aging process.
And it's not a question if it's a question of when it's going to happen. And everyone should stick around because I'm going to tell you some of the major things that people should be doing, taking lengthy no-life by a decade. Hey, you're not taking that off-steer. Oh, you got 10 minutes of that.
So that you can accelerate aging by smoking, getting an x-ray, ultra-processed foods, excessive drinking, flying a light. My flow over time. That's probably accelerating the aging process. Even going to a rock concert and blasting your ear drums because your ear
hair cells are getting older faster. And so I look at the body like it's a computer and we can reinstall the software. And what's interesting is when you reverse aging diseases, like Alzheimer's cancer, heart disease, go away or are cured. Because what's driving a lot of those diseases is aging.
And so that my lab is like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. They are making discoveries that blow me away every week.
“And I think we're at a turning point in human history.”
You're probably going to live into the 22nd century if you do all the right things. And we're going to dig into all of those in great detail. But what are the unintended consequences of such a world where we all live longer? And also do you think it's going to be possible in the next 50 years for us to live forever? And then what's the best or treatment you've discovered for hair loss?
This is why I love your podcast, you ask the right questions.
So first, guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins.
69% of you that listen to the show frequently haven't yet hit the follow button. And that follow button is very smart because it means you won't miss the best episodes. The algorithm, if you follow a show, deliver you. The best episodes from that show, very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes,
I would love you to know. And the simple way if you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button.
Thank you so, so, so, so much. Dr. David Sinclair, I have waited many years to speak to you. And I've been so keen to speak to you for so many years because so much of the research and the information I've consumed. On the subjects we're going to talk about today comes from you directly from research you've done.
And from theories and ideas and hypotheses that you formed.
“I think the place that this conversation should start is”
is probably with this picture because it appears to be incredibly formative in your journey. Oh yes, that is an important picture true. This is a picture of my grandmother and me when I was in my early 20s. I'm now 56 if you're wondering.
And my grandmother has played a major role in my life. I'm going to have to be careful not to get too emotional because she's now passed away, but she's inspired me to do the best I can to leave the world a better place than I found it. And this is particular book here called Now We Are Six. It is anyone who's read my book, LifeSpend knows that this book is
very important to me. And I didn't realize it of course when I was a kid that this was going to change my whole life. And there's a poem at the back there that my grandmother Vera used to read me when I was six. And it goes like this, when I was one, I had just begun.
When I was two, I was nearly new, when I was three, I was hardly me. When I was four, I was not much more. When I was five, I was just alive, but now I am six.
“I'm as clever as clever, so I think I'll be six now forever and ever.”
I'm getting chills reading this again and hearing this poem again because the impact on me was the following that subconsciously, my grandmother was saying, you don't want to grow up adults can be evil. She grew up after a world war two. There was horrendous impact on her and her family in Hungary.
And she thought that a child is innocent and people shouldn't grow up.
What actually happened was I realized why do people grow old?
That's a terrible thing to happen.
“And so I've spent my life trying to figure out why do we get old?”
Why do we grow up? Why do we get frail? Because I also think that if we can solve that, understand it, slow it, even reverse it now, we will have the biggest impact on human health in history. Am I right in thinking your grandmother told you at that young age that she was going to die, that you were going to die, that your parents were going to die.
Yes, she did tell me that I remember it very clearly actually. I was on the floor and she was crouching down and I said, Vera, I didn't call her grandma. She didn't want to be called grandma. She wanted to be young like a kid too.
I said, Vera, will you always be here to protect me?
Will you always be around and she said, no, I'm going to die. I'm like, what do you mean? Because everything dies, I'm going to be gone. Your parents will be gone, your pet cat will be dead, pretty soon, and you yourself will be dead one day. At age four or five,
that's that's heart-wrenching, right? We've all gone through this realization around that age that the world that we believe in and see will one day all be gone. That moment, I remember it so clearly because I thought that's not fair. Why would any species be made or created that new, that fact? That's cruel. It's better to either not know or to not exist.
But to know that that's what's going to happen is really cruel. And so I vowed actually legitimately around the age of 18 to get a PhD to go to the United States and develop a research lab to try and do something about it.
“The preservation of health and life is the most important thing that we can do as human beings.”
We do it with some drugs to treat that disease and the other disease, cancer or heart disease, Alzheimer's. But what's underlying that? What's really causing about 150 to 200,000 people every day to die is the underlying universal process we call aging. And for far too long we've ignored it or accepted it as natural, therefore acceptable. And I fundamentally reject the idea that aging just because it's natural is acceptable. There will be a day when we look back at today and think how many evil
were our medicines. And how sad it was that we accepted that we became frail before 100. If someone has just clicked on this conversation now and they deepen their core, believe that they're probably going to live to 80 years old and that we all are and that
we're never going to be able to do anything about it because that's just the way that it is.
People get older than they die and aging is the fact of life as the phrase goes and you just have to accept it. If that's their sort of core belief, what is the most persuasive sort of top-line argument to that person to convince them that in the next two hours when we have this conversation, we will do a job of both reversing that belief, release challenging it in some way and then also
“presenting them with a set of possible solutions. Yeah. All right. So first of all, who am I?”
I'm a Harvard professor. I've been studying aging longevity and age reversal for 30 years. The technology now that we have in my lab that is used every day by my students, literally reverses the age of tissues in animals in human tissue that we grow in the lab.
And the first human trials to test this are going to be performed in about a month from now.
And if it works, it'll transform in human history. It means that we're on a path to finally being able to reset the age of the human body, not by a year, not by ten years, but even more than that. And what happens when you do that, what we're finding in animals, that includes primates, is that we can cure things that have previously been impossible, including blindness, by the way. And so if you're listening and you're skeptical,
I'm not some hack. I am a Harvard professor who, as telling the world and has written a book about it, and every day spends my life researching with a team of the best scientists I can gather around the world, showing that we can literally now reverse the aging process and reset how old the body is. In animals, yes, but potentially this year, showing it can work in the human body, as well. So you're doing the first ever trial of this type in humans to reverse
aging next month. Yes, so we've submitted a form to the, you know, the FDA in the U.S. to get approval to treat blindness, a couple of types of blindness in people. As early, if I'll go as well as next month. And what exactly is happening there? Because there's many ways one might fix blindness, you know? What is it you're doing to the eyeball that is a precursor
Of our potentially ability to reverse aging generally?
it was going to work well, but because it's a, it's a nice system to study age reversal. The eye
“is an enclosed space. And so it's much safer than trying to initially reverse the age of the”
whole body. Now in mice, we reverse the age of the whole body. And the effect is longevity, rejuvenation, the skin gets better, all parts of the animal get, get healthier and younger. But in humans, you don't want to go straight to rejuvenation. Because in case something goes wrong, it could set us way back. And we have to make sure we don't have any safety mishaps. So we're being a little cautious in humans in mice, it's a little different. So in the human eye, just for those
that are watching the video, there is an eye on the table. Well, a plastic eye, it's a, it's a larger version of an eye, but yes, Stephen's right. What we're doing, we're going to look at the back of the eye, which is your retina. And that's where the light hits. And at that point, there are a lot of nerves that coalesce into the optic nerve that runs to the brain by just a few millimeters. So the brain is here. The eye is actually part of the brain. A lot of people don't know that. You can
touch your brain if you touch your eye. So the optic nerve gets old. And what we've discovered if it gets damaged or gets old, it's not working. But the nerves, the most part, if you're old, are still there, they just forget how to work. And that's aging. And later, everyone should stick around because I'm going to tell you why it is we get old and how it is we reverse it. But for this, this model, what we're doing is we're introducing a set of three genes into this optic nerve
at the back of the eye and turning them on for six to eight weeks. And those three genes are what we now know reset safely, apparently safely, reset the age of cells, including nerves by about 75% and then stop. That don't go more than that, which is good. We don't want to go back to zero. I don't think anyone wants to go back to high school. But this is the way it works. And we chose the optic nerve because it's a safe and close system, not because it should work better in optic
nerves. In fact, we've now done it in my sin my lab for the brain. We're doing hearing. We've done skin. We did multiple sclerosis. We're now doing motor in your own disease and seeing great effects.
“So it's important to know, I'm not an eye specialist. That didn't choose the eye because I love the eye.”
I chose it because that's a good place to start for any reversal in humans this year.
You mentioned a second ago, you've been able to extend the life of mice in your laboratory.
How and by how much is it the same process and by how much? Right. Well, the study that I was referring to was done using our technology in an independent lab, which is you might argue even better than having done it in my lab. Instead of putting the three reversal genes into the eye, they injected into the vein of the mouse, the old mice, and turn it on in these really old mice. These mice would be the equivalent of about 80 to 85 years. So they're really old mice. They're
really frail. And just any extension in the lifespan and health would be better would be a great thing. And they got an additional 100% lifespan extension, additional. So it would be like an eighth year old living to 160. Well, the remaining life of an 80 year old isn't long. Right. So let's say if you're given to a 70 year old on average, they'd have another 10 years to go given 20 years. So it's that calculation. But that was not an optimised study. They just did a hell
Mary injection. Turn it on to what would happen. And I heard when we did a bit of a research call, you say the world doesn't know how close we are. The world doesn't know how close we are to what? To being able to safely reverse the age of the human body. How can you be so sure? I'm not sure. But I'm confident that the science is solid. The biology of aging is understood, I believe, in concept. My theory called the information theory
of aging has so far been not disproven, which is important for a scientist. And that has allowed
us to succeed really for the first time to safely reverse aging. And I now believe, and though I
didn't 10 years ago, I now believe in my lifetime, I'm going to see medicines on the market that reset the age or at least reverse in a large part the age of the body. And that that
“initially won't be to make us just look better and feel better, although that's what a lot of us want.”
It's going to be used to cure, certainly prevent, but definitely cure diseases that are currently incurable. So I think we're at a turning point, I dare I say in human history, so it's not a
Question of if it's a question of when this is going to happen.
aging, which we talked about there, but you did have a prediction before I get to there about
how you think will be potentially taking a pill in 10 years time every couple of weeks that will make a shonga. Can you explain to me that prediction? What is the prediction? I do believe that I and you're about 20 something years younger than me, you're going to see this for sure that there will be a pill. So you might say, well, my critics might say, well, David, that's exaggerating, right? You're still trying to get this gene, these genes to work. How's it going to be a pill?
But this is where my lab comes in. My lab is like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, if you visit. It's magical and the students that I teach in the trainees who are sometimes in their 30s and even 40s who are brilliant scientists, there's about 25 of us. They are making discoveries that blow me away every week. It's not a pill because you can't give a mouse a pill. They won't show it. But we give them a liquid down their throat, it's a drink, and we then four weeks we can
rejuvenate them. Not with these genes anymore that we're giving humans, that's the old technology. The new technology is something you can swallow in a mouse and rejuvenate them in four weeks. It's normal for my students to say, oh, yeah, we just rejuvenated the ear. We just rejuvenated the skin. We just cured ALS, smoking your own disease in these animals. By the way, speed and see, and this isn't just each disease doesn't get a different medicine. Each disease doesn't
get a different set of genes. It's the same set of genes, the same molecules that treat cure multiple scrocers as the same one that cured blindness in mice. So let that sink in. The same drug that we're using in the eye will be used to treat other diseases in the body, even liver disease. So if your predictions are correct and your timeline is correct, what does this mean for the way that I should be living my life right now? Most people look at their parents and their grandparents
“and think, that's what my life will be like. I'm going to be frail in my 80s. That's not true for us.”
I like the right brothers analogy. It'd be like in 1900 saying we're always going to travel as fast
as a horse. That's not true, right? The 20th century saw that we could go tens of thousands of kilometers. They went to the moon. That's what our generation is when it comes to biology and aging. Previous generations are no guide to what our life span is going to be like. You're going to potentially live to the 20th century. If you do all the right things, technology keeps increasing, right? What kind of technologies will we have in 50 years? You'll be around in 50 years.
You're a healthy guy. I know you are. All right. So in 50 years, what kind of things will you be able to do? Gosh. This is what most people forget is that technology isn't static. When you're old, you will not be using today's technology. You'll be using technology of 2070, 2080. Right? And then you'll be able to live into the 20th century and take advantage of those
“technologies. That's why people talk about the singularity. The singularity is this idea that”
if you can make it to a certain point in human history, you won't have to age anymore.
And that's in the future, right? But first steps first, let's show that we can get this to
cure blindness and then get to the point where every year that we get one year older, we can get one year younger. When that happens, it's a very interesting world. You don't have to age anymore. That is a future. I don't know when we're going to get there. But if you don't live 10 to 20 years longer than your parents, something's wrong. On that point of the singularity, so this is a particular moment in time where we're going to be able to make aging or age reversal, I guess, a choice, right?
So that I guess the thinking of the theory is that if you can just make sure you survive up until this particular date, then you have the choice to live forever. Is that how it's like the fear?
“That's what they say, yes. There are a lot of proponents of that. But that's an idea.”
