2022-05-03 - Interview Dr. David Sinclair - Knowledge Project - How to Not Die

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRdTfh1_88I&ab_channel=TheKnowledgeProjectPodcast
• Length: 1:33:16
• Biologist and genetics expert Dr. David Sinclair is out to prove he can live past 100 years old, and he thinks you can too. On this episode Sinclair goes in-depth on the process of aging and the techniques you can incorporate into your life that help you live a longer, healthier life, including optimizing your diet, the benefits of exercise, the role of a positive attitude, the importance of sleep, the three supplements he takes every day, why it’s never too late to slow the process of aging, and so much more.

Transcript

Intro

0:00	well of course we can there is no law that says we have to age uh right now there's a limit because
0:06	that's what we've seen happens but the people that live over 100 typically don't take care of themselves
0:12	a lot of them smoke and some of them smoke and drink and don't eat good food [Music]
0:23	marcus aurelius said death smiles at us all all we can do is smile back and i feel like you sort of get up in the
0:29	morning and you look at the god of death and you simply say not today i do that
0:34	actually i do bounce out of bed thinking every day is a miracle to be a functioning living
0:41	organism and i know that time is short we we live for not even a blink of an eye
0:47	in geological time and so uh i live my life like that carpe diem is another
0:52	motto that i would say to myself many times a day actually and working on aging
0:59	and for stalling ill health and death certainly does uh act as a motivating force
1:05	not so much for myself um honestly you know i'm not really afraid of dying but i am aware that every day over 100 000
1:12	people die from aging itself and it's something that uh i'd like to alleviate if not extend
1:18	lifespan by a century what i would like to do is to at least have people live another 10 20 years in good health what
1:23	is aging biologically speaking and why is it a problem it's one of the largest

What is aging?

1:29	costs in to our economy globally
1:35	it's more sick care than health care there's a huge amount of suffering for the individual and of families anyone
1:42	who's seen someone die understands that it's often not a pleasant process
1:50	and it can take many years and the final moments are extremely stressful for everybody and
1:55	and often painful so you know that that's in itself enough motivation
2:01	um but you know the economic reasons are are really important though we just calculated with i have colleagues in
2:07	london who are economists and they calculated that the us alone just by
2:12	slowing down aging by one year and making people productive more productive for one year
2:18	would save over the next three decades 86 trillion dollars which we waste now
2:24	on just keeping people alive in a sick state um and they're not productive of course
2:29	and so if you do it for 10 years it's 365 trillion dollars that's a lot of money that can be used for
2:36	education uh additional research healthcare and even combating things like uh global
2:42	warming climate change so you know again i can't think of a more important thing
2:48	to be tackling right now as a species on this planet what happens in our body as we age yeah so that there's a

What happens in our body during aging?

2:56	growing consensus that what happens is we lose information that we got in the womb
3:03	now part of it was from uh genetics right we're we're carrying one copy in every cell of our mother and
3:10	father's chromosomes but we're also in fact largely determined by what's
3:18	called not the genome which is the dna but the epigenome and the epigenome are the control systems that tell
3:25	the cell which genes to turn on and off and there's 20 something thousand genes but they only use a few thousand to to
3:32	specify how to be a nerve cell versus skin cell and this all gets laid down as where embryos and
3:39	eventually born and this epigenomic information that tells cells how to behave we think
3:44	breaks down over time and that results in diseases tissue dysfunction so you know
3:50	you start to look older you can't clear toxins you can't think well your nerve cells don't work well you become
3:57	less able to see at night eventually you get diseases that kill you and
4:03	that's really the major cause of suffering on this planet and what we've done as a medical community
4:09	um is to look at the end stage of this process and we call these things diseases
4:14	and try to treat them with drugs and you're basically putting band-aids on the problem forgetting what got us to
4:20	that point in the first place which is aging itself which i have proposed and is
4:27	increasingly thought to be the case that it's disruption of that epigenetic
4:32	control system that tells the cells which genes to turn on and off and that's sort of the information loss and
4:38	i think one of the analogies you've used before is like a dvd player and a dvd getting scratched for those of us over
4:44	40 i guess yeah uh i didn't realize you're over 40 you look young yourself so whatever you're
4:51	doing keep doing that the um yeah so the dvd or the cd analogy
4:58	works well to older with older people but anyone who doesn't remember these were plastic discs with um
5:05	foil that had little pits uh that represented zeros and ones and this is digital information and that digital
5:12	information in the cell is dna and it's not zeros and ones it's atcg
5:18	chemicals and they're strung out about six feet long of dna in every cell
5:24	and that's about the same amount of information that you can fit on a dvd okay so our cells are dvd
5:29	but what aging is i've proposed is that it's like scratches that disrupt
5:35	the ability of the machine the laser beam to read the right songs at the right time or the movie
5:41	and you get a horrible cacophony of music and what we've discovered is that
5:46	there are ways to well we discovered one of the main causes of scratches that's broken
5:52	chromosomes which happens all the time in our bodies extreme cell damage also does that if we
5:58	crush nerves but we've also figured out and recently published
6:03	that there's a way we think to polish those scratches so that we can play that
6:08	beautiful music of youth again let's talk a little bit about sort of like reducing our biological age

How fasting decreases aging

6:15	and i think we're all interested to some extent some people more than others and living a
6:21	long time but we all want that time to be full of vitality and productivity and
6:27	not just living longer for the sake of living longer and i think that's where the biological age versus your
6:33	chronological age sort of becomes important one of the ways that i've heard you talk about before is fasting
6:40	and it's super interesting because fasting isn't new i mean it used to be a necessity for us but now we're starting
6:46	to learn about why it's helpful can you talk a little bit about the benefits of fasting and how it relates to slowing
6:52	down or even reversing aging yeah well these systems that tell cells
6:58	how to read the genes at the right time this epigenome there are gene there are factors that
7:03	control that and so a little very little bit of biology here
7:09	uh dna isn't just floating around the cell it's actually looped into
7:15	big loops that tell genes to be switched on uh and genes that should be switched off are bundled up tightly um and we call
7:23	this stuff chromatin and those those loops of genes that are on and bundles of genes that are off
7:29	are controlled in part by a set of genes called the sirtuins
7:34	and those genes make proteins that cause these loops and bundles particularly they create these bundles to keep genes
7:40	switched off because you don't want a liver liver gene or a skin gene coming on in the brain
7:45	but that's what happens with aging we find and so one way to make sure this process goes slower
7:52	is to turn on these sertuan epigenetic regulators to use a more technical term
8:00	and there are seven of these uh epigenetic regulators the the things that prevent the scratches
8:06	and we can turn them on with gene therapy uh in mice we do this and
8:13	if you do it in the brain of a mouse they'll live longer do it in the body they can live longer but we can't genetically modify
8:19	ourselves so what we can we've also found is that these genes get turned on by adversity
8:24	adversity or at least perceived adversity if our body thinks we're going to run out of food or we need to run away from a sabretooth tiger or we're
8:32	chasing a mastodon then our body says oh you know times might be tough
8:37	don't put all our energy and resources into growing bigger muscles in fact put that
8:43	some of that energy into surviving hunkering down and defending the body against
8:49	toxins against damage and that we know leads to longer life it slows down this clock of epigenetic
8:56	changes uh which we can measure uh and we also know that um
9:02	the ways to mimic adversity include skipping meals uh eating less protein in
9:09	general being hot and cold um and then the big one
9:14	um is eating the right types of food that uh we all know a healthy mediterranean type
9:21	diet and there are actually chemicals within those foods of a mediterranean diet in olive oil and red wine
9:27	that we found in my lab to activate these sirtuins and probably also slow down the clock but they certainly
9:33	improve health and then the last thing i think is really important is what i'm working on is not about keeping
9:38	people older at the end of life and alive for longer it's the opposite we're keeping animals
9:45	and increasingly we're showing with people that you can keep them younger for longer so that when you're 80 you
9:51	can actually be 60. is there are there's so many different directions i want to go in here but is
9:56	there a point where fasting becomes i mean there is a point unhelpful right like if you don't eat you will die
10:02	eventually is it sort of like you skip one meal is good do you skip two meals is great you
10:08	skip six and you're back to good again or is there sort of like some sort of limit that we should think about in
10:15	terms of maximizing the benefit if we are going to pass yeah well there's some real key points
10:20	to hear here one is we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation that would not be
10:26	beneficial and in fact when you know 10 000 years ago or more people were not living a long time from
10:33	fasting because they were not getting enough nutrition but in our world now we can have any not energy drinks but drinks
10:41	that contain enough nutrients we can make sure that we're not deficient we can measure things with blood tests
10:46	and we can make sure that we're not deficient but the optimal the second point is that the optimum is
10:53	different for everybody in part because we have different tolerances for not eating but also because we have
11:00	different micro microbiomes with different genders and
11:05	we just are genetically different and we know from studies in mice that you can take
11:10	regular lab mice and mix up their like breed them in a way that you get a
11:17	little bit of diversity in these lab mice and give them caloric restrictions so you don't feed them
11:23	more than i think it was 40 what they would normally eat and some mice breeds strains we call them lived a
11:31	lot longer some of them died earlier so you then practically what should you do well
11:38	it seems to be a rule that if you fast at at least
11:43	14 hours you'll have a lot of health benefits better metabolic stability lower blood
11:49	sugar levels better cholesterol these kind of things kick in a popular one is the um
11:58	what 16 8 go for 16 hours so you skip one meal a day and have a late lunch or an
12:05	early lunch depending on which one you're skipping and that uses the period of sleep as a fasting state and then
12:11	what i do is i skip breakfast and often i skip skip lunch as well and so i'm getting actually more like 20 hours of
12:18	fasting on a good day i will say that today i had a little bit of avocado for
12:24	breakfast because i had to get up really early so i'm not perfect and i don't think anyone should strive to be perfect
12:30	but you do what you can now there are other people that do uh a week long fast
12:36	now now that's the other extreme i wouldn't go further than a week actually uh given what i know but once you've
12:42	gone more than three days there's a special type of uh recycling of proteins that's very beneficial called autophagy or autophagy
12:50	and that takes about three days now i've never done that myself i'm pretty wimpy when it comes to uh
12:55	to these kind of things i'm a hedonist by nature and very lazy but i think that if you can go three
13:01	days or four days that would be occasionally not it not of course not
13:06	every week but you could do that every few weeks and if you do a week-long fast um you want to do that maybe four times
13:13	a year and those are the the rough guidelines and if we if we like if we fast for two
13:20	meals and then on the third meal we eat as many calories as we would have eaten
13:26	during the rest of the day normally are we still getting benefits of fasting yes or does it sort of yes yes yes we are
13:33	that's the great news that so take me for example i have big dinners um because i'm making up for
13:40	the lack of food during the day and so i'm not losing weight once you've hit a set point and you've got your
13:46	your body weight and during covert i dropped from 150 pounds to 132 i'm now
13:52	steady at that 132 feeling great eating tons of food that i always wanted but it's packed into an hour or two of
14:00	feeding now how do we know that works well we know from blood tests in humans that it looks like it's beneficial you
14:06	get the kind of changes that are seen in younger people things like i mentioned blood glucose
14:12	and then there's hormone levels and stress levels which i've been measuring in myself for a decade so i can tell you for me it works
14:18	um but the the other thing that's important is that from animal studies that have been done over the last 100 years
14:25	in mice and rats and dogs it's very clear that it's not just what
14:30	you eat it's when you eat and there's a very famous study that was done by a colleague of mine
14:35	rafael de cabo at the nih in bethesda and he made three different types of diets for mice one that had a lot of
14:42	protein the other had carbs the other had fat and he thought he would find the optimal diet for the mice
14:49	turns out it didn't make any difference what mattered was when he gave the food and if he gave it to them just within
14:54	this short hour-long window every day they live dramatically longer thirty percent longer that's that's fascinating where

On eating three meals a day

15:01	does the notion that we should even eat three meals a day come from i suspect and i want to research this
15:07	for my next book it's i think it's the the uh the food producers that they want
15:13	that uh it become you know a saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and and
15:20	then you've got the the the bars the uh the food the snacks that we now eat in between meals for some reason
15:28	doctors nutritionists were either educated or misinformed or both that the body is best when it's
15:36	never hungry and we know that is not the case and uh just one point on the hunger
15:42	i typically am not hungry now if if you start fasting and you've never done it before you will feel
15:48	hungry there's a hormone called ghrelin which will cause that of course it's not real hunger is just
15:53	mental state but after three weeks you find i found that the state of hunger goes away so during the day i'm not
16:00	not peckish you know i might eat some nuts or whatever just to suppress a little bit of twang but
16:07	i'm not starving by any means and i actually really really enjoy my dinner as a
16:12	result but you know i tell you this shane and your listeners because if you try to do what i do
16:19	tomorrow you will fail you need to slowly work up to it and learn the tricks like drinking water drinking tea
16:25	fill your stomach with hot or cold water and uh fluids and that will help i i
16:31	found when i used to eat out a lot before kobe because i used to travel a lot and i was always found myself in a
16:36	restaurant i always found that i'd eat more in a restaurant for whatever reason than i would at home so i i've always
16:42	used this thing where i have two glasses of water before a meal and that was a way to slow down or sort
16:47	of at least reduce how much i was eating in the restaurant yeah well that's a that's a trick you
16:52	can use every day i do it i'm drinking for those that are listening i'm drinking uh some water here right now
16:59	actually it's a it's a supplement drink but yeah that's a really good trick and also you want to eat your carbs after
17:05	you have protein because that'll prevent your glucose from shooting up too high and glucose
17:11	i wouldn't say it's poison we need glucose to survive but this typical western diet of spiking
17:16	glucose after breakfast and then it shoots back down and becomes now your hypoglycemic as it's called you start to
17:23	get the jitters brain fog now you eat again and this cycle throughout the day which is a typical western diet
17:30	is really not very enjoyable once you realize that when you
17:36	do what i do your liver is making glucose throughout the day at a perfect level and it doesn't go up and down much and
17:43	you can focus and you're not worried about where your next meal is and your brain's really optimal
17:49	and that to me i wish i'd started 20 years ago um eating less often because it
17:55	you don't just look better you actually can perform better as well i like that a lot and it's not just physical
18:00	performance it's also mental performance right 100 you know i'm not a physical guy
18:05	right i'm sitting and typing mostly and using my brain and i i'm way
18:11	i wouldn't say smarter but i'm way more focused than i was i don't get distracted i don't have
18:17	memory loss and i'm also not wasting money and time on meals during the day either
18:23	but yeah it's it's fascinating and it's been shown in mice to be true as well and i think what's also likely is that
18:30	my brain activity and health will be maintained for a decade or more longer by adopting this
18:37	kind of diet so let's talk a little bit about what we eat in terms of reducing aging or

The best things to eat to reduce aging

18:45	sort of reducing that that biological clock what what are the best things to eat um we sort of
18:53	yeah what are the best things to eat yeah well i know it sounds a little bit repetitive but it is individual but you
19:01	can make some generalizations so first of all the individual differences are obvious there's
19:06	um your body type but also your gender and i think just as important
19:13	your physique if you are into bodybuilding or you're an athlete professionally
19:18	that's very different than someone like me who's just using their brain and their fingers to make a living
19:23	so that there's that consideration and there are there are hacks that i'm helping develop that allows you to
19:30	be in the adversity state which is what we're describing eating less
19:35	consuming less protein and that's the adversity state that's longevity but then have periods where
19:41	you can have an abundance state and so perhaps i would suggest trying
19:48	on days that you work out assuming you're not a professional athlete um having some extra protein eat a
19:55	little bit of fish for example but mostly for that adversity state you want to be focused on plants
20:01	why is that because plants have less available amino acids your body has to work harder to get them out but they
20:07	also have a ratio of amino acids that turns on some of these defenses that i'm talking
20:13	about a very important one is called mtor little m capital t or and it's there to sense how much protein
20:19	you're taking in and if it's always sensing that you're eating protein it will not
20:25	turn on the survival pathway that leads to longevity so you'll look good if you're always eating protein because
20:32	your body is yeah i got plenty of energy let's go for it let's grow but if you never have that state of want
20:38	that adversity um i'm convinced and the data shows it from population studies that a carnivorous
20:45	diet isn't longevity uh isn't a longevity producing diet in the in the long run right but in
20:52	the short run of course you'll feel better uh and a lot of people argue with me saying i feel great how could this be
20:58	wrong but you know remember life is long you want to look look at ways that will extend your lifespan two three four
21:04	decades from now but i think you can have both i think that it's all about pulsing it doing adversity and then occasionally having
21:12	the abundance as well and you mentioned a mediterranean diet earlier is there anything that we've
21:18	learned about what we know about what we eat and like high fat versus low carb versus all of
21:24	the stuff that to maximize our longevity yeah so the the amazing
21:30	thing about the state of knowledge of humanity right now is that over the last few thousand years
21:36	humans have figured out to eat less often there are states of fasting most religions do that but also
21:42	the types of foods mediterranean diet is a good example there's a okinawan diet which is a
21:48	japanese island that has mostly plants and a little bit of
21:53	uh of fish but mostly it's not overeating and there's not huge amounts of animal fat
21:59	and animal products and dairy in a typical long-lived population
22:05	uh that i just described so that we've known for a long time and you know it's crazy that we're debating
22:11	this mediterranean diet is just known to be healthy and vegetarian and vegan diets are also conducive to longevity
22:19	um but the other thing that's amazing about our state of knowledge is that people like me have discovered genes
22:25	that control aging sortuns are the ones that we work on this mtor gene that i mentioned
22:31	those diets are turning on those defenses that we discovered not because we were
22:36	studying diets because we were starting yeast cells and worms and fruit flies but now we understand in this unified
22:42	theory of aging that by eating these types of foods you're making the body think that times
22:47	are tough turning on the defenses that for the long run will be conducive to longevity and
22:53	fostol these diseases that will kill us and in the short run you'll actually feel better
22:58	um and in the term in terms of um body composition will actually look better too now now assuming we're eating like

Organic v non-organic foods

23:05	let's say a green pepper or red pepper is there a difference between
23:10	organic and inorganic or ones that have undergone stress and ones that haven't undergone stress in terms
23:17	of how our body processes that yeah for sure the other reason to be focusing more on
23:23	plants is that they make molecules that are very healthy for us and again we scientists have figured out
23:30	that those molecules aren't just being antioxidants you know that's the theory of the 1980s what we've
23:37	realized is that in addition to be being antioxidants they actually turn on those longevity pathways the sirtuins they
23:44	work on mtor there's another one called ampk which senses blood sugar and energy
23:51	and by eating plants that in general make these molecules and
23:56	especially plants that are stressed themselves or have adversity which heightens the amount of these molecules
24:03	we can ingest them and trick our bodies into thinking that there is adversity right we've evolved i
24:11	believe this is my theory with conrad howard's is that we're sensing the plant world and when our food supply might run
24:17	out we need to defend our bodies against the environment and that leads to longer
24:22	life and the theory came from our discovery that resveratrol from red wine
24:28	and 19 other plant molecules that are produced by plants when they're stressed turn on these sertuan defenses and we're
24:34	trying to figure out how is that possible is it just a coincidence and then we came up with this theory that
24:40	we've evolved to sense our food supply i want to come back to resveratrol later
24:46	but just for people listening don't run out and grab a glass of red wine i think you'd need like a hundred glasses of red
24:51	wine to get the the amount that you would you would we'll come back to supplements in a
24:57	second is it our organic plants stressed more than inorganic plants or unorganic
25:03	i don't even know what the opposite of organic is i suppose it's non-organic but um
25:10	plants are definitely organic but yeah they're grown organically so they're they're under more stress they
25:15	wouldn't have as many uh purpose uh well pesticides on there they're not grown in perfect conditions
25:21	the best ones are locally grown ones that are in a local garden where the environment the temperatures the
25:27	there's diseases uh there's caterpillars that's the best kind of environment to
25:33	get your food from and if they don't look pretty that's not a bad thing often the other thing you should look for
25:39	is bright colors nutritionists have known this for years that they're very healthy if you eat those bright orange dark green
25:46	red fruits and vegetables the reason that
25:51	i think colors are good is that they're indicators of of stress if you stress a
25:56	fruit or a leaf you've probably seen it changes color gets brighter and those
26:01	are chemicals that protect the plant but also are produced in combination with what
26:06	these these um health promoting molecules um uh are involved in uh you know i wanted
26:14	to mention a word that may be foreign to to your audience which is xenohormesis
26:19	and this is a coin a term that conrad and i coined xeno means across species
26:26	and hormesis is this idea that what doesn't kill you makes you live longer and
26:31	i mentioned that word because if you can remember it you'll you'll live that lifestyle you want to induce
26:39	hormesis which is a state of want adversity and you can also get that from other species as well
26:45	as do it yourself by like doing what we said don't eat as much
26:50	eat plants that don't have as much uh protein which is being sensed and then
26:57	other things that you can do like temperature changes uh and exercise these all put the body in that state i like the idea of

Should we only eat food that's "in season?"

