The 8 SECRETS To Age In Reverse & LIVE LONGER Today! | David Sinclair & Lewis Howes

One of the big things that we're missing in medicine is that aging is driving a lot of our sickness. And when we treat diseases, we're treating them far too late.

When you think about extending lifespan, the important thing is to realize that you don't live longer in old age, you live longer in a youthful state.

Truly reverse aging, like a reset switch, then who knows? We could live 220.

Did you know that it's possible to reverse your age.

In this video, Harvard scientist Dr. David Sinclair breaks down the secrets to becoming young again.

Was there anything new that you discovered in the last year that hasn't been out yet, that hasn't been talked about?

Yeah, well, it's in my book, but other than that, that might be why the journal's angry that some of it ended up in the book, but Maybe I jumped the gun. So what we think we've discovered here is that cells lose their ability to stay young because they lose information.

They lose information.

Yeah.

So there are two types of information in our cells. One is the genetic information that we get from our parents, of course, DNA. But there's another level of information that's just as important, but we just don't talk about it. It's called the epigenome, which is the instructions to tell the cell which of those 25, 23,000 genes to read. And if you read the right ones at the right time, you'll be a nerve cell or a skin cell. Because you don't want to read all 23,000 at once. That doesn't work.

It doesn't work.

So the epigenome is like the pianist that plays the piano. And what we think we've figured out is that aging is that the pianist becomes demented.

Demented.

Just can't play the tune right anymore. The wrong genes come on.

What is that called?

The Pianist?

What's that called?

The demented pianist?

What's it called?

The epigenome.

The epigenome, okay, so the epigenome becomes demented, loses function in some way.

Right, and we can cause that to happen. One of the main reasons that it happens, we think, is chromosomes break every day, a trillion times in our body every day, and in the process of having to open up the DNA and fix it and put it back together, the epigenome gets messed up and we lose the ability to read the right genes.

So how do we stop it from breaking?

Well, you can't always prevent it. Start by not smoking. Start by not getting burnt by the sun.

Really?

Yeah.

Don't be in the sun for too long.

No.

No, I mean we know that age is your skin. Any Australian will tell you that.

What about like, what's the amount of time we should be in the sun without aging? Or does it always have sunscreen on at all times? Isn't that chemicals that affect the skin?

I mean, yeah, there are some people who will tell you that zero is the best.

Zero sun?

Well, that's what some people say. Isn't vitamin D supposed to help you live longer too? Well, yeah, they would say to take a supplement instead.

But I'm not sure.

It's human nature, right? Sun, for me, makes you feel good, a bit of UV. But you don't want to overload the body.

It's very easy to overdo it.

So 10-20 minutes a day. When your skin's starting to tingle, Don't get red. But in Australia, we used to pull burns of skin off our arms.

Like blisters, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So I've only been burnt maybe once or twice in my adult life for good reason.

Don't say that's done too long.

Right, right. Unfortunately, it ends up, you know, you look white and pasty, but for Caucasians anyway.

Right.

But that's the price you pay. if you suntan a lot in your 20s, by the time you're 40 or 50, you will look about 5-10 years older.

Okay.

Now it's not all about vanity, but skin cancer is also an issue. So in Australia, we learn a lot about that.

Wow. So you can be in the sun, just put protection on, is what I'm hearing.

That's right.

It's like, or just stay inside all day.

Yeah, no, put protection on.

I mean, it's like, enjoy Mother Nature. You can go to the beach, you can go on hikes, just wear a hat, put sunscreen on your face, your arms, your hands, right?

Right.

Okay, just make. Okay, cool.

Yeah, you gotta go outside for sure. I mean, otherwise what's life? Absolutely.

Okay. Now, I just did this trip to Poland with Wim Hof, where with a group of guys where we did this intensive breathing and ice therapy training where we were in the ice for 10 minutes up to our neck. breathing and exposing ourselves to the cold. We also hiked four hours in a mountain that was about 50 miles an hour wind at the top, -22 Celsius, with no clothes on, just shorts, hats, gloves, and shoes. So exposing our legs and our chest and our face to the wind and the cold, pelting us with hail essentially at the top. How important is heat therapy and cold therapy to aging or anti-aging?

I want to hear all about this. This sounds fascinating. Definitely tell us more about that. But yeah, so when I started writing the book, my editor said, you, got to talk about this cryotherapy and also sauna. That's not science, can't be real. So I looked into it and we'd also actually I must admit, we've done some work on cold already. One of these sirtuin protective genes, not number one that I talked about, but number three, responds to cold and actually turns on healthy production of what's called brown fat. So the more I looked into it and the more I pondered my own research, I thought maybe being cold does help your health. And so I write about it, but I think that the data, it's not as strong as as fasting and exercise. But it's believable that what you're doing when you're cold or actually when you're hot is turning on those protective longevity genes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, not internally, you're not going to freeze internally and be cold. But on your skin, you're going to... and just under your skin, you're going to have what's called brown fat, which is full of energy producing and heat producing mitochondria, the battery packs of cells. And those mitochondria are really dense and one of the reasons that they, that brown, not white fat. And the brown fat, it's not like normal fat where you're just storing energy. It's actually metabolically active. So it's burning energy. But it's also seemed to be healthy because it's secreting these little proteins that tell the body to stay young. We don't know what they all are, but there's a lot of evidence that they're having it.

Stay young.

Well, yeah.

So brown fat is found mainly in babies.

Wow.

Because they can't shiver. Little babies. Did you know that?

I don't understand.

Why can they shiver though?

I don't know. It's weird.

How old do you become until you can shiver for the first time? I don't know. I'd have to guess. But newborns don't shiver and they have to use this brown fat. They're full of it. But as we get older, we lose it. In fact, when I was, you know, 20 years ago, when I was just starting out, people thought there was no such thing as brown fat in adults. And then they did. PET PET scans and found that this brown fat was mostly in people who were cold and experiencing cold and found across the back mainly.

So you can recreate brown fat in an adult?

Exactly. Yes, or beige fat. You can turn your white fat into brownish fat by being cold.

Do we know how much cold therapy.

You need to do?

Is it once a month? Is it once a week? Is it daily? Is it for a certain amount of time?

Well, we're still figuring that out. seems like the more the better, unfortunately.

So what you were doing sounds perfect. So like every day doing a cold shower or an ice plunge for a couple minutes a day or just something like that helps generate brown fat, which is a layer of mitochondria, dense mitochondria under the skin, which helps you burn more fat.

Yeah.

Is that what it is?

That's a good way to put it.

Okay.

It's designed to keep you warm, but it also is telling the body, hey, times are tough. we could freeze to death. Adversity, right? What doesn't kill you makes you live longer.

Oh, that's a good one. So put your body through pain throughout your life as consistently as possible. Like controlled pain, right? Going in a sauna for 15 minutes and pushing an extra minute, like that feeling of adversity, going in cold, working out hard, doing something where it's a, you're not gonna kill yourself or hurt or break a leg, but it's like, Discomfort. Is that what I'm hearing?

That's the most important lesson. We call it hormesis. And it's basically your body will be complacent if you don't tell it to work hard. And the problem with our society is everything is designed to be comfortable. That's what we strive for. You know, I was coming here flying out and I'm looking at all the roller bags and thinking, I'm carrying my two bags here. and I'm thinking, should I put it down? No, I'm gonna walk with my bag, 'cause that's what people used to do. But, you know, these days everything is all about comfort. Constant food, don't exercise, don't be cold ever. It's crazy. We're killing ourselves. We're accelerating our aging process. So we gotta get out of that comfort zone.

We're killing ourselves by being comfortable.

Right.

So is there too much, like if I'm cold therapy and hot and fasting and doing a HIIT workout, is there such thing as too much discomfort? in your life that will start to age you?

I don't think so.

So, I could fast, be in the cold and the heat, two minutes of sun, like do all these things in a day, do it consistently, carry my bags everywhere, and you think it'll make me younger?

I think your rate of aging will be slowed down dramatically. Skip a meal or two a day as much as you can. Yeah, I mean, there's no question in my mind that this would work. Give you an extra at least 15 years, maybe 25.

Wow.

It's not rocket science. If you do that to a rat, if you give it cold or you actually give it less food, it starts to... If you come to my lab, you'll see mice. We've got mice that are on a regular diet. They can eat whenever they want.

Food just laying around, just eat as much as you want.

And those are not fat mice because they're on a lean diet. The ones we give the high fat diet, they die 30% faster anyway. They age rapidly. But let's say even if you're lean like you are and eating well, but you're eating a lot, right? Constantly.

Yeah.

If we do that to a mouse, they will age at what we call the normal rate. So they'll be two years old, they're getting frail, they get gray hair, they're looking old, and then they'll die about six months later on average. The mice that are on this calorie restricted diet that either get less food in total or only eat for a few hours a day, they're running around the cage, no gray hair, they're super active, they stay young.

So don't eat.

Well, you gotta eat.

It's fasting. What do you like, intermittent fasting or do you like the 24 hour fast or do you like a three day fast? What do you think is, I deal for most people.

Well, yeah, scientifically, I think going for three days is great. So scientifically, Peter Attia hats off to him. That's his profession.

He can do that. What's the prolong or what's the diet? What's this guy?

Peter Attia?

Yeah.

I don't know what his diet is.

Do you have a diet? Does he have like a program for this or.

No, I just think so. He's a doctor who's experimenting on his body in severe ways.

And three days is like what he eats.

Well, he goes for a week without food. He just drinks water.

And skin and bones though, right?

Yeah.

It's probably not the best for high performance of like... No, no, no.

If you're an athlete, forget it.

So what if you're an athlete, if you want to work out and do HIIT training, what do you think is scientifically right? Like one day fast and then intermittent fasting and skipping meals?

Well, so I get asked this every day. And the simple answer is do as much as you can and the more the better in general without losing your energy. But the other fact is that nobody knows the true answer. Anyone who says this is the way to do it is BSing you.

Because everyone's different and we all have different needs and...

Different bacteria in the gut, different energy levels, different genes, different lifestyles. different professions. And so for someone like me, I'll tell you what works for me is, so I'm often sitting probably for half the day. I got a standing desk, that's a start.

Right.

You're not working out.

No, I work out once a week for a few hours, that's about it.

That's it.

As much as I can do. So for me what I do is I very rarely eat breakfast. I'm not hungry in the morning anyway. I try to skip lunch with my cups of tea. I would say I'm about 70% successful. I might have a little nibble of something in the afternoon because I can't focus well. But then I have a normal dinner, I go out to dinner and I'm living normally. That works for me. And I think for an athlete, at least skipping one meal would be good.

Would be good. And then maybe one day a month not eating or something, right?

Yeah, that sounds reasonable. Going for a whole week though.

Yeah, 24-hour fast could be good once a month.

One thing though about that three-day fast, I've never done it myself, but what happens we know is that it kicks in what's called the super cleansing autophagy pathway, which kills the bad cells and gets rid of the bad proteins that have accumulated. Three days.

You need to go for three days.

To really get the deep cleans, unfortunately.

You've never done it though, huh? She don't need it.

You look like you're 30.

You're fine.

Maybe I could be 20, who knows.

From your perspective as a geneticist, why do people have such different physical reactions to viruses like the coronavirus? Why are some affected and others not? Is it a genetic thing or do you think it's something else?

