EP #18 Why Aging is a Disease w/ David Sinclair

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This limit to human lifespan, There is no biological limit. Of course there isn't. We are the same stuff as a whale that can live a lot longer than us. We're built of the same stuff as tortoises and pretty much the same stuff as trees that live thousands of years. It's a software problem I'm putting on the line. It's a software problem. And what's interesting about biology is that software encodes the ability to rebuild the hardware. So we got to reset the software. And when we do that in my lab, we find that tissues regenerate in animals. Organoids, which are mini human organs, regenerate, they fix themselves and they function like they're new again. So it's in my view, 99% a software problem.

Massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Hey, David, Good morning. Good afternoon. How are you doing, pal?

Peter. Hey. Good, thanks. How are you doing?

Good. I would normally ask you what you have for breakfast or lunch, but I know you skipped those.

Yeah, I'm a struggling vegan. I'm not always successful, but I do strive most of the time to skip those meals.

Yeah, as do I. But coffee is a mandatory. The question is how much coffee? But we'll get to that conversation later. I want to talk about a conversation that you and I have and frankly, you've championed to a large degree, which is. Is aging a disease? I just saw a Twitter poll recently that you retweeted, and I did too, on that subject. Before we get there, you know some of the facts that are at both our fingertips that I think are pretty crazy. I just held my longevity platinum trip and one of the things that was shocking to me was that 70% of all heart attacks have no antecedents. There's no shortness of breath. There's no narrowing on imaging. It's just all of a sudden, you know, someone literally dies from a heart attack from soft plaque. Crazy, right? Just. And the other. The other facts, you know, at Fountain Life, we do full body imaging and coronary imaging. And in seemingly healthy adults, what we're finding is 2% of people have cancers they don't know about, and 2 1/2% of people have aneurysms they don't know about. And so it's interesting. We're all optimists about our health, but yet we have very little insight. I don't know. How do you think about that? It's crazy.

I think of heart disease and cancer as largely avoidable diseases these days with high technology, the sort of things that found life are doing, and that's through genetic testing, looking at the DNA circulating through blood, as well as new types of imaging, and the sort of things that you and I do, which is extensive blood work on a regular basis, but that's not able to be reached by most people. And right now, it's a fair amount of somebody's salary to do all that. So it's not fair to me to say, oh, yeah, just do this, and it will be fine. But we are heading towards a world where we will know much more about our bodies before we get sick. And one of the things that I've rallied against is the old concept, and you're a trained M.D. you know, this of medicine thinking of treating disease rather than treating the patient before they get disease. And so that we have to shift from that mindset to take care of people throughout their whole life before they get sick. Because what's driving most of these diseases, including sudden death from an infarction, unstable plaque, or even soft plaque, is the aging process itself. And that's happening every day and depends on how we live our lifestyle. And that's largely slowable. The way we live our life will actually slow down the ticking of that clock. In my lab here behind me, we are routinely measuring that clock in mice and in human samples. It's very clear that some people age much more slowly than others, and 80% of that effect is not genetic. It's based on lifestyle. Just a personal note. I had one of my best friends die last week suddenly from a heart attack while he was driving home. Professor at Cornell. And I've had lost three people in the last couple of years very close to me for the same reason. So, yeah, we do need to take preventative action and measure things as best we can. And it'll only get better.

Yeah, the stat I was with mutual friend of ours, Eric Verdon up at the Buck and we were talking about this. The stat that he threw out is that genetics account for 7% and lifestyle for 93%. And that's extraordinary because we do have control over our lifestyle. But the point you made, which, and I also, Brian Binney, who was the pilot who won the Ansari X Prize, made the flight again, felt dizzy, went to sleep, never woke up at age 69, people don't realize this, that heart disease does start early and it is to a large degree preventable. It is expensive. But this is where the work that you do and to some degree my companies do, is going to change the game. I'll give you one example which I'm excited about. We have this enzyme in our liver, PCSK9, that generates our bad cholesterol, our LDL. We've had these monoclonal antibodies that cost ridiculous amounts of money. It's like five, $10,000 a year. And so it's not a first line defense to lower your cholesterol by 50%. But we've just finished our primate studies now going to humans on a vaccine against the PCSK9 enzyme and it will be 50 bucks a year. And you can sort of do this preventively and I mean, you can talk about the CRISPR edit of the PCSK9 gene.