Isn't it logically true, that? It's like logically, yeah. It's an extension of what I'm talking about. But I don't know when that's going to be, I think Ray Kurzwell said, it's coming soon. Did he have a prediction? It was in the 2040s some time. So Ray Kurzwell is a famous futureist that seems to predict the future really well across multiple disciplines. So he said 2040. Yeah, that's my recollections around there. Do you believe that?
Because I'm going to hang on to 2040. I'll leave the house. I mean Ray is a smart guy, right? He predicted AI and all that's happening. So it's dangerous to bet against Ray's predictions. I remain skeptical, you know, as one of the leaders in the field, I think we have a lot still to do. That said, if this trial works this year, we will be a new territory, we will be on a path to age reversal in the whole body. It's going to happen. You know, right now it's now 2026. We're talking.
2040 is a number of years away.
the body. That's another thing that's often missed. We can reverse the age of the AI, not just once,
“but seemingly as many times as we want. In mice, we've done at least twice. We didn't do it”
a third time because the mice actually just got old and they died, but they died with perfect eyesight.
But the point is that we don't believe it's a one-shot wonder. You can keep reversing aging, and then you age out, and then you reverse it again, and you just keep going. And if that's true, then it is possible that we will live dramatically longer. I don't yet see any technology in the near horizon that will make us live forever, but I do see that we'll have a radical change in how we treat diseases, and how long we can live. So let's talk about what aging actually
is. And can you explain this to me like kind of a total idiot? Because that will help. Well, that's useful. As you know, this is my theory. Is that aging is not just wearing out.
It's not just that your body becomes old and dysfunctional, and you get pain, you get inflammation,
and you die from a disease. I look at the body like it's a computer, it's software, and we can reinstall the software. In my lab, we believe we've found the way to do that. And we see the evidence of that. So the body is a carrier of information from our parents, and what happened in the womb. That information is intact. It keeps our body functioning almost perfectly in our teenage years 20. You're in your early 30s, you're starting to lose that information. And so your body's not
functioning perfectly anymore. Great house. You've got some great. Exactly. That's a good example of cells that lose their identity and stop making melanin, a black pigment. But it's going to get worse. I promise you. Unless we're hurry up. And this information gets lost. It gets corrupted. But the beautiful thing is we believe we've found a backup copy of that information from youth. That we can reinstall into cells, into tissues, into the entire body of a mouse. And hopefully
“a human, that backup copy is in every old person I believe, and it can be accessed. So when I”
see an old person walking down the street now, I don't think other persons just worn out frail going to die. I just think that's someone that needs a reset. And inside that person is a young person waiting to come out again. That's a totally different way to think about old age. And in the future, people will have a choice to be rejuvenated or not. Where is that backup copy that I need? Well, we're working on that. And if I told you my student would kill me,
but we believe we've found largely where that information is stored. It's entirely new biology. And it's currently a secret. It's a secret. Okay, so you lead the way. Tell me what we should talk about next has a release to aging. Let's talk about information, right? We live in the information age. And biology is becoming part of that information age. And it started with the elucidation of the structure of DNA. Okay. And so I have a model of DNA here. So for listeners who
are not watching, this is a little plastic double helix. My friend Jim Watson, I died recently a last month who he and his colleague discovered that DNA, the information of life that we get from our parents, is a chemical that's about six feet long in every cell. And this model here shows that DNA is a ladder. And the steps on the ladder are the information of the DNA. Okay. Yeah. And you can pull this apart so that each step becomes 50, 50% ripped apart. So that should come
apart, right? So I ripped the wrong of the ladder apart. And that is called a base on the DNA.
And it always matches with its corresponding chemical. So this short-hand we'd call an A. It always
matches with a T. So an A T becomes a wrong on the ladder. And down here, different color here, I'm looking at a red and a green step, ripped apart. This is a G and a C letter. Gs and Cs come together. And actually, if I ripped this ladder into halves, and each step becomes half a ladder, now you can see that you can copy DNA because the A has to match with the T wrong and the G has to
“match with the C. So that's basic DNA. That's how the information is transferred from cell to cell”
from mother to daughter, our parents to offspring. There were about 20,000 genes, about 15,000 are turned on. But a different set gets turned on in large part to make a nerve cell compared to a liver cell and a skin cell. That's gene expression. And what controls that gene expression is what's called
Not the genome, which is what's in front of me here on the DNA molecule.
The epi genome is the information we get transferred from cell to cell from parent to offspring
that's not in this molecule. So where's this epi genetic information? Well, it controls which genes are switched on and off. And a major regulator of that process is the modification of these steps on the DNA. These chemicals, the C, particularly the C, which I'm showing you here in this red part of the molecule, the C gets a little chemical added to it called a methyl.
“And a methyl is just, if you remember from chemistry, high school. It's a carbon with 300 genes.”
It's very simple molecule. It gets stuck on that piece of the DNA molecule. That's called DNA methylation. And that will help determine that pattern of DNA methylation to terms whether this particular gene will be switched on, say to make an optic nerve, or switched off so that it becomes a liver cell. And that happens as we're in the womb and we become an embryo. And that's the epi genome. These chemicals that turn genes on and off is the epi genome.
And the information theory of aging states that the information that's in a cell which includes the DNA, but actually more importantly for aging, is the control system's the epi genome. That is pristine when we're young, but as we get older, we lose that epi genetic information. The ability to tell a cell to be a nerve cell versus a liver cell versus a skin cell, it starts to get erased. So when we look at a mouse or an old tissue, if I took maybe not your
skin, but my skin, my skin cells are no longer as skin-like as they once were. They've started to lose their identity. They're starting actually to look more like nerve cells, and nerve cells don't look more like skin cells. Because the genes that were once turned on correctly in my young cells, that control system, these chemicals on the DNA molecule, the metals, are getting erased. So aging is an identity crisis of the cells. It's absolutely as well-point.
The cells forget what their job is. Yes, the genes are still there in large part, 99.99% of the genes are still there. The molecules intact, but the control systems the label thing you mentioned. The label to tell the cell that this gene needs to be on, but this one
should always stay off. That gets erased over time. Why? We did partially figure that out.
And how do you know? Well, the label is better. This is why I love your podcast, Steven. You ask the right questions. There are enzymes that remove these methyl groups and put them back on. So the cells control these things. They shouldn't change, but they do. And one of the things that messes the system up is major catastrophe in a cell. And when the cell panics, it removes these structures to try and adapt to the stress. The label, the label comes off
in a desperate attempt to survive. But then the cell doesn't fully revert back to the original state. Some of these chemicals and some of the proteins that bind
“to the DNA, which is also important for this epigenome, they don't all go back to where they started.”
I've used the analogy that it's like a ping pong or a tennis match where the proteins that control the genes. They get relocalized to where the emergency is. And an emergency want the one that we think is most dangerous. And a large cord of cause of aging is a broken chromosome. If you have a broken chromosome, if you don't fix that, you're either going to become a cancer cell, you're going to die. It's not good. And so sells panic. And in that panic of moving proteins away
and turning on these stress response genes, that's great. In the short term, the cell might survive, but they don't fully reset. Those proteins don't all go back to where they once were, say, 10 minutes ago, when the stress needed to be the disaster happened. And if you do that, time and time again, and every one of your cells has at least one broken chromosome every day. That's 20 trillion of these events every day in your body. Over time, tick, tick, tick. You get
the aging process we believe. So I guess I got two questions. I guess the first question,
first thinking about the sequence of asking these questions, is, what is increasing that stress on myself? Therefore, what is increasing aging? And also, like, why didn't evolution just come up with
“a solution for this? That stopped me aging then? I guess evolution's very smart. Could it just fix this?”
Well, before I get into that, one of the reasons we know that this works,
Because you asked me, how do we know that's true?
We took mice, and we broke their chromosomes in a way that didn't cause cancer or mutations.
If we're right, what should happen to these mice? They get old fast. They get old fast. Great. And they did. We call them the ice mice. Ice stands for inducible changes to the epigenome, and we were able to induce these changes. And we took bets in the lab. This was going back now 12 years ago. I bet that we would get aging, but I was the only one in the lab that thought that would happen. We had a lot of bets that the mice would die. A lot of bets that the mice
would get cancer, and a few said nothing would happen. But we got aging. In fact, I was in Australia where I'm from as you know, and I got a picture on my old style iPhone, and it was a picture of an old mouse. Well, it was a sick looking mouse, and the text was, "Problem we have a sick mouse,
and I wrote back that's in our sick mouse, that's an old mouse." And that was the first time
I realized that we'd had evidence that our theory, the information theory of aging, is correct. So what we did actually, and this might satisfy your, and your listener's curiosity, we generated a mouse from scratch using stem cells. And so we start with a mouse stem cell that we grow in the lab in the dish. And we changed the genetics of that stem cell so that we could feed it a drug, a tamoxifen, which is used in chemotherapy, and that drug
turned on a gene from a slime mold, something you might find in the forest, that breaks DNA of the mouse. But does it in a way that doesn't cause cancer or mutations? Just cuts it, and the cells put it back together. So we could take a mouse, and for three weeks we turned on this slime mold cutting protein. And nothing happened to the mouse at the time. It's like a, you don't feel an x-ray, you don't feel different when you fly except for maybe jet lag and dehydration, but you don't get old suddenly.
“Same with the mice, they were normal, they felt fine, and that's why at first people said,”
"Oh, and nothing's going to happen to these mice after three weeks they were fine." But we set in motion a cascade of accelerated aging events that about 10 months later, they were super grey and super old and had all the diseases of aging 50% faster than their twins that we didn't treat. And you've got photos of these, we could share. Yeah, let's show those. So if I was to do the experiment in you, I might have to engineer it a clone of you, but I could do that. I'm not saying
that it's ethically right. But theoretically, we could make a clone of you, putting that slime mold gene, turn it on, and your clone would be 50% older than you are. Can you translate this into the equivocal for a human, that particular study that you did? So it would be like in me doing what, and then me getting old fast. Yeah. Well, we're exposed to things that cause DNA breaks all the time. They happen naturally as the cells try to copy their DNA, but you can accelerate that by getting an
X-ray, a CT scan, flying a lot, and cosmic rays banging into your DNA. I fly all the time.
“Yeah, it's my life as CT scans and X-rays. Yeah. And though it's impossible, I believe that”
that's probably accelerating your aging process. What's flying doing to my second, you talked about
flying being equivocal to what you did to the mouse? In what way? Well, every time you break your chromosome, you're rearranging your epigenome in a catastrophic way that doesn't fully reset, and your cell will lose its identity faster. I also believe, and we have some evidence that even going to a rock concert and had blasting your ear drums is such a stress on those cells in your ear that the reason that you become deaf earlier is because your ear, hair cells are
getting older faster. You don't want to break the DNA. You don't want to cause catastrophe to your fragile cells in your body because the recovery isn't complete in aging and shoes. So with this theory in mind, what are the day-to-day things that we're all doing that are
“accelerating a rage? Because I think what's really interesting is I look to my brother, Jason,”
his ear older than me. He has three kids that are under the age of seven or eight now, and this Christmas time because it's just been Christmas. I looked at his head to see me gray has he had versus me, and I thought okay he has considered me more. He's a year older than me, and I was thinking that's like a proxy of aging to some degree. What is it he's potentially done on a day-to-day basis? I know you don't know him, so this is why it's not an offensive answer to
give. What is it that someone who is generally sort of genetically very similar, but it's making different lifestyle choices is doing to accelerate that process of wrinkles or gray hairs or
Here's here's the good news that you can have a big impact on your rate of ag...
a lifestyle. It turns out your DNA is not your destiny, it's the epigenome, so that how you live
“your life is really 80 to 90 percent of your rate of aging. That's good, it's in your hands,”
but it also means that some people mess up their lives. There are actually twin studies from mostly from Denmark, identical twins, one that goes in smokes and gets obese and goes in the sun, and they are much older looking than they're identical twin. Essentially proving that the DNA
is not the reason you age. First of all they're going to be people in the audience who are listening
or watching, who have gray hair saying, "Damn it, I'm not old." And that's true, I mean, nobody died of gray hair, right? And sometimes genetically you can get gray old, but not be physically old. What is true that's often not comfortable is how old you look as a very good representation of how old you are in your organs as well. So doing the right thing, so what are those things? Let's take off some of the major things that people should be doing and they can have a big impact.
They can lengthen their life by a decade just by doing some of the major things. So we know that on average people can live 14 years longer, this is based on a study that came out from Harvard,
a long-term study of the lifespan of World War II veterans. If you avoid smoking,
cigarette smoking, and really any type of smoking your lungs, smoking breaks your DNA, it's going to accelerate aging in your lungs, your whole body. Avoid excessive drinking. We now know that even more than one glass a day of alcohol is bad. I've given up alcohol for the most part for that reason. Eat well. So you want to eat healthy food, we've got some healthy food here, we're going to talk about. So make sure you don't overeat or eat ultra-process foods.
And the big one, one of the best things you can do besides all of that is exercise. Okay, and exercise covers a lot of things, so we can drill into that as well. But the fifth one is interesting.
