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[Music] [Music] hey joe hello david always good to see you my friend how are you likewise feeling great uh i enjoyed you on the lex friedman podcast i learned some things me too i learned that i like the guy he's the best isn't he yeah he's a such an unusual human being a brilliant guy who's uh incredibly humble he's uh both a martial artist and an ai scientist you know he's i love that guy he's so he's so special yeah a philosopher a poet everything yeah and he's like so he's so real like and he does he he pushes himself in these very unusual ways and i think a lot of the reason why he does it to examine his own mind and to examine his own potential like he does it as a scientist but also as a brute he's a weird combination of the two things because you know he's a like a legitimate black belt in jiu jitsu he's really good no way i didn't know that about oh my god you didn't know he doesn't look like he could hurt a fly oh lex will [ __ ] you up like lex is like legit black belt in jiu jitsu yeah very good now i'm amazed but yeah everybody i know that's trained with them is like he's very good okay well what i also didn't know about him he's been too busy to have much of a social life so you and i and everyone else should try and find him a good woman that's one of my goals now i the the good woman thing is god the good man good woman thing that's uh that's one of those the keys to success and happiness in life and it's so hard to find the right one and maybe sometimes for some people hard to recognize if you found the right one even if you found them well the problem is that we're finding them in our teens and twenties often when we have no idea what the other sex or or the partner that you're looking for really is and i have a theory that when you're young you look for the opposite you're
attracted by what you cannot do but as you get older you really want to go for someone who's more like you right where you have a friend yeah someone who you can talk to about common interests yeah exactly but it's tough you know the whole dating thing is is crazy most of it's done through text now and you've got to try and figure out somebody through the internet and there's all these games about when do you reply how long do you wait emojis or not oh emojis are not that's what a 2021 dilemma emojis or not yeah yeah don't overdo the emojis no no emojis well i'm not an expert but back in our day we were lucky to meet a girl at a bar or something but uh these days i think it's it's harder it's more like during covert i'm i'm happy i'm married but if i was single i'd be doing confetti emojis the big heart that blows up whoop i'd do all that [ __ ] you have balloons you'd have a million women after you joe no i i think um i think emojis are fun jamie thinks they're a different language jamie thinks that emoji's at the beginning of the next hieroglyphs and he said it and a light bulb went off in my head and i'm like i think he's dead right i think one day we're going to commit i really believe this that and maybe you can help me out on this i think that if someone concocted a universal language a language that every country could adopt and understand and they did so in um you could do it in the form of a game where it would be a like as you're getting better at it you score points and you do you know you do better like say if you're playing like a call of duty type game and in that game you in order to increase levels of the game you must learn this new language and this language is an image language that interprets intent through some sort of emoji character system that doesn't require english or kanji or any any sort of letters or any sort of way that we
interpret sounds and language which is some new complete new thing kids would learn it quick well they had but they already have it it's their esperanto for sure oh yeah yeah right like you and i can talk to someone in japan and they'll know what we're talking about right but how many people have adopted esperanto huh one but it was an idea that person's dead right it wasn't but it was an interesting idea but i think that if someone came along and did something in the future just like think how quickly people adapted to cell phone use in the 1990s no one had a cell phone it was there was no cell phones you just went about your life and to call someone you had to call them at home and then in the 2000s everyone had a cell phone i mean literally it went from like 1991 no one has a cell phone 2013 everyone has a cell phone and everyone has a smartphone by that so it's a completely new world in the span of 12 years that's unprecedented right it is well it's similar to the turn of the 19th to the 20th century where all these gadgets showed up and people were hyper stressed and agitated with anxiety and we're seeing the same now with super change and the kids adapt but a lot of people our age we're roughly the same age are just trying to play catch up you know what what's the latest emoji in fact laughing is a skull did you know that laughing yeah dead yeah so you know but i didn't know that my kids thought i was i was an old guy you know where that comes from that's black culture like yeah yeah when that's that's something adopted correct me if i'm wrong it's like black twitter right yeah yeah sure i guess i was asking if you guys know what a hat means no you see the hat cause this that's like it's two levels deep so a hat would mean cap cap or no cap right you know what that means what cap on someone no
shoot them it means you're lying a what yeah really if someone says like if they make a statement they say that's no cap or whatever that means like i'm not lying or they'll call out you're lying is cap what is cat i don't know that's the part i don't know it's just this is one of those things that's come out of internet culture that you just sort of have to like what the [ __ ] are they talking about am i wrong about dead is that no you're 100 on yeah yeah it's black where it came from i don't know the exact part but probably when i see when i follow like funny black dudes and they they wrote right dead dead as [ __ ] or whatever like af and they have a bunch of skulls after someone says something is something new that's popped up that i've seen a few people asking like what does that mean and i was going to see if you got it now no man i got i rely on jamie because he's younger right but it's a constant effort to keep up with this that young jamie thing is like eventually eventually we'd have to change it to not that young jamie my fingers hold on this is fascinating we can watch a new language evolve yes in real time it's really great it is and it and it's driven by kids and it's driven by these interactions it's like every now and then a wave catches on and like a bunch of people hop on the wave and they think it's fun and then they'll start doing this thing and then that thing becomes like like eggplants when did eggplants become dicks i don't know but they're dicks right yeah i mean yeah if you saw an egg plant a cap what would you say now i'm confused that's where i'm going with the emojis like yeah it would happen you fall into like what the [ __ ] does this mean yeah kids know well you said that like it was years ago that you said that that picture we pulled up i was trying to think who asked us where there was two people and a turtle in between it
like a week or two ago it wasn't like it was sketched on a wall somewhere yeah that turtle supposedly means like it's a sign of fertility so that was sort of like two people maybe were having sex or they were bonded in some way or another was that um the gobekli tepe image it could be i think so yeah yeah yeah but you know well we live in a crazy age it's fun but stressful stress for a lot of people well and for your study for the study of human life extension and anti-aging when you look at the stresses that are completely they're very novel to the human experience like the stresses of social media the stresses of cell phone use the stresses of blue light like staring at screens at night like all that stuff like how much of an effect do you think that's having on people and have we even quantified that yet uh we are quantifying it and it's having a real negative effect mental health issues is going to be the medical problem of the 21st century no question there are companies that are doing these uh remote video chats with a psychologist or psychiatrist they are booming these are the next billion dollar companies yeah i mean you wanna anyone wanna make money look into that but we are living in a stressful world and we part of it's because we don't have much else to worry about we've gotten rid of all the major worries wolves yeah we don't have to we're not in savannah anymore we're not going to get picked off by a cheater well a line probably but we've built this world we you know six million years ago the first hominid ape-like thing was up in the tree walking around actually upright which is interesting right wasn't swinging from the branches that picked up a stick that animal picked up a stick and that was put us on this treadmill where we are today innovation after innovation tool after tool after tool but in response our bodies have deteriorated we only build our bodies as much as we need to so if we've got tools and we can throw rocks we don't need
a lot of muscles and in fact our head just expanded so we could build better tools faster and faster and you know the culmination of that is an iphone but where are we going to be in another hundred thousand years it's really scary because this treadmill we cannot get off it there's no going back there's no stationary because we've got problems that we've already created from our own technology that we have to solve with better technology so that we're a species that once we've picked up that stick we're on this path and those things that got us here there are actually four traits that i think can think of that got us here that make us different from all other animals those are our not just our what got us here they're our biggest threat and but we also have to use them to get us out of this problem and what are those well let's see so the first one is tool making okay no big deal we've got hands that have evolved to throw rocks shoes um our feet actually are built for shoes imagine that they're all these jeans that we've our feet are built for shoes yeah yeah our feet actually are we've had shoes for so many years that we've got feet that fit shoes have you ever seen what it looks like when those guys in the amazon walk around with no feet and they develop these hand-like feet no oh they can't pick up stuff oh no you have to see this because what happens is when they walk around barefoot in the dirt for so long their toes develop the ability to grip so they're gripping the ground so their toes instead of being like a person who wears shoes all the time where the toes are all connected they splay out like hands that's very strange make sense i want i want that what about my friend steve ronella was in uh guyana and he was uh hanging out with his tribe and they lit they live in the forest like look at their feet that's incredible maybe that's the way we should be well that's a way i think people lived when
they lived in the jungle forever this is the horror how do you say that harani this is the ecuadorian rainforest these people this um when you look at their feet i think it's soft ground and they're walking around in dirt all the time and they their feet splay out and they develop the ability to like push off of things with their feet so it's it's the exact opposite of the way human beings develop bunions or they smush their feet into like these shoes that don't really fit human feet and then they get these weird bunions where their toes are pointed towards the other toes this is the opposite they spread out like fingers yeah well we can trace the genetics of this we become a very weak species if you get into a a fight with a with you know let's say a chimp let's say a house cat even that yeah bite you off a dog your face at their mercy but even the strongest human cannot beat your average chimp or any chimp don't even call it pathetic so we're basically a lollipop physique we're a stick with a big head but that's because we've had these tools for so many years we've had fire even our guts have shrunken down we don't have long intestine so he put us out in the wild we're screwed we can no longer exist in the wild yeah but i live in boston i'm out there in the winter for maybe 10 minutes i'm dead so that's who we are now we are this pathetic physical species that has built tools that are got us here but are actually messing with our minds the blue light the chairs we sit in the food we eat all the time these have made us a weaker species so what i'm hoping to do with my research and and some companies i'm building is to get us out of that problem and engineer our way out and also make wellness and health a thing that people actually can take care of themselves and what are the steps
that what there's one thing that people can do and exercise is a good one right because of the fact that we live these sedentary lifestyles and most of the time people are sitting down and there's a lot of time spent standing at screens how important do you think it is to get out and do something and what kind of an effect does that have like what kind of quantifiable effect does that have on life extension oh it's very clear there are two things you can do uh that are well known to extend your lifespan and when i say extend lifespan i don't mean be older for longer i mean be healthier in your 80s and 90s like my dad who's turning 82 who's got the the physique and mental uh aptitude of a probably a 30 year old he's stronger than me so you want that okay so what do you have to do well you have to start early you can't just start when you're 80. although it helps but it's not the best so you want to just get out of the chair people say walk but i think it's better to lose your breath become hypoxic you know hypoxia chambers or hyperbaric chambers these stress the body a little bit so run for 10 minutes a few times a week that's what i do um and you don't have to run for hours it's just 10 minutes is enough go biking so it's a fact that people who regularly ride bikes and i think it was something like up to 80 miles a week but they would have a 40 less chance of having a heart attack than someone who didn't do that so it's a massive change not just a little thing at the margins massive changes the other thing is which i do uh is to skip meals so it's not that hard i now feel weird if i eat a meal for breakfast or lunch and i try not to snack too this this idea of nutritionists three meals a day plus snacks never be hungry is killing us it really is and we know that if you do these things to animals in controlled settings they live longer a lot longer 20 sometimes 30 percent because they're healthier for longer they don't get
cancer and heart disease and dementia so i don't know why we don't all do that i just think we just like to sit around and eat it's it's good it feels good to just eat chips have the m m's do what just feels good oh for sure yeah but is there like so when you talk about um how eating one meal a day can extend your life is it because when you're eating all the time you're taxing your digestive system which taxes your resources or is there some sort of a mechanism that leads to decay of the human body from over consumption like what is it yeah so overconsumption or just consumption in general makes your body complacent and we know this in great detail at the molecular level there are genes that respond how much you're eating and what you're eating and where you're exercising and these are called longevity genes and they give our body resilience and fight aging and slow down what we can now measure the biological clock so i can take your blood or actually now we've developed a very cheap test just a swab to be able to tell you very accurately how old you are not based on how many times the earth goes around the sun that's ridiculous age is just a number you can actually take the swab i can tell you how how old you are really but then using real science tell you how to slow that down and this is really cool just in the last few years we've figured out you can reverse human aging as well well um you and i have talked about this before but i'm doing hyperbaric treatments i've done 40 of them 40 90 minute treatments over the past few months how's it feeling i don't know i feel pretty good good but i always feel good that's what's confusing well i've been doing so much [ __ ] for so long yep like never stop you don't know what's working that's the problem so this test that i'm developing uh which will come out later uh probably this year is how do you know what you're doing is working this is a big problem
for everybody and you don't stay motivated if you don't see it we have dashboards on our cars we know how fast we're going we know if the engine needs work with our bodies we don't know that and if you go to the doctor once a year they don't know much either to be honest i mean some of my best friends are doctors real doctors but what you need is one number at the top to rule them all so you can measure things you can wear rings you can wear these wrist watches i do a lot of that i put these things on my chest but it's really complicated it's expensive it's confusing what you want is one number and that's your biological age which the test that i'm developing and i want to democratize that because right now the people who are doing all of this stuff are the really rich people and most people either don't know i can't afford it in the hyperbaric treatments the reason why i'm doing it is because of that study out of israel you want to tell people about that uh yeah so this is a study out of israel it's um a group that has a chamber built by germans which is ironic over in israel and yeah yeah so i went in this chamber actually i visited them uh before covert some of my good friends over there and what they do is they put you you pro i don't know if yours is the same but this is a really big room and you can fit about 20 people in there and they give you oxygen so extra oxygen and then they raise the pressure up and then they drop it and raise it is that what you've been doing yeah and so what happens i think to the body is the body's going oh [ __ ] i've got too much oxygen so it responds and then the decrease oxygen makes you feel hypoxic like running so this is a way of getting you might view exercise without having to exercise and then you turn on these longevity genes and i would bet though i haven't proven it yet though i am working on it is that some of these genes that we've discovered
the soturans was discovered to be involved in aging we didn't discover them are activated by this hyperbaric chamber and what they showed in this paper that got probably you excited as well as everyone else is they looked at the ends of chromosomes which shorten over time the telomeres and actually got longer after this therapy and that is a sign of reversing aging it's not as good as the clock that i'm developing but it is a good sign and they decided after examining these people from 90 min or 90 days doing 60 sessions that it gave you the equivalent of 20 years decrease in biological age because of the length of the telomeres which is super controversial right it's certainly controversial everything's controversial in science till it's being repeated and you it takes ten years for it but it's also controversial the concept of telomere length being equal to biological age well yeah it's one aspect i would say that it's not that controversial but it's it's certainly not the only determinant of age what i think and as i wrote about in in my book is that this biological clock which is literally chemical changes to your dna over time is the real number telomeres are out there they're like the the wrist watch for for health they don't that doesn't tell you your real age it's an indicator and the reason that it's not believed by a lot of people and i'm kind of skeptical to some extent is that telomeres get shorter when cells divide not all cells divide your brain doesn't divide right not typically and also the telomeres can vary quite dramatically if you measure them one week after another one month after another they're jumping around the test isn't very accurate whereas the one what i what's called the epigenetic age test or a horvath clock named after my good friend steve horvath that's much more accurate that doesn't jump around unless you actually do something to either slow down or reverse