Well, it seems to be both. There are variations in the ACE2 receptor that seem to be involved, but most of it, as far as I can tell from my reading, is actually people's age. That's tenfold worse than anything else. Further down the list is diabetes, heart disease. But we're literally talking about aging here. Aging is your biggest risk. If you've been healthy your whole life, and done the right things, that's going to protect you from dying from COVID-19. Because a lot of things go wrong as you get older that make you susceptible to the disease. One for sure is that your immune system is a lot less resilient. You know when we are exposed to a virus, our immune cells will multiply. Well, actually, as you get older, you have a lot less ability to do that. And there are even a lot less variance of your immune cells. So you can have a hundred year old person has a lot fewer types of immune cells available to fight an infection. We generally have clones of clones in our bodies we get older, whereas when we're young it's like a melange, a whole different set. So the immune system is screwed up, but there's also other issues As you get older, you get more and more inflammation in general. There's a protein in the body called a complex of proteins called the inflammasome and it controls your inflammation. As you get older, it's harder and harder to keep that at bay. And so older people in general tend to have this hyper immune response that actually often can do them in. And it's not because the virus, it's due to the body overreacting to it.

Is there anything that people that are more susceptible currently that they could do to help combat the coronavirus or viruses like that without staying at home all day and not being around it? Is there things that they could do to enhance the immune system and support them?

Oh, sure, there are. I mean, if anybody is out of shape or is carrying too much weight, those are the easiest things and most likely to work is to lose some of that excess weight and get moving. These things are known to greatly improve your immune system and including lowering inflammation. Now, not everybody can do that, right? People who are at an advanced age, you can't expect them to go out on a run or even perhaps to restrict their food. But, you know, people who are middle-aged, you know, like myself, I've been working out a lot more, exercising a lot more, to make sure that my body's ready if I catch it.

What is exercise or shorter moments of bodily stress? Why does that boost immune system and help us anti-age?

Well, there are a lot of answers to that. But in general, the summary is that these protective pathways that we've discovered dampen inflammation when it's too high and they also allow the immune system to attack a virus when it's needed. One possibility, and this hasn't been proven, but there's some evidence over the last six months of published work, is that as we get older, we lose the ability to make a molecule called NAD, which we work on in my lab. And without NAD, our bodies are not very well equipped to fight diseases, including infections. This inflammazone, which I'm kind of showing as a ball, but it's obviously much smaller. It is regulated by the levels of NAD.

What does NAD stand for?

Oh, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. Think of NAD as a small chemical that we need for life. It controls about 500 or so chemical reactions in our body. It's needed for those. We make less of it and we destroy more of it as we get older. But here's the thing, that two of these sirtuin proteins that we work on in my lab are controlling inflammation through this inflammazone protein complex. And as we lose NAD, one possibility in older people is that the inflammazone is now dysregulated and that goes crazy and leads to this cytokine storm that can eventually kill people. We have drugs that people are trying to dampen that down. And one of the things that we're trying now in a clinical trial is a molecule that the body can use to make more NAD, an NAD precursor we call it. And there are patients being dosed right now in, I think, four hospitals or at least going to be four hospitals where we'll see if that is one of the ways to give older people resilience.

So the body stops making NAD, stops producing it the older we get. And it's one of the causes that helps us defend against infections, inflammation, disease.

Well, we think so. What we see is when there's an infection, the virus actually chews up a lot of NAD. So cells, even if you're not old, the virus will deplete cells of NAD. And we think that that's a problem. Cells need NAD for life. If we don't have NAD, we're dead in about 30 seconds. Wow. But also without that energy, you could easily imagine that the body is unable to fight the infection, but also could be an issue late in the viral infection where the body starts turning on itself.

At the moment, there's no supplements out there that you could buy that have NAD to help you replenish NAD. Is that right?

Oh, well, so, you know, I'm a Harvard professor. I don't hawK any molecules or recommend any. Have to be very clear about that. But there are people, some companies that are selling NAD precursors.

Really?

Interesting.

Okay.

I don't endorse or recommend any of those.

Sure, sure, sure. Testosterone is also something that men lose that stop producing over time as well, which helps you, is it just look younger or be younger?

Well, there was a set of very expensive clinical trials done with testosterone. And the results from those studies were that there wasn't a change in long-term health. The results were they were negative for slowing down aging. That said, testosterone will help you build muscle. And having muscle is very important as you get older, of course. You don't want to be frail. And if you fall over, you want to be able to be resilient and not break a bone. Every few minutes, somebody falls, an elderly person falls over, breaks a hip and doesn't recover from that.

Oh, man.

So anything that you can do to be more flexible and resilient and have more strength, that to me sounds like a good thing for elderly people.

Got it.

You're in your 50s or 40s, I don't know. I couldn't say I'm an expert on that.

I'm gonna ask you another question that might be controversial based on a couple of previous Doctors that I've had on, I had Dr. Roger Patrick on and I asked her, I said, Hey, what are some of the healthy foods that are marketed as healthy that in your opinion aren't as healthy as they claim to be? Essentially was the question I asked. And, she said, Grapes have a lot of sugar in them that spike my blood pressure. I think she wears like a glucose monitor so she's monitoring all of her food and constantly testing it. She said, when I was eating grapes, my glucose levels went way up, skyrocketed, and I realized that that's not good for the body to have grapes, a lot of grapes, and you can transition it into having blueberries or something else that might be better for the nutritional benefits. I put that online and people slammed me for that. And then Dr. Gundry said that he doesn't think modified apples the way they are now how we modify them, how they're so big, how they're full of so much sugar. He's like, I don't think that's good to have these big apples that are modified because of the sugar and the fructose in these big apples, like a Honeycrisp or something. And he was saying we should be having a lot less fruit because of the fructose levels. What's your thoughts on fruit in general? Should we be eating fruits every day? Is it something with, you know, I've been heard in the past, like we only used to have fruits right before the winter to kind of store up the fat and a seasonal thing. There's a lot of fruit eaters out there that believe in eating fruits, only fruit all day. I'm just trying to find the answers. I don't know the truth of the matter, but what's your thoughts based on research?

So research, we don't research fruits of course, but we do research the effects of sugar on the body and it's not good.

So try- and is that all sugar or is that fruit sugar or refined sugar? What's, do we know that?

Well, there's glucose and fructose, okay? So it doesn't really matter where you get it. These are just chemicals that's the same chemical wherever you get it from. Glucose, you need glucose, right? Again, we die without glucose. But the foods in our world are so full of sugars that we're constantly feeding ourselves more sugar than we ever would have experienced. even just 100 years ago or 50 even. So where do I come down on this? Well, let me tell you from my own experience, it's probably better to give you my examples than preach to others.

Yes.

I definitely like fruit and I eat fruit and I encourage it with my kids for sure. But it's a balance. You want the most nutrition and vitamins and the lower amount of sugar. And on a scale of that ratio, I think Rhonda Patrick's right that grapes have more sugar than nutrition compared to other fruits. The types of fruits that I like to have are ones that have lots of polyphenols, colored fruits such as blueberries, blackberries, those things. You don't want to eat too many of them, of course, because then you you're basically eating tons of sugar in it anyway. But yeah, blueberries I would have in a yogurt in the morning if I had some. The other fruit that I think is worth looking at is cantaloupe or rockmelon. That I believe has the most nutrition versus sugar of any fruit. So we try to eat those kind of melons as well. You know, watermelon probably isn't in that category. but we still eat it in summer. The point in my family and in my life is we're not so strict that we avoid every type of food. I'll even eat a hamburger or whatever if I feel like it. But most of the time I try to focus on plants and have meat as something like a reward, even though I much prefer the taste of meat than just leafy vegetables. But I think that it's borne out just looking at people who live a long time and cultures that have a lot of elderly people, over 100, the type of foods they typically have a lot more plant than just pure meat. I know I'm going to get hate mail as well from the carnivores, but it's important people know I'm not saying don't eat meat. I'm just saying the kind of balance if you want to focus on types of foods for longevity, that's what the data says.

Gotcha. Do you know if the people in the blue zones who are living over 100, are they eating, I'm hearing you say they eat more plant-based, are they eating lots of meat, lots of fruit as well, or are they limiting intake on some of those areas?

Well, they seem to do all the right things. So, it don't eat a lot. On the island of Okinawa, they tend to stop eating when they're only 70% full, which is a very good idea.

Gosh, it's like I keep eating until I'm 70% full. over full.

Yeah. Then you can regret. Then I regret it.

But you're like, yeah.

But you also, you. You work out more than I train hard.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They tend to eat the right types of foods, which are packed with these polyphenols, these little chemicals that are found in plants when, particularly when those plants are stressed out, they don't eat a lot of processed foods, which kills a lot of these vitamins and polyphenols as well. They colored Foods, which. which as I mentioned is a good thing. They tend to have good social life, they tend to move a lot, they do gardening, they do walking as they get older. These are all things that just make a lot of sense anyway. We know that exercise and eating these healthy fresh foods are good for us no matter how old we are. In terms of chemicals in the diet, olive oil for example has a lot of oleic acid and a lab just last year showed that oleic acid works just like resveratrol to activate the sort of 2 and 1 enzyme, this protective defense enzyme. So, normally you would have to be hungry to turn this on, this enzyme on that we work on. But now we know that you can probably take some resveratrol or some olive oil to activate it artificially.

Well, Gundry would say the whole purpose of food is to get as much olive oil in your body as possible. He's a big believer in olive oil and how it helps you anti-age. This is fascinating stuff. Again, I want to make a note that I hope all the fruity eaters out there don't hate on us. I'm just trying to find the answers and David is giving some of the research that he's seen from his experience as well.

Something you said before you got on here and that I read in your book is that aging is a disease, is that right?

Well, that's what I think.

That's what you think it is. Would that mean death is a disease as well?

Well, death is the end product of aging. Okay. So we've cured just about every other major disease. So you don't die from an infection. You typically don't die in childbirth if you're a woman. So now what's left is aging. And while we're whacking each of these diseases, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, we're trying to whack them on the head like a whacK-A-Mole game. We forget that the main reason all these diseases occur is that our bodies are aging. If you don't get old, you don't get those diseases.

Is that because your immune system is strong and so that it fights against disease essentially?

Well, yes, it's similar, but it's not the immune system that you're thinking of. We actually have inbuilt defenses, we call them longevity genes, that we can activate in our daily lives by doing certain things.

Longevity genes.

Yes, that's what we call them.

How many genes do we have?

Oh, we've got about 23, 24,000 of them.

23 or 24,000 genes.

Right, but there's only about 50 really important ones for longevity.

Okay, and what are the ones that are called longevity gene?

Well, the ones we study are called sirtuins, and there are seven of those, and they're in all parts of the body and they do all really crazy good stuff for us.

Okay, and where do telomeres come into play?

Well, they're part of it. There are seven hallmarks or eight, depending. These are causes of aging. So telomeres are one of those hallmarks. Other things are like the battery packs winding down, those mitochondria in our cells, we lose stem cells, all this other stuff. But here's the important point. We think, A, that there's a unified cause, a whole upstream cause of all of those things. we can talk about that. But also these sirtuins, they defend against all of those. So while we used to think we'd have to develop eight different drugs to slow down aging, if you just tap into these longevity genes, they take care of everything.

Really?

They continue to regenerate good cells. They continue to fight against disease or stress or whatever it may be.

They do. They're really smart. They make proteins that act like traffic cops telling the body how to fend against adversity.