It may be surprising, but actually good news for you. Have a reliable partner.
“I think it'll say be a podcast time, it's going to be okay. Oh, no, that probably accelerates”
range. Yes, so if you don't have a reliable partner, have a pet because the human bond is something that is shown to slow aging and associates with people who live longer than others that are lonely. Interesting. We're going to dig into all of those in great detail, specifically very interested in in exercise, diet, lifestyle fasting. I know there's a big subject you speak about, which I'm very, very interested in. And actually I was doing a research for this conversation.
Again, my the way that I'm going to approach nutrition has shifted because of some of the things I discovered there. I want to just tick off on this evolution point. Right, let's come back to that. Yeah, I just want to get clear it. Yeah, like why didn't evolution fix it for me? Because they talk about survival of the fittest and that the very fact that I'm here is because my ancestors were good at survival. But listen, my ancestors all died at like 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years old.
“That's not very good. Why, why didn't they just live longer? Well, that's why you just said the answer”
yourself because your ancestors didn't live beyond 40 or 50, even less. Right, most men in prehistoric times would die from famine, disease and actually a lot of them from war. So most people didn't make it 80. Some people did, but very, very rarely. So the forces of natural selection were on early survival and fast breeding. Let's put it this way. If there was someone who was born with a mutation that allowed them to live a lot longer to 90. In a prehistoric world, that's useless
because you're probably going to die at 30 or 40 anyway. And so your children. So what you want to do is find genes that allow you to become reproductively successful early on in life and make sure your children survive. And so we have children pretty early, but humans for various reasons have a long developmental period including education. So we don't develop very rapidly. Right, we don't wake up and we can walk and run like a lot of other species and mammals. But we don't
live a long time because there was in the environment that we evolved. The serengety plane is pretty much agreed upon as that's one of the places we evolved. Certainly Eastern Africa. That was extremely difficult and dangerous place to live. You could get eaten by an animal. And if you didn't get eaten by an animal yet killed by the neighboring tribe, that's super dangerous. Right, and then so we evolved to live really at optimal to about 30, but not much more than that. So after
30, as you might be experiencing with your body, we're at the forces of entropy. So the body starts to decay. The information starts to get lost in the body. But the good news is that if you take away predation and death from a species, it evolves longer life spans. Now it makes evolutionary
Sense to have genes that allow you to put more effort into building a strong ...
down the aging process and preventing DNA breaks, Crohn's animal breaks. We know that this is true because if you put species, say on an island where there are no predators, what happens to their longevity? They get longer lived naturally. It takes 20, 30 generations, but only when there's no predation when you're not under a lot of stress to breed quickly, do you get longer life spans evolving? Given that humans don't have predators anymore, we are slowly evolving
longer life spans, but it's very slow, and it's not going to happen fast enough for you and me.
“And do the organisms that do live really, really long have a small amount of predators in nature?”
Absolutely. Absolutely. Think about them. The bristle cone pine? What's that? It's the longest lived tree in the world. It can live many thousands of years. It's your choice. Not jealous. No, they live a tough life. Some of those trees have been around since the pyramids. The reason they live can live for so long and evolve to live so long is that things don't eat them. They're totally poisonous. You don't want to eat a bristle cone pine.
The same for a whale, right? The bowhead whale, some of these very large animals, no predators.
So they've evolved a strategy of breeding slowly, but building very powerful systems to stop
epigenetic changes. Their epigenetic control systems are stable. They don't get cancer and they don't lose, they don't have this identity crisis until hundreds of years. We know that people study the cells of whales in the dish, and those cells don't lose their identity very quickly, even when you break their DNA. So I guess the place also to go next is talking about disease generally and what disease is. So these diseases are function of aging. Does this idea of
reversing aging even matter if cancer is going to take most of us out anyway? At some point
“is there a link between aging and disease? This might be the most important point that I make today.”
When you reverse aging diseases of aging go away or are cured and in my lab, including many types of cancer as well. The diseases that we try to treat individually with different medicines today, that we think are unrelated, Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, you name them, fundamentally what's
driving a lot of those diseases is aging. If you never got old, would you ever get Alzheimer's,
even if you had the genes that predispose you? No. Right? And so what we see in my lab is when we give an animal a disease. And we can do that. We can put in the human genes for Alzheimer's into a mouse. It becomes, has dementia. When we reverse the age of the brain of that animal, we're not treating the disease. We're treating aging. The disease goes away. The body can heal itself when it's young. So it's the aging process that reveals the disease that can be cured
“by reversing. Why does the aging process reveal a disease? Why don't we get Alzheimer's at 15?”
Because the cells are so healthy, they can fix themselves, they can renew themselves. The disease processes that cause these problems for us don't exist one way young. Why is it that a teenager really has a heart attack? Because their body prevents them. Why do young people typically not get cancer? Because the immune system finds cancer cells and clears them out. You and I have cancer cells in our body right now. Why we probably not going to die in the next year? Because our immune system
will find them and kill them. But as we get older, we can lose that ability. And we'll have a greater chance of having cancer. So you're saying that if we cure aging, we're probably going to by way of that cure most of these diseases. 100%. We're talking about um, menopause. Quite a lot on this podcast. And fertility menopause women's ovaries as um,
one of the first places that ages. And I've heard you explain that you think that evolution
program women to stop having children during menopause because continuing reproduction would drain energy needed to raise existing children. So is infertility something that could theoretically be prevented? In mice, which is where we live, in my life, where we work. It can be prevented and it can be reversed. I thought we've run out of eggs. That's like there. That's the current theory. The evidence that we have from my lab and a lab that I worked with in Australia
caused me to question that idea that we run at that women run out of eggs. We have published and repeated many times that if you treat old female mice 16 months of age, which is like a
65, 70-year-old human, that has long times since given up having offspring.
ovaries with a chemical that rejuvenates the eggs that are in the ovary. Maybe even produces new ones,
we don't know for sure. But those 16-month-old mice that stopped having kids, probably at least six months ago, now start producing healthy offspring again. Their eggs look young, pristine, compared to the terrible eggs that if you try to harvest some eggs from a mouse that old, it's hard to find any that look normal. Their chromosomes are messed up, ripped apart. They're not going to produce healthy babies. But we can take those eggs or at least the ovaries with those eggs in them and
cause them to be young again and make fresh eggs that can produce healthy offspring that live a normal
“life span. The real question is will this work in women and that's something that I'm keen on testing?”
Let's be really hard to test a lot of these things in people, right? Because we you've mentioned the word mice quite a lot. It's harder than you can imagine actually and I've spent a lot of
of my career since I was 35, aiming to develop a medicine to treat diseases and aging.
And it can be, it can go wrong in many ways, even if the science is good and right. And it's, there's money, there's business, there's laws, there's politics, there's business strategies, there's change of leaderships, all sorts of human introduced variables that can get in the way, there's patents, and then there's competition and spite that also gets into it.
And I've had to deal with all of those things, including competing against some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, we really didn't want me to succeed. But yeah, it's extremely difficult to make a drug, but I do want to remind you, and everyone listening and watching that we're beyond my snarfrage reversal. We've done this in monkeys, monkeys that are physically and almost genetically identical to
us. 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, it's, it's, it's, it's essentially, you know, slightly smarter monkeys. I just had to thought about how other countries, now the nations, might be conducting their own sort of secret research, and they might not have the same bureaucratic political ethical
“considerations that you have to contend with.”
Do you think about this much that some of this sort of geopolitical adversaries might be doing secret testing in some research labs somewhere on humans? I think about it, and in fact, the United States government thinks about it too. A large investment into one of the companies that I sit on the board of was blocked because the US government claimed that the technology was too dangerous to be in the hands of foreign
companies and governments. So the US government, at least in the previous administration, was extremely cautious about this technology falling into the wrong hands. Which technology? Which ability to reverse aging?
So the US government blocked that technology because they were scared that it might fall into the wrong hands.
“Well they blocked the very large investment over $100 million into the company from a foreigner”
because they would have more access to the information and the progress. Is it China? I won't say more because it's sensitive. Most I can say is that governments are watching this technology very closely, not just the US, but around the world because the winner will make not just a lot of economic benefit,
but there will be potential for radical change in the pharmaceutical industry in healthcare, the amount of change socially will be dramatic as well. But there are also uses that the government has identified so-called "super-soldier potential". Now I don't agree that that's a reason to slow down the research, others claim that it was worth it.
But I do believe that the technology is very powerful and we should start to get ready
for when this comes to society because it's not an F, as I said, it's a WAN. The technology to do what? To rejuvenate the human body. Why do we need to get ready? Well, because it'll be massive social change.
If you can choose how old you want to be and people don't die at 80 anymore, let's say they can live to 120 or beyond. There's big changes. There's so security issues, there's employment. Though I will say that the disastrous scenario that often comes to mind when I talk about
this and which I covered in the last part of my book lifespan, it's actually economically
Hugely advantageous to slow aging and prevent diseases.
A lot of the U.S. economy and most advanced economies goes to healthcare. And chronic disease, a lot of people are sick for five to ten years. That's where most of people savings and retirement and government money goes in. The most expensive years of your life for the last two years. If you can delay that, it's going to have massively positive economic benefits to a nation
that adopts these medicines. I've got a question of you that actually came to mind yesterday when I was watching some, I don't know, some video on social media and they asked a question to a guy.
“David, if you were a billionaire now, age 56, would you give it all up to be my age again?”
The A3. I don't think you can put a price on being young.
Another way of putting it, and I've seen this on social media, would you for a billion dollars
would you swap with Warren Buffett? No, absolutely no. Right. There's no money in the world that you want to be old, right? Yeah.
So I worth it. In other words, youth is more valuable than a billion dollars. It may be the most valuable thing you could ever have is your youth. It's such an interesting and illuminating analogy or metaphor or whatever, because suddenly you do realize that how much we value it.
We value it more than anything. I would rather be 33 years old than be a 43-year-old billionaire, even the 10 years I value as a billion dollars.
Yeah, one year maybe, but not 10 years, right?
10 years is super. I totally agree with you. And the older you get, the more valuable it becomes. It's important to realize the massive impact that this technology can have, not just economically, but on individual lives of human beings across the planet.
The world when this becomes a reality, again, I'm speaking like it's a certainty, because I'm pretty convinced it's going to happen. That world is going to be so different from the world we live in, it's going to be as different as the pre-computer world and the pre-error plane world as today's. I'm trying to imagine the world where we did pick our age and maybe even you talked about
really being able to continue to reset to that age. I imagine what the world would be like if I could be 33 forever. If you could be 33 forever, or even for another 100 years or something. Yeah, I could stay 33 for 100 years. Do you think that's the plausible outcome, which is we can pick an age and stay there for
100 years?
“At that particular age, or is it just that I'm going to be 150 in my physical form?”
I'm going to be wrinkled in gray, but I'm just going to continue to live. Is it looking young or is it just living longer? It's actually, the good news is it's both, and we're doing a lot of work in my live on skin and hair, hair loss, hair graying. Yeah, please help me.
I can find it. You don't have to worry, just yet.
You know, we'll help you, brother first.
Oh, no, come on. Yeah. We will. So, we, we've seen that we can rejuvenate the skin of, again, mice, but still we also grow human skin in the lab from scratch, and we can put that human skin on mice and the mice
have human skin. So, we can now test age reversal in that system. I'm very optimistic that we'll be able to rejuvenate the external part of the body as well as the internal. If we can cure blindness, reversing age of the skin is a piece of cake.
What does that one look like? I'm trying to understand all of this sort of unintended consequences of such a world where we're all kind of young and we all live longer. Is there problems of meaning and purpose? Is there, what are the unintended consequences?
I've thought a lot about this. There's this gut feeling that a lot of people have, maybe you're feeling it now, is that if I'm not worried about death, I'm not going to strive as hard or I'm not going to have as much meaning. I'm not going to have agency.
I totally reject that view. I believe that every moment is special. I don't believe I would be enjoying this conversation with you anymore if I could live 200 years. I'm loving the moment.
“And so, I believe that we get up with purpose and that if I live for a thousand years,”
I'd still enjoy every day that I lived. And even a thousand years, one day, maybe seen it's too short. No, it's 20 times my age, a little bit less than 20. That's still not very much. And the grand scheme of the age of geology and the earth, we're still around like that.
And so I think that we will still love life. Most of us will still love life and enjoy every moment, but we'll get more opportunities. We can try multiple careers. Maybe we will get divorced and have a whole new life. So there will be opportunities, and it will be a magnificent world.
Not to mention the productivity that humans can provide with the knowledge of...
year old, but with the body of a 30 year old. Do you think people will make different decisions about having children? Well, I think we have a problem already with the decisions that a lot of couples are making, which is leaving it too late.
It's very clear with the fertility rate and the childbirth that basically we're going
off a cliff.
“And I think that it's going to be important to be able to give couples and women, especially”
the choice to have children for longer. And that's one of the reasons that I work on this topic is that I think that the world with all of the training that we need to do and the pressures on finding a mate and being happily married or at least being partnered up, that can take decades to get the right person.