aging so i would say that you want to do this test we should do a mouth swab get you our test and you know you can decide if you want to release that number but i bet you're younger than you are and we could tell everybody okay let's do it all right sounds good and then i complete the 60 sessions of the hyperbaric chamber first well you should do that anyway then we'll give you a washout period and then period yeah how long i don't know probably a few months i think let it let it settle in uh yeah but you can sign up for it well i'll put your email in there i'm down for whatever you're doing dude i'm listening all right tell me what to do well so yeah we just put up a website because i thought people would be interested in this so it's dr sinclair spell out doctor d-o-c-t-o-r sinclair.com if you want to sign up there's a few is dr sinclair taken uh yeah we didn't get that one i don't think yeah too slow well jamie.com there's a certain limited number of these tests um but yeah it's just a number find out how fast you're aging don't join dr david sinclair's wait list so i'm doing this you know i've had it fortunate in my life i don't need to make a lot of money but what i need to do what i want to do is to make everybody aware of their health and how to benefit i mean you and i we read a lot about this we care but most people either don't have the time or the knowledge or access to the people we have this is what i want to do and it starts with this number this this overall arching top level number like your credit score you know if you if you don't you can look at things like did you pay your electricity bill did you pay off your car those are similar to the watch and the rings that you can wear and the heart monitors but the credit score is what matters and this number that we can tell you is really what tells your inner
core age and it's irrelevant really love's irrelevant what how many birthday candles you have and what's really cool about it is that we didn't know until recently that if you do certain things like hyperbaric oxygen chamber or there's some things you can inject into yourself in one study you can reverse human aging what's the things you can inject into yourself oh boy all right i'm not endorsing doing this but there is a study that came out looking at this clock that we'll measure for people for not a lot of money and and so this group they put a few things into the body of patients and it was for a few weeks and they measured the clock and they measured the thymus which shrinks as you get older so i know you want to know what they are all right let's list them metformin metformin growth hormone and a precursor to hormones called dhea which goes down as you get older and that rejuvenated the thymus of these people it was very clear and the clock went back by years the metformin thing is controversial right because that is uh a drug for what is it for diabetes yeah high blood sugar high blood sugar and what what's controversial is that decreases physical performance in athletics all right well so am i right about that no no one's right about that no i know of so i've read the papers i don't know how many people actually read the papers oh okay uh so here's what the papers say first of all the difference is tiny you have to squint to see it and they also change the axes so that it's not zero at the bottom so that's that's cheating to begin with second of all the muscles can you explain that explain what you just glossed over yeah science speak i apologize that's okay okay so if i if a graph looks like that all right i'm sorry i'm i'm showing so my hand is just listening like a hockey puck yeah so it's a hockey stick a two-dimensional graph on one on one axis the the vertical axis uh
you've got one number and on on the other you've got uh the basically the treatment and if you what you should do as a good scientist is that bottom number always in the corner should be zero okay but you can cheat you can actually say that that vertical axis starts at 30 and the difference is you know 33 to 35 and then your eye psychologically thinks oh that's a big difference but actually if you stretch it out to back to zero it'd just be a tiny little difference so there's a minuscule difference in discernible physical performance but it's also worse than that it's also it's been misinterpreted this is the bane of my career as things being misinterpreted because people don't have the time to read it the other thing is those muscles were just as strong whether you're on metformin or not now the difference in that little difference in that graph was the size of the muscles so if you want hypertrophy you want to build up you want to bulk up yeah metformin may reduce that slightly i think it was five percent different something like that but for a professional athlete five percent difference is astronomical no doubt i'm not saying that but what a sprinter right imagine when you're just like literally trying to be one half of a footstep ahead of your competition five percent means everything yeah but but i'm not saying i'm not speaking here to professional athletes necessarily but there's another there's a third misconception isn't it it's crazy how this stuff becomes memes turns out that the reason it that the uh the exercise doesn't build as much muscle is that you just get a little bit tired when you do the reps but if you have the willpower to do the same number of reps you're good so just overcome that feeling and the reason for that i think is metformin interferes with your energy production in these little packages in the cell called mitochondria or the battery packs
is there a ability to accentuate your energy in some sort of other way like with stimulants well i i take an nad booster oh it's i don't prescribe anything i'm not a doctor so disclaimer this thing with your hands well you know i'm always you know i'm a harvard professor and i'm cognizant that they will watch this um so i'm not prescribing anything but i take this molecule nmn which raises nad which we've shown in my lab and others that it boosts mitochondrial activity gives more energy atp in animals and we're doing human trials right now and it looks promising so i try to counteract my metformin with that molecule that's a supplement metformin's a drug which you either need a doctor or you can get it elsewhere other countries actually it's over the counter it's so safe for them but long story short i occasionally i'll skip a metformin if i'm going to work out just you know in an abundance of caution but this controversy is way overblown as you can tell oh so you could literally work out and then take your metformin so then you don't have to worry about the negative effects because they're temporary that's what i do oh okay so you're only dealing with a very small number five percent and then it's this is you could mitigate this by just taking it after exercise which is that's a no-brainer yeah so it's not temp like it's not a permanent change of your ability to move weight or your ability to have exercise and maybe you could have a couple stiff espressos before you work out you'll probably balance it out yeah yeah anything that'll make you um feel good i didn't tell people why metformin yeah i was just gonna answer thank you yeah that's right i can run your show for you please do so metformin inhibits your mitochondria which are the power packs uh it binds to this protein that makes chemical energy and when you do that
the body responds by making more mitochondria remember a little bit of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger that's exactly what's going on here we call this hormesis and uh so by inhibiting it your body builds more so when the drug goes away you've now got more energy and that also helps the body take up blood sugar uh become more what's called insulin sensitive and that's why it works for type 2 diabetics but by accident this drug has been shown in tens of thousands of veterans and mainly but tens of thousands of people to also delay other diseases of aging heart disease cancer frailty alzheimer's it's it's amazing uh when you look at now it's it's associations so for the aficionados we don't know for sure if it does that but this is the closest thing we have right now to a drug that slows down aging and what is going on with metformin what's the mechanism yeah it's uh well part of it's the boosting of the mitochondria number and raising the energy but it's got other benefits it's anti-inflammatory as well and to be honest as i should be as a scientist we don't know there's other stuff it does but we just know that people who take it a diabetic who right is sick and often overweight who takes metformin on average lives longer than someone who doesn't have type 2 diabetes and doesn't take the drug really that is an amazing statistic that's insane yeah so it literally not just mitigates the effect of diabetes but it enhances your lifespan past the point of a person who doesn't have diabetes on average on average yeah i like how you just hedge your bets there so what's going on with metformin what is it doing to the body and how is it doing it well it's going to in inhibit the energy production and the body will start to make more so you'll have more energy you'll have it inhibits the energy production household how so okay how deep do you want to go
all deep let's go dude let's go all right so the mic was on all right and stop me if i get boring you're not boring so in the cell right so let's zoom down into a cello cells is a bag we break through the membrane the bag out uh out of bag and now we're in liquid now we're swimming around and there are these weird shapes that are floating around they look a little about lip like uh look like um mike mike and ike's so they're gonna make an eggs and mics little little tubes oh mike and ikes okay yeah i'm australian so i talk about other other things but cadbury chocolate and stuff okay these are little cheese cadbury chocolate do you do it yeah sure it's famous okay got it cadbury eggs right yeah yeah so cadbury eggs uh floating around the cell they they look more like an extended little tube okay and they they they are what we use to make most of our energy when we eat sugar or aminos they get transported into the mitochondria and they get converted into energy so how does that work i'm glad you asked the the mitochondria have them have another couple of membranes so now we're going to pierce through the outer one and then we're going to swim in between the inner and the outer membrane what's happening is that that's really acidic it's a lot of protons in there and the cells are pushing them into there and that builds up this gradient of ph so it's acidic and then those protons that are in there they want to get back inside that little uh that little thing and so they they can't get through but there are these little holes which is a protein called atp synthase and when they bust through that hole it's like a propeller like a hydroelectric uh generator on a dam and they shoot through and this thing spins around and makes a chemical called atp
which the body needs to to survive that's where we get all our energy if we don't have atp or this little spinny thing we're dead in less than 30 seconds you take cyanide that's what it does it blocks that process wow so it's needed for life and it seems the more you have of that the better now one thing that one of my companies that i'm helping uh and i've invested in to be honest but to be transparent is developing is a way to punch holes in that membrane so that the hydroelectric dam is less efficient so we've got a leak in the dam and so not all the energy is going through so what we we see happen in animal studies is that they can eat more food and not gain weight it's a perfect weight loss pill wow so i want to help cure obesity that sounds very dr oz like though so it's a perfect week it's a miracle it's a miracle pill well it seems like it sounds cool i don't believe in miracles but i believe in good science and in the 1920s uh mostly women who are uh at in these factories actually was earlier world war one they were making bombs and there was a chemical called dnp the nitrophenol which has this property to break through this hydroelectric dam wall and those women were really skinny and people didn't understand it and they found out that if you eat this molecule dnp you shed weight and this started to be sold uh how are they hospital molecules although breathing it in and that was sufficient really yeah so then it became sold it became one of the best-selling drugs yeah i think it was 1928 something like that and people thought that that this was the end of obesity and you know people were partying the streets basically but the problem is when you bust holes through that membrane it generates as a byproduct heat and people took too much because they wanted to get thin really quickly and they overheated and some of them died and that led to
whoa the fda the fda act and this is why we have drug regulation that's why one of the main reasons yeah they shut that down because it was killing people how many people died oh not that many uh but still one is two but it's an overdose issue right and you can still get it on the black market they used to give it to russians apparently in world war ii to stay warm wow yeah but if you're wondering david why are you making a drug that's going to kill people well actually the the chemists are working and have made molecules that are sensitive to this acidity and if it gets too low it'll turn itself off why don't you just let people figure out the right dosage let them get warm they're always stupid people who are there are and you need to let them you need to let them be stupid that's a part of the problem with today we nerf too many corners you gotta some people need to bump into the ends of the world ow you can't have everything cushioned well you're not a problem because also we've got so many people who need help and yes it's a trade-off yes it is everything's a risk every drug there's no safe driving yeah it's uh like but we need education but we also need these fascinating things like like this so let me tell you some of those other traits that make us different from animals okay so the first one i told you is tool making the next one uh let's see let's talk about exploration right humans have the [ __ ] eugene or eugene for short i just made that up but i'm looking for it okay but there are people like you and me who just say and a lot of humans who say i want to do things my way don't tell me what to do and we've evolved that way i mean most animals don't behave this way right it got us to this point we started you know teenagers have a lot of turn they turn on their refuge in heaps
i have teenagers it's been hell in in for some you know what this is oh yeah so the f eugene is a problem but it's also been the greatest thing on on the earth because we left africa the teenagers said screw you i'm not going to listen to the chief i'm going to go for my own village with my women let's go. and that we spread across the planet we screwed some neanderthals and denisovans over the time and we bred with those and we became even better stronger fitter species neanderthals aren't extinct they're actually still in us so that that's interesting no i have my dna done yeah how you higher low percentage oh super high no comment but that will protect you from heart disease oh nice yeah hopefully if you got that gene yeah so we're hybrids but anyway the the [ __ ] eugene has gotten us to this point but it's also a problem right we have society like covert when a lot of people said i'm not gonna wear a mask we have that in us but it's also the way we're gonna get out of this problem the fu gene like elon has like probably 20 copies of the fu gene uh but we need those people to engineer us out of the crap that we've built into society from previous technologies you can't have universal compliance it's not gonna work right you need some people that are mavericks and some people that are just like testing the boundaries yeah for sure i mean most scientists are like that but i've got it in abundance too well i think it's also we're dealing with like think about what we're talking about here about your field of study about life extension and how to maximize health the amount of people that don't know what you're talking about and don't know the science and and aren't even aware that this is possible is the majority so for someone to step out and say you know what i'm going to do i'm going to do sauna and ice baths every day because it increases hormesis and it maximizes my
heat shock and cold shock proteins and then i'm going to make sure i use blue light blocking glasses and i shut off my cell phone by 6 p.m and i don't drink coffee after five and all these different things most people don't know that there's an actual quantifiable benefit to doing all those things and if you looked at like this is a i use this is a anthony robbins quote i'm stealing this from him but it's a very good one that incremental changes if two boats are on the same path and then one veers off two degrees over time that two degrees equals a huge difference in the distance of your destination exactly and that's why you got to measure your age yeah that that's your core number because if you don't you don't know you're drifting or how to correct course unless you measure it and then use science to correct it and this thing you could measure it fairly regularly that's what we want to do yeah so you can every few months get a new test it's just a mouth swab you just send it in so maybe you have some bad habits maybe you've been partying too much or what have you or studying too late you can correct that and then see hey look what happened when you did that now your body's moving in a better way a better place right i mean you can't really fix what you're not measuring so that's what it's all about and also most people ignore it you know i'm going to eat that pizza who cares but you're right everything you do that is wrong not everything but mostly it'll veer you off course but the good news is we know how to slow it down and now we're learning how to reverse it too and i want people to not just you and me but everybody to have a sense of their own wellness because you can make a big difference your genes are only control 20 of your ultimate health in old age 80 is in your hands people don't know that it's liberating 80 yeah because people have studied
twins in denmark uh and they showed that they're twins who lead very different lifestyles you know one would smoke one didn't one would exercise one didn't it makes a huge difference 80 percent and another statistics this is from a harvard study last year if you just do the five things that doctors that we all pretty much know um you can extend your lifespan by 14 years on average and that's just the easy stuff what we're talking about today and with what i hope i'll make to you know democratize will get us beyond that so what are those five things uh if by recollection it is uh so exercise yeah eat the right things don't eat so much eat less frequently uh what else was it uh there was sleep and stress oh and don't smoke so i think that was six but you get the idea so though that that's the minimum and that's not even that hard and what is going on with eating so if you have one meal and say this meal comprises uh you know 2 000 calories or whatever and you have this meal at 6 pm and you fast for 24 hours until you eat again at 6 pm if you have this one meal a day why is it better to do that than to have say you know smaller meals of like 500 calories multiple times per day little snacks well because going back six million years back you know we're in the trees and then in the savannah our bodies were designed well or evolved to respond to adversity and we've removed that from our lives because it feels good but we need adversity to be resilient and to fight disease so what i'm saying is that period of hunger and it's not even hunger these days i don't even feel it i feel great if if i don't eat and it takes a few weeks so anyone wants to start make give it some time give it a couple weeks but what's happening in the body is you're turning on these adversity hormesis response genes we call them longevity genes and they make the body fight aging and
diseases and so by by eating through the day the traditional oh you gotta have breakfast best meal of the day blah blah blah um first of all it's not true that you need to be full or fed to think clearly it's it's very clear that people who are fasting have as good if not better mental acuity okay that's one so i think that that needs to be throughout the window kids are different we're not talking about kids talking about adults and we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation too let's be clear but we are talking about lengthening that window of not eating so if you always are satiated fed your body says hey i've just killed an you know a mammoth no problem don't need to worry about survival i'm just gonna go forth and multiply and screw my long-term survival so this is all about long-term survival by making the body freak out that there's tough times and that's running away like running away from a cat like the savannah and being hungry or you know there's molecular reasons that all this works but you know trust me that the the data is very clear that this is the way to go if you want to be healthy in your 80s and 90s well it it actually does make sense when you put it in that way that your body when you're fed relaxes and so if you're just doing that all day long and i know for a fact that when i am um not fed and i go and do things whether it's perform one of the things that i've been doing um is i don't eat before shows like i take many uh many hours before a comedy show and i used to just like eat whenever i just see and and then i would do shows and i would have a meal like an hour before the show and i don't know trying to wake up i'm really trying to come on come on come on but i've now recognized actually i saw a video where kat williams was talking about this do you know what kat williams is
