Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast. In this episode, I talked
Speaker 1: to world renowned biologist David Sinclair about aging and longevity.
Speaker 1: David rejects the notion that the deterioration of health is
Speaker 1: a natural part of growing old and asserts that aging
Speaker 1: is a disease itself that we need to reverse. In
Speaker 1: this episode, we explore how a reset of our biological
Speaker 1: clocks could affect our interactions, responses to adversity, morality, and
Speaker 1: how we live our lives. We also discuss the ethical
Speaker 1: implications of limitless lifespans and touch on the topics of death, evolution, genetics, medicine,
Speaker 1: and data tracking. This was a deeply personal episode as
Speaker 1: well as a highly scientific episode. I think you can
Speaker 1: really see David's humanity in this episode and his high
Speaker 1: ambitions to advance the human species. This was a really
Speaker 1: fascinating chat for me, and I think David's research has
Speaker 1: enormous implications for every single human on this planet. So,
Speaker 1: without further I bring you David Sinclair, Doctor Sinclair, so
Speaker 1: great to chat with you today. Well, Scott, it's a
Speaker 1: real pleasure. I've followed you for many years and it's
Speaker 1: great to finally meet you. Yeah. It really is great,
Speaker 1: and I know we're going to have so much fun
Speaker 1: jamming on the intersections between the brain, mind, and longevity today.
Speaker 1: So I've been really looking forward to this chat. I
Speaker 1: want to start off by asking you how old you
Speaker 1: feel inside? Gee. Mentally, I feel about somewhere between six
Speaker 1: and twelve. The six year old in me still wonders
Speaker 1: about the world, and I see the world with that
Speaker 1: kind of wonder. I have the ability to see things
Speaker 1: like I haven't seen them before, which is a good
Speaker 1: thing if you're a dreamer and a scientist and an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1: I've got a twelve year old twelve year old in
Speaker 1: me because I actually now realize that life is serious
Speaker 1: and those twelve year olds at that point. I've realized
Speaker 1: that physically I haven't changed since I was twenty. In fact,
Speaker 1: somebody said my father actually told me my body looks
Speaker 1: better than it did when I was twenty, so I'm
Speaker 1: happy about that. So all in all, I'm not feeling
Speaker 1: the effects of aging at all yet. Cognitively, in fact,
Speaker 1: I feel more energetic and smarter, way smarter and able
Speaker 1: to focus than I did any other than any other time.
Speaker 1: In my mind, Yeah, there was a certain sticky beak
Speaker 1: personality you had as a child. Can you explain to
Speaker 1: our audience what a sticky beak is, because our Australian
Speaker 1: audience will know what that means, but our non Australian
Speaker 1: aids can explain what that means. And you know it
Speaker 1: seems like you still have that in abundance. Well, it's curiosity,
Speaker 1: but beyond your usual curiosity. I have to know how
Speaker 1: things work, and so I stick my nose into things,
Speaker 1: and so sticky bik comes from an Australian term for
Speaker 1: someone who just can't keep their nose out of other
Speaker 1: people's business, and literally that. There are birds that stick
Speaker 1: their beak into things. We had These still have magpies
Speaker 1: they called cralons in Sydney, and they stick their beak
Speaker 1: into bottles. When I was a kid, we used to
Speaker 1: still get milk delivered in glass bottles with foil hoods,
Speaker 1: and they would stick their beak into the milk and
Speaker 1: drink the milk. So you come out and be fairly
Speaker 1: messed with by the birds. But that's what I am.
Speaker 1: I cannot avoid opening things up, seeing how they work.
Speaker 1: It's often a challenge to put these things back together,
Speaker 1: as I found out when I pulled apart a couple
Speaker 1: of cars as a teenager. But I'm getting better at it.