Well, this is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be done and I commend you for supporting that kind of development. I talked about the expense and you and I talk about this a lot, is that it starts out for the rich and let's call them the elites who are pushing the boundaries. That's true for old technology. The printing press wasn't available. Books were not available initially. Flight was not available to most people. And it's going to happen the same way here. Computers get cheaper and biotech is going to get cheaper. And you're helping that. What I'm looking for is in the same way that you are reprogramming now. We use gene therapy. We're in non human primates now. Correcting vision, restoring the youth of the eye. That's still going to be a, a therapy that is expensive. Gene therapies are expensive by their nature. But my lab is working extensively, hurriedly, with passion.

Yes. Hurry up, hurry up.

Yeah. I walk in every day and push them harder on our behalf. Those of us who are over the age, they do have molecules and combinations of molecules that can reverse aging without gene therapy. And so those chemicals could be very cheap. They could be a few cents a day, maybe a few dollars to reverse aging, but save trillions, tens of trillions of dollars overall in GDP costs for the US and that's the kind of buck that you get.

Yeah, I know, it's great. I mean, picking up on the point you said earlier, I think people need to realize that as you said, technologies in the beginning that are only affordable to the rich also in the beginning don't work that well. The mobile phone in the beginning was $100,000 device and it would drop a call for a Wall street banker on every block going down Manhattan. And then by the time it works really well, it's cheap and available to everybody. And hopefully the work that you're doing is going to democratize and demonetize these things. Picking up on the trillion side, I'm sure I know, you know, the stat that came out, I don't know, nine months a year ago, that a single additional productive year of life for the human population is worth $38 trillion. The global economy, which is, I mean that's mind boggling.

We calculate it and by we, I mean Andrew Scott and other colleagues in the U.K. we've calculated that it's actually 86 trillion for the U.S. alone, extending healthy life by one year. And if you do 10 years, it's 365 trillion for the U.S. and so this is the only way of saving that much money is to stop military spending, which obviously we're not going to do. And this is money, remember, that can be used for developing new medicines, education, tackling climate change, pushing technology forward. The idea that slowing aging is going to bankrupt us and overpopulate us turns out to be patently false, demonstrably false. And so that's why you and I think that this is one of the challenges of our time over the next five to 10 years to be able to achieve cheap, safe, effective age slowing and age reversal.

Yeah, I don't think, I mean it's a moral obligation and I think people need to realize that. And there's such a pushback. You know, I think people don't realize there are so many institutions that exist today that don't want that because they built their entire existence on the fact that we die and the fact that we are not living longer. But it's the single greatest gift you can give humanity and any individual.

Well, it is. And you give a lot of talk. So I'm curious how you have your audiences respond mine? What I've learned over the last 25 years is that it's all about framing the question. If I ask people how long do they want to live, most people will say over age 90 or 100. Come shoot me. It often offends the 90 year olds or 100 year olds in the audience. And I'm also on record saying nobody who's healthy, who has friends, wants to die tomorrow. Nobody, no matter how old they are. Age is irrelevant as long as you're healthy and happy. And that's what we're aiming for. But also, if I frame the question differently, it is, if you could be healthy at 120, would you? And almost everybody wants that. It's not the longevity that people want, it's the health that leads to longevity. The good news, the technology does that. I don't know how to make someone live longer without keeping them healthy. Do you?

No. I think we need to define for a second the term of lifespan and health span. I think really what you and I speak to to a large degree constantly is healthspan is retaining your cognition, your aesthetics, your mobility. So you're thinking clearly, you look good, you're moving well past 100. And I've had the same experience. I literally was at a event at the Vatican on stage with an elderman, a rabbi, a priest, a cardinal. It sounds like the opening of a joke. And there's this audience of, of probably about 300 scientists and physicians. Tony Robbins was there with me, and I asked them, how many of you here would like to live past 120? It was like crickets. It was like maybe 20% of the room raised their hand. And I was shocked. This was in the earliest days of my asking that question. Of course, I reframe it now in a different way. But there's another. You said that beautifully, which is you need to have friends.

Right? Right.

You need to have people you care about. And the notion that having. You need to have your future and your mind and heart be larger than your past. If you have nothing to live for, why live? And I think that whole psychology is so, so critically important.

Right. And you're, you're the expert at this. You inspire people to have goals, which is really what gets us out of bed in the morning. And anyone who doesn't have a passion or a goal in life, just find one. It's essential for health and longevity and in my view, and happiness. And it can be small, it can be large, but you need one. And it's actually now proven that those who have goals and companions who support them, those two things are the ones that live the longest. In fact, that was even more important than diet in this long term Harvard study.

