47. Dr. David Sinclair: Author of Lifespan

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to episode number 47 of our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, I interview one of the world's top authors, and as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and to live better. In this episode, I am thrilled to interview Dr. David Sinclair. David is a professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Time magazine has named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world and among the top 50 in healthcare. He and his colleagues study sirtuins, protein-modifying enzymes that respond to changing NAD levels and to caloric restriction, as well as other subjects like learning and memory, which is one of my favorites, neurodegeneration, cancer, and cellular reprogramming. Even reading this off my little script here makes me feel smarter. Our conversation today is all about his book Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To. David believes that aging is a disease and that soon we may have the tools to put aging into remission. This has been one of my favorite conversations to date. So without further ado, please enjoy this amazing conversation with Dr. David Sinclair. David, thank you for coming on the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books podcast. How are you doing today?

I'm doing great, Nicholas.

Thanks for having me on.

I would love to have you introduce yourself to everybody who's not familiar with your work.

Yeah, sure. Well, I'm, I'm just a regular human being trying to get by. Uh, my day job is a professor at Harvard Medical School where I do research into the biology of aging. How to slow it down, how to reverse it, and in doing so, I think improve humanity and our lives in general. I live in Boston, Massachusetts. I grew up in Sydney, Australia, on the edge of what we call the bush, and so made it all the way from Sydney to Boston about 25 years ago. And I'm also an entrepreneur. I've started probably 20 biotech companies, taken the first 4 of them public. Um, I very much enjoy working and building— working with and building teams and doing things that others would think, uh, might be impossible. And so I wrote this book Lifespan, uh, to talk about that and my new ideas about why we age and hopefully why we don't have to.

Well, Lifespan was a fantastic book. I really enjoyed going through it. I went through it twice, so I listened to the book a few months back, and then I breezed through the book and kind of read some sections over recently, and I really enjoyed it. It was a fantastic book, and I know that we have hundreds of mutual fans based on the Instagram interactions that I've had already when I've posted your work. So, this will be a fun conversation. Could we start at the very beginning? How did you get interested in aging, and at what point in your past did you decide that this was going to be the path moving forward for you?

Well, so both my parents were scientists, and they would talk about feces and blood at the dinner table. So I think I was destined to be a scientist or a biologist or a doctor. And I've also been fascinated with death. And actually, our oldest child is as well. They're a taxidermist, and what they want to do forensics. So I think that there might be a gene for this, and I can first remember being fascinated, perhaps horrified by death when I was 4 years old, when my grandmother told me that it exists for humans. You know, you see plants die, but you never think that your, your pets or your parents or your grandparents or you would die one day. But that is a pretty big shock for most 4 or 5-year-olds when they find out. Most people bury that thought because it's just too sad to think about. It's paralyzing, in fact. But I haven't been able to get that out of my mind. I think it's really cruel to be a conscious animal and have the knowledge that everything you know and love will one day fall apart, and sometimes quite painfully. And so I went to college, got a degree, PhD in genetics, molecular biology. And while I was studying that, thought, hey, I think I could apply what I'm learning to understanding in a rigorous way why we actually age in the first place, because very, very few people even ask that question. They just look at aging and say, that's life.

Yeah, they do. And as we discussed prior to jumping on the show, mortality has been a really interesting subject for me. And I originally got into that subject, I suppose, by studying Stoic philosophy. And there were certain Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius who would constantly have people remind them that, hey, you're a mortal, you're going to die soon, you need to prioritize your time. We're not going to live forever. At least we're not going to live forever yet. And so that subject has been important for me and it helps me prioritize my time. So we have a mutual interest there. And it really is a scary thought. We're all going to die. And it's, it's a scary thought. Everybody we know is going to die. So I'm happy that you're researching this, and I'm happy that you've written this book for people. So part 1 of the book is aging is, is a disease that should be aggressively treated. And so can you define that? Aging is a disease. That's a pretty interesting stance.