Speaker 1: And even now when we talk about biology in my lab,
Speaker 1: we're getting pretty good at fixing damaged organs and tissues
Speaker 1: such as the eye able to regenerate those. So I'm
Speaker 1: making up for all the bugs that I pulled apart
Speaker 1: as a child. I think, Yeah, this is always fascinating
Speaker 1: to me. You know when I study the lives of
Speaker 1: creative people, people who make the history books, and there's
Speaker 1: this very common thread among them. They were dreamers. They
Speaker 1: were daydreamers when they were a child, and they also
Speaker 1: like to take things apart when they were children. Also,
Speaker 1: serial killers as children had that characteristic as well. So
Speaker 1: there seems to be you know, it's like a non
Speaker 1: overlapping Van diagram, you know, like there's like parts of
Speaker 1: the Van Diagram that you don't share with your of course,
Speaker 1: but that you a fine line, right, but just just
Speaker 1: ravenous curiosity. I had to say that as a psychologist,
Speaker 1: you know that's that's that's true. But yeah, creative people,
Speaker 1: there's a fine line between creativity and madness. I mean,
Speaker 1: there actually is a fine line there to a certain degree,
Speaker 1: as I found in my own research. You know, like
Speaker 1: really creative people. Often people will think they are mad
Speaker 1: or that their imaginations and grandiose ideas of the future
Speaker 1: are crazy until they actually make it a reality, and
Speaker 1: then people call them a genius. That's just a very
Speaker 1: common common theme across lots of creative people. You know,
Speaker 1: as you were a child, I was wondering how your
Speaker 1: grandmother inspired you. It was very, very touching this poem
Speaker 1: by Alan Alexander Milne. Yeah, this poem now we are
Speaker 1: six that was read to you as a child. But
Speaker 1: now I am six, I'm as clever as clever, so
Speaker 1: I think I'll be six now forever and ever. It's
Speaker 1: a beautiful poem, And I was swarming how your grandmother
Speaker 1: inspired you as a child. Yeah. I have to be
Speaker 1: careful here because I have a tendency to get teary
Speaker 1: eyed when I talk about this. So this is a
Speaker 1: person that essentially raised me. My mother was working full time,
Speaker 1: both by chemists' parents, and this is a woman who
Speaker 1: lived through the Depression as a kid and then World
Speaker 1: War Two in her thirties and had my father Okay,
Speaker 1: birth to my father when she was fifteen, and he
Speaker 1: was taken away from her to be raised by my
Speaker 1: grandmother's mother in law, and this was traumatizing for her,
Speaker 1: both experiencing World War and the aftermath of that in Hungary.
Speaker 1: When she's in Budapest and having a child taken away.
Speaker 1: You know, I come along when she's in her early forties,
Speaker 1: and now she's just saying, Okay, I have to pour
Speaker 1: all my love and knowledge into this one child. And
Speaker 1: she did. But she also said, I have to use
Speaker 1: what I've been given to make humanity better than it
Speaker 1: was in the twentieth century. Humanity can do better than this,
Speaker 1: capable of great evil but also great wonderful, inspiring things
Speaker 1: that if there were a species looking at us from above,
Speaker 1: or a deity, they would be impressed with what we
Speaker 1: could do, and so that meant a lot. I basically
Speaker 1: have spent most of my life, if not since I
Speaker 1: was four years old, trying to live up to what
Speaker 1: my grandmother had told me to do with my life.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think of her every day. She
Speaker 1: was a very unusual person. She was a philosopher, a
Speaker 1: great thinker. She couldn't handle small talks. She only wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about the universe and philosophy, and that's what
Speaker 1: I was raised on, and that was the basis of
Speaker 1: really how I got here today. Do you remember some
Speaker 1: of your early childhood fantasies and dreams. I think you
Speaker 1: mentioned one point that you used to pretend that you
Speaker 1: were giving a large lecture or something, and I used
Speaker 1: to do that too. I related a lot, by the way,
Speaker 1: I related a lot to a lot of the things
Speaker 1: you said, a lot of your early fantasies. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: don't want to come across as being an egomaniac because
Speaker 1: I was a very shy childhood. Yeah, I have two personalities.
Speaker 1: A lot of us do. My childhood, I was very
Speaker 1: insecure for a number of reasons. One, I wasn't very tall.
Speaker 1: I was put in school at the age of just
Speaker 1: when I was four, and other kids were five or
Speaker 1: six years old at that point, so I was a
Speaker 1: couple of years behind some of them. But cognitively I
Speaker 1: was different. I remember thinking that, and I spent probably
Speaker 1: up until college just being frustrated because people would treat
Speaker 1: me as though I was dumber than I actually was.
Speaker 1: I remember being five and being talked to like a
Speaker 1: five year old, and so what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: I know more about this topic than you do, kind
Speaker 1: of that kind of arrogance. But it was annoying, and
Speaker 1: I really grew to dislike humanity because I was treated
Speaker 1: that way. I thought humans were horrible. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of kids look at parents and they don't think
Speaker 1: much of them, to be fair, So that was me.
Speaker 1: I used to cry when people gave me compliments about
Speaker 1: my long eyelashes because I thought they were telling me
Speaker 1: I was a girl, you know, that kind of silliness.
Speaker 1: Fortunately I grew out of that by the time I
Speaker 1: hit college, got some confidence, found that I had this
Speaker 1: other personality, which was if you'd give me a topic
Speaker 1: to talk about and put me in front of a
Speaker 1: lecture or on a stage, then I'm somebody very different
Speaker 1: than I love talking and I have no inhibition. I
Speaker 1: hear a lot of comedians. I like that as well,
Speaker 1: and so I've worked very hard in my adult life
Speaker 1: to suppress the shy child who is insecure and just
Speaker 1: work on being this other person. And it's so far,
Speaker 1: so good. But there were days when I revert back
Speaker 1: to being that shy young kid who can barely talk
Speaker 1: to girls. Yeah, I'm constantly oscillating between those two states
Speaker 1: myself on a daily basis. No, I definitely, I definitely
Speaker 1: can relate a lot to that. But there's also just
Speaker 1: you know, it's such a beautiful thing when you're given
Speaker 1: an opportunity to talk about something that you're so passionate about.
