Harvard Scientist REVEALS The Surprising Secrets To Age In Reverse! w/Dr. David Sinclair EP 1232

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It's this what we call DNA methylation pattern that changes over time and I can read that and tell you how old you are exactly within about 5% error and predict when you're gonna die unless you change your life.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to this special episode and thank you so much for being here today. And if this is your first time listening, I hope today's episode inspires you and helps you on your path to greatness. And I'd love to hear from you and know what your key takeaways are over on social media. Just message me at Lewis Howes over there. And if you're a regular listener of the show, then welcome back. I'm so grateful and inspired by your commitment to live greater, love deeper, and leave a legacy. Make sure to reference our show notes in the description for today's guest information and any mentioned links. And if you enjoy the show, make sure to tell a friend and leave a review over on Apple podcast. This really helps the show reach more people and impact more lives as a result together. Okay, now it's time to dive into today's episode. According to the latest research, 90 of employers plan to make enhanced the employee experience a top priority in 2022. And after all, a happy workplace is key to attracting and keeping great employees. Keeping a workplace happy all comes down to a focus on company culture and making sure each employee knows their value, not only to the company, but also to the world. And I think every business owner is on the hunt for more valuable people to add to their company right now. I know we are here at Greatness Media, and that's what where ZipRecruiter comes in. Their matching technology helps you find the right people for your roles fast. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/greatness. As their powerful technology gets to work, you can easily review the recommended candidates and invite your top choices to apply for your job, which encourages them to apply faster. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site in the US based on G2 ratings. Find the right employees for your workplace with ZipRecruiter. Try it for free at this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com/greatness. That's ziprecruiter.com/G-R-E-A-T-N-E-S-S. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. People age at different speeds, and the date on your license may not represent your inner biological age at all. And if you're looking for ways to extend your health span and slow down the aging process, The keys to your health and longevity run in your blood. That's why InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to boost your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. It's created by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometrics. InsideTracker analyzes your blood, your DNA, and fitness tracking data to identify where you're optimized. and where you're not. You'll get a daily action plan with personalized guidance on the right exercise, nutrition and supplementation for your body. Add Inner Age 2.0 to any plan for a definitive calculation of your true biological age to see how you're aging from the inside out. And when I got my results back from Inside Tracker, they told me and I quote, Louis, you're beating the clock. and that feels good. But if you know how competitive I am, you know I'm still going to keep working towards a lower and lower inner age. And now that Inside Tracker has shown me my biological age, they are now providing an action plan of science backed recommendations with the goal of improving the quality and quantity of the years ahead. And one of the things recommended for me was intermittent fasting seven days a week. This is something that I've tried out before and I've loved it. so it's refreshing to know that it's in fact the right choice for my body. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insideTracker.com/school-of-greatness for more. You are teaching people how to understand reverse aging, really, and how to live longer, how to live younger and how to reverse aging is kind of one of the main things you're known for, correct?

That is correct, yes.

We were talking beforehand that is a massive fear. Death is a big fear for a lot of people. Some people you meet who are spiritually enlightened and they're just like, I know this is a part of life and it's okay and it's gonna be fine. But you have experienced things on the other side where it hasn't always been as pretty to witness death. And I'm curious, I want to talk about why you got into this field in a second, but I want to give people a few hacks that you've learned recently to help people with the reversing aging process. What would you say are a couple daily things we could think about or do to start reversing that aging process?

Well, we now know enough that you can definitely slow it down. Slow it down. Yeah, we've had some breakthroughs that seem to reverse it as well. though they're still experimental. But we're talking about one day being able to reverse the age of the body by 50-75%. We do that in mice now. We can cure old age blindness and this kind of stuff. But importantly, what can we do now to stay alive till those technologies come online five, ten years from now? So if there's one thing that I could say to everybody, if there was only one thing, it would be to eat less often. Okay. I used to say eat this or that, but actually I believe that when you eat is just as important as what you eat, perhaps even more so. And so I've changed my life accordingly. So there's that. You know, there's often there's the exercise thing, but that's really true. And I'll tell you why it works, actually. That's important to know. And, you know, you're a fit guy, so you're doing all those things. By the way, you look really young.

Thank you.

All right. I would have thought maybe in your 20s, but you're actually in your 30s.

Yeah, I'll be 39 in two months.

It's impressive. Yeah, I mean, you can't even see the stitches.

Exactly.

No, it's really great. You haven't aged since I first met you, and that's been a while.

Yeah.

And then the third thing would be to eat plants, more plants, but plants in particular that have been stressed out. So you can stress plants before you pick them. There's organic, of course, but you can pick the fruits and vegetables after they've faced adversity. A lot of light, not enough water, not enough nutrients. And there's a whole theory that we have behind that. But in general, how do you know a plant has these molecules that I'm talking about?

The stressed out molecules.

Yeah. So plants need to survive just like we do. And those molecules they protect the animal and the plant. And when the plants get perceived adversity, let's take a grape vine, okay, that you know, make red wine out of. And I'm the guy that said red wine is good for you and resveratrol and that blew up 30% sales in red wine 2006. But so let's take red wine so that before you pick the grape, you typically dry out the vines or you hope that there's not enough rain. And then the plants, the grapevine, gets stressed out, not mentally stressed, but fearful that it could die. So it starts making these, what are called polyphenols. And a phenol is just a ring of carbon with some hydrogens on it, and poly, obviously more. So this resveratrol is two carbon rings with some little 8 OHs, oxygen, hydrogen. They make a ton of it, and it's bottled in red wine. And that's why, one of the reasons why you probably have some health benefits when you drink red wine. in moderation.

Right.

And when you take resveratrol as a supplement, it also has similar benefits. It's found in clinical trials.

Wow.

So what?

In the supplemental form. Yeah.

Yeah. So I take, I've been taking resveratrol myself for over a decade now, probably 14 years.

Is that what covers up the stitches? Yeah.

Right. Actually, people on the internet make fun of me. They say, you know, you've had work done.

Right.

And I'm now. 52. So it's going up there.

52?

Yeah.

Times a.

Times a. So I just stopped that one. Right. But anyway, these molecules, you know a plant has them when the plant is full of color. So try to have a variety of colors. Don't get the white insipid lettuce. Get the bright orange, whatever, organic. If they've been kept in a greenhouse at perfect temperatures, that's probably not the best. kind of food to eat. Really?

Yeah.

And I've gone more plant-based. I know there's a lot of people that love meat. I love meat.

I wish meat was super healthy. I'd eat it all day. But based on the scientific trials and studies.

Yeah. And, you know, on social media, there's.

A lot of debate. So I don't mind going up. There's so many, but there's so many people that talk about meat who swear by it, and a lot of them look young. You know, a lot of them look really lean and shredded. Yeah, I will. You know, I've lost all this body fat. from eating meat and the meat only diets and all these things. I've gotten rid of the eczema, I've gotten rid of the other allergies or whatever it might be challenging them in those times. So, you hear certain studies of this from people, but I guess having that diet for 40, 50 years, we haven't really seen that. It's like, okay, maybe it works for five years or three years, but how does that affect you with aging long term, right?

That's right. So, I've had debates with Joe Rogan ad nauseam about this. So the way to think of it is that you can mimic adversity or abundance. And the abundance is the steak, and what I do is the adversity, which is not as much protein.

Interesting.

And there are systems in the body that sense a slight deficiency of protein, or at least a lower level, and kick in the defenses that we think make us live a long time. But you can go to abundance and feel great, you can look great, you can build muscle a little bit more, not a lot more, a little bit more. But when people say that works for me, it's within a few years of time frame. I'm talking 50, 60, 70, 80 years like you said, and that's what I'm betting on. Otherwise, you're burning the candle at both ends. Now, one way to do it perhaps is to spend a year on a carnivore diet, fix yourself, bulk up, and then switch, and then maybe go back and forth. There's a lot to be said about variety. in biology. And in the case of resveratrol, when we gave resveratrol to the mice, not every day, but every other day, that was the best lifespan extension.

Not giving it to them in abundant formats, but in every other day or sporadically.

Really? Yeah.

So what happened to the mice when you gave it to them every day as opposed to every other day?

They didn't statistically live longer unless they had some other adversity, which in that case was a high fat diet. And then resveratrol worked really well to protect them and they lived longer. Wow.

So high fat diet and that supplement. Then if you're like a mouse, if.

You are a mouse, then you will do pretty well. That was benefiting them, got you.

But for a human, how would that impact? Well, we don't actually know.

There's been a number of studies. If you take a high dose, so I take a gram a day in a tiny bit of yogurt every day, and that's important. If you mix it with water, it'll sink to the bottom.

It won't work. It won't be absorbed into the body. Really?

So it needs to be, you can't just eat it.

Drink water, I mean, put it in.

A pill format and drink water. No, that's a real tip, is you gotta dissolve it in something, a yogurt.

Or some olive oil, for it to get in. It doesn't dissolve in water and it won't penetrate the system or what?

Yeah. It'll come straight through. It's little crystal lumps. So a lot of these plant molecules, there's one called Quercetin, Fisetin, Resveratrol. A lot of supplements you get, if you break open that capsule, often they're yellow or white. and you put it in water and it doesn't dissolve, it'll sink to the bottom in these crunchy little crystals, it's.

Not going to get absorbed. So if it dissolves in water, that's good. That's okay.

Right. Okay, that's fine then. Some vitamins will, but most of this stuff from plants is going to be just straight through the body. A little bit will get absorbed, but.

If you take it with yogurt or some food, we actually know you get five times the levels. So you can take it with food as well and it'll dissolve better, it'll Digest better. Right. Gotcha. Interesting. Okay, so these are a few things you mentioned. Eat less often. You didn't say eat less. You said eat less often. So you can still eat less often but pack it in the meal.

That's what I do. I have a big dinner and I really enjoy it now because I'm not eating much during the day. And it comes from a study. And actually it's important that when I'm not talking about malnutrition, certainly not talking about starvation. So, you know, if you're a teenage kid, this is not for you. It's kind of people in their late 20s, 30s at least. But you don't want to have a calorie deficit unless you regard yourself as being obese or your doctor recommends it. I have to maintain my weight, which I do pretty easily. Yeah. Yeah, so I eat a pretty big dinner and it's great. Multiple courses. I don't eat dessert though. I gave up sugar when I was 40. Really?

And do not regret that at all. What have been the biggest benefits Of 12 years, no sugar.

Surprisingly more energy, actually. This combination of the plant-based one main meal a day and no sugar, I feel so much better. I power through the day and I measure my blood glucose levels on occasion.

I'm supposed to be doing that soon. Do you recommend it?

Well, yeah, you'll learn a lot about your body.