Okay.

And they've been with us on the planet since life first arose.

And it's seven of them?

Well, the ones I studied, there are seven. There are others. There are seven sirtuins, and there are three classes of longevity gene. The ones I study, those seven, and there's a couple of others that you can turn on.

Why don't you study the others? Are they not credible enough?

We do. We do. But we scientists, we like to specialize.

Gotcha, gotcha.

But in truth, even though 10 years ago we used to fight with each other, my longevity gene is more important than your longevity gene. It was ridiculous. My worm's living longer than your worm. It was really silly. But now we've realized most of us admit that all these genes are talking to each other and if you tweak one set, the others will be tweaked too.

Right, okay. So these genes, when you say you study them, what does that actually mean? You're pulling like blood out of different humans and you're putting them in a tube and you're researching and you're like, what's actually happening to study these? Yeah, because I'm a non-scientist. I have no clue what that actually means.

Right.

Is it like rats? Is it humans? Is it, you know, you've got to.

Come to the lab. You got to see what's going on because it's crazy stuff. We do anything we can to answer questions.

You're cloning humans in there.

You're doing all sorts of stuff, right? It's crazy stuff. So we're driven by the question, not by the technology. So most labs will say, okay, I'm an expert in rats. I don't give a rats about a rat. I care about answering a question. And our question is, why do we age and what can we do about it? And will that transform medicine? And so what we do, if you came to the lab, you'd see we've got jellyfish growing, we've got mice that are living longer and running on little treadmills. Up in the lab, we have stem cells that we're growing. actually turning them back in time, we can reverse the aging of these human cells. Stem cells.

Yeah.

So, what does that mean? You take a cell from a human, like a sample, like a skin sample, like a blood.

Brain cells growing the dish. Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brain cells growing the dish. So, you take it from a living human, you take a little piece of brain, you put it in a dish, and you reverse the age of the brain. Correct.

Wow. Yeah, that's what we do. Now we can actually grow little brains in the dish too.

From scratch?

Well, you start with a network of cells and then you coax them into forming these networks and it's like a mini brain, yeah.

Okay.

And we can age them forwards, make them older. So we think we understand what's driving the aging process.

Really?

And then we reverse it.

So you can create a brain from nothing. a bunch of little cells that come together and create a thinking brain.

Well, I don't know how much it thinks, but it'll respond to stimuli. It'll fire. Yeah.

And then you can make it older, like Benjamin Button, and then reverse its aging.

Right.

Wow. I'm telling you, it's. It's crazy. But when I'm in the lab and with my students, for us, it's just every day.

It's like, right. Work.

It's like, ah, there's the brain.

It's getting older, it's getting younger.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. But now that I'm talking about it.

With you, it does sound fascinating.

It sounds bizarre. For a non-scientist. Yeah, the other thing that's weird about this profession, anyone who wants to go into it, is that essentially you're an apprentice under me, and you work in the lab and you spend a few years learning how to do all this stuff. It's not easy. The first two years, basically, you screw up. Yeah. But it's weird that to think about it, you get a bench in a lab and some chemicals, and you have to make the chemicals yourself usually. And then your job is to discover something nobody else has discovered. It's got to be not just slightly new, radically new. Because I'm at Harvard, they don't give prizes for discovering something obvious. It's got to be shocking. And if it's not shocking, it's not worth studying.

And haven't you discovered like tens or 30 something, 35 awards for new discoveries or something, or 35 patents, what do you have?

Something crazy. Some numbers like that.

You've discovered a lot of new things.

Well, yeah, yeah, if I didn't, I wouldn't have a job. There's motivation to always be doing cutting-edge stuff. But what drives us, and the reason I think we've been successful, is that we're driven by the question, not by the technology. And the technology comes second. So what I'll do is I'll say, okay, here's a question. We want to figure out why does cold improve health? Or why does fasting, not eating, improve health? How do you figure that out? Well, then you got to pull together teams of people, molecular biologists, biochemists, mathematicians, computer software people, and we get in a room and we figure it out.

Really? So what would you say, your questions are why do we age and how do we reverse it? Is that the two questions you're focused on the most right now?

Yeah, that's pretty good.

Yeah.

Why do we age and how do we reverse aging?

Right.

Do you think, and so you say aging is a disease. Is death a disease as well then in your mind? Is it like that just leads into, and can we reverse death? Is that a possibility?

No, not yet.

Okay.

Not yet. So anyone who's had their head frozen, there's nothing I can do for you right now. But we can turn back the clock radically. Just in the last couple of years, we've figured out that there's a backup hard drive of youthfulness in the cell that we can access. to reset it. So usually the earlier you start in turning on your longevity genes, the better. We've learned from studying mice and now humans for many years that if you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, you want.

To start- Turn it on now.

Do it now because- Don't wait till.

You'Re 80 and then say, how do I go be 60 again?

But most people do. They wait too long.

Why?

Well, because they're in denial that they're mortal. And we used to think that aging was a one-way street. You couldn't do anything about it. We now know from studying twins that 80% of your health in old age is up to you, how you live your life.

Right.

Your community, your positivity, your thinking, your food, the sleep you have, all those things, right?

Yeah. And the reason that they work, we've discovered, is because they turn on the longevity genes. that's the breakthrough. Okay. So now we're artificially tweaking these longevity genes genetically or with supplements or hopefully medicine soon.

Gotcha. But you could do it in more.

Natural organic ways is what I'm hearing. Well, right now that's what we've got. And even if you just do the five obvious things, things like skip meals and don't smoke and exercise, that'll get you an extra 14 years on average.

Really?

It's that big. That's not even using high tech.

That's just there's no technology just like living a good life.

Right.

So what are the main things to turning on the longevity that anyone can do without technology, without money, you know, science?

Yeah.

Well, okay, so we've first of all, don't smoke.

Yeah.

That'll damage your DNA. That'll accelerate the aging process.

Does that include, like, e-cigarettes and all these other vaping? Does that also include.

Well, I'm a big advocate for putting nothing artificial in your body, including vaping.

Yeah.

My mother died from lung cancer, so I'm pretty militant about it.

Wow.

I don't think vaping is as bad in terms of the number of chemicals getting into your body. Yeah. But we've seen recently it's probably not healthy anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so no smoking.

That's one. That's one. Next one is don't eat so much, eat less often. So not malnutrition, of course. you don't want to get too thin. But this three meals a day plus snacks is ridiculous. In the future.

Great.

I need to get rid of that.

Yeah, well, you're also working it out. But someone like me who's not an athlete, the most exercise I do during the day typically is typing. Three meals a day is too much. Actually, one meal is enough for someone like me. Yeah, I'm now 50, so my metabolism is way down.

You look like you're 37.

Oh, thanks. That's great. You might need to be careful.

I thought you're like 100 and you're looking at 37. You've already reversed the aging.

Well, I'm glad I don't look 80 because that would really be bad for your message.

Okay, so we got no smoking, eating less.

Yeah.

Next one would be the obvious high intensity interval training. Lose your breath once in a while.

Lose your breath? What do you mean? Just by like working out, Yeah, become hypoxic.

Tell your body that you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger or something like that. The reason all of this stuff works in terms of the diet and exercise, it's not that your blood flows more or that being hungry is just healthy for the body. It's actually that your longevity genes get turned on by these things. And why does that happen? Why does it happen in humans, in mice, even in yeast cells for bread and beer? Oh, the reason is that the body senses adversity and says, crap, we gotta fight back. We might die next week without food and we're running away from tigers and lions. That's what this survival network, this longevity.

Gene, so it turns it on when it feels like it's in survival mode.

That's it. We want to be in survival mode and we spend our whole lives trying to reduce our adversity.

Being comfortable.

Right. Don't be hungry, don't be puffed, don't walk, valet your car, roll your suitcase, don't carry it for goodness sakes. We've done the worst. No wonder we're getting sicker and sicker.

We're in a world of convenience.

Right, and it's the worst thing we could do for our bodies in terms of longevity. So those three things, the other two, let's see what else is there. Oh, the type of food you eat is important. There's a big debate, of course.

They say plant-based is going to extend the telomeres, right? If you're eating leafy greens, that's what I've heard.

Right.

Well, among other things, it's also going to have a couple of really important types of molecules. One are the monounsaturated fats, fatty acids. You get that from olive oil and avocados. Those are great. We've just learned that that's a really important trigger for a certain longevity.

Olive oil.

Yeah.

I think when I had gundry on, he was like, I drink a cup of olive oil a day or something like teaspoons of olive oil. He's just eating it.

He's like, I'm trying to get as.

Much in as I can, putting it on everything.

Well, let's get back to that because there's a new discovery as of a week ago that says we think we understand how that works. But in olive oil, there's also what are called the other important component of a plant-based diet are polyphenols, which are the molecules that plants make when they're under adversity, when they're stressed. And I believe that we've evolved to sense when our food is running out. So we get that signal when our plants are stressed. So you don't want to eat plants that are like this white liquid lettuce you can buy, California lettuce.

Right, right.

These colored vegetables that have been a little bit stressed, a little bit dried out. Wine is a perfect example. It's full of polyphenols, one called resveratrol that we've worked on for 20 years. And it activates these longevity pathways really well. So stress your food, organic. I am for a plant-based diet, but I do eat meat occasionally. It tastes pretty good. But it's very clear, Dan Buettner is right, where you go to the longest lived places in the world.

The Blue Zones, right?

Sardinia, right? Okinawa Island in Japan, they're not eating all meat. And actually we know that if you eat a lot of meat, you shut down some of these longevity pathways.

Really?

Yeah.

So you actually, you might look good and grow muscle, and that's great when you're young. You wanna find a mate, you wanna look good, you wanna feel good. But in the long run, I don't think that's healthy.

Really? So cutting down less and less meat, at least, having more plants is the way to go.

Yeah, that's what I've done. I was on an Okinawa diet in.

My 20s and 30s. Which is what? rice and leaves.

It's a bit of rice. You've got to watch out for white rice because it's a spike of sugar.

Yeah, it's a lot.

But it's a lot of tofu, miso soup, green leafy vegetables, dark greens for these phytochemicals. And then what else was it? There was a bit of fish.

Okay.

Yeah.

But also what's important is not a lot of food. These days, I'm stopping eating when I'm about 60-70% full.

And I'm trying to feel this full. I just never feel this full. Until I'm like eating so much that.

I'm like, okay, I'm full.

Well, you're a young, hungry man. Well, here's one of the things. I think one, when you eat slower, you start to get fuller, you start to feel it. And I'm the youngest of four. And so as a kid, we didn't have a lot of money growing up in a small town in Ohio, and there wasn't that much food. So I learned to grab and just shove it in my mouth. And that became a habit. that I've kind of stuck with and I'm not starving anymore. Like the food's available at any time. I can afford it and I have it all the time. But I think it's reconditioning my mind or a habit or routine of like, I'm not scarfing my face down right now, but you know, it's that mindset of, what if I'm gonna go hungry?

For sure. We all suffer from that. Well, not all of us, but those of us who grew up in regular.

Families, we were told to finish our meals.

Right.

Don't leave anything on the plate. Hungry kids everywhere. Sisters, right? They're stealing your food. My wife grew up in a very poor family and even when she was a student, she could barely afford food. She would scrounge and buy potatoes. And at the dinner table, she'll kill me for this, but she will eat like it's gonna all go away tomorrow. But I have to remind her and everybody, everyone should know this. There's always gonna be another meal. There will be another meal, don't worry. But we're conditioned to eat food when it's in front of us.