Beautiful. Good. I've got both of those in spades. I'm curious. One of the mindsets I talk about is having a longevity mindset because I think you can will yourself to live and will yourself to die. And I'd love to, you know, you don't use that terminology, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think a longevity mindset means.

Well, I've witnessed it. My father, who I wrote about in my book Lifespan and who recently flew out from Australia to be with me in Boston and helped me teach a course at Harvard to those students.

He.

Had to change his mindset. He was a typical 67 year old at the time, which is a mindset as I understand it. I'm going to retire, I'll have a good 10 years hopefully and then the rest is hellacious and I don't even want to think about it. But it's going to happen and my career is over and I'm not sure I'm going to do much but just sit around and maybe do some gardening. Now that was 67. He's now well, he became mid-70s and realized he actually after adopting these longevity lifestyles that I talk about and which includes we'll get to fasting, eating well, exercising, the usual stuff, but also some sleep. He gets a lot of sleep. He has very good social group. He hangs out with one of my ex girlfriends which keeps him young. True story. The supplements. A lot of people know the supplements that I take myself, he takes those as well. And together some combination of those has allowed him to get through 70s in a very healthy way. He's got no diseases, he's got. He started a new career, he went back to work. He's helping raise his grandkids. In fact, one of his grandkids is living with him and he loves life and he's had to change his mindset. His mindset is, hey, he told me last night over the Internet, a video conference, hey, I've decided to get a puppy. His mindset is I'm going to live over 100. I've seen that. I've made it through my 70s. I'm getting younger. Literally he's getting biologically younger as he gets older. He's now 83. No diseases, not even any pain. He's got super amount of energy. His brain is actually sharper than it Used to be in his 40s because he's not distracted by his kids. And so he's loving life like he never did before and realizing that the idea that you have this finite limit, you need to just give that up and say that anything is possible. Because science is also advancing at such a rate that we don't know what's going to be possible even five years from now. Five years ago, I didn't know it was possible to reverse aging safely. Now we know, at least in animals it is, and it looks like it will be in primates, with which we are one. The longer you live, the longer you will live. That's already true, but it's going to be exponential. And so we do have to have a mindset of we need to love what we do, multiple careers and not have a limit, because that does place limits on us mentally as well as physically.

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Well, my head is spinning and even I can't really keep up. I'm using AI to feed me the papers that I need to read or look at. Social media helps before I get out of bed. I know this sounds really bad for my social life. Before I get out of bed, I probably read the abstracts of 20 different papers in this field of advances. And that's just the beginning of my day. And I'm not exaggerating. There's a Dell use. I get feeds for that. And these are big breakthroughs. We used to think it was exciting to extend the lifespan of a yeast cell by 10%. That was when I was in my 20s. Nowadays you can't open up a major journal, typically, without seeing something relevant to aging and a breakthrough in understanding why we age and how to slow it down and even now reverse it. It's a wonderful age where we can do, instead of one experiment per month, which is how I did my PhD, we can do a million in a day. The genome is now $100 to $200 instead of being 2 billion. Even reading the DNA methylation clock from a cheek swab or a blood, which is one way of measuring your biological age. Speaking of democratization of technology, it's a few hundred dollars at best for a consumer right now to measure their biological age through a blood test or a cheek swab. My student just developed technology that brings that down by at least two orders of magnitude. Probably go three to make it just a few dollars. It'll keep coming down to where the cost of sending the sample in actual test itself.

That'S.

That's to plug the company. It's called Tally Health. If you want to sign up as one of the early users, I'm excited, get it, get in line for that. But. But my point is that we are in a world where things are changing so rapidly that you want to stick around, if not anything but curiosity.

Yeah. Well, what's the most exciting time ever to be alive? I mean, the only time more exciting than today is going to be tomorrow. And I agree with you. The deluge is exponentially accelerating. And I ended up building an AI system myself that searches the world's news for converging technologies impacting health span and longevity. And I think Everybody listening knows longevityinsider.org and I get 10 to 15 journal articles, tweets, anyway, magazine articles about this. What are the breakthroughs? And it's. It's staggering. What's amazing. And David, you mentioned this slightly earlier. Five years ago, really, 10 years ago, the idea of working in the field of longevity or aging or an idea of age reversal was a death knell. Now it's the hottest subject. How many graduate students do you have competing for positions in your labs? It must be staggering.