Right. Well, I don't think it takes a genius to realize that aging is a disease by definition. If you look up in the medical dictionaries what a disease is, it's a condition that results in a deterioration of function and that can eventually lead to death. And that's exactly what aging is. But for some reason, I think historical reasons, psychologically as well, we put it in a different category. And it turns out that the the dividing line is simply just how many people get that disease. If something happens that's horrible over time to less than 50% of the population, we call it a disease and we try hard to treat it. We sometimes, we give it names like a syndrome. But if it happens to more than 50% of us, let's say even if it's just 50.5, we call that aging. And that's just a total arbitrary cutoff.

Yeah, no, it really is. And over, over the past— and I kind of forget what the stat is in the book, but you said over the past X number of years, our life expectancy is increasing, but the limit does not. And so that's really interesting. Could you explain that to everybody?

Yeah, well, so that we can talk about the mean lifespan, the average lifespan, and the maximum. And we've done a very good job of preventing infections and death during childbirth and limiting wars. So the average lifespan has gone up dramatically and continues to go up almost every year with the exceptions of wars around 1918 and 2020. But that line will continue to go up, but the maximum has not. There have always been very old people around, you know, probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago. We know of one person who lived to 122, even though that's even now debated, but around 117, 118, we reach our maximum— men a little earlier, a few years earlier— and we haven't been able to push past that barrier, and some people say we never will. What I say is there are plenty of species that live longer than us, and they're not so biologically different than us. Some of them are warm-blooded and have offspring, and they've only been separated by us— from us by a fraction of a second in geological time.

Mm-hmm.

And so it's not a biological barrier to living longer. We just need to understand what's going on in them. Let's say the bowhead whale is a good example, or a tortoise. and apply that to us, either using gene therapies or other types of medicines that could give us what they have and we lack.

So the tortoise, the whale, the jellyfish— why are some of these animals able to live much longer than humans?

Uh, well, that's still debated. Uh, what I write about, uh, in Lifespan is a new theory that's, you know, even since I've written wrote the book, um, has taken on a life of its own in the scientific field, which is, uh, exciting and rewarding. And that's the idea that our bodies have certain types of information. You know, we live in the information age, so this is no longer so hard to talk about and conceive of. The 2 types of information— one's digital, which is DNA, the other is analog, which is the control systems of that DNA. Think of it as the software of the body. And what I'm proposing is that it's a glitch in the software, not the actual code, which is the DNA, which is good news, potentially good news, because if there's a reset switch that allows you to reboot the system— I mean, how many of us just turn to switching the computer on and off and restarting and it works? Perfectly again, get rid of that blue screen. So aging is like a blue screen, and I, I think there might be a reset switch that allows our bodies to be young again. That would, A, allow us to not just prevent but treat diseases that are currently impossible to treat, but B, also allow us— our bodies to function like they're young again. And literally be young again so that we don't get heart disease, and Alzheimer's. And the interesting idea, if that's true, if you can reset the body and you have, for example, Alzheimer's disease, does it just go away? Um, and I'm willing to bet that it does.

There's an analogy that you use in the book with a DVD, uh, on the information theory of aging, and I'd love to have you explain that to everybody because it's pretty easy to digest.

Right. You know, I, I jokingly say when I give lectures, uh, to younger audiences, med students at Harvard, for example, that DVDs and CDs are these old-fashioned things that we used to put movies on and photos, and I get a chuckle. I think most people know what I'm talking about. The analogy works because the DVD has the digital system, which are the zeros and ones, the pits in the foil, And that's like our genome. Our genome isn't zeros and ones, it's 4 chemicals, A, T, C, G for short. But it is digital. It's base 4, not base 2 based. And so what we can think of is that this digital format is the information that we inherit from our parents, genetics. But there's another form of information which we call epigenetics. which in the cell are the systems that read the genes correctly, but in the DVD analogy, it's the reader of the DNA— of the DVD. So that, you know, remember you have to have a blue laser that reads the DVD, and that's analog, right? It's— it still has to move around. It's not digital, at least the machinery isn't, and it can get screwed up a number of ways. So the laser little, uh, a device can break down. But I also like to think of aging as scratches on the DVD so that the reader cannot read the information correctly. And that's what I think is happening similarly in, uh, the body, where we still have most of our genes that are intact in our body, in our cells, but the body doesn't read them correctly. And that is a breakdown in the epi— genetic information.