How much junk you put in your body.

Yeah, and what you'll see, what kind of meals do you have during the day? I mean, three?

Well, I go through. It depends on the season of life, but I try to skip breakfast most times. And then, like, I haven't eaten today, and it's, what, 2 45? So I just had a coffee and some ghee, and then, yeah, I'll maybe have, like, a protein bar in the afternoon, and then I'll have a dinner. But it all depends on the season of life. Sometimes a lot of breakfast and lunch and dinner, but sometimes I'm fasting, so.

Okay. but it sounds like you're on your way. Yeah.

You're doing something.

Yeah. Well, you're obviously doing something. Yeah. You look like a kid, man. That's great. Whatever you're doing, keep doing that. But, yeah, you want to have this period of about 18 hours at least to let your body produce its own blood sugar. And so your blood sugar actually comes from your liver. It's called a process. Gluconeogenesis. Okay. Glucose. Sugar. Neogene. Genesis, obviously. And what I saw in my blood levels when I was measuring it, and I do this maybe every month, is contrasted to what somebody who eats three meals a day, it's super steady. I have this green line across here and it's wiggling here and then at dinner it goes up a little bit, but never out of this zone unless.

I eat a chocolate or something. With the blood sugar levels is what you're saying, right?

Glucose levels, yeah. Glucose levels, not blood sugar level.

Well, it's called blood sugar, but glucose is the molecule.

Yeah.

And so it goes up a little bit when you have dinner, but it's steady throughout the day. For me.

For you. What?

Because I've trained my liver to do that. To produce it at that level.

Well, it's really smart. It knows what I need, and I power through the day. So I feel so good. I never get the brain fog. I never feel hungry. Well, not very. And I certainly don't have that, oh, I'm caffeinated, got to jitters kind of thing. And that's because it's steady. And I've measured myself eating three meals a day. and this is what happens. This is a typical person breakfast, huge spike above it goes up 150-200 units. And then you'll feel good for a while and then three hours later, it's called postprandial, your body puts out a ton of insulin through pancreas and it'll shoot down, pulling the glucose out of your bloodstream into your tissues, but it'll overshoot. The body just now goes down, so I'm here, an average person goes up here, down there and now I can tell, now I'm hungry, I can't think, I need a snack, and it's down here and then what do I do? I go and have lunch or a snack, it's back up here again. And then that's happening three times a day for most people and that's the problem. If you just want to not worry about food and have a lot of energy and think really clearly, you want that and that's how I am.

So what are other ways of reaching that kind of even blood sugar level? or glucose level, is it doing the one meal a day? Can you eat smaller meals throughout the day? How do you stay consistent? What are the different ways to do it?

Yeah, well you can eat small meals in small bits during the day. That's the old way of doing it. That's what nutritionists... Like eating five times.

A day but small.

Yeah, I don't believe that.

When you're spiking it five different times, right?

A little bit, yeah. But really what you want is for your body to get the the thought that it could run out of food. This is the adversity mimetic. You always want your body to feel like you could die next week.

What are the benefits of tricking your body to think it's gonna die in a week?

Well, it's not having food in your mouth for most of the day. It's running and lifting things. We know these are good for us. Now I'm telling you why. and I can tell you about the genes involved too. And then you can also change the temperature of your body. That's also puts a bit of a shock in your body. It's called horm. The whole thing is called hormesis. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Yes.

And you know that. Yes.

Yeah.

How you become resilient and long-lived okay. And otherwise, if you're always having the abundance, tons of amino acids and meat, your body says, hey, it's great. I don't need to do anything but build, build, build. You'll have. you know, a pretty good body. By the way, you can still have a good body in this. It's just, you know, you'll be a little bit leaner, maybe five percent less bulky. But here, it's like burning the candle at both ends. We are always in a state of, I got so much food, screw it. I don't need to worry about protecting my body. I'm gonna have kids for the next five years, replace myself, and then I can be out of here. Whereas my mode of doing it, the adversity mimetic is, The thought that my body has is oh crap if I have kids right now they might die I need to stick around until food comes back or the mammoth goes away and doesn't chase me every day, right and so you stick around for longer so you can get a couple of decades longer by doing what I do versus that on average everyone's different sure, but just doing the five main things that doctors tell you and we all know are good like don't smoke don't over drink and eat good food, so Mediterranean kind of diet, sleep well and don't stress out and have friends, those things are enough to give you an average of 14 years.

Oh my gosh.

That's just the easy stuff.

'Cause what's the average lifespan now for a man or a woman in the US?

Went down, dipped a little bit with COVID but it's around late 70s.

Late 70s, yeah. And so you're saying if you have those five things, at a great level, then it could go an extra 5, 10, 14 years, what you're saying.

Oh, easy. That's just the easy stuff. I haven't told you about the science and all of the stuff that I'm doing.

That's just the basics. The foundation. How much, now you've mentioned minimal alcohol, but how much does alcohol, smoking, or marijuana, or psychedelics actually affect lifespan? Do we have enough research on this? yet or?

Well, we do on tobacco smoking. Obviously, it's very clear that's a decade off your life. And what's interesting is that what we're learning about these various things that you can do to hurt yourself or to protect yourself is that what's happening is that your body is aging at a different rate.

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Comcast is committed to bringing access to the internet to all Americans, including rural communities across the country. like Sussex County, Delaware. We were being left behind. Everybody around us seemed to have internet, but we did not. High-speed internet is one of those good things that we needed to help us move our farming, our small businesses, our recreation forward. Learn more about how we're bringing our next generation network to more people across the country at ComcastCorporation.com/InvestmentInAmerica. So smokers, you can measure it, are older biologically, than people who've never smoked. That's why they look older too. Wow. We can measure that now in my lab. If I took your blood, I could tell you how old you are biologically.

Not just your chronological age. I wanna do that. I saw you post this on Instagram.

That you're like 46, is that right? Or you're 42 or what is it? I went down to, what was it, 44 I think, or 42.

It bounces around, but it's usually a decade younger than I thought I was. That's cool. So what do you do? You take a blood sample, And then you what? Measure the blood?

There's two ways of doing it. There's one company that I advise called Inside Tracker and that's what I use. I've had that too, yeah. You've done that, yeah. So they come to your home or you donate and then you get this readout of, I think it's 40 different parameters and they use an algorithm and tell you how old you are. So I'm 42 or something like that. I'm in the top 2% of people my age for youthfulness. So I'm happy with that.

Just dust it off, a little brag over there. I like it, yeah. You better be if you're researching this and the top scientists in the world on this.

Oh, yeah. I don't like to brag. That's not what Australians and scientists do. But what I do want to say is I use my body as an experiment. Yeah. And trying to be a role model. And I've been optimizing my lifestyle for 20 years now based on this feedback from InsideTracker for the last 12, 13 years. Wow. And you can see the graphs of things going out of the optimal zone and then I make a change based on science and it comes back or even better.

So we know from smokers that their biological age is older when they smoke is what you're saying, right?

Yeah, well that's one test. The inside tracker test is what I do routinely every few months. But there's a new type of test that my colleagues and in my lab we've developed. It's called the DNA methylation test. It's also known as the Horvath test named after my friend Steven Horvath at UCLA. The way to think of this is, if you've ever heard of the Epi genome, I've heard of that. These are the control systems that control our DNA. It turns out that that system you can measure, it's chemicals on your DNA that change over time predictably. And we've just developed a way to measure that 100 times cheaper than it was before. And I'm gonna bring this test to the public so that people can test.

Their biological home or something.

It should be a cheek swab, that's what we're developing.

So you don't have to prick or take blood or anything. You do a cheek swap.

Exactly. And then you ship it in or something. Yeah, you'll post it in. And then you get hopefully just a week later or less. Here's your credit score for your body. That's cool. And then even better, here's how you slow it down or reverse it based on everything we know about you. Wow. That's cool.

That will take you on that journey. So do this, eat this, swallow this.

That is cool.

I gotta take that test. Yeah.

Well, You can get on the wait list if you want.

Okay.

There's a website because we are taking names right now. We may do some studies with early adopters too.

That's cool. Where's the wait list?

It's called Tally. T-A-L-L-Y tallyhealth.com and the reason I'm excited about it is it's very hard to focus on what works because we have no idea. You exercise, you hope that it's good. Is it too much, too little? If I eat this, does it help me? We need a dashboard for our bodies and that's what these give you.

That is really cool. Okay, so we know that smoking makes you age biologically. That's why it makes you look older smoking. What about drinking alcohol? We've talked about wine and the substance in wine that could be supportive, but alcohol in general, does that affect biological age and aging?

Well, it all depends on quantity. One glass a day, most doctors would say, especially if it's red wine, it's fine. And the alcohol actually can help with the cardiovascular system, reduces bad cholesterol, and more importantly raises the good cholesterol HDL.

This is for red wine.

And the alcohol in white wine does a little bit of good too.

But beer.

So beer will raise the levels of uric acid. which is a breakdown product of a protein breakdown product that you can pee out. But if you have too much beer and other types of food that contain a lot of this type of protein, you will raise your uric acid level. So why does that matter? It's becoming very clear that if you have high uric acid levels, your body will age faster.

We just had Dr. David Perlmutter on.

Exactly.

Who has a book about uric acid talking about like this is one of the the root causes of poor health and aging faster and things like that. So, alcohol. You talked to him a lot?

Yeah, yeah. I actually was one of the first people to read his book before it came out.

Yeah, it's really good.

It blew my mind. I now measure my uric acid levels. You can get little test strips. You can just buy them on the usual. You just pee on it and spit on it and 10 seconds later you see. You see your acid levels. Yeah.

And so the lower the level, the better. Right. The higher the level means there's risk for what?

Everything, according to David, it's really bad for cancers and heart disease mainly. But I think he's right that it's a sign of accelerated aging.

The higher the uric level, the faster you're gonna be aging.

Yeah.

And a larger amount of consumption of alcohol, specifically beer, I'm hearing, raises that level.

Beer in particular has a lot of the chemicals in it that will raise uric acid, unfortunately. And that's from David Perlmutter. He gave me a list of foods.

So, beer. And I said, oh, that's awesome. Now, is there any benefit to beer in biology, in science? Does it help you improve the quality of your health? Does your brain get better? Does your body, your system get better? Does it make you younger at all? Or are there no benefits to beer biologically and in your brain?

There are benefits because there's alcohol in there and a little bit of alcohol is good for your cardiovascular system.

But- But there's other things that's good for your cardiovascular system, right? That you don't need.

So beer on the list of alcohols is at the bottom for health. Got it. Mostly, unless it's full of sugar, like those very sweet wines I think would be a problem. But beer does have a lot of vitamin B, B group vitamins, B3, tons of it.