It's hundreds per position, but. And we're fortunate that there are a lot of new labs opening up in this field. It's blowing up in a nice big way. There's probably more than $10 billion now committed to investing in aging research and drug development just in the past couple of years. And so there's a lot of opportunity for young people. Not all of them will end up in my lab. I have a Lab of about 20 people, so we're short on space, but it is really exciting to me to see young people jump in. We actually, as a field, made a mistake about 20 years ago. We thought, even 10 years ago, we thought that the people we want to target with the message of get on board, get with us, get with the program, call aging a disease. Were people over 70, 65, maybe 50s, might, might listen? We're not sure. Turns out Those that are 18 to 30 are the ones that are most passionate. And I didn't see that coming, but it's really been heartwarming, and I think it bodes really well for the future of humanity.

So for people who are listening, who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, is it the message that it's not too late to start?

Yeah. Yeah.

Definitely not. Definitely not too late. Just to be clear. Yeah.

Here's the thing to remember, is that aging is something that's really malleable. We know from twin studies that those who change their lifestyle can have a dramatic effect on their ultimate longevity. Animal studies have shown you can intervene at the equivalent of 80, 90 years old and still have the benefit. And that's with relatively old technology. These age slowing molecules. Now we're reversing age. We can take a blind mouse and make it see again in a week. These are the technologies that are coming online that will allow someone who is of any age to be rejuvenated. We can now multiply, rejuvenate tissues. We haven't published this yet. It's a scoop. It's not just a one time reset. This is in a mouse though. We reverse the age of their eye. And I got to give credit to Bruce Cassandra's lab here at Harvard. We reverse the age of the eye of the mice, they get their vision, they age out again and we just hit them again with the reversal and then they go back again. I see a future where a 90 year old goes back to being 50. They age out till they're 60 and then they just keep resetting every decade. That technology, we can do this in mice. We're not that biologically different in terms of our aging process as a mouse is. In fact, the process of aging, as I've shown in my research, is similar all the way from us back to a yeast cell. So I'm very optimistic that these technologies of age resetting will work in the very old as well.

I love it. A few pointed questions here for fun. So I'm curious. I've had conversations with Ray Kurzweil about this idea extensively about longevity escape velocity. Right. The point in time in which science is adding a year to your life, greater than a year for every year that you're alive. So it's divergent and you escape. And then I've also had this conversation with George, George Church, a mutual friend working with us together on our age reversal xprize, which maybe we'll talk about. And they both gave me a number of when they think we'll reach longevity escape velocity. And I am curious if you're willing to offer one.

I already know how to ostensibly make someone less aged than they currently are. And I can work with them to make them more than a year younger within a year. So I would say we already have knowledge how to go back more than a year every year. Now the critics will say, well, David, you're just measuring the epigenome and you're measuring some biomarkers. That's not Proof. And the answer is, yeah, you're right. But we're certainly not far away from a future where we're able to, if nothing more, stop the aging process. And I truly believe that if you look at my biological age, based on a number of measures, I'm at least a decade younger than my chronological age. My birthday candles would tell you, and I'm not that good at exercise. I could probably be a lot younger if I tried. So I really think that we're on this cusp. If you ask me in what, 1903, are we close to flying? I'd say, yeah, we got the technology. It's just a matter of when. And it's probably going to happen in the next few years.

Okay, so you didn't actually give me an answer. You gave me a sort of answer. But the question needs to be a finer point, because you're right. It's like, could you, theoretically, now, when will you. So I guess the question is, when will a set of treatments exist that might allow age reversal and be accessible to some segment of the general public?

All right, 10 years.

10 years. Beautiful. So that's what Ray said. George had it at about 15. But both of those numbers are shocking. So, I mean, when I'm speaking to anybody interested in this area, I'm saying, listen, your job is not to live for 50 years. Your job is to live healthfully for the next 20. To intercept all the technologies coming our way during that period of time.

Exactly. And so my father's on that trajectory. He's 83. He'll be around, all goes well, at least for another 10 years. So I'm talk about motivation. It's not just about how long do you want to live, it's how long do you want your family to live? And when you phrase it like that, who wouldn't give a lot of money to spend extra year with their parents?

It's crazy, right? There is nothing more valuable than our health, and health is the new wealth. And at the end of the day, you're going to spend the money one way or another on health. And the question is, do you want to spend it at the end of life fighting a multitude of diseases in and out of the hospital, or do you want to pay the attention and prevent these diseases from happening in the first place? I mean, it's that cut and dry. How old do you want to live, pal? I mean, that's not a fair. I don't think it's a question I can ask you with a straight face because of all the Conversations we've had.