Sometimes when I tell people that, uh, I'm doing certain things to prevent aging, or that aging might not be a thing in the future, if I'm referencing your book or something like that, they'll say, well, I don't want to be 200 years old, I don't want to be 150 years old. And you paint this picture in the book where you say, imagine you show up and you hand in your little card And you get it back and it says you're 90 years old or something like that, but you still feel like you're in your 30s or your 40s. Would that be so bad? I mean, if you're not actually experiencing the physical decline that typically comes with aging nowadays. And so it's a really interesting thought process to go through because what we do fear about aging most of the time is the decline of the body and the decline of the mind. And so if those things can be reset, like you said, or they can be reversed. Aging isn't scary anymore. You know, we get to choose our life. Um, what do you think about people like Dave Asprey who say, okay, the oldest people are 120, I'm making a 50% improvement on that, I want to live to 180? Do you follow his work at all?

Yeah, I know Dave. Um, I like his philosophy. Now, Who knows how long Dave's going to live? He doesn't know, right? But there's no harm in trying. You certainly cannot start and expect a great result if you start when you're 80 or 90. It's a lifelong thing. And those people that typically live very long, you know, usually it's just an accident that they're not trying. So if Dave has the right genes and and modulates his epigenome, prevents the scratches from occurring so quickly, and makes it into an age where we have even better technologies to treat aging and disease, then I don't see why he couldn't break some barriers. And what's the worst that can happen? He lives a healthy life. He doesn't get diseases till later. Sounds like a great philosophy to me.

Yeah, it does. I like Dave's work too. I've read a couple of his books. And so part 2 of the book is steps and therapies that can be used right now to stop or reverse aging. So to prevent those scratches on the DVD, what are some of the things that you'd like to highlight as far as things that the average person could take advantage of today?

Yeah, well, one of the things that I wanted to write about in my book, and I think one of the big things that people come away with when they read it, and sometimes reread it and reread it because it has a lot of information, as you said, is that there are things you can do right now that can slow your aging. We know this for a fact now. We know this, for example, because we can read the biological clock. The epigenome can be read just as easily now as your DNA, your genome. And if you look at people who do certain things, which I'll get to, We can see that their aging has slowed down and they have a much greater healthspan and lifespan on average. So if there's only one thing that I could recommend— and there are more than that in the book for sure— but the one thing that I'd say that you could start with today is to eat less often. I'm not talking about malnutrition or starvation. I wouldn't recommend it for you know, young teenagers, but, uh, you know, in your 20s, 30s, there's a lot of evidence that skipping a meal each day, maybe 2, uh, have long-lasting benefits, and it slows down this— these scratches. Uh, I, for one, I don't eat breakfast, I rarely eat lunch, and I eat a reasonable dinner. Um, if you do this to mice, by the way, and just restrict the time that they eat during the day, they can eat as many calories, almost as many calories as a mouse that grazes through the day. But they live, I think it's 20% longer and stay healthier. So that's what I think is the easiest thing to do. And I'm sitting here with a cup of tea. If you do it for about a week or two, you literally don't feel hungry. So don't imagine that it's that difficult. And some people do it even more than I do. Some people go for a week every month without eating. I can't do that. But anyway, that's an easy thing to do, I think. There's the obvious things like keep your muscle strength up, which Nicholas, I see you must do. Here's the last thing I'll say on that topic. Only 20% of our longevity is based on what we inherit from our parents, our genetic inheritance. The rest is up to how we live our lives. And we know this from studies of twins who lead different lives but have the same genome, and they can live very different and lead very different lives when they get older.