But you can get that in other ways too. You can.

What can you do? I mean, you gotta live as well.

Right, right.

I don't prescribe a life that's prolonging and feels longer. You gotta live a little.

Right, right. Enjoyment, the enjoyment of the richness of life, yeah.

Right, though I am trying not to drink alcohol these days.

I've never been drunk in my life.

Yeah, amazing.

Never been drunk. I don't find it amazing because I just never found the I never had the desire to do it. I never, I tasted some when I was 16 and I was like, I don't understand why I would ever drink this. Plus it was also for me, maybe that's one of the reasons in your mind I look younger, I look like I haven't aged more, is because I found it as an advantage in sports. When everyone else was drinking, I was like, oh, it's weakening their immune system, it's making them slower. Mentally, this will give me an edge. in athletics. They were hung over after games in practice and I was like, I'm gonna be sharp. And so I just kept on with it. I was like, this is just gonna make me sharper. Now, I have my other vice. I use, you know, sugar in other ways is my vice. So, I'm not perfect, but does alcohol make you look older too?

In excess.

In excess. Gotcha.

Yeah, yeah. So, a little bit every day is okay. A little bit. But most doctors, like physicians would say, if you overdo it, you will age. And actually what you do as a researcher is you look at people who live a long time and compare them to either their twin, which has been done, or family members. Interesting.

Yeah.

And actually how you live your life has a massive impact on how long you live. There's a twin study. They took identical twins, genetically identical in Denmark, and they said, okay, look at them through their life. And there were massive differences in how they looked and how long they lived. And when they went back to see what the causes were, they could figure out, first of all, that 80% of their lifespan was determined by how they lived, not their genetics.

You mean the way they felt about themselves, the people they hung out with, their environment, the activities they took on, or what do you mean?

Well, mostly their lifestyle. What they ate, did they smoke, did they drink, did they exercise. Those are the things.

Did they sleep well, all that stuff? Right.

And those that did all the good things, the same genetics, twins born the same day, one could live 10 years longer than the other.

Now, this is what I'm curious about. Were these twins hanging out all the time? Or were they, because usually when you're hanging out with someone all the time, you pick up the similar habits, right? You pick up a similar lifestyle habit as your parents, as your partner, and you kind of eat the same things. It's really hard to be like, I'm gonna drink every day and I'm not gonna drink every day if you're living.

Together and in the same room, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. I wonder how it is. Maybe they got separated at birth or something. Interesting. But it does tell you a lot. The fact that 80% of our future health is in our own hands is liberating. That's really cool. Because often we think, oh, it's not going to make a big difference. It really makes a big difference how you live your life every day. Focus on that. And one thing that I do is I look at my future self and I ask myself, what's that guy saying to me today if he could speak to me?

What's he saying? Please don't eat that. Exactly. Please don't drink that anymore.

You had enough, like, you're gonna hurt.

Me in 10 years. That's how you need to think about it. It's coaching yourself 10, 20, 30 years out. Right. It's interesting. I asked David Perlmutter, I said, what are some things you wish you would have done sooner to improve the quality of your health? And he was like, flossing. He was like, and I didn't go deeper into that, but I remember him saying that. I was like, there's wisdom in whatever it is. Maybe he had some gum issues or something he had to deal with at one point that was really affecting him for a year or two? I don't know. I'm just making this up. But if he could go back, he'd be like, I wish you would have done this better so I didn't have to suffer later.

Right?

Yeah. What are the things you've done or you're doing now that your 10-year-old self will be so happy for? But if he was in front of you right now, he'd just be hugging you and high-fiving you non-stop the things you're doing that he will appreciate in 10 years. and then what are a few things that he's gonna say, man, I really wish you want to do that right now.

Oh, yeah. Okay. All right, so let's see. So I'm. So I measure myself so I can speak scientifically, not just that it makes me feel good. It's the. The one meal. One main meal a day he would be grateful for. I'm sure of it. And. And as a result, I'm leaner and, you know. more ripped. I hate to say it.

You look lean.

I am lean.

You look really lean.

I've gone over the last two years from 150 pounds to 133. Yeah.

You look leaner even from when I. The first time I had you on, your face is leaner and chiseled.

Yeah. I don't think I can lose any. I want to lose any more.

Yeah.

I need to go back to the gym and do a little bit more.

So the one meal a day. But you weren't doing one meal a day.

What?

Five, ten years ago?

No, I only started during the pandemic. Yeah, this is new for me too. It's hard actually when you begin.

Very hard.

You feel hungry because you've got those crashes that make you really hungry and you've got this hormone called ghrelin that makes you hungry. But once you get through that, it takes about three weeks. So anyone who tries it, make sure that you don't give up early. Just power through and then your liver will wake up.

One mean meal a day.

So that's one. The other thing I think that he will be happy is don't eat sugary foods.

Oh man.

Yeah. Don't eat that cake. So at a restaurant, when they say, Do you want dessert? I always say no, but then I'm hoping that someone at the table orders what I want. Yeah, but that's all you want. All I need. I need to taste it. I don't need to fill myself with a cake.

Gotcha. Because you still want to enjoy your life and live a full life, but you don't want to in 10 years be like, why do they eat cake every day?

It's not worth it.

Yeah.

Really? Your future self will thank you for it. Mmm. Lifting weights, I know you do that, so I need to do more of that. I got a standing desk, so most of the day I'm standing, which is great. Again, you have to get used to it. You'll feel tired for the first few weeks.

Yes.

Your legs will. I'm now mostly focused on eating plants.

When did you start that?

That's recently.

Eating mostly plants.

Yeah, I've switched. I love meat. I wish that I could eat more. But you just gotta look at the science. There's some really good studies of thousands of people who just look at how long people live and what they eat. And I mean, it's not even an argument.

But there's so many people that bring in the argument, well, all these people have cured these diseases or whatever, you know, gotten rid of these things from meat only and But people make the argument, right? Like you see it online, people making the argument for meat, meat, meat. So where are they finding these research studies of people living longer on an only meat diet?

I don't know.

But you're not seeing them. You're not seeing studies of anyone that lives over 100 that all they do is eat meat.

Well, there might be one person or two, but when you look at 10,000 people, what they eat, it's the vegan and the pescetarian that win out.

In the blue zones, right?

Yeah, and the numbers are something like that. You drop it down to you've got 88% less chance, or actually it's 12% chance for most diseases. So most diseases are protected by these diets. Really?

Wait a minute, 88% less chance of what?

Of dying at any one point in the age range of the study, which.

Is... By being a pescatarian.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's vegan pescatarian, those are the best. Then above that would be actually pescatarian was better than vegetarian. A little bit of meat seemed to help, but it has to be fish.

What's the omega-3s in there, right? Yeah.

And particularly oleic acid is good. Which is found in avocados and olive oil. That activates one of the protective enzymes that we study in the lab.

Which acid?

OLEIC.

E-I-C. What is some of that, but not a lot of that.

It's a monounsaturated fatty acid or a mufa. If you have a bit of olive oil, there's a supplement online that I get that has high levels of oleic acid in it that I take every day. Okay, cool.

With the DHA and EPA.

All that good stuff. Yes. Okay.

So that's my fish intake is a pill.

You don't eat fish, you eat very little. Well, you know, I'm evolving my diet. I've gone from a Mediterranean diet over the last 10 years to the last two, three months to all plant-based, no dairy and yeah, no meat. And I'm just seeing what happens to my body. I'm measuring things. It's an experiment. Yes. It's not a philosophy. And if things don't work out biologically, I'll go back. I mean, I'd love to go back to a steak. I'm Australian after all, but, you know, I'm driven by science. and that's all that is.

Yeah. Okay, so you got these four. Is there another thing that your future self would thank you for? One meal a day, don't eat sugary foods. That's gonna be one of the most challenging for me. Lifting weights, eating mostly plants. Was there anything else?

Get control over psychological stress.

Oh yeah. Why is this so important?

Well, the main problem is you have high levels of cortisol when you're stressed out psychologically. And it's clear that people who have high levels of really high levels of stress are chronically ill. And even it accelerates gray hair. That's actually a fact. It's not just a myth. You really are getting older if you have stress.

Really? So this scientifically proven that if you're stressed out all the time or more frequently, you're gonna get older biologically.

Correct. Wow. Yeah.

Can you reverse gray hair without dyes?

Yes.

Really?

Well, not routinely, but there are examples of that. There are some drugs that have shown in the clinic that make hair go gray from gray to brown. The best example I can tell you is that when people are stressed out, let's say they're in they're in the banking world and they're losing their minds. You can find hairs that start to turn gray. Okay, so you look at them and they're a little bit gray at the bottom. Oh, good, turning gray. Okay. Then they get given a vacation and they go away for a couple of weeks. And guess what happens to the hair shaft?

It gets brown.

It's brown again.

Come on.

You can find these gray brown segments of hair.

Interesting.

Yeah. And what they tracked it down to was that the cells that make the hair pigment start to shut down, but they can be reinvigorated. But I suspect once you've been gray for a number of years, it's really.

Hard to reverse that. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, I'm the first person to say aging is not unidirectional. In my lab, we're driving it forwards and backwards at will. It's not really difficult anymore once you figure it out. Any high school student could do it these days in a mouse at least.

To drive the aging process faster and also reverse it at any time.

Right.

Just by doing a few of these things.

Well, those things will certainly slow it down and may retard it and maybe even reverse it by a couple of years. The Mediterranean diet, there was a study that came out, what is it, last year? And people on a Mediterranean diet, which includes what?

What are those foods?

So it's a lot of plants. It's focusing on good fats, the avocado kind of an olive oil, you know, think Greek kind of food, a little bit of meat, but mostly fish. That's Mediterranean and a bit of red wine. So that's that. That if you give that to people or tell them to eat it for a year, they will be younger at the end of that year than people who didn't switch.

Wow. Yeah.

But age reversal is a little different. I don't think just by avoiding sugar, you're gonna reverse your age. Otherwise, we'd have people living a thousand years. But what it does, what we do know is that you can actually flip a switch and reset the body, at least a human cell or a mouse, to be about 50% younger, even more than that.

By not eating sugar. No. Or by all these other things.

By my lab at Harvard.

Got you.

It's not mainstream yet, but we hope it will be. So we're developing medicines that can reverse the aging.

Can reverse aging.

Reverse, yeah.

By 50% you're saying?

At least 50%. Wow. We do it in the eye all the time. We've just published this about a year ago, that we could reset the age of a mouse's eye so that it went from being blind to having a young eye again.

That's crazy.

And then it stays young, and then the mice get old and die with young eyes.

No way. So they can keep looking sharp and clear, 2020 vision, but the body shuts down.