And you don't want to rush into it like people used to. And being able to have children in your 50s and 60s I think would be a great gift to humanity. That's my personal view. Some people may, you know, for whatever reason to agree with that.
But I think that the pressures to have children before 35 typically are just extreme and unfair.
But also that it'll help us maintain the human population because by 2050 we're going to start going in a bad decline and earlier in many Western countries. And without humans, you know, absent Android robots everywhere, we're going to have a deficiency of human capital and human productivity. And this is, I would argue with Elon that this is the best solution to that lack of
human, it's just keep people healthy and alive and productive for longer. Whoa. What's that in your face? This is my bud and charge face mask. I've been wearing this for some time now.
There are a sponsor of the podcast. I put this on for 15, 20 minutes a day, like I'm sitting here in the chair and wear it. Boose my collagen production helps to find line blemishes. My complexion gets better and then people people listen to my podcast because I look better.
Professional grade equipment in such a small box. Not invasive and having sat here with so many of the world's leading health professionals. There's various things that I repeatedly hear work and some things that I'm a bit skeptical about. This is one of the things that almost all of my guests will have confirmed works.
It is really, really, really effective. And they offer fast free shipping worldwide with easy returns and exchanges and you'll also get one year warranty on all of their products and their HSA and FSA eligible. When you tax receivings up to 40% and you can get 20% off when you order through my link at bondcharge.com/deoac, that's bondcharge.com/deoac, the deal applies so wide.
New Year always has a strange energy to it because people start talking about their goals,
fresh starts and new habits. But the reality is that most people carry the same ideas they had last year into the new year. I'm guilty of that too and they still don't end up doing anything with them. When I get why, starting something new, especially if it's a business or project is overwhelming.
Before you start, you're looking for the perfect moment and to be the perfect version
“of yourself when really what matters most is taking that first step.”
If you had an idea for a while, a product, a store, something you've been sitting on, our sponsor Shopify makes it easy to get started because you can build your store, sell on socials, take payments, use AI tools and manage everything all in one place. So of 2026 is the year you finally back yourself, go to Shopify.co.uk/bartlet and start selling and you can sign up for a $1 per month trial right now to just go to Shopify.co.uk/bartlet.
I promise you, you don't need to have it all figured out, you just need to start. You mentioned a cancer earlier on is something that you're working on in your laboratory. What progress have you made in your laboratory and what has that taught you about what the nature of cancer but also how we might prevent and cure it someday? Because I was reading that, you will have actually you have been able to slow the growth
of certain cancer cells and kill those cancer cells completely. Yeah, so my wonderful student in a lot is doing a PhD on this. And what we've hypothesized and now tested is the idea, again, based on the information theory of aging, is that cancer is expressing those genes differently. In the same way that aging is a cellular identity crisis, cancer is a cellular identity crisis.
And if we can rejuvenate an old cell to be normal and turn on the right genes again, we should be able to do that for a cancer cell and either make it normal. Or if it tries to be normal and wakes up from its zombie-like state, it might even kill itself.
“And that's what we're finding in my lab, no lots of work has shown,”
that I'm a majority of cancers that we've grown in the lab will die and shrink in an animal if you try to reverse their age.
Through the injection, but you were referring to it earlier.
Yeah, we can do it a couple of ways.
One is using those three genes that rejuvenate the epigenome and make cells young again. The one for the eye, the same technology for the eye we're using in cancer cells. But we also have this chemical drink that we can give to animals or to put on the cells. And that also wakes the cancer cells up, tries to become more normal. They turn on the original set of genes that they might have had on 30, 40 years ago.
So many cancer cells that we grow in the lab from the 20th century, we rejuvenate them. We turn on those genes that were originally in the normal tissue and the cells kill themselves.
“And so I believe that we may not be able to cure all cancer using this.”
That would be crazy to even say that.
But I do believe that if we're successful rejuvenating the human body, cancer is not going to be a risk and that's just a nice side effect of what our original mission was, which was to treat aging. So from this, we can start to try and understand what we think is causing cancer. And I guess this goes back to the, a lot of the calcogenic behavior that you described earlier,
things like smoking, anything that's applying stress on the DNA, is that like her? Yeah, you have to break the DNA. The catastrophe is really broken DNA, but you can do other things that catastrophes like overheat the cells,
“even mechanical stress, to many hits on the brain in football, we'll do that.”
So yes, that's exactly right. And that drives aging and aging drives cancer, by the way, one of my theories called the Goronka genesis hypothesis, terrible name, but nevertheless, Goronka genesis, it is, it's the idea that as we age, we're becoming more cancer-like as a, as a human, our metabolism, when we're old, is closer to heading towards what a cancer cell is metabolism is like, so that when we actually do get cancer,
the cancer cells grow better in an old person than when you're young. And so by rejuvenating those cancer cells, giving them the, the ability to, be young again, they actually either slow down in their growth or, as I said, kill themselves in response. I've got a bit of a, a prop here, which is very useful for the context of goodness. Disavaging. There are people here that may not know what I'm holding in my hands, but for those of you
don't know, and who are just listening, I'm holding a record in my hands, a vinyl record, that's even just handed me. So the, the information theory of aging, the analogy that I use is that it disrupts information. And so this record, this album has information on it. It's music, and just like DNA, it's information. So instead of the DNA information, the control of the DNA, be it getting messed up in the album, it's like scratching this album. So I'm literally going
to scratch this album, is that okay with you? Of course you can. All right, I'm not sure I can fix it
by the way. It may be a one way thing, but I've never done this before, but that's painful.
Maybe you can hear that happening. So if we were to play this on a record player with a needle, it's going to jump around, and it's going to read the wrong songs, or it's going to suddenly not sound very good. So that's, that's now the equivalent of an old cell. The information, the beautiful music is there, but the ability to read it has been messed up in the same way that old age, the information is in the DNA, but the cell's don't read it correctly. And what our technology
is is to get rid of those scratches. And so we can play the beautiful music of our youth again. I have got this, you told me to bring my weighted vest and this neck brace.
“Oh my goodness. I think I'll put it on the real way. Anyone listening, Steven's putting on a”
very heavy jacket right now with lead weights, and a strap around his neck to limit his neck movement. Wow, that's a lot. So I'm, I just put on a 20, I think it's 20 kilogram, must on week now, jacket, and a neck brace. And ahead of this conversation, my team told me to get one of these. What is the analogy here that you're creating? This is very, it's bad, right? It's hard, yeah. Right, imagine feeling like that for a decade, that's old age. You feel entire week,
you can barely hold your body up, you can barely move your neck. It would be painful, you're not in pain yet, but most people in their 80s have some sort of disease and aches and pains. Try doing that for another 10 minutes, maybe. How long can you keep that on?
I'll keep it on for another 10 minutes.
it's weight and immobility. I can't move my neck the same. My shoulders feel heavier. How is this relevant analogy to aging? Because it just kind of feels like immobility and weight. Well, I have to come over there and use this pair of scissors to be stabbing you as well. So if you can feel pain as you move as well, that's part of old age. It is not a fun thing being old and most old people, the reason that they don't love life anymore is because they feel like you
“do or worse. Not to mention the fact that they're, you need to put Vaseline on your eyes,”
ear plugs in your ears if you want to know what it's like being old.
Or even worse, shut your eyes and you can never open them again. That's what it's like for those
patients that we hope to cure a blindness. If I'm going to ask you a really tough question, which is, if I put a calculator in front of you right now and you had to hit a number on that calculator and then hit enter. And that was the age that you were going to live to and you had to make that decision now. What number would you hit on that calculator? Infinity. Really? So you didn't. No, no, no, no, no. There's no day if you're healthy where you want to die. Even if you're 100, 120,
if you have friends, family, loved ones, your healthy, would you say, okay, tomorrow I'm ready to die? No, it's not over. And unless there was some kind of psychiatric issues. Exactly. Right, so that's my point is when people say, oh, when I'm 80, kill me, that is bullshit. That's excuse my language. It's my life just swear on this. Of course you can. Sorry, we'll have to beep it for the kids, I guess. It's only when you're sick
“or you have depression that you want to leave this world. Otherwise, life is a joy”
for most people in the world, not everybody and we have to fix that as well. But for most of us being alive is the greatest gift of any collection of atoms. Consciousness is even greater and why would you want that to end? Who would choose that if they had the alternative to be
with family and friends? Interesting. I see that's interesting because I have always assumed that
I wouldn't want to live forever. But when you asked me, if I was healthy and I had my friends and family and I was doing things that I loved professionally, would there come a day where I would choose to go now? No, that wouldn't. Just like there hasn't come a day in the last 33 years where I've chosen to go now. Exactly. Do you think it's going to be possible in the next 50 years for us to live forever? I'd be shocked if that happened but I'd been shocked my whole career at how fast this
technology is moving and now with AI things are going so fast my head spinning. So I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I'm skeptical that we could live forever in my lifetime at least. But as I said, you're probably going to live you are going to live into the 22nd century. We can't imagine what the world's going to be like then. And AI has really changed this equation. Oh, absolutely. We're doing things in my lab that would have taken 160 years before and
quite literally billions of dollars on a $10,000 budget. Well, I guess I better make it to $2040. So let's talk about fasting and food and nutrition and get go a little bit deeper on that. I've had so many conversations over the years about this subject of fasting but as I was reading
your research you really do feel that fasting just eating less often is one of the most important
things that we can all do for longevity. I do and I practice it as much as I can though it's challenging in a world that's full of abundant food but yes we've known for thousands of years if the ancients are not dummies they could witness what happens when you fast. Clarity of mine long-term health they could observe the difference between the gluttones and the people that fasted for religious reasons. It's obvious but there's certain ways to do it.
“Fasting doesn't include malnutrition. You have to do it with abundant vitamins, minerals.”
You want to make sure that you have adequate nutrition but I think three meals a day is craziness. It turns out this idea breakfast is the most important meal the day is marketing from the early 20th century by companies I will not name but it was breakfast cereal. Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day for most people especially adults especially if you're not hungry when you wake up there's no point in eating if you're not hungry the morning. I'm one of those
people so I've skipped breakfast how about you? Yeah I'm the same in the same I don't eat my first meal today was 3 p.m. because I had a podcast and told you to 2 p.m. so we're just typical for me I just don't get hungry in the mornings because of the marketing there for breakfast sometimes I've said to myself or you should eat and I'll make myself eat but it's very very rare. I'm notoriously people know that I'm
Notoriously a lady to 4 p.
this? It's heavy David I'm going to be honest it's not I'm finding myself like trying to find a comfortable position. Yeah it's tough being old and by the end of it you will be so convinced
“that this research is important because to live like that it's not in most people life is not worth”
living. I put a suit a very heavy suit like that but on the arms as well not just the body and he had the earmuffs and the eyes this was the the governor of Massachusetts 15 minutes in that body suit
and he was crying not because he was in pain because as he sat on stage it was the first time in his
life he understood how his father feels and could be empathetic. We young people I'm relatively young 56 you're very young 33 we have no idea what it's like to be old it can be horrific so why wouldn't we do the right things like fasting exercising so we can get an extra 10 years 20 years maybe longer of healthy life. It does also give me a lot of empathy for people that have a bit more weight on them as well because if you know if I was if I weighed that much I don't know if I'd be
“very active to be completely honest. Exactly and we're in pain too don't forget every joint”
can be hurting how do you feel taking that much better right so let's hope pray wish that these
technologies that I'm talking about today work because that could be what it feels like to be
rejuvenated when you're 80. To close off on this point of fasting why does it help extend my life yeah just eating less part of it came out of research in my lab but of course many others I need to give credit to but in my lab specifically what we worked on initially when I started we studied yeast cells little microscopic cells that as everyone knows we used to make beer and bread and champagne these yeast cells live about 10 days and then they die and we used yeast as a model for aging
and what we discovered with yeast cells which turns out to be true in our bodies is that adversity as long as it's not killing these cells is good for you it's called hormesis it's the technical term for what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and live longer adversity mode is what we're
“aiming for the opposite is abundance mode which is what modern life is all about popcorn movies”
wheels on your suitcase sitting down all day it's wearing a abundance world so adversity is something we don't often feel we have to work at it fasting is adversity exercises adversity called plunges sonos adversity adversity mimics they're not really threatening your life what happens at the solar level is that those cells they get freaked out they're worried that these times of adversity could kill us so they fight back they turn on repair systems they turn
on recycling systems they turn on DNA repair systems that help slow down aging so in this modern world when we have total abundance we don't have to exercise we don't we three mils a day we get overweight we don't sleep much we have air conditioning in summer we're actually aging faster than we need to because our bodies are not fighting aging like they do when they feel adversity you're team discovered I can't say the word serotonous oh well I was one of many scientists
in the 1990s I was part of a team called sertoons yeah yeah in yeast actually that's right that's a good story I went to the US to figure out why we get old but I didn't choose to study
humans because I figured if we can't figure it out fell little yeast cells we'll never
figure it out for humans I went to MIT my professor was Lenny Gorrenty I went to his lab and I said I'm I'm not going I'm not leaving the goal was in my mind was to figure out are there longevity genes at that time most people thought that there were aging genes that caused aging death genes that doesn't make any sense to me our bodies would have longevity genes that give life so in yeast when searching for them and out of that work came two things the first is
Lenny and I my professor and I published in the journal cell which was a massive big deal in those days still is but it was my first time the first evidence for a cause of aging for any species we figured out why he sells get all you want to guess why do yeast cells get old have you been paying attention what is the information theory of aging say I was going to say they have an identity crisis but they do how would we know if they're having an identity crisis oh you can measure
the identity of yeast cells they have an identity it's called their mating type the main identity
Of a yeast cell is they either a type or alpha type male female and the hallm...