On the intermittent fasting piece, is what it's commonly called now, skipping a meal, restricting your eating to maybe a 16:8 ratio or something like that. I'm, I want to say, 4 months into following the intermittent fasting, and I've only broken it a couple times, maybe if I go out to dinner late at night with some friends or whatever the case may be. I'm loving it, and it only took me a couple days to fall into the rhythm. So I have a cup or 2 of black coffee in the morning, zero calories. And if I'm really working and I'm really focused and energetic, dedicated to my work, sometimes I do go down to just one meal a day, which is dinner. and I'll completely forget about lunch as well. So for anybody that's listening and wants to try that out, feel free to message me specifically, or even check out Dave's new book. He just wrote a book on— uh, Dave Asprey's book. He wrote a book on, uh, I think it's Fasting is the title, or something like that. But, um, I've found that my energy has actually been increased substantially by eliminating breakfast. You kind of avoid that crash that you get in the morning. So I've been really enjoying that. So you just said DNA is only responsible for about 20% of our aging. I'd love to have you expand on that because you hear the excuse sometimes like, oh, my parents died early, it's inevitable for me, and I'm going to age faster than everybody else. So there's, there's not that much truth to that, huh?

I work in the genetics department at Harvard Medical School, so I have to give a nod to genes. But when it comes to long-term health, Yeah, a lot of it can be avoided. You might have a predisposition to type 2 diabetes, high blood sugar. I do. You know, I can see that running through my father's bloodline. But, you know, my father and I, we practice what we preach, and we've managed to keep our type 2 diabetes and blood sugar levels well within control. And our bodies are in tip-top shape for our age. You know, I would say for my father, he's physically 30 years younger than his actual age. And I'm not kidding, we've tested it. And so with that, you know, it's just an example of just by modifying your lifestyle, you can have a huge impact on your genetic destiny.

Well, for your father, he's— well, he was a scientist, you said, or is a scientist. It's also great to have you as his son because He gets access to all the information immediately. Speaking of information, we talked a little bit about how you communicate directly to the public nowadays and the restoring vision thing. So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about that because it's pretty impressive that you made the COVID and that you talked about it so much earlier in the book.

Oh yeah, right. So yeah, we, we were really, I guess, blessed and lucky is the way to put it, that Nature magazine put us on the COVID It doesn't happen to most scientists, and if it happens, it's, you know, it's one of those Golden Globe Award—

Frame it on the wall.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we had that happen this December. It was a picture of an eyeball being rejuvenated, and it was— the title was Turning Back Time. What you mentioned is pretty interesting. In the book, I talk about what it was like to make a discovery that I think is an extremely important one, if I'm able to say so without sounding too pompous. My student, Wen Cheng Lu, who I think will go on to do great things, he managed to figure out that there was a way to remove the scratches on the DVD and reset the age of a highly complex tissue in the mouse. which is the eyeball. And so we took some mice, we gave them glaucoma, which is one of the leading causes of blindness, or we just let them grow old naturally. And then we gave them this gene therapy, these 3 genes that are normally turned on when mice and we are very, very young, even in utero. And what happened was remarkable. The cells went back in age, their scratches, their epigenetic clock, uh, went in reverse, and the mice got their eyesight back. And in the case of glaucoma, we've now improved on the method. They get their eyesight back fully, as though they were young and untreated, um, undamaged. And then, uh, in the old age, their eyesight came back fully as well. So what does that say? That, that's a big deal. I mean, not just for people who need to have their eyes treated. But it's a big deal because what it shows is, really for the first time, that there's a reset switch in the body where you can go back to being young again, uh, very rapidly, within a matter of a week or two. And this isn't just a temporary reset. We think this is a permanent age reset, and it opens up the possibility that we could treat other organs. You can just imagine what would happen if we could turn back the age of the brain or the heart, the skin, the liver, and perhaps one day full-body rejuvenation. We hope to treat the first human patient with glaucoma in less than 2 years from now.

Wow.

We've been working on that. Yeah, so that, that's where my entrepreneurial experience comes in. We don't wait for that. But just to finish the point, which I think you raised, that's important, is in my book I talked about this discovery, and that was 18 months before the science world learned about this, which is fun and exciting to me that finally the public can hear directly from scientists, and in this case, hear about it a lot earlier than the Illuminati. Would and did.