hilarious comedian uh i do know where you're slipping if you don't uh he's he's hilarious when he was doing this interview and he's saying they were telling what's your process before a show and one of the things is i don't eat i make sure i don't eat and i was like that's wise that's really smart and i'm like i needed to hear that even though i kind of knew it but i never written it down i never like associated it absolutely but now i have like now i do not eat before shows i won't do it unless i know i have three hours so what what's your average day look like it depends entirely on whether or not i'm doing podcasts if i'm doing podcasts generally i'm up early i get my workouts in i usually have something to eat after the workout so i'm talking about like i eat around 11 11 a.m that's my first meal of the day and then i go and do my stuff and i generally feel like my workouts are so strenuous that i need some sort of nutrition afterwards some sort of fruit to pump the muscles back up and give them some sugar and some protein so usually i'm eating meat and maybe like an apple or something like that that's like a normal meal for me and then i don't eat again until nighttime great and you're not snacking no yeah maybe sometimes after a podcast i'll have like we have these uh on it warrior bars that are just buffalo meat and some cranberries and stuff i like those i'll eat one of those good well at least you're going till 11. you got that sleep yeah so you're probably not eating late it's just the str strenuous activity me like out my workouts are very hard so after them i feel like i need something you know i just i don't like that feeling of like a brutal workout and then being starving for four or five hours because then it becomes a distraction so i i listen to my body but if i don't
work out i don't eat until dinner like say a day like today i didn't work out today so i woke up hung out with a dog had some coffee sat out you know like just got went over some emails did some [ __ ] just a relaxed morning and then rolled into here no food i won't eat until we're going to dinner tonight right until then yeah with likes that's gonna be fun and john donahue yeah of course looking forward to meeting yes uh yeah so you're doing the right things uh certainly better than most people uh but what i'm trying to build up make are molecules that mimic fasting as well so if you cannot fast like i do then you can just take a pill and what we've shown in in mice at least is that if you give them this molecule that i'm taking nmn nicotinamide mononucleotide which as i mentioned um speeds up metabolisms all that stuff those mice could run 50 further these old mice we gave it to them for three weeks put them back on a treadmill and those that had the anime in their water around 50 for that better blood flow better oxygenation better energy and that is literally exercising a pill that's crazy so we're in late stage human clinical trials now when do you think it's going to be released to the public well it depends on what the fda does and if it was [ __ ] oh don't get me in trouble i love the fda um fair enough they protect us yes but yeah we're going through the procedure that has been around since as i mentioned early 20th century but we've done hundreds of people now um certainly dozens over the last few years and we know at least that this molecule is apparently safe and raises the levels of the molecule we want to build up the molecules called nad do you want to talk a little bit yes please so nad is what might those mitochondria little uh mike and i little uh
energy producing things use to make energy so you need there are two molecules in the body that are really great you need both for life and without them as i said you're dead atp is the energy and nad makes that and as we get older the levels of nad go down our body makes less and actually also degrades it more you have so i if you take my skin or in the study that they took people's skin when you're 50 you've got half the levels of this nad that you did than you did when you're 20. which is scary because this is this molecule is required for life without it we're dead in 30 seconds so what we're doing with our clinical trials is giving a precursor a smaller version of this that the body will turn into nad and bring those levels back up from where they are when you're old to where you are when you're young and we see at least in animals and hopefully in people that it revs up their metabolism and makes them fight aging and disease like we do when we're young i mean there's a reason we don't get a lot of heart disease when we're young or alzheimer's because our bodies fight against disease as we get older and especially if we sit around or smoke and don't exercise our bodies just give up that's very exciting now i used to do injectable nad i used to do uh ivs when i was living in california i haven't done it out here what is the difference between this nmn supplementation versus iv drip and what's superior well so there's just a deliver delivery route um my assumption is that they're working the same way um same effects but nobody's put them head-to-head um i'm yet to see a clinical trial that shows that literally and any of them actually work the way they're advertised but the theory is that you'll you'll have the same effect um i don't know if nad iv is better i mean certainly more direct than eating it and yeah your
gut's not eating it i have an anecdote to tell you please and to my harvard colleagues it's just an anecdote this isn't a clinical trial so i wrote my book took a couple of years i sat down for most of the most of that time and my piriformis muscle which is one of the main ones in your holds your hip up cramped up and for probably 12 months i had a permanent cramp in my ass that was really painful i could barely walk made me really grumpy and i couldn't get rid of it exercise building muscle physiotherapy wouldn't go away and this happens fairly frequently to people who don't stand up so i now have a standing desk that's another good tip but i went out to california um and met with um some of the um power broker uh people in hollywood who you know children remain nameless but there's plenty of people you and i know out there who are doing this they recommended this one person um who's well-known and very kind she said go to see my doctor get an nad shot and i thought come on n.a.d shot who believes that science uh so i went anyway uh honestly out of courtesy i thought it might work but i'm always up for something and doctor injected into my ass and i felt a tingle as was supposed to happen and i walked away thinking yeah that was fun been there done that and i flew home that night and i was at the airport at l.a airport and i found that something was different i was kind of skipping in my walk and i thought it's gone after a year this damn thing is gone now gabby raised um the the volleyball player who was at at her place jumping up in the pool the other day uh that's hypoxia almost drowned again but anyway gabby says it's probably just the needle and she might be right this is not a clinical trial but it's certainly interesting well dry needling does do something to muscles if you have a muscle like have you ever been dry needled before no you offering uh that sounded strange i uh i've done
it before it's really interesting yeah they they basically stay take acupuncture needles and they stick them in stiff muscles and a lot of times they do it uh with in conjunction with electrical muscular stimulation so they'll put these little clamps onto the acupuncture needles and it just goes it gives you this weird pulsating thing in your muscles but it's really beneficial for release releasing and relaxing like really tight intense muscles you know i've i have an imbalance in my back because of power kicking on my right side my left side is what stabilizes it so the left side of my back is thicker than the right side of my back because if you think about if you're standing here like this and you're doing this all the time you're like you're leaning into the left side and throwing a kick with the right leg and then also when i draw a bow back right i always draw it with my right side and so my right shoulder is stronger than my left shoulder but my left shoulder is stronger pushing because the left shoulder pushes and the right shoulder pulls i've got all these [ __ ] weird imbalances probably do something else with one hand too that doesn't help hey easy i didn't say that anyway and uh so this uh nice lady jennifer uh over at exo started sticking these needles in there and dirt dirt dirt and uh she's a wizard it worked it was amazing it's like i could feel it after it was over it's like oh it released all this tension so that might have had something to do with it but i mean it's not like they're sticking nad in your butt just because they think like maybe it'll work like she's probably got some responses from other people in the past right and there's got to be some science there's a lot of anecdotal stuff and this doctor i have huge respect for um so that that was another reason and it may work so no one has measured the
benefits of nad iv versus pills nope nope got to tell you what the nad drip is rough really it's rough yeah like uh that's why people do it very slowly they do it over have you done it no it's i was offered it at a hotel that i was at it's the strangest feeling it's like your body like your stomach cramps up you're like whoa um it's hard to like open it up and you know it's possible to tolerate it with a very fast drip but uh most people do it for like like two hours yeah or 30 to 45 minutes not 20. what's the fastest you did it like for 35 ish yeah uh well if anybody has some data i'd love to see it it gets rough but marijuana here's a pro tip marijuana changes the whole game if you smoke some marijuana before you get an nad drip i did it in 10 minutes yeah i just sat high as [ __ ] sat there but so high i was i was way too i got paranoid but if you uh there's something that happens with you know marijuana reduces nausea in patients with cancer going through chemotherapy uh a lot of people that are have wasting issues also different ailments where they have a difficult time eating marijuana reduces nausea and whatever that mechanism is marijuana has a profound effect on the way your body processes the nad drip because the difference for me between um nad drips with no marijuana is rough the fastest i did it with no marijuana was like 30 minutes maybe that's a long time to sit thirty it's it's not just a long time to sit still it's a long time to sit still and be super uncomfortable i think i maybe did like 20 20 minutes but uh but i was like this i was like for 20 minutes like and then i ope i i smoked some pot once i we actually did a podcast and we smoked during the podcast and then right after the podcast i was
scheduled for the iv drip and i was high as [ __ ] and i said just open it up let's see what happens and they did the full like opened it wide and then went through the whole bag in 10 minutes and the nurse was freaking out like are you okay are you okay because it's crazy what it would feel like if you weren't on marijuana but marijuana just like i was like it's just this is tolerable i can pro tip it's used a lot these drips of nad are used a lot particularly in florida for addiction ah why addiction you know i don't know it's just that doctors have found that it helps their patients tremendously well it makes you feel better and in conjunction with an iv vitamin drip it's really it's a nice effect and i would always like to do it uh post flights like say if i fly in from the east coast or something like that and i'm worn out there's some signs on that oh yeah uh so a good friend of mine at washu sheen and my uh and colleagues showed that the nad levels in the body of an animal probably in a human they cycle through the day they go up in the morning get you ready uh and then they go down at night so you don't want to be taking these supplements or having this stuff injected into you late at night because it'll make your body believe that it's the morning and i also believe um and it really is backed up by the mouse studies that jet lag is caused by a disruption of this cycle of nad going up and down in your body and so i've been using nmn this supplement to reset my body when i travel and it's been a night night and day excuse the pun yeah no kidding so like if you fly to australia you'll just land take some ndd people are shocked people who travel with me go david you just landed how come you're going to give a talk it it makes me able to go without rest i barely have sleep sometimes that's
incredible and that actually does make sense because that's the feeling that you get when you're jet lagged like you just can't get your energy going exactly and what actually happens unfortunately is even if you get your light in your eyes which resets your brain your liver has a clock other tissues do you know that there's separate clocks within the body and if they're out of sync maybe your liver is looking for a meal but your brain says it's middle of the night and you don't know what to do and that's why you feel like crap the only thing that's ever helped me reset it and it's not profound but it does help a lot is exercise so what i would do is if i fly the moment i would land somewhere i would just put my stuff in my room and go straight to the gym that'll raise your nad levels oh makes sense because that was and i know i don't like to do it right it's like they're feeling like god here finally i won't relax i don't have a show for five hours let me take a nap but no no straight to the gym it and for anyone who's listening to this uh we know this in great molecular detail and i'm not going to bore you to death but this is not just oh dr sinclair thinks that this is likely to happen it's known that there are proteins in the cell that bind to genes that control your body's clock and they're regulated directly by the amount of nad in the cell and if you manipulate the nad levels that clock and turning on genes are not on and off gets screwed up and as you get older it naturally gets screwed up and one hope is that by raising nad more naturally you also get better sleep mmm makes sense it all makes sense a getting better sleep is huge right that's a big part of uh your body's ability to recover and recuperate um how many hours you get at night last night i got three but usually i'd get about six to seven
you feel like that's good enough oh for sure yeah yeah and what about people that say that you need eight or nine everyone's different you think that's it's just uh yeah how much do you need i don't feel good without eight i feel good at seven i feel better at eight eight's like it's quantifiable it's like i could see it i could feel it six or five i'm like i could suck i can function but i have friends that just like five and they're good you know like jocko jocko five hours and he's you know he's lucky real lucky but um the danger is that if you don't get enough sleep you do accelerate your aging clock that's clear if you uh keep a rat from having sleep for two weeks it gets diabetes two weeks yeah it's so fast oh that's what we need to do to get rid of the rats just starve them give them diabetes um when you're uh getting ready for sleep do you have uh a routine do you take uh like a like a relaxing tea do you take any do you are you tryptophan are you doing anything that makes you calm down and relax i do a lot i have a melatonin procedure yeah i'm an excited guy um and the whole day for me is a thrill so try trying to calm down is hard so it starts with turning off the the blueness on my computer screen my phone i try not to watch tv after 10 o'clock try not to do emails after 10 30. that's the start then i have a special tea that has tryptophan l-theanine gaba um and that helps uh i might have a sip of a little bit of alcohol just to calm my nerves not a lot literally not nothing like that uh and then if that doesn't work then i nibble on an ambien and that will finally get me to sleep an ambien really you go hard nibble it's barely much what does that mean as little as i can yeah yeah right how do you know what a nibble is yeah it's that so if you have a whole ambien
are you taking like a tenth of the ambien oh probably and just enough to just like get you yeah just do the edge off and once i'm asleep i'm good but yeah but it's a procedure i've had to learn this i spent my 30s basically not sleeping it was hell i i was almost suicidal it was so bad really and is it just because you're so excited and you're so busy and then you just it couldn't wind down yeah and then young kids didn't help oh yeah yeah sure the winding down thing is really hard for people that are like high performance people that are working all the time and you're go go go go throughout the day and then sometimes when you lie down it's the only time where you're not engaged with an activity so then your mind starts racing and starts doing an assessment of all the various things that are going on in your life and throughout your day that's my my issue when i go down like i have to make sure that i do not allow my mind to start like going on a rampage and you know like thinking about various projects i'm involved in or different things that i'm working on because then i'll get stuck because it's one of the rare times where i'm alone by myself not thinking like i'm not by myself but you know i'm just i'm not engaged in anything i'm just laying there and sometimes when you just lay in there your mind's like oh we got nothing to do terrific because there's a lot of [ __ ] i've been wanting to talk to you about it's like you know it's like if you don't uh have a conversation with your spouse and then you know you don't talk all day but a lot of things going on then finally at the end of the day like okay here's some things we need to talk about like that's what it's like with my brain at night it's like hey [ __ ] there's a lot of [ __ ] you need to work on like let's do this and then that and what about that and how about this and here's what i screwed up damn it yeah that's oh my god that's the worst i have it's very difficult for me to not think about things that i've screwed up
right before i go to bed but i must because if i do i will have a really hard time sleeping that's why you're successful that's why yeah you evaluate yourself and fix the problems constantly but it's ruthless yeah it is it's hard being that kind of person it's a heart you have to make sure you don't do it at night though that's the big one don't do it at night because at night time i go i have to go hey shut the [ __ ] up stupid go to bed deal with this in the morning because in the morning i'm also by myself i'm having a cup of coffee i'm relaxing sit down outside listen to birds chirp for a little bit then's a good time because then you're starting you you're actually in motion so you could actually get some stuff done that maybe is bothering you maybe you can work on some of those things nighttime you're not working on [ __ ] you're just going to ruin your sleep well do you have any tricks drinks tricks tricks um my tricks are just mental exercises like i feel myself starting to think about maybe like a bit that i'm working on that i need to correct or you know this is this is not the right way to do it you need to re i got to go hey hey hey stop and just think about your breathing so my my number one trick is just concentrating on in and out and in and out and it's not even along the way i will go right back into the things that are bothering me and write down oh i screwed up this or i shouldn't have said that and in and out and in and get myself right back on track and eventually i fall asleep great yeah breathing is is really important yeah even during the day when you're starting to freak out or just get too busy just 10 breaths will bring your heart rate down have you ever read james nestor's book breath oh i want to it's very good i've been told every day very very good he's a really interesting