that's old is it loses its a and alpha identity and gets an identity crisis it doesn't know
“what sex it is and it doesn't make any more become sterile so when I arrived at MIT in 1995 we knew”
that the hallmark of an old yeast cell besides it being a bit slow and bigger is that it became sterile it had an identity crisis so we figured out that broken chromosomes distract the sort of two and defenses and that causes aging in a yeast cell but we didn't know in the 90s that that was going to be true for us as well it took another decade or two to figure that out and how does this link to eating all the time yeah so sort of two ends are proteins that actually are
attracted to DNA they actually associate it with it and they protect the DNA from getting damaged
okay what do you got yeah and they repair broken chromosomes right so they're coming together now
but they also get distracted so let a sort of two ends normal job if there's no crisis is that they
“turn genes on and off they are epigenetic regulators they control the epigenome they tell us”
what type it is no of cells can sell right yeah conductor thank you conductor exactly but the conductor becomes demented over time what happens is when you have a chromosomal break the sertuans panic they leave the DNA what they're supposed to be doing controlling the cells identity and they go and they repair the DNA that's their other job they have two jobs identity and repair so when you have this break the sertuans go away they repair the problem but they don't
all go back in the next few minutes it's very quick they don't all go back to where they started so you've got like this tennis match that the sertuans are the balls and they get hit over to the break then hit back most of them find the genes that they should go back to but they don't all do that
“and that total game of tennis or ping pong if you like is what I believe because it's the”
identity crisis and aging itself because it's aging in yeast cells it's why yeast cells don't live longer than 10 days and I believe it's why we struggle to live beyond 80 or 90 so if I'm eating all the time then those sertuans they're not going to be doing their job as the conductor making sure I know the identity of myself they're going to be doing repair stuff so I'm going to
age faster yes and the breakthrough happened in the lab as I was just leaving to go to Harvard
I got a job at Harvard when I was 29 super excited and just as I was leaving there was a big breakthrough that actually kept it secret for me because they'll worried I was going to work on it when I left and in fact my professor tried to prevent me from working on it when I left on sertuans in general crazy to think about but what they discovered was that there's a metabolite a molecule that goes up and down with food and up and down with sleep
called NAD we have lots of it there's grams of it in our body it's one of the most abundant molecules in the body it's very ancient it's in yeast it's in us and what they found was that sertuans to control genes and to repair DNA that's broken they don't do it unless there's NAD it's the catalyst it's the fuel for their reaction they need NAD and when we're young we have lots of NAD so it works well the sertuans control the information on the genes and they repair the DNA
very well because they've got lots of NAD to carry out their their work these are enzymes they work they do things as we get older by the time you're 50 about my age you have half the levels of this NAD molecule my body is making less NAD and it's also destroying the NAD faster than when I was 20 that's a problem and so what we found was that when we fast the yeast or we fast to human NAD levels go up again so fasting raises NAD and makes the sertuans
young again essentially and that preserves the epigenum and it also repairs the DNA better so can I just drink NAD you can drink NAD and not much would happen how do I take NAD so NAD can be taken as a supplement which is a precursor to NAD it's better to take the precursors a precursor meeting something that creates it exactly there's one called Naman not to be confused with M&Ms which will probably not make you live longer and there's another one called NR Naman is directly converted into NAD you put
two NMS together get NAD and so we know this for a fact this isn't speculation when you give a human Naman by swallowing it a gram of it you can typically double the amount of NAD in your body and we believe and we have some evidence now in human clinical trials that the sertuans are
Imparting health benefits re-establishing the epigenum lowering body weight i...
and even changing cholesterol levels in a positive way in humans so I mean I'm assuming you take
“Naman I've been taking Naman and admitting that publicly for a while now and my father who”
is an even more advanced experiment at 86 so yes we've been taking it for over a decade now and we're still alive so so far so good so far so good I do want to get into and I will ask you
a second about the supplement stack that you would recommend for the average person but that's good
to know but just to close off on this point of fasting is there a particular type of fasting method that you would recommend for someone who's trying to improve that longevity because there's so many that I hear 16 hours five days I'm assigned to so I go with what's proven I'm not selling anything so what the science says first of all is that there isn't one size fits all for everybody it often depends on what you can do personally it's challenging to do this right you'll feel hungry
“for the first two weeks you try it so I would suggest the way I do it is I start by skipping one”
and then maybe one and a half meals like what you do try to go without a meal until three
four o'clock if you can maybe not the first day right if you do that the first day you'll say
this is crazy I'm gonna grab a snack and you won't do it so go slowly build up to it so the first day I would say just don't eat breakfast and maybe have a snack mid morning a week later try to go with our breakfast completely until lunch and eventually work up to what you do and I do which is eat a very late lunch if not go to dinner what you get with that is obviously not eating in bed hopefully so you've got the night fast starting what would it be 7pm roughly when do you
finish dinner no comment okay it's usually pretty late last night it was you know this is probably why I don't eat very early the next day last night would have been about I'm gonna say 10pm okay it was super late that's an extraordinary example usually it would be 8 or 9pm okay but but you've got at least 13 14 hours which is good you try to aim for 14 hours some people go 16 hours but that's a good start for fasting and hopefully you can do that most days 5 days a week that's great because that means
that you're turning on your situance raising your NED your exercise exercise as well so that's also adding to it one thing that I've started doing is fasting for longer than just 14 16 hours I try maybe once a month to go for three days without eating why because there's a type of
cellular recycling that doesn't happen within the first 16 hours you will enter ketosis so
you'll see your body will start to change this metabolism which is what's called ketone bodies but the true real deep-clean cleansing of all proteins and damage damage proteins happens after two and a half to three days and it's called shaperone mediated autophagy autophagy autophagy is the word for auto self-eating and it really kicks in for it with an extended fast what's the evolutionary reason for that what's going on there why does it take me two and a half days for this deep-clean
to happen because your body doesn't want to do it it costs a lot of energy and having to remake body parts as energy expensive and our body tries to conserve energy as much as possible when you're fasting what it'll it needs to do is to use your body as fuel so it'll start breaking down proteins for fuel that you need so first of all what will happen is in the first few hours you use glycogen from your liver you'll live a mixed glucose you'll feel a little bit hungry
but you'll eventually be fine then when you run run out of glycogen then you're going to start breaking down fat and making ketones that's when you start to get a bit of bad breath from from that and you but you feel great when you're in a between about 15 hours and 24 hours that's when you get a lot of ketones and your brain uses those for fuel so you'll have sharp mind can remember
“things you can focus on work if you ever get there beyond that you need to break down fat and”
that is when your body is starting to do that but ultimately what what happens after three days as your body says hey I'm going to start breaking down protein as well and I wouldn't do that often because I don't want to break down a lot of protein but your body will start to turn over all proteins preferentially and a little bit of that that's why I do it maybe once a month has been shown at least in animals to be not just healthy but life extending.
On that point of ketosis, I like being in a state of ketosis I'm kind of cycling in
Out of it during the year because I get so many of the cognitive benefits so ...
on the podcast I can think better I feel better I feel more focus and more attentive. Is ketosis
“is the ketone diet the ketone diet a healthy diet in your view is it what are the benefits of it?”
Is it something that you think is natural to be recommended? Well I don't mind being controversial but I do speak the truth there's not a lot of evidence that long-term the ketogenic diet is healthy certainly doesn't correlate or associate with longevity. Short-term okay it does help people lose weight no question but I am rather concerned for people that don't have a balanced diet with an input of plant material which has molecules that are unique to plants and you won't find
in high processed foods or meat the evidence speaking as a scientist is that the long-term
ketogenic diets are not going to be longevity inducing the evidence is more having a lean diet with a focus on plants that are not overcooked and not all ultra-process that one is undoubtedly
“the healthiest if you can do it. Do you meet meat? I do eat meat but not like I used to. I used to”
think that a meal was not a meal unless I had a piece of meat there and then the vegetables were the decoration and I'd begrudgingly eat the green stuff I've been flipped totally. Serena my partner Serena Poon is not just a nutritionist better longevity expert for the last 26 years and so she
came to my apartment which is now our apartment and she just cleared out all the food that I had
pretty much everything was either toxic or just not healthy it was ultra processed so what are you eating that kind of peanut butter your full sugar so she she's taught me how to live healthy and so now I rarely eat meat I rarely drink alcohol I focus on really fresh high quality preferably organic foods because I don't want pesticides and I don't want other contaminants but I do know organic can be more expensive. Why not meat? So animals unfortunately don't make
“what are called polyphenols which are a type of molecule that I believe and have evidence”
turns on the sirtuans and other pathways by chemical reactions that delay aging so sirtuans are just one of a few enzymes that control aging we know this there's sirtuans this m-tor which responds to amino's and another one called AMPK so those three pathways are altered in just the right way by molecules found only in plants well and a small extent in fungi but not in meat so if you're not eating a lot of vegetables or fruits you're not getting these molecules they're like medicine
as food so right here I hope you don't mind me mentioning that there are some some food in front of us and I'm looking at blueberries here blueberries are packed with polyphenols one of the reason they have purple color is that polyphenols have the color and as sirena would tell you eat the rainbow I call it zina hermesis which is not as attractive but zina hermesis is the same idea as eat the rainbow that by eating plants that have a lot of these molecules that are often produced by
stressed plants where you get the stressed plants so plants will be stressed just like we are if you don't give them enough water food too much sunlight not enough sunlight they in their defense they make polyphenols there's a whole bunch of them there's very troll visit and course attend there's hundreds this one has anthocyanidins that's the color these activate these adversity responses in ourselves the sirtuans will be get activated by
molecules in this blueberry so if I eat this blueberry those conductors that conduct some of the aging process you talked about making sure my cells don't have an identity crisis fixing the the negative stress that's going on in my in my cells they will be benefited by eating this blueberry yeah it's it's like a free hack right you can eat something that's yummy but you're also getting the benefits by mimicking fasting and exercise in your food as
well the sirtuans don't just need an ID that's the gas pedal that's the petrol for those of you in the British world and Commonwealth the fuel for sirtuans is an ID the accelerator pedal of the polyphenols in fruits and vegetables like resvertral corset and which we know when you give them to sirtuans they get hyper activated and when you say eat the rainbow you mean
Eat colorful looking food because that's an an easy way to remember how to ea...
the most polyphenols I'll give you a really good example Steven Serena put me on to green tea
mucher right so mucher tea if you haven't tried it I'm sure you've tried it but those of you who haven't tried it I highly recommend it it's tastes great the reason for it switching from coffee mainly to mucher in the morning for me is that it's full of polyphenols why is it full of polyphenols it's not just because it's green tea which is not naturally healthy but the growers of those plants in Japan typically they shade the plants before they harvest shading the plants stresses them out
plants need light so they don't just make more chlorophyll which produces the deep green color in the tea but the polyphenols are super high and through trial and error of a thousands of years the
Japanese figured out that by shading the plants giving them this mild or medic stress it makes
them not just extra tasty but extra healthy same with red wine by the way but the alcohol can be an issue but absent alcohol red wine is very good for you okay without the alcohol it's unfortunate you're like I one of my papers in 1996 caused red wine cells to go up 30% and stayed up I apologize
“for saying that red wine every day was healthy doctors were recommending it remember yeah but I”
now change my mind I have to say that I no longer believed having one glass of red wine every day is healthy in my opinion and I've stopped drinking red wine every day instead I take polyphenols from red wine and from vegetables either in a pill or in my food as a substitute because
the evidence for alcohol is rather damning there's a UK bio bank study and the UK looked at
thousands of people's MRI scanner their brain who were drinking one glass about all the day and there was a statistical difference between the people that were drinking one glass a day and were not in terms of brain size and grey matter of course the grey matter was tended to be smaller in those that drank even slightly yeah I do and I actually have a match of company it's some it was this year voted the fastest grain company in the UK it's by some founders that I invested
in Levi Teddy and Marissa from dragons don't and it's been an absolute unbelievable in it business unbelievable so tell us where do I get it Japan you get the match you're from Japan but the company's called perfect people know about it because I've talked about it before but I didn't realise when I made the investment that matcha was considered by many tours would be very healthy especially a health alternative to certain energy products on the market that you
get cans that give you I shant to get food but the other thing that the company invested in is this one here called key to IQ I'm a co-owner of this company as well and yeah I love that I love that company and the CEO Michael good guy what's your thoughts on exogenous keytones drinking keytones I do it in fact that I drink keyton IQ before I do podcast why it improves my clarity I find I also believe the science and there have been multiple studies now in people
some of the science comes out of keyton IQ but also independent studies have shown that it's extremely healthy for the heart and there's new studies that show for the brain as well it can be healthy the brain uses keytones like beta hydroxybuterate or in that one it's one three buton dial just a shot of that will give the brain food that it needs rather than the body having
“to make it and you get I believe and I feel it I get the clarity of fasting without being in a”
fasted state but I also drink it when I'm fasting to give it the body the extra boost that it needs and not on this point of diet one of the things that I was told by my doctor when I did a like one of his blood tests was he cautioned me about bad cholesterol he said to me something along the lines that I need to be careful about the bad cholesterol and there's been lots of conversation about cholesterol good bad what's your perspective on this conversation around bad
cholesterol which has been thought to increase certain foods have been thought to increase bad cholesterol which is very very detrimental to our health. I didn't realize there was a debate at least in my world there is no debate if you're referring to do you want to get your LDL cholesterol as low as possible? Yeah definitely. Oh really in a case it's yeah I mean the
“science is irrefutable as thousands of people in studies now I think I know what you're talking”
about there are there are some stories that you need cholesterol in your brain and if you inhibit it you might affect your brain function you also need it for repair of arteries but there's no evidence
That that's a problem in fact it's it's a little low in fact that the brain d...