27:04	adversity and i want to explore that in different paths including exercise and some other ways that we cause adversity
27:10	there's two things i want to i want to go into on food before we move to a new topic one is
27:16	is there a notion to eating things in season like i go to the grocery store apples are there
27:23	365 days a year but they're not ripe on a tree 365 days a year they have a
27:28	season they have a time should we be eating with that season or is that a good thing that these
27:34	plants and fruits are available 24 7 365 now yeah well so the it's knowing that if
27:41	the plants are in season um and um otherwise healthy they're they're
27:46	actually they have the energy to produce these molecules um so yeah in season but but grown under
27:52	conditions that are not perfect okay um the offseason apples the the the
27:58	ones that are a little bit flowery i would avoid those they don't have the abundance of nutrients and chemicals
28:03	that we want but yeah it's um so organic in season vegetables and fruits is is the way to
28:10	go and that's what i have turned to in my lifestyle increasingly so as i get older and then
28:16	increasingly regretful that i didn't do it earlier um shane
28:21	for those of you who are not watching this on on video i'm now drinking a cup of hot matcha tea the
28:29	green tea the very concentrated green tea those leaves that are grown often in japan
28:34	they come from green tea plants that are put in shade conditions before they're picked and it's that lack of light
28:41	that causes it to become bright green but also produces molecules that are healthy
28:46	there's one called for short ecgc which is known to be a xenohermetic
28:52	molecule to turn on the body's defenses and pretty much every morning i start my day with one of these
28:58	and it's a great way to start because there's of course no sugar in here it's boosting uh my
29:04	body's defenses but it's also filling up my stomach so i don't feel the need to eat breakfast though i as i admitted i
29:09	ate a little bit of avocado today just because i felt like but usually i don't when you say boosting defenses you mean
29:16	from the antioxidants no actually so ecgc is slightly antioxidant but it's actually
29:23	it inhibits and turns on the right enzymes that are known to
29:29	invoke longevity in animals and probably in ourselves as well it's another one of these xeno-hermetic
29:34	molecules in the same class as resveratrol olive oil or components of olive oil and
29:41	there's a whole bunch of them and you know we can talk more about these when you want to get to the supplementation

On sugar

29:46	let's talk about sugar before we get into some other adversity states what do we know about
29:53	sugar and its effect on our biological age not that much so the biological age
30:00	right now is measured a number of ways you can do a panel of 40 blood tests
30:07	inside trackers is just one that i use the so that's one way the other more more
30:14	[Music] epigenetic related so back to the scratches on the cd you can measure
30:19	those scratches it's called the dna methylation clock or the horvath clock named after stephen horvath a scientist
30:27	at ucla and these are the the chemicals that get added or subtracted from the dna
30:32	molecule that tell genes to be on or off and the sirtuins that i work on help
30:38	control that process and you can read these with a dna sequencing machine and dna sequences
30:45	you know we're using all the time now in the lab and by reading those chemicals where they are and how they've changed over
30:50	time for instance chain i could take your blood or a cheek swab and tell you biologically how old you
30:57	are relative to others your age and so your birthdays don't
31:02	matter as much for your health as your actual dna methylation age or your scratches now we can measure that but to
31:08	your point we haven't known about the clock long enough to know
31:14	if glucose or sugar directly impacts that clock what i can say is that people that eat a
31:20	mediterranean diet have a slower ticking clock and people that exercise and do the kind
31:26	of things that i'm telling everybody today to do in general have a lower biological age
31:32	than those who do all the terrible things don't exercise smoke
31:38	become obese these are ways to greatly accelerate the rate of aging how would a listener go about testing their

How to test your biological age

31:45	biological age uh well it's there are some companies that have just started up
31:51	that measure this from a blood sample uh uh it's fairly expensive it's a few
31:56	hundred dollars at least my student one of my students at harvard has developed a technology where we can
32:02	measure this clock very cheaply for at least 10 times less than that
32:08	and we're about to release a product uh in this sometime this year that would be a cheek swab which is far easier than
32:16	a blood test of course and so just for a lot less money and hopefully more more
32:21	often you can look at your biological age and say well is my new diet affecting my age have i slowed it down
32:28	am i reversing my age which is increasingly doable um and so that um there's a website if people want to
32:35	sign up i hope it's okay if i've mentioned that people often want to know so that the company is called tally
32:40	health t-a-l-l-y health dot com and there's a wait list but get on that
32:46	because we're also looking for people to help us try and figure out
32:51	through experimentation what happens when you eat certain things or take certain supplements
32:56	and so we'll guide you through that we'll give you your credit score for your body and then the goal is to use science to
33:04	slow down and reverse the ticking of everybody's individual clock so that you know getting 14 15 years extra life is
33:11	not that difficult just by doing the things that i'm talking about today you'll get an extra 14 15 years on average but then i want
33:17	to help people get 20 years 30 years beyond what they would have otherwise had you mentioned

Using exercise effectively

33:23	exercise and i know some people love exercise i'm not one of those people i sort of um do it but i don't love it i
33:30	don't look forward to it i um is there any hope for me like is there a point at
33:35	which i can maximize the advantages of exercise but not not anymore like
33:41	declining utility yeah well i feel for you i'm the same um i'm
33:47	lazy as i mentioned so let's see so so what what's recommended
33:53	by doctors who know what they're talking about it's you want to have two types of exercise
33:58	at least three if you can so what are they there's there's yoga pilates that's you know for
34:04	joint stretch that's the basics important for longevity you don't want to break bones if you fall over
34:09	the other is weight lifting you want to exert your muscles grow muscles at least maintain your muscles
34:16	by the time you're my age you know i'm 52 now i'm losing more than one percent of my muscle mass every year
34:22	if i don't exercise so lifting weights that's important then the third type is aerobic
34:27	and the minimum amount to have benefits um pretty substantial benefits though would
34:34	be to lose your breath at least once a week preferably three times a week for 10 minutes so that's not a lot but even
34:40	that i'll admit is hard for people like you and me to do but it's not as though you have to go
34:45	running for an hour or cycling for 100 miles it just a little bit goes a long way and
34:51	what's happening when you exercise is that again it's turning on these defenses that your body
34:56	uh thinks is needed to survive but you know i'll tell you something
35:02	more personal and this is this is not medical advice it's not science
35:07	but i do everything really well except two things
35:13	sleep and exercise those are my advices i try to sleep but i work a lot i travel a lot
35:20	um but i know i'd be better if i could sleep seven hours a night i'm more like five to six
35:26	the other thing that i don't do that i prescribe or recommend is exercise and i
35:31	rarely lose my breath i try i used to have a treadmill pre-covered and i would do that but because of the pandemic i'm
35:37	not doing a lot of that so i probably lose my breath maybe two days a week not not as much as i'd
35:43	like but my biological age is still getting younger so i think it's possible to
35:49	to hack it some of the molecules that we work on resveratrol there's one called nmn which
35:55	we can talk about later but it's a nad boosting molecule that also turns on sort of i've been taking that
36:01	um and so my health has never been better you could argue maybe it would be even better if i exercised more but i'm
36:08	pretty happy with my biochemistry my blood biochemistry is equivalent to a 20 year old i'm a 52
36:13	so i think there is hope for us that's a long answer to uh to your question but wait isn't sleep super important to

Sleep and aging

36:20	longevity like as we age okay so here's some notions that i bring to this right like my
36:25	baggage with sleep is like as we age we tend to sleep less and everything that i
36:30	know about sleep tends to tell me that sleep is super important for mental functioning for
36:36	age aging well for all of these like health benefits
36:41	associated with sleep and you're telling me you get four or five hours and you're 52 and you have a 20 year old biological
36:47	clock so maybe sleep isn't that important um maybe maybe i i'm i might be 15 years
36:55	old if i could get more sleep but uh we will never know but i i what i know is that those sort of
37:02	genes that i talk about all the time and i've been studying for 30 years they control the clock and then the
37:08	disrupted clock affects them because it's a big cycle and if you get that out of whack in an
37:14	animal they will if you don't let them sleep they will age prematurely if you stop a rat from sleeping for just two
37:20	weeks it will develop diabetes it's really important so i don't think there's any argument that sleep is
37:26	important but can you hack your way around it maybe that's what i'm showing but i don't want to give the impression
37:32	that i think that that's the best way to live life i mean i got i got up at 5 30 this
37:37	morning i went to sleep probably at one o'clock um that's not a good way to live i i am
37:43	tired um i i do find i've got caffeine i've got my nad boosters which do help me get
37:50	through the day in the morning but ideally i would want more sleep i think i'd have better memory and focus if i did that there are two hacks that i'm
37:56	doing that allow me to get away with less sleep now um i've included meditation at night
38:01	into my daily life most days um and that's been very helpful um and
38:07	the second is that i have a bed that reduces my body temperature in the middle of the night and i get
38:13	deeper sleep which also seems to help are you using innate sleep i am yeah what's your setting profile on that i
38:19	use one too what's your what's your do do you do warm cold warm or are you like cool
38:26	cold warm like how do you set that up depends on the season um i'm in winter
38:32	now in boston which is my my apartment's very cold but so these days i i started
38:38	out a bit warmer than usual but what i normally do would say i get into a coolish bed
38:45	and then the next stage is drop me down lower and lower and then half an hour before waking up it'll shoot up to
38:51	um as warm as i can handle it but yeah i like to drop the temperature down and i
38:56	sleep better that way so coming into this conversation one of the notions that i had is one of the
39:02	reasons that we we tend to age or accelerate aging as we get older is that we tend to sleep less
39:09	and i guess that's not the case right because i always thought oh like you know i see this with my parents right now right like they're sleeping
39:16	less than they used to and i just assumed that that was part of aging but also what accelerated
39:23	our aging yeah i think you're right and and that's the problem once you start like getting less sleep you will age and
39:30	your age will give you less sleep and that's why it's important to to maintain
39:35	that that you know sleep health and uh but you know nmn which is this
39:40	nad boosting molecule that i mentioned earlier that is part of the sleep wake cycle
39:47	and one of the hacks that i i think is is really beneficial is that by taking nmn in the morning
39:54	i'm simulating or stimulating the morning response and i get the alertness
39:59	and the energy that i would have had if i'd had more sleep and i can reset jet lag
40:04	you know i'm a scientist so people might say david you can't mention anecdotes but i'm going to do it anyway
40:10	i haven't had jet lag for a decade because i've been able to modulate my own
40:16	body clock by using these chemicals which as i mentioned are activating sirtuins and controlling
40:21	the clock now most people don't know that but um i think if if you uh have paid attention
40:28	to the kind of things that i'm saying out there uh you would know that um
40:34	it is possible to hack the clock i want to go back to the theory of adversity before we come to supplements and sort

The benefits of saunas and hot tubs

40:40	of like some of the stuff that you do and with adversity there's other ways that we can introduce stress to our bodies
40:46	like hot tubs or saunas what do we know about saunas and hot tubs like there seems to be a strong
40:53	correlation at least with saunas to longevity why is that um well so i'll
40:59	admit when i started writing uh my book which is um [Music]
41:04	which was a number of years ago uh the editor said oh you should talk about saunas and hot tubs and i said
41:10	this is a serious book come on i'm not going to put that fashion in there but i was wrong
41:17	actually there's now a lot of evidence that being in a sauna is good for heart health at a minimum there's a lot of
41:23	studies of thousands of mostly men in finland that do sauna bathing as they
41:28	call it and they are protected dramatically like excess they are exercising but
41:33	how does that work well you know there's lots of theories it's hard to prove but one theory is that we
41:39	have what are called heat shock proteins in our body that get turned on when the body's
41:44	too warm and we know actually if you turn on heat shock proteins in animals they live longer and they do that
41:49	because they help fold proteins correctly and misfolded proteins and the recycling of proteins
41:55	is very very important it's one of the reasons that i eat a plant-based diet mainly is to turn over that protein
42:03	cycle but yeah so that's one cold is different we think it's working through a process that is called browning of fat
42:11	we have white fat on our back that turns beige or brown by being cold
42:16	and then that revs up our metabolism and this brown fat also seems to secrete
42:21	uh little signals that make the rest of the body healthy but it's still early days we only
42:26	discovered we scientists only discovered that brown fat exists in humans about a decade ago so we're really not sure how
42:33	this works but i can tell you from having talked to a lot of people that do saunas sauna bathing
42:39	cold tubs and myself included that it does have benefits on blood by
42:46	chemistry and even if it doesn't you feel great um and you know these kind of things if
42:52	they make you feel great you know why not do those with the potential to extend lifespan as well i feel like
42:58	we've been doing some form of like hot therapy for thousands of years through baths and saunas and you know we're
43:05	quick to dismiss this stuff but i also feel like there's a reason that it sticks around uh even if we can't even
43:11	if we don't understand that reason at this point that we still use it i use a sauna like two or three times a week and
43:18	it it's super helpful for not only my mental health but my sleep and i feel like it has a
43:24	huge impact on my physical health but feelings aren't scientific right so right right but you know that i would
43:31	say there's enough data to say yeah you're probably protecting yourself at a minimum against cardiovascular disease
43:37	by doing that but i also find that that my my lungs benefit from bringing breathing
43:43	in that really hot air in the sauna and yeah in my case i walk out and it's like
43:50	minus 30 celsius so i get the hot and the cold right away so i i'm trying to live forever here
43:57	and if you don't it'll feel that way but yeah it's all about stressing the body and and sometimes it's it's it's the
44:03	differential that counts there's a therapy called hyperbaric oxygen therapy where you go into high
44:10	pressure and breathe in oxygen and then they cycle it off often they cycle it not always where you go high
44:16	pressure and then low and high and what i think is going on is that it's not the high pressure that's important it's the decrease that you're
44:24	becoming pseudo-hypoxic your body thinks it's running out of oxygen when it's just coming down from a
44:29	high level and my lab has shown in mice that pseudohypoxia
44:34	is a real thing and uh and is probably mimicking exercise and the kind of benefits that
44:41	people are reporting are similar to exercise except you're lying down i've done it a few times it's
44:47	it's really quite enjoyable you get to watch it i you know you'd appreciate this i watch shit's creek on uh while
44:53	i'm in one of these tubes uh and you know i'm getting seemingly a workout just by lying down
45:00	well so physical stress is good what about mental stress does mental stress have a benefit or you know i tend to

The relationship between stress and aging

45:06	think it would only be a drawback like this low level of persistent mental
45:12	stress would be bad for you but maybe if it's intensity and it comes in intensity
45:17	and then dies to nothing and then comes again it would be good for you how do we think about the relationship between
45:23	stress mental stress in this case and longevity yeah well it's important not to mix up the two
45:29	were the two uses of the same word um so stress that i'm talking about
45:36	hormesis is biological stress making your body and your cells think that there's adversity
45:41	psychological stresses are just a different beast it's not it shouldn't even be called the same word
45:47	um but let's focus on that now we know that a little bit of excitement
45:52	and thrill is very beneficial um but you can have chronic stress depression
45:59	[Music] you know just the kind of stress that leads to cortisol surging through your body
46:05	this is not healthy at all and would reduce lifespan we know from animal studies that those that are
46:10	under social stress will be unhealthy and die sooner so if you are experiencing that
46:19	try to figure out how to reduce your psychological stress meditate breathing exercises
46:25	just try to avoid worrying too much this is really important and i can speak again from experience i was a very
46:32	agitated anxious person in my teens and twenties by my thirties
46:38	i went to harvard and i thought if i continue worrying like i have been i am going to die young and that's not going
46:43	to be a good look for someone who works on aging so i've learned to not worry so much
46:49	i focus on what i can do in the day i focus on the fact that i'm never probably ever going to run out of food
46:56	because i live in a wealthy country i'm not going to run out of shelter i'm going to have friends and family and that's all i need
47:03	to exist so what's the worst that can happen still not that bad and that's a good way to live life i think
47:09	yeah i think it was buffett warren buffett who who at one point said something along the lines of the
47:15	key to his age was the fact that he has no stress in his life and i thought that that was a really
47:20	interesting yeah when you look at centenarians the people that live over 100
47:26	they have that in common they have a good sense of humor they don't worry too much in their lives on average and they
47:32	also have good partners it's been shown by studying hundreds of people over their lifetimes that one of
47:38	the most important if not the most important factor is to have a reliable partner
47:44	a pet can substitute for that if you don't have one of those at the time but yeah you want companionship
47:50	that really does reduce your stress levels and leads to longevity it's been proven does attitude affect our biological age