Yeah, so now what we've done is we've learned how to age Mice, we can do that. We understand aging well enough to do that. So we drive their age forward. So we have a twin mice. If you come to my lab, I've got to see this.

Embryos.

You've got, yep, yep, at Harvard Medical School. We have mice that are twins and they're born with black hair and when we age them, they get gray hair. And so you've got these twins in the same cage, they've grown up, eaten the same stuff. One's gray and one's black, same age. But We've aged one 50%. That we've been doing for a decade. That's in my book. That we've been able to do. That's not hard.

You've been able to age them.

Aging things has been easy. Yeah.

I know.

It sounds crazy.

Eat poorly, don't sleep well.

Have a stressful environment. Yes. Well, we do it a little bit more differently. We use an enzyme to cut their.

Chromosomes and that accelerates the aging process. Oh, wow. Interesting. Okay.

Yeah.

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And you've already done that.

It's in progress. We have a mouse called Lisa, who's our first test case, and she's having her age reversed right now.

Have you been seeing, so she had white hair or gray hair? Yeah.

And is it... And frailty and sickness.

Well we'll see, it's in progress.

The bones are light, yeah. We're hopeful. We've reprogrammed a middle-aged mouse and let it go for a year, and it seemed healthier. It didn't have any more cancer. If anything, it had less cancer. But here's the thing with science. You have to do what the reviewers, the judges of your, of your paper tell you to do if you want to publish it, which is our currency. And this paper we published a year ago, which was in the journal Nature, which is really hard to get into, the reviewers said, you have to prove to us that this treatment, which is a gene therapy, we turn on three genes in the body of the mouse.

And the eye of the mouse, prove.

To us that it doesn't cause cancer.

Right, that's one.

Yeah, but how do you prove that? Well, we had these mice that we had, we're hoping to make live for, you know, another three years instead of two years. But they're all the mice we had. So we had to kill our precious mice that we were testing age reversal on to see if there was any cancer in them. Now, there wasn't. There was slightly less, but we've had to go back and restart. But there were technical challenges to reversing aging right now. The gene therapy is it's not easy to give the genes to the mouse or the human. I mean theoretically you'd come to my lab, we could inject ourselves and see what happens. We won't do that, but theoretically you could. But the problem with it is A, we don't know human safety. Right. The other problem technically is that trying to give these genes to all the cells in the body is hard. If we inject a mouse with these gene therapies, so they're viruses that carry genes, We can get into the eye, just put it in the eye in a needle.

And it won't go through the rest of the body.

No, it stays in the eye. That's what's great about that is therapy. It's not going to cause cancer in the liver because it's stuck in the eye. It's also not going to ignite or turn on your immune system if it's.

Just in the eye. It's called immune privileged. The eyeball is. Doesn't it connect to the brain? Isn't it a part of the brain? Yeah.

From hubris saying it's a piece of the brain.

It does. It goes into the brain that way or is it stuck stop in the eye.

No, L- gene therapy will travel all.

The way into the brain.

That doesn't go into the immune system?

No, no, it stops there.

But does it cause tumors in the brain? Thank goodness, no, we haven't seen any evidence of tumors. Interesting. But what we need to do is develop these viruses and eventually chemicals and a pill and a supplement that can do the same thing and spread this age reversal throughout the body evenly. And we don't have good technology to do that yet. Mostly it goes to the liver. and to some other parts of the body like the spleen.

So it spreads right now.

Spreads, but imagine being able to take a pill. So what we're doing in my lab right now, so my, you know, some people forget that I'm a professor because I profess too much. But I have a lab of 20 people, a lot of students and budding what we call postdoc PhDs. And their goal, one of them is to understand how do you reset the body? Where is the backup copy of youth? We don't know where that is yet. We know how to flip the switch, but where it's stored, we don't know. We're looking for the hard drive. So there's that. But also, I think one of the coolest things is can you reverse the age of the body with chemicals? And by chemicals, I mean maybe a plant molecule or something in food. And there's some evidence. There's a study that just came out of a chemical that we all make in our bodies, not a lot of it, called alpha-ketoglutarate. There's probably 10 grams of it in our bodies, my guess. But if you give people, I think it was a gram a day, but don't quote me on that, but it's a high dose. And measure their biological age with this test that I was telling you about, looking at the chemicals on the DNA. They claim, all right, it's a big claim that within eight months, no, seven months, they went back eight years in age. I know, it's crazy, isn't it?

There was this study that already came out. It was a recent study.

A few months ago.

Are you guys-- now what happens in the scientific world? Do you guys-- I mean, scientists go and try to discredit this or disprove.

It on a scientific level? Yeah, that's our job. Our job is to be skeptical.

So you go in and say, okay, I'm going to use the exact same protocol you used and see if I can discredit this. But if you do it and then it works and you take the blood draw and the biological age is the same, Then you say, okay, I reviewed this paper and it's either works or didn't work. So what happens, what needs to happen in order for a paper to actually be credible in the science world?

Louis, that's a really important question because science works this way and a lot of people don't understand how hard it is to get something proven in science. If you show it once, no one's going to believe you. It has to be shown not just once but probably 10 times Really? And it has to be done in reproduced independently by someone who has, who's not your best friend, who gives no crap about your career. And if they cannot disprove you, after a few years, you might actually be right. But it takes this vetting. So these new studies that come out in the press about, oh, you know, eat this, you'll, you know, you'll be fitter or.

But if it's one study, it doesn't mean anything.

No, it usually it's, yeah, pull the other one.

Interesting.

This one. Fortunately, I haven't had that happen to me where we put out something that was disproven, but it happens all the time. But I think scientists shouldn't be fearful of making mistakes. It's the same in business. You've got to take a risk and go for it, and that's progress. But it's pretty brutal when scientists make a mistake. Sometimes it's inadvertent, sometimes it's just too complicated, or they make wrong conclusions. but you can have careers destroyed by being really wrong about something.

So what's this paper giving you hope about then, even though it's not fully vetted yet in the science world? But what is it telling you?

Well, let's imagine that even only 10% of it is true, and you can.

Go back... A year or two.

Yeah. That's still a freaking big deal.

And that's by just taking what, a supplement?

It's a supplement, alpha-ketoglutarate. I have nothing to do with the company.

I'm not. Have you taken this before?

I am taking it actually. Now you are.

I'm taking that study.

Really? To see what happens. I'm measuring my biological age fairly frequently to see what happens.

I'm the guinea pig.

You're the guinea pig, alpha, what is it? Keto. Keto. Glutaryate. It's just a little chemical that the body uses in what's called the citric acid cycle or TCA cycle. It makes energy in the body. But it also has this other role. It's used as fuel to control the clock. How so? I can draw it if you want. Yes, I know we have a whiteboard. We got a whiteboard.

All right, let's do that.

I'm left-handed. I'll see if I can do this for everybody.

Okay.

So here's what I'm gonna draw for Lewis and the rest of you. All right. DNA is a long string of chem- of a chemical in the cell, which.

Is six foot long.

In every cell.

A DNA is a six foot long chemical in a cell. Yes.

Okay.

But it has to be wrapped up in the cell.

It's wrapped up in the cells because it has to fit into a microscopic little bag of membranous bag. Okay. And there's six of those. Six feet of those. Okay. When you add that up over your whole body, you can go to the Moon and back eight times. That's great. That's how long this chemical is in hell. But it has to fit in your body and into a cell. It has to be wrapped up. And that's partly what's controlling which genes are on and which genes are off. So let me draw DNA as a line here. Right, so I've drawn little circles on a board and these are called histones. These are the DNA packing proteins. These allow that string to be put into a microscopic size. And the way they do it is that the DNA, and this is now DNA is this little line I'm drawing, it goes around about two times.

It's so fascinating, the human body.

You know, when you see how complicated the body is, it's hard to imagine how it actually happened. But four billion years is a long time for something to happen. Right, right. All right, so now we've got this DNA molecule wrapped around proteins. My point is that these packing proteins are not evenly distributed. Some parts of the DNA are totally packed. So this is your DNA, this is your double helix. and there's a code on here, A, some of these are T's, some of these are C's, and some of these are G's. Okay, and that's the code, but it could be A, C, T. Okay, it.

Can be any order though.

Yeah.

ATCG.

Yeah, and there's billions of them in this strand that make up this chemical, and you know, we have 23 different chromosomes, so they're split into 23 chunks.

Okay.

Okay, six feet divided by 23, and this This letter code is what tells the cell how to make new proteins, how to behave, and it also encodes the genes for every type of cell in the body. So this code here might be the gene for a nerve cell. But there's a problem. This DNA is also going to be in a liver cell. So what the heck would a liver cell want to do with a nerve cell or with a nerve gene?

It doesn't need it.

It doesn't need it. But it's still in the cell. So the cell has a problem. The gene is there, but doesn't need it. In fact, not only does it not need it, it's a bad thing if it turns it on.

Turns into cancer or tumors or what?

Yeah, it'll start to function like a nerve cell and it's supposed to be a liver cell and vice versa. So when we're developing in the embryo and we start to get, because we're multi-cell, we have a trillion cells, each cell starts to package things differently. So this packaging here in a nerve cell is going to be different than a liver cell. So this is what's called silencing. Okay, so this gene is off.

Because it's in the liver, but you don't need it, so it's turned off.

Yep, and this gene here in this little segment here, we're going to say that's on because that's needed for the nerve cell.

Okay.

So now you've got- Interesting.

So it's on, off, on. So it's a strand of genes throughout the body and some are turned off in certain areas of the body that don't need to be turned on.

Yeah. And that's what gives our cells specificity. It's how they know how to behave when we're young. It's why we work optimally when we're young. Because this structure, this pattern of on off, on off, is perfect.

But we mess it up as adults.

It changes over time. And we can measure that because there's a chemical that binds to this C letter called methyl. I'm calling it Me for short, right? So that Me is a DNA methyl. A methyl is pretty simple. It's just a carbon with three hydrogens on it. But it's a chemical tag that says in this cell, can you please keep this gene off forever? But this doesn't have methyls, so that's on. So that's the way the cell says off on.

Is with the methyls.

The methyls. In part, it's a major thing. But what we can do now we go into the lab and I take your DNA and I can see, oh wow, in some of your cells, that methyl got taken away. Holy crap.

So it's on when it's supposed to be off. Right. Which is not good.

And now your brain cell is partially behaving like a liver cell, which is bad news. You do not want that. And that, I believe, sir, is what is aging.

Ooh. So what happens when this methyl is called? When does this start to not function?

Well, it'll be removed over time through all sorts of issues. One is a broken chromosome will cause these problems, accelerate aging. Crushing a nerve will accelerate it. Really bad damage to a cell takes these away. So you want these to stick around?