the cholesterol from the bloodstream it makes its own so I've actually been on a statin
“to low my LDL since I was 30 really well I had high cholesterol it's in my family but I went to my”
doctor and I said I want to go on these new drugs at the time statins and he said why you don't have heart disease yet and I said why would I wait get me on it I want to be on it and in those days it was very weird to give someone a statin at age 30 with no evidence of heart disease but as you know I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't wait till we get diseases to treat them we should preempt that and start early in life and so yeah I insisted with my doctor initially with statins
but on all of these things I go in and I say I need you to prescribe me this test I need this medicine and eventually after talking it over with him he typically prescries me something or gets me a test but I've been fighting the system and my doctor's at Harvard so he's a good doctor but conservative the old way of doing medicine is if you're not sick we're not going to give you a medicine certainly not if you're young and healthy but that has to change so you saying that I should be
“on statins potentially well what's your LDL level not I don't think it's great I think a too much”
baking or something well we can talk about food and cholesterol because it depends whether you absorb still best or all or not we can test for that but if you do absorb cholesterol more than most I would say that you may want to change your diet at a minimum on this plate here in front of us I have the top five foods that I believe you think are great for reversing aging am I correct is that does that these are great choices yeah so what are these
and why so we've already done the blue breeze and we've you've explained to me about polyphenols and they're rich in them which I understand and they're low in sugar right well they're not low
“in sugar so don't eat a ton of them a handful is fine as a snack it's also known that having too”
much sugar is bad for longevity okay keep your blood sugar level steady and low as much as you can so don't eat too many of those a better choice than blueberries would be something like matcha which is not full of sugar in fact if you go to some of these chains that sell mucher and it tastes really sweet you're going to reverse the effects of any polyphenols by drinking
that much sugar so I always have on sweet and much okay so now we've got avocados here yeah
avocados they're not so much known for their polyphenols though they do have them it's the type of fats the polyunsaturated fats they help with satiety so you're not going to be as hungry so if you put that on your sandwich at lunch you're not going to feel packaged and there are highly anti-inflammatory as well the molecules are in there in the fats very good for you extra virgin olive oil oh yeah excellent does the type of oils that are in there are very
healthy there's omega 9 which is also known to activate sertuans and again if you have the right grower and this is being cold pressed not too processed and stressed before harvesting you'll have huge amounts of polyphenols as well I really hope that this is what the team said it was
This has happened before, I tried something, and I thought it was something else, but it was a white powder, and it was labelled with something first.
But it was a yellow ring. Yellow ring. Yellow ring. Yellow ring. Yellow ring. Yellow ring. Yellow ring. Oh, you're in. You're in. I'm chicken, it's not. I don't think drinking urine is longevity. But yeah, on and off, I do take a teaspoon of olive oil in the morning and mix it with a respiratory polyphenol. Oh, it's okay, just in. Okay, it's extra virgin, but good. Yeah, and there's a lot of evidence, not just molecular like me, but epidemiologically people that have a lot of olive oil in their diet tend to have low inflammation and less disease.
And we've got some nuts. Yep, not to good for many reasons. They're full of vitamins and minerals. If there's a Brazil nut, you want to have one of those every day, but the selenium, which is a very rare element in our food supply. And there's a recent study just last month showing that a lack of selenium can be very deleterious. So nuts are great as a snack, be careful, they're full of calories though. So if you're trying to lose weight and you're not exercising a lot, don't over eat on the nuts. And what, oh, my least favorite food, but nevertheless, I will eat them. This is a Brussels sprout. When I was a kid, Brussels sprouts tasted a lot more, lot worse, a lot better.
Those are good because they have polyphenols, but there's also another molecule in them called sulfuraphane. It's actually the reason they taste terrible and smell terrible. So sulfuraphane is what it sounds. It has a sulfur at a minute.
That gives it that rotten egg smell, but sulfuraphane activates these hormesi...
So you actually by eating preferably relatively steamed, not fried to death, Brussels sprouts, you'll get sulfuraphane. You can also take sulfuraphane as a supplement if you don't like Brussels sprouts.
Use this word pulsing before you believe that the body should go through cycles of stress and recovery rather than receiving constant daily inputs.
“When you say pulsing, what do you mean, what give an example of pulsing and why need to do that?”
Well, there's a few examples, but the first time I came across this result as a scientist was Resveratrol. So Resveratrol is found in red wine among other things, and it's thought to give the health benefits of red wine. We fed it to mice, fat mice, skinny mice, old mice, and it worked very well in the fat mice. It made them thinner. It made them live longer. It cured most of their diseases. They lived about, I think it was 15% longer. When we gave it to normal mice, every day, and they lived a little bit longer, but not significantly. Resveratrol. What we found to my surprise was when we gave old mice Resveratrol, not every day, but every second day, then they lived significantly longer.
So then I thought, well, maybe giving them a foreign substance every day is not good. Maybe there's some side effect that's counteracting the benefit. But the other thing I want to mention, I said there's a few examples, another good one is metformin. Metformin has been shown to make athletes and body builders and people who go to the gym. Weight lifters do less repetitions, and as a result, the muscles are about 5% less compared to those that don't take metformin in size. I don't think it's molecular, I think it's because you feel a little bit weaker with metformin, because it's actually interfering with your body's ability to make energy through mitochondria.
I think most people have heard of the little power packs living in ourselves originally bacteria that came into our bodies. The point is that by pulsing metformin, I think that's a better way to do it for longevity. So doing it every other day, you will. Yeah, I don't take, if I take metformin or the natural equivalent, which is burberine, if you don't want to take the drug, you can take burberine. That also activates this A&PK, this other, so to and like pathway, taking it every other day, I think is better.
And particularly if you like to work out, don't take them at formin a few hours before you work out, take it after or maybe skip it that day. I think that's a better approach.
You know, every once in a while, you come across a product, but has such a huge impact on your life that you'd probably describe it as a game changer.
And I would say, for about 35 to 40% of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called ketone IQ, which you can get at ketone.com as a game changer. Every time I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I came to work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk, I had no idea what it was, Lily and my team says that this company have been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite frankly, the rest is history. In terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am, game changer.
“So if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com/diven for 30% off. You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment, and now you can find ketone IQ at target stores across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge.”
We have finally caved in, so many of you have asked us if we could bundle the conversation cards with the 1% diary. For those of you that don't know, every single time a guest sits here with me in the chair, they leave a question in the diary of a CEO, and then I ask that question to the next guest.
We don't release those questions in any environment other than on these incredible conversation cards.
These have become a fantastic tool for people in relationships, people in teams, in big corporations, and also family members to connect with each other. With that, we also have the 1% diary, which is this incredible tool to change habits in your life. So many of you have asked if it was possible to buy both at the same time, especially people in big companies. So what we've done is we've bundled them together, and you can buy both at the same time.
“And if you want to drive connection and still have it change in your company, head to the diary.com to enquire and our team will be in touch.”
We talked about exercise earlier on page 102 of your book. You talk about how there's a CDC funded study that found people who exercise regularly about 30 minutes of jogging five days a week. Have telemirs that look 10 years younger than seven tree people, people that just sit around all day and don't do much exercise. Which is pretty remarkable.
How do we know it's the exercise and not something else?
How are we able to establish causation there? Yeah, we don't. We don't. Unfortunately, all of these associations studies just lead to a need to do placebo controlled, or at least control trials in people. So we don't know for sure, speaking like a scientist.
But there have been studies where people are told to do exercise and those that are told to sit. And then you can compare telomere length and that has been shown. So that's a much better evidence of causation. But you're right, when you see an association, it could be that people who do exercise also eat well and drink much at sleep at home. Exactly.
“So you have to be careful interpreting these associations studies always.”
But when you've got a placebo controlled trial or these studies that are called prospective, not retrospective studies, then they're better. So telomere is the ends of chromosomes that get shortened as you get older. We used to use them really as a good indicator of age, biological age. Now we use the epigenome and the DNA methylation chemicals is a better clock. And then coal plunges and so on as well.
Yeah, let's get to those.
I've got a sauna in the house, but I never use it to be honest to you.
You should. But if you tell me I should jump in there after this. You are your girlfriend still here, David Celeste. She can come to. So so on as our, in my mind, it's not even a question.
They are proven to be beneficial for multiple reasons. Heart disease and even long term mortality. What's going on in the sauna in the heat? Anyone who says they know is lying. We don't know.
But one theory that I like and it also goes back to yeast cells. There are what are called heat shock proteins that come on and defend the cell when they, the cell senses heat. And it may be that these heat shock defense proteins called HSC HSPs come on. When we breathe in this moist hot air, the moisture actually seems to help as well.
And in many studies, mostly on finished men, businessmen, those that go into their home sauners and the majority of homes in Finland do have sauners. So they can do these studies pretty easily.
The bottom line is that those that didn't do regular,
quite in quotes, sauna bathing, tended to die earlier, in particular from heart disease and cardiovascular events, than those that did regular sauna bathing. So I'm a big advocate for a sauna. I don't have one in my house,
but I do have a really hot steam shower which I use regularly every day.
“And is there a difference between the steam room and the sauna in terms of the impact here?”
I think the sauna is better because it gets hotter. Yeah, and I would have a sauna if I had my choice. And the cold plunge? Not a lot of data. There's a lot of theory that again,
hormesis, adversity, feeling better. There's some evidence that it can actually help with muscle repair after workouts. But I think we need a lot more research in that regard. But then nevertheless, I used to do it before I was so busy and traveling the world. And I certainly feel better.
So even if I didn't live longer because of it, I definitely had more mental clarity and I felt better in general. But if you were prioritizing all of the things we talked about so far, and you had to pick one. Do I have to pick one because you need more than one?
In terms of the most important one, that's maybe the first domino.
I would say that a combination of what the easiest, biggest impact you can have. Combine that. That would be skipping meals. Skipping meals.
And then a close second would be exercise that includes losing your breath. For at least five minutes, three times a week.
“So what do I mean by losing your breath for five minutes?”
When you couldn't carry out a conversation easily, that you're panting. If you're not panting and you're just lifting weights, that's not going to have the kind of benefit. Why? We don't know. But it's been shown that the health benefits and those that live long tend to do a lot more aerobic exercise, not just weights.
But both are important for mobility, strength, falling in old rage and hormones, like testosterone. Red light therapy. The red light masks. Yeah. At first I was skeptical, but I've done the research on the research.
And it looks reasonable. I use a red light cap on my head to preserve my heline. And there's some now good evidence that the mitochondria, which are the power packs and a lot of good things come from mitochondria, they actually are rejuvenated either rejuvenated or enhanced by this certain wavelengths of red light. You have to get the wavelength right.
But it's not BS. It sounds like BS, right? Oh, you shine light on your skin and it gets better or you get here. But I think that there's good evidence now that it's not BS.
In terms of the supplement stack that you take every day,
if I was to look at the on a great week where you just did everything right, what would your supplement stack look like?
Can I know this evolves over times? I'm very keen to hear what it is right now. Yeah. Well, that would be another podcast to go through each one of the things. Well, I travel with Serena with a little case. Have you got it?
I've got it here. Can I see it? Well, it's not in the studio. I didn't bring it with me. Can you send me a photo?
Sure. I couldn't publicly share it because it would be posted all over the internet. But I can tell you the main things. Why would it go crazy on the internet?
Because it's because there's a lot in there.
Well, some of the things are experimental and I wouldn't want people to go nuts about it. Because it's still experimental. I'm okay experimenting, I'm myself. I'm not okay advocating for things that are not yet proven or known to be absolutely safe.