Yeah, here's the thing. I've been changing my views over the years. I could have told you very honestly, if you ask me, let's say 10 years ago, let's say when we were hanging out at the tedmed conference in San Diego, how long do you want to live? And I would have honestly said, I'm not doing this because I want to live longer. I'm doing this because I hope future generations will live longer. And I really believe that. I'm now at a point where I've had a lot of fun biohacking my body, measuring things, taking things, getting younger, feeling better, arguably looking better. And I'm just having so much fun doing this. I don't want to stop doing that. I'm not afraid of death. Anyone who's seen me drive my Tesla around knows that's true. That's one of the reasons I autopilot. So, you know, it's not, I'm not personally scared of what's to come, but I am now I'm hoping that I'll be able to stick around for another 50 years, maybe 100 years to help push the field forward, to see what happens, to help inspire others as well and train others. And so I'm, I'm now more of, you know, I'd love to live to 150 if I could. Before I really didn't think about it.

Yeah, it's interesting, right? I remember when I was in medical school, not far from where you are right now, I watched this television show on long lived sea life and bowhead whales are living in 200 years and Greenland sharks four or 500 years and sea turtles potentially longer. And I remember thinking, if they can live that long, why can't we? It's either a hardware problem or a software problem and we're going to solve that. And I see this decade as that time we're making that, that we're getting the tools to do that. But then I stop and I think, you know, there appears to be some kind of a existing limit in the 120 time frame that has never been statistic. There's, you know, no one's, we haven't seen any examples of out of billions of people, anybody living longer than that.

Yeah, yeah, that's a bunch of, bunch of baloney.

Good, I'm glad to hear that.

That's not even logic to use that argument. You know, it's 1899. Let's look at the statistics of human flight. What are you going to project? It's Impossible to fly because it's never been done right. But this limit to human lifespan, there is. There is no biological limit. Of course there isn't. We are the same stuff as a whale that can live a lot longer than us. We're built of the same stuff as tortoises and pretty much the same stuff as trees that live thousands of years. It's a software problem. I'm putting career on the line. It's a software problem. And what's interesting about biology is that software encodes the ability to rebuild the hardware. We got to reset the software. When we do that in my lab, we find that tissues regenerate in animals. Organoids, which are many human organs, regenerate. They fix themselves, and they function like they're new again. So it's, in my view, 99% a software problem. And that's the good news, because you can reboot software pretty easily. We do this all the time in my lab. And what blows my mind in a paper that we published in 2020 was that we discovered that there is a backup copy of the original software in the body that you can access and flip the reset switch. And it all comes back to Life.

December, December 2020 cover issue. I remember it well. It was epic.

It was fun to discover and a shock. And actually, that was one of the biggest moments of my life because of my career, because we didn't know if there was a backup copy. It's one of those gifts to humanity that it exists. We don't exactly know how it's encoded, whether it's in a protein or on the DNA or some other thing we haven't thought of yet, but 100% we know that it exists and we can tap into that now.

I love you for that, buddy. Thank you for your passion and your extraordinary work. Let me flip the conversation slightly to the morality of living longer. Because if you ask the general public, many of them would say it's immoral or it's not fair, we don't have enough resources, it's overpopulation. They come up with a multitude of reasons of why it's a bad thing to live longer. And I just. For those who might be having a dinner conversation that goes that direction, I'd like to forearm them with the opposite.

Sure. Well, read the last third of my book. It's all about that. I wrote it because a lot of these same points were brought up and there are some very simple answers in. In my view, and I've debated bioethicists. Leon Cass was someone who advised the Bush administration, who I debated on, on public radio, so that I've thought a lot about this, so that the summary would be that ethically it is our duty to allow people to choose when they die. We don't get to choose when we're born. But I think everybody has a right to choose how long they live. It should be a human right. If there are tools to do that, you get a choice. You don't have to take the technology or use the technology, but I want everyone to have that choice. So it's also, I think, not just a right. It's your obligation to live as healthy and as long as you can to do the right things. I do that not just for selfish reasons. I'm not vegan just because I want to live long. I don't want to be a financial and other burden on my kids. Who hasn't had parents that have cost them a lot of time, money and angst, sorrow, desperation because their parent didn't look after themselves or was sick for 10 years. I've had a parent that was suffering for 20 years. Now, you know, I'm not upset. This was just the way life went for my mother. But she did smoke, she didn't take care of herself. And I would say that having seen the difference between my mother and my father, now we have an obligation to our family to look after ourselves. And that's, that's my view on the ethics of it.