I want to stick around. How do you strengthen those then? And how do you get them to stick around? All these things we've talked about.

The things that we do in our daily lives, we know preserve that pattern. So nerve cells remember that they need to be nerve cells. But here's the thing, now we have the technology to put them back on where they belong. We do. Yeah, the reprogramming stuff I just told you about. And somehow there's a backup copy of this pattern in cells that we can turn on and it takes a few weeks. but that's how we reinstate youthfulness in the body.

That's pretty cool.

It's really cool, and I don't even know how it works. Somehow the cell remembers that if that's missing, it needs to go back on there.

And it puts it back in.

We don't know how. Maybe there's some other chemical on here that we don't know that is a flag that says, this is where it should go if you want to be young again. And we're looking for that right now.

That's fascinating. So that is aging right there. When those things are turned off when they were removed, when they're not supposed to be removed.

Yeah. And sometimes you get one over here that shouldn't be here as well. But it's this what we call DNA methylation pattern that changes over time. And I can read that and tell you how old you are exactly within about five percent error and predict when you're going to die unless you change your life. We can draw a graph. When you're young, you age pretty quickly, surprisingly, even before birth. And then it's linear, you get a straight line. And this is, what is this? Let's call this 80 years at the bottom here. So I can take someone's blood, let's take Lewis's blood. Lewis, I'm gonna say, he's pretty young. He's been doing the right things, doesn't drink a lot, and what, you're 39?

Yep.

All right, let's put you halfway through life. you're going to come out here compared to people who have smoked, drank, didn't exercise, didn't get a standing desk. They will come out here. And that means they're much closer to death than you are.

Wow.

But here's the good news. You can slow this down. You can change the trajectory. If you're here and you know you're going to die in the year 2070, you can slow that down so that you can extend your life that way. That's so fascinating.

Doing the right things.

That's so fascinating. And eventually we will be able to.

Take that person and bring them back down.

Come on. To there. We do that in, we did that.

Already in the eye. That's so crazy. So you can do it in the eye, but not in the whole body yet.

Give us a few years. Give us a few years. Well, we're not just working on it. There's been billions of dollars now invested in this.

I'm sure.

Yeah.

Jeff Bezos and the like could put money into it.

Yeah, I'm sure. They're trying to live longer, too. They want to extend this. Well, yeah, imagine a world where you could do that for people. And it's not about living forever. This is really important, Louis, is that the reason I do this is because I think medicine can be done better. We're treating aging at the end of life when diseases caused by aging have taken hold. Trying to treat Alzheimer's without taking into account aging is crazy. That's like putting a Band-Aid on the thing that's actually cutting you. far too often ignore the thing that's causing the problem. And 90% of the diseases in old age are caused by aging itself, probably by that process that I was drawing before. And so by reversing the age of a part of the body, we can actually make diseases go away, which is better than just trying to slow them down. And we know, well, I should say we don't know. In biology, we never know anything. It's not like physics. So in biology, we think what's going on is that if you can reverse the age of an Alzheimer's brain, that mouse will not have Alzheimer's. And we're doing this in the lab right now.

That's crazy. Can you, when someone has, you know, if someone already has Alzheimer's, are you able to reverse that or is that.

Very challenging to do?

Well, right now it's impossible. There's no solution for it right now. Once you have it, it's like just trying to do what? Keep the brain active enough to like maintain the memory and that activity as long as you can.

Yes. Yes, but that's because the cause of the disease, which is aging, is not being addressed. The age of the brain is old. You don't get Alzheimer's when you're 20 and 30. There's a reason because the brain is young and youthful and can repair itself.

And so you gotta think of what are the activities that will keep my brain young longer?

Right, long enough until we can de-age your brain.

And these are the things you're talking about right here. That'll help the brain.

Do those things.

Do these five things and you'll hopefully prevent Alzheimer's or you'll wait longer until you have.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's not even debatable. We know the people who do those things, the kind of things that I do in my life, delay those diseases by a lot, independent of genetics. Now, there are some bad genes. There's one called APOE4 allele, it's called, that predisposes to Alzheimer's. And we've put that and gene variants like that into mice, and we're giving them the equivalent of Alzheimer's. And we also age their brains so that the mouse doesn't have a two-year-old brain. It's like a 30, 40-year-old mouse brain. So remember, we can drive aging forwards. But we can also take away aging. And we've de-aged those mouse brains that have gotten dementia, Alzheimer's. And guess what happens? What? They can learn again. No way. Really? Yeah, that's in the lab right now. We haven't published it, so I don't want to scoop myself. It's not peer reviewed yet. It's not peer reviewed, but I can tell you what's happening. That's pretty cool. And we can also do this in the dish.

We grow little brains from human cells. I could make a mini Lewis Howes.

Brain in the lab. You can make a little brain? I could make brains. From what? I take some skin back to the lab. Really? What I would do is de-differentiate, which means put them back to a stem cell state. So make them age zero instead of age, you know, 85% less, go to 100% less. Now that cell will make millions of copies of itself, will have dishes of your cells, and then by applying the right genes and chemicals, I can make anything from those. What?

Well, not a car. You can make a brain.

We do this every month in my lab.

So you can see an actual, you can take my cells of my skin, put it in a A test tube, and then it's a little plate like that. A little dish.

Petri dish, yeah.

Petri dish, yeah. And you can, how big can this brain actually get to?

Pretty big. Well, you know, it's like a pea, a big pea. But they think they've got brain waves, we can measure the electrical activity. They think? Yeah, I think they might even dream at night. I'm not sure about that.

But they definitely are brain waves. Yeah. Wow. It won't grow bigger though, huh?

Well, the longer you leave it, the bigger they grow, but eventually, They don't have a bloodstream, so it's hard for the oxygen to get in. But they have parts of the brain with different cell types. That is fascinating. Even immune cells in there.

Well, I hear they're growing organs and ears and all these other things, right?

I mean, this has been happening for a long time. Exactly. This is the cutting edge of biology right now. But here's one of the cool things is you can see these things, and I've got whole plates of shaking little brains. If you go to my Instagram, I've.

Got some photos of this.

I want to say check it out. They're really cute. Little brains. We call them the little guffs.

Do you have a brain?

A little baby brain?

I don't have my own brain. Why not?

Well, I think Harvard frowns on that. Gotcha.

You're getting like little mice brain or something or like little.

Oh, that we can do. That's easy. But what we do is we take skin cells from people that have gotten Alzheimer's disease or are already old versus normal people who don't get Alzheimer's typically. and we can make mini brains out of those and have a look what happens when we age them to 80 years and then reverse them. And that's what we're doing now and it's working. Wow. So what will you be able to do then?

Will you be able to take the stem cells and inject that into a person who has Alzheimer's? Is that like, in the future, what that would be like or how is that? To help them reverse?

Well, so my philosophy in biology, it's better to fix what you've got because it's already assembled.

Prevent what you have. Yeah.

Well, prevents the most important. What we talk about today that you do in your life, that's number one. That doesn't take a lot of technology. In fact, that just takes a bit of willpower and a change of lifestyle and habits. Discipline, yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's easy to do.

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Hey everybody, it's Rob Lowe here. If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe. And basically it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J. Fox. There are new episodes out every Thursday, so subscribe please and listen. Wherever you get your podcasts. The important part of it is that we can actually fix what's in place. So in the case of the eye, when we reprogrammed the mouse's eye, we didn't add any new cells. We just woke them up from being old. We rejuvenated them. And then they could see like normal, like a young mouse again. And that's so much easier than trying to replace the cells by putting stem cells in the eye to me, that is just technically challenging.

So you just wake it up. Yeah.

And I think we forget that the body still has the information, the DNA, to be young. It's just not packaged correctly.

It's the methanols, right?

The methanols.

Methanols that get messed up. That get messed up.

Yeah. And put those back on and make those bundles and those loops that say off and on go back to the original pattern. In the same way it's like polishing a scratched CD if anyone remembers an old CD. Instead of skipping songs, you polish it, now it can read the right songs or the right genes at the right time, and that's youth again.

That's interesting.

But how cool is that? Someone who is 100 years old who looks 100, most of their cells could be young. They have the information in their DNA to be young again, just put the methyls back on.

Could it make them look younger too?

Well, of course.

So if you're 100, you can make you look, what, 70? How young could you look potentially?

Well, yeah, this is where my colleagues start to get upset. But there's no biological law that says we can't rejuvenate externally and internally. We've done internally, that's easy. The eye looked younger when we looked at it. Its shape, the structures that are complicated, went back to being young again. It should be true for the hair and the skin as well. Really?

Well, we don't have, we haven't seen it yet. Well, we've got that experiment in progress.

Lisa is being rejuvenated right now. That's fascinating.

Do you have a video of Lisa somewhere on your Instagram?

I want to see this. Yeah, Lisa is on my Instagram.

Okay, I'll check it out. There's a couple of mice. The brother is there. Oh my gosh, this is fascinating stuff. What are the three technologies that are coming in 5, 10, 20 years? that will be connected to us or we'll be using to really help reverse aging?

Well, connected to us is important. We're living in an age where we're going to be fused or at least stuck to machines that measure us all the time.

That's happening now with Levels and these other devices, right?

Yeah, Levels is just the first foray into that. I talk a lot about it in my book about where we're going from having a big patch that measures one thing to having a patch under the skin that measures thousands of things.

That's crazy.

And in the future, and it's not that far away, we will have on our phones an avatar that tells us how we're doing and what we should eat, where we should go for lunch, we're deficient in that, or if we're gonna have a heart attack next week, get to the doctor now.

That's fascinating.

So why couldn't we live another decade on top of what I'm doing just by predicting diseases, by measuring things constantly. How crazy is it that we go to the doctor once a year for a checkup and they say, oh, how are you feeling? That's not medicine. We should be measured a thousand times a second. And there are devices that do that. I have one that I put on my chest. If I didn't put it down, I might even have it still in my pocket. Hold on. So this normally goes on my chest.

What is it?

It ran out of batteries, but it lasts for two weeks. It's called a bio-button. You stick it on?

Stick it on your chest.

You can leave it there. Leave it there, you can swim and shower with it. And it's measuring the body at a thousand times a second. Really? Oh, it just flashed. And it communicates with your phone and it tells your doctor and you if you have any heart issues, but it also measures your body temperature, your movement, your sleep, even can tell if you have a cold or a flu or a COVID.

What's this called?

It's called a bio button.

Bio button.

Yeah, and it's actually FDA approved, which means your hospital, your doctor can send you home with one of these and you'll be monitored by a nurse or a doctor 24/7 in case something goes wrong.

That's crazy.