How positive attitude impacts lifespan

47:57	like would a positive outlook help you live longer than a pessimistic one it does it does well we don't know cause
48:04	and effect we're looking at associations but people who live a long time tend to have a sense of purpose
48:09	are driven by mission and so that is great advice is to
48:15	work towards a goal and you know clearly you and i are like that and i think that also helps
48:22	focus the mind reduce stress if you're actually working towards something bigger than yourself
48:28	you'll have that mental state and you won't be so focused in on yourself and anxious i don't want to go too deep on

NMN, Athletic Greens, and resveratrol

48:35	supplements i think you talk at length for over an hour in lifespan which is
48:40	your podcast on supplements the third episode i think i do want to talk about three in
48:46	particular that seem to keep coming up across a lot of people i know who are super focused on health you bring up
48:52	animen resveratrol and athletic greens and you take those every day talk to me
48:57	about those three and why you take them and what they do to your body in the context of slowing or reversing aging
49:05	right uh so let's take them one by one resveratrol is a small what's called a polyphenol
49:12	it's produced by many plants to survive it's produced by grapes and it's
49:17	concentrated in red wine it should be a white powder it shouldn't be brown if you buy it and it's brown
49:22	throw it away um i take a gram of it every morning
49:27	with rare exceptions when i'm traveling i forget it but i mix it with a little bit of yogurt because it just a little
49:34	bit like a couple of teaspoons or today i had a bit of avocado because resveratrol is insoluble in water
49:41	and often people take it and it doesn't get absorbed so do that why does it work well we we have shown
49:47	in many animal studies and people now shown in human studies that it's activating
49:53	uh one of the main sertuan pathways called sir t1 and it does that
49:59	like an accelerator pedal the chemical residual will bind to the enzyme and make it work faster
50:05	now that's the accelerator pedal for t1 the gas or the petrol is nad
50:11	nad is a molecule that we need for life without it we're dead in 30 seconds and nad
50:17	isn't something that you can um well you can swallow it but the best bang for the buck is to eat
50:24	molecules that the body uses to make this nad molecule and the one that i choose to take is
50:31	called nmn short for nicotinamide mononucleotide but think of it as m ms but just flip
50:37	the letters around don't eat m m's you won't live longer you can eat m m's but if you want to
50:44	live longer don't do that but the the nmn is important because it's the immediate precursor
50:50	to make nad and the body makes nad very rapidly and i know from clinical trials that i've been involved with
50:57	that taking a gram of nmn which i do every day raises nad levels in whole blood in the
51:03	cells in the blood probably in the rest of my body as well it's hard to test that without a tissue sample i'm not
51:08	going to give up my brain anytime soon but the doubling of that nad is important
51:14	because as we get older we make less of this chemical we have about half the levels of nad in our skin for example as
51:21	i i have half the levels if i didn't supplement that i would have made when i was 20.
51:27	um and so i boost those levels back up to being youthful and then the idea is that the sirtuin defenses are activated
51:34	and that's enhanced by the diet that i have as well as a little bit of exercise
51:40	now the third one you mentioned is athletic greens because i'm on a vegetarian vegan
51:45	diet i describe myself as a newbie struggling vegan
51:50	um i need nutrients and so athletic greens is uh full of vitamins and and plant-based
51:58	whole foods that ensures that i don't lack those nutrients because if you're
52:03	just eating a vegan diet and i've also given up dairy you want to make sure that there's adequate nutrition so
52:10	you know i'm i'm on one meal a day basically oh mad but i want to add another couple of letters which is a n o mad a n i just
52:18	made that up by the way shane so trademark that madden let's call it
52:23	adequate nutrition put that on the end and that's what athletic greens does for me um
52:29	i do take one other drug called metformin which is a type 2 diabetes drug that has been shown to
52:36	associate with longer life and less diseases in old age by looking at type 2 diabetics and
52:41	there's a stunning stunning fact that type 2 diabetics that would normally have a short lifespan when they
52:47	take metformin typically at 2 grams a day i'm on one gram a day by the way
52:52	they actually have less diseases and live longer than people that don't have type 2 diabetes why did you give up

Why David quit dairy (and did it matter?)

52:58	dairy you mentioned that you stopped stop dairy what what caused you to do that
53:03	and then did that have any impact because you i know you monitor your body quite a bit did that have any impact on
53:08	you uh seemingly it did yeah and so i change one or two things at a time and have a look how it goes
53:14	and i'm an experimenter i love dairy i was eating a lot of cheese and red wine my diet
53:20	two or three days a week was a cheese board and a couple of glasses of red wine maybe more and
53:26	uh my my partner she was looking at what i uh eat
53:32	and she actually uh said uh that's not very healthy and uh so i've
53:39	adopted her lifestyle which is not so much um meat cheese dairy
53:45	um and i've looked at my blood biochemistry and i'm actually now
53:50	younger and healthier than i've ever been since i've been measuring it over a decade now it's more like 14 years
53:57	and i can plot various parameters testosterone glucose the list goes on inflammation
54:03	blood type blood cell composition and uh for most of those markers i'm
54:09	better than a 20 year old for for health and and i think a lot of that's due to my new diet that i've adopted because i
54:16	can just see things getting better and better over time i interviewed alan campbell who was the former personal
54:22	chef for tom brady and gisele bundchen and we talked at length and sort of
54:28	about diet and eating for peak mental and physical performance and it's interesting to me that you mentioned
54:33	cutting out dairy and seeing this go because the three things that he mentioned carry the most bang for the
54:39	buck for for cutting out were gluten dairy
54:45	and sugar in terms of your sleep your physical performance your mental performance
54:53	do you have any thoughts on that yeah i do i really do um so i'm i'm i'm a lazy guy i like me
55:01	right so i'm an average person uh and so i've i've done this
55:08	over time i'm not great at it and i i'm just mentioned that because sometimes people say i can never give up alcohol i could
55:13	never give up meat it's not true and so i at least i found it not to be true
55:20	first thing i cut out was a lot of carbohydrates i used to eat bread every day i would just put if i ate
55:27	something it would be on toast okay that's my life i cut that out and i found immediate improvements in my
55:33	biochemistry levels particularly my glucose levels the next thing i cut out was uh was meat
55:40	i worked towards a mediterranean diet had fish and eventually now i'm i'm no meat
55:46	and and that improved my numbers even better cholesterol what do you call it triglycerides all
55:53	came down and i have a familial history genetics of heart disease i have what's
55:59	called lp little a high levels lp little a is the worst about 30 of us have this and
56:06	we're destined if we don't do something to have a short lifespan but though that was very important was
56:11	the cutting out meat and it's not just the protein it's also the fat that comes along with the steak and whatever that i
56:17	was eating and then the third change was the the dairy
56:23	i did that just to see what would happen i figured it wouldn't matter i'm not allergic to dairy i'm not lactose intolerant but it
56:30	did have an effect it made things even better and what i think is going on shane is that i was eating a large
56:36	amount of protein not just fat but eggs and all that stuff and
56:41	and now that i have less protein i think that mtor pathway that's really important for longevity
56:48	um in animals and probably people is really kicking in in a way that had never done so before that's really
56:53	interesting and the only other thing i want to mention about alan campbell and just out of uh just so people don't get
56:59	the wrong idea he's also super plant forward with a little bit of fish so
57:04	it's mostly plant-based diet and it's just interesting how you you've both sort of like
57:10	come into the same sphere i guess if you will from very different approaches uh
57:16	in terms of that and i always find that stuff interesting because it makes me think that there must be something there
57:21	well i don't like plants um i mean i'm now learning how to enjoy plants but
57:26	for me they were a side dish but here's the thing there's a lot of debate especially on social media about meat
57:32	versus plants i would love meat to be lifespan extending that would be heaven but it's not you just look at those
57:39	populations and people that live a long time they are generally smaller
57:45	women who don't eat much who eat vegetarian i mean that's the fact we can
57:51	debate it all day but there are these scientific facts that we have to pay attention to shrink to live that's a good title of a
57:58	book is it ever too late or too

When should you start slowing your aging process?

58:03	soon to sort of like start to slow the effects of aging if not like how do the how do you stage interventions at
58:10	different points in your life i would say speaking myself because i'm not a professional nutritionist but i do know
58:16	the science i would if it was me start doing the meal skipping in my 20s but
58:22	make sure i've got enough calories coming in i'd start the supplements in my late 20s
58:29	before that you've got a lot of nad already your body's already defending itself when you're young it's your late
58:34	20s 30s things start to kick in um and then but what about your question
58:40	which is more important which is when is it too late for people um i've never seen it too late there are
58:45	animal studies you can that i could point to that show that you can have
58:50	effect this mtor pathway with a drug called rapamycin that extends their lifespan even if they're the equivalent
58:56	of 70 years old and um no there's a point where you're so frail and so sick you're probably on
59:03	death's door that it's unlikely you know just that you should start exercising
59:09	and fasting probably though that's really at the final stages if
59:14	you're still let's say a relatively healthy 70 80 year old my father is a good example
59:21	these changes to your lifestyle can have rapid benefits but do it in consultation with a doctor
59:27	because you might not you know benefit from fasting if you need body weight if you have other
59:32	existing conditions it's important to take those into consideration as well so talk to me a little bit more about
59:38	your father is he eating mostly a plant-based diet too yeah yeah so he and i are very similar i'm
59:45	people think i'm experimenting on my dad but i'm not he's a scientist he reads the science and we've come up with this
59:51	protocol which is the uh very low glucose we don't eat a lot of sugar we try to avoid desserts
59:58	low carb um don't eat a lot of meat he would eat meat very occasionally but mostly it's
1:00:03	plants um he doesn't eat much during the day he mainly eats dinner and he's he's lean
1:00:10	now and what else he does more exercise than i do so he's better at that he does aerobics i goes a couple of
1:00:17	times a week to the gym and does rowing and weightlifting what else is he takes the supplement so
1:00:23	he's on resveratrol nmn metformin and that's his cocktail
1:00:28	he doesn't take athletic greens just yet uh but he's a super healthy 82 year old he was not on that path in his 50s my
1:00:36	age he was overweight he had high cholesterol looking at dying in his 70s
1:00:41	in his mid 70s he went on this protocol and is now an 82 year old that's fitter than most people that age he has no
1:00:48	diseases perfect mental health his eyesight hasn't changed in all that time and so
1:00:53	yeah i mean we're looking forward to this experiment being a successful one but if nothing else he's a beacon of
1:00:59	hope that you can start late and have big effects you mentioned teenagers is there a link
1:01:04	between when we start puberty like that that sounds to me when we think of puberty it sounds like rapid aging

On puberty and aging

1:01:11	almost like a concentrated dose of aging oh no you're like
1:01:18	is there a link between when we start how long we live and is that true that puberty is sort of like this rapid dose
1:01:24	of aging well i'm gonna speak um as a scientist with an opinion
1:01:29	okay um and that opinion is based on all the science that i've read and i read a lot of papers i before i get out of bed i'm
1:01:36	reading science science papers so that here's what i believe now
1:01:41	i don't want parents to get upset with me i certainly don't want people to worry but here's what i think
1:01:47	will turn out to be the case the biological clock this the scratches on the cd that we talked about earlier
1:01:55	they start at conception the egg and the sperm come together even an embryo even a fetus and a young
1:02:02	baby they're aging we can measure this on this clock and certainly teenagers are aging now we
1:02:10	know that obesity and lack of exercise lack of nutrition lack of plants
1:02:16	is unhealthy and i would not be surprised if
1:02:21	the teenagers are by the time they hit their 20s on average or older biologically than they
1:02:27	were 20 30 years ago when i grew up because we are we were moving we were generally not so
1:02:34	overweight we were not eating as much sugar and that's probably accelerating our kids aging rate
1:02:39	meaning that 20 30 years from now 40 years from now that is still going to echo in their
1:02:44	health because the clock unless you do something radical doesn't go backwards
1:02:50	you track a lot of your data right with uh you have an aura ring on i think you

Are biological problems becoming engineering problems?

1:02:56	use an eight sleep uh you're testing your biological age are we
1:03:03	starting to think of biological problems almost like engineering problems where
1:03:08	we optimize for specific data points in the hope that those data points are correct well absolutely that
1:03:16	there's a growing number of people uh you know i was at the forefront i was kind of this biohacking guy
1:03:22	scientist interested and i was out on a limb as one of you know maybe 50 people in the world that do what i did
1:03:28	now there's millions of people around the world that monitor themselves with rims
1:03:33	with beds with apple or you know i shouldn't say brands but you know with watches um there's plenty of fitness trackers
1:03:40	you'd be aware of they're all part of this global movement to not fly blind with our health
1:03:47	we can track things we can see what works what doesn't and it was crazy that for up until recently
1:03:53	we would be driving the equivalent of driving a car without a dashboard
1:03:58	who would do that you know you might have a check engine light you could overheat same with our bodies and and
1:04:04	going to the doctor once a year for an annual checkup now that we can monitor ourselves every
1:04:09	hour soon every every second eventually every thousandth of a second
1:04:15	that world that we're entering makes this old world of going to the doctor once a year see medieval and it
1:04:21	is what can happen in a year you could get cancer you could have heart disease you could have a heart attack
1:04:27	now we have the devices some of us use them increasingly eventually everyone will have them
1:04:33	we'll know ahead of time if we have cancer if we have heart disease if we can have a heart attack next week and
1:04:39	stave off those things and prevent them from happening and that is a revolution separate from what i'm working on
1:04:46	that will extend lifespan i believe by another decade it's super interesting to me because we
1:04:52	have all of the tools available to us now we're not using them where i could walk into my doctor's office and i could
1:04:58	tell them what i'm feeling or the symptoms that i'm experiencing but then they could pull up on their ipad or
1:05:04	whatever like all of my biomarkers to see and to gather more data but we don't we choose
1:05:10	not to use that at this point or we're not ready for it i mean privacy concerns aside but how do you think about that
1:05:16	like we will get to this point where i have like a device in me i'm sure during our lifetime that i'm
1:05:22	showing up at a hospital and instead of filling out paperwork or answering questions they're just looking at it and
1:05:27	they're being like okay now we have the data to back up some of these decisions 100 there's no question um you can take
1:05:35	that to the bank that that's the world that's coming um and i wrote about it a few years ago
1:05:40	and and covert 19 has accelerated that i was predicting
1:05:45	telemedicine and um you know wellness at home and this whole revolution i thought that would be
1:05:50	10 years away and and it's here now so why isn't it so common well partly it's education and
1:05:58	podcasts like this are helpful but it's also that it's expensive so we tend to forget that
1:06:04	these watches and rings are hundreds of dollars and these tests these blood tests are also hundreds of dollars
1:06:09	and our doctors are reticent to be doing all these tests because the health
1:06:15	care systems want to save money ultimately right forgetting that ultimately they will save money by
1:06:20	keeping people alive and healthier for longer but in what's what's fascinating is that
1:06:26	i have this collection of data that i can call up on my phone and it's all graphed by this inside tracker group but you can
1:06:33	you can do others and my doctor i thought he would say oh i don't want to trust that data i only
1:06:39	trust the data that i gather on you but the opposite was true i actually i was zooming with him because we don't tend
1:06:45	to go to the doctor as much anymore and i called up my data on the screen and he loved it he was into it he said oh this
1:06:51	is so great i wish i had this on every one of my patients but yeah you're right that they the
1:06:56	doctors generally don't do that because it's expensive but we can now do that and then show our doctors and they're grateful
1:07:02	well it's so interesting because it it it's expensive in the moment but it's super preventative
1:07:08	if we go with the assumption that most medical care costs are at the end of life or from chronic diseases that we
1:07:15	might be able to avoid that then this these costs tend to be up front and they're massively preventative
1:07:22	so they actually would save health care systems lots of money in the long run but we we never look at that because we
1:07:28	look like to treat things and so like as a computer scientist i look at this and i'm like not only can we prevent
1:07:34	problems before they happen but now we can start to get this amazing quantity of data where i can be like you're
1:07:41	showing up with this thing and you feel this way what we know from 20 million other people who've shown up
1:07:48	with this thing in this way that it's not what you think and it's something different and then we can save a lot of
1:07:54	money and time there as well for sure and those technologies exist
1:08:00	i've been wearing what's called a bio button i have no affiliation so
1:08:05	if you want to look them up they're called bio intellisense and this is an fda approved device that
1:08:11	doctors can send home with their patients after surgery to monitor their heart as well as their movement their
1:08:16	vibration their temperature and that data that comes in is actually very informative beyond the
1:08:22	heart they can tell if you've got a flu versus a common cold
1:08:28	versus depression covert 19 and that's can the world will be you have something stuck on or under
1:08:34	your skin that will tell a nurse or a doctor or some sort of ai system that something is wrong and it
1:08:41	needs fixing well before you would ever have a problem noticeable by yourself or a doctor a lot
1:08:48	of money seems to be going into life extension recently i'm thinking of altos labs with jeff

Using drugs to reverse aging

1:08:54	bezos and some others committed about 3 billion which is the biggest seed investment i've ever seen in my life and
1:09:01	they hired some of the world's top scientists it it seems like it's set up to commercialize
1:09:07	i can't even say this that yema yamakata factors yamanaka how do i
1:09:12	say that yamanaka how do i say yamanaka factors for cellular reprogramming for age
1:09:19	reversal now that's different than sort of the area that we've been talking about a lot today but the initial
1:09:24	results from that those biomarkers seem to indicate that we're on to something with a shoot
1:09:30	a few short bursts of these drugs at least in the mice
1:09:35	how do you think about that and is that also the future so that we control sort of like part of our aging and then what
1:09:42	we don't control we can use drugs to reverse or slow down yeah well so
1:09:50	we were working on this for a while based on the idea that we could find genes that would polish the scratches on
1:09:55	the dvd um and we came across a set of three genes called o s and k for short which are
1:10:02	three of the six or so yamanaka factors um and about a year ago we published
1:10:08	that we could reverse the age of an animal and we restored eyesight to a blind old mouse
1:10:14	and cured glaucoma in that animal and we are now working towards human clinical trials in canada we have
1:10:21	um a non-human primate study for safety to see how that goes and within the next 18 months if
1:10:27	all goes well we will be reversing aging in a human if all goes well so that's going well and then so that
1:10:33	discovery in part you know there are a few other colleagues that are in this but not a lot led to a huge interest in
1:10:40	this epigenetic information theory of aging that we started off talking about
1:10:46	and the idea is that we can truly reset the age of the body and diseases of aging like alzheimer's
1:10:52	and heart disease and even cancer will go away if we become young again and so yeah i have my company is called
1:10:59	life biosciences it's here in boston altos has come along three years later
1:11:04	and they're working on this too but the goal is is a great one i wish them all the best of luck i hope that
1:11:10	they are hugely successful because it could be transformational for our species on the planet the ability to finally control
1:11:17	the rate at which we age not just in the forwards direction but in reverse as well i want to switch gears a little