It's also important for other scientists to get access to this information faster, probably. I understand the idea as an entrepreneur, you want to be competitively differentiated. But the reason that we're able to evolve so fast as a species is because everybody gets access to information faster. So that's, that's amazing. And in the book, I found it fascinating too, where you were able to, to target and age specific parts of a mouse faster, And so if you can age them faster, you can reverse it faster. If you can give it, you can take it away. And that principle is really interesting to me. So you also mentioned something about hearing as well, reversing hearing loss.

Yeah. So having, uh, it sounds crazy to say this, but it, but it is true. Having cured blindness, uh, we're now moving on to other disabilities and we're now working on curing, uh, hearing loss. Deafness, which is something, of course, you know, these 2 things historically were impossible, and now we're doing on a routine basis, admittedly in mice, but, you know, vision and hearing, they're not too different than what happens in our bodies, and I'm quite optimistic, as are my collaborators in the field who are experts on this, that this should translate into human therapies if all goes well. You know, there's a ways to go, I have to say, you know, please don't get too excited just yet because there's some safety things we have to figure out. But the good news is when we reset the eyeball of the mice, or even reset many of the organs in a mouse, we didn't see any evidence of any downsides. You know, you might think, well, there's got to be a downside, sounds too good to be true, but, and, and maybe, maybe it causes cancer. Well, we haven't seen any evidence of that. It seems like when you polish those scratches, this—

the—

it goes to a certain level and stops. You don't keep polishing until you rub off the information too much. And that's great news. If that's possible, then the sky's the limit. It's similar to the Wright brothers, uh, you know, you— they knew they could fly. How soon they could— the world could have Boeing 747s, you know, they didn't know. But they knew that it would happen one day.

Well, it's a great transition to the 3rd part of the book, which is the many possible futures this change can create. And that's where sort of the sci-fi brain gets opened up and you start thinking about these worlds without aging. Like, I asked my Instagram community, if you could stop your aging at any specific point biologically, like you don't look like you're any older, at what age would you want to do that? And the answers varied. Uh, but those kinds of questions are a lot of fun to think about. I mean, you could sit back over a couple drinks and have that conversation with your friends, and it can go in a lot of different directions. So what are some of the more popular questions that people ask you about the possible futures without aging?

Oh yeah, I get a lot of those. So one question is, how long can humans live? And we touched on that, that there is no biological limit. There's no law that says we have to age. How soon could we reach 150? Well, I'm on record saying that if this trajectory holds and this reprogramming turns out to be safe, the first person to make it to 150 might already be alive. And we have to remember that, that we're— the longer we live, the better technology we have access to. And even 5 years ago, we didn't know how to Reverse aging. Now we do. You know, what's it like 100? Well, if you can make it another 50 years, what is the world going to be like? So that's that's what gives me optimism. Just to to get a little bit to your point about living longer. A lot of people who don't read the book and don't understand what we're talking about do worry about. all the negatives. You know, there are the optimists, which the two of us are, but then there's the people that say any big change has to be a negative, it can't be positive. And so their mind goes to, oh, is it like Dorian Gray? Are you going to have a horrible life if you get older? Is it going to destroy the planet? These are questions that I get asked a lot, and I do address in my book for that reason.