And the moment that somebody dies from a heart attack where the doctor didn't give them one of these for 20 bucks, there's gonna be a lawsuit that says, why didn't you give my dad or mom, one of these bio buttons for 20 bucks.

That would predict when a heart attack.

Could have saved his or her life. And then these will become ubiquitous. Your doctor will probably send you one of these in the mail a week before you come in for a checkup. Eventually we'll all not want to leave the home without one. We'll sleep with them because, I mean, who wants to die from a heart attack if you can prevent it? That's what these will do.

That's amazing. There's other. So there's devices out there like the bio button. like levels like oral rings that are telling us information now.

And they're exploding. I get my heart rate and my sleep patterns done by my bed every night and it's adjusting the temperature.

The bed is doing that for you.

The bed does all of that. Yeah. My bed knows more about my sex life than probably everybody else.

Which everybody?

But my partner. It's called Eight Sleep.

Eight Sleep. I know that one.

Yeah.

And that tells you It's what tracking your body temperature, temperature and movement, heart rate. Really? And it'll what, make it cooler or hotter based on how you're sleeping? I don't know if it's got that.

Much feedback, but you can adjust it to your preferences.

Gotcha.

And it lowers your body temperature through the night and then warms up when you need to wake up. And there's even a vibration in there.

That wakes you up in the morning. Wake up, yeah. That's pretty interesting. I need sleep. what else is coming? What do you think is good? Like, what are the crazy things are going to be happening in 5, 10, 20 years in terms of devices or technologies?

Well, so when I wrote lifespan, this was 2000, end of 2019, I predicted a world where we wouldn't need to go to the doctor and we'd have these, these telemedicine things and they'd send the, the drugs in the mail. It's pretty funny. It's only two years later, and that's the world already, so. Trying to predict the world 10-20 years from now is really hard. It's going super fast. And medicine is going faster than probably any other thing on the planet with perhaps the exception of NFTs right now.

NFTs and crypto, right? Yeah.

The metaverse. Yeah, all that's going crazy. But medicine is totally different as well from, you know, the iPhone isn't changing much these days, but what's the data coming into the iPhone, or I should say any phone, is what's going to change.

How will the metaverse and being in virtual reality affect us in aging or anti-aging? If we're in five, 10 years, let's say we're all hooked up to devices, staring into a world that we could never imagine in the real world through our devices or working eight to 10 hours a day in these devices, playing games, watching movies, hanging out with friends, In the virtual world, what do you think would happen to our bodies, our minds, our eyes, and the longevity of our genes by being hooked up on this device?

This is what my next book is about, the world that we've built and the pluses and minuses and how the heck do we get out of this mess we've created over the last million years. And so I've thought about this. There are pluses and minuses to the metaverse. the pluses are the following that if you have friends or a pet it's known that that's going to make you live longer. Actually the strongest effect, there was a study done at Harvard of men who after it was the first world war I believe they tracked their whole lives and then found out what made them live the longest and some of it was food, some of it was exercise but the biggest effect was having a reliable partner. So there you go. Or get a pet if you don't have a human partner.

Friends, a healthy partner, and pets.

Yeah.

Will help you live longer.

Right. And the metaverse could help there.

Okay.

You could have lots of friends there.

Okay.

That's the upside. I would imagine you could also be doing meditation and relaxation in there. The downsides, there are a number. So I have a 14-year-old son. Benjamin.

Is he in the metaverse?

Is he in virtual reality? He's got a virtual headset. He's got a couple of virtual reality headsets. And if he's not in virtual reality, he's got screens. Screens, yeah. So that's not going to make you live longer. I mean, your brain will stay active. There's some brain benefits, but mostly it's poor sleep from all the blue light coming in at night.

And mostly, honestly, it's a lack of exercise. Right. Well, now they're trying to do it. You see all the boxing videos of people wearing the goggles and then they're boxing in there. I guess if you're moving and you're doing something where you're moving, that's good, but the light constantly is probably still not good for you, right?

Right. Now there's some move, I mean, in virtual reality, there's a little bit of movement. Right, right. Some light sabers and whatever, but for the most part, if I look at my son, for example, he's not getting enough exercise like a normal kid who's outside. You know, I was talking to my brother about this the other day that we used to, and you're probably the.

Same, but we used to get scratched.

Up and we always had bruises. Yeah, of course. Kids these days, they rarely get a bruise.

It's too safe. They get a bruise hitting their head on something when they're the virtual reality world.

They put grazes and scratches and dirt on their knees.

No, you never see that. They're too clean, right?

Yeah.

They never get scuffed up. So imagine someone's in this, let's say eight hours a day. Because I think in the future, well, based on what I'm seeing Facebook wants is people working in the metaverse. in the future is what I saw in his kind of like videos. It's like once you're in here, you'll be able to work, you do all these things. If someone's out in the goggles eight hours a day, would that make them live longer or less, do you think? Even if they're moving in the goggles and all these other things, do you think they could extend their life?

No. I think that the downsides don't outweigh the benefits, unfortunately. I think most just moving in the 3D world is extremely beneficial. Interacting with people in 3D, physically moving, I mean, unless you're on a treadmill with your virtual headset, which I don't think people are going to want to do, you're not getting enough exercise. Lifting weights is very important. Do yoga if that's not your thing, all that good stuff. Socializing with meals and whatever, that's real life. real benefits to longevity. You know, Mark Zuckerberg, I'm afraid, I'm just telling you my thoughts.

Yeah, I mean, maybe everything in moderation. Maybe you get on there for an hour a day and that's not going to hurt you. That's true. But if you're on eight hours a day, I'm hearing you say that's probably.

Not going to benefit you in living longer and healthier. I think it's just going to make.

The obesity epidemic worse. Because it's just more sugar, more, you know, sodas, more bad food, quick stuff to get calories in while you're In Goggle land, I guess.

Well, it's a lot like the ending to Wally E, the Disney movie. The Pixar movie, yeah. Just sitting around with eating. And I see this with Benjamin, that, I mean, if he has a choice, he'll be on a game all day. Eating, drinking.

Without moving, yeah.

Right.

So how do you discipline your kids? and how can parents discipline, not discipline, but educate, inspire, and create structure around kids today so that their 25-45 year old cells will thank you, the parents, for setting them up as opposed to them having health challenges in their 20s, 30s, and 40s because of sitting in front of screens all day and eating sugar all day.

Yeah, well that's a really important point is that I think a lot of parents don't think about this, but it's super important to know this, is that the way you raise your kids in terms of not just socially, but what they eat, how much they eat, when they eat, of course, they need a lot more food than someone my age for their growth and everything, and you need to make sure nutrition is all there. But if you allow your kid to become really obese and not exercise, that's going to affect them 30, 40, 50 years later, because that clock is ticking from conception. Right? So you gotta look after your kids and the kind of things that we talked about, the kind of foods that are healthy. Certainly meat is fine for kids. I'm not saying that, but focus on less per meal if it's a big fatty fried meal.

That's not good.

No, I mean once in a while you gotta live, but most kids will thrive on Fresh food, homemade food if you've got the time and money to do that for sure. Get them out of the chair. But the one big thing that I've been quite militaristic about with my kids, much to their chagrin, is sugar.

Because they want it all the time.

Well, it feels good. It tastes good. But there are brands of sodas that don't have any unnatural sweeteners or just stevia. What's the Oolong Pop or something?

Oolong Pop is the one that I... I've been drinking that recently. I really like that. Yeah. Like it doesn't taste that good when.

I first had it, but the more you drink it, I'm like, this tastes great.

Even the grape one is great. Yeah, I know. So, yeah, that's the kind of thing.

Oolong Pop for kids. Which is, well, way less sugar and it's like got probiotics or something. It does.

And the sugar that's in there is low glycemic index, doesn't spike it, and it's all natural, yeah.

Have you tested it with the levels.

And making making sure that it doesn't spike too much for you.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it seems like it's not too bad.

It didn't change it at all. Yeah, I was really impressed.

Interesting.

Yeah, so that's what my kids drink now.

That's, look at you, I like that. I wanted to ask you, I asked you beforehand about what you think would be, make this powerful. You mentioned what your greatest fears are. So with all the research you've done, all the science you've done, what are the things that bring you the most hope and also what has caused the most fear or created the most fear inside of you?

Yeah, so as a kid and to this day, I've often looked at humanity from above as though I'm an alien observing us and judging us. My grandmother taught me to do that. She said that humanity is capable of great things, but very horrible things too. And she lived through World War II in the aftermath. in Europe and Hungary. And so I like to look at us as a species that's capable of very horrible things, and we know that from history, but amazing things. I believe any problem is solvable, any, if we just work on it. The fact that we've built these phones and the internet and all that, I mean, how amazing is that? It's magical.

Incredible.

We don't stop to think of it much. I'm gonna fly home.

100 years ago, you'd been like, it had been the craziest thing to see something flying.

Yeah, and now we see it.

This is unbelievable, right?

Yeah. So, humanity's fantastic. And I do want to stick around to see where we go from here.

Yeah, now you can FaceTime someone in seconds, and 20 years ago we couldn't do that.

Yeah, where are the video phones? Oh, here they are. Crazy, isn't it? It is great. But my fear is, that. That. That Humanity is not going to reach its potential. And then to some extent, that I'm not going to reach my potential. So I. I have a fear of being irrelevant and to have wasted my life.

Really?

It's like I've been given this chance to bend the needle of humanity towards good, not bad. And I have this finite number of years, hopefully not maybe a little longer than I thought, but it will be finite.

What will make you the most proud of your self, if you reach what potential, if you solve what problem, if you help in what way. Let's say you live to as long as you want to live. You extend life as long as it will take you while being sharp and functional and healthy, not just suffering and extending the suffering. What would be the thing where you look back and say, man, I did exactly what I felt like my potential was.

Wow. So I have three great kids. So that for me is one type of immortality.

Yes.

But for myself, what I'd like to leave behind is proof that you can make medicines that slow or reverse the aging process and that that's the best way to address diseases. Because I believe aging itself is a medical condition. We just ignore it because it's so common. But it should be treatable aggressively and we should be working on it way more than we are right now.

Interesting. So creating technologies and medicines to solve that.

Right. Hopefully saving millions of lives, that would be one thing that I'm hoping to achieve in my lifetime. But what I'm also doing, the reason that I'm here and I've written, I'm writing books and I have a podcast, is that I need help. I can't just do this all by myself. And so I'm educating what to do in your life today and what kind of research we need and where spend your research dollars or donations if you want to help and change the way people think about medicine. So when they go to their doctor and the doctor says, oh, we don't need to give you that medicine because it's for someone who's sick, they can say, well, why not give it to me before I get sick?

Right.

