In this Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast episode, host Claudia von Boeselager interviews longevity investor Sergey Young, who outlines his personal "10 longevity choices" and shares recent experiments with diagnostics and wearables. The conversation begins with a light‑hearted discussion of biological versus psychological age, then moves into concrete, actionable strategies: (1) annual comprehensive medical screening (full‑body MRI, AI‑assisted cancer detection); (2) quitting high‑risk habits such as smoking, extreme mountaineering, and unsafe driving; (3) always using seat belts; (4) reducing calorie intake through fasting and plant‑based meals; (5) prioritising food quality – wild‑caught fish, organic meat, and avoiding processed “poison” foods; (6) daily supplementation with vitamin D3, omega‑3, and NMN (plus optional milk‑thistle, garlic, etc.); (7) moving at least 10,000 steps a day and doing 90 minutes of cardio weekly; (8) optimizing sleep (8 h in bed, aiming for 2‑2.5 h deep sleep, using Oura Ring or similar); (9) mental‑health practices such as meditation, a daily mantra of living 200 years, and cultivating purpose; (10) practicing kindness and gratitude. Sergey then updates listeners on his recent focus on balance (cheat‑day meals), testing new wearables (glucose‑cortisol monitors, real‑time blood‑pressure watches), and early diagnostics. Claudia adds a brief discussion on external appearance, linking skin health to gut health, red‑light therapy, and peptide‑based senescent‑cell removal. The episode ends with resources (sergey‑young.com guide, Sergey’s book "The Science and Technology of Growing Young").
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Hello, longevity friends, and welcome to another episode of the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. I'm your host, Claudia von Boeselager, here to uncover the groundbreaking strategies, tools, and practices from the world's leading experts to help you live at your best and reach your highest potential. If you haven't done so already, make sure to sign up for my weekly newsletter by going to llinsider.com, where you'll get top insights into all things longevity and lifestyle. In today's episode, I'm joined by longevity investor and visionary Sergey Young. Sergey and I share a mission to extend healthy lifespans of at least 1 billion people. Sergey is the founder of the Longevity Vision Fund and has an ambitious goal of living to 200 years old. In today's episode, Sergey shares his top 10 strategies for longevity. Please enjoy.
Hello, hello, how are you?
How are you, my friend?
Very good. It's been 6 months.
Oh my goodness, it has been far too long, and it's incredible how time is just flying by. How are you keeping?
Yeah, very good, but, uh, you and I and all of our audience, they're becoming younger and younger.
This is great, right? We're aging backwards and we're growing younger and younger by the day. It's amazing.
I love it.
Are you 20 years old yet, Sergey?
Not yet. I'm working on that. We have 4 different ages, one in passport, the other one is biological age, but all of us can have psychological age. So if you think you are 25, then you are 25. So I'm thinking I'm on 25 years young level, only on psychological level yet. But it's okay, we're all working on that.
So happy to have you on. And Sergey, as a longevity visionary, I'm excited to dive into your favorite 10 strategies, Sergey, to growing younger for longevity.
So I have, you know, 5 different secrets or 10 different secrets. Today we're discussing much longer, 10 longevity choices that I defined for myself that I use in my everyday and every night life, because we're gonna talk about sleep as well. 10 things that I do for my own longevity that we can share. So number 1, and when I have 30 seconds on longevity, I'm always telling people to do their medical screening every year. To get this message across, the most important day of your life every year, it's not your birthday. It's the date of your medical screening. 20, 40 years ago, the best strategy for protecting health would be go to church and pray, because there was like almost the only means that we had in terms of predictive and preventive medicine. Right now, we can complement spiritual ourselves with more focus on technology and the science that we have through medical screening. Full-body MRI, Ultrasound, CT. I mean, this is amazing thing. The MRI today, if this is 3 Tesla MRI, can identify early cancer in 94% of cases. The same done by humans, early stage is still 30 to 40%. So that's why AI will help humans to identify early stage cancer. So number 1, do your medical screening. Guys, we spend on our health less time and money that we spent on our cars. Isn't it ridiculous? So we have to fix that. One, book your medical screening wherever you go. Speak to the hospital next door, speak to your doctor, and do medical screening. This is very important. So that's number one. Second, you know, quit bad habits. And I know I sound like your mom or dad, but smoking is minus 10 years from your life, okay? You know, there are so many dangerous things that we do there. One of the friends of mine, she's a mountaineer. So she's going to— and she climbed a lot of— one of the top peaks in the world. Recently, she went to the mountain called K2, and mortality rate on this mountain is 25%. She went to Annapurna as well, and mortality rate is like 33%. So like Russian roulette, you know, I'm originally from Russia, is 1 out of 6 chances to die. What she did is 1 out of 3 chances to die. And I mean, you think you don't do it, but you actually do it. Look at the statistical probability of damage to yourself when you're doing some risky things like riding motorcycles is 17 times more dangerous than driving a car. 17 times in terms of mortality. Okay, be careful. Third, it is about driving. I already went to this area with motorcycles. Use seat belts. I'm traveling, I've been to more than 100 countries in the world. Not sure you can do it in the UK or in the US, but in some of the countries people don't even use the seat belts. So using seat belts is plus 2 years to your life, not using is minus 2 years. So be careful with that. Number 4, it's about calories, is about food. Okay. Okay? And the main thing is, you and I know there's a lot of disagreements, you know, with the scientists, with technologists, what extends our lifespan, what will add 5, 10 healthy and happy years to our life. But there's one agreement shared by all scientists that I know, that decreasing your calorie intake would actually add another 2, 3, or 5 years to your life, statistically. Okay? We have different means how we can do it. Like I do it through fasting, for example. I do it from going more plant-based. This is my food.