On lyme disease

1:11:24	bit and talk about lyme disease your daughter had lyme disease i had lyme disease in the summer to the
1:11:30	point where i couldn't even get out of bed basically i had full on bell's palsy i like
1:11:37	couldn't open my jaw i couldn't stand still for more than 15 seconds without being in massive amounts
1:11:43	of pain and to going to the medical system just
1:11:48	briefly um we're about preventative care so you
1:11:53	show up and it's like oh you have bell's palsy it's on a heart attack here take some pregnancy and like go home and it's
1:11:58	like well no i'm a healthy you know 40 something year old male what's causing this like why aren't we
1:12:05	going deeper to figure this out and i'm curious as to what research you did and what you learned about lyme
1:12:11	um during the process that most people don't know uh my middle child
1:12:17	contracted lyme i think it was about seven years ago now and i was exposed to the how the medical
1:12:24	system works when you have an infection uh first of all it was very hard to diagnose she had headaches who knows
1:12:29	what's causing that right and um i i googled it i searched it and i said it's probably lyme disease
1:12:37	uh we took it to emerg the emergency room and uh they said well it might be this
1:12:43	might be that could be leukemia or whatever you know but we'll do a lime test
1:12:48	okay i think i had to insist but they did a lyme test but the problem with the system was
1:12:54	that it took uh three days to get a result that was out that was ambiguous because it's
1:13:00	using 1980s molecular biology technology it's primitive it's called a western blot which we
1:13:07	don't even use anymore much and then because it was ambiguous the insurance
1:13:13	company said no we have to have a definitive result before we start treating your daughter with antibiotics meanwhile
1:13:20	natalie is losing her eyesight you know you like you've said you you can't focus
1:13:26	and she got to the point where i i've now been told that she had a chance of dying that was pretty high 40 50 at that
1:13:33	point it was in her brain and we were not treating her because the test wasn't definitive
1:13:38	so that was that was disturbing and i also told the doctors give me a sample of her dna or you know spinal fluid
1:13:46	and i've got my lab across the street i'll go sequence the dna and i'll find this organism if it's there
1:13:52	and they refuse to give me a sample so you know i'm traumatized at this point
1:13:58	as a parent and i when you traumatized you you'd like to do something about it and so i started a company
1:14:04	that was a spin out of ai that we were doing in my lab we built our own little mini supercomputer out of gpu
1:14:11	uh you know graphic processing units um and we were able to
1:14:16	figure out how to find any organism in the blood of a human being and this company now
1:14:22	has a product that is being used for example by liver transplant patients that are immunocompromised because of
1:14:28	the drugs and we can track the infections that they have like viruses that come out of their liver and rest of
1:14:34	the body so that's now a reality it's not mainstream but eventually it will be
1:14:40	and when that's possible you know you go to a go to a shop a pharmacy or you go to your doctor or
1:14:46	at home you do an immediate test you don't know what's causing the problem it'll say oh we've detected lyme disease
1:14:53	and by the way three months ago you had the rhinovirus whatever you know you can see all that stuff now
1:14:59	and that's going to be a world that's almost here but when it arrives mainstream the idea of waiting four five
1:15:04	six days for a result for something that could kill you i mean that again is medieval science and medicine
1:15:11	on the the same whale i mean i had to advocate for a test and it was only actually a friend who gave me a test my
1:15:18	family physician wouldn't give me a lyme disease test um despite all the symptoms that i had
1:15:24	did your daughter end up taking doxycycline right it was so severe she had to have an iv treatment
1:15:31	for many weeks i think it was at least three weeks that were it was delivered at home um
1:15:37	by her mom to get rid of it how did you treat yours uh doxycycline yeah so i just did a
1:15:45	cycle of that i mean it seemed to instantly not instantly but over a period of maybe two weeks like it went
1:15:51	back to you know gradually like i had facial paralysis on half my face and you know
1:15:58	so it started with uh i could stand again i could open my jaw a little bit more the last thing to come back was sort of
1:16:04	the facial paralysis and it was scary i mean it was really and it was scary that
1:16:09	you had to be an advocate of your own health too in a system which
1:16:14	you don't know how to navigate which i also thought you know as a parent you feel as somebody who shows up at a merge
1:16:21	with like a face that doesn't work you also feel it in a different way um is there any lifespan effect of lyme
1:16:27	disease after treatment no one knows don't know um
1:16:33	doxycyclin um in my my recollection i have to check on this uh people who listening can search for
1:16:40	this in in pubmed.org uh is lifespan extending so maybe
1:16:46	it's a short course that you took but um maybe there's some upsides but the problem with lyme is particularly if you
1:16:52	don't get it early it can become chronic it it lives in your joints comes out
1:16:58	causes a lot of joint pain that would be not a state that would be conducive to longevity any increase in
1:17:03	chronic inflammation is anti-longevity i i like the notion you mentioned yoga earlier i'm just circling back to that

On hip-replacement and increased death rates

1:17:09	now but like you sort of mentioned well there's there's exercise in terms of like lifting weights and running and
1:17:14	exerting yourself that way but there's also preparing today to live
1:17:20	a much longer life that might be well into your hundreds and part of that preparation is you need
1:17:28	to stretch and have joint flexibility and because it doesn't like hip surgery
1:17:34	correlate to death like you break your hip and it you basically like there's a strong correlation to p people who do that and
1:17:41	then their lifespan is is almost over at that point it is uh yeah the chances of
1:17:47	dying after you break your hip as an older person uh is about as bad as late stage cancer
1:17:53	and every 19 seconds in the u.s at least someone breaks their hip so it's a massively uh
1:18:00	untalked about problem a colleague of mine at harvard
1:18:05	made i guess unnecessary light of it but his motto is the secret to living longer is hanging
1:18:12	onto the handrail and these points well taken really that that it's pretty easy to prevent
1:18:18	deaths sometimes my grandmother who i wrote about in my book was really influential in my life
1:18:24	died that way she tripped on a little bump in her rug broke her upper femur
1:18:30	um went to surgery not enough oxygen in the brain and then the next five years
1:18:35	which was basically a vegetable and then died um you know not a very pleasant way so
1:18:41	yeah it's avoidable right if you maintain your hip strength if you can muscles
1:18:47	flexibility you also want to make sure your household doesn't have ripples in the carpet and don't walk on stairs
1:18:53	don't climb ladders that kind of thing can save lives you know and it's not that difficult and and
1:19:00	shane this is this is the point i want to make is 80 percent of our longevity
1:19:05	and our health in the future is in our own hands only 20 is genetic which we cannot yet do much about
1:19:12	and some of these changes are very simple skip breakfast have tea instead
1:19:18	work out maintain your muscle strength do yoga flex a little bit touch your
1:19:23	toes in the shower if you can these can add years if not decades to your life just by changing things
1:19:30	in a small way you don't need high tech to make a big difference yeah it's interesting we always look for that one
1:19:36	thing right that that causes somebody that decision the drama the movie moment
1:19:41	that you know causes somebody to be successful or get results or live longer and what we
1:19:47	you know what we miss is the magic that happens on a daily basis that's this slow
1:19:53	incremental progress that is too too little to notice in the moment but by
1:19:58	the time you notice it it's so great that you're looking for that one magical moment that one factor that that caused
1:20:05	it yeah it is a lot of work i'll admit you know it's been daily since my 30s but
1:20:11	it's been worth it it was an experiment i should say but um i didn't know if it was going to work so far so good right i'm 52 i'm not dead
1:20:18	yet but it's it's every day making the right decisions or better decisions about what
1:20:23	to eat of course what not to eat going to the gym or your you know your home gym when you don't really feel like
1:20:30	doing it that's really hard but these are the the decisions every day that need to be made to reap the decades of
1:20:37	benefits later in life and there is no instant cure yet we're working on it
1:20:42	reset the age with a pill gene therapy working on that but that's not there yet and the other thing that that really is
1:20:48	important to know is that their additive there are additive benefits
1:20:54	if you eat exercise do hot and cold therapy mental
1:20:59	state if you do all of that plus the supplements they're additive it's not that take a supplement and you don't
1:21:05	need to do any of the others in the animal studies in my lab if we give let's give you a concrete example when
1:21:12	we gave nmn this molecule that i take every day to a mouse that was um sedentary didn't have a wheel didn't
1:21:18	run it could run further okay and we actually have human data that's looking really promising in that direction as
1:21:24	well but if we exercise the mice and gave them the nmn then they could run
1:21:29	double that again and so if you really want to optimize you've got to do more than just take a pill
1:21:35	and it's about consistency right most of us try it for a couple weeks and then we're like i haven't seen the results and then we quit and it's sort of like

How to think about aging before it's too late

1:21:42	the equivalent of sisyphus like rolling that boulder up a mountain getting halfway there and then you know
1:21:48	just like putting your hands up in the air watching it roll down back to the bottom you have to be consistent over a
1:21:53	long period of time and and to that point like growing old seems like a distant event in the future i mean it
1:21:59	happens slowly and then all at once we don't seem to think about it until we're really late in the game or we have
1:22:07	a loved one or somebody goes through something why is that is there anything that you
1:22:12	you've seen effective at bringing that forward for people uh well this is what i what my mission
1:22:18	is the reason i'm talking to you today is to wake people up and realize that you shouldn't just wait till
1:22:25	something traumatic happens in your life whether you get sick or your parents or your grandparents
1:22:30	um and it's important to realize now that you can do things for those people in your lives um your life and and yourself you know
1:22:38	typically i we we wait until it's it's it's too late for those people my
1:22:45	parents my mother is a good example my mother died young from lung cancer she was a smoker who
1:22:50	didn't take care of her body at all and i watched her live
1:22:55	the last 20 years of her life in a really painful state she had one of her lungs taken out through her ribs that's
1:23:01	not what you want for your mother i wish that i had the knowledge that i
1:23:07	have today that i'm applying with my father to her life and she might even be around
1:23:12	today if we had done that that's the hope right but you have to want to make the changes too i think
1:23:17	that that's that's the key point a lot of people don't right they they they want to for whatever reason they don't
1:23:23	want to act on it so to sum up maybe like and get a little
1:23:28	more philosophical here a little bit like our average lifespan right now i think he's about 80 if we do the right

What's the ultimate age we can live?

1:23:35	things in our life like we eat healthy food and not too much of it we get enough sleep and we stress our bodies a
1:23:40	bit with exercise or saunas and we don't get too much mental stress we add i think about
1:23:47	another 10 to 15 years to our lifespan that's right yeah 14 is the number that
1:23:52	was in that harvard study um that i was referring to yeah
1:23:57	is there anything that you've seen that says that there's a physical limit on
1:24:02	like that we have to actually die like can we ultimately live to 200
1:24:08	250 well of course we can there is no law that says we have to age
1:24:14	uh right now there's a limit because that's what we've seen happens but the people that live over 100 typically
1:24:20	don't take care of themselves a lot of them smoke and some of them smoke and drink and don't eat good food
1:24:27	so what happens when you have great genes which is 20 plus people who do the optimal lifestyle
1:24:34	and take the optimal supplements and take the optimal drugs there's no reason why 120
1:24:39	needs to be the maximum human lifespan there is nothing in biology that says that there is a
1:24:45	limit and there are many species that live a lot longer than us not just trees that live that thousands of years but
1:24:51	warm-blooded mammals take the bowhead whale that can live over 200 years
1:24:56	that's very similar to us our genes are almost identical compared to you know a banana and a yeast cell these are living
1:25:04	breathing mammals with you know milk and they're they're conscious beings and they live two centuries or more
1:25:11	why why can't we we just need to learn how they do it and i think it's all about slowing down these scratches
1:25:16	slowing down that clock and we know that by looking at whales and other species that live a long time the ticking of
1:25:21	that clock goes very slowly now they they don't you know they don't have supplements they don't have to do the
1:25:28	kind of things that we do we're trying to hack our bodies right now to give us some of the benefits that
1:25:33	whales naturally have do you think like that we you will see a person live to 150 today
1:25:39	oh gosh uh i think the odds are against me but i do think that somebody born today
1:25:46	will live that long because the technology is just going so quickly and remember they're going to live into the
1:25:51	22nd century who knows what that's going to be like we can only imagine um i would like to
1:25:57	i'm not in any rush to leave this planet i'm having a lot of fun i think i'm helping people doing my best at least
1:26:04	but you know realistically and nobody's asked me that question shane but honestly i think the chances of me
1:26:11	making it beyond 150 are slim i was born probably one generation too early
1:26:16	but our kids and their kids are going to reap these benefits that we're talking about now when you think about it what's
1:26:21	your expectation of your age realistically well you know i haven't set a goal i i
1:26:28	you must have one though no i don't i mean i'm not worried about my own
1:26:34	death i mean i'm not a fan of being a burden on my kids or suffering but
1:26:40	i really don't mind if i die tomorrow i'm not going to cry about it obviously but i live my life
1:26:46	like every day is a blessing and i'm happy to have every day now if you forced me to give you a
1:26:52	number i'd love to live beyond 100 i wouldn't say no to 120 and i wouldn't
1:26:57	say no to 150 and i wouldn't say no to a thousand years a thousand years isn't that much actually
1:27:02	geologically speaking i'm 50 years old now that's just 20 times my lifetime
1:27:08	50 years went by in a blink of an eye so what's 20 blinks not that much so i i
1:27:13	would love to live centuries i don't think it's likely i think eventually people will
1:27:19	um but you know i'm a fairly um let's say i i have high levels of the fu
1:27:26	gene um and i do like to show the naysayers uh to be wrong
1:27:33	and i would love to be able to live to 130 just so i could say
1:27:39	hey remember when you said it was impossible too and that you know that's my rebellious gene in me but no that's not
1:27:46	why i do this obviously um hello i do i do joke that you know i've had plenty of naysayers and enemies over
1:27:52	the years and i do like to joke and it's serious it's it's actually a joke i don't believe this but it is fun to to think
1:27:59	about that uh one way of uh getting ahead of your enemies in the
1:28:06	naysayers is to outlive them and uh there is a little bit of truth to that
1:28:11	that science progresses one funeral at a time and as
1:28:16	the old god is dying off we're seeing more rapid progress in the way
1:28:22	scientists and doctors think about what we can do for patients well that's an interesting implication of if we all
1:28:28	start living longer too because we then we start to hold on to old theories a bit longer and

Second-order effects of living longer

1:28:34	have you thought much about the implications of living longer and like what that means for society and housing
1:28:40	and money and fiscal policy and politics and [Music] yeah well lots you know
1:28:46	i'm working on a whole bunch of things that i i think are necessary for the world to exist with people living 120
1:28:51	and beyond housing shelter food i work on preserving food
1:28:57	right now i have a patent that i just wrote on that but um yeah it's important i think about
1:29:03	it a lot and we need to have less impact on the planet i think that technology can solve anything we want we just need
1:29:10	to put our minds to it and and that includes being being able to
1:29:16	grow food that isn't wasting water using up too much land degrading the soil we
1:29:22	can do this we have that knowledge it's just a matter of investment and willpower and incentives and capitalism
1:29:28	being you know conducive to to making that happen but yeah we we waste a lot half of the
1:29:34	food in the u.s by the way is thrown out so to say that we have a food shortage is is ignorant of that fact but what we
1:29:41	want to do is to produce food and not throw it away and that's one of the reasons i've focused recently on
1:29:46	shelf life of vegetables but that that's just one small part of a whole load of things that needs to happen
1:29:53	one thing that always comes up from a crowd that i would talk to about this is what about overpopulation
1:29:59	and if you do the math it turns out that even with slowing down aging and making
1:30:04	us live 120 we're not going to overpopulate we're going to level out at about 10 billion people
1:30:10	uh whether we live longer or not the big impact is reducing fertility or fertility rates birth rates and that's
1:30:17	plummeting across the planet particularly in the developed uh developing world and already in the
1:30:23	developed world where you and i shane live us for example replacement rates of
1:30:29	children are now negative without immigration that's true for europe uh it's true for australia
1:30:35	japan really bad for that bad in for the economy that is and china
1:30:41	increasingly worried about replacing their population so staying alive for longer in a productive way not an
1:30:47	unproductive unhealthy way but productive people who have wisdom who have knowledge
1:30:52	and who can impart that wisdom and be leaders of the community rather than burdens on the community
1:30:58	that's a massive change that we will see probably in our lifetimes of people
1:31:03	being you know centenarians and still running companies that will come back in trillions of
1:31:08	dollars in benefits to the economy and just the u.s economy alone my my hunch
1:31:13	is that we're gonna if you could live to 120 like i feel like we're just gonna leap frog things
1:31:20	right like we're not gonna go from average lifespan of 80 to 81 to 82 to 83
1:31:26	to 84. i feel like we're going to go from like 80 to 110 to like 150 because
1:31:31	technology is also going to progress over all of these years right so if you if you get the the first wave of this
1:31:38	you might actually be able to ride the technological boom to over 200. yeah
1:31:43	well it's a fact that for every year that you stay alive you get to tack on another three months
1:31:50	of life but that's going to change we're gonna get an extra four five six months of life
1:31:55	if the age reprogramming work that altos is doing and i'm doing works
1:32:01	you could get an extra year of life every birthday and what does that mean that that's a
1:32:08	very interesting world um a little out there i want to mention now we can measure the blood clock there
1:32:14	are treatments that include stem cells there's some hormones so dhea metformin growth
1:32:20	hormone combination and others that i'm aware of not yet published that purport to reverse aging
1:32:26	more than a year in a year there was a publication just now of a molecule called uh what
1:32:34	alpha ketoglutarate that molecule seems to control the clock that according to this blood clock send
1:32:40	people back eight years in age biologically in just seven months now
1:32:46	there's a lot of skepticism it needs to be repeated but even if that's partly true we are going to be in a very
1:32:51	different world where we can control the age that we are in a way that we only dreamed of that's beautiful
1:32:58	thank you so much for your time today david this was a fascinating and insightful conversation it was great to
1:33:03	chat and i thought the questions you asked were really spot on and i thought our
1:33:09	conversations can be very useful for a lot of people thanks again

Intro

0:00	well of course we can there is no law that says we have to age uh right now there's a limit because
0:06	that's what we've seen happens but the people that live over 100 typically don't take care of themselves
0:12	a lot of them smoke and some of them smoke and drink and don't eat good food [Music]
0:23	marcus aurelius said death smiles at us all all we can do is smile back and i feel like you sort of get up in the
0:29	morning and you look at the god of death and you simply say not today i do that
0:34	actually i do bounce out of bed thinking every day is a miracle to be a functioning living
0:41	organism and i know that time is short we we live for not even a blink of an eye
0:47	in geological time and so uh i live my life like that carpe diem is another
0:52	motto that i would say to myself many times a day actually and working on aging
0:59	and for stalling ill health and death certainly does uh act as a motivating force
1:05	not so much for myself um honestly you know i'm not really afraid of dying but i am aware that every day over 100 000
1:12	people die from aging itself and it's something that uh i'd like to alleviate if not extend
1:18	lifespan by a century what i would like to do is to at least have people live another 10 20 years in good health what
1:23	is aging biologically speaking and why is it a problem it's one of the largest

What is aging?