Speaker 1: So I'm giving you that opportunity today, brother, you know,
Speaker 1: and I hope you I hope you enjoy it, and
Speaker 1: I know our listeners will enjoy it. You know, you
Speaker 1: did say that from a very young age you were
Speaker 1: tormented by the idea that you know, death is inevitable
Speaker 1: and irreversible. So it sounds like you did think a
Speaker 1: lot about death as a kid. I certainly don't want
Speaker 1: to say anything that too emotional, but I thought I
Speaker 1: was quite poignant that you were there at your mother's death,
Speaker 1: and I was wondering if you feel comfortable talking about
Speaker 1: that at all, and then maybe just how it affected
Speaker 1: your own sort of cognitions about death. How did that
Speaker 1: affect that who you are today? Yeah, these are great questions.
Speaker 1: So one thing I don't want to forget to say
Speaker 1: is that my grandmother told me at the age of
Speaker 1: four that everything dies, that my cat would die, which
Speaker 1: was horrific enough that she would die, my parents would die,
Speaker 1: I would die. Everything dies, and it's often painful. And
Speaker 1: my grandmother was like that. She never lied. She knew
Speaker 1: I never lie. This is what we believe in, but
Speaker 1: often it's brutal truth, and most kids forget about that
Speaker 1: because it's tormenting. And I haven't been able to get
Speaker 1: that out of my mind. How cruel it is to
Speaker 1: be a conscious being with the knowledge what's going to
Speaker 1: happen to you, ends and family in yourself. So that
Speaker 1: was a driver for a lot of my life still is.
Speaker 1: Then when I had the experience of seeing my mother
Speaker 1: pass away, that was transformation as well, because I'd never
Speaker 1: experienced death up close and go to funerals, but you
Speaker 1: don't really know what the process is like. So my
Speaker 1: mother developed lung cancer when she was my age and
Speaker 1: I was just coming to MIT from Australia. There's a
Speaker 1: big question whether I should come to it to the
Speaker 1: United States at all, because I needed to look after
Speaker 1: my mother. She had a big tumor in one lung.
Speaker 1: She had a lung taken out. It was quite a
Speaker 1: serious operation and I figured I may not see her
Speaker 1: again if I go to America, and my supervisor who
Speaker 1: was there in Sydney for my PhD, said you've got
Speaker 1: a bright future ahead of you. You have to go.
Speaker 1: You cannot let this hold you back. And so I
Speaker 1: did that, and I'm glad I did because my mother
Speaker 1: lived for another twenty years and got to see five
Speaker 1: grand kids and travel the world. But on the day
Speaker 1: of her passing, which was a few years ago, now
Speaker 1: her last remaining long her one remaining lung I had
Speaker 1: given out and it was filling up with fluid, unbeknownst
Speaker 1: to any of us, and I'd flown to Australia and
Speaker 1: I wrote a eulogy for her, expecting to get there
Speaker 1: too late. And I got to the hospital and she
Speaker 1: was there, smiling, sitting up in the bed, and my
Speaker 1: father and my brother were there, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: you know this false alarm. And I made a joke
Speaker 1: to her that I had written her eulogy and I
Speaker 1: would like to read it to her because I thought
Speaker 1: she'd find it funny. But it was only probably two
Speaker 1: minutes later that she started coughing and suddenly couldn't breathe
Speaker 1: and literally choked to death, suffocated in front of us,
Speaker 1: and we only had time to say our last words
Speaker 1: in those last seconds, and I remember leaning in and
Speaker 1: she was starting to turn blue and choking it. It It
Speaker 1: was a horrible sight, and I whispered into her ear
Speaker 1: that I wanted to thank her for being the best
Speaker 1: mother I could ever have, and then that was it.
Speaker 1: Then she's basically gone, and then you're just in shock.
Speaker 1: But what it left me with permanently was the realization
Speaker 1: that that's a bad day. Everything else that's a problem
Speaker 1: is not an issue. So every day now, when people
Speaker 1: say I have a problem or I have a problem,
Speaker 1: you know, it's always nobody died, So don't worry about
Speaker 1: the scratch in your car. It's going to be okay.
Speaker 1: I just lost money, It's okay. But it also showed
Speaker 1: me the brutality of death, that there are very few
Speaker 1: cases where somebody dies peacefully in their sleep, and we're
Speaker 1: not prepared for that. We're not told that, And I
Speaker 1: kept thinking, why doesn't somebody tell