I think it's a mental conditioning and it's also like either your body's tricking you or it's your brain or it's your gut or something is tricking you like, I'm still hungry. Even though you've had 2000 calories in 10 minutes, you're still like, oh, there's food. It's like turning something on. We're like, I want to eat that. I don't know why that is.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's the reason that when our ancestors put on fat and they survived the famine. We don't have famines anymore, thank goodness. But we've descended from those people. So, we've got the genes in our brain that say, eat, eat, eat.

How do you turn that gene off?

Well, you can take certain types of food. I drink a lot of tea and coffee, hot water even, just to fill up my stomach. That works really well.

Hot water, not cold water.

I just like the feeling of hot water. Cold water, Isn't as I actually it might be something about the heat. I've never thought about it But for me that's what works so when I get a little bit hungry at lunchtime I'll just basically drinking tea Warm water tea.

Yeah, you put it like some interesting.

But it's a fight all the time youe know, I fly a lot and.

People are bringing nuts and cookies and.

Ice cream and you gotta fight it and it's really hard to fight How.

Do you say no?

Well, I do I don't but how.

Do I do that?

So I've trained myself yeah to fight it. And the best thing that I do besides saying, can I have a cup of tea? Is what do I want to look like next week? What do I want to look like a year from now? What do I want to look like when I'm 80?

So you tell yourself that. You ask yourself the question. I think it's also how do you want to feel tonight, tomorrow, next week when you're 80? It's like look like and feel combination is powerful.

Right, because your mind is saying now is important and you've got to train yourself to say, tomorrow and the next year is just a rest of my life.

Yeah. Right.

And that's more important. Okay.

So, was that the fourth thing or the fifth thing?

The fifth thing I didn't mention. There are a couple of things. Let's divide it up. One is get good night's sleep. Sleep with everything.

Yeah.

And then surround yourself by friends and.

People who will take care of you. Yeah. That's like the blue zone way, too, right? It's like be around a good community, get lots of rest and naps, move a little bit. eat healthy.

Right?

Well, these are things that most people should know, but they don't do. So you and I are here to motivate people to do that.

Exactly.

But the research that I discuss in the book is how to take that to a new level, how to optimize those things and add some science in there to reverse it or get getting there.

I like this. Okay, before you share that stuff, how did you get into this Fascination or curiosity of reversing aging in the first? was there someone that inspired you? Was there a moment? Was there an event? Did something happen?

Yeah, it was an event that I think we've all gone through. We just forgot about. We learned that there's such thing as death. We don't live in a Disney movie.

Right.

It's not all happily ever after.

It's not. It's shocking. When we're four or five, we're told this and we realize it and we're in denial. You know, oh, no, that's not going to happen, but. For me, I haven't been able to get that out of my mind.

Really?

It's cruel, don't you think, that we're sentient beings that know that this is all going to end?

We love people, they take care of us, and then they're gone.

Yeah, and I don't want to live forever. I would just like to leave the world a better place. And I think one of the big things that we're missing in medicine is that aging is driving a lot of our sickness. And when we treat diseases, we're treating them far too late. Once you've got, well, I won't say which disease, but, you know, take my mother, for example. Let's use her lung cancer as an example. She could have not smoked. She could have done all the things we've talked about. She could have perhaps taken some molecules that we work on and not had lung cancer. By the time she had a tumor that was the size of a grapefruit in her lung, it's game over.

She couldn't do anything.

Right.

But we've put billions of dollars trying to cure lung cancer. not prevent it.

If we just prevented it, we wouldn't have to worry about it.

It's easier.

Prevention is very easy.

Yeah. Right.

So how old were you when your mom passed away from lung cancer?

I was 25.

Okay. And.

Oh, no.

Let me take that back. She was diagnosed when she was 25. When I was 25.

When you were 25.

And she went on another 20 years.

Really?

Yeah.

But it wasn't. Wasn't really an enjoyable life.

It was a...

They took out her left lung.

So was she breathing from a tube.

Or was it like... She could breathe, but she wasn't, she was always short of breath. There were times when she thought she was just gonna suffocate in front of us. Eventually she did, by the way, that was not pleasant.

Oh my gosh.

That's not something anybody wants. Yeah, and no one tells you what it's like to see your mother die or your parents die. It's horrific.

Wow.

I've never experienced another death, just this one, but it was not pleasant. And we don't talk about it. We deny it, you know, oh, they're gonna drift off into sleep.

That's not what happened to my mom. It's suffering.

It's pain, it's agony, it's suffering, right? Yeah, my mother was turned into a writhing lizard in front of me. And all I could do is whisper into her ear, Thanks for being the best mom I could ever hope for. Oh my God. That was it.

A couple of minutes later, she's turned blue and choking.

No way. It can't do anything for her. Right, that's it. You're helpless. You're helpless. Anyone who smokes, please, please work to give it up. It's just not a good ending.

Wow, were you with her alone? Were you with family, was it friends?

Yeah, my father and my brother and I, I was also in denial because I flew from America to Australia to be with her.

You're like, gosh, she's gonna get through this.

Yeah, you tell yourself she's always recovered. last 20 years, she'll pull through. And the doctor pulled us aside and said, we've x-rayed her lung. There's barely any lung left that's working. Oh, my gosh. You better say goodbye. And I said, what are you talking about? Oh, my God. She's laughing in the bed. She's fine. And 10 minutes later, she starts choking and fluids building up in her lungs. And, you know, if you've ever seen somebody have something stuck in their throat.

That'S what it was like. Oh, my. you can't get it out. Can't get it out. She's drowning. I'm like, maneuver. You can't.

CPR. You can't try this. Well, I'm running around saying, help me, help me. And all the nurses are like, it's nothing we can do.

Wow.

So that's traumatic. So please, you know, let's try to prevent these diseases as long as possible. How old was your mom when she passed? So she's my age when she was diagnosed with lung cancer, and then she lived till 70.

Wow, but she could have, hypothetically, if she didn't get hit by a bus or something, she could have lived a.

Much longer life if she didn't have the cancer. Oh, absolutely. And through my teenage years, I would shout at her, Stop smoking, you're gonna die. When you're in hospital, I'm not gonna come visit you. Oh my gosh. You're only given one life. Because I'm pro-life. Everything about me is we are so lucky to be alive. You know, one in a trillion sperm from your parent, from your dad. and it's you. What's the chance?

It is.

Don't throw it away. And she was the opposite. She's like, you know, drinking and smoking and I've lived a good life. Don't. Don't bother me. And she paid the consequences.

What's your thoughts on the difference between humans and artificial beings or some other species that the more we alter our bodies in non-natural ways, like, what's the difference between. natural humans and kind of altered bodies with artificial beings.

Yeah, well, we're already there. I mean, what about our surroundings right now is natural? Or maybe even the air is different thanks to humans. So, you know, we're, I'm wearing a computer on my wrist, right?

Yeah.

Cyborg.

Yeah, we have a cell phone that has access to all the information in the world. at our fingertips. It's probably eventually going to be embedded in our brain in some way in hundreds of years.

Sure, sure. That's coming. But even things that we don't think about, the vaccines that hopefully we'll have soon, that's artificial, that's partly biologically cyborg. But these are early steps. You know, eventually our grandkids will have things integrated more into their bodies. I don't see anything wrong with that. It's just an extension of what we've been doing for the last probably a few hundred thousand years as humans.

You mentioned vaccines. I had a doctor on a few months ago and I asked him, what's the misconception about the medical world that people have that they should believe in more? And he said, It's really sad when people don't... I'm paraphrasing this, but he said something like, It's really sad when people don't believe in vaccines because especially with kids, because they don't have the choice and a lot of kids get sick and die without, and they could just take a vaccine that could save their life. And I got a lot of heat for even allowing that to be said on my show from parents and mothers who are completely against vaccines because of the side effects that they believe it had or whether it's true or not. I don't know because I'm not the researcher. What are your thoughts on vaccines in general? I mean, should we be taking vaccines? Is this, you know, there's a lot of angry people that say, don't listen to the vaccine people, but what is science saying?

You want some more hate mail?

I don't know if I want more hate mail. I'm always trying to find the truth. I'm trying to find answers. And I don't want people to hate on you or me or anything. I just am like, okay, what's the information? And I always want everyone to do their own research. and figure out what works for them and make their own choices. But I'm just curious based on your research.

Well, my research is really just reading the scientific literature when it comes to vaccines. There have been a number of scientific papers that have been retracted that showed that vaccines were, for example, causing autism. So in the scientific literature, you know, this isn't me saying it. This is published work. in journals and other scientists have done other work and looked at that work and tried to repeat it. And it's come to the point within the scientific community that some of the original work that gave rise to these fears was unfounded and was not scientifically valid.

So in normal layman's terms, there were some research that said vaccines are bad or can cause side effects like autism. There was research that said that. And now what I'm hearing you say is there's other research out there that says that was not true.

Right.

And when a paper turns out not to be correct, the journal or the author or both decide to retract the paper so it's no longer in the literature. Oh, that has happened to those original papers.

Now, you said scientists are always trying to prove themselves wrong every couple of years. So all the science could be wrong still, we just don't know. But what we found so far is that it doesn't cause autism based on these scientific studies.

Well, yeah, I think if you ask a thousand scientists, 998 roughly would say what I'm saying, which is based on scientific literature. Now, please don't, you know, everyone listening, don't attack me.

I'm not- Right, you're not saying this.

I can read scientific papers and that's just devastating in fact.

Makes sense. I'm always trying to find the answers and the truth and I feel like it's always evolving and we're always trying to learn more stuff. I'm curious with all this artificialness in us right now, it sounds like none of us are real whole complete human beings anymore. If you take a vaccine, if you're wearing a digital watch, using cell phones, the air is different, the environment is different. It's almost like there's not a real human being anymore. What makes a human human? And as medicine improves, how will we know if we're no longer human?

Well, I found out last night, I took one of those little tests online and it said, I'm not a robot, which was good news, right? It came as a surprise. Beyond those little robot, I'm not a robot tests, We'll always be human unless it's life synthesized from scratch or it's some other life form or computer intelligence. I don't think we'll lose our humanity. Augmenting the brain, I think, is still we're going to retain our humanity. So I'm not so worried about that. I think more interesting is the debate about will artificial intelligence ever be close enough to be called human thought. And I think one day we may actually get there. Yeah, as soon as computers develop their own type of consciousness, and we model it based on the way we think, it's quite possible that you think it's.

Possible that computers could have human thought.

Yeah, sure.

Wow.

They could. It probably is going to be different than human because they We're not mimicking the human brain currently.

Right.

But, you know, let's say in a thousand years, there are some researchers even now that are modeling the human brain in a way that's different than your typical neural net that, say, Google is working on. The idea is to mimic nerve cells rather than mimic just computer connections. And these nerve cells, as I mentioned, are very complex. They have inner workings and they're actually analog devices, meaning they're not just ones and zeros. They have these waves that pass through, chemical waves that pass through, by mimicking an actual human neuron and then putting, you know, he's got millions of them, he can actually mimic what happens in thought and in a mouse brain and now he's building a human brain. So that's a new approach and I.