1:29	costs in to our economy globally
1:35	it's more sick care than health care there's a huge amount of suffering for the individual and of families anyone
1:42	who's seen someone die understands that it's often not a pleasant process
1:50	and it can take many years and the final moments are extremely stressful for everybody and
1:55	and often painful so you know that that's in itself enough motivation
2:01	um but you know the economic reasons are are really important though we just calculated with i have colleagues in
2:07	london who are economists and they calculated that the us alone just by
2:12	slowing down aging by one year and making people productive more productive for one year
2:18	would save over the next three decades 86 trillion dollars which we waste now
2:24	on just keeping people alive in a sick state um and they're not productive of course
2:29	and so if you do it for 10 years it's 365 trillion dollars that's a lot of money that can be used for
2:36	education uh additional research healthcare and even combating things like uh global
2:42	warming climate change so you know again i can't think of a more important thing
2:48	to be tackling right now as a species on this planet what happens in our body as we age yeah so that there's a

What happens in our body during aging?

2:56	growing consensus that what happens is we lose information that we got in the womb
3:03	now part of it was from uh genetics right we're we're carrying one copy in every cell of our mother and
3:10	father's chromosomes but we're also in fact largely determined by what's
3:18	called not the genome which is the dna but the epigenome and the epigenome are the control systems that tell
3:25	the cell which genes to turn on and off and there's 20 something thousand genes but they only use a few thousand to to
3:32	specify how to be a nerve cell versus skin cell and this all gets laid down as where embryos and
3:39	eventually born and this epigenomic information that tells cells how to behave we think
3:44	breaks down over time and that results in diseases tissue dysfunction so you know
3:50	you start to look older you can't clear toxins you can't think well your nerve cells don't work well you become
3:57	less able to see at night eventually you get diseases that kill you and
4:03	that's really the major cause of suffering on this planet and what we've done as a medical community
4:09	um is to look at the end stage of this process and we call these things diseases
4:14	and try to treat them with drugs and you're basically putting band-aids on the problem forgetting what got us to
4:20	that point in the first place which is aging itself which i have proposed and is
4:27	increasingly thought to be the case that it's disruption of that epigenetic
4:32	control system that tells the cells which genes to turn on and off and that's sort of the information loss and
4:38	i think one of the analogies you've used before is like a dvd player and a dvd getting scratched for those of us over
4:44	40 i guess yeah uh i didn't realize you're over 40 you look young yourself so whatever you're
4:51	doing keep doing that the um yeah so the dvd or the cd analogy
4:58	works well to older with older people but anyone who doesn't remember these were plastic discs with um
5:05	foil that had little pits uh that represented zeros and ones and this is digital information and that digital
5:12	information in the cell is dna and it's not zeros and ones it's atcg
5:18	chemicals and they're strung out about six feet long of dna in every cell
5:24	and that's about the same amount of information that you can fit on a dvd okay so our cells are dvd
5:29	but what aging is i've proposed is that it's like scratches that disrupt
5:35	the ability of the machine the laser beam to read the right songs at the right time or the movie
5:41	and you get a horrible cacophony of music and what we've discovered is that
5:46	there are ways to well we discovered one of the main causes of scratches that's broken
5:52	chromosomes which happens all the time in our bodies extreme cell damage also does that if we
5:58	crush nerves but we've also figured out and recently published
6:03	that there's a way we think to polish those scratches so that we can play that
6:08	beautiful music of youth again let's talk a little bit about sort of like reducing our biological age

How fasting decreases aging

6:15	and i think we're all interested to some extent some people more than others and living a
6:21	long time but we all want that time to be full of vitality and productivity and
6:27	not just living longer for the sake of living longer and i think that's where the biological age versus your
6:33	chronological age sort of becomes important one of the ways that i've heard you talk about before is fasting
6:40	and it's super interesting because fasting isn't new i mean it used to be a necessity for us but now we're starting
6:46	to learn about why it's helpful can you talk a little bit about the benefits of fasting and how it relates to slowing
6:52	down or even reversing aging yeah well these systems that tell cells
6:58	how to read the genes at the right time this epigenome there are gene there are factors that
7:03	control that and so a little very little bit of biology here
7:09	uh dna isn't just floating around the cell it's actually looped into
7:15	big loops that tell genes to be switched on uh and genes that should be switched off are bundled up tightly um and we call
7:23	this stuff chromatin and those those loops of genes that are on and bundles of genes that are off
7:29	are controlled in part by a set of genes called the sirtuins
7:34	and those genes make proteins that cause these loops and bundles particularly they create these bundles to keep genes
7:40	switched off because you don't want a liver liver gene or a skin gene coming on in the brain
7:45	but that's what happens with aging we find and so one way to make sure this process goes slower
7:52	is to turn on these sertuan epigenetic regulators to use a more technical term
8:00	and there are seven of these uh epigenetic regulators the the things that prevent the scratches
8:06	and we can turn them on with gene therapy uh in mice we do this and
8:13	if you do it in the brain of a mouse they'll live longer do it in the body they can live longer but we can't genetically modify
8:19	ourselves so what we can we've also found is that these genes get turned on by adversity
8:24	adversity or at least perceived adversity if our body thinks we're going to run out of food or we need to run away from a sabretooth tiger or we're
8:32	chasing a mastodon then our body says oh you know times might be tough
8:37	don't put all our energy and resources into growing bigger muscles in fact put that
8:43	some of that energy into surviving hunkering down and defending the body against
8:49	toxins against damage and that we know leads to longer life it slows down this clock of epigenetic
8:56	changes uh which we can measure uh and we also know that um
9:02	the ways to mimic adversity include skipping meals uh eating less protein in
9:09	general being hot and cold um and then the big one
9:14	um is eating the right types of food that uh we all know a healthy mediterranean type
9:21	diet and there are actually chemicals within those foods of a mediterranean diet in olive oil and red wine
9:27	that we found in my lab to activate these sirtuins and probably also slow down the clock but they certainly
9:33	improve health and then the last thing i think is really important is what i'm working on is not about keeping
9:38	people older at the end of life and alive for longer it's the opposite we're keeping animals
9:45	and increasingly we're showing with people that you can keep them younger for longer so that when you're 80 you
9:51	can actually be 60. is there are there's so many different directions i want to go in here but is
9:56	there a point where fasting becomes i mean there is a point unhelpful right like if you don't eat you will die
10:02	eventually is it sort of like you skip one meal is good do you skip two meals is great you
10:08	skip six and you're back to good again or is there sort of like some sort of limit that we should think about in
10:15	terms of maximizing the benefit if we are going to pass yeah well there's some real key points
10:20	to hear here one is we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation that would not be
10:26	beneficial and in fact when you know 10 000 years ago or more people were not living a long time from
10:33	fasting because they were not getting enough nutrition but in our world now we can have any not energy drinks but drinks
10:41	that contain enough nutrients we can make sure that we're not deficient we can measure things with blood tests
10:46	and we can make sure that we're not deficient but the optimal the second point is that the optimum is
10:53	different for everybody in part because we have different tolerances for not eating but also because we have
11:00	different micro microbiomes with different genders and
11:05	we just are genetically different and we know from studies in mice that you can take
11:10	regular lab mice and mix up their like breed them in a way that you get a
11:17	little bit of diversity in these lab mice and give them caloric restrictions so you don't feed them
11:23	more than i think it was 40 what they would normally eat and some mice breeds strains we call them lived a
11:31	lot longer some of them died earlier so you then practically what should you do well
11:38	it seems to be a rule that if you fast at at least
11:43	14 hours you'll have a lot of health benefits better metabolic stability lower blood
11:49	sugar levels better cholesterol these kind of things kick in a popular one is the um
11:58	what 16 8 go for 16 hours so you skip one meal a day and have a late lunch or an
12:05	early lunch depending on which one you're skipping and that uses the period of sleep as a fasting state and then
12:11	what i do is i skip breakfast and often i skip skip lunch as well and so i'm getting actually more like 20 hours of
12:18	fasting on a good day i will say that today i had a little bit of avocado for
12:24	breakfast because i had to get up really early so i'm not perfect and i don't think anyone should strive to be perfect
12:30	but you do what you can now there are other people that do uh a week long fast
12:36	now now that's the other extreme i wouldn't go further than a week actually uh given what i know but once you've
12:42	gone more than three days there's a special type of uh recycling of proteins that's very beneficial called autophagy or autophagy
12:50	and that takes about three days now i've never done that myself i'm pretty wimpy when it comes to uh
12:55	to these kind of things i'm a hedonist by nature and very lazy but i think that if you can go three
13:01	days or four days that would be occasionally not it not of course not
13:06	every week but you could do that every few weeks and if you do a week-long fast um you want to do that maybe four times
13:13	a year and those are the the rough guidelines and if we if we like if we fast for two
13:20	meals and then on the third meal we eat as many calories as we would have eaten
13:26	during the rest of the day normally are we still getting benefits of fasting yes or does it sort of yes yes yes we are
13:33	that's the great news that so take me for example i have big dinners um because i'm making up for
13:40	the lack of food during the day and so i'm not losing weight once you've hit a set point and you've got your
13:46	your body weight and during covert i dropped from 150 pounds to 132 i'm now
13:52	steady at that 132 feeling great eating tons of food that i always wanted but it's packed into an hour or two of
14:00	feeding now how do we know that works well we know from blood tests in humans that it looks like it's beneficial you
14:06	get the kind of changes that are seen in younger people things like i mentioned blood glucose
14:12	and then there's hormone levels and stress levels which i've been measuring in myself for a decade so i can tell you for me it works
14:18	um but the the other thing that's important is that from animal studies that have been done over the last 100 years
14:25	in mice and rats and dogs it's very clear that it's not just what
14:30	you eat it's when you eat and there's a very famous study that was done by a colleague of mine
14:35	rafael de cabo at the nih in bethesda and he made three different types of diets for mice one that had a lot of
14:42	protein the other had carbs the other had fat and he thought he would find the optimal diet for the mice
14:49	turns out it didn't make any difference what mattered was when he gave the food and if he gave it to them just within
14:54	this short hour-long window every day they live dramatically longer thirty percent longer that's that's fascinating where

On eating three meals a day

15:01	does the notion that we should even eat three meals a day come from i suspect and i want to research this
15:07	for my next book it's i think it's the the uh the food producers that they want
15:13	that uh it become you know a saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and and
15:20	then you've got the the the bars the uh the food the snacks that we now eat in between meals for some reason
15:28	doctors nutritionists were either educated or misinformed or both that the body is best when it's
15:36	never hungry and we know that is not the case and uh just one point on the hunger
15:42	i typically am not hungry now if if you start fasting and you've never done it before you will feel
15:48	hungry there's a hormone called ghrelin which will cause that of course it's not real hunger is just
15:53	mental state but after three weeks you find i found that the state of hunger goes away so during the day i'm not
16:00	not peckish you know i might eat some nuts or whatever just to suppress a little bit of twang but
16:07	i'm not starving by any means and i actually really really enjoy my dinner as a
16:12	result but you know i tell you this shane and your listeners because if you try to do what i do
16:19	tomorrow you will fail you need to slowly work up to it and learn the tricks like drinking water drinking tea
16:25	fill your stomach with hot or cold water and uh fluids and that will help i i
16:31	found when i used to eat out a lot before kobe because i used to travel a lot and i was always found myself in a
16:36	restaurant i always found that i'd eat more in a restaurant for whatever reason than i would at home so i i've always
16:42	used this thing where i have two glasses of water before a meal and that was a way to slow down or sort
16:47	of at least reduce how much i was eating in the restaurant yeah well that's a that's a trick you
16:52	can use every day i do it i'm drinking for those that are listening i'm drinking uh some water here right now
16:59	actually it's a it's a supplement drink but yeah that's a really good trick and also you want to eat your carbs after
17:05	you have protein because that'll prevent your glucose from shooting up too high and glucose
17:11	i wouldn't say it's poison we need glucose to survive but this typical western diet of spiking
17:16	glucose after breakfast and then it shoots back down and becomes now your hypoglycemic as it's called you start to
17:23	get the jitters brain fog now you eat again and this cycle throughout the day which is a typical western diet
17:30	is really not very enjoyable once you realize that when you
17:36	do what i do your liver is making glucose throughout the day at a perfect level and it doesn't go up and down much and
17:43	you can focus and you're not worried about where your next meal is and your brain's really optimal
17:49	and that to me i wish i'd started 20 years ago um eating less often because it
17:55	you don't just look better you actually can perform better as well i like that a lot and it's not just physical
18:00	performance it's also mental performance right 100 you know i'm not a physical guy
18:05	right i'm sitting and typing mostly and using my brain and i i'm way
18:11	i wouldn't say smarter but i'm way more focused than i was i don't get distracted i don't have
18:17	memory loss and i'm also not wasting money and time on meals during the day either
18:23	but yeah it's it's fascinating and it's been shown in mice to be true as well and i think what's also likely is that
18:30	my brain activity and health will be maintained for a decade or more longer by adopting this
18:37	kind of diet so let's talk a little bit about what we eat in terms of reducing aging or

The best things to eat to reduce aging

18:45	sort of reducing that that biological clock what what are the best things to eat um we sort of
18:53	yeah what are the best things to eat yeah well i know it sounds a little bit repetitive but it is individual but you
19:01	can make some generalizations so first of all the individual differences are obvious there's
19:06	um your body type but also your gender and i think just as important
19:13	your physique if you are into bodybuilding or you're an athlete professionally
19:18	that's very different than someone like me who's just using their brain and their fingers to make a living
19:23	so that there's that consideration and there are there are hacks that i'm helping develop that allows you to
19:30	be in the adversity state which is what we're describing eating less
19:35	consuming less protein and that's the adversity state that's longevity but then have periods where
19:41	you can have an abundance state and so perhaps i would suggest trying
19:48	on days that you work out assuming you're not a professional athlete um having some extra protein eat a
19:55	little bit of fish for example but mostly for that adversity state you want to be focused on plants
20:01	why is that because plants have less available amino acids your body has to work harder to get them out but they
20:07	also have a ratio of amino acids that turns on some of these defenses that i'm talking
20:13	about a very important one is called mtor little m capital t or and it's there to sense how much protein
20:19	you're taking in and if it's always sensing that you're eating protein it will not
20:25	turn on the survival pathway that leads to longevity so you'll look good if you're always eating protein because
20:32	your body is yeah i got plenty of energy let's go for it let's grow but if you never have that state of want
20:38	that adversity um i'm convinced and the data shows it from population studies that a carnivorous
20:45	diet isn't longevity uh isn't a longevity producing diet in the in the long run right but in
20:52	the short run of course you'll feel better uh and a lot of people argue with me saying i feel great how could this be
20:58	wrong but you know remember life is long you want to look look at ways that will extend your lifespan two three four
21:04	decades from now but i think you can have both i think that it's all about pulsing it doing adversity and then occasionally having
21:12	the abundance as well and you mentioned a mediterranean diet earlier is there anything that we've
21:18	learned about what we know about what we eat and like high fat versus low carb versus all of
21:24	the stuff that to maximize our longevity yeah so the the amazing
21:30	thing about the state of knowledge of humanity right now is that over the last few thousand years
21:36	humans have figured out to eat less often there are states of fasting most religions do that but also
21:42	the types of foods mediterranean diet is a good example there's a okinawan diet which is a
21:48	japanese island that has mostly plants and a little bit of
21:53	uh of fish but mostly it's not overeating and there's not huge amounts of animal fat
21:59	and animal products and dairy in a typical long-lived population
22:05	uh that i just described so that we've known for a long time and you know it's crazy that we're debating
22:11	this mediterranean diet is just known to be healthy and vegetarian and vegan diets are also conducive to longevity
22:19	um but the other thing that's amazing about our state of knowledge is that people like me have discovered genes
22:25	that control aging sortuns are the ones that we work on this mtor gene that i mentioned
22:31	those diets are turning on those defenses that we discovered not because we were
22:36	studying diets because we were starting yeast cells and worms and fruit flies but now we understand in this unified
22:42	theory of aging that by eating these types of foods you're making the body think that times
22:47	are tough turning on the defenses that for the long run will be conducive to longevity and
22:53	fostol these diseases that will kill us and in the short run you'll actually feel better
22:58	um and in the term in terms of um body composition will actually look better too now now assuming we're eating like

Organic v non-organic foods

23:05	let's say a green pepper or red pepper is there a difference between
23:10	organic and inorganic or ones that have undergone stress and ones that haven't undergone stress in terms
23:17	of how our body processes that yeah for sure the other reason to be focusing more on
23:23	plants is that they make molecules that are very healthy for us and again we scientists have figured out
23:30	that those molecules aren't just being antioxidants you know that's the theory of the 1980s what we've
23:37	realized is that in addition to be being antioxidants they actually turn on those longevity pathways the sirtuins they
23:44	work on mtor there's another one called ampk which senses blood sugar and energy
23:51	and by eating plants that in general make these molecules and
23:56	especially plants that are stressed themselves or have adversity which heightens the amount of these molecules
24:03	we can ingest them and trick our bodies into thinking that there is adversity right we've evolved i
24:11	believe this is my theory with conrad howard's is that we're sensing the plant world and when our food supply might run
24:17	out we need to defend our bodies against the environment and that leads to longer
24:22	life and the theory came from our discovery that resveratrol from red wine
24:28	and 19 other plant molecules that are produced by plants when they're stressed turn on these sertuan defenses and we're
24:34	trying to figure out how is that possible is it just a coincidence and then we came up with this theory that
24:40	we've evolved to sense our food supply i want to come back to resveratrol later
24:46	but just for people listening don't run out and grab a glass of red wine i think you'd need like a hundred glasses of red
24:51	wine to get the the amount that you would you would we'll come back to supplements in a
24:57	second is it our organic plants stressed more than inorganic plants or unorganic
25:03	i don't even know what the opposite of organic is i suppose it's non-organic but um
25:10	plants are definitely organic but yeah they're grown organically so they're they're under more stress they
25:15	wouldn't have as many uh purpose uh well pesticides on there they're not grown in perfect conditions
25:21	the best ones are locally grown ones that are in a local garden where the environment the temperatures the
25:27	there's diseases uh there's caterpillars that's the best kind of environment to
25:33	get your food from and if they don't look pretty that's not a bad thing often the other thing you should look for
25:39	is bright colors nutritionists have known this for years that they're very healthy if you eat those bright orange dark green
25:46	red fruits and vegetables the reason that
25:51	i think colors are good is that they're indicators of of stress if you stress a
25:56	fruit or a leaf you've probably seen it changes color gets brighter and those
26:01	are chemicals that protect the plant but also are produced in combination with what
26:06	these these um health promoting molecules um uh are involved in uh you know i wanted
26:14	to mention a word that may be foreign to to your audience which is xenohormesis
26:19	and this is a coin a term that conrad and i coined xeno means across species
26:26	and hormesis is this idea that what doesn't kill you makes you live longer and
26:31	i mentioned that word because if you can remember it you'll you'll live that lifestyle you want to induce
26:39	hormesis which is a state of want adversity and you can also get that from other species as well
26:45	as do it yourself by like doing what we said don't eat as much
26:50	eat plants that don't have as much uh protein which is being sensed and then
26:57	other things that you can do like temperature changes uh and exercise these all put the body in that state i like the idea of

Should we only eat food that's "in season?"