So there's a drug called metformin, which is for type 2 diabetes, high blood sugar, that looks promising as an anti-aging drug. It protects against cancer and heart disease and frailty and Alzheimer's even. But doctors most are reticent to give it to people who are not sick yet because it's approved only to treat a disease. But aging isn't a disease, so doctors can't treat it yet. So if aging becomes a disease, then that's another thing that I'll die happy knowing.

How do you make aging a disease?

Well, the government has to regulate it and they have, they could do it tomorrow if they wanted to. The World Health Organization in two years ago, they have this handbook of diseases, about 400 diseases that we can all suffer from. It's great reading. But they changed it. There was an MG42 code that they put in called old age. And for the first time, the WHO said aging is a medical condition. And I Rejoice. That's a first step. FDA needs to step up. Let's do that. Recently, there were protests from some doctors around the world saying old age cannot be a disease. So they changed it back.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it's a real setback.

Why are they wanting to change it? Or why are they saying that? That old age is not a disease.

Well, it's very common. And the definition of a disease is something that happens to less than 50% of people.

And this happens to everyone, essentially, right?

If you're lucky, yeah.

Aging. If you don't die before.

Yeah, earlier. Right. But the symptoms are the same. It causes deterioration, suffering, pain. can cause death. Yes. Why is that not a disease?

Right. Because everyone, it happens to everyone, I guess.

Right. So what? Right. Then we should be working on it even more.

Yeah.

Than other rare diseases.

Why, when you were a kid, did this become such a fascinating thing for you to become, you know, driven to be a top scientist in the world, to be at Harvard, to be, you know, doing this type of research? Why have you been driven? your whole life or has it not been your whole life? Has it been more in your younger adulthood?

I was quite a precocious little kid. My grandmother raised me in part. My father was taken away from my grandmother because she was 15 in high school and so she didn't have a kid to raise. Then I came along, her first grandkid, and she put a lot of energy and she was a philosopher and and artist and just instilled in me all of these things that I've been telling you, including make everyday count. And so from an early age, not only did I try to make everyday count, I was told by my grandmother that I could do it. So if you're a parent, trust me, if you give your kids positive feedback, it'll have a big difference because they can actually believe it. I truly believed I could change the.

World, you know, and and how was that, what did that belief do for you?

It gave me the courage to attempt it and to believe in myself. And if I look back at my life, it was crazy to think that I'd be here today with you. I was a kid in the suburbs of Sydney who, you know, you wouldn't have looked at me and said, you know, that I was anything special. I was okay at science, but I wasn't a good speaker. I wasn't outgoing. I was pretty shy. And so to get here is quite something. I've had to change my personality. I've had to become smarter and focus and much more resilient, less shy as well. But I think I've done that because I believed that I could do it.

Yeah.

And the fear of failing was way worse than trying it and. and not succeed. So, I mean, the fear of not attempting it is the problem. I would rather die with no regrets and having failed, but I'll take on big things. But because they're big things, I do worry that they might fail. Okay, so it's this dichotomy of these overachievers that, wow, I'm gonna build a company or I'm gonna get a job at Harvard. And then I get a company and I get a job at Harvard. oh, crap. Now what?

Now what? Yeah.

Yeah. So that's what gets me out of the bed in the morning, but also the. The knowledge that as I've gone in my career, I have a greater chance of actually making a difference. I I'm. Now, what am I? 52? I'm in a position that I really could only dream of having, of being able to talk to the world and make discoveries that can impact the world and make medicines, hopefully, that can save millions of lives. So that drives me now is that every moment that's wasted, every day that I don't succeed, another 100,000 people die. Wow.

Because what is 150,000 to 180,000 people die every day? Is that the stat from old age? From old age, yeah.

100,000 a day from old age.

Yeah, roughly, yeah.

Because I think it's- It's more.

It's more, yeah. I think I saw 150,000 on average die every day in the world. I don't know if that's from all causes or what, but- That's fascinating. You talked about your grandmother giving you instilling you the ability or the belief that you can really accomplish what you want to accomplish. What do you think instilling negativity or negative belief or doubt in someone does for their aging? Does it accelerate the aging process when we have negative thoughts or someone puts that in us? Or does that give us any benefit of all of living longer with negative thoughts in our mind.

Yeah. So I don't know of any research on that.

That'd be interesting.

It sure would. The power of the mind is strong. And I'm saying that as a scientist, not just because it's a lot of people say it. It's been shown that parts of the brain control our longevity. There's a particular part of it that hangs down the base of our spine, of our brain called the hypothalamus, which is secreting a whole bunch of molecules into the bloodstream, some of which control our immune system, but also our age. And so again, we use mice to test this because we can manipulate them better. And if you decrease inflammation in this hypothalamus, the mice will secrete less of a molecule that causes aging, and then the mice live longer.

Okay.

So I think that your mental attitude being more resilient, don't worry so much, don't have chronic stress, have some confidence could have remarkable benefits on your long-term health.

Because that's where the part of the brain that connects to this, is that what you're saying?

Yeah, it's the drip feeder for hormones and chemicals from your brain. So what you think controls your body largely through that. There's some other nerves like there's a vagus nerve as well.

So this is science too, that your thoughts impact your immune system or inflammation or certain areas of the body that also make you age.

Yeah, right. And that's true. And there was a study just two weeks ago, again in mice, but usually these things are applicable, that they manipulated some nerves in the middle of the brain that were known to be affected by stress. And they started to find more immune cell defenses in the gut of those mice controlled by these nerve cells in the brain.

What does that mean?

Well, if you're under a lot of chronic stress and you know people say, oh, my immune system is depressed. I used to think, yeah, right. How's that possible? Now we know that it could be possible.

So the more stress you have, potentially the weaker your immune system.

Yeah. Through your brain actually reducing the amount of immune cells going around your body.

What do you do to eliminate stress or remove? Because obviously, a certain amount of stress is good for the body, right? Not eating all the time, moving your body, tearing the muscles in a healthy way, resistance, like having the courageous conversations to apologize or clear whatever things are happening in relationships. There's a certain amount of stress that's healthy. But how do you manage the unhealthy type of stress?

Well, I was a stressed out kid, so I've had to work at it. Everything worried me.

You had to change your personality or something.

I did. Yeah, I did. I had to take the long view of life and not worry so much about what's happening today and think about, is this really going to be a problem a year or two or 10 years from now? That helps a lot.

Perspective.

Perspective is good. Breathing, Jim Nestor does a lot of this.

Yeah, he's great.

So there's breathing. And very recently, though, I'm enjoying it a lot, some meditation. Yeah, I have a brain tap helmet. Have you seen these? It helps me.

You put the helmet on?

You do, and there's lights that flash at certain frequencies that are known to get your brain into a certain state.

Theta wave or whatever it's called. What's the helmet called?

Oh, it's called Brain Tap.

Brain Tap. Okay.

Yeah, I'm sounding like a paid ad. I have nothing to do with them, but I do like their product. And so I'm not a professional or a long time meditator, but every night I do a minimum of about 12 minutes, sometimes half an hour, and find I can get by with less sleep as well.

Really? What's the pressure like being, you know, heading up this department at Harvard and and putting these research papers out there and writing these books and now podcast and YouTube channel, putting your, you know, life's work out there while having Harvard on your, you know, next to your name, arguably one of the most credible institutions in the world. How, what's the pressure like? And how do you manage that pressure?

Yeah, that's really stressful. I used to pull it. When I first got this job, I was only 29.

Wow.

I think I was one or the youngest guy there.

So biologically a few years ago.

Yeah, right. I become a little wiser, but I was, I used to freak out. I'd pull into my car parking spot and sit in the car and think, David, what are you doing? You know, the imposter syndrome.

How did you get here?

And how, not just my age, but I don't know how to run a lab. I met this prestigious university. They'd just given me half a million bucks to work with. Now what? Now that's the fear of failure coming in. I've got what I wanted. Now what? And so I've been fearful of failing, but at Harvard, what I've done... So I've got an overdose of the fu gene. So the fu gene runs through my family. It's typically turned on in teenagers, but I've got a heavy dose of it even as an adult. I don't like being told what to do. You can talk to people around me, you know. But what I like to do at Harvard is to push the envelope. People say, that can't be done. And if you say that to me.

That'S kind of like, okay, let's go.

Come on, let's try that. And I pushed the envelope sometimes a little too far. I've got my hand slapped over the years. But in general, I've been slightly ahead of the curve. So 10 years ago, if I had a podcast, Even five. What are you doing? You're selling out. You're a salesperson. This is crazy. Now, you know, it's accepted and in fact it's probably liked that the university has a spokesperson. Same with companies. I was starting companies in my early 30s. A lot of people, my elders were saying, my mentors were saying, you can't start companies. That's not what scientists do. You're contaminated with industry. less trustworthy. So I kept doing good science, thankfully, so that trust was maintained. But now at Harvard, probably one out of four professors has some sort of company affiliation. Really? Yeah, it's a pretty normal thing, but you do that 20 years ago.

You were like kicked out or something? Yeah.

Well, you're a pariah for sure. And there's a lot of gossip at a place like that.

Sure, sure.

It's very clubby. Yeah. And I was the Aussie. kid who probably didn't belong there. So I'm still there. Thankfully.

Yes.

I have what's known as tenure, which means as long as I don't do something really bad to embarrass the university. The university and the universe.

Yeah.

I get to keep my job as long as I keep money coming in.

Right.

So one of the other things I'm fearful of, like most scientists, is running out of money. Our Labs exist on grants from the government and donors and. The university doesn't give us any. Very little, it's a small amount of our salary. But other than that, I've got a few million bucks every year to raise to keep my experiments going. And people who visit my lab, they're shocked because they think that I'm just rolling in money. But I could, you know, two years from now, I could be out of money and out of a job. And that never ends.

It's this treadmill of a scientist. Constantly, yeah, trying to raise money, essentially. Let's just hypothetical scenario. I don't really want to even want to put this out there, but hypothetically, let's say you could only solve one problem. You had 10 years to solve the impossible, and you put all of your energy and focus into solving this one problem that bugs you the most. What would be the problem and what would you solve?

That's what I'm doing. In my lab, we like to say, ask good questions and then figure out the rest later. So my question is, I think we figured out largely why we age. There's a lot of things going on I haven't talked about today, but I think we know that. But what I want to know is how do you access the backup copy of youthfulness in the cells that we have? And can that be done with a pill?

One pill. Yeah.

Simple question, big one. So that's what you're trying to figure out. That's it. Yeah, and I've got 20 people in.

My lab working on it right now. That's amazing. And so why do we age them? Is that what you're saying?