Think it's all possible. How old do you think you can get to live? Personally, with all the research you've done now and with potentially in the next 20-30 years of science that you're going to discover, if nothing happens physically with a bus or something, how long do you think you personally can live if you optimized everything?

Yeah.

What's possible? Not what's going to happen, but what's possible.

Right, right. Well, before I tell you that, I'm not doing this to live longer.

You don't want to live forever.

I wouldn't mind. I'm not looking forward to a horrible death. But that's not my goal here. It's not that I'm worried about myself. I do want to leave this planet having done something meaningful. That's what drives me mainly. But I'm also a scientist. I'm experimenting. I want to know stuff. Remember, I told my friends, we're the last generation. so I'm trying to accelerate knowledge at Harvard and at home.

Yeah.

So I do these things to myself. I measure myself glucose levels, whole bunch of parameters to see what's going on. Not as proof, but as indicators of what other people may test. And so I know from my own body that I'm still pretty young. I still need to do the definitive age test. We can now look at exactly how old we are.

Really? Like a ring of a tree.

It is, we've just, it's called the Horvath clock. It's the pianist, you can measure how old the pianist is within a few percent. So you can actually predict when you're gonna die.

Shut up.

Really?

Have you predicted?

I gotta do it, I gotta do it. I've done a primitive form of that, which is in full disclosure, it's a company that I own a little bit of. So this company takes blood tests. Can I say the name? Sure. It's called InsideTracker. I mention it because people are going to write to you about it. Sure, sure. So InsideTracker does blood tests and they measure a bunch of things and I've been doing that for about 12 years. So I know I'm tracking myself and everything's staying young. And they can estimate your age. It's a rough estimate. You can estimate your age by taking a blood sample.

Right, and measuring things in there that go up.

Up and down with it.

It's probably like a three-year swing either side or something. Or it's pretty close.

Yeah.

It's an indicator of how well you're doing with your body. And.

Wow.

I actually took a test a few years ago, many years ago, and I was. They came out as 58.

I freaked out because it made you older than what you are.

I was older than I was. I was 48 at the time.

Oh, so what did you change?

Well, I. I upped some doses of molecules, took a couple more, and stopped eating badly. And the next test came out at 31.

What?

Shut up. What do you mean stop eating badly? Like, sugars and candies and cakes or.

Is it just like... Well, I wasn't strictly intermittent fasting. I'd eat lunches, I had more fat than I do now. I'd eat pizza and things like that.

I love pizza.

But I've turned it around. I've never been unhealthy, but this was a real.

That was a wake-up call.

I have terrible genes. My father's side, we all died in our 70s, usually as males.

So what does it say that you can live to? You don't know yet.

Well, so I haven't answered your question. So that says that I've probably got another 20 years. Extra, right?

Extra than the average lifespan.

Well, based on that blood test, we'll see. Got it, got it. But what could we live to? So here's the good news is that if we just continue on the trend that we've been on for 200 years, and it's been perfectly linear, so you can keep stretching it out. A child born today in the US can expect, not hope, but expect 50% of them to live to 104. So. And in Japan, 107.

Oh my gosh.

If we keep going up. Now, that's not going to happen by accident. That's going to take researchers like me to figure it out. And a lot of people doing the work.

And people actually not eating horrible and smoking and doing the things that help.

Hopefully that'll help too. That's why I wrote the book, is to help people live longer.

But just 100 years is their lifespan now.

Well, yeah, that's the predicted trajectory. That's without any radical breakthrough, without fixing the pianist. Now, if we can fix the pianist and truly reverse aging, like a reset switch, then who knows? We could live 220, maybe longer.

It's hard to believe.

Are you or- well, yeah.

People born today. Well, I'm going as fast as I can. And we've had a big breakthrough in the last year. that we found the reset switch, we think, in the cells just to reset the age.

So, what's the next step? It's like you guys are researching this for the next five, ten years, figuring out how to do that, reset it.

Well, we know how to do it in a mouse pretty easily. That worked first time. That was easy.

Okay.

And one of my students, another brilliant student, he decided to reverse the age of the eye. So, he took old mice that were basically blind and made their eyes young again so they could see just like they were young again.

So you could do that with people too?

Well, that's the next step. That's a few years away. But we're working. I'm an entrepreneur as you know. So I'm trying to push this out of the lab as fast as possible. But if it works on the eye, what else could it work on? Probably everything, I think. Now is it safe? We think it is. We've given it to mice for a year and no problem. no cancer showing up or anything.

Wow.

But you don't want to push it too far. You don't want to go back to being an embryo.

You'll be the world's biggest tumor.

Right. Right. Wow.

Wow. So what do you think you could live to personally?

Yeah.

You know, I'm trying to avoid the question because my, my peers, my colleagues.

Sure.

Sure. Hate it because it's, it's unproven.

It's unproven. Got you. Got you. But just like, you know, obviously it's not proven, but just, and if all goes well, you know, All right. We get sick and all these things don't happen.

All right.

So, no traumatic events.

People are gonna rewind this video when I die, aren't they? So I'm on a trajectory to live well beyond 80 because I'm healthy.

Yeah.

My father's an example.

He's 80. He's 80 and he should live at least 10 years beyond that. Right.

So at least that. I should be healthy into my 90s. Be nice to break a hundred with the technologies and some of the medicines that I'm working on and one of them that I'm actually taking maybe beyond 100, that would be nice.

Wow.

In a healthy way, playing tennis.

Wow. In a healthy way, beyond 100.

A lot of people do that.

Yeah.

It's not for everybody, but you do see people in their hundreds that are still working and happy.

How much does inflammation play into the longevity of your life?

Oh, it's huge. It's huge. It's one of these hallmarks that if inflammation is going up too fast, basically.

Your clock is... You're aging.

Accelerated, yeah.

So how do we get rid of inflammation?

Well, there are a number of ways. One is do these things and turn on your longevity genes, which are anti-inflammatory. Otherwise, I'm still taking a little aspirin every day. The data still looks pretty good for that.

Taking an aspirin.

Yeah, 81 milligrams a day.

That just takes away inflammation.

Yeah, mostly in your blood vessels. But you need to take it for a long time, of course, I think, to stop that. Resveratrol is anti-inflammatory. And remember how I said those mice have beautiful arteries, no fat on them.

Really?

So that's good.

Huh?

Yeah, but basically it's that. But overeating and being obese is going to massively turn up inflammation. Within a few weeks, you'll do it just eating bad food for a few weeks will turn it up.

And fasting will kill inflammation.

Exactly.

Wow.

But you might say, well, if your immune system isn't overactive, what about getting sick? Turns out your immune system gets heightened, but inflammation, chronic inflammation gets dampened. So when you talk to a centenarian and say, did you used to get sick? They say, can't remember last time I got sick.

Centenarian?

Centenarian, people who live over 100. So that's a hormone.

They don't remember when they got sick.

They don't get sick. They rarely get even a sniffle or a cold.

How is that possible?

Well, they have massive immune systems. So even if someone sneezes on them, that virus is attacked and killed. But here's the thing. Since I've been eating and living the right way over the last few years, since that terrible scary test, I haven't gotten sick.

No sickness. No cold, the flu.

No, and I'm on planes, people are sneezing on me. We've got three kids, they're always sick.

What if you got like, what if you ate something that had like food poisoning that would fight against that too?

Or is that kind of hard to defend? Question, I don't know.

I don't know, but I haven't.

Chicken or something, you know, it's like. I haven't had food poisoning recently, but.

It might just be that I can afford better food now. That's good, I like that. Wow. This is all fascinating stuff, and I know you've got more in your book. lifespan, why we age and why we don't have to. Make sure you guys get this book, really powerful research in science. I got a couple questions left for you. This is called the Three Truths. I ask everyone at the end of my interviews. So I want you to imagine it's your last day on earth and you're 150, 200 or however old you want to be. And you've done tons of research. You've written every book you want to write. Answered every question that you can think of while you're alive. You publish all this information, but for whatever reason, you've got to take your work with you so no one has access to your work anymore, your research. All your content is gone. It's going with you to another world.

It sounds like hell. Okay.

Just imagine.

Yeah.

But you get to leave behind three lessons or three things you know to be true from everything that you've learned in your life. you can write it down on a piece of paper. Everyone would have access to these three truths. And this is the only three things you could share that they would have access to. What would you say are your three truths?

All right.

The first one that I live by is all about maximizing human potential. I believe that we're way underutilized. But for the individual, what you have to think every day is do something that's worth writing about or write something that's worth reading. So have an impact. That's my lesson is don't settle for mediocrity. Do something spectacular and don't listen to the nay-sayers.

Okay. Is that one?

That's one.

Yeah.

The next one would be Do something that scares you every day. Send off an email that you wouldn't be, you'd be afraid to do. And along with that, when you're young, take risks like we did. You can fail. That's okay. You will fail. But it'll make you, it'll open you up to more opportunities. But also you'll be a stronger adult. stronger 40-50 year old.

Okay, that's two.

Ah, gee, the third one, I haven't pre-prepared this up, but this one's from the heart. I've described to you what it was like to see my mother pass away. And I spent my life arguing with my mother. I regret that. So as a parent now myself, let me tell the younger people.

Yeah.

Tell your parents how much you appreciate what they've done for you. Tell them that you love them, assuming that you do if they're good people. Because there will be a day, most likely, when they'll be gone and you won't have a chance to hug them anymore or see them anymore because they're gone. And when they're gone, you think, how is that possible that somebody can be there and not there within a matter of two minutes? That happens. And, yeah, I just wish that I'd told my mom more about how much I appreciated her. So, I've dedicated the book to her because she cared more about herself than her kids.

Wow, special.

Those are good three truths. I love those.

Two months ago, maybe three months ago, I decided to give myself an experiment. And, I wasn't happy with the results I was getting with my health. I was training hard, I was eating well, I was intermittent fasting for 16 hours a day, I was sleeping well, I was taking supplements, like I was trying a lot of stuff. And I wanted to try to like lose some extra weight but also just kind of feel like there's some little inflammation here from past injuries and sports. I was like, I just want to get rid of it. And I said, I've never tried a, you know, multiple day fast. And I remember you mentioning about just, hey, eating less will help you live longer and help you get less disease, which will help you live longer. And I said, okay, I'm going to try a. I did a four days, no food, essentially. Four days, no food, water. I had a little bit of juice on some days, and I had black coffee, and I just drink a lot of water. It wasn't until a week after the four-day fast when I started to feel the effects. Sure, I lost some weight because I wasn't eating for four days and I felt healthier in general. I felt super focused and clear, but it wasn't until a week, two weeks later when I was like, Huh, I just feel better. I feel lighter. I felt more flexible, less inflammation. What is the power of doing a one-day fast? a two, three day pass. How often should we be doing these types of fasting? And I want to make sure that I don't tell people go not eat for three or four days without talking to a doctor or nutritionist or something. But what is the benefit of not eating for a day or two days? What does that do for our body long term?

Well, we're still learning, right? We've only just finished doing, we as a field of scientists have only just finished doing a lot of animal experiments, but we're now in a period where we're actually finally doing these in humans. So what do we know? We know that if you fast for one day, you're going to turn on these three main mechanisms that protect the cell. Their names, by the way, there's one called mTOR, which senses amino acids that we eat. There's one called AMPK, which it controls and registers how much energy the cell has. so if you eat sugar, you'll switch it off. If you're not eating sugar, you'll switch on. And then the ones that we work on, they're called sirtuins, and there are seven of these sirtuin proteins that protect the cell in very different ways, but all seemingly good. The question is, how much should you be doing? Well, we know from fasting for one day that you, you activate these defenses.