27:04	adversity and i want to explore that in different paths including exercise and some other ways that we cause adversity
27:10	there's two things i want to i want to go into on food before we move to a new topic one is
27:16	is there a notion to eating things in season like i go to the grocery store apples are there
27:23	365 days a year but they're not ripe on a tree 365 days a year they have a
27:28	season they have a time should we be eating with that season or is that a good thing that these
27:34	plants and fruits are available 24 7 365 now yeah well so the it's knowing that if
27:41	the plants are in season um and um otherwise healthy they're they're
27:46	actually they have the energy to produce these molecules um so yeah in season but but grown under
27:52	conditions that are not perfect okay um the offseason apples the the the
27:58	ones that are a little bit flowery i would avoid those they don't have the abundance of nutrients and chemicals
28:03	that we want but yeah it's um so organic in season vegetables and fruits is is the way to
28:10	go and that's what i have turned to in my lifestyle increasingly so as i get older and then
28:16	increasingly regretful that i didn't do it earlier um shane
28:21	for those of you who are not watching this on on video i'm now drinking a cup of hot matcha tea the
28:29	green tea the very concentrated green tea those leaves that are grown often in japan
28:34	they come from green tea plants that are put in shade conditions before they're picked and it's that lack of light
28:41	that causes it to become bright green but also produces molecules that are healthy
28:46	there's one called for short ecgc which is known to be a xenohermetic
28:52	molecule to turn on the body's defenses and pretty much every morning i start my day with one of these
28:58	and it's a great way to start because there's of course no sugar in here it's boosting uh my
29:04	body's defenses but it's also filling up my stomach so i don't feel the need to eat breakfast though i as i admitted i
29:09	ate a little bit of avocado today just because i felt like but usually i don't when you say boosting defenses you mean
29:16	from the antioxidants no actually so ecgc is slightly antioxidant but it's actually
29:23	it inhibits and turns on the right enzymes that are known to
29:29	invoke longevity in animals and probably in ourselves as well it's another one of these xeno-hermetic
29:34	molecules in the same class as resveratrol olive oil or components of olive oil and
29:41	there's a whole bunch of them and you know we can talk more about these when you want to get to the supplementation

On sugar

29:46	let's talk about sugar before we get into some other adversity states what do we know about
29:53	sugar and its effect on our biological age not that much so the biological age
30:00	right now is measured a number of ways you can do a panel of 40 blood tests
30:07	inside trackers is just one that i use the so that's one way the other more more
30:14	[Music] epigenetic related so back to the scratches on the cd you can measure
30:19	those scratches it's called the dna methylation clock or the horvath clock named after stephen horvath a scientist
30:27	at ucla and these are the the chemicals that get added or subtracted from the dna
30:32	molecule that tell genes to be on or off and the sirtuins that i work on help
30:38	control that process and you can read these with a dna sequencing machine and dna sequences
30:45	you know we're using all the time now in the lab and by reading those chemicals where they are and how they've changed over
30:50	time for instance chain i could take your blood or a cheek swab and tell you biologically how old you
30:57	are relative to others your age and so your birthdays don't
31:02	matter as much for your health as your actual dna methylation age or your scratches now we can measure that but to
31:08	your point we haven't known about the clock long enough to know
31:14	if glucose or sugar directly impacts that clock what i can say is that people that eat a
31:20	mediterranean diet have a slower ticking clock and people that exercise and do the kind
31:26	of things that i'm telling everybody today to do in general have a lower biological age
31:32	than those who do all the terrible things don't exercise smoke
31:38	become obese these are ways to greatly accelerate the rate of aging how would a listener go about testing their

How to test your biological age

31:45	biological age uh well it's there are some companies that have just started up
31:51	that measure this from a blood sample uh uh it's fairly expensive it's a few
31:56	hundred dollars at least my student one of my students at harvard has developed a technology where we can
32:02	measure this clock very cheaply for at least 10 times less than that
32:08	and we're about to release a product uh in this sometime this year that would be a cheek swab which is far easier than
32:16	a blood test of course and so just for a lot less money and hopefully more more
32:21	often you can look at your biological age and say well is my new diet affecting my age have i slowed it down
32:28	am i reversing my age which is increasingly doable um and so that um there's a website if people want to
32:35	sign up i hope it's okay if i've mentioned that people often want to know so that the company is called tally
32:40	health t-a-l-l-y health dot com and there's a wait list but get on that
32:46	because we're also looking for people to help us try and figure out
32:51	through experimentation what happens when you eat certain things or take certain supplements
32:56	and so we'll guide you through that we'll give you your credit score for your body and then the goal is to use science to
33:04	slow down and reverse the ticking of everybody's individual clock so that you know getting 14 15 years extra life is
33:11	not that difficult just by doing the things that i'm talking about today you'll get an extra 14 15 years on average but then i want
33:17	to help people get 20 years 30 years beyond what they would have otherwise had you mentioned

Using exercise effectively

33:23	exercise and i know some people love exercise i'm not one of those people i sort of um do it but i don't love it i
33:30	don't look forward to it i um is there any hope for me like is there a point at
33:35	which i can maximize the advantages of exercise but not not anymore like
33:41	declining utility yeah well i feel for you i'm the same um i'm
33:47	lazy as i mentioned so let's see so so what what's recommended
33:53	by doctors who know what they're talking about it's you want to have two types of exercise
33:58	at least three if you can so what are they there's there's yoga pilates that's you know for
34:04	joint stretch that's the basics important for longevity you don't want to break bones if you fall over
34:09	the other is weight lifting you want to exert your muscles grow muscles at least maintain your muscles
34:16	by the time you're my age you know i'm 52 now i'm losing more than one percent of my muscle mass every year
34:22	if i don't exercise so lifting weights that's important then the third type is aerobic
34:27	and the minimum amount to have benefits um pretty substantial benefits though would
34:34	be to lose your breath at least once a week preferably three times a week for 10 minutes so that's not a lot but even
34:40	that i'll admit is hard for people like you and me to do but it's not as though you have to go
34:45	running for an hour or cycling for 100 miles it just a little bit goes a long way and
34:51	what's happening when you exercise is that again it's turning on these defenses that your body
34:56	uh thinks is needed to survive but you know i'll tell you something
35:02	more personal and this is this is not medical advice it's not science
35:07	but i do everything really well except two things
35:13	sleep and exercise those are my advices i try to sleep but i work a lot i travel a lot
35:20	um but i know i'd be better if i could sleep seven hours a night i'm more like five to six
35:26	the other thing that i don't do that i prescribe or recommend is exercise and i
35:31	rarely lose my breath i try i used to have a treadmill pre-covered and i would do that but because of the pandemic i'm
35:37	not doing a lot of that so i probably lose my breath maybe two days a week not not as much as i'd
35:43	like but my biological age is still getting younger so i think it's possible to
35:49	to hack it some of the molecules that we work on resveratrol there's one called nmn which
35:55	we can talk about later but it's a nad boosting molecule that also turns on sort of i've been taking that
36:01	um and so my health has never been better you could argue maybe it would be even better if i exercised more but i'm
36:08	pretty happy with my biochemistry my blood biochemistry is equivalent to a 20 year old i'm a 52
36:13	so i think there is hope for us that's a long answer to uh to your question but wait isn't sleep super important to

Sleep and aging

36:20	longevity like as we age okay so here's some notions that i bring to this right like my
36:25	baggage with sleep is like as we age we tend to sleep less and everything that i
36:30	know about sleep tends to tell me that sleep is super important for mental functioning for
36:36	age aging well for all of these like health benefits
36:41	associated with sleep and you're telling me you get four or five hours and you're 52 and you have a 20 year old biological
36:47	clock so maybe sleep isn't that important um maybe maybe i i'm i might be 15 years
36:55	old if i could get more sleep but uh we will never know but i i what i know is that those sort of
37:02	genes that i talk about all the time and i've been studying for 30 years they control the clock and then the
37:08	disrupted clock affects them because it's a big cycle and if you get that out of whack in an
37:14	animal they will if you don't let them sleep they will age prematurely if you stop a rat from sleeping for just two
37:20	weeks it will develop diabetes it's really important so i don't think there's any argument that sleep is
37:26	important but can you hack your way around it maybe that's what i'm showing but i don't want to give the impression
37:32	that i think that that's the best way to live life i mean i got i got up at 5 30 this
37:37	morning i went to sleep probably at one o'clock um that's not a good way to live i i am
37:43	tired um i i do find i've got caffeine i've got my nad boosters which do help me get
37:50	through the day in the morning but ideally i would want more sleep i think i'd have better memory and focus if i did that there are two hacks that i'm
37:56	doing that allow me to get away with less sleep now um i've included meditation at night
38:01	into my daily life most days um and that's been very helpful um and
38:07	the second is that i have a bed that reduces my body temperature in the middle of the night and i get
38:13	deeper sleep which also seems to help are you using innate sleep i am yeah what's your setting profile on that i
38:19	use one too what's your what's your do do you do warm cold warm or are you like cool
38:26	cold warm like how do you set that up depends on the season um i'm in winter
38:32	now in boston which is my my apartment's very cold but so these days i i started
38:38	out a bit warmer than usual but what i normally do would say i get into a coolish bed
38:45	and then the next stage is drop me down lower and lower and then half an hour before waking up it'll shoot up to
38:51	um as warm as i can handle it but yeah i like to drop the temperature down and i
38:56	sleep better that way so coming into this conversation one of the notions that i had is one of the
39:02	reasons that we we tend to age or accelerate aging as we get older is that we tend to sleep less
39:09	and i guess that's not the case right because i always thought oh like you know i see this with my parents right now right like they're sleeping
39:16	less than they used to and i just assumed that that was part of aging but also what accelerated
39:23	our aging yeah i think you're right and and that's the problem once you start like getting less sleep you will age and
39:30	your age will give you less sleep and that's why it's important to to maintain
39:35	that that you know sleep health and uh but you know nmn which is this
39:40	nad boosting molecule that i mentioned earlier that is part of the sleep wake cycle
39:47	and one of the hacks that i i think is is really beneficial is that by taking nmn in the morning
39:54	i'm simulating or stimulating the morning response and i get the alertness
39:59	and the energy that i would have had if i'd had more sleep and i can reset jet lag
40:04	you know i'm a scientist so people might say david you can't mention anecdotes but i'm going to do it anyway
40:10	i haven't had jet lag for a decade because i've been able to modulate my own
40:16	body clock by using these chemicals which as i mentioned are activating sirtuins and controlling
40:21	the clock now most people don't know that but um i think if if you uh have paid attention
40:28	to the kind of things that i'm saying out there uh you would know that um
40:34	it is possible to hack the clock i want to go back to the theory of adversity before we come to supplements and sort

The benefits of saunas and hot tubs

40:40	of like some of the stuff that you do and with adversity there's other ways that we can introduce stress to our bodies
40:46	like hot tubs or saunas what do we know about saunas and hot tubs like there seems to be a strong
40:53	correlation at least with saunas to longevity why is that um well so i'll
40:59	admit when i started writing uh my book which is um [Music]
41:04	which was a number of years ago uh the editor said oh you should talk about saunas and hot tubs and i said
41:10	this is a serious book come on i'm not going to put that fashion in there but i was wrong
41:17	actually there's now a lot of evidence that being in a sauna is good for heart health at a minimum there's a lot of
41:23	studies of thousands of mostly men in finland that do sauna bathing as they
41:28	call it and they are protected dramatically like excess they are exercising but
41:33	how does that work well you know there's lots of theories it's hard to prove but one theory is that we
41:39	have what are called heat shock proteins in our body that get turned on when the body's
41:44	too warm and we know actually if you turn on heat shock proteins in animals they live longer and they do that
41:49	because they help fold proteins correctly and misfolded proteins and the recycling of proteins
41:55	is very very important it's one of the reasons that i eat a plant-based diet mainly is to turn over that protein
42:03	cycle but yeah so that's one cold is different we think it's working through a process that is called browning of fat
42:11	we have white fat on our back that turns beige or brown by being cold
42:16	and then that revs up our metabolism and this brown fat also seems to secrete
42:21	uh little signals that make the rest of the body healthy but it's still early days we only
42:26	discovered we scientists only discovered that brown fat exists in humans about a decade ago so we're really not sure how
42:33	this works but i can tell you from having talked to a lot of people that do saunas sauna bathing
42:39	cold tubs and myself included that it does have benefits on blood by
42:46	chemistry and even if it doesn't you feel great um and you know these kind of things if
42:52	they make you feel great you know why not do those with the potential to extend lifespan as well i feel like
42:58	we've been doing some form of like hot therapy for thousands of years through baths and saunas and you know we're
43:05	quick to dismiss this stuff but i also feel like there's a reason that it sticks around uh even if we can't even
43:11	if we don't understand that reason at this point that we still use it i use a sauna like two or three times a week and
43:18	it it's super helpful for not only my mental health but my sleep and i feel like it has a
43:24	huge impact on my physical health but feelings aren't scientific right so right right but you know that i would
43:31	say there's enough data to say yeah you're probably protecting yourself at a minimum against cardiovascular disease
43:37	by doing that but i also find that that my my lungs benefit from bringing breathing
43:43	in that really hot air in the sauna and yeah in my case i walk out and it's like
43:50	minus 30 celsius so i get the hot and the cold right away so i i'm trying to live forever here
43:57	and if you don't it'll feel that way but yeah it's all about stressing the body and and sometimes it's it's it's the
44:03	differential that counts there's a therapy called hyperbaric oxygen therapy where you go into high
44:10	pressure and breathe in oxygen and then they cycle it off often they cycle it not always where you go high
44:16	pressure and then low and high and what i think is going on is that it's not the high pressure that's important it's the decrease that you're
44:24	becoming pseudo-hypoxic your body thinks it's running out of oxygen when it's just coming down from a
44:29	high level and my lab has shown in mice that pseudohypoxia
44:34	is a real thing and uh and is probably mimicking exercise and the kind of benefits that
44:41	people are reporting are similar to exercise except you're lying down i've done it a few times it's
44:47	it's really quite enjoyable you get to watch it i you know you'd appreciate this i watch shit's creek on uh while
44:53	i'm in one of these tubes uh and you know i'm getting seemingly a workout just by lying down
45:00	well so physical stress is good what about mental stress does mental stress have a benefit or you know i tend to

The relationship between stress and aging

45:06	think it would only be a drawback like this low level of persistent mental
45:12	stress would be bad for you but maybe if it's intensity and it comes in intensity
45:17	and then dies to nothing and then comes again it would be good for you how do we think about the relationship between
45:23	stress mental stress in this case and longevity yeah well it's important not to mix up the two
45:29	were the two uses of the same word um so stress that i'm talking about
45:36	hormesis is biological stress making your body and your cells think that there's adversity
45:41	psychological stresses are just a different beast it's not it shouldn't even be called the same word
45:47	um but let's focus on that now we know that a little bit of excitement
45:52	and thrill is very beneficial um but you can have chronic stress depression
45:59	[Music] you know just the kind of stress that leads to cortisol surging through your body
46:05	this is not healthy at all and would reduce lifespan we know from animal studies that those that are
46:10	under social stress will be unhealthy and die sooner so if you are experiencing that
46:19	try to figure out how to reduce your psychological stress meditate breathing exercises
46:25	just try to avoid worrying too much this is really important and i can speak again from experience i was a very
46:32	agitated anxious person in my teens and twenties by my thirties
46:38	i went to harvard and i thought if i continue worrying like i have been i am going to die young and that's not going
46:43	to be a good look for someone who works on aging so i've learned to not worry so much
46:49	i focus on what i can do in the day i focus on the fact that i'm never probably ever going to run out of food
46:56	because i live in a wealthy country i'm not going to run out of shelter i'm going to have friends and family and that's all i need
47:03	to exist so what's the worst that can happen still not that bad and that's a good way to live life i think
47:09	yeah i think it was buffett warren buffett who who at one point said something along the lines of the
47:15	key to his age was the fact that he has no stress in his life and i thought that that was a really
47:20	interesting yeah when you look at centenarians the people that live over 100
47:26	they have that in common they have a good sense of humor they don't worry too much in their lives on average and they
47:32	also have good partners it's been shown by studying hundreds of people over their lifetimes that one of
47:38	the most important if not the most important factor is to have a reliable partner
47:44	a pet can substitute for that if you don't have one of those at the time but yeah you want companionship
47:50	that really does reduce your stress levels and leads to longevity it's been proven does attitude affect our biological age