Hello, Book Thinkers family. A quick word from today's podcast sponsor. Today's episode is sponsored by Audible. Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audiobooks ranging from bestsellers to celebrity memoirs, business, and my favorite, personal development. And as part of Audible's partnership with us, we're actually offering listeners a free 30-day trial. This trial includes 1 credit good for any Premium Selection titles you'd like on the whole platform. So that's pretty much any book, including the one we're talking about today. That book is yours to keep even after the trial is over. Now, this trial also includes access to Audible's Plus catalog of podcasts, audiobooks, guided wellness programs, and Audible Originals. You can listen all you want, no credits needed. Now, everyone on the Book Thinkers Instagram knows that I love physical paper books. There's nothing better than having a book in your hand, Scribbling notes everywhere in the margins. I kind of tear those things up, but I've been completing an additional 20 to 30 books every single year using Audible by listening when I'm in the car, doing chores around the house, or while I'm on my morning walks or runs. You could take advantage of this free trial by clicking the link in today's show notes or going to www.bookthinkers.com/audibletrial. You will not regret it. Now back to today's episode. In my mind, because of the books I'm reading and also being in the entrepreneurial space and the investing space, my mind immediately goes to, wow, I mean, imagine the compounding of a 401 over the course of 150 years instead of just until the age of 65. And those are some of the things that I think my mind defaults to. But that future without aging and that future where you can reset yourself, it's so fascinating to me. Like, I can picture you going in for your yearly checkup or your, I guess, every 25-year checkup or something like that, and going through a scan and the doctor says, oh, you know, we need to do a rejuvenation of your skin this time around, or whatever the case is. And that's just so fascinating to me.

Yeah, I don't think that's good. That's so much science fiction. I mean, right now, clearly, it's— it is fiction, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that you go in, you have an infusion, an injection, you take an antibiotic that turns on the genes that you're given, and over the next 2 weeks, you literally do get younger. Your eyesight gets better. You look younger. You feel better. I want to just ask— there are 2 things. One is the 25-year checkup is definitely not going to happen. We are going to have nanosecond checkups. We already can do that with rings and watches and eventually sensors. And even now, you can do your own check up with a blood test and have AI, uh, look at your, your biomarkers and give you suggestions. We're, we're entering a world where if you're not measuring yourself, you're missing out on so much information. You know, if we, if we take a pill or we do exercise or go on intermittent fasting, unless you're measuring something about yourself, you have no idea if it's working. We have to get away from the mindset of the annual physical where the doctor makes you cough and takes your blood pressure. That's so 20th century. It really is ridiculous.

Yeah.

The second thing that I was wanting to mention was more about the ability to measure one's age. We all assume that we're as old as our birthday candles, but that doesn't have to be true. My father is physically 30 years younger. I haven't changed physically or mentally since I was probably 20. And so when you ask people what age would they like to be, you know, for me, it's somewhere between the ages of 20 and 51. It's all the same to me.

No, I love the perspective. I love the thought shift. I know it's going to take a long time. for our civilization to reverse some of those preconditioned thoughts just because of holidays and birthday cards and so many of the different standardized measurements. It's funny, my mom for a long time worked for Hallmark, and so we always used to joke that they created all of these holidays just to sell cards. But it conditions us to this linear way of thinking, you know, this incremental block that leads to a specific destination that's irreversible. And so I'm excited that you're moving people's opinions away from that. On the measurement piece, that Peter Drucker line, like, what can't be measured can't be managed— I'm big into measurement. And so I'm wondering if there are any specific devices or wearable technology that you recommend. I wear an Oura Ring for measuring my sleep. I wear an Apple Watch to check physical activity, heart rate, things like that. But I'd love to hear what some of your recommendations are.

Those 2 things are a good start. I do the same. I do blood tests, which I think eventually will be a chip under the skin, but for now it's— you need some blood drawn. I've been doing that for 11 years, actually more, and I've been able to see things that have gone out of whack or are trending upwards when I didn't want them to and immediately corrected them. This is not what your doctor will do for you. They're not in the business of optimizing you. They're in the business of treating a disease. And if you don't have type 2 diabetes, they're not going to give you a type 2 diabetes drug that would undoubtedly prevent type 2 diabetes. So I take a different approach. The blood tests, your listeners might be saying, well, how do I do that? Well, there are companies that will do this. Um, one, and in full disclosure, I am an advisor and a very small co-owner of this company, so, you know, take, take my advice as, as you see fit. Um, it's called InsideTracker. Uh, it's in the US, but you also, if let's say you're anywhere else in the world, you can upload your own data.