These three defenses, we want to, we want to activate these three things as much as possible or once in a while.

Good question. I think it's better to do it once in a while. You don't want to always have them on. And the reason I can say that is based on animal studies, the best effects we've had and my colleagues have had is when you do things and let the body rest afterwards. For example, we did a study with resveratrol, this molecule from red wine that activates one of these sirtuins that I was telling you about. We gave it every day to mice. or we gave them this calorie restricted fasting diet. But it was when we actually gave them resveratrol every second day that we got the longest lived mice in combination with caloric restriction. So that's just an example of many that we're finding that it's helpful to pulse the body and let it rest. And it does make sense that you want to have a hunker down period where your body is fixing itself and removing bad stuff, but then also a repair phase. So when you go back to eating regularly or you're not running marathons every other day, which some people tend to do, then your body can recover and grow and heal. So yeah, long answer to your question, but I think pulsing it is the right way to go.

Is there a calculated approach to say, okay, if you're 225 pounds male, 37 years old, how many calories should I be eating a day? Like, is there a perfect system to this of like, okay, if you eat 1000 calories a day for three days in a row, then you have 2000 for a day, then you fast a day. Have you figured out this process yet with rats?

Dr. No.

No, it's not like that yet.

That can be interesting.

Yeah.

The problem that we face in the field is, we were talking earlier, you and I, before we went on air about funding for science, we don't have tens of millions of dollars to run these clinical trials. We're always scrounging for money and always worried about what's going to happen when it runs out. So we can do some experiments, but consider a Some of these longevity experiments even in rats and mice, they take about three years. And if you do it in monkeys, then your whole career is used up by one experiment. And so what we're trying to now figure out is what's the right combination of what you eat, when you eat, and what supplements to take. And that combination is hundreds of thousands. And you can't run hundreds of thousands of these experiments.

Wow.

So it's hard to find the optimum. But in general, what I would say is that if you fast for one day, you get some benefits. If you fast for three days, something interesting happens. You turn on another level of cell cleansing. And I'll tell you a bit about that. So there's this process called autophagy, or some people call it autophagy. It is what it sounds like, auto, which is self and phagy is eating. So you're self eating. And what that means is that proteins.

That are- It's amazing. You're eating yourself, you're killing it.

Well, eating the, getting rid of the bad stuff, recycling the bad proteins. As we get older and also if we have damaged proteins, say if we eat a lot of burnt food, we will accumulate proteins that have a, oxidation is one, for example. And these proteins also are very hard to get rid of. They tend to clump.

Sticky.

They're sticky and Alzheimer's disease is a good example of that, of proteins that stick together and just accumulate and you can't get rid of them easily. But autophagy is this process where the cells can chew these up and recycle the amino acids in those proteins. But our bodies, especially as we get older, do a pretty crappy job at doing that. And at least the things like macular degeneration, your generation, and others. Now, what one day fasting does is it turns on autophagy and will clear out some of the proteins. But from my reading, if you do three days of fasting, something else kicks in. It's a different type of autophagy. It's called chaperone-mediated autophagy or CMA. And it was discovered by a good friend of mine in New York, Ana Maria Cuervo. And she has shown that this CMA process is really important for extending the health and the lifespan of mice. And I'm helping her a little bit with a, one of her companies to bring this to humans and hopefully treat diseases. For example, like mycoload generation. But anyway, long story.

So three days really starts to kick in the benefits. Is there a time when fasting too long? hurts the body.

Well, sure. You need nutrition, right? Your body needs to. Needs amino acids to repair itself. I can't stress enough that we don't want anybody to lose so much weight that it's bad for them.

Yeah.

There are a lot, especially young people who.

Who can overdo it.

Yeah.

You. You always want to have some adiposity of fat on your body. You need it for. For lean times, and your body needs it for, you know, energy when you're sleeping, for example, but. So, I think that going for a week is okay. I haven't done it myself. It's too difficult.

But, what's the longest you've gone personally?

I'm not that good at it. I've gone for a day. That's about it.

I tell you what, four days was tough, but it was also like, once I set my mind to it and I was just like, I'm gonna commit to this, I also wasn't that hungry. I was just like, okay, I can go a little farther.

It was just weird.

I'm so used to eating every, I don't know, four or five hours. It was just like, is everything okay? But I felt the effects. I felt like it was getting better. Like my body was healing. I felt like the pain was starting to go away and I just felt clear and focused.

That's a common thing that people report is you'd think that you'd be distracted by hunger but what actually happens once you do it for a longer time or you've done every other day eating for a while, or even in my case where I like to skip breakfast and have a late lunch or maybe even go straight to dinner. Your body gets used to it. You don't feel those hunger pains. If you drink a cup of tea or even a glass of water, it numbs any desire. That's when you know you're doing it right. But also what people report, and I can tell you from my experience, it also focuses the mind. And you're not distracted at all. In fact, it's like a high that you get. And I can get a lot of work done when I'm in that phase.

Is do you think human beings will ever be able to become immortal?

Yeah, that's a tough question. Here's the honest answer. No, I don't think so.

Never in a thousand years, 10,000 years, never.

Well, never is a pretty hard statement. I would say that with the technology that I can envisage, even the best technology, give it a thousand years of development, I think we can live many hundreds of years.

Really?

Well, let's get into that later.

I think we've we've got some new technology coming out of the aging field that makes the old stuff, even things just two years ago, look primitive. But immortality is so hard. I mean, we're fighting entropy. We're fighting the second law of thermodynamics, which is a very powerful law of nature. And really what we've discovered in my lab and some others around the world is that it's hard to preserve adult living things for a long, long time. You can keep them together and functioning for longer. Some species on the planet, particularly plants that can live thousands of years and many hundreds of years for some mammals, bowhead whale, for example. But going immortality, you're fighting what turns out to be a loss of information. We all understand the importance of information. Our computers get corrupted. We used to have things like compact discs and DVDs that got scratched. These are examples of the problems with trying to store information forever. How long would an iPhone last? It's not going to last for a thousand years, that's for sure.

But if the information's in the cloud, then it can't be scratched, maybe digitally.

Scratched, but... Well, that's the saving grace. Maybe if we are able to upload ourselves somehow or rebuild ourselves from scratch, that's immortality. that's beyond anything that I'm seeing right now. I think a lot of people who say, oh, let's just download our brains into the internet, are underestimating the complexity of the human brain. It's not like just wires contacting each other. Every one of those wires is extremely complex, more complex than anything in the known universe. And so you put a few trillion of those together into one thing, and it's very hard to map it without damaging it and let alone rebuild it.

So the brain wiring is more complex than anything in the universe.

Our brains are the most complex thing in the universe.

You think it's more complex than the understanding of God or source or the creator?

I think that's pretty simple. You believe it or you don't. We've inherited brains from our ancestors that have consciousness and then we're able to ask these questions. Where do we come from? Is there a force beyond what we understand that gave rise to everything around us? Or are we just an accident of nature?

In your opinion, what do you think is an ideal lifespan for humans then with the technology we have today and the technology we're going to have over the next two decades? What do you think is the ideal lifespan where we'll be functioning healthy human beings that have memory, and not just blobs that just last longer?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And I don't recall ever having been asked that one. Right now, the maximum human lifespan that's recorded at least, and even that is debatable, is 122 years old, the French woman Jeanne Calment. The thing about living that long is that, and we often forget, is that that means she was still very active, Sure she was riding a bicycle around her village when she was 105.

Wow.

So if you live that long, you have this period of health where you don't have diseases. Aging brings on those diseases. And so when you think about extending lifespan, the important thing is to realize that you don't live longer in old age, you live longer in a youthful state.

What do you mean by that?

Well, we do have technology in animals, let's say mice, to make them live 20% longer. They don't live 20% longer at the end of life. They actually live 20% longer in midlife so that they don't get diseases.

They stay younger, longer, earlier.

Right.

So that you can compare these animals. You can actually do this pretty easily. Actually, anybody could do it. You take a mouse and another mouse and you give a lot less food to one of them or feed them every other day. and yeah, they'll be hungry. I think they eventually can get used to it. But what happens is you can compare those two mice, or 50 mice in one group and 50 in the other. This is what has been done for now 80 years. And the ones that have spent some time in hunger are not always satisfied. They are remarkably different. Their coats look all shiny. They have very little cancer or evidence of cancer. They're running around the cage. and the mice that have been eating as much as they ever wanted, which is kind of how we live now, most people, they are decrepit. They are not moving. They've lost a lot of their ability to remember things. They don't bother making a nest. It's dramatic, and this has been done for monkeys as well. It's been done for Labrador dogs. It's a really universal thing in life. To get to your question, Louis, actually, What's the optimal life if you had the chance to stay young? Why would you want to die? I don't think anybody who's healthy and has friends and is enjoying their life says, I want to die tomorrow. I haven't ever met anybody like that. You know, there's pain, there's suffering, there's depression. But if you don't have those, why would you want to die? I mean, maybe boredom, but you know.

There are ways of- Right, you'd always want to live. You'd always, if you had a purpose, if you had community, if you were pain free, you'd want to keep living, I would assume. If you were enjoying your life and you had love and connection and mission, then you'd want to live as long as you could. So, what I'm hearing you say is that it's almost like food becomes the disease. If you don't manage it properly, it's what is the big cause of death the more you eat.

Well, yeah. Well, the food isn't the cause of death. We need food and we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation by any means. I want that to be clear. Eating disorders here, but we are talking about not having three large meals a day. The way to think about it is not that the food is killing you. What it's doing is it's turning off your body's protective mechanisms against disease.

Creating some smaller stresses in the body turns on the immune system to fight against disease.

Yeah, well not just the immune system, but that is a big part of it. It also turns on repair of DNA, it clears the body of old proteins that are just accumulating and causing issues, rejuvenates the mitochondria, which are those battery packs, the energy parts of the cell. A lot of things happen. We don't understand everything that's going on when animals or we are hungry, but we know that there are, at least we know of three main pathways that, and by pathways I mean biochemical workhorses in our cells, proteins that do good things. Three main pathways that are activated when we're hungry and go to work and tell other parts of the cell to repair the body and clear out the old stuff.

So in your opinion, what's the ideal lifespan?

Well, it's personal, but I would say I wouldn't mind living for 200 years. There's a lot I'd like to see in the future.

Right.

But I think if I reach 200 years, I'll still feel young. I might feel young and then why would I want to die? It's all about being healthy. Now, what's the optimal lifespan for seven billion humans? That's a different question. You know, we can't all live a thousand years and expect the planet to do well. But what I talk about in my book is that when you do the numbers, allowing people to live longer and healthier adds huge amounts of percentage to the GDP. We're spending at least 17% of our GDP in the US on taking care of people who are sick. And most of that is spent in the last few years of life. And it turns out the longer that somebody lives, they actually are less costly to the healthcare system because they die quicker. And so if you draw a graph and, I tend not to draw grass, but this is what I have to. So we used to die off as a population like this and people would often get sick and stay alive for a lot longer in a sick state. I mean, now it's still possible to get cancer and suffer for 10 years trying to fight that disease, heart disease the same. But in a world where we can push that out and people tend to live to 100 years, we know that's possible. There are people that do this all the time. Then there's the very quick die off. And a lot of people get to that point, would get to that point, and then quickly die off. And that's a world that I think would be far better than this one, where from an economic standpoint and from an individual and family standpoint, anyone who's had a grandparent or a parent who became chronically ill, This is just nothing you would wish even on your enemy.