Nice and green.
I have buckwheat as well. Sorry, guys, to share all of that, but this is what makes our conversation interesting as well. Personal and fun, right? Yeah, this is my sources of protein, eggs as well. So that's what I have for my lunch. So, you know, just be mindful of your calorie choices and and not overdoing this with kind of sugar or with industrial food will obviously add 2 to 4 years to your healthy life. Okay, so, and you can do it in parallel. Well, number 5, so we just discussed food quantity in number 4, right? Decreasing your calorie intake. Well, let's, in number 5, we go to food quality. It is extremely important. Some of the things which are sold in our supermarkets You can label them as poison. I, I, you know, I literally can give you a lot of examples. Specifically, we need to be mindful in terms of the quality of the protein and in terms of the quality of meat and fish that we take. Okay, like if you ask me, I know all of us have different means and resources, but if it's me, every time I have a choice to do wild fish, not farm-grown fish, I go for the wild fish every time that we see it, which is ocean and the river, not necessarily farms. And every time I have a choice of going into more organic meat, I'll go for that. Okay. Without going into unnecessary details. So, and making big enemies like Bigfoot, I just want to tell you guys, the more you go natural, the better for you and better for your health and longevity. Number 6 is about supplements. If you go to sergeyayang.com, there's a number of, I mean, it's all free of charge. This number of longevity supplements you can download from there. You can go for 10 longevity choices. And this is what we're discussing with you and to you today. My top 3 supplements that I take is vitamin D3, because I think we all deficient of the vitamin D3 because we're always under the roof, unlike our predecessors through the evolution. Second one is Omega-3, I think, is important. I have high cholesterol level, like 40% on the planet, statistic of people on the planet have high cholesterol level. So, you know, I think taking omega-3 from the best available source, like as a supplement, is amazing for your health and longevity as well. And third, oh my goodness, I have another 7 candidates. I mean, I can go on and on, like it can be milk thistle because of my high cholesterol level, it can be garlic because garlic, and right now you have garlic in supplements. So you don't need to keep social distance after you, you know, eat real garlic.
For people who don't know, there's odor-free garlic.
Yeah, I think it's amazing. So I love it. Uh, it's important for your vessels and the work of your heart. So if I were to recommend third supplement, I would actually consider NMN. Yeah, it does matter. Like ignore the producer, you know, take whatever producer you think is suitable for you. But NMN is a, is a supplement from new category of supplements which are longevity related. And some other examples can be like Ageless Cell from, it's the Life Extension. But it doesn't really matter which NMN you take.
Sergey, just a quick question for you in case people are not familiar. Can you explain NMN, what it is exactly and what does it do?