You—

I, I have a, a health service. I advise people on things, and one of my clients is in Turkey, and they don't have InsideTracker, but the doctor does these 34 blood tests, and we enter the data in, and we look at it and see what the, the AI tells us. And what's different about that is that a doctor cannot store a billion data points in their head This company can, with hundreds of thousands of of individuals and scientific papers. And this thing, you know, it it has you know help from scientists and doctors. But we scientists and doctors need help these days from machines. So that's one thing. That's that's true monitoring. I've done a blood glucose monitor. I don't do it anymore because I've already learned enough about my body that I don't need to to watch it. and become obsessed with that. I've learned the type of foods such as white rice and grapes that send my glucose up tremendously. And I also learned that I'm one of the people where my blood sugar goes up early in the morning, which explains why I have no need for breakfast anyway.

Yeah, there's a, there's a very clear, I guess, example of this, the difference between what a doctor might recommend and what's actually the best for us that I read, I think, in one of Dave Asprey's books where he said, Look at your hormones. If you go to a traditional primary care doctor when you're 50, they're looking at the average for a 50-year-old male, not the average for a 20-year-old male, which maybe is your ideal self. And so by supplementing with hormones and getting your body back to that age, you're now feeling better, you have more energy. But a doctor would never, ever, ever make that recommendation. A traditional doctor would never make that recommendation. And so I'm sure there are a lot of areas of our health where changes like that are probably necessary.

Yeah, absolutely. My doctor and my dentist, they're scared when I'm coming in because I will ask them about stuff such as, is it worth fixing teeth? Yes, I expect to be around a lot longer than you think. Is it worth giving me medicine to correct my cholesterol levels at age 29. My doctor literally said, well, you're not old enough to worry about that yet. And I totally freaked out. I said, why do we want to wait till I have heart disease? Give it to me now. And fortunately, he did. But, you know, when I was 29, that wasn't something that doctors tended to do for young people. So that— I'm not every doctor, you know, there are a lot of doctors that are changing their ways. I think more of them need to think about the future and to try to help younger people stay fitter for longer, not just wait until there's something to treat.

Yeah, I'm, like I mentioned, I'm 27 years old, but I have sleep apnea issues, you know, highlighted by the different wearable technology and apps that I've tried out. And that's because of a constructed or an obstructed airway.

But it's funny, I go to my primary care doctor, and this really happened.

I showed him the data and I said, I have more awake time and more restlessness through the night than I think I should. I'd like to optimize this. Can I have an at-home sleep study or can I go and get a sleep study and just see what they say? And he said, insurance will never cover that. You're too young. So what do you mean I'm too young?

I have the data.

He said, you're too young. And then when you go and look at the actual qualifications that you need to meet in order to get like a CPAP machine or something like that, they're ridiculous.

And if you're off by just a little bit, you don't qualify.

And so a lot of those things need to change. We had James Nestor, who wrote the book Breath, on the podcast. Have you, have you read that book? Yeah.

And it's just so interesting, the, the link between our airways and nasal breathing and sleep and overall health and things like that. So I'm happy that it's becoming a little bit more popular to reverse some of these traditional thoughts.

Yeah.

For somebody who's maybe in their mid to late 20s, like much of our audience, early 30s, and they're starting to become more aware of these things, what other resources are available for people who want to learn a little bit more about stopping or reversing aging?

Well, first thing is, don't believe everything you read on the internet. There's a lot of BS, non-science out there, especially when it comes to aging. And so I would go to pubmed.org. You can read abstracts there. That's the primary source for scientific information. If you want the summary of 25, 30 years of knowledge and experience, you can skim my book. If you want to know what I do based on that knowledge. It's page 304 of the printed version. There's an audiobook too. And this is what my father and I do. It's a, it's a list of things and why we do it. And yeah, so that's, that's it. I'm also on social media. I try to put out tidbits of knowledge and things like that. Besides that, there's very honestly very little that's out there that's trustworthy, uh, when it comes to trying to stay young, um, and that's the reason I wrote my book and then the reason I'm working on another one.

Well, yeah, the, the internet and social media specifically, it's built to, to create, uh, dopamine hits, and so those headlines are exciting but maybe not always accurate. Now, you just said you're working on another book. That's something that we— I wanted to make sure we touched on. What's the next book going to be all about?