guest too i really enjoyed talking to him but his book is fantastic and it's very very beneficial and i use those many of those breathing exercises that are outlined in the book i use in the sauna it's like one of the ways that i get through the sauna and if i do it correctly i can get i can get through like a sauna session and i barely know how rough it is if i do if i really get into it and i like force myself to fully concentrate by the time i look down like oh my god it's already 25 minutes i'm good hang on how are you making your sauna it gets close to 200 degrees yeah like last night was i'll tell you because i take a photo of the the thing it was [Music] 190 let me see so you can fry an egg in there yeah that's it right there i believe you know yeah it's close to 200 that looks like 198 199 yeah i did that um at gabby reese's place recently oh yeah that's where i learned it from from laird that's savage that savage he gets on an airdyne bike with oven mitts in the sauna and works out like yo right those two no hormesis they exponential it but i was i was almost thrown up i had to leave and come back had a cold shower and an ice bath how hot did he make it about that hot yeah he goes harder than that he sent me one uh a photo where it's like 225 degrees and he's in there with [ __ ] oven mitts on they're used to it actually there was a there's a photo that was posted online uh gabby and i and you know she she's used to this and i was i was a beetroot i looked like that girl from willy wonka's interest i saw that photo yeah it was brutal i was about to pass out at that point yeah well they're they're accustomed to uh some well first of all she was an amazing volleyball player and he is one of the greatest surfers of all time they're super athletes right and he's a genuine freak of nature he really is laird hamilton is a freak and not not just a freak of nature but
like a freak of like willpower and control over his mind have you ever seen his ankle no i hate to show this to everybody again but he broke his ankle and just didn't do anything about it just kept walking on it and his ankle fused and became like this tree stump like literally it looks like a tree stump yeah but that's not smart that's his ankle okay don't do that yeah i want to see what that looks like under a uh x-ray but that's that's just insane mental strength because he's walking around for who knows how long on a broken ankle and he's like whatever yeah my nervous matter those two so that they made me uh not made me i volunteered for the second time to jump up and down with weights in my hands in their swimming pool yeah how's that well it's certainly motivational to jump high to get a breath but if you don't time it right you're just going to suck in water which i did so what is the workout how do you do it oh really interesting you start with a weight that they they make it's different for them but you i started with a lightweight i think it was about 10 pounds hold it to my chest with one arm very close and then you use one arm to swim and you swim sideways across the pool uh there and back under without breathing underwater underwater and you feel like you're going to run out of breath on the second lap but what gabby tells you to do is just don't worry it's your body screaming for for uh well you've got a lot of carbon dioxide but you've got enough oxygen so just forget about what your body says and keep going and you do that and it works and that that's part of what she's training you to do is to don't worry about what your body's saying do what your mind wants you to do yeah my friend john joseph he's a lead singer of the crowmags and he's also an endurance athlete he does a lot of ironmans he's
he's got this like heavy duty new york accent he goes tell your mind your mind is the one who tells your body who's the [ __ ] in charge 100 really this is what this this podcast is about is don't do what feels good force your body to do what you want it to do yeah then they then what they do is once you've done that that's just making sure you you're okay in water then they make you hold two weights heavy weights and walk down into the deep end so you're about a foot below the surface and you have to breathe by jumping so no not a foot hit at least it's above your head a little bit so you have to get the only way to get air is to jump with these weights out of the water and then under exactly and how how many reps do you do ten you do ten but but it yours it's also quite a mind of a matter thing because you you have to relax if you don't which often happens to me in that pool uh i suck in the water because i'm i'm scared right but if you calm down it's fine and do you do any kind of pool exercises and or pool workouts other than that no so this is a completely novel thing for you well it's my second time but uh yeah it's still weird um and i i have a fear of drowning so that wasn't great either who doesn't have fear exactly that's the worst way to die apparently really well suffocating is bad i watched my mother suffocate to death and that was not pleasant oh god for her for sure um and i expect drownings the same yeah i can only imagine like and then the willpower like i always think about this is so stupid but i always think about magnum pi remember the the tv show yeah there was an episode where magnum p.i got stuck in the ocean and he had tread water for 24 hours with sharks probably going around him i don't remember but i was a little kid but i remember thinking watching that episode like damn
like you know he wanted to quit but i know people can do that like people can do things where they want to quit but they do not right they just keep going and keep going like i have a couple very good friends that are endurance athletes that do ultramarathons they do these crazy like moab 240s and that kind of [ __ ] where they're just running for days you know like you can tell your body what to do you really can yeah well you're reminding me so good friend of mine um he just won the what was it one of the big marathons on on the west coast it'll come to me but he's 50. that day he turned 50 and so he's he's taking a couple of these molecules that we talked about but it's great to see his time get better and better and better um and people say oh you you won the marathon for your age group he goes no dude i won it outright at 50. wow that's huge that's super unusual isn't it to win a marathon at 50 years old yeah and he's just getting faster every year so like how is that possible well i'd like to take credit but i won't uh but he claims that it's made a huge difference so this is nmn and what else is he doing that's doing the metformin metformin i believe and and resveratrol is the third thing nmn resveral troll metformin dhea as well not that i know of hmm interesting and he's it's had a big impact well he's like one of these mice in our lab that runs further so that all fits but a scientist says that doesn't prove anything but it's certainly inspirational like my father is doesn't prove that he's staying young because of me but it doesn't seem to be hurting him at all but you're pretty confident that with further research it's most likely going to determine that all these things are extremely beneficial to basically the overall population so for sure that's why i wouldn't that's
why i'm doing it right if we wait for another 20 years for proof of all of this we're done for we were born a generation or two too early unfortunately right so you've got to take some risks and the older you get the more risk you should be able to tolerate because you know what's going to happen if you don't do anything it's not pretty yes it's not pretty you know i don't want to shame anybody but there's a photo of kelly mcgillis who is with tom hanks in top gun and uh tom hank not tom hanks tom cruise so there's a photo of the two of them in the top gun movie where she's young and beautiful and he's young and handsome and then there's a photo of the two of them now and she's kind of let herself go a little bit he has not and he looks [ __ ] fantastic it's kind of crazy when you see the contrast of the difference between someone who's taking care of themselves and someone is not yeah i wrote about this in my book and in fact i used tom as the example of what you can do and if you look at somebody his age that was in a previous generation um those actors look really old and he looks great right and he has taken care of himself i'm sure there's probably some other work that he's had done but it can make a huge difference how you live your life that's the goal of me now is to say don't wait because you don't want to waste away or become an ex have an accelerated age clock the one that we measure yeah and often it's gonna be too late if you just wait and so in my life i've been doing this since i was 33 doing various things um adding things along the way what do you think someone should do if they maybe they are 80 and they're listening to this for the first time and we don't want to like rule them out or count them out like what should someone do if you know you're saying it's too late but if you are 80 and you're like god i wish i had done this earlier but what can i do now
uh well so i i know a little bit about this uh because i have some um some friends who are that old uh and when they do the kind of things that we've talked about today it's a remarkable change they they look younger they walk younger in fact the speed that you walk is the best determinant besides this clock that i talked about of how long you're going to live and there was somebody that i was talking to the other day that in their 80s started fasting doing all these things took some supplements and their walking speed went back to a young person uh within a matter of months it can have a huge difference and we now know that the clock is malleable you can turn it back that's hugely liberating and even if you're that old you can make a big difference i'm just saying that it's better to start early because you're going to have the biggest bang for the buck hmm right so uh even if you're older look it'll definitely have some effect but the correct way to approach this is if you're a young person don't wait until you get old start now right yeah now when you're a young person like if someone's 30 years old they don't need to do this do they like should should they think about metformin and things along those lines at a very young age uh 25 in my opinion no because you've got your high levels of nad you've got your longevity genes activated but there are things you should definitely do in your 20s that i did i didn't need a lot of food i skipped breakfast my whole life um and then exercise i used to go to the gym a lot and do a lot of aerobics i definitely don't regret that now i've still got that core so i think in your 20s do the basic stuff but then the supplements i think save till your 30s because your body has the longevity and resilience in those years but we i'm speculating based on animal
studies we don't know nobody's done this kind of experiment and this is the problem they're going to know in 20 30 years what i'm saying is true or not but we can't wait that long um so i do my best to extrapolate from animals and and look at societies that live a long time and make the best i can scientific judgment as to what will work and when you say your whole life you skipped breakfast was that instinctual like was that just a just you don't enjoy eating breakfast i know i love you know i i love a vegemite on toast like any australian but i gain weight over obesity uh alleles that's obesity genes is the colloquial way to say that and and type 2 diabetes is in my family and if if all i have to do is really look at a food and it'll it'll i'll put on weight so for me to have a physique like like i do so i'm pretty lean now takes a fair amount of effort and skipping breakfast was the easiest thing to avoid that uh getting overweight that's interesting so even when you're a young boy like you just realize that this is the way to do it just don't eat breakfast well how long have we known that being overweight is bad for long-term health well we have but we also were told when we were young that's the most important meal of the day right well i'm not a breakfast guy if i could skip at one meal it would be breakfast um but some people need breakfast so i think i'm not saying everyone has to do what i do and that's that's the other important point joe is that whether it's your meals or your exercise you're changing your microbiome if you've got or even supplements unless you measure something you don't know if it's working and we're all different yeah even even sleep as you mentioned and so that's why measuring things with the the clock with the cheek swab and you've got to measure it otherwise you
don't know what works for you and what works for me may not work as well for someone else that whole uh breakfast is the most important part of the day i think people need to kind of know that that really doesn't make sense right well for kids it's been shown that you do need a bit of food to to wake up and think at school so i'm not saying that but for adults i think most of us can skip breakfast and over time matter of weeks months a lot of us feel better without it when we look at the average american body i mean what percentage of americans are obese it's a kind of nutty percentage right i want to say it's close to 40 percent or something like that right yeah that so there's obviously a lot of eating when you don't really need to eat and there's that thing that we all do and i'm guilty of it too and you just go ah maybe i should eat something but you're not hungry you're not really hungry but like if i'll go through the cabinets and i'll see some chips like those would be good right now and i will sacrifice my physical health for some temporary mouth pleasure and if you think about like what a bowl of chips like my god if you eat a bowl of ruffles how much [ __ ] calories and [ __ ] oils and stuff or in those chips yeah it's not good well you know our brain is is designed uh or evolved to to crave energy yeah it makes sense right because we used to go through periods of famine we don't do that anymore right so one of my points um in the book that i'm writing about how we got here and how we get out of it this treadmill that we're on is that we're slaves our limbic system that you and elon talked about the core of the brain that we don't seem to control very well with our frontal cortex it's telling us eat all the time eat high calories sugar fat have sex that's the evil part of our brain but we need to overrule that in general uh with with our frontal cortex which we have in abundance the
lollipop species yeah it's i mean i wouldn't say that's the evil part of our brain it's kind of how we got here yes right eat and have sex is how we got here um but it's it definitely in modern society when you're thinking about you're working all day and you know you don't have really the time to really sit down and plan your meals out your your mind can tell you to eat constantly like especially i know a lot of folks that work at places that have snacks available for other employers so you go into the break room and there's just like all these snacks there's like granola bars and that kind of stuff and they just eat them and then next thing you know you've added a few thousand extra calories to your diet every day yeah exactly and so the first thing you can do if you want to do this is clear house of those snacks yeah it makes it easy because i too you know even though i know the science i will still i i'm i'm currently addicted to twizzlers unfortunately but i get stressed out i will snack like crazy and but that's that's the limbic going why is that whizzlers a friend of mine put me onto them unfortunately oh they are delicious yeah they are delicious have but what's a good low calorie substitute to something like that or does it even matter if it's a low calorie like if you're just eating like rice cakes throughout the day as snacks you're still eating don't do that rice cakes and rice in general will spike your blood sugar which we try not to do if we want to live a long time so you so what twizzlers yeah i know it's crazy i'm not perfect i'm i'm a work in progress yeah but um so rice cakes spike your sugar too much yeah rice in general i don't know about rice cakes i haven't measured that but even personally i've been wearing this glucose monitor on occasion and stuck into my arm and that'll a lot of people doing this
it's actually is that glued on ones can i see it yeah i'm not wearing it today i'm just tapping where i put it on my arm up here and but there are a lot of companies now doing this yeah i've seen those yeah and well i know that rice is bad unfortunately i love sushi um our potatoes weren't that bad actually and grapes were the worst rhonda patrick the health fitness guru who many of us know uh she said grapes were the worst for her as well which is sad right grapes healthy vitamins they taste good yeah the thing about potatoes though potatoes there's an effect that happens when you cook a potato and then cool it down and then reheat it it apparently has much less of an impact on your blood glucose levels do you know about that no there's a rhonda patrick explained it to me there's actual science behind it see if you can find what that science is young jamie but there's uh it's much more uh it has much much less impact on blood sugar levels and uh here it is uh high glycemic index diets are associated with include uh the gi is a measure of the blood glucose raising potential of carbohydrate-containing foods we previously found that eating cooled or reheated potatoes reduces the gi by 30 to 40 percent so when it's cooled or when you reheat it it reduces the uh the intake the gi measure which is crazy yeah well that's starch which is just a string of of glucose molecules but isn't it weird that hot when the the temperature of the food has a difference yeah it's good to know yeah it's nuts resistant starch try cooking rice potatoes beans and pasta a day in advance and cool in the fridge area overnight huh reheating doesn't decrease the amount of resistant starch all right interesting right so for just for health benefits uh cook your potatoes in advance cool them off and then reheat them again
it tastes the same but it has a big difference in the way your body reacts to it i assume we're not talking about french fries though yeah well the french fries you're dealing with those horrible fats unless you get them in duck fat you ever have dutch fat fries you've told me about them i have to try them so good they're so good i don't think they're good for you though what what probably not cuz i'll shoot you putting on it but would not fresh french fries then be kind of good because they're frozen and then you're reheating them maybe you're right maybe it's a health food but then maybe like in and out fries which are my favorite they're not good that's what i'm saying because they're fresh and cut right then yeah those are not those are the ones that are not good for you right mcdonald's oh mcdonald's are barely fries man that's like that's a sugar cube dressed up like a fry that's like one of them vegan chicken sandwiches it's not really chicken i uh i'm a big fan of fries though it's a problem but sweet potato fries are better but anytime you're deep frying something like the odds are that's just not good for you yeah and actually that because my stomach and and in digestion and the microbiome the bacterium i got have adapted to my my lifestyle what i mean if i eat something like that a fried piece of chicken the other day with my son i ate this thing fried piece of chicken in a sandwich for at least two days i felt like i was going to throw up it wouldn't go down because the bacteria in my gut are not ready for it so that's what happens but it's also been showing that your microbiome changes as you get older and one way to restore that to a more youthful mix is not to eat so much you need to uh get your gut microbiome ready for gus's fried chicken because there's a place in town called gus's fried chicken if you've never had it right
it's a goddamn sensational fruit we need to have a pill that you eat before that of of these bacteria to digest it something because man that place is good that's real fried chicken i will take you up on that um but one of the things you you wanted to know is what can you replace snacks with yes and what i do is i have warm drinks it's either a hot herbal tea or in the morning i drug myself up with caffeine but with coffee or tea you know down at the night in the morning i'm definitely you know like a normal human but hot drinks are the way to go i definitely if i'm a bit hungry if i just fill it up with hot water it feels great and uh when you're drinking these teas they're decaf teas i assume it depends after about 11 i don't have more caffeine because then i won't sleep because when i drink tea uh like herbal tea or even a lot of times coffee on an empty stomach it kind of sets my stomach a little bit but tea seems to be more so for some reason like a caffeinated tea on an empty stomach yeah yeah i agree yeah but yeah liquids are the way to go if you and again if somebody tries this and says i can't do it i need to be sticking something in my mouth there's a lot of habit there yeah give it time at least two weeks and then you'll get used to it um there's a thing that people are doing now where they're trying to quit cigarettes where it's like a wooden i saw it advertised on bridgette fetishes show on dumpster fire it's like some like a wooden cigarette that gives you like flavors but it's not even a cigarette you don't even light it because people are so accustomed to just putting something in their mouth and having this thing that they do to relieve stress so as they're quitting cigarettes this uh the idea is that you're putting this thing as a replacement to the