Yeah, just add, you know, one of the concerns people have is overpopulation of the planet. And if you look at the charts, it may be exactly the opposite. Elon, who now has, I guess, on record 10 children, goes on to point this out for different reasons. But 50 years ago, the average children per family globally was something like 5.6. It's now dropped down to below 2.4. US is below the replacement rate, as is Japan by a large margin in many parts of Europe. And it may well be that we have a massive underpopulation on the planet and you know, just go fly across any country and look out the window. Yes, we have our megacities, but the majority of the planet is, is underpopulated. And yes, we need to feed, clothe, provide energy, clean water to everyone, especially as people become wealthier. They want better quality of health care, better education and better food sources. But we can do that. And that's what technology does. It's from everything from cellular agriculture to solar, this is the direction we're going. But saying to a group of people, thou shalt not have the right to Live a longer, healthier life. That doesn't sound like an ethical option.

Well, no. And even doctors should feel that, that their mission is to prolong life. There is no great, greater or nobler cause than the prolongation of life. This is Francis Bacon, 1614.

We add to prologation of a healthy life.

Yes, exactly. Even better. And that includes mental health. You got to keep the brain young, otherwise there's no point. But your point is well taken, which is that what we're doing in this field, addressing either 80 or 90 something percent of the cause of ill health on the planet is the right thing to do for our species and for the planet. Also, considering how much we could save and how much is wasted right now on what I call sick care rather than healthcare, it's devastating.

Devastating. And just make one point. The United States ranks 42nd in terms of population longevity on the planet. It's insane.

Well, this is because technology is distributed unevenly and that we need to figure out a better way. I'm from Australia originally, where everyone has free health care and it works great because people who get sick are a major burden on all of us. We forget that it's not just isolated and it impacts all of us socially as well. So really what we want is cheap and effective, not just medicines that treat diseases at the end stage, these Band AIDS or what I call whack a mole medicine. We want these cheap medicines to make it possible for us to get through our 60s without the fear of cancer and our 70s and 80s without heart disease. These are medicines that are right on the cusp of being available. There are some medicines such as metformin and low dose of rapamycin that are already on the market and are being used to prolong health that way. And these are the drugs that I think are going to have a huge impact on the future of humanity in the same way when antibiotics and vaccines were discovered.

Yes. Thank you. Let's jump in for a few minutes into what you and I both do that others can do that is effectively cheap and reasonably affordable for everybody. And then talk a little bit about what the next layer of activities are to maximize. So let's go back and forth. I'll start with sleep. I didn't get enough sleep last night, but I prioritize it. I used to in medical school shoot for five and a half. I considered my stability point, but I just sat down with Matt Walker for, for an hour and the stats are staggering. There's nobody who can actually sleep under six hours and have good health. We need at least seven, closer to eight hours to be able to do that. I use an eye mask, I use a cooling blanket. I use basically a process of bringing the lights down and ultimately getting myself to bed at the same time every night which is like 9:30 because my eyes pop open at 5:36. 45. 45. Similar for you.

Yeah. So exercise and sleep are my downfalls. I have worked on it as well. I was talking with our mutual friend Tony Robbins about this and Serena Poon. We were also on a podcast in Instagram Live to be specific and we were comparing our sleep patterns and after that we followed up with our our actual sleep measurements. We're all measuring it and I thought I was bad. I was getting an average of about 5.5. Serena by I think Tony was less than 5 and then Serena was 4 point something. So here we are professing get sleep and we are the worst offenders of probably most people. So I think that I freely admit that I'm not perfect and I am striving. You mentioned some hacks. I have a bed that reduces my body temperature so I get better sleep, deeper sleep. I also use other things such as dimming lights as well. But I really, I do need to do better. One of the things that's not well appreciated is why is it so important to get sleep now there's two things. New discoveries have said that it's a way of cleaning the toxins out of the brain. There are draining channels that pump when we're asleep. That's important. That's even true for flies, fruit flies. The other thing is that these longevity genes that we've worked on for years called the sirtuins control not just our longevity clock, our biological clock, but they also control our 24 hour clock. When either of those clocks gets messed up, they affect each other. And so by sleeping well you also slow down your rate of aging.

Interesting. Let's get to exercise next. It's a weak point for anybody busy but one of my takeaways from this longevity platinum trip I just finished because everybody was over and over and over stating exercise is one of the most important if you would complements to any longevity plan. And if it was a drug, it'd be a multi trillion dollar drug. How far are we from exercise mimetics that can help maintain muscle mass?