Yeah, well, we did touch on this before we put— you pushed the record button, and that I bring it up rarely because I don't want someone to scoop me on it, but I just can't help myself. It's pretty exciting. It's the idea that we've caused our own evolution. Some of it's very positive. We've got a very big brain, but the rest of us is pathetic. We are a lollipop as a species, and we've caused it because of our technology. Our bodies are shaped by technology. Our technology goes back many millions of years, ever since we picked up a rock. And that's interesting. I'm writing about the genetics that have changed to make us so pathetic. But also, we're now on a treadmill where our technology We rely on it. How many of us would survive a winter without technology? I'm in Boston, so I'd survive about 15 minutes right now out there.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat.

Yeah, it's brutal. But we cannot stop. We, you know, we can't go back to Neolithic times, and we wouldn't want to. We wouldn't even want to go back 50 years. It's not the way to go. We have to keep going forward. But our technology keeps making life better, but also worse. Anyone who's had to sit down for 8 hours a day staring into a camera like many of us know that technology is good and it can also be bad for us. So the book is about how did we get here, where we're going, and how to best prepare for that future that is inevitable, really, for any species that's ever picked up a rock.

I'm excited to check that out. That sounds very interesting and The very last thing I'll ask you about, because you mentioned something, just a sentence or two before we jumped on, but clinical trials related to COVID-19. Could you expand on that a little bit?

Yeah, uh, so what I talk about in, in my book is a group of genes that we link to aging called sirtuins. These, uh, sirtuins prevent and control the scratches, uh, and how the DVD is read. And they also turn out not just to be defenders of the body for long-term diseases, but also short-term infections. And they're controlled by a molecule that we have a lot of in our body, but less so as we get older, called NAD, capital NAD. And by the time you're 51, like me, you have about half the levels of NAD when you were 20. And it only gets worse from there. And it turns out that COVID-19, the virus, uh, SARS-CoV-2, one of the ways it attacks the immune system and the body is to chew up the NAD in the body. So if you're already depleted in this molecule that you require to be healthy, and it's being depleted, and you can no longer make a lot of energy, I mean, it makes perfect sense that the elderly are more susceptible. to illness, disease, and actually ultimately accelerated aging after you recover. And so our clinical trial is based on the supplementation with a capsule that has the ability to raise NAD levels in the body. We know this for a fact. We've been doing clinical trials on people for over 2 years now. And our hypothesis is that it will allow older people to fight the disease and recover more quickly.

It's exciting news. Well, one of the other exciting things, I guess, that I'll say when— before we wrap up is just that there's also some information benefits to having somebody like you live for a very long time, because you're more likely to make bigger advancements with 40 or 50 years of information and studies in the— in your back pocket than you are with only 10. And so if we can get you another 100 years of information, I think that you'll be doing You've already done some very special things, but you'll be able to do even more special things. So there's, there's a compounding effect to that information as well.

Uh, I, yeah, I totally agree. The statistic I like is that for every year you stay alive, you get another few months of life, um, because technology keeps advancing. So let's all try to stay alive for longer and give us the best chance of, of health. I, I don't think we'll, we'll ever live forever. But I do think that we can barely imagine what the future is going to be like health-wise.

Cheers to that. Well, David, thank you so much for coming on the, on the podcast today. I really appreciate you spending some time. And when that next book comes out, I hope that we have another conversation.

Uh, definitely. And, uh, keep doing what you're doing. It's really important for, uh, people like me to not just stay in our labs, but, uh, come and talk directly to people who listen.

I will. Thank you very much. That is a wrap. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Book Thinkers, Life-Changing Books. It would mean the world to us if you could write a review and share this episode with a few of your friends. I mean, these books truly have the power to change people's lives, and by reviewing or sharing our podcast, you're helping us make an impact. If you have any recommendations for future guests or any constructive feedback for us on how we can improve our show, please feel free to submit a form on our website, www.bookthinkers.com, or send us a direct message on Instagram @bookthinkers. With that, I am signing off, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Don't forget, go read something.