cigarettes there's a lot to that uh i've talked about my grandmother a lot i wrote about her in my book she was she's the reason i'm i'm doing what i'm doing she told me to try and make humanity better but um so vera used to smoke a lot and drink a lot it's surprising she made it as far as she did to 92. so when she's quit smoking it wasn't the addiction but what she had this thing she needed to put in her mouth so she had one of those cigarette holders and she was chewing on and sucking on that for a couple of decades which as a kid was really off-putting but you know now i understand why she needed to andrew dice clay you know the comedian yeah he uh quit smoking for a while i think he went back to it but when he quit smoking he would just bring a cigarette everywhere and he would just hold on to it and he put it in his mouth too and he'd never light it he put it behind his ear he would just hang on to it and just didn't light it and i was like what kind of willpower is that like imagine it's right there this is what you want it's right there and you decide to not do it you know but i was like that's a real no one's going to tell you to do that like no one would tell you just carry it around so he would like have one between his fingers and be talking to you and never light it yeah that sounds harder but it's a strange thing that people develop these patterns where they feel like they must eat right they must put something in their mouth they must smoke they must hold on to something what is that the thing i think so yeah that's it it's called a fume so what is in there oils but it doesn't really smoke right it just you just but does it is it a vape there must be something see there's like a little maybe make a v see if there's a video see if like fum has a video on like youtube they must have something on youtube right like yeah that's exactly it
well yeah i mean i went to our video to find it it wasn't googleable really but it's very strange i don't know yeah i'll find a video but it's just to me it's very odd that people have such incredibly ingrained patterns that that physical activity of just putting something to your mouth uh can help alleviate some of the cravings so this lady's a little like there's a little wick or something in there it looks like so she's uh sticking it in there are you talking too much lady way too much talk get to the party come on oh yeah so she poured an essential oil on that oh she looks she might be annoying so maybe it's a way to i'm kidding lady don't get mad let me see what happens is she breathing it out i don't even see any smell get out of here with your voodoo yeah get away from me with your trickery one thing i'm curious about is why is it the mouth or or if we had a drug we stuck a needle in our eye would we get addicted to that mmm that's a good point right what would do coke addicts like want to put anything else up their nose when they quit coke i don't think so oh mouth what is it about us as a species that makes us want to suck on stuff maybe nipples from the time you're babies there you go that's a good theory that makes sense right yeah and plus we associate food with pleasure we're always putting food in our mouths kind of makes sense yeah no hold on we should write a paper together yeah for sure you go all the time coming this is a it's not i don't even think it's marketed towards smoking even though it obviously is but it's calling itself aromatherapy as opposed to like smoking or something like that which is the [ __ ] out of here all those hardcore cigarette smokers are like listen to me that is not gonna do the job those people like head rushes they like to get head rushed uh you're still doing mushrooms yes how's that going it's going well which one are you talking about i don't
know yeah i do all kinds of them yeah because i do like the nutritional ones i do the psychedelic psychedelic yeah yeah there's a company called etai that uh is turning these into actual drugs they're doing really well in what way uh they're just re-engineering the molecules out of mushrooms to be able to help cure things like or help with uh ptsd and depression yeah it's a big thing i think you helped start this whole trend maybe um john hopkins i know is doing some work they're uh planning on doing studies with uh former ufc fighters and dealing with people that have cte yeah yeah because neurogenesis because psilocybin in particular promotes neurogenesis yeah cool mdma is being very useful for ptsd huh yes for ptsd cte is different yeah yeah that's from banging your head yeah um ptsd i had uh rick doblin in here the other day from maps and he's the one who is at the forefront of all this work and pushing this forward and getting approval to uh use all of these schedule and substances and trying to make them available for therapeutic use for people with all sorts of issues ptsd and all sorts of trauma oh it's an exciting time for brain research actually and for the patients because there hasn't been much you could do for people who had mental issues and even alzheimer's now we have these tools that are only going to get better super exciting one of the things we're doing in my lab that's exciting is you know we can age the brain forwards and backwards now really did i tell you that no uh so since we last spoke we published a paper uh in the journal nature in december that showed we could uh not just accelerate aging but now we can reprogram cells to make them oh you know a little bit so we were able to reprogram the eye of a mouse a blind mouse became uh able to see again
by making the eye younger again it's a gene therapy but ultimately you want to make it just a pill that reverses aging and how how'd you do it on the mouse's eye uh we so we package it in a virus and it's drug and useful so he could just take an antibiotic and turn it on but it literally it's just a quick injection in the eye which we do to mice it's easy in humans um people get that all the time if they have macular degeneration or need gene therapy to correct their genetic defect in their eye and it doesn't hurt it's very quick in and out and uh what we did with those mice was we then turned on these three genes that are normally on only turned on in embryos and we reversed the age of those eyes and they could the mice could see again and now we're just ticking off the various tissues and organs that we can rejuvenate and turn the clock back and this is the same clock that i'm talking about with the cheek swab we now have the ability to turn that clock back and it looks like it's permanent and and so you set the clock back 50 in the body now we do the eye but hopefully the whole body and then you age out another couple of decades take another course of antibiotics go back again and just rinse and repeat wow and so what is happening like how is it working well we know some things we know that the proteins in the cell that alter the clock are necessary for the visual vision to come back so the clock isn't just a clock on the wall it's actually representing time itself which is amazing and we can read that with the same test we use for this cheek swab for people we use on the mice but we do a blood test on them or we measure their eyes we can extract their their eyes forgive me uh and then we measure the age of their eyes using the same clock test but literally what it is is it's we take their dna out of each cell each cell has about six feet of dna and uh of course it's bundled up very tightly and how it's bundled up determines
the age of the cell so a a young cell will have beautiful loops of dna and bundles that tells it to be a nerve cell at the back of the eye but over time what we see is in part due to dna damage and cell stress and injury those loops and bundles get disrupted so now instead of this beautiful loop bundle pattern like a symphony on a piano they come unraveled so the bundles get unraveled and instead of it being a symphony the cell is playing a cacophony and no one wants to listen and it it messes up the cell's ability to work they're still in the eye they haven't died but they're just not working like a nerve cell in fact they think they're more like a skin cell they lose their identity so when we put in our three gene combination and turn them on somehow we don't know how those loops and bundles of dna go back to the original structure like playing a concerto again or i mean i use the analogy of a compact disc for the young people that's a little disc we used to put music on but it the aging process is analogous to scratches on a cd so that you skip songs when you get older you know and literally we're skipping jeans reading when we get older and our treatment is like polish is is polishing the cd so that the cell can now read the beautiful music of youth is this the stuff that andrew huberman at stanford is working on as well we're collaborating yeah and are you using that on people with normal macular degeneration like age related we want to uh we're going to be testing it shoot it in this dude's eyes because i got issues you do oh my god i have i have a sign up sheet but no just kidding uh but we're gonna be testing um uh macaque uh monkeys to see if we can improve their vision and if that works and it's all safe then then you move to me the fda oh yeah one little step up yeah so then we'll hopefully have fda approval to go
into our first patients in a couple years from now if all goes well wow that's that's incredible and so down the line this may be a thing that people do where every x amount of months or years you go in and you get a shot and it backs your age up a few years well for your eyes yeah but imagine one day which is what we're developing you put it in your vein and you become transgenic and then you just take an antibiotic for a month and you get rejuvenated why the antibiotic oh we just engineered it that way we need a way to turn it on and off for safety reasons and an easy way to do that is just to use doxycycline which is what people use for a variety of antibiotic reasons there's some side effects to taking antibiotics though and uh do you mitigate those with probiotics we probably should but we don't yeah i have some friends that have had some real huge issues from staph infections and then taking antibiotics yeah it makes sense i mean your gut is so important and the gut blood barrier is increasingly known to be important for aging as that breaks down bacteria in your gut leak across leaky gut syndrome and we're finding we scientists are finding bacteria showing up in cancers and even in the brain of alzheimer's patients and we think that they might be a cause of these diseases really yeah it's brand new science super exciting so why do they think it's a cause of it well anytime you associate one thing in another you you speculate that but it makes sense that bacteria in tissues could be creating inflammation and inflammation is part of the aging process and diseases alzheimer's very inflammatory and the thought is instead of attacking let's take alzheimer's instead of attacking the plaque which has been largely unsuccessful it's a little bit successful but not very maybe we just take an antibiotic and
kill those off in the brain it's similar to when uh this australian barry marshall discovered that stomach ulcers could be cured just with an antibiotic most people younger than us probably don't remember stomach ulcers were thought to be due to increased acid yeah it used to be a stress issue people thought we talked about on the podcast the other day that it's actually uh a gut bacteria issue right and barry marshall an australian uh like me we tend to experiment on ourselves he gave himself this bacteria got stomach ulcers and then cured it with an antibiotic so he gave himself bacteria that caused stomach ulcers on purpose but it was worth it he won the nobel prize yeah i guess so well he was on to something right well you know how much uh goodness has he brought and happiness he brought to the world that's what scientists should be all about it's not just about publishing that's what is the immediate goal but there are a lot of us like andrew huberman you mentioned a really good guy good friend of ours he also wants to change the world and he's from stanford one of the lesser universities but i love guys like that uh people like that because a lot of scientists are just about what's my next publication but there are a few of us that look at what is the goal what are we really trying to do here we're trying to make the world a better place how do we do that well we'll innovate we'll have ip we'll start companies we'll make drugs and hopefully we'll be saving lives one of things i really like about huberman is he does things publicly so he's really big on using social media he puts videos up on instagram explaining these things puts videos up on youtube and they're really easy to follow and he'll show you and demonstrate to you like like he had one today on the benefits of focus and posture that there's like some actual real benefits in terms of alertness just by posture and where you're looking at with your eyes and
science you know and he's talking about this stuff it's not anecdotal evidence it's actual he's talking about the real neuroscience behind all this stuff and it makes it interesting and it makes people intrigued and makes people look into things more people should definitely check out his uh his podcast it's great and he's showing the world that scientists can also be eloquent and educational and on the money and look like a hunk how about that oh he's yeah he was in the pool where i was drowning too uncomfortable to be shirtless with that guy but uh it's all right he looks like a superhero in a marvel movie he does he he does it he looks like a guy that you would say that if you saw a marvel comics movie and that guy was a scientist he's like that guy's not a [ __ ] scientist get out of here right well as i said he's not at the at a so yeah but this is because he's not at a great university he has time to work out he's going to kill me um but he but please do listen to his stuff he knows you have a sense of humor a little while i'm bad at stanford though not good no it's great it's great he might recruit me out there let's see but but this brings me to the third trait that makes us different from animals which is the storyteller this is what we do and andrew's great at it so it got us to this point we needed stories because we didn't have written words initially we had to tell history and oh the flood came up to here when i was a baby um and but that that's screwing us as well it got us here it's our history but now we don't know what to believe right you go we've got q anon we've got the internet you try to buy a supplement how do you know what supplement you can buy what do you trust and the other problem is we don't know who to trust you and i we spend i think half of our lives trying to figure out if someone lying to us or not yeah it takes a lot of brain power in fact i would argue that the reason we have such
big brains is that once we became liars we had to be like lie detectors too and then there's this game that's interesting i never really thought about that like like yeah you once you figured out a way to communicate we also figured out a way to be deceptive but then you've got to figure out if they like the con game yes and then the fourth trait is future seers we became able to to project our mind back in time and forward in time and what's important about that is if someone's you can lie to someone i could tell you that i don't know i'm i i'm going to be your best friend and i'm going to screw you really right so you need to detect that but also i need to know do i need to to be your friend in the future and am i taking the right risk so that am i going to take the risk to lie to you absolutely not you're one of the most well-known people in the world i'm not going to take that risk but if i meet someone at supermarket you know i can lie to them because i know in the future it doesn't matter what they think and that together the storyteller and the future seer is also what gets us to this point but these also are the traits that will get us out of the problem we've got which brings me back to andrew we need scientists to be the storytellers we can't just have people saying oh i heard from a friend this is a fact or go to a website trust us our product works because that's untrustworthy and andrew is one of the first if not the first and the best scientist to engage the public in in a way that you know is is now a mega hit um and be a world-class scientist at the same time and so i i i said to andrew at beginning of covert here are the people i work with i got the best media guys in the world of people in the world run with them go for it and he's become a mega star and the other the
other day i was saying you know damn it why shouldn't i do that so i here am i saying i'm about to uh to work on having myself talk about this as well and so andrew's going to teach me how he did it so you're going to start a podcast you're going to start video blogging you start doing the whole damn thing it's going to be different than this format it's going to be new but i'm going to try it what's a different form that's gonna be a short mini series and so we'll see how it goes a short mini series yeah yeah what's the plan like what are you gonna release it on youtube yeah yeah what do you think yeah sure perfect yeah definitely let me know i'll promote it i'll let you know i'll let people know rather thanks that's exciting so what is the seek like are you gonna just talk about anti-aging the scope of your research like uh so the first um eight part series is going to be some of the the themes that people keep asking me about uh in the book people have read the book keep saying you know what do you take how much do you take when you take there's all the stack bros get that um and then there's other things about sleep how do you improve that how do you improve what's i mean basically what we've talked about today but in greater detail and more prescriptive and and why it works um i'm probably gonna have a co-host who is my co-author we'll see uh but he's a super funny guy and uh that's the idea but what what i find is that i get so many emails every day i took my email off the internet somehow it still can be found please don't write to me please read it no no no no but but my point my point is that i know what people crave for information and i'm a storyteller myself i love educating it's been one of the greatest things is bringing up three kids and telling them about the world and i want to do that on a grand scale well you certainly have a lot to offer and you certainly have a perspective
that i think a lot of people um could benefit from and you understand things that are super important for life that most people are unaware of when it comes to like longevity and the strategies and what the the actual significant impact of all these things that we've discussed so far today i mean it's amazing when i talk to people that like are seemingly health conscious that are not aware of all this stuff and i kind of get it because one of the beautiful things about this podcast is it's my job to talk to people like you so i've gotten this sort of accidental education over the past 12 years well thank you for doing this guys like me people like me and scientists we never had this platform to come and speak to you before that we were speaking through reporters newspaper reporters typically and it was mangled and hyped and it was embarrassing and every story was was there was a lie or something wrong in there and a headline that was we're all going to live forever and i i rarely talk to the old media anymore because it's just too risky i want to talk directly to the public and it's been great this is a new world that's exactly how i feel about interviews that's why i don't do interviews because they'll take my words out of context they'll edit it they'll take something that i've said and and put meaning to it that's not true and they do it because of clickbait because their business is to sell things and i'm i think it's very unfortunate i think it's changed pretty radically since the internet it's one of the few things that i think i think true journalism has suffered in some ways because of the internet i think independent journalism like the matt tybees and the glenn greenwalds and the people that still practice independent journalism they've they've thrived because of this this vacuum this that's been created but i think there's many uh publications today particularly