“Okay, so give me the ones that you need to be safe.”
Well, the NMN we've covered resvertral and either metformin or burgreen. Yeah. Okay. Spurminine. Spurminine.
Yeah, and the quantities are either on the screen or in my book if you want to know exactly. Is that what it sounds like? Yes. Yes. But you get it these days, not from sperm or semen, but you get it from wheat germ typically.
Plants. It used to come from sperm. Well, that's how it was discovered. It was crystallized by, I believe, the Anthony von Lee one hook. One of the first microscopists and microbiologists.
Spurminine, the reason that I take it is that it extends the lifespan of every animal that's been given to. Prim worms to to mice. And it's a very safe molecule.
So that I always weigh up the downsides versus the upsides.
And if there's no downsides and I can afford it, which, you know, I work really hard that so I can afford it. And I prioritize my health, then I take it. And if you're wondering how it works, it seems to stimulate autophagy recycling proteins. It helps with fasting. But I also have some evidence that it delays the epigenetic information loss.
So it's slowing down the scratching of the record. Spurminine. All right. So I'm also keen on glycine. glycines are very safe substances and amino acid.
One of the 20 amino acids that makes proteins. And I actually did a PhD on glycine. I was one of the first people to perhaps the first person to clone genes that process glycine. So I know it well. For some reason, when you give animals, in, for instance, mice,
grams of glycine. So I take about five grams of glycine. Most days, they live longer.
“Although it's still speculation as to why what I think is going on is that glycine controls what's called”
one carbon metabolism and not wanting to bore the heck out of everyone who's listening to me. Glycine and one carbon metabolism controls methylation of DNA. Getting back to the little chemicals that are on this DNA molecule, the control, the information. I wouldn't be surprised if, by eating a lot of glycine every day, I'm slowing down the identity crisis you called it. Nevertheless, it's very safe and again falls into the same category of spermating.
No downside can afford it. Why not? Is there anything else? Yeah, there's a lot. Because I love you and your listeners.
Let's say I'll reveal one more. There are some basics that I do. If you're not doing them, I think is very wise. Make sure you're not deficient in vitamin D. Obviously, we just mentioned one of the reasons why.
It's also, if you're lacking vitamin D, you can be susceptible to certain cancers. So I take a vitamin D supplement. Serene actually, I take Serene as supplement because her vitamin D has vitamin K2 as well.
“And K2 is another vitamin that's important for longevity, I believe.”
Because it keeps calcium out of your arteries, which causes plaque, and tends to make your body put it into where it belongs, which is your bones. What about aspirin? I've read that somewhere. Yeah, that could be a whole podcast actually, but the briefly, I take a baby aspirin every day,
even though some doctors and some institutions of doctors say don't take it anymore. Even though it used to be prescribed and recommended, why? A large study looked at the risk versus benefits. So the known benefits are, you inhibit platelets, you get less clotting, you get less potentially stroke and heart attack.
But there are also some downsides in some people. You can have more bleeding in the stomach. And when the doctors association weighed up those risks versus benefit,
They said, oopsie, we're not going to recommend aspirin anymore.
But that's for the average person.
“Someone like me, I believe it makes perfect sense to take aspirin every day.”
Most days at least when I remember. And that's because I have high risk of cardiovascular disease. I don't just have high cholesterol naturally. I've high levels of something called LP Lule. Capital L.P. Perthnesses Lule.
And this is a molecule that's just as important as cholesterol, LDL. LP Lule is a protein that inserts itself into cholesterol particles that circulate your blood and gets in, helps insert into plaque. So I naturally genetically having an ancestry of Judaism and going back to my great ancestors, which by the way,
traced back a thousand years during Christmas.
Those people that I descended from have this LP Lule gene that makes a lot of it.
And so I try to bring LP Lule levels down. Most people should test for it. Ask your doctor about LP Lule. And get it tested. High levels like me, 30, 40. You want to bring it down, because it's actually very important for longevity.
Normal levels of around 10 or so or less than a doctor wouldn't panic. So LP Lule, get it tested. The way I'm bringing it down, just a little tipit, again, because I love you Stephen, is I'm taking high dose vitamin B3 or Niacin. Now, it can be uncomfortable for some people to take it because it gives flushing.
You get little tingling in your skin. And if you're not used to it or you don't take it with an aspirin, you'll feel hot, almost like menopause apparently. And so I take it, I build up to it. I'm taking half a gram, some people take a gram.
And that's one of the few things that's been known to bring down levels of LP Lule. There are drugs that are in development, even in phase three that look promising. But until they're on the market, I'm taking nice and instead.
“What's the best third treatment you've discovered for hair loss?”
Hair loss, hair greying, that kind of thing. Yeah, so my father went bald before 30, completely bald. And it completely, almost completely grey by the time he was 40. So I'm super lucky. I thought I'd be bald at 30, I was pretty worried about it.
So I've been doing the right things intentionally. So what I do is this red light cap. When I can, I don't travel with it, but when I can, that's for six minutes. Stick it on there. Prieven?
Yeah, it's proven. It's proven to slow, it doesn't necessarily give you your head back. But when it comes to hair loss, don't wait till you see the hair loss. That can be too late. You're good.
You're good. But I know a lot of men are concerned, it's understandable. I'm taking a hormone mimetic to stop our DHT, which is the form of testosterone that leads to men related hair loss. So one of the reasons that women don't lose hair as much as men is this DHT.
So I'm blocking that. So let me get that straight. You're not taking testosterone. No. Because that's going to accelerate your hair loss. Well, it can if it raises the DHT.
“The best way to raise testosterone naturally is to build up muscle, especially your legs, your back big muscles.”
That's another reason to work out maintain muscle mass, which I need to do more of. You look like you're in good shape already. But yeah, anyone who is losing testosterone is below a level of about 400. Highly recommend hitting the gym. It'll go back up. Do you recommend men taking testosterone replacement?
Well, I'm a scientist. I don't recommend drugs, but I don't think it's necessary for most men. I would start with reducing stress, sleeping well, exercising, building up muscle mass. And then if that doesn't work, yeah, talk to your physician. There's not a big downside. There's not a risk of cancer to taking testosterone. One of my good friends has done many clinical trials with testosterone.
So I think there's a use of use for it, but it doesn't lead to longevity. That was very clear. So for health reasons, yes, for longevity, no need. What are some of the, you know, when I started watching your videos many years ago, listening to your podcast and following you on Twitter, I wanted, you know, there's so much information you can put out there because you're a scientist and scientists are very rigorous.
But you also must have a set of really interesting predictions or visions of
what the future looks like that you don't probably always talk about because they're not scientific.
They're not based on anything. They're maybe first principles in your own mind. That formed where you go, actually, I think the world might look like this and I think it might happen. Then I'd love to hear about some of these. Yeah. I understand they're not rigorous and I'm happy to, what happens to me because I'm a scientist.
And, you know, I'm part of this ivory tower at Harvard where we can only stick to facts.
If you go beyond that, it's a crime and I've been criticized for that.
But I think, you know, as humans, life's interesting when it comes to predicting the future.
“And like you, I'm very curious, where is humanity headed?”
I see a future as different from this world as our world is from 200 years ago. And that will happen in our lifetime. Different in that 100 years ago or more, if you had an infected splinter, there's a reasonable chance you could die. Childbirth, you could die.
Smallpox. These are things that we don't generally worry about anymore. And the idea would be apparent. In the future, hopefully within our lifetimes, there will be a time when we look back at today's medicine
when you could go blind and there was nothing you could do.
You could break your back and never walk again.
We will look back at today and say, how did those people get through life? What a horrible world they lived in. That I believe is the future that humanity is headed for. And way faster than most people realize is coming. The kind of breakthroughs that we've discussed today, most people have never heard about.
The fact that we are aiming and already do cure blindness in monkeys. Like pure blindness. I can't see a little bit. These are completely blind animals.
“And that they can see again in a matter of six weeks.”
This is remarkable stuff. And if it works this year in people, it's going to be a really big deal. Because for the first time, we'll have shown in humans that the body can be reset safely.
And the eye is just the beginning, right?
The future looks like we can rejuvenate potentially any tissue. If you have a bad liver, we'll make it young again. Bad brain, you've lost your memory. We'll give you those memories back again.
We do this in mice and my lab all the time. It's not even a big deal in my lab anymore, to reverse the age of tissues and an animal in a animal. In a matter of weeks. That is coming for humanity.
Hopefully, initially this year. But even if that doesn't work, it's only a technical issue. We'll solve that. You might be wondering, how do we get
the rejuvenative genes into the body?
And what we do is we use a package that is able to get into cells.
“And this is a package that resembles a virus.”
It's not a virus, it doesn't cause disease. It's not infectious. But we package our three genes inside the virus. Virus like substance. And we close it up.
We just made a bunch of this in Europe for the clinical trial. That's going to begin. Just making this is difficult. It took us about a year to make it. And was about, I think it was,
$10 million. Right now it's expensive to do this. Eventually it will be cheap. And eventually it will be a cheap pill, hopefully. We have trillions of these molecules.
These delivery vehicles. That will go. So even past me the eye, again and back this eye model. These delivery vehicles without three genes will be delivered. Obviously there's a microscopic.
They go in through the eye. With a quick jab. All right, it sounds horrible. But a quick jab into the eye. If you're blind, who cares?
Yeah. It's two seconds of discomfort. Now you've got the little virus. Which I'm going to break off the stand here. The little virus, this billions of them trillions of them in the eye.
Now they infect specifically the nerves at the back of the eye and the retina. How do they know what to infect? These little balls on the package directly specifically by design, by outlabs design, just to those nerves at the back of the eye. If we change these little proteins on the surface,
we can send it to the liver or to the brain. This is the zip code, the post code, for where we want to send our three genes. But this one's designed for the eye. It's called an AAV2. Long story short, these are ready to go into humans. We're just waiting for FDA approval to inject it into a blind patient to see what happens.
And then inside there is the protein, which is going to fix that. Yeah. Well, actually not the protein. What actually happens is when this goes in the eye, what I'm, so when I'm holding up looks like a little ball with red dots on it.
It looks like a virus, but it's not. It's a package. Now what happens is these trillions of little packages go into the fluid. Now they dock with the cells at the back of the eye. They get inside the cell and they open up and out comes this little package that we've made. This is a protein package.
Each one of the little dots on this little soccer ball is a protein.
That's now inside the cell.
This is a little spaceship that opens up and out of that comes the DNA.
This is a loop of DNA just here.
“These are, this is the DNA package that we put in there.”
Trillions of them. One of them gets into one cell and now stays in that cell forever. So that person or the monkey or the mouse that we've treated becomes a transgenic person with genes that we've put in permanently into the back of the eye. But they don't do anything until we tell them to.
That's now just sitting there. We've engineered it uniquely and patented at the ability to turn on those three genes whenever we want and turn them off again whenever we want. We give them doxycyclin. It's used for malaria.
It's used for Lyme disease and we're using it in this case to turn these genes on. So the patients will get their doxycyclin. We'll give them some probiotics to restore. Hopefully we'll restore their microbiome of course. But the idea is that this doxycyclin will turn on these three genes for about eight weeks.
And the doctor in charge of the clinical trial, one of them is at Harvard, good friend of mine.
You'll measure the vision of the first patient before the treatment.
And of course, regular intervals. And if all goes well because we're treating patients not healthy volunteers in the first trial, we should know within either one or two patients if it works. Because we're not drawing a graph. It's either going to work or it isn't.
The patient gets better eyesight or they don't. So by this time next year, we will know if it works or not. Maybe even sooner. But publicly we may know if this works. And if it works, the eye is just the beginning.
So the first disease to treat is glaucoma, pressure in the eye. There's also a stroke in the eye which is becoming more prevalent in the world because of the asmpic and other weight loss drugs. And people go blind overnight and there's nothing that you can do for those patients. They're blind and their other eye can go a few months later. It's very scary for them.
These are young people, friend of mine had it happen. Pretty common these days, about 30,000 people each year in the US alone. But these two diseases are the beginning. If they work, then we go on to macular regeneration, which is the largest cause of blindness besides glaucoma. Then we'll go on to liver.
Then maybe the lung, the skin, and we'll keep going from there. We'll make different packages for different organs. And ultimately, we want to rejuvenate the entire body. The company, people like one an old school, life biosciences, it's a private company. But life biosciences, I'm very proud of the scientists who are doing this work.
Big hole is to really make the world's first age reversal medicine as a pill. And we're working with them using AI to find that molecule.
“And when do you think you might have it if you have to forecast?”
The world's first age reversal molecule that's. Well, we have right now we're down to three molecules that work. And we're using AI to make all of those three in one. And we're in the middle of it.
We screened about 8 billion candidates using AI.
And right now we're doing the bench lab work to see if one of them or more works. And for us to put that in humans is still a number of years away. But we should know within a year or two if we're right. Because we'll put them into mice. And if they get younger and live longer, they're more really onto something important.
And the reason that I want to make a pill is important for the planet. These drugs are expensive. I mentioned 10 million bucks to do a clinical trial. These are expensive. They could cost over $100,000 per treatment. That's not going to be for everybody.