Well, I think we're already here. It's just not well known. So the first thing is that exercise plus these mimetics gives you a double bang for the buck. Based on animal studies and some hints in human, one of the molecules that we've worked on for many years, resveratrol is an ex seismimetic. Makes mice run further, gives human more energy. The one that's more recent from my work is called NMN, not to be confused with M&MS. Please don't switch those out. NMN is a precursor. And Peter, your.

I'm imagining everybody who knows your work and who's read David's amazing book, Lifespan. Yes.

So with nmn, the mice run further, and it's even better if they exercise. But we have new data from Metro Biotech, which was spun out of my lab 10 years ago. And using a molecule that also raises NAD in muscle and other tissues, those people had increased endurance as well as lower other parameters such as cholesterol and blood pressure. So, again, probably an exercise mimetic. You know, I'll let you in on a little bit of a secret. Working with the military who are helping sponsor these trials, I'm allowed, I'm now allowed to say that I saw the.

News when it came out, when it was leaked. Yeah.

Well, I went on Joe Rogan's podcast and he asked me about that. And I got in huge trouble for even mentioning it. And that's all I did. I mentioned it. And then, then the military put out their own press release a couple of years later. And I thought, okay, all right, now I can talk about it. But we're also. And we're just increasing the number of patients there being tested by a lot, by another hundred. But that, that study has gone really well. And so I think that this NAD boosting is one of these exercise mimetics. Are we going to be in a world where we just pop a pill and we're just as fit as we would otherwise be? We're a long way from that because exercise does a lot of things. There's an interesting new molecule called LAC fee, which is a little lactate plus phenylalanine amino acid, which was shown in a recent paper that that is what stimulates hunger after exercise. And one of the reasons it's hard to lose weight after you exercise or if you exercise. And so there are these discoveries where we're able to manipulate our physiology and our mental state as well. And those things, I think, together will help us. But also products that you mentioned, like the PCSK9 inhibitors, are also helping people lose weight and bring their metabolism back to more of a healthy, lean state as well. And I just want to encourage people to try and lose weight if they are overweight. Because there's really few things that really accelerate the biological clock. It's smoking, it's lack of sleep, but it's also obesity. So try and bring your body down to a BMI of around 25 or less. It really help.

A brief note from our sponsors. Let's talk about sleep. Sleep has become one of my number one longevity priorities in life. Getting eight deep uninterrupted hours of sleep is one of the most important things you can do to increase your vitality and energy and increase the health span that you have here on earth. You know, when I was in medical school years ago, I used to pride myself on how little sleep I could get. You know, it should be five, five and a half hours today. I pride myself on how much sleep I can get and I shoot for eight hours every single night. Now usually I'm great at going to sleep if I'm exhausted. You know, I've worked a hard, hard day, I'm right out. But if I'm having difficulty and it occurs I'm having insomnia or my mind's overactive and I need help to get that eight hours I turn to a supplement product by Lifeforce called Peak Rest. Now Peak Rest has been formulated with an extraordinary scientific depth and background. Includes everything from long lasting melatonin to magnesium to L glycine to rosemary extract, just to name a few. This product is about creating a sense of rest and really giving you the depth and length of sleep that you need for recovery. It's a product I hope you'll try. It works for me and I'm sure it will work for you. If you're Interested, go to MyLifeHorse.com Peter to get a discount from Lifeforce on this product. But you'll also see a whole set of other longevity and vitality related supplements that I use. We'll talk about them some other time. But in terms of sleep, Peak Rest is my go to supplement. Hope you'll enjoy it. Go to MyLifeHorse.com Peter for your discount. For those interested. I mean my exercise protocol. I will do all I can to get 10,000 steps in. I'll take my conference calls there. I can't do my podcast there because of the noise, but I'll take walking meetings wherever I can and then I'll do a heavy weight workout once a week at the gym and then I've just got a Catalyst suit. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Catalyst suit. It uses electro muscular stim. In a whole suit you're wearing And a video. Check it out. So it's Katalyst with a K but it's a pretty cool technology that I use for exercising at home. Sort of the exponential tech version of it.

Peter's wearing a suit that electric electrically stimulates his whole body.

Let's go to, let's go to diet. Let's begin with the fact that sugar is a poison.

Yeah, that is true. Do you watch how much sugar you eat?