the ones that are online that survive by click bait they need clicks and if they don't get clicks they don't get advertisements so if they can twist things a little bit in the title or give you a deceptive title but then sort of correct itself in the body of the work they'll do that but a lot of people just read the title and they're like did you hear david sinclair says he's living forever and then next thing you know like you have to talk to your colleagues so david telling people you're living forever you're like i didn't say that right right i even get called into back rooms at harvard with lawyers who say you couldn't say that i don't think i said that so i also now record interviews just in case no that's that's huge yeah that's huge and it's um it's just it's unfortunate that it's necessary and i i get it from their perspective look we all benefit greatly from journalism i benefit greatly from reading these stories i get educated but it it when when someone writes something that's not accurate about me then i go okay well what are you telling me that's not accurate about syria or what do you you can't trust anything right and and even your doctor that they they find it hard to keep up with all of this they don't know what's true i i recently saw my doctor after a year in in um indoors after covert and it was a virtual meeting with my doctor and he's a harvard trained harvard um specialist so you think top of the top of the world and so this is how the meeting goes you know hi doctor hi doctor whatever um so how you feeling feeling good okay so how's your sleep blah blah so it was just questions okay we're done hang on that's not enough you know don't you want to know about this or this system i said for example give me a prostate specific antigen test psa which is important for people our age because prostate cancer can show up so his question to me was uh well do you have a family history
um and he said oh your father's not alive went half the world knows my father's still alive you don't even know that my father's still alive that's firstly a problem second of all i said no he doesn't have prostate cancer never had it he goes okay well do you have any symptoms no but why the hell am i going to wait till i get prostate cancer before i come and see you get the test and he goes okay get the test but that's the problem with medicine right now either have to be sick or have a family history before they treat you so one of the things i've been saying for years in in my book especially is aging is a disease and it's treatable and you know i think we all have a family history of aging so let's treat it let's try to prevent it and uh you know i think that we'd really have a much better society if we came in early and tried to stop things before they actually occurred and we went in we were sick that's an interesting perspective we all have a family history of aging it's terrible disease it really is i mean it truly truly is um do you think do you anticipate a time where we actually will completely stop and reverse aging in our lifetimes uh if you will old ladies look hot again so that they look like 25 year old ladies well let's see if we can make really hot mice first uh that's the first time come on man the old ladies don't have much time they can't wait for you to publish my studies so that here's the good news that there is a massive mega trend zeitgeist revolution in aging research i used to be in the back water biology 20 30 years ago 25 years ago now billions of dollars are being poured into research and development it's super exciting there's new breakthroughs all the time in leading scientific journals and companies being developed for new ways to treat skin to rejuvenate that uh livers kidneys and eventually whole
body so is it gonna happen in my lifetime that we can reverse aging in part of the body yeah absolutely i'm gonna die trying um and i think in if we're really lucky in two years we'll have a success can we make old ladies look young again i don't know but i know that just in the same way as the wright brothers built the right flyer with powered flight it was an inevitability that there was going to be a concord and a jumbo jet 747 and go to the moon it's going to happen it's just a question of how much we as a world want to invest and accelerate it those old ladies listening they're crossing their fingers right now come on what's his email what's his name come on doctor get it together um in the future let's look let's not even put a timeline on it but let's like think about how this technology progresses and just assuming um we don't blow ourselves up or get hit by an asteroid or the aliens land and stop all the nonsense when you look at the future you anticipate human beings science to have complete control over this process and the ability to literally bring the body back to peak form in their prime absolutely wow we are tool makers we are a few species we can do anything we want yeah right i'm i'm like elon but for the way i think about biology is we can do anything we can understand it there are many species that live longer than us all right we've got an elephant clock cheek swabs from elephants right they they've figured out how to not get cancer for for a hundred years um they have multiple copies of a gene called p53 which protects them we only have two copies and that's just an example we can engineer ourselves either through medicine or through even genetically changing our species so that we don't ever get cancer at least not for centuries and that's that's doable that with
today's technology what about genetically engineering ourselves so we're not susceptible to viruses things like covid like getting ourselves into a position where those things have a minuscule effect on us like that something like covid would really only be like like it is for the most healthy folks where it's like a minor cold well what covert taught us is that your age matters not just for how you look and diseases like heart disease but dying from infection so if you can stay young let's say you've been exercising eating the right things eating less you will be literally younger based on that clock and you will have a much better chance of surviving covert if you're obese and you don't exercise we saw those were the most susceptible to infections so one is stay young the second is there there will be medicines to rejuvenate the body we're testing our nad boosting drug right now in covert in 30 hospitals around the us so fingers crossed for that maybe not for covert but eventually the next virus that will definitely come by the way i don't know if you remember in my book i which came out a few months before covert i said we're going to be hit by a virus a pandemic and most people went yeah here he goes again but it happened unfortunately i'm not proud of predicting it but it was i knew this would happen and so i was getting ready for it um anyway so that that's what the technology is there's a third technology which is we could engineer our genes our children could be resistant to viruses that we could do as well and when you think about these things happening like what would be the mechanism to engineer our genes like would you be using crispr would you be using some as of yet not invented technology like well i can imagine a few ways uh just the way vaccines work you stimulate uh the production of antibodies that recognize certain
proteins like the spike protein on the outside of covert 19. or cyrus kov2 and so we could have that we could definitely make children that would never have uh a problem with with sars the problem though is that viruses are smarter than us in many ways because they evolve super fast and we always are one step behind them so i don't think it makes sense actually to genetically modify for specific viruses but there might be ways that are universal an antibody that recognizes all flu proteins we could put that into children and they never get flu wow now when you look at uh human bodies one of the things that's always been interesting to me is uh how how much variety there is in terms of like how we react to certain things how like allergies and things along those lines and how people react differently to different foods is there a way that you can anticipate where one day we'll be able to give someone a test and say oh your ancestors uh thrived on these particular types of foods and these are more beneficial to your body because it's it seems like this one-size-fits-all approach that some people preach it's just not effective for everybody it might work with that one person it's sort of like do you remember that that book the secret yeah remember like everybody's like you can wish yourself and think about the future and you can make it happen but they only talk to people that were actually successful and they're like i dreamed it into reality like oh my god that's all you have to do but they didn't talk to all the people that dreamed it into reality and it failed miserably like like oh uh how did you win the lottery i bought a ticket right so if someone says like uh you know the key to health is to only eat meat um some people that [ __ ] works it really works there's some people that eat carnivore diets and
their eczema clears up and their their brain fog goes away and they're healthier these sort of diets where um your elimination elimination diets but i know other people that go vegan and they go vegetarian and they just they basically get all their protein from plants and they feel much better so there's obviously some sort of a biological variability that exists in people we know it is right i'm not allergic to peanuts but you can't even eat peanuts on planes anymore because some people are so allergic that the dust from you chewing peanuts can get them deathly ill well thank you for saying that because for far too long we've treated the average human and none of us are average right and we're changing the way we treat people in medicine and with wellness because we have to personalize it and the only way to personalize something and to know if it's working for you is to measure it hence you know the company that i'm building to measure things but that's really important because it now means we can tailor your food to you your supplements your exercise because they're they're really like you say everybody responds differently i have a different microbiome in my gut than anyone else on the planet and how do i know will i measure it i can measure these things and so in the future and not too distant future we can even have an app on our phone that will say all right your latest reading from your heart from your from your uh your swab says that you're deficient in these things and your epi genome the the scratches on the cd are looking like this you've got that scratch you've got that scratch to correct that go to that restaurant they've got a special meal for you wow a special meal to correct issues that would be the most bizarre thing if you could go to a restaurant and a restaurant would
serve you a meal that's been genetically engineered to correct all the issues that you have right and the problem today is that we we can measure our genome and there are a number of companies that can do that but we're missing the other half of the information which i would say is even more important for health which is the epi genome the control systems this clock that i'm talking about which we can measure and that together tells you whether you're going to be an asthmatic or susceptible to diabetes because the dna itself is just like a code we don't know how that code's being used throughout our life and it changes every time we have a meal every time you see something it's changing in your body so you've got to measure both of those to get the real answer to whether what you're doing is working and how to fix it this has got to be a very rewarding career path for you because you're you're not just engaged in something that's intellectually stimulating but you're engaged in something that could potentially benefit the human race in a spectacular way what is that like knowing that you're working on this stuff uh well i'm australian so i'm just happy to be here what does that mean i'm happy to be alive i wake up and i'm like oh i'm not dead that's cool are australians like happy we are generally happy we don't have egos we're it's beaten into us as kids in school if i got an a whatever if i said that i get beaten up tall poppy syndrome exactly that yeah so i'm wired not to get a big ego people don't know that's a australian expression right right but it's self-explanatory right well i guess so so the tall poppies they want to drag them down well you get cut off if you can stick your head up above the rest of the poppies you get cut out cut off oh that's what it is okay uh but what does it feel like to be in this position well it
i mean it certainly feels satisfying but i'm never satisfied right you're the same this is our personality but i also feel a tremendous sense of responsibility because i do have the ability i think to change the world um and i want to make the right decisions and not get distracted or waste my time actually when when you know that 150 155 000 people will die today from old age it's really hard to take a day off is there a possibility that one day doing this and all this work might lead to a substantial increase in overpopulation no no how come uh well even in the us now population is declining the fertility rates have gone down uh and when you do the math the the rate of people who die from aging is barely the replacement of uh of well birth is fairly replacing the people who die especially in most of the world i mean there's still certain parts of the world that are reproducing at high rates but even those are coming down i was in africa a while ago and they would these people i talked to on the ground uh literally on the ground were saying yeah we used to have you know 10 kids as and now we have two and we want them both to go to college so that we are in a world now where if we don't do anything population is going to decrease which isn't that great either to be honest um but we also have technology to solve the way we treat the planet there's no way we can continue exploiting the planet the way we do right now even with the current uh you know seven to nine billion that that we'll have on the planet steady state which is predicted and bill gates talks about this wonderfully on youtube please check it out if you haven't seen it um and so the future of humanity is it's gonna be steady state maybe it'll top out at 10 billion but even with aging not being cured but slowed down and extended
health-wise we're not going to run out of room um but resources yes but that's going to happen anyway so what we need to do is to solve the healthcare problem we spend 17 of gdp in the us on on sick care it's not even health care anymore and if you can save let's say even a few percent of that within that decade that's trillions of dollars that you save that can put be put towards research and development for climate change and other things that we need to solve as well there was a woman that i had on recently dr shanna um the woman who talked about phthalates and the all the various enviro she's an environmental epidemiologist shanna swann and she was amazing and she wrote a book what is the book called she she wrote a book on declining fertility rates declining testosterone rates um the decline uh increase in miscarriages and decre declining birth rates in uh people that's directly related to the amount of phthalates that we find in their body which come from environmental toxins primarily from plastics there it is that's the book it's called countdown how our modern world is threatening sperm counts altering male and female reproductive development and imperiling the future of the human race it's an amazing amazing book and the podcast was incredible she's so injured and she's really funny like uh she has a thing on her thing on our instagram called the jizz quiz like because like like literally if you track the phthalates in in the water supply and in food supply and in human beings there's a direct correlation between the introduction of petrochemical products and the decline in sperm production and the decrease in the size of the taint which is really crazy because taints apparently in mammals are one of the very best ways of telling the difference between males and females because the taints and males are generally 50 to 100 percent larger
than the taints of females but the introduction of phthalates is shrinking these taints and it's making male penises smaller it's making the testicles smaller and lowering the sperm count and people are on testosterone replacement earlier in life they have lower fertility lower sperm count earlier in life and generally they have less energy they have less vitality and it's these [ __ ] chemicals that are in our plastics that are leaching into our bodies but it's measurable and it's only really been studied to the extent where she's describing it in these peer-reviewed studies that have come out over the last decade this is a new science and a new understanding of this impact and it's really terrifying uh yeah it is and it's it's on it's on the theme that i mentioned which is we've we've gotten to this point with with technology but technology screws us so we have to engineer our way out of the problems that we've created for ourselves and this is a treadmill that we may never get off but we need to embrace science to understand what's making us sick and then solve that with ingenuity and the fu gene um i don't microwave plastics anymore for that very reason it's scary those pcbs and all sorts of stuff i mean i truly believe that that is is an issue for us um there's a real problem with testosterone too with men um that it goes down with aging but it's just going way down i'm one of the best ways to besides taking either a cream or an injection of testosterone is what you do and what i do a little less than you is to build up your your core body muscles the big muscles actually tell your testes to make more testosterone and for me that's been helpful i i do hip hinge exercises a fair bit uh try to build up those muscles swings like kettlebell swings yeah yeah yeah why hip hinge uh well partly because my
piriformis was destroyed but also because at least my trainer says that that'll help me maintain strength around my core and one of the problems with aging is when you fall over you break your hip and this is going to prevent that well any time you're adding weight like any weight pushing exercises you're building bone density and one of the problems with sedentary people is when you're not weight bearing you're not carrying things around not lifting and you don't have any resistance exercises your bones get fragile as you get older especially with our mineral poor diets you know there's just mineral poor diets no weight resistance not good but if there was like one exercise that you can do that is like if someone said all right i just want to do one thing i might say kettlebell swings yeah you know because you can you can do kettlebell swings with heavy weights too and it's an incredible body exercise you're using so many different things you're using your grip you're using your leg muscles using your back you know you're using your traps your shoulders it's a lot going on when you think about taking something and doing this and swinging it all the way up and swinging and you could do it for repetitions you could do it like heavyweight do low reps you know it's a good with lightweight it's a good way to warm up and exercise that's how i start out my warm-ups i jump rope and then i do light kettlebells like 30 pound kettlebell swings yeah great i i just can't tell you how much better i feel having done about three years of more intense exercise like that uh anyone who isn't lifting weights you got to do it yeah you just feel so much better you got spring in your step you don't get tired uh you you feel like a new human and so i i've lost a fair amount of weight since covert um stopped eating large meals and i've never felt better um this i'm not calling it prescription
but what i've done to my body over the last 10 years if you measure my blood biochemistry and even this mouth swab test i'm younger than my chronological age in fact i've been getting younger over the last decade so 10 years ago based on those tests you're younger now than you were 10 years ago right wow though and you can maintain this i'm on a trajectory to be getting younger yeah that's so crazy so what do you think is you think it's just a combination of all the things or do you think it's metformin do you think it's an nmn do you think well i i think it's the combination because i i'm a scientist and i add things one by one and then measure them again you've got to measure something if you're going to fix it and so i add things sometimes they do nothing to my age or to my health or how i feel or my my mental ability and then i don't do that anymore and then i add something else great that worked i keep that and then i'm just adding that on um i would say i'm not the smartest guy in the room by any means at school i was you know reasonably intelligent but i wasn't the smart one but i think that through what i'm doing and through mind exercises and just running a marathon in my mind um figurally speaking every day i am smarter than i used to be and it's interesting right i'm engineering my body to be better and better and younger and younger as i go yeah that's a real thing you can get smarter yeah i mean i did it accidentally i think wow doing this podcast oh that's true talking to people because if you go back and listen to the early podcast i mean look there's times today that i sound like a [ __ ] but if you go back into 2009 i really sound [ __ ] stupid um and i think that's not an accident that's not a coincidence it's just that's who i was then i was a dumber person i was less aware well this is why we need to live longer