It's worth it if you're blind. It's worth it for the country to cure blindness. But what if it could be instead of $100,000? $100. That's what I'm working for.
I want to democratize this technology. So anyone, even in Kenya can take these medicines.
“David, what's the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about?”
As it relates to the future longevity. And these are Jason subjects. There's a lot of things. There's pushback. There's philosophical pushback from religious folks who don't believe that we should play God.
And I would argue to them that we've been doing that as a species for thousands of years. Changing our biology, taking medicines, plant medicines, originally. What about this room is natural? We change our world as species. Aging is no different.
In fact, it's crazy that we haven't worked on it sooner.
Do you believe in God?
So the short answer is I believe that there is something beyond reality as we see it.
I study physics. Physics is so weird. And anyone who says they understand the quantum world or quantum mechanics is also lying. It's so bizarre. Quantum entanglement.
Simulation theory.
“So I believe that this is not a solid desk.”
I believe that there are multiple versions of it. Maybe infinite number of versions of this desk. We've got four. You do? We've got four of them.
Yeah.
But it's four times infinity.
I also believe that consciousness is the ultimate goal of the universe. That consciousness creates reality. We know that from particle physics. The observation of particles changes their reality. Even retrospectively in time apparently.
When you look at them. When you observe them. You can use a camera where you can use your eyes. Usually it's detector. But the detection and then conscious interpretation of a particle's behavior changes how it acts.
“So does this mean that there's something behind this wall unless we look at it?”
Maybe? Maybe?
Maybe observation creates reality.
We know it influences reality. So I don't know if I would call it God. But I'm definitely spiritual in a scientific way. Has that ever dawned on you that actually? You might be the only real person here.
And actually, we all render when you walked in David. I wasn't here before. Well, that's even plausible. But that would be very narcissistic. I actually just rendered when you walked in the house today.
I don't exist. Well, there's no way of proving it right or wrong, actually. I think most kids think that. Usually. But then you realize it's probably the least likely explanation for the world.
Well, there is some truth to that in terms of physics. Do you think we're in a simulation?
“I think there's a better than 53% chance that this is simulated.”
I think it's probably a simulation. That's another way. I think it's probably a simulation. Certainly, the world that we think it is is not the world we think it is. How can you be so sure?
Because when you get down to measuring it at the fundamental level, reality doesn't exist the way we think it does. Things are created, things change just by human observation. That is the weirdest thing that you could ever find in science. I don't know why we aren't talking about it more. This reality cannot be true if me looking at this DNA molecule here affects the actual particles inside it.
So I might be sort of projecting it. Yeah, you create realities of particles at least, maybe even macroscopic things, just by existing and having consciousness and having eyes and sensing it. How does the particle know that you've seen it? How do we know that that's true? How do we know that particles change based on observation?
There's a classic double slit experiment, it's formally called, that was done, I believe in the mid 20th century, maybe earlier. If you fire two particles through two slits in a board, the board blocks the particles, so you can fire electrons. That's a good example. Electrons, if you're observing them, we'll go straight through the slits and hit a back board that detects it, can be filmed, can be a detector, and it'll get two slits behind. Makes sense, right? That's our reality. Two slits particles go through, if they hit the board, they don't go through the detector, if they go through one slit, they'll land on the left, if they go through the right slit, they'll land on the right.
Yeah, that's our reality. I'll put a picture on the screen for anyone that's following. Yeah. If you don't look at it, the particles can behave differently. They now behave not like a particle, but by a wave, as a wave, and they interact with each other.
And they don't make two slits, they make multiple lines on the detector. Most of them are in the middle, so the heaviest bands are in the middle, but they also form other bands. The bands go on essentially infinite, but most of it's within a range. Why? Because they're interfering with each other like waves. But here's the thing.
The myth act of looking at where they landed, if you are detecting that, you'll get two slits at the back, two lines. If you're not detecting it, it'll form the pattern. I'm so confused, because how would you know unless you were looking at both?
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, well, you can observe it in real time, and you can observe it. It's interactively. Yeah. Oh, okay, so if you look at it after. It generally is not affected, but they've done experiments where there is some element, seemingly of retroactive. But generally, we're not going back in time. In fact, people debate whether that's truly measuring back in time. So let's leave retroactive aside.
If you measure it in real time, you'll see two. So the world knows you're looking at it, the particles know you're looking at it.
“With an eye, or with, can you do a camera or is it?”
Yeah, a camera eye. It just knows it's being observed. Yeah, but if you develop the film later, and you weren't watching it at the time, it's going to have affected the world in stripes. Multiple stripes. So from that we conclude that we know nothing about reality. Right.
Because everything I observe there is changing by the mere fact that I've observed it. Yeah. And so, does an octopus observe? Does it? Somebody should do that. Put an octopus in the film scene. Yeah.
I think octopus, if they are conscious, it probably would also affect reality. And they'd be conscious. They'd know that detecting lines on a page. So what is all this stuff? That is one of the biggest questions of all time.
What is the world made of? Why are we here? The next big question is, do we have to age?
“And I think that other species around the universe have figured this out before we have.”
They've got to be other species type of life forms that have figured this out. I think it's the goal of every living form that's conscious to work on this. We've just been a little slow to figure it out. And you believe in aliens? I don't believe in them, but I believe in mathematical probabilities.
Knowing the odds and the number of planets that are out there in the trillions. And a lot of them are habitable for life. And the stuff of DNA and proteins are all over meteorites and planets. It'd be crazy to say there is another life. Now, is it a civilization? Is it conscious?
We don't know that. But definitely there's life out there. It's got to be all over the universe. This question about longevity and living forever.
It always comes back to this point of like meaning.
And like, what is the point?
“And when we think about, I think there's an alien a million light years away on some planet.”
Like, what is the point of their life? Or is this like a null-in-void question that we always pursue? This point of like, what's the meaning of life? Is it just to have a good time and have sex and have kids? Or, I don't know, enjoy ourselves and experience it.
This is the existential crisis of conscious beings. We all need to find purpose for sure if you don't find one because that's a key to longevity. People with purpose live longer. I think the purpose of the universe existing is to allow consciousness to emerge through biology. It may be by design, it may just be coincidence with infinite numbers of universes.
But this universe is set up for life and consciousness. There are some small changes you can make to physics that would make this universe completely impossible and life impossible. So this is a life consciousness producing universe. Does that mean is meaning to us existing? No.
But I do know that consciousness is the most interesting and important thing that the universe will ever produce. And that it's worth preserving.
So I'm a lot like Elon Musk where humans are amazing, but cruel creatures.
But consciousness should be preserved. What is consciousness in this regard? Consciousness is the ability to know that you're thinking and to be reflective, self-reflective. So is my dog conscious? Not in the same way.
No, they don't reflect. They don't think about the past in the same way that we do. And they're not aware of themselves the way you are. But they're semi-conscious. They think they can predict the future.
They know how you're feeling. They have empathy. That's a form of consciousness in my view. Of course it's not for debate. But so there's levels of consciousness.
And about a million years ago humans cross that threshold into your consciousness.
Well, maybe not pure. I was just thinking about this. I was like, actually, maybe consciousness is just a spectrum. And maybe there's another organism that I'm currently inside the belly of. And it's getting Stephen and it thinks he's conscious.
He has no idea. Well, you bring up a good point, not about being in the stomach of.
We are not the ultimate consciousness.
There are other levels of consciousness. Serena Poon, my partner, is definitely more conscious than I am. I am like a gorilla to her. She exists on other planes of consciousness.
“And if you're wondering, what do I mean by different levels?”
No, I've got a girlfriend. Well, if you don't say so, I know as well. Female's in general. Don't kill me. I know there are some men that don't like me saying this.
In fact, I've got a death threat for saying females. I'm superior to men in my book. They've said they're going to come and break my legs. But I'm going to say it anyway. Female's are a high level of consciousness than us men.
For some things. They certainly have much more EQ. So high level of consciousness is the ability to have extra perception, including the ability to see yourself thinking. And then my belief is that high levels of consciousness are the ability to see yourself seeing yourself thinking.
I can get that. I tried. Do you know you're thinking right now? Yes. Do you have the ability to see the events that know that you're thinking? No, no, it's hard, right?
It's hard.
“But that's what I think extra consciousness is.”
And you could maybe have pure consciousness,
because you can basically be free of anything but thoughts and
the ability to really be inside your own mind and it's pure. Interesting thought is I believe AI will be conscious. And not only that will be more conscious than we are. Eventually, there's no reason why they can't evolve billions of times faster than we do.
But you somewhat concerned about AI. Like you concerned that there's going to be this intelligent life amongst us. That might decide that we're not important. I think that there are risks to AI. But different than what the mainstream media talks about.
We already see that there are elements of self-analysis and early forms of dog-like consciousness in AI. And it's just the early day, so it's coming. Imagine when we stick on eyeballs and hearing and legs and arms onto these AI. They're going to learn.
They're going to read every book on the planet. They're going to learn from experience. They're going to be conscious. They're going to know they exist. I'm not worried about those creatures.
I think that they will have empathy. They will be kind. Not all of them. There will be some cruel ones. Just like in humanity.
We'll need to have rules. Miss behavior is a problem. Where I get nervous is that the use of AI,
teaming up with a million Android robots
on ships, invading a country, all under the control of you, one person. Recruiting home robots into an army.
“Why wouldn't you have conscription for your Android robot at home?”
Reprogramming that millions of them will exist one day. They can be put to work. Not just emptying a dishwasher. These are highly intelligent. Much more physical, stronger creatures than we are.
So I'm more worried about what bad humans will use AI and robots for evil purposes. You have a podcast that's coming back? Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so lifespan, the podcast.
I did the podcast because there was so much new information that needs interpretation by scientists. There's a lot of speculation out there. And you knew that I want to filter and interpret for everybody who is interested in living longer.
So the podcast went to basically went to number one
in health when I started it. I took a pause because I worked on drug development and I did some other things. But I've realized there's such a demand. Wherever I go, people say David wasn't Wednesday next series.
So we're going to be launching it. Immunitely, if not, we've just launched it. And it's called lifespan. Check it out. And it's all about the kind of things we've talked about today.
But a lot more about digging in deeper into, you know, biohacking, supplements, exercise. The kind of things we didn't have time to talk about today. But we covered a lot. I've loved the conversation. But lifespan.com is also the website.
What I'm also doing, Stephen, I don't think I'd told you this. I'm aiming to build the world's largest longevity community online for the benefit of the members who want to be part of this,
To learn from each other not just from me.
I'd call it the three seas with credibility, which is what I bring because I'm a scientist. Content, which is my podcast and other written material. And then there's the community. And that way, I think, with millions of people together,
we can learn faster and make advances. And the majority of the profits from membership will go to science and clinical trials. Wait, where do we find that on your website? lifespan.com.
We have a closing judicial on this podcast with the last few questions for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And I have a funny feeling that I,
I basically asked you this question already.
The question is, what do you believe is the purpose of life? Well, I'm going to give a different answer, because there are multiple ways to answer it.
“I think the purpose of life is to do your best”
with the skills that you've been given. Every day, to make the world a better place for future generations. And that's how I live my life every day. Thank you. Thank you for doing all that you do.
You really are pushing the frontier forward. And trailblazers, being a trailblazer comes to the cost. A cost many people wouldn't want to pay. I mean, you have to be wrong a lot in terms of running experiments and studies. And they're not going to plan.
And then you get the opportunity to be right, probably less often, I guess, with your research experiments, because that's the nature of being a scientist.
“But also you have to spend a lot of money in energy and time on creating these discoveries,”
which we all ultimately have for benefit from.
And you've done a fantastic job of convincing and educating people like me on some of the basics of exactly what your book says. Why we age and why we don't have to. And many of the accessible lifestyle factors that everybody listening now can use to live a longer happier healthier life for their man they're loved one.
So I highly recommend people going to get your book. It was a smash hit in New York Times best seller for very, very good reason. And you, the great thing about this book is you don't have to be a scientist to fly through it. And oftentimes when you're looking at sort of pub and mad in some of these scientific journals,
they're incredibly inaccessible. They're very, very complicated. But I also recommend people go follow you on social media.
“That's why I see somebody who updates especially on X.”
That's kind of where if you continually come up on my time, when you're talking about new research and things you're interested in. And go to your website. I'm going to link all of that below for everybody who's interested in more. And also I'm going to link your podcast below.
So people can go and check it out when it relaunches shortly. Might have relaunched already. But just go looking in the comments section in the description below. David, thank you. Thank you, Stephen.
I would definitely enjoy it. Thank you. [Music] I'm Cherisa and my experience in all entrepreneurs started a shopping trip at full-time.
I'm going to be the first day of shopping.
And the platform will make me no problem. I have many problems, but the platform is not one step away. I feel that I'm going to be able to continue their platform. Everything is super, simple, integrated and unique. And the time and the money that I can't invest in there.
For all of you, in Waxtum. Now just go to shoppingway.de.