How positive attitude impacts lifespan

47:57	like would a positive outlook help you live longer than a pessimistic one it does it does well we don't know cause
48:04	and effect we're looking at associations but people who live a long time tend to have a sense of purpose
48:09	are driven by mission and so that is great advice is to
48:15	work towards a goal and you know clearly you and i are like that and i think that also helps
48:22	focus the mind reduce stress if you're actually working towards something bigger than yourself
48:28	you'll have that mental state and you won't be so focused in on yourself and anxious i don't want to go too deep on

NMN, Athletic Greens, and resveratrol

48:35	supplements i think you talk at length for over an hour in lifespan which is
48:40	your podcast on supplements the third episode i think i do want to talk about three in
48:46	particular that seem to keep coming up across a lot of people i know who are super focused on health you bring up
48:52	animen resveratrol and athletic greens and you take those every day talk to me
48:57	about those three and why you take them and what they do to your body in the context of slowing or reversing aging
49:05	right uh so let's take them one by one resveratrol is a small what's called a polyphenol
49:12	it's produced by many plants to survive it's produced by grapes and it's
49:17	concentrated in red wine it should be a white powder it shouldn't be brown if you buy it and it's brown
49:22	throw it away um i take a gram of it every morning
49:27	with rare exceptions when i'm traveling i forget it but i mix it with a little bit of yogurt because it just a little
49:34	bit like a couple of teaspoons or today i had a bit of avocado because resveratrol is insoluble in water
49:41	and often people take it and it doesn't get absorbed so do that why does it work well we we have shown
49:47	in many animal studies and people now shown in human studies that it's activating
49:53	uh one of the main sertuan pathways called sir t1 and it does that
49:59	like an accelerator pedal the chemical residual will bind to the enzyme and make it work faster
50:05	now that's the accelerator pedal for t1 the gas or the petrol is nad
50:11	nad is a molecule that we need for life without it we're dead in 30 seconds and nad
50:17	isn't something that you can um well you can swallow it but the best bang for the buck is to eat
50:24	molecules that the body uses to make this nad molecule and the one that i choose to take is
50:31	called nmn short for nicotinamide mononucleotide but think of it as m ms but just flip
50:37	the letters around don't eat m m's you won't live longer you can eat m m's but if you want to
50:44	live longer don't do that but the the nmn is important because it's the immediate precursor
50:50	to make nad and the body makes nad very rapidly and i know from clinical trials that i've been involved with
50:57	that taking a gram of nmn which i do every day raises nad levels in whole blood in the
51:03	cells in the blood probably in the rest of my body as well it's hard to test that without a tissue sample i'm not
51:08	going to give up my brain anytime soon but the doubling of that nad is important
51:14	because as we get older we make less of this chemical we have about half the levels of nad in our skin for example as
51:21	i i have half the levels if i didn't supplement that i would have made when i was 20.
51:27	um and so i boost those levels back up to being youthful and then the idea is that the sirtuin defenses are activated
51:34	and that's enhanced by the diet that i have as well as a little bit of exercise
51:40	now the third one you mentioned is athletic greens because i'm on a vegetarian vegan
51:45	diet i describe myself as a newbie struggling vegan
51:50	um i need nutrients and so athletic greens is uh full of vitamins and and plant-based
51:58	whole foods that ensures that i don't lack those nutrients because if you're
52:03	just eating a vegan diet and i've also given up dairy you want to make sure that there's adequate nutrition so
52:10	you know i'm i'm on one meal a day basically oh mad but i want to add another couple of letters which is a n o mad a n i just
52:18	made that up by the way shane so trademark that madden let's call it
52:23	adequate nutrition put that on the end and that's what athletic greens does for me um
52:29	i do take one other drug called metformin which is a type 2 diabetes drug that has been shown to
52:36	associate with longer life and less diseases in old age by looking at type 2 diabetics and
52:41	there's a stunning stunning fact that type 2 diabetics that would normally have a short lifespan when they
52:47	take metformin typically at 2 grams a day i'm on one gram a day by the way
52:52	they actually have less diseases and live longer than people that don't have type 2 diabetes why did you give up

Why David quit dairy (and did it matter?)

52:58	dairy you mentioned that you stopped stop dairy what what caused you to do that
53:03	and then did that have any impact because you i know you monitor your body quite a bit did that have any impact on
53:08	you uh seemingly it did yeah and so i change one or two things at a time and have a look how it goes
53:14	and i'm an experimenter i love dairy i was eating a lot of cheese and red wine my diet
53:20	two or three days a week was a cheese board and a couple of glasses of red wine maybe more and
53:26	uh my my partner she was looking at what i uh eat
53:32	and she actually uh said uh that's not very healthy and uh so i've
53:39	adopted her lifestyle which is not so much um meat cheese dairy
53:45	um and i've looked at my blood biochemistry and i'm actually now
53:50	younger and healthier than i've ever been since i've been measuring it over a decade now it's more like 14 years
53:57	and i can plot various parameters testosterone glucose the list goes on inflammation
54:03	blood type blood cell composition and uh for most of those markers i'm
54:09	better than a 20 year old for for health and and i think a lot of that's due to my new diet that i've adopted because i
54:16	can just see things getting better and better over time i interviewed alan campbell who was the former personal
54:22	chef for tom brady and gisele bundchen and we talked at length and sort of
54:28	about diet and eating for peak mental and physical performance and it's interesting to me that you mentioned
54:33	cutting out dairy and seeing this go because the three things that he mentioned carry the most bang for the
54:39	buck for for cutting out were gluten dairy
54:45	and sugar in terms of your sleep your physical performance your mental performance
54:53	do you have any thoughts on that yeah i do i really do um so i'm i'm i'm a lazy guy i like me
55:01	right so i'm an average person uh and so i've i've done this
55:08	over time i'm not great at it and i i'm just mentioned that because sometimes people say i can never give up alcohol i could
55:13	never give up meat it's not true and so i at least i found it not to be true
55:20	first thing i cut out was a lot of carbohydrates i used to eat bread every day i would just put if i ate
55:27	something it would be on toast okay that's my life i cut that out and i found immediate improvements in my
55:33	biochemistry levels particularly my glucose levels the next thing i cut out was uh was meat
55:40	i worked towards a mediterranean diet had fish and eventually now i'm i'm no meat
55:46	and and that improved my numbers even better cholesterol what do you call it triglycerides all
55:53	came down and i have a familial history genetics of heart disease i have what's
55:59	called lp little a high levels lp little a is the worst about 30 of us have this and
56:06	we're destined if we don't do something to have a short lifespan but though that was very important was
56:11	the cutting out meat and it's not just the protein it's also the fat that comes along with the steak and whatever that i
56:17	was eating and then the third change was the the dairy
56:23	i did that just to see what would happen i figured it wouldn't matter i'm not allergic to dairy i'm not lactose intolerant but it
56:30	did have an effect it made things even better and what i think is going on shane is that i was eating a large
56:36	amount of protein not just fat but eggs and all that stuff and
56:41	and now that i have less protein i think that mtor pathway that's really important for longevity
56:48	um in animals and probably people is really kicking in in a way that had never done so before that's really
56:53	interesting and the only other thing i want to mention about alan campbell and just out of uh just so people don't get
56:59	the wrong idea he's also super plant forward with a little bit of fish so
57:04	it's mostly plant-based diet and it's just interesting how you you've both sort of like
57:10	come into the same sphere i guess if you will from very different approaches uh
57:16	in terms of that and i always find that stuff interesting because it makes me think that there must be something there
57:21	well i don't like plants um i mean i'm now learning how to enjoy plants but
57:26	for me they were a side dish but here's the thing there's a lot of debate especially on social media about meat
57:32	versus plants i would love meat to be lifespan extending that would be heaven but it's not you just look at those
57:39	populations and people that live a long time they are generally smaller
57:45	women who don't eat much who eat vegetarian i mean that's the fact we can
57:51	debate it all day but there are these scientific facts that we have to pay attention to shrink to live that's a good title of a
57:58	book is it ever too late or too

When should you start slowing your aging process?

58:03	soon to sort of like start to slow the effects of aging if not like how do the how do you stage interventions at
58:10	different points in your life i would say speaking myself because i'm not a professional nutritionist but i do know
58:16	the science i would if it was me start doing the meal skipping in my 20s but
58:22	make sure i've got enough calories coming in i'd start the supplements in my late 20s
58:29	before that you've got a lot of nad already your body's already defending itself when you're young it's your late
58:34	20s 30s things start to kick in um and then but what about your question
58:40	which is more important which is when is it too late for people um i've never seen it too late there are
58:45	animal studies you can that i could point to that show that you can have
58:50	effect this mtor pathway with a drug called rapamycin that extends their lifespan even if they're the equivalent
58:56	of 70 years old and um no there's a point where you're so frail and so sick you're probably on
59:03	death's door that it's unlikely you know just that you should start exercising
59:09	and fasting probably though that's really at the final stages if
59:14	you're still let's say a relatively healthy 70 80 year old my father is a good example
59:21	these changes to your lifestyle can have rapid benefits but do it in consultation with a doctor
59:27	because you might not you know benefit from fasting if you need body weight if you have other
59:32	existing conditions it's important to take those into consideration as well so talk to me a little bit more about
59:38	your father is he eating mostly a plant-based diet too yeah yeah so he and i are very similar i'm
59:45	people think i'm experimenting on my dad but i'm not he's a scientist he reads the science and we've come up with this
59:51	protocol which is the uh very low glucose we don't eat a lot of sugar we try to avoid desserts
59:58	low carb um don't eat a lot of meat he would eat meat very occasionally but mostly it's
1:00:03	plants um he doesn't eat much during the day he mainly eats dinner and he's he's lean
1:00:10	now and what else he does more exercise than i do so he's better at that he does aerobics i goes a couple of
1:00:17	times a week to the gym and does rowing and weightlifting what else is he takes the supplement so
1:00:23	he's on resveratrol nmn metformin and that's his cocktail
1:00:28	he doesn't take athletic greens just yet uh but he's a super healthy 82 year old he was not on that path in his 50s my
1:00:36	age he was overweight he had high cholesterol looking at dying in his 70s
1:00:41	in his mid 70s he went on this protocol and is now an 82 year old that's fitter than most people that age he has no
1:00:48	diseases perfect mental health his eyesight hasn't changed in all that time and so
1:00:53	yeah i mean we're looking forward to this experiment being a successful one but if nothing else he's a beacon of
1:00:59	hope that you can start late and have big effects you mentioned teenagers is there a link
1:01:04	between when we start puberty like that that sounds to me when we think of puberty it sounds like rapid aging

On puberty and aging

1:01:11	almost like a concentrated dose of aging oh no you're like
1:01:18	is there a link between when we start how long we live and is that true that puberty is sort of like this rapid dose
1:01:24	of aging well i'm gonna speak um as a scientist with an opinion
1:01:29	okay um and that opinion is based on all the science that i've read and i read a lot of papers i before i get out of bed i'm
1:01:36	reading science science papers so that here's what i believe now
1:01:41	i don't want parents to get upset with me i certainly don't want people to worry but here's what i think
1:01:47	will turn out to be the case the biological clock this the scratches on the cd that we talked about earlier
1:01:55	they start at conception the egg and the sperm come together even an embryo even a fetus and a young
1:02:02	baby they're aging we can measure this on this clock and certainly teenagers are aging now we
1:02:10	know that obesity and lack of exercise lack of nutrition lack of plants
1:02:16	is unhealthy and i would not be surprised if
1:02:21	the teenagers are by the time they hit their 20s on average or older biologically than they
1:02:27	were 20 30 years ago when i grew up because we are we were moving we were generally not so
1:02:34	overweight we were not eating as much sugar and that's probably accelerating our kids aging rate
1:02:39	meaning that 20 30 years from now 40 years from now that is still going to echo in their
1:02:44	health because the clock unless you do something radical doesn't go backwards
1:02:50	you track a lot of your data right with uh you have an aura ring on i think you

Are biological problems becoming engineering problems?

1:02:56	use an eight sleep uh you're testing your biological age are we
1:03:03	starting to think of biological problems almost like engineering problems where
1:03:08	we optimize for specific data points in the hope that those data points are correct well absolutely that
1:03:16	there's a growing number of people uh you know i was at the forefront i was kind of this biohacking guy
1:03:22	scientist interested and i was out on a limb as one of you know maybe 50 people in the world that do what i did
1:03:28	now there's millions of people around the world that monitor themselves with rims
1:03:33	with beds with apple or you know i shouldn't say brands but you know with watches um there's plenty of fitness trackers
1:03:40	you'd be aware of they're all part of this global movement to not fly blind with our health
1:03:47	we can track things we can see what works what doesn't and it was crazy that for up until recently
1:03:53	we would be driving the equivalent of driving a car without a dashboard
1:03:58	who would do that you know you might have a check engine light you could overheat same with our bodies and and
1:04:04	going to the doctor once a year for an annual checkup now that we can monitor ourselves every
1:04:09	hour soon every every second eventually every thousandth of a second
1:04:15	that world that we're entering makes this old world of going to the doctor once a year see medieval and it
1:04:21	is what can happen in a year you could get cancer you could have heart disease you could have a heart attack
1:04:27	now we have the devices some of us use them increasingly eventually everyone will have them
1:04:33	we'll know ahead of time if we have cancer if we have heart disease if we can have a heart attack next week and
1:04:39	stave off those things and prevent them from happening and that is a revolution separate from what i'm working on
1:04:46	that will extend lifespan i believe by another decade it's super interesting to me because we
1:04:52	have all of the tools available to us now we're not using them where i could walk into my doctor's office and i could
1:04:58	tell them what i'm feeling or the symptoms that i'm experiencing but then they could pull up on their ipad or
1:05:04	whatever like all of my biomarkers to see and to gather more data but we don't we choose
1:05:10	not to use that at this point or we're not ready for it i mean privacy concerns aside but how do you think about that
1:05:16	like we will get to this point where i have like a device in me i'm sure during our lifetime that i'm
1:05:22	showing up at a hospital and instead of filling out paperwork or answering questions they're just looking at it and
1:05:27	they're being like okay now we have the data to back up some of these decisions 100 there's no question um you can take
1:05:35	that to the bank that that's the world that's coming um and i wrote about it a few years ago
1:05:40	and and covert 19 has accelerated that i was predicting
1:05:45	telemedicine and um you know wellness at home and this whole revolution i thought that would be
1:05:50	10 years away and and it's here now so why isn't it so common well partly it's education and
1:05:58	podcasts like this are helpful but it's also that it's expensive so we tend to forget that
1:06:04	these watches and rings are hundreds of dollars and these tests these blood tests are also hundreds of dollars
1:06:09	and our doctors are reticent to be doing all these tests because the health
1:06:15	care systems want to save money ultimately right forgetting that ultimately they will save money by
1:06:20	keeping people alive and healthier for longer but in what's what's fascinating is that
1:06:26	i have this collection of data that i can call up on my phone and it's all graphed by this inside tracker group but you can
1:06:33	you can do others and my doctor i thought he would say oh i don't want to trust that data i only
1:06:39	trust the data that i gather on you but the opposite was true i actually i was zooming with him because we don't tend
1:06:45	to go to the doctor as much anymore and i called up my data on the screen and he loved it he was into it he said oh this
1:06:51	is so great i wish i had this on every one of my patients but yeah you're right that they the
1:06:56	doctors generally don't do that because it's expensive but we can now do that and then show our doctors and they're grateful
1:07:02	well it's so interesting because it it it's expensive in the moment but it's super preventative
1:07:08	if we go with the assumption that most medical care costs are at the end of life or from chronic diseases that we
1:07:15	might be able to avoid that then this these costs tend to be up front and they're massively preventative
1:07:22	so they actually would save health care systems lots of money in the long run but we we never look at that because we
1:07:28	look like to treat things and so like as a computer scientist i look at this and i'm like not only can we prevent
1:07:34	problems before they happen but now we can start to get this amazing quantity of data where i can be like you're
1:07:41	showing up with this thing and you feel this way what we know from 20 million other people who've shown up
1:07:48	with this thing in this way that it's not what you think and it's something different and then we can save a lot of
1:07:54	money and time there as well for sure and those technologies exist
1:08:00	i've been wearing what's called a bio button i have no affiliation so
1:08:05	if you want to look them up they're called bio intellisense and this is an fda approved device that
1:08:11	doctors can send home with their patients after surgery to monitor their heart as well as their movement their
1:08:16	vibration their temperature and that data that comes in is actually very informative beyond the
1:08:22	heart they can tell if you've got a flu versus a common cold
1:08:28	versus depression covert 19 and that's can the world will be you have something stuck on or under
1:08:34	your skin that will tell a nurse or a doctor or some sort of ai system that something is wrong and it
1:08:41	needs fixing well before you would ever have a problem noticeable by yourself or a doctor a lot
1:08:48	of money seems to be going into life extension recently i'm thinking of altos labs with jeff

Using drugs to reverse aging

1:08:54	bezos and some others committed about 3 billion which is the biggest seed investment i've ever seen in my life and
1:09:01	they hired some of the world's top scientists it it seems like it's set up to commercialize
1:09:07	i can't even say this that yema yamakata factors yamanaka how do i
1:09:12	say that yamanaka how do i say yamanaka factors for cellular reprogramming for age
1:09:19	reversal now that's different than sort of the area that we've been talking about a lot today but the initial
1:09:24	results from that those biomarkers seem to indicate that we're on to something with a shoot
1:09:30	a few short bursts of these drugs at least in the mice
1:09:35	how do you think about that and is that also the future so that we control sort of like part of our aging and then what
1:09:42	we don't control we can use drugs to reverse or slow down yeah well so
1:09:50	we were working on this for a while based on the idea that we could find genes that would polish the scratches on
1:09:55	the dvd um and we came across a set of three genes called o s and k for short which are
1:10:02	three of the six or so yamanaka factors um and about a year ago we published
1:10:08	that we could reverse the age of an animal and we restored eyesight to a blind old mouse
1:10:14	and cured glaucoma in that animal and we are now working towards human clinical trials in canada we have
1:10:21	um a non-human primate study for safety to see how that goes and within the next 18 months if
1:10:27	all goes well we will be reversing aging in a human if all goes well so that's going well and then so that
1:10:33	discovery in part you know there are a few other colleagues that are in this but not a lot led to a huge interest in
1:10:40	this epigenetic information theory of aging that we started off talking about
1:10:46	and the idea is that we can truly reset the age of the body and diseases of aging like alzheimer's
1:10:52	and heart disease and even cancer will go away if we become young again and so yeah i have my company is called
1:10:59	life biosciences it's here in boston altos has come along three years later
1:11:04	and they're working on this too but the goal is is a great one i wish them all the best of luck i hope that
1:11:10	they are hugely successful because it could be transformational for our species on the planet the ability to finally control
1:11:17	the rate at which we age not just in the forwards direction but in reverse as well i want to switch gears a little