Why do we age? Yes. Well, I believe it's the loss of information that we have as kids and that those bundles and loops of the DNA get messed up and you can reset those. But there are lots of other downstream, we call it downstream causes. It's like a pyramid. And so the other causes, there are things like protein misfolding, the mitochondria, the energy packs start to decline, you lose your stem cells, you get zombie cells in the body called senescent cells, which we're learning to fix now in my lab. And DNA damage is another thing that drives the clock forward, we've discovered. So those mice that get older, we actually just cut their chromosomes and then the clock advances. So those are the groups of what we call the hallmarks of aging that we can measure in you and predict how old you are and when you're gonna die.

That's crazy.

Including those methyl chemicals that we call the DNA methylation clock.

Wow.

Yeah.

So do you know when you're gonna die based on these markers?

I do.

What's the age that says right now?

So right now my age is tracking at, there's a number of tests, but I'm typically five to 10 years younger. based on a variety of tests. So that gives me that amount of time at the end.

What is that? So 78, is that the average age right now? So it'd be like 88, 90 or something or. What do you mean?

Yeah. 88. 88. 88. Right.

Yeah.

So that's like 2058.

That's nuts to think about, isn't it?

That you have a dead date.

It's crazy.

I think about that date a lot. Wow. I actually set the year 2050 as my. spiry date when I was a teenager and have been working ever since to get stuff done.

Right. 2000, 2050 as your expiration date.

Yeah.

And what is it now?

What year is it? No.

I mean, what is the expiration date now?

It's another eight to ten years. Beyond that. But if we can reverse aging by one year every year, then all bets are off. Right. And we're learning how to do that.

Wow. That's fascinating. How often do you think about your death?

Many times a day.

Really? What does that do for you when you think about it?

It makes me want to work harder and get stuff done and call people I love and tell them that I love them.

Mmm. Yeah.

I think everybody should be aware of their own death. I watched my mother die in front of me. It wasn't pretty. And I think that's what a lot of us are going to experience. We just are in denial. And until you're probably in your 60s, 70s, you can kind of forget about it. You're healthy, you don't have to worry about it. But I haven't been able to get that thought out of my mind.

Right.

Having an expiry date and a certain amount of time to achieve things.

And when did your mom pass?

Oh gee, 2014.

Okay. And it was smoking was the main cause. Well, old age is the cause, I guess, of everyone's death, but smoking was what accelerated it?

Yeah, accelerated the clock and then some cell in her lung became, lost its identity, went back to age zero, started growing, became a tumor about the size of a grapefruit.

In the lungs.

In one of her lungs.

Oh man.

She was coughing up blood. That was the first she knew about it.

When she coughed up blood?

Yep. They took out one lung. That's vicious surgery. And then suffered through lack of breath for another 20 years. Oh, man. And. But it was. It was more painful for her, but. But it was psychologically painful for me because I was so against the smoking that just every day, a fight with my mother about, don't smoke. You're gonna kill yourself. You're gonna get cancer. I was hiding her cigarettes, trying to save her life because I, you know, I like to save lives. That's what I do. Yeah. And the fact that I couldn't save my mom's life still. pretty harsh thought, as you can tell on my face right now. Yeah.

So she. Did she keep smoking after the surgery, too? No, she stopped.

Right. Having a lung taken out, it's a pretty good way to stop smoking. But she did stop. Right. She was in a lot of pain for many years. It's quite. Because they have to cut through your. Your ribs to get. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it's not good. But, I mean, in the end, the other lung gave out. slow, progressive, and she would struggle for air at night when she was asleep, even with oxygen, couldn't get enough, and you know, suffocating is not pleasant. So she spent many years suffocating slowly. That's exhausting. And eventually that's how she went. Yeah, so if you smoke, please quit, please. It's not worth it. I know it's hard. The addiction is really hard for a lot of people. Yeah. But I've seen what it can do. It's just really, really tragic.

What is the best way to die?

In your sleep peacefully. I don't think it happens that often, though.

Does it ever happen?

Rarely. Yeah, it's. I was just talking with Tom Bill you the other day, and he saw somebody die, actually, somebody had a stroke at one of his events in his 40s, and there was. nothing he could do.

He watched them just right in front of him die. Yeah.

Yeah. And they were trying to revive him.

Oh, they can't do anything. No.

No. His brain basically had popped.

Oh, my gosh.

But you. You realize, you know, this is a 40 year old in his Prime, that you can die. We could. One of us could die this afternoon. We got to live life like that.

How does a stroke happen like that? If you're healthy or seeming healthy, is there some underlying condition?

They can be, yeah, there are some weak blood vessels in some people genetically. But being overweight and having high blood pressure is a big thing.

What are three things we can do medically every year? Is it just check with the doctor once a year and do some tests? Or what would you say are three things, whether it be see a doctor, take this test every year, to at least have a baseline of understanding of the information about our bodies, our blood work, I guess. What are those things we can do that you were like, this is a bare minimum. Do these three things.

All right. So the best predictor of your long-term longevity that we know of is your blood sugar. And there's a readout called HbA1c. HbA1c.

HbA1c. C. What is this?

Ask your doctor. It's the amount of glucose that's become fused attached to your hemoglobin. And when you've got high blood sugar, it attaches to a lot of proteins in your body. You become caramelized. And hemoglobin you can measure in a blood test. And HB stands for hemoglobin, and A1C is the version that's got sugar on it. And doctors measure this routinely for diabetics. but they don't measure it routinely for regular people. But you want to make sure, and the reason you want to measure HbA1c rather than just your fasting blood glucose, which is quite variable, is the HbA1c, it's a snapshot of a month because your hemoglobin gets turned over every few months. So it's like an average of a month. Now you can do it with a monitor from levels if you want, but if you don't have that, then this HbA1c number gives you an idea So if you're around five or lower, you're super young and healthy. If you're in the mid-range up to about seven, you're pre-diabetic and above that, you're type 2 diabetic.

So having this information every year is important.

It is. And not just every year, you can do it more often.

Every month, every week, every day.

Well, I do it every few months, Insight Trackers, I get it through them. And I'm seeing things go up and as they go up, up, I bring them down.

You make adjustments.

I do. Yeah. I mean, that's the point of having this data. Otherwise, you get sick and it's too late.

Yeah. So having the information about this is a huge thing you can do a few times a year.

Right. And there's another one that I'd measure for heart disease, which is called HS, little HS, and then capital C, capital R, capital P. Okay. High sensitivity. CRP. So this C-reactive protein is a good measure of cardiovascular inflammation and you want that to be low.

How low do you want it to be?

I forget the units.

Okay, but you just want it to be low.

Yeah. And then there's a new type of cholesterol, not new, but new to the mainstream called LP little a. It's a little capital L, little p, and then in parentheses A. And that is the new measure of cholesterol. That genetic variance of that, if you have a lot of it and it's a little particle, a really small particle, then it'll oxidize. And that's what likely predicts your heart attack of the future. But most doctors either don't know about it and don't measure it routinely. talk to your doctor.

And what are the three supplements we should be taking on a consistent basis?

Well, I don't recommend anything. I'm just a PhD.

Okay, what are three things that you want to take consistently?

Yeah, if I could only take three, I would take resveratrol, I take a gram with a bit of yogurt, NMN, we haven't talked about NMN, and then metformin.

NMN, Yep. It's a supplement.

It is.

Okay.

I don't sell any supplements, by the way.

Gotcha.

I'm not making any money here.

But you would take these?

Yes. I would. I would because our research has said that that's what works in animals at least, in some clinical trials. We've done plenty of studies and others in resveratrol, long-term benefits. I've been on it for 13 years. Activates the genetic pathways we've worked on.

Controls the epigenome.

Yeah.

NNN.

NNN also activates the same epigenetic structures. Okay. Makes them stay young, we think.

And the third one again?

Metformin. This is the type 2 diabetes drug that controls blood sugar.

That doctors aren't able to give out right now?

They're reticent, but they can if they want to. Interesting.

Interesting.

I believe there's a website online. Check that out.

What's it called?

I don't remember.

Okay, but Google it.

Google it.

You'd see it. Interesting. But these are the three things you would take daily if you could only take these. Right now, I mean, I've got some.

Other things in the hopper that I'm trying. The alpha-ketoglutarate might be promising, the age-reversal one, if we see if that's got merit.

You're trying all these?

Well, I add them one at a time or two at a time and then I measure. It's all scientific.

Interesting.

And so I've optimized myself. You can actually, I've got graphs where you see a 20-year-old's numbers, on average, a male and an 80 year old's numbers. And where am I? You know, I'm trying to be down here and.

Yeah, so far.

So far, so good.

Oh, I've only got a couple minutes left with you. We'll have to have you come back on and do more on this because I have a ton more questions that we didn't get to. But you have an amazing new podcast that Rob finally convinced you to launch. Lifespan. It's also on on Spotify, Apple, audio, lifespan and also YouTube, which is inspiring that you're on YouTube as well. And you've already blown up on there. So, make sure we subscribe to you. David Sinclair, all of her social media, David Sinclair PhD, lifespan, the podcast, lifespan and David Sinclair on YouTube. Make sure you guys subscribe if you want more science research and to look at this beautiful man's face in front of you all the time on YouTube. But really, you're breaking down the science and teaching all this stuff in way more in depth. If you want the, the whiteboard in your face, you'll get that more with the YouTube videos as well. And you're making science more simplified for people like me to understand, where I think it's extremely important for us. So I really acknowledge you, David, for constantly making this your mission to serve people, to help people live longer, to help people eliminate diseases, things that cause suffering and pain, because we don't have all the information out there yet. And a lot of it is mixed information, people saying all these different things. So for you to be committed to doing the science and now teaching it more and more to the masses, I really acknowledge you and appreciate your energy, your effort in doing this. and look forward to having you back on many, many times in the future. I'll ask you one final question. We've asked you this a couple times before. It's called the three truths. So I'm curious to see if this is different than the last time we had you on.

And I don't remember what I said.

Exactly. So imagine it's your last day on earth and for whatever reason you've got to take all of your work with you. All of your content, your work, your books, your videos, podcasts, research, It's gotta go with you to the next place. We don't have access to it anymore. Hypothetical. But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world or three things you know to be true from all of your life experiences, your work, your relationships, anything at all. What would those three truths be?

Number one would be find your soulmate and don't rush it. your partner will determine your happiness more than anything. Second would be make every day count. Act as though it's your last day on Earth. Work hard, make great decisions, and tell those you love that you love them. And then third, look after your future self because you will be that person one day.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple podcast as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

Hey, everybody, it's Rob Lowe here. If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe. And basically it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J. Fox. There are new episodes out every Thursday. So subscribe, please, and listen. Wherever you get your podcasts.