When it's like five years, 10 years, and it keeps extending where it's just uncomfortable suffering pain, as opposed to what I'm hearing you say is live a great life and then once you start to feel a little sick, die quicker as opposed to die over 10 years of suffering.

That's the ultimate goal with this research. And it looks feasible based on the work that's been done over the last 20-30 years.

Because essentially, what I'm hearing you say is we're not dying effectively. We should be dying in a better way that's better for us as individuals, that's better for our families, that's better for the economy, the planet is what I'm hearing you say.

Right.

No, we see that today as well, people who don't take care of themselves, who never exercise and eat the wrong foods and too much of it. You can see that those are the people that develop diseases in their 60s and 70s that are often horrific, you know, diabetes and having limbs cut off.

From lack of blood flow.

This in large part is preventable already. We know how to do that.

It's really sad. I know some people at that stage of life where it's just, you can't really come back from it. Once you've gotten to that point, you can't really reverse back to a healthy state. Is that correct? Maybe you can manage it a little bit, but it's not a reversible thing at that point.

If you asked me that last year, I probably would have said, it's not possible to come back from that. But this new work that I'm hinting at really does look like an age reset is possible in complex tissues and maybe one day an entire body.

Really? So someone who's 60s, 70s, who's got diabetes and it's really slowing them down and they're losing, you know, function in their, their body, you're saying that in the future, potentially we could reverse that?

Right, theoretically. Now we haven't tested it in the context of diabetes. We tested it in the context of vision loss due to aging or due to damage to the optic nerve. But there it was very easy. In three weeks we were able to recover a lot of eyesight in a blind old mouse by resetting the age of the eye.

We haven't tested this on humans yet.

No, I'm trying to do that.

Wow.

In hopefully clinical trials will be two, three years from now.

That's amazing. So, I remember you saying in our last interview that you wouldn't want to live forever. But as you say, with research things change and last year you would have said something and this year is different now and you might want to live to 200, but if you were still healthy at 200, would you want to say, hey, let's keep doing this another century or Would you say, I'm healthy, I have love in my life, but I want to call it quits. Is there ever a time if you were healthy still, you'd want to call it quits?

I don't think so. I really don't. I haven't met a happy, healthy person who wants to die, have you?

No.

So, it only becomes when it's a time of suffering, pain, immobility to function at life at a normal level.

Yeah, or depression. Let's face it, there are a lot of people on the planet that are not living great lives, you know, countries that are not as well off as these ones that we live in. So I can understand there may be situations where you wouldn't want to live longer if you're doing a profession that every day is painful or just way too much work. You know, you and I have the privilege that we can do jobs from an armchair, but not everybody can do that. So I just want to, you know, realize me, that not everybody's in our situation, but hopefully if you have an extended lifespan, you'll be able to change professions if you're in one that you don't like and have the possibility of three, four, five different careers.

Right.

Is it, in your opinion, more important to extend life or reverse aging or live better with the years that we currently have?

Huh. Well, yeah, obviously you wanna do both. And actually it turns out if you live better, during the years that you have, you will live longer. If you're making the most of life, you're enjoying your life, you have a career that you love, getting out in the outdoors, that will lead to longer life. We know that. So a good life actually leads to a longer life.

When did you become kind of obsessed with being the master of anti-aging?

Well, I've got an obsessive personality. I think anyone who's, you know, become at the top of their profession has to be obsessed with something. They're not normal people. They're not normal. At age four, I became obsessed with it, actually. Four? Yeah.

My first memory is four.

I don't even know.

Well, this is my first memory.

Really? What was it?

Seeing your mom smoke and be like, I don't want to be a smoker.

Well, there was that.

Yeah.

You know, in this in the 70s, early 70s when I was a kid, the smoke was everywhere. I couldn't stand it. But that was not really my motivation. It was that my grandmother who helped raise me told me, Everybody's gonna die, and so are you, and so is your cat. And my grandmother was brutal. She didn't lie. She told it as it was. But she said, Now that I've told you that, you know, I hear am I crying? My cat's gonna die.

Santa Claus isn't real. My cat's gonna die.

My cat that was the problem.

-Oh my God, you love this cat.

-Yeah, because she said, oh, your cat's gonna die before you're 20 or whatever. But she said, Now that you've realized that, here's the lesson. Make the most of life. Do your best to make humanity the best it can be, and don't waste a second. And that was it for me. Okay, I'm gonna go for it.

But when did you actually start researching?

-Yeah.

-Okay, now, maybe you had this positive mindset. I'm gonna make the most of every moment. I'm gonna enjoy my life. I'm gonna learn quickly and not be stuck in these painful moments. What was it like, middle school, high school? You're like, oh, mitochondria and telomeres and, you know.

So I was a pretty average kid. I liked to have a lot of fun, and I didn't really take care of myself. Actually, you'd be surprised.

I was.

I was pretty chubby as a kid. Really?

Yeah.

But I got to college, and two things happened.

One was exciting.

Where were you in school? I was in Sydney.

In Sydney.

So I went to, there aren't that many choices in Sydney. I went to, it's called the University of New South Wales, like the MIT of Boston. So I was there and I wanted to get a degree in what we used to call genetic engineering. And I thought, that's a cool thing. Everyone's going into computing, I'll do something, because I've got also the personality that I don't like to be told what to do and I like to be different.

You're unique, one of a kind.

Yeah, I do.

Me too.

I was a big dumb jock who.

Never drank a sip of alcohol in college, who learned salsa dancing in guitar, who was in choir in the musical. Like I was whatever you thought I was gonna be, I was like, I'm gonna do the opposite. So, we have that in common.

Yeah, probably your parents learned they had to tell you the opposite of what.

They wanted you to do.

Exactly. So, I went to college and I realized two things. One was, if I'm, Chubby, I'm not gonna get a girlfriend.

Right.

So I started working out. Survival.

Survival mode.

I ate carrots for a month and shed 15 kilos, whatever that is in pounds. Got a best body I would have dreamed of. It's long gone. That was one thing. So I became healthy. Yeah. And I've been this weight ever since. Basically haven't changed. It takes effort.

Yeah.

And the second thing I realized was that I think I could make a difference in the world. And I was playing cards with friends. We did a lot of drinking. They did a lot of smoking, typical college life. And there was a moment where somebody was talking about old age and laughing at old age and making fun of old people, which we. We do sometimes as kids.

Yeah, we're young.

Yeah.

Old they are.

And.

And I had an epiphany. I think I was 18 years old and they said, Do you realize everybody? Hold it. No cards, shut the fuck up. I've got something to tell you. I've just realized that we are probably the last generation of humans to live a normal lifespan. Because there's going to be a breakthrough and we're going to miss out by one generation.

Oh my God.

Out of the how many hundred thousand generations leading up to us of primates, we're the last ones. We're the last ones.

We're going to die at 100 or 80 or whatever.

Right.

And our kids are going to live to 130 who knows what.

And their kids are going to be 160.

Yeah.

So then I thought, hey, that's what I want to do. I want to make that future be a reality in my lifetime.

Wow. Isn't that sad if just give us another 50 years to be born? How much farther you could extend life, right?

Yeah.

I didn't realize how quickly the science would go. I thought that I'd probably be lucky to see a little bit of change in my lifetime.

Like 5, 10, 20 years, maybe more.

Well, we already got 14 just on what we talked about. But the kind of breakthroughs that we've made now, you know, I get criticized for looking too far into the future because I'm supposed to be a Harvard scientist. But I think another 5, 10 years is easy. Look at my dad. He's doing all the right things. Also taking some molecules that we've worked on in my lab. They're not doing any harm. I hope that he makes it past 100. It's not a clinical trial clearly with one subject. But he's a role model for what life can be and should be like. Right.

So now is this molecule, the same molecule that you worked on 10 years ago that got a lot of credibility and then was debunked, I guess, by some researchers and then now the last week has come back to be verified as true?

One of them, yes, so resveratrol. is the red wine molecule. It's one of these polyphenols that plants make when they're stressed out. And that we found, at least we thought that when you take this molecule over many decades or as a supplement, you'll be protected against a whole variety of diseases, including obesity.

Really?

Yeah.

Is that where everyone says, like, drink a glass of wine every night or something? It's going to make you live longer.

Well, that's basically because of me. But there's other research, of course, other people have studied red wine and found that people who drink red wine tend to live longer. Dan Buettner will tell you all about the blue zones.

Right. So this molecule, is it something you discovered 10 years ago or you started researching 10 years ago?

Well, so remember these longevity genes, they make proteins that tell the cell how to survive. And we can turn on the production of these proteins by being hungry and exercising and being out of breath. But we wanted to do it artificially because if you're an older person in a wheelchair or you're like my mom.

And she's not doing hip workouts at 90.

Yeah.

You need a drug. You can't just expect them to run marathons or go hungry. So we wanted to figure out how does fasting, how does exercise work? That's another important question, a couple of questions. And we found that this sirtuin number one, there are seven. Number one was very important. In mice, if we turned it on, we can make mice with extra genes.

By the way, in the lab.

You can make them.

We make mice.

From scratch.

Well, from stem cells.

From a cell, you can turn it into a moving mouse.

Yeah, that's easy. It can breathe and has a whole... Come to my lab, you can make a mouse. What?

We can make them glow green if we want.

It's not that hard.

You can take cells and they just kind of like form together and turn into a mouse.

Well, we need another mouse to gestate it.

But it's, yeah, it's pretty pretty easy these days.

Okay, this is crazy. You can come, I'm gonna check it out.

You can take a skin cell of a mouse, turn it into a stem cell, make a sperm, make an egg.

Fertilize itself, and make a mouse.

Anything possible these days.

Wow.

So we engineer a mouse to have more of this sirtuin one gene.

Yeah.

And it was protected against a whole variety of diseases.

Really? Were you injecting with disease to like test that or natural environment diseases.

So we have a lab where we-.

It's like other mice have the disease.

We let them age.

Yeah.

And that's the main thing. We have a lot of old mice and we test them if they're frail. We look at their strength, put them on treadmills, test their memory. We've got this whole floor in the building- Mice. Of mouse testing machines.

How many mice are in the lab?

Thousands? Well, I don't want anyone to be upset because we do have a large number of mice. Okay. Our goal is to make them healthy. Gotcha. Unlike a lot of other labs.

You're not trying to kill them like most labs. No, no. You're trying to say, how can we.

Keep them as healthy and live longer? And our mice live longer.

Our mice live longer.

So we're one of the few labs where we do that. But yeah, so this sort of two in one gene, it makes a protein that helps the cell. So we found this red wine molecule. just coincidentally turns it on. So if you put the end, we can put in the little test tube where these little test tubes, and we put in the protein, and we can test whether it's more active or not by how much it glows or fluoresces. Okay. And then we tested thousands of molecules. And the one that worked the best was this one from red wine. It made it glow really brightly, fluoresced. And that was the beginning of this story where we found a molecule from red wine. that turned on our body's defensive enzyme. And that was great. We put it onto yeast cells. They lived longer. I did that experiment in my dining room, actually. You can make yeast cells live longer.