I, I do. I'm usually I just took off my cgm. I use a continuous glucose monitor to monitor it and listen. I'm not perfect, but it is, I think think twice about eating sugar and people need to realize the body. Did you know humanity did not evolve over the last 100,000 years in an environment that had all the sugarcane and all the sugar? It's an inflammatory molecule, it causes hypercholesteremia, neuro inflammatory, cardiac inflammatory. It's not good for you to say the least.

Yeah, I've avoided it as much as I can since my since I turned 40. I don't eat desserts unless I steal it. And then I, I look at sugar again at like it. It's not going to kill me but I do think of it as a poison. It helps me get over it because our bodies crave sugar. It's what how we evolve. It's a good source of quick energy, but it does it. One of the things that it also does is it covalently very tightly attaches to proteins and makes them malfunction or even become toxic. And so one of the readouts for type 2 diabetes is what's called glycated hemoglobin or HbA1c which is a glucose attached to our hemoglobin protein. But what most people don't remember is that hemoglobin is just one protein out of twenty something thousand that also get attacked attached to glucose. And that's bad for the body. So keeping those levels steady as well is, and as low as possible without feeling tired is a goal. So practically what I do, I'm wearing a CGM right now down here on my tummy. I won't show you that for obvious reasons, but I like to see as steady levels as I can. That also doesn't just mean I'm going to be healthy, but it also means that I don't get the rushes and then the brain fog during the day. And that used to be my life. I would eat and then I'd get hungry and eat hungry. And it was my glucose doing this. And it's no way to get through life. I can now just power through the day. My liver takes care of my sugar levels for most of the time. I don't feel hungry and I just think and I can focus.

Yeah, no, it's, it is amazing. I use, I use levels as the, the system, the app that I use. They work with Dexcom and it's interesting, right? If so both of us do a seismon intermittent fasting. I think you do more than I do. I will try and fast. Six o' clock at night through one the next day I'll have a late lunch and a dinner. But you have an extraordinary amount of energy, more than people realize when you're able to do that because you're not, you know, blood's not flowing to your gut and people need to try it. It's a fascinating feeling. I mean I literally felt hyper when I started that the first time.

Yeah, you're right. It's a fallacy that you get tired because that's what happened when you start because your liver is lazy. It won't make glucose for probably the first two weeks. So power through that zone. Drink a lot of water, tea, coffee, whatever gets you through. Fill up your tummy and you'll find that you end up having more energy than you've ever had in your life.

Yeah, it's amazing. So we hit sleep, exercise, diet. I think mindset is, is clearly one of the most important things as well. And that comes with love, community, hugs and just purpose in life. And then we can talk about it some other time. But there's a whole slew of I call it don't die from something stupid category which is imaging yourself in a way, this is through life force, through fountain life, through Insight Tracker. These are ways to understand what's going on inside your body so that you can be data driven in the decisions that you make.

Exactly. Yeah. So I work with top athletes and other well known people who want to optimize their body for performance and longevity. And I cannot do anything scientific or even effective without measuring something. And I either use Inside Tracker. I've been involved with them for many years and I into just full disclosure, I put an early investment in that company. There are other measuring companies. Telehealth is one I'm now developing for biological age. There's life, the whole Life force group, they do a lot of measuring. So what I made the case of for in my book was that we need a dashboard on our bodies as good as or better than we have for our cars and drive Our cars without a dashboard, it would be crazy. We wouldn't know where we're going, how fast we're going. If we're running out of fuel. Why do we do that on our bodies? Why do we go to the doctor for an annual physical? This is medieval. We need our bodies to be checked up a thousand times a second, which is what you can do now with monitors like, you know, levels health provides. That's just glucose. The future, as you know, is that we're going to be monitoring thousands of.

Analytes constantly, and it's all going to your AI that is optimizing your life. If you wanted to, if you don't, if want to be a couch potato, that is your option. But you should have the option to actually maximize your health. Buddy. I am grateful for our time. I'd love to come together and on our next conversation, do a little bit of an ama. We both have a large Twitter audience. I think both of us have asked them what they'd like us to talk about. So on our next session, why don't we take some conversation from the community? But I wish you an extraordinary day and week ahead, pal. Appreciate you.

Well, thank you, Peter. And likewise, what you do for us people at the forefront of technology is you inspire us and give us the resources to make the impossible possible. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm proud, by the way, everybody, to be a benefactor to David's research in his lab, along with Tony Robbins. We love what he does and counting on you so much, David. All right, take care, buddy.

You too. Bye. Bye.

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