On lyme disease

1:11:24	bit and talk about lyme disease your daughter had lyme disease i had lyme disease in the summer to the
1:11:30	point where i couldn't even get out of bed basically i had full on bell's palsy i like
1:11:37	couldn't open my jaw i couldn't stand still for more than 15 seconds without being in massive amounts
1:11:43	of pain and to going to the medical system just
1:11:48	briefly um we're about preventative care so you
1:11:53	show up and it's like oh you have bell's palsy it's on a heart attack here take some pregnancy and like go home and it's
1:11:58	like well no i'm a healthy you know 40 something year old male what's causing this like why aren't we
1:12:05	going deeper to figure this out and i'm curious as to what research you did and what you learned about lyme
1:12:11	um during the process that most people don't know uh my middle child
1:12:17	contracted lyme i think it was about seven years ago now and i was exposed to the how the medical
1:12:24	system works when you have an infection uh first of all it was very hard to diagnose she had headaches who knows
1:12:29	what's causing that right and um i i googled it i searched it and i said it's probably lyme disease
1:12:37	uh we took it to emerg the emergency room and uh they said well it might be this
1:12:43	might be that could be leukemia or whatever you know but we'll do a lime test
1:12:48	okay i think i had to insist but they did a lyme test but the problem with the system was
1:12:54	that it took uh three days to get a result that was out that was ambiguous because it's
1:13:00	using 1980s molecular biology technology it's primitive it's called a western blot which we
1:13:07	don't even use anymore much and then because it was ambiguous the insurance
1:13:13	company said no we have to have a definitive result before we start treating your daughter with antibiotics meanwhile
1:13:20	natalie is losing her eyesight you know you like you've said you you can't focus
1:13:26	and she got to the point where i i've now been told that she had a chance of dying that was pretty high 40 50 at that
1:13:33	point it was in her brain and we were not treating her because the test wasn't definitive
1:13:38	so that was that was disturbing and i also told the doctors give me a sample of her dna or you know spinal fluid
1:13:46	and i've got my lab across the street i'll go sequence the dna and i'll find this organism if it's there
1:13:52	and they refuse to give me a sample so you know i'm traumatized at this point
1:13:58	as a parent and i when you traumatized you you'd like to do something about it and so i started a company
1:14:04	that was a spin out of ai that we were doing in my lab we built our own little mini supercomputer out of gpu
1:14:11	uh you know graphic processing units um and we were able to
1:14:16	figure out how to find any organism in the blood of a human being and this company now
1:14:22	has a product that is being used for example by liver transplant patients that are immunocompromised because of
1:14:28	the drugs and we can track the infections that they have like viruses that come out of their liver and rest of
1:14:34	the body so that's now a reality it's not mainstream but eventually it will be
1:14:40	and when that's possible you know you go to a go to a shop a pharmacy or you go to your doctor or
1:14:46	at home you do an immediate test you don't know what's causing the problem it'll say oh we've detected lyme disease
1:14:53	and by the way three months ago you had the rhinovirus whatever you know you can see all that stuff now
1:14:59	and that's going to be a world that's almost here but when it arrives mainstream the idea of waiting four five
1:15:04	six days for a result for something that could kill you i mean that again is medieval science and medicine
1:15:11	on the the same whale i mean i had to advocate for a test and it was only actually a friend who gave me a test my
1:15:18	family physician wouldn't give me a lyme disease test um despite all the symptoms that i had
1:15:24	did your daughter end up taking doxycycline right it was so severe she had to have an iv treatment
1:15:31	for many weeks i think it was at least three weeks that were it was delivered at home um
1:15:37	by her mom to get rid of it how did you treat yours uh doxycycline yeah so i just did a
1:15:45	cycle of that i mean it seemed to instantly not instantly but over a period of maybe two weeks like it went
1:15:51	back to you know gradually like i had facial paralysis on half my face and you know
1:15:58	so it started with uh i could stand again i could open my jaw a little bit more the last thing to come back was sort of
1:16:04	the facial paralysis and it was scary i mean it was really and it was scary that
1:16:09	you had to be an advocate of your own health too in a system which
1:16:14	you don't know how to navigate which i also thought you know as a parent you feel as somebody who shows up at a merge
1:16:21	with like a face that doesn't work you also feel it in a different way um is there any lifespan effect of lyme
1:16:27	disease after treatment no one knows don't know um
1:16:33	doxycyclin um in my my recollection i have to check on this uh people who listening can search for
1:16:40	this in in pubmed.org uh is lifespan extending so maybe
1:16:46	it's a short course that you took but um maybe there's some upsides but the problem with lyme is particularly if you
1:16:52	don't get it early it can become chronic it it lives in your joints comes out
1:16:58	causes a lot of joint pain that would be not a state that would be conducive to longevity any increase in
1:17:03	chronic inflammation is anti-longevity i i like the notion you mentioned yoga earlier i'm just circling back to that

On hip-replacement and increased death rates

1:17:09	now but like you sort of mentioned well there's there's exercise in terms of like lifting weights and running and
1:17:14	exerting yourself that way but there's also preparing today to live
1:17:20	a much longer life that might be well into your hundreds and part of that preparation is you need
1:17:28	to stretch and have joint flexibility and because it doesn't like hip surgery
1:17:34	correlate to death like you break your hip and it you basically like there's a strong correlation to p people who do that and
1:17:41	then their lifespan is is almost over at that point it is uh yeah the chances of
1:17:47	dying after you break your hip as an older person uh is about as bad as late stage cancer
1:17:53	and every 19 seconds in the u.s at least someone breaks their hip so it's a massively uh
1:18:00	untalked about problem a colleague of mine at harvard
1:18:05	made i guess unnecessary light of it but his motto is the secret to living longer is hanging
1:18:12	onto the handrail and these points well taken really that that it's pretty easy to prevent
1:18:18	deaths sometimes my grandmother who i wrote about in my book was really influential in my life
1:18:24	died that way she tripped on a little bump in her rug broke her upper femur
1:18:30	um went to surgery not enough oxygen in the brain and then the next five years
1:18:35	which was basically a vegetable and then died um you know not a very pleasant way so
1:18:41	yeah it's avoidable right if you maintain your hip strength if you can muscles
1:18:47	flexibility you also want to make sure your household doesn't have ripples in the carpet and don't walk on stairs
1:18:53	don't climb ladders that kind of thing can save lives you know and it's not that difficult and and
1:19:00	shane this is this is the point i want to make is 80 percent of our longevity
1:19:05	and our health in the future is in our own hands only 20 is genetic which we cannot yet do much about
1:19:12	and some of these changes are very simple skip breakfast have tea instead
1:19:18	work out maintain your muscle strength do yoga flex a little bit touch your
1:19:23	toes in the shower if you can these can add years if not decades to your life just by changing things
1:19:30	in a small way you don't need high tech to make a big difference yeah it's interesting we always look for that one
1:19:36	thing right that that causes somebody that decision the drama the movie moment
1:19:41	that you know causes somebody to be successful or get results or live longer and what we
1:19:47	you know what we miss is the magic that happens on a daily basis that's this slow
1:19:53	incremental progress that is too too little to notice in the moment but by
1:19:58	the time you notice it it's so great that you're looking for that one magical moment that one factor that that caused
1:20:05	it yeah it is a lot of work i'll admit you know it's been daily since my 30s but
1:20:11	it's been worth it it was an experiment i should say but um i didn't know if it was going to work so far so good right i'm 52 i'm not dead
1:20:18	yet but it's it's every day making the right decisions or better decisions about what
1:20:23	to eat of course what not to eat going to the gym or your you know your home gym when you don't really feel like
1:20:30	doing it that's really hard but these are the the decisions every day that need to be made to reap the decades of
1:20:37	benefits later in life and there is no instant cure yet we're working on it
1:20:42	reset the age with a pill gene therapy working on that but that's not there yet and the other thing that that really is
1:20:48	important to know is that their additive there are additive benefits
1:20:54	if you eat exercise do hot and cold therapy mental
1:20:59	state if you do all of that plus the supplements they're additive it's not that take a supplement and you don't
1:21:05	need to do any of the others in the animal studies in my lab if we give let's give you a concrete example when
1:21:12	we gave nmn this molecule that i take every day to a mouse that was um sedentary didn't have a wheel didn't
1:21:18	run it could run further okay and we actually have human data that's looking really promising in that direction as
1:21:24	well but if we exercise the mice and gave them the nmn then they could run
1:21:29	double that again and so if you really want to optimize you've got to do more than just take a pill
1:21:35	and it's about consistency right most of us try it for a couple weeks and then we're like i haven't seen the results and then we quit and it's sort of like

How to think about aging before it's too late

1:21:42	the equivalent of sisyphus like rolling that boulder up a mountain getting halfway there and then you know
1:21:48	just like putting your hands up in the air watching it roll down back to the bottom you have to be consistent over a
1:21:53	long period of time and and to that point like growing old seems like a distant event in the future i mean it
1:21:59	happens slowly and then all at once we don't seem to think about it until we're really late in the game or we have
1:22:07	a loved one or somebody goes through something why is that is there anything that you
1:22:12	you've seen effective at bringing that forward for people uh well this is what i what my mission
1:22:18	is the reason i'm talking to you today is to wake people up and realize that you shouldn't just wait till
1:22:25	something traumatic happens in your life whether you get sick or your parents or your grandparents
1:22:30	um and it's important to realize now that you can do things for those people in your lives um your life and and yourself you know
1:22:38	typically i we we wait until it's it's it's too late for those people my
1:22:45	parents my mother is a good example my mother died young from lung cancer she was a smoker who
1:22:50	didn't take care of her body at all and i watched her live
1:22:55	the last 20 years of her life in a really painful state she had one of her lungs taken out through her ribs that's
1:23:01	not what you want for your mother i wish that i had the knowledge that i
1:23:07	have today that i'm applying with my father to her life and she might even be around
1:23:12	today if we had done that that's the hope right but you have to want to make the changes too i think
1:23:17	that that's that's the key point a lot of people don't right they they they want to for whatever reason they don't
1:23:23	want to act on it so to sum up maybe like and get a little
1:23:28	more philosophical here a little bit like our average lifespan right now i think he's about 80 if we do the right

What's the ultimate age we can live?

1:23:35	things in our life like we eat healthy food and not too much of it we get enough sleep and we stress our bodies a
1:23:40	bit with exercise or saunas and we don't get too much mental stress we add i think about
1:23:47	another 10 to 15 years to our lifespan that's right yeah 14 is the number that
1:23:52	was in that harvard study um that i was referring to yeah
1:23:57	is there anything that you've seen that says that there's a physical limit on
1:24:02	like that we have to actually die like can we ultimately live to 200
1:24:08	250 well of course we can there is no law that says we have to age
1:24:14	uh right now there's a limit because that's what we've seen happens but the people that live over 100 typically
1:24:20	don't take care of themselves a lot of them smoke and some of them smoke and drink and don't eat good food
1:24:27	so what happens when you have great genes which is 20 plus people who do the optimal lifestyle
1:24:34	and take the optimal supplements and take the optimal drugs there's no reason why 120
1:24:39	needs to be the maximum human lifespan there is nothing in biology that says that there is a
1:24:45	limit and there are many species that live a lot longer than us not just trees that live that thousands of years but
1:24:51	warm-blooded mammals take the bowhead whale that can live over 200 years
1:24:56	that's very similar to us our genes are almost identical compared to you know a banana and a yeast cell these are living
1:25:04	breathing mammals with you know milk and they're they're conscious beings and they live two centuries or more
1:25:11	why why can't we we just need to learn how they do it and i think it's all about slowing down these scratches
1:25:16	slowing down that clock and we know that by looking at whales and other species that live a long time the ticking of
1:25:21	that clock goes very slowly now they they don't you know they don't have supplements they don't have to do the
1:25:28	kind of things that we do we're trying to hack our bodies right now to give us some of the benefits that
1:25:33	whales naturally have do you think like that we you will see a person live to 150 today
1:25:39	oh gosh uh i think the odds are against me but i do think that somebody born today
1:25:46	will live that long because the technology is just going so quickly and remember they're going to live into the
1:25:51	22nd century who knows what that's going to be like we can only imagine um i would like to
1:25:57	i'm not in any rush to leave this planet i'm having a lot of fun i think i'm helping people doing my best at least
1:26:04	but you know realistically and nobody's asked me that question shane but honestly i think the chances of me
1:26:11	making it beyond 150 are slim i was born probably one generation too early
1:26:16	but our kids and their kids are going to reap these benefits that we're talking about now when you think about it what's
1:26:21	your expectation of your age realistically well you know i haven't set a goal i i
1:26:28	you must have one though no i don't i mean i'm not worried about my own
1:26:34	death i mean i'm not a fan of being a burden on my kids or suffering but
1:26:40	i really don't mind if i die tomorrow i'm not going to cry about it obviously but i live my life
1:26:46	like every day is a blessing and i'm happy to have every day now if you forced me to give you a
1:26:52	number i'd love to live beyond 100 i wouldn't say no to 120 and i wouldn't
1:26:57	say no to 150 and i wouldn't say no to a thousand years a thousand years isn't that much actually
1:27:02	geologically speaking i'm 50 years old now that's just 20 times my lifetime
1:27:08	50 years went by in a blink of an eye so what's 20 blinks not that much so i i
1:27:13	would love to live centuries i don't think it's likely i think eventually people will
1:27:19	um but you know i'm a fairly um let's say i i have high levels of the fu
1:27:26	gene um and i do like to show the naysayers uh to be wrong
1:27:33	and i would love to be able to live to 130 just so i could say
1:27:39	hey remember when you said it was impossible too and that you know that's my rebellious gene in me but no that's not
1:27:46	why i do this obviously um hello i do i do joke that you know i've had plenty of naysayers and enemies over
1:27:52	the years and i do like to joke and it's serious it's it's actually a joke i don't believe this but it is fun to to think
1:27:59	about that uh one way of uh getting ahead of your enemies in the
1:28:06	naysayers is to outlive them and uh there is a little bit of truth to that
1:28:11	that science progresses one funeral at a time and as
1:28:16	the old god is dying off we're seeing more rapid progress in the way
1:28:22	scientists and doctors think about what we can do for patients well that's an interesting implication of if we all
1:28:28	start living longer too because we then we start to hold on to old theories a bit longer and

Second-order effects of living longer

1:28:34	have you thought much about the implications of living longer and like what that means for society and housing
1:28:40	and money and fiscal policy and politics and [Music] yeah well lots you know
1:28:46	i'm working on a whole bunch of things that i i think are necessary for the world to exist with people living 120
1:28:51	and beyond housing shelter food i work on preserving food
1:28:57	right now i have a patent that i just wrote on that but um yeah it's important i think about
1:29:03	it a lot and we need to have less impact on the planet i think that technology can solve anything we want we just need
1:29:10	to put our minds to it and and that includes being being able to
1:29:16	grow food that isn't wasting water using up too much land degrading the soil we
1:29:22	can do this we have that knowledge it's just a matter of investment and willpower and incentives and capitalism
1:29:28	being you know conducive to to making that happen but yeah we we waste a lot half of the
1:29:34	food in the u.s by the way is thrown out so to say that we have a food shortage is is ignorant of that fact but what we
1:29:41	want to do is to produce food and not throw it away and that's one of the reasons i've focused recently on
1:29:46	shelf life of vegetables but that that's just one small part of a whole load of things that needs to happen
1:29:53	one thing that always comes up from a crowd that i would talk to about this is what about overpopulation
1:29:59	and if you do the math it turns out that even with slowing down aging and making
1:30:04	us live 120 we're not going to overpopulate we're going to level out at about 10 billion people
1:30:10	uh whether we live longer or not the big impact is reducing fertility or fertility rates birth rates and that's
1:30:17	plummeting across the planet particularly in the developed uh developing world and already in the
1:30:23	developed world where you and i shane live us for example replacement rates of
1:30:29	children are now negative without immigration that's true for europe uh it's true for australia
1:30:35	japan really bad for that bad in for the economy that is and china
1:30:41	increasingly worried about replacing their population so staying alive for longer in a productive way not an
1:30:47	unproductive unhealthy way but productive people who have wisdom who have knowledge
1:30:52	and who can impart that wisdom and be leaders of the community rather than burdens on the community
1:30:58	that's a massive change that we will see probably in our lifetimes of people
1:31:03	being you know centenarians and still running companies that will come back in trillions of
1:31:08	dollars in benefits to the economy and just the u.s economy alone my my hunch
1:31:13	is that we're gonna if you could live to 120 like i feel like we're just gonna leap frog things
1:31:20	right like we're not gonna go from average lifespan of 80 to 81 to 82 to 83
1:31:26	to 84. i feel like we're going to go from like 80 to 110 to like 150 because
1:31:31	technology is also going to progress over all of these years right so if you if you get the the first wave of this
1:31:38	you might actually be able to ride the technological boom to over 200. yeah
1:31:43	well it's a fact that for every year that you stay alive you get to tack on another three months
1:31:50	of life but that's going to change we're gonna get an extra four five six months of life
1:31:55	if the age reprogramming work that altos is doing and i'm doing works
1:32:01	you could get an extra year of life every birthday and what does that mean that that's a
1:32:08	very interesting world um a little out there i want to mention now we can measure the blood clock there
1:32:14	are treatments that include stem cells there's some hormones so dhea metformin growth
1:32:20	hormone combination and others that i'm aware of not yet published that purport to reverse aging
1:32:26	more than a year in a year there was a publication just now of a molecule called uh what
1:32:34	alpha ketoglutarate that molecule seems to control the clock that according to this blood clock send
1:32:40	people back eight years in age biologically in just seven months now
1:32:46	there's a lot of skepticism it needs to be repeated but even if that's partly true we are going to be in a very
1:32:51	different world where we can control the age that we are in a way that we only dreamed of that's beautiful
1:32:58	thank you so much for your time today david this was a fascinating and insightful conversation it was great to
1:33:03	chat and i thought the questions you asked were really spot on and i thought our
1:33:09	conversations can be very useful for a lot of people thanks again