So basically one of the things it does for your health It actually improves your metabolic balance and it also helps your body to take out senescent cells, the outdated cells inside your body, which is basically like, um, cellular waste. Yeah. At a certain point, it also, it's, it's an important, like a feeding element and feeding input for mitochondria inside your cells. So it contributes to mitochondrial health as well. And actually one of the countries that I know considering churning NMN, not in this from supplement to drug. This is how powerful this today. So some of us has last chances to buy this as a supplement before it gets regulated and going to be prescribed. So I like the effect on this on the body and it's sold in many pharmacies. It's not prescription drug at all. It's a supplement. So I kind of like it. Um, well, number 7 is move daily. 10,000 steps a day. It's important. I actually like to gamify it. So I use like, um, Apple Watch to count my rings, kind of circles and rings. Yeah. I think it's kind of cool when you do a lot of activities, like on the go, on the run. We have this binary view of physical activity. We need to like either run marathon or we just sit in the office and we do nothing. I think there is something in between. You can do 10,000 steps a day. For the sake of time, I'm not going to go into details like about the importance of heavy lifting or stretching or like yoga. Cardio, you should do 90 minutes of cardio at least every week on a weekly basis. So then number 8 out of 10 is sleep well. I'm using Oura Ring. You can use whatever gadget you like. The simple rule, you should spend 8 hours in the bed, which gives you 7 hours of sleep. And if you measure that, you can actually work on the quality of your sleep. First, maximizing like the length of your deep sleep. Before I started, my deep sleep was somewhere around 40 to 50 minutes every night. Right now I'm in different territory. It's at least 2, 2.5 hours every night. And it's kind of cool. You know, we don't have time to discuss that. You can actually look at my book called The Science and Technology of Growing Young. It's available on Amazon. And the last chapter there, which is twice as long as, as any other chapter in the book, has also some information about sleep improvement. Or you can read Matthew Walker with Why We Sleep. It's just an amazing book about importance of sleep. And two final ones. One is meditation. When we talk about health, in 80 to 90% of cases, people talk about physical health. But like, what about mental health? I think it's equally important or probably even more important than that. So easiest way to regulate your mental health is through meditation. I also have my mantra. Like, every morning I wake up and my mantra is, I want to live 200 years, which is crazy today and impossible today, full disclosure. Anybody of 25 years old, I say, in the 25 years young man, and see how your body will respond to this mantra. Or you can meditate like whatever school of meditation you like. And finally, and it's tip number 10 out of 10, be kind and grateful. You are not happy about your life, like, why extend that? So I think, you know, sharing the best of you with the world, doing something good, doing, you know, something like an act of kindness every day. So I have this rule, small or large, it's not important. Make you a better person and you will enjoy your life. Yeah, that's it.
These are such powerful tips, and I love the summarize into the 10. And I think a lot of people get overwhelmed. They're like, longevity, and it's complex, and I can't do it. But the way you've broken it down there is so, so beautiful as well. Yeah, I'd love to hear in the last— since we've spoke last, I guess, at the— towards the end of last year, what are some different or further longevity strategies that you've been trying out and testing?
I became much more balanced in terms of implementation of all the strategies. So sometimes I'm actually, I think it goes in cycles in life. So sometimes I've implemented my kind of cheat days with the food, with sugary drinks as well. So I do that on Saturdays and that's, I know this is not exactly what one longevity person should recommend the other longevity person, but I I think relaxing some of the rules and trying to get the balance in life. This was what I was working on in the last 6 months. So that's probably it. I'm also digging in into more the world of diagnostic and wearables. I'm experimenting a lot with different wearables and last 6 months, a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of companies brought a lot of new wearables to the market. Like in terms of glucose monitor, I'm now testing. I couldn't disclose the name because it's still still in testing, testing the glucose monitor, which is not testing only glucose level, but also cortisol level in the same device. It's kind of cool. I'm also testing device, which is like watch, which can measure real time your blood pressure. Hmm.
Yeah.
And that's kind of cool. It's actually, it's much lighter than watch. It's not something which you are used to use. So I'm actually used last 6 months for going into world of sensors. And early diagnostic.
It's so exciting as well. I'm currently testing also from Hanu Health. I'm sure you've come across some. Dr. Jay Wiles, I've had him on the podcast too, for heart rate variability and really understanding that more as a measure of stress resiliency. We have a question: recommendations for looking young on the outside. First of all, a smile, I think, decreases age quite quickly, but skin health is very directly correlated with gut health as well. And I think a lot of people overlook the importance importance of getting gut health. And as you said at the beginning, and what I recommend my clients as well, is that screening. And there are really great tests out there for screening as well. And then I think just for skin, red light therapy, there's really great strategies. And then, you know, some really great companies I've had also on the podcast— OneSkin, they have a peptide for removing senescent cells. Um, Peter Diamandis is involved with them, he's one of their advisors also. What would you say, Sergey?
What further—
I think it's— this is typical human beings, all of us, We just want to look beautiful outside. I think like the easiest way to look beautifully outside is to become a better person inside. Think about some religious people, you know, or people with a mission. They always look bloody younger because they have a purpose. They're sharing the best with the world, right? They have more positive thoughts. So I know it's, and I'm like you guys, so I know it's kind of cool. And if you try to do something on the surface, But changing yourself inside, and gut health is the same area, is like the easiest way to project a lot of energy and be young. Okay?
Yeah, exactly as well. Good question. If you go to sergey-young.com, there's that beautiful guide, that infographic that Sergey was showing as well for anyone interested. Sergey, it was such a pleasure to have you on today.
Likewise, as always.
I know, we have to catch up again soon. It was wonderful. Thanks so much.
Thank you. Okay. Stay healthy and happy.
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