because i mean you're you're in peak condition mentally physically right i'm in very good condition both yeah i think definitely mentally this is as smart as i've ever been physically there's certain things just because of injuries like particularly like back injuries that my body has a hard time doing at full clip like martial arts but just because of the unusually extreme demands that the things that i'm interested in require like jiu jitsu and kickboxing are two very explosive things so the the pressure on the tendons and the joints is pretty extreme it's an unusual demand fair enough i mean you've had a harder physical life than i have but my point is that our brains only become good at 50. uh how old are you 53 53 almost 54 i'll be 54 in august okay well similar i'm about to turn 52 next week but we're you know we used to think of 15 how good your hair looks it's amazing no color did you put any color in that is that your actual hair color i dyed it but i don't have gray i tried to go summer blonde summer blonde and it went it went orange so why don't you spike it oh i i was messing with my i was bored during covert how about you get frosted tips no i should i was bored but i have no gray hair on any of my body just for the hell of it you should make it all gray just to freak people out i was i told my kids that and i went don't do it but it's very cool now girls were doing that for a while yeah you know young girls were dying their hair gray it's really weird it's like what a hot old lady would look like yeah well fashion's a funny thing yeah it's a weird one but um what do you think is causing you to not have gray hair is that genetic like does your father have dark hair uh my father uh lost his hair a lot of it by 30 and is fully gray my mother had um
color in her hair when she was still 70 when she died so it may be genetic but uh i don't know i'm happy i'm not doing any i'm not plastic surgery i don't haven't had hair transplant or anything you look really good like for a guy who's 52 your skin looks like very pliable you look like you look youthful well there's one way to tell um you know people can botox anywhere right but if i've got headphones on but if you look near their ear you get the wrinkles you can if you look at someone's ear and around that that's and you don't botox that how's your ear you have a young ear pretty young pretty young everyone can check out my ear but yours grow that's what gets really crazy when you see old old dudes they have ears as big as these headphones straight old dudes have giant [ __ ] ears like you run into like a 75 year old guy like whoa the size of his ears what the hell's happening there i have no idea but if only other parts would grow it'd be good sorry as if old dudes are just yeah uh but my what i wanted to say before is your our minds are at their peak so far maybe they're gonna get better so we need to allow people to live longer a lot of people start off careers that i mean first of all we need people like you to stick around for longer the planet needs you and so my goal is to let people be healthier for longer and if you're healthy you don't die right so that's the idea of all this research but also if you get longer life you have more choices you can have have kids later um you can change careers if you're busting roads for a living and you hate it why not have two years of a paid skill battle from the government or alone and change go go make guitars or start a band or become a therapist whatever you want to do it gives you more options during life if you're not worried at 50 that it's all downhill
did you call it a skill battle yeah so like a sabbatical where you learn a new skill yeah is that your own term yeah i like that all right you slipped it in there you didn't even didn't even address it trademark yeah i think you're you're making a ton of sense and i think also as you get older there's there's something that happens to people as you live your life hopefully where you keep making mistakes but you make less of the same mistakes because you go oh i remember the last time i [ __ ] this up i'm not going to do this like that anymore now i'm going to and then you anticipate well if i do that that's going to cause problems so i'm going to do this and then as you get to be 50 years old you have a lifetime of these things that you can draw upon hopefully you have a lifetime of corrections of mistakes that led to success unfortunately for some people it's just disaster after disaster and they never develop either a strategy or a pattern of behavior that leads to improvement in the way they think and behave yeah well you need reflection yeah and this is us as the the time traveler species that makes us different than all of the others is that we have a very good ability of look in general learning from our mistakes and people like us at every night are like oh man i screwed that up i gotta fix that and that's a way of improving yourself throughout your whole life and that's what we call wisdom um and you know i know when when you're 20 probably you and i as well as most 20 year olds think that we're the smartest people on the planet we can solve everything and the old people don't know anything but if you're 20 and listening to this i can tell you guaranteed that when you're our age at 50 you've got so much wisdom to refer to because you will make mistakes and you will learn from them and that's why i like being an educator is that i don't want my students
uh or anyone on the planet to make the same mistakes i've made and i've made plenty along the way yeah that's one of the benefits of being able to talk to people it's like you can learn from their mistakes without having to make the same mistakes yeah like you really can you don't have to necessarily have only experience in order to learn you can most certainly learn like i've never done cocaine the reason i've never done cocaine when i was in high school one of my best friend's cousin was selling coke and i watched his life deteriorate i watched him be addicted all they wanted to do was do coke and they would they had this apartment in an attic and they would just sit there and just look [ __ ] weird watch movies like they were gone and i said wow it's like i knew him before when we were all younger we were high school kids and then i knew him later and i was like this is like watching a person has been bit by a vampire and then for me it was like that drug [ __ ] you up and so i learned from other people's mistakes right well this is the storyteller in us as well we can learn from from other people's uh wisdom yeah um and so we have to have respect for elders as well and one of the things that i really loved seeing during covert was that we really cared about the older people i didn't know humanity really cared about other people we were kind of ageist they're all put in a nursing home who cares but i think what covert showed us is that many of us really do care about older people and that was really reassuring i have more faith in humanity now well overall like the the problem with the thought of do you care about older people is it so abstract like yeah you care about them but they'll be fine they're all they're over there they're just doing their thing but then when you find out that there's a disease that targets old people disproportionately
and then unfortunately what happened in places like new york state where they were taking people that are coveted positive and bringing them back into nursing homes and it ran through them like fire that kind of [ __ ] we hear about it just makes you so sad when you think about like the last few years with your grandmother that you could have enjoyed and now she's gone because of this [ __ ] disease you know and people say oh well you know she was 86 would you expect well didn't expect someone to bring a coveted positive patient back in the nursing home and infect her and everybody else around her like she could have lived a few extra years and enjoyed her family a few extra years and they could have had those memories so i think it made us directly aware of many many things about our mortality and about what's precious and what's important and because so many people were forced to stop working and so many people lost their businesses it i think it made people rely on community more too you know there's a lot of negatives that happen during this cobit where this uh this pandemic where a lot of like really hysterical people and i don't mean that in a funny way i mean people that were like prone to anxiety and people that have a different difficult time with stress in a difficult time with adverse conditions and situations it this accentuated them past their breaking point and you see them on twitter just freaking out wearing three masks and screaming out the window there's a lot of people that lost their [ __ ] mind and i'm hoping that we can bring some of those people back to baseline over the next few months and slowly you know just call everybody calm the [ __ ] down let's learn something from this let's do better and what i really hope people learn as they go over the studies and they look at all these things that we've
learned is your health is of paramount importance it is the most important thing the number one comorbidity besides vitamin d levels is obesity and you can control that you can control both of those things right well we might get some hate mail or hate tweets whenever i talk about obesity there's always a few people that say what are you hating on fat people for it's not what i'm saying not what you're saying we're saying look at the data yeah look at the data what is bad for you you cannot say that being very overweight is a healthy thing for most people and that's all i'm saying it's not a decision it's just not good for you it's not hating on persons state and listen i easily could be a fat person a lot of people listening to this could be a fat person it's about a pattern of behavior that leads to an adverse result that is that will affect every single human being listening to this if you chose to eat the wrong foods and live a sedentary lifestyle it is inevitable it is just what happens it is and it's part of being a person but also what we're talking about it comes from from love we want everybody to to live well and be the best person they can be yeah be happy i want people to be happy i want people to feel good it feels better to have a healthy body when you know i've been in situations where i gained weight and not even that much but then when i lost the weight of like ah feels so much better like that's a guy gaining 10 pounds and losing 10 pounds that's not a lot but if you're 50 60 70 like my friend laura bites she's a hilarious stand-up comic and uh she was on the podcast recently and i hadn't seen her since uh i was in california and she lost like how much did she lose like 60 pounds 50 pounds a lot she lost a lot she looks
fantastic she just she just she found out she's really funny she found out at the beginning of the the pandemic she's like well what's the thing that it [ __ ] you up the most if you're fat she goes well [ __ ] i'm fat time to lose weight and you know like she just decided to go on a sensible reasonable diet and exercise she's online programs like followed someone online and is now on a total health path and when you talk to her she's like everything feels so much better i have so much more energy my body feels better i can move better oh yeah think better everything so a friend of mine who i've co-published a couple of papers with ray krones he advocates the cold therapy and we came up together and we published this thing called the metabolic winter hypothesis which is in when we were out in caves where we're cro-magnon people we would go through winter being hungry and cold and that that is what we need to be healthy or at least mimic that and so the the fasting and cold therapy is what we've evolved uh and what our bodies need to be to be in tip-top shape uh and the problem is we basically stay warm we especially here in austin it's pretty warm mostly and uh so that his prescription which has worked really well um for some celebrities he's worked with um among others is that you want to be slightly chilly keep your house temperature down sleep without blankets um and and don't eat a lot and he says i think it was something like if you don't shed half a pound a day you're not doing it right half a pound a day eventually you'll be nothing right but he's starting with people who are really big oh okay but it works great that combination just being uncomfortable and cold well not even uncomfortable just slightly chilly but he also prescribes things like cold jackets and there's even a thing that lady hamilton was telling me he has this
chilly jack jacket he sleeps in and stays cold at night so it's it's actually chilled yeah he said so so it's got like an electrical supply or something and it cools you off i don't know i don't know if jamie you can find that we'll have to ask i was using one of those uh mattress covers for a while in l.a and i liked it but i i [ __ ] up a couple of times and one time i made it too cold and i was waking up the middle of night shivering that was a problem that's overdoing it that's me and then the other time uh one of them leaked um and it was my mattress was wet and i was like what the [ __ ] is going on like the the you know because what it is is essentially like you put this cover over it and the cover has these tubes in it and the tubes have water and then there's a machine that sits by the bed and the machine cools the whole deal why aren't you using like a whole mattress i still do yeah which which one you use the one i use called eight sleep yeah it's very similar you can change you can make it hot if you want if you like to go the other way you can have different zones if the person you're with doesn't want it to be cold so you can not have to freeze them out too but yeah i almost feel like i can't sleep without it to be honest with you like i get mad if i have to sleep somewhere else i'm like [ __ ] it's not going to be cold i'm going to be so hot i'm going to be sweating interesting so when you go to a hotel room you know some big experience i know it's going to and yours is an actual the way eight works is an actual mattress it's covered but it's a bit it's like proprietary to their mattress but i think they now actually have a really big cover it's i think it works almost very similar though do they have a mattress or is it no it's just a cover it's a cover for the mattress but the mattress is covered in something else that you then zip around this thing on top this is not just sitting there it's zipped around it doesn't like slide around what i'm getting at do you need
to use their mattress or could you use a regular mattress initially i think you had to use their thing i think they've now created something you can cover other mattresses as well yeah okay they just start advertising yeah that's a big thing a lot of these uh tim ferriss type dudes they're always into those uh chili mattresses i i used it for a brief amount of time and i think there was some benefit in it but i stopped using it yeah i could barely sleep last night in my hotel because well it was warm and i had to rip all the i did a show last night at uh vulcan gas company and then we went to golden tiger which is maybe the best [ __ ] cheeseburgers in the world and i had two of those [ __ ] two double cheeseburgers at one in the morning not the best move right it's definitely the wrong move i ate them in 30 seconds too i wolfed through those [ __ ] and then i woke up in the middle of the night drenched with sweat like what the [ __ ] are you doing yeah the food and the meat's wet so yeah i i i wore one of these rings um that you can measure your sleep for a ring yeah yeah and uh so i figured out pretty quickly what would disturb my sleep and more than a sip of alcohol will do it obviously but also food if i ate late it was terrible i didn't get into that deep sleep which is you know matt walker says is the thing to get into because your body's always dealing with the food that you've digested yeah and i think if you lie down and it's still in your stomach i'm guessing gravity just barely gets it out of there i'm guessing yeah i was just so hungry and after i do shows i'm so indulgent i just want to eat you know i'm tired i did an hour and a half on stage just want to go eat you know did you have a drink as well i think i had a couple because that that for me is now i don't care about food i mean i'm going to eat if i have a little drink that's [ __ ] it juice right yeah yeah
yeah i had a couple of i had a couple of whiskeys and then uh two giant cheeseburgers but it was a great time with some nice people a lot of fun well you've got to live i mean this is this is my mantra as well if you're always too strict you won't stick to it yes so for everybody who tries if you if you don't do it the first time try again be go easy on yourself but but do it for yourself in the future it's going to pay off maybe a decade or two of extra healthy life yeah there was a great podcast that i did recently with uh ethan suplee how did i say it so please play so plea ethan is an actor and at one point in time he was more than 500 pounds and uh now he looks like a football player now he looks amazing i mean he looks like an athlete he's like this big like muscular healthy god that's him look at that look at the difference between him on the left and him on the right i mean substantial i mean really really impressive but what he's done um on top of all this exercise and diet and you know taking care of himself is uh express himself and talk about what the struggle was like and part of it was like at one point in time he had lost so much weight that he had to get his skin cut you know and removed and then he gained 100 pounds so he goes back and forth and back and forth and he did this over like 20 years until he got to where he is now and he's a really really bright guy super smart dude so it's it's it has nothing to do with intelligence like willpower and intelligence they're not necessarily directly related and willpowers doesn't even like cover all of it because there's so much weird psychological [ __ ] that's going on with people that do things that they know are bad but they keep doing it anyway whether it's cigarettes or gambling or the limbic system is powerful people are crazy but he got it dialed in
and it's a massive inspiration to people because you see him now and you know anybody that would say like you know you shouldn't talk badly about obesity you shouldn't say that obesity is bad because you're going to make people's feelings hurt when they're obese i'm not trying to do that i'm trying to inspire you to try to achieve what that guy's done what my friend laura's done to with what many people that i know have done i'm trying to inspire people to because it's possible you're alive you're breathing you're moving around can you do all those things you can get to a better place and once you do that you will have extreme satisfaction and i think you'll also have the the knowledge that you are capable of great feats then you can do this great thing to lose 270 pounds like ethan did my god that's an incredible thing because that's a that's a mountain that you chop down over years this is not an easy thing to get to for years and years and years he slowly avoided temptation and and then even [ __ ] up and gained all this weight again and then slowly got back down again and now he's had a completely healthy weight where he looks amazing yeah one of the things i'd like to figure out is uh if you lose a lot of weight how far back does your biological clock go yes and i i would suspect it has a big difference on your actual age is to lose all that weight oh my god for a guy like him i would love to do that swab with him at 500 and do that swab with him at 250 and see the difference well next time there's somebody on your show who wants to try that let's we could do that well it's just so hard for to get someone to commit to losing an astronomical amount of weight like that yeah but it's also it's you know you need help and you need help from either counseling or coaches or loved ones or friends or someone that can kind of like help you along too because it's it's difficult yeah
uh and actually your social circle has been shown to work against you in like many cases so ray i mentioned he said that when he works with his clients um i think it's okay to mention that penn gillette has lost a lot of weight thank you ray uh and he found that you shouldn't tell people that you're trying to lose weight because there'll come a point where they say you've lost too much weight you shouldn't [ __ ] are those people friends [ __ ] yeah maybe they don't like the fact that you look better than them yeah look at you david looking all good you lost too much weight your head's too big for your body yeah yeah no those people are [ __ ] you need better friends good friends will tell you dude this is [ __ ] amazing let's celebrate with cheesecake no once in a while but it's also been shown that if you have good friends and a partner that you love who you can trust you live longer by a lot that makes sense lonely people that's got to be like a painful existence it's the the feeling of you know that's why like the the concept of in cells you know involuntary celibates like that is one of the most depressing things in our culture these angry people online like [Music] like big grown-up man babies that no one wants a [ __ ] like that's terrible right that's one of those saddest things it does sound horrible yeah uh well yeah that that that's that's the issue that um um we do need friends and we need partners to take care of us when we're older yeah but i think generally the reason that my guests that those people live a long time and it's the fact that they live along longer is that you're countering cortisol levels when you're stressed out and worried and and you don't have a lot of friends you you have these stress hormones and cortisol is the worst one the insidious
one that causes you to age more rapidly um and cortisol is just stress yeah stress mental stress mental stress causes cortisol yeah and i want to be really clear joe that when i talk about adversity and stress on the body hormesis right it's not the same as mental stress this is very different just we use the same english word for it unfortunately but there is some benefit in um i don't want to use the word stress but difficult tasks for the mind right challenge challenge purpose so the is the difference that cortisol is released by the body under situations of uncontrollable stress or or or situations where things are unmanageable or you've gotten past your breaking point like what is the difference between the stress that one uh one experiences through cortisol or where cortisol is release versus the stress of say like high-level chest playing you know where this is obviously very beneficial to the mind you know it's an exercise in fact well i think what you said is right from my understanding of the science is that if you reach a tipping point and you have real anxiety that's going to secrete cortisol but being focused and having a high focus on what you're doing and taking your mind to the next level even with the your heart rate goes up a little bit that challenge to the body and the mind my understanding is that doesn't doesn't release a lot of cortisol but um the hormesis effect it's a u-shaped curve that once you get a little bit of intensity and biological stress and even mental stress it's good thing but you go over a tipping point and then it becomes bad again same thing with physical exercise right like those people that run the ultramarathons after it's over they're wrecked yeah because they've gone too far right
actually for me says there's a the way it was discovered was people were spraying herbicides on plants and they kept diluting them down and everyone thinks you know the the less you have uh the less it'll work but the plants that got the really low dose this is not um homeopathy this is real science plant's got low dose herbicide that would kill a plant at high doses grew better than the untreated plants and so what you want to do even if you're a plant is to experience adversity whether it's a plant like a grapevine making wine it's a little bit dried out or fungus they make the best wines they make these molecules that i call xenohermetic molecules xeno meaning cross species hormatic hormesis and we get the benefits of plants that are biologically stressed out or have adversity without actually having to do it ourselves so i try to eat plants that have color in them have been stressed organic not grown in a perfect greenhouse condition now why do plants that are have color in them what is that is that they contain more vitamins well so the color is partly good for you there are some anthocyanins that are that are healthy that have color but it's more of an indicator dye indicate a color that the plants have been stressed so for instance if you shine uv light on a lot of plants they'll turn bluish or reddish if they're green and that's their way of resisting uv and that color is an indicator interesting um and when your body's releasing cortisol because of the high stress that you're in this unmanageable stress that is also one of the benefits of exercise that you can actually reduce that cortisol you could reduce that physical stress right absolutely exercise is one of the best ways to get out of depression and just general anxiety i use it a lot for myself you know it's a stressful job what i do um and the exercise
a little bit of running bit of weight lifting i feel like a new person and that's cheap therapy yeah it really is and it's it's one of those things that if you can just write down a routine and force yourself to do it in the beginning you'll still be stressed out it'll be hard to concentrate you'll be like ah [ __ ] everything sucks but if you just keep going if you just keep going and when you get through the routine you will literally experience during a one-hour exercise routine the actual alleviation of stress you'll experience it melts away it'll melt away and then as long as you actually are rigidly you gotta you gotta rigorously exercise you gotta really get after it but at the end of that thing you're like it's gonna be okay like yeah man it's gonna be okay give me a hug you know everybody's all right i love that it's my favorite thing the feeling of a post-workout bliss is just a beautiful bliss it's like you know just you you you have much fresher cleaner perspective on things and you don't just feel physically great mentally it's yeah i did that yes i've achieved something that's so important yeah that's important for people i think people it's entirely too easy to get through life for most folks and i think we're not wired for that we're wired for overcoming great odds and obstacles i think human beings are wired for predator attacks and all kinds of [ __ ] and we're worried about things that are real that are and when they don't happen i think we [ __ ] stress ourselves out about little things somebody said something once i forget who said it but it's a great expression and i like to repeat it all the time and i wish i could attribute it to that person but they said the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you even if it's not much you got to always remember that human beings respond to the worst thing that's ever happened to
them if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is your mom took your phone away when you're 16 and you're a brat you know like you're like [ __ ] it mom what the [ __ ] mom this is [ __ ] that is a person with no character because this is the worst thing that can happen to the spoiled baby is his mom took his phone away from him whereas if you grew up in war-torn serbia if you you know if whatever you've had a very difficult life on the farm you've been wrestling since you're 10 years old and you're preparing for tournaments all the time that kind of person has experienced a level of stress and difficulty that makes normal situations in life far more easy to manage 100 and you can see that in in generations even before us that there was the greatest generation um my grandmother grew up in world war ii depression and and she never got stressed for her there was nothing that could compare to that i became a different person after i saw my mother die in front of me and i couldn't do anything but whisper into her ear that she was the best mom i could ever have after that nothing was as bad as that i would have a bad day at work and i'd come home how was your day everyone would ask at home and i'd say nobody died today it was a good day and that sets the baseline right once you've gone through something like that every day is a good day yeah every day is a good day if you can if you could stay on this earth and enjoy your friends and enjoy your loved ones and do something that you're actually in that you actually love and get satisfaction out of for an occupation find a purpose yes right it if you have a purpose in life you live longer okay so you i say find a purpose do that make money if you're the expert in the world at something you will naturally earn money at it so just do what you love
live longer it's a win-win yeah and you'll enjoy yourself it's just so many people unfortunately get so stuck in whatever path they were initially on that it's so difficult for them to course correct they get stuck where they developed debt they got a lease for a car and they got a mortgage and they got a this and that and then they have a family independence and then they're moving up the corporate ladder and the company needs you mike the company relies on you you're a big asset to the company and then you're like [ __ ] i really wish i was a pianist i really love playing piano i wish i just stuck with that i could have been in the concert i could have been [ __ ] elton john [ __ ] and then you know right well one of the the things that i think has gotten me to this point in my career i i started my career when i was four years old my grandmother said do something important so i said you know that's kind of amazing i'll stop people from getting i remember that when you were four years old i remember the exact moment what did she like how did she say i know where i was what we were doing what the carpet felt like wow uh she said david um no i asked her i said yeah vera i didn't call her by her first name because she had the [ __ ] eugene excuse my language uh v i didn't call her grandma i called her by vera fiora you called her vera yeah she just wanted to be called by her name really wow interesting she's very rebellious um yeah one of our kids has the same refugee and it's been quite interesting there but that's a different you really do think it's a gene i'm sorry is this the the child that's a baby yeah yeah yeah uh anyway my grandmother uh i said you can always be around she said not gonna die what do you mean you're gonna die she's everything that you love your pet cat uh me uh your parents and you are gonna
die and it's not gonna be pretty and as a four-year-old that that really freaks you out and there was a turning point in my life i said that's not fair and then i you know over the next few years i thought that's that's cruel to have conscious consciousness a species that knows that's gonna happen the future see our species and be burdened with that knowledge that everything that you love is going to die in many cases horribly so i decided at age 4 to make that my purpose and i've been working back from that goal ever since and figuring out how to get there get a phd come to america mit harvard make discoveries go on a podcast wow what a wild moment a four-year-old looking up at his beloved grandmother that doesn't want to be called grandma and then she hits you with something that really affects the whole course of your life at four which is so crazy anyone who knew her knew she was a special person so i'm not just making this up she really she's uh yeah i could i could you know get a bit weepy here if i talk too much about her but she didn't want to talk about the small stuff she didn't care about politics or the weather she just want to talk about philosophy and history and making humans better because she saw the worst of humanity nazis russians coming in crushing the revolution in hungary she had to flee for her life with my father she had my father when she was 15 years old so that were already she's a rebel and then she got to australia she fled europe and i was born and she said i'm gonna pour love into this child me and uh and make him the vehicle to change the world for to make it a better place dude you're gonna make me cry yeah it is now you understand why i jump out of bed every morning to to do what i do wow that's heavy and it's it's heavy also that through
horrible tragedy and the the worst part of human nature through genocide and war that she comes out of it the other end determined to only concentrate on important things and good only focus on what's significant and then to look at you and to think that you can really change this place i think you can man i think she's right i mean i think you've you've honored her with your choices trying every day thanks joe now we're crying not really but you know i think that these loved ones uh our ancestors uh our grandparents you know it it's a tragedy when we lose them yeah and so i just want people to have an extra year two years ten years with their parents and grandparents and that's that's it's real personal it's not about the economy it's not about you know populating the planet overpopulating the planet it's that what would you give for an extra few weeks with with your wife yeah it's also optimizing the quality of the time while they're still alive which is so important as well like just because someone's alive and in a vegetative state just sitting in the corner drooling for the next 15 20 years while they're still alive i experienced that with my grandmother unfortunately my grandmother had a stroke when i was young she had an aneurysm and no one was home and she fell down and was in the backyard and by the time they found her she had been there for quite a while and they gave her 72 hours to live they're like you know prepare it's not gonna she's not gonna make it and she made it for 12 years and it was rough and um when i moved to new york when i was 24 or something like that i um i stayed with my grandfather in in new jersey and my grandmother and so she was under you she had bed care and she couldn't she can't move
she couldn't go anywhere you know she's paralyzed and um she would moan in agony and occasionally she would talk and i remember my grandmother when i was young she was just like really eccentric interesting lady who uh always home cooked all of her food like home cooked her pasta made her own sauce and and she was just an interesting lady she's just uh a really unique lady and then to see her in this and she was so fiery and she was always like yelling about things and she's always passionate about things and to see her completely immobile for the last 12 years of her life and then when i moved to new new jersey well i stayed in new jersey for a while with them trying to save up money for an apartment and when i was doing that i just got to see first hand like really clearly like this life doesn't end well and then and it can end the way it ended for my grandmother in a terrible way where she was just in agony and it just it was me really the beginning of a new stage in my life where i was signed by a manager who's still my manager to this day as a comedian and i was embarking on this like very promising aspect of my life i was very excited it was a new beginning and i'm like here i am and then i move to my grandfather's place and stay with him and my grandmother and watching her die and she's dying slowly and it's ugly it's ugly i would just hear in the middle of the night just whoa he could just hear him moan it wasn't a big house you could hear everything and it was uh just a reminder man like you gotta get going this thing doesn't last and you don't want regrets you don't want any regrets that's right and we're all going to die one day yes and we're going to think was it a life well lived or not yeah was it a life well lived and did you learn did you learn from your mistakes you're going to make mistakes
don't define yourself by them but did you learn and and and are you on the path to optimize yourself we uh did you become the best person you could be with what you're giving right yeah yeah and if not why and if not do it now yeah you can't change the past you know a lot of us would i would love to go back and correct some of the things i've done um particularly things if i hurt people's feelings but you can't so what do you do you gotta keep going and you gotta learn and honor your mistakes and who you were and feel that pain and recognize that regret is very valuable because regret teaches you that there's a real there's a cost to mistakes there's a tangible feeling that coincides with knowing you did the wrong thing or you [ __ ] up or you you made an error learn from that and use it as fuel and be the best person that you could be and it's possible for everybody to do that everybody can improve it's not impossible this is not this is not unsurm and even if it's just incremental improvements in the quality of the relationships that you have or in the way you interact with people at work or in the amount of exercise you get in a week or in how you stick to your diet all those little incremental steps as we were talking about earlier the little shift of a couple degrees of the the path of a boat over the course of the entire journey it's going in a completely different direction now you're a way better person this is one of the things that i concentrate on probably more than anything in my life it's just trying to trying to just be the best person i can yeah well you're in an inspiration to millions of us i thank you for you too thank you for what you do we try listen man you are you are in a weird position right now
you really can just imagine if you kept people alive for an extra 10 15 years and those people that you kept alive had an incredible impact on the way our cultures formed because they've drawn from their lifetime of experience and all the things they've learned and they've expanded on that and had the opportunity because they stayed alive for 20 extra years or 30 extra years to spread that to so many other people that also learned and it has this overwhelming effect on everybody right yeah we can do way better as a species but we have to use these four traits that that i think make us different that got us in the in this place uh in the first place and we are capable individually of doing amazing things you got to take some risks i live by the mantra of do doing at least one thing that scares me every day often ten or ten of them would you do today that scares you um i'm not scared of coming your podcast but what did i do that was scary oh i was investing some money that i could lose dogecoin did you go crazy no i won't in case the sec is listening but uh yeah i invested money uh but yeah it's that kind of thing even if it's just an email to somebody that i'm afraid that they'll say no to me i'll send that off but yeah i'm getting better at it i manage my stress but i i've always been quite a nervous insecure person um deep down and pushing myself to do things that i wouldn't actually do has been the best decision i ever made yeah there's not a lot of growth in comfort that's a that's an important lesson for people but also here's a even more important lesson the comfort that you get after growth is so much more enjoyable because like if you've gone through difficult things especially self-imposed difficulties the comfort that you
get afterwards like when you can actually earn relaxation when i plop down on the couch after a long hard day and i watch some tv it's like ah i can relax i really feel good enjoy this it feels good instead of feeling like i'm wasting time you earned it yeah was that sound i heard it too like a fan yeah do you hear when this thing's off oh it's my computer damn it's blowing hard oh explode i don't know was that your laptop yeah it's the fan on it it's old it is old them old laptops but those don't the new ones don't have the right connections right uh they might i don't know i have a look at the brand new one they just announced i don't know i was thinking about it but yeah sorry i think we did three hours already believe it or not that flew past we just used up three hours of our lives we used it but we uh we got out something that i think will benefit a lot of people is there anything else do you think that we didn't cover that you'd like to talk about uh i would like to mention often people ask how they can help my research um and so if you go to sinclairlab.com you can help us there donate donate a few bucks that's all and we can do amazing things okay i'm in well done thank you let's go there it is right there the sinclair lab nice beautiful support our research bam very clean and you are on all the social media platforms right you're on twitter you're on instagram how do people find you on those uh so uh twitter is david sinclair phd um no david a sinclair and then uh instagram is david sinclair phd well listen my friend it's always a pleasure to talk to you i really appreciate you very much and i really really appreciate what you do i appreciate you too john thanks for thank you thank you bye everybody [Music] you