Oh my gosh. That's crazy.

We fed it to mice, and they were much healthier. They were resistant to obesity and diabetes and cardiovascular problems. It basically made mice immune to a high-fat Western diet.

Wow. they could eat whatever and it wouldn't affect them.

And they lived just as long as those that were.

They burn the fat quicker.

Well, they were actually still fat. That was the crazy thing. But fat didn't. Didn't hurt them. They were immune to the effects of being fat.

Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Okay.

But.

But then. And this is the one that my father started taking about a decade ago, same as me. But here was what happened in. That was 2003 to 2006. things were great. We started making better molecules. We made thousands of them. They went into human clinical trials, put it on the skin of patients with psoriasis. They were actually it was a pill and the psoriasis got better.

No way.

Yeah, we were on track to having a medicine for aging and diseases that are related to aging and inflammation.

Wow.

But then everything fell apart.

Why?

So in 2010, a couple of companies published scientific papers that said, it's all wrong. That this molecule, resveratrol, does not activate this enzyme. This fluorescence that we were looking at in this test tube was just an artifact. It was fluorescing for other reasons. It wasn't real. And yeah, my world fell apart. The company stopped working on it. And it was hell.

You stopped working on it.

Well, we didn't. Well, for about two weeks, I stayed in bed. It was horrific. I went into mild depression, my lab, didn't know what to do. I had friends calling me, well, ex-friends who called me and said, you know, I'm really sorry and didn't hear from them again. It was a tough time. And when you're, you know, and this is what I built my career on, I was known in the world for this. And then it went away. And if you're a scientist and you lose your reputation, you're screwed because you're relying on grants and your colleagues opinion of you to give you the money. to give you those.

Their endorsements, their recommendations, things like that.

Right.

So if no one's recommending you anymore, no one's giving you money.

Yeah. Grants dried up. I had 20 people, vibrant lab, world-leading science, top of the world, gonna make this medicine. Bam. Most people left. No money, four people, tiny little lab. Even people in my lab said, I'm out of here. This is crazy. you're full of it. And there was one student who I had, his name is Basil Hubbard, and he said, you know what? There's something to this. I'm not going to give up. Wow.

And.

But the other people in the lab, one guy in particular was really mean. He just said, you're working on this BS stuff.

Wow.

This was virtual stuff. But he figured it out. It took him three years to figure out the intern. He was a PhD student.

Okay, I got you.

Basil. And just through grit and stubbornness and genius, he figured out that it was real. And we published in 2013, three years later, that there was good evidence that we were not wrong. So, okay, take a deep breath. I'm swimming. I'm not drowning anymore.

This is three years of, like, depression or just figuring out, how am I going to get to my life, my career, everything back on Right, right.

I was so mad with the world.

I'm sure.

I said it.

Through everyone, I can't trust anyone anymore.

Well, it was that because I devoted my whole life to this. I'd barely taken a weekend off in my life.

Yeah.

And to have that happen, I was like, oh, you know, I could have retired at that point.

How did you recover?

Well, so the problem was I didn't want to die not knowing the answer. Wow. Needed to figure this out. And knowing that I was wrong was still better than not knowing it all. So we tried to figure it out.

Because it's better to be like, okay, I'm actually wrong. Here's the proof. Here's the science. You can live with that is what you're saying.

Right.

Knowing the truth. And then, okay, how do we solve it? What's the new solution?

Right?

Where do I go next?

Yeah, and we actually had evidence that we weren't wrong. So that's why I got out of bed, went back to the lab and said, let's figure this out. Let's do some key tests that'll tell us either way, if we're right or we're wrong. And it turns out we weren't wrong. And there was this study you referred to that came out a week ago that said, You know what? That mechanism that you discovered actually is really important for being activated when you're fasting, when you're hungry. What happens is when you deplete fat, let's say you're hungry, you haven't eaten breakfast, you'll melt away some of the fat and you'll generate what are called free fatty acids and some of them we can get from plants from olive oil, monounsaturated fatty acids that good ones. A lab discovered that the way resveratrol works is actually just mimicking those unsaturated fatty acids that we already know are good for you. And Dan Buetner in the blue zones would tell you, from the blue zones, would tell you that these are what leads to long life.

Wow.

And so it turns out resveratrol, if this is true, is basically mimicking gobs of olive oil but without all the calories.

So my father and I, you know.

Maybe we've been doing the right thing.

So he's been doing, your father's been doing this for 10 years, even though people try to say this isn't true, this is stupid, it's not actually doing anything, but he's been taking it consistently.

Right.

Well, he's a scientist too. Everyone in my family is a scientist, including my wife. And people say, oh, are you testing this on your father? No, he's a scientist. He can read this stuff for himself, and he's the one that made the that he believed in it. And yeah, I'm glad that he did because so far so good.

Wow. Okay, so that just happened last week. So 10 years you've been waiting for this to be like proven again.

Right, and we've always predicted, I've always said, resveratrol isn't the big story. The big story is A, can we make a medicine, which we're still trying. But B, we call it the endogenous activator. what's in our own bodies that resveratrol is mimicking. And it's these monounsaturated fatty acids that come from when we're hungry or if we eat these healthy plants.

Wow. Okay. That's pretty exciting.

It's damn exciting, but it's not as exciting as I thought it would be because, you know, in life, it's always an anticlimax, right? You think, I can't wait until this in my life happens. And then it happens. You think, yeah, but tomorrow I've got something else to figure out. Really, that's just my personality.

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You said that science is driven by the question, not the technology. What are the biggest questions you have out there right now or that science has out there right now?

Well, there's a big one that we're chasing right now. As I mentioned earlier, we found that we can reset the age of a cell and literally turn its age back. There's a clock in the body that we can measure. It's little chemicals that bind to our DNA as we get older. And by measuring the rate of those changes, think of it like plaque on your teeth accumulating, the older you get, as long as you don't scrape it off, the more you'll have, similar to how DNA accumulates these chemicals. We can measure the clock. We can predict how long you're going to live based on that clock. And what we found is we have a new, currently it's a gene therapy, but hopefully one day it could be a pill that resets the clock and cells go back to acting and being young again.

No way.

Yeah, that's how we restored the vision of those old mice. We put therapy into their retina.

We can reverse, reset the clock of time on our cells in our body.

Well, in mice, yes, and in human cultured cells in the dish, yes. We will know in a few years if it's true for humans.

What would that mean if we could do that?

Well, this is why I'm more optimistic than I was even a couple of years ago. We know that we can reset the age of cells in complex tissues like the eye at least once. And it looks like it's going to be a long lasting change. But we don't know, but I'm optimistic that we can reset multiple times. Imagine that.

Amazing.

And so the big question that we're trying to understand is similar to how a DVD gets scratched, how do you polish that DVD and allow the cell to read the young information again?

Wow.

And it's quite a a big idea that our cells have a backup copy of youthful information. How do they know which of these chemicals to get rid of to make the cell young again and not go too young that you become a tumor or basically an egg cell again? We don't understand that yet. So we're trying our best. We've made some breakthroughs. We know some of the machinery that allows this to work. But ultimately we still don't know what form this information of youth is in. For instance, it could be a new type of chemical that is added to the DNA when we're an embryo or when we're very young, and we still have it in our bodies that our cells can recognize and use that as the reset switch. It could be another type of molecule, could be a protein that binds to our DNA. So we're looking very hard for where that information is stored, and when we figure that out, then I think we can really have a good handle on age reversal.

Science is fascinating. Now, I know why you love being a scientist. Is there a way right now to predict like when someone would die based on their current life, their cells and say, okay, you're gonna live from 84 to 87 range based on what you keep doing at this stage. If you don't change anything.

Yeah, yeah.

Really?

Even some companies selling these clocked tests, you can have either a swab in your mouth or a blood test.

No way.

It'll tell you to predict the age you're gonna die.

I don't know about specific companies, what they're offering, but in the lab, we can do that. A good friend of mine, Steve Horvath, at UCLA does this routinely, and he's published work that can predict within a few years of when you're gonna die if you don't change your habits. And people who smoke, people who are overweight, have a faster clock. There's no doubt that you can control the rate of your aging with how you live your life.

What are the effects on a lot of people moving from smoking cigarettes to vaping? I feel like vaping is taking over the world right now and a lot of teens and smokers who are saying, okay, well this is better for me. I'm going to vape now and it's not going to be as bad for me. How bad is vaping on the body? in the body's lifespan?

Yeah, we don't know. Somebody needs to test that.

I feel like that's gonna be a big issue in the next five, ten years.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so my personal view, having a mother who died of lung cancer from smoking is that our lungs are pristine organs. They need to be free of particles, free of foreign material. to work well. They're very fragile and putting anything foreign into your lungs to me doesn't make any sense.

Vaping, smoking, any type of inhalation of a toxin.

Right, right. I mean, there are fewer toxins, I understand it, with vaping, but still we're learning that it's not risk-free.

Okay, I got one final question for you. From your study of biology, do you think aliens exist?

Yes, there is a calculation, a formula that you plug the variables in and the one thing that we tend to underestimate are the number of stars in the universe. And they're actually, it's not infinite, but it's close to it. There are so many possibilities that there has to be life out there. It's a certainty.

It's a certainty.

Yeah.

Wow.

Why is it a certainty?

We'll ever get to know them is another thing. Some of these life forms are going to be so far away that we can never communicate with them, unfortunately. But yeah, the science says they're out there. They've just got to be. The odds of them not being there is infinitesimal. Now, the problem that comes up is that just like we're learning as human beings, we tend to evolve destructive capabilities. The reason that we are survivors is that our ancestors wiped out the neighboring village plundered and raped routinely. We are not necessarily good animals at this point. We've got laws which prevent people from going too rebellious. But deep down, we do have an evil side as a species, not everybody individually. And it's probably true for aliens as well, that they've come up the same way we have and have a bad side as well. And that leads to destruction. And it could be that every civilization eventually wipes itself out after 20,000 years.

Yeah, I mean, because it's a foreign thing came here, we probably want to be welcoming something new, foreign with welcome arms. We would be worried living in fear, stress, anxiety, and to want to protect ourselves, kind of like whatever, anytime someone settled into a new place, there's probably already There was some type of worry, fear, or stress, right?

Exactly. Whenever I see a human trait, my mind goes to why does it exist? And whether or not it's being altruistic and kind or evil and a liar or someone who commits adultery. These are all traits that have at one point in our history been advantageous. And we are descended from those people. But, you know, we shouldn't be slaves to our DNA. This is why we have a big brain. We should be able to choose a path of survival and kindness where we can all live on this world and enjoy, you know, the freedoms and the luxuries of not having to worry about food.

David, you're one of the smartest and nicest scientists out there, my man. I really appreciate you and acknowledge you for constantly doing the research. and constantly putting yourself on the line based on things you've discovered 10 years ago, two years ago, where you're constantly learning new things and sharing that wisdom with us. You're doing great work and I really acknowledge you for that. You've got a great book out there called Lifespan. If people want to learn more about how they can really live longer, live healthier, you're on social media, David Sinclair on Twitter, David Sinclair, PhD. on Instagram. We got to have you come back every, you know, six to 12 months for sure because I have so many questions that I want answered and I know your information is really helpful.

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We're all faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations and we are at that point, that nexus point in our evolution as a species. So then you don't try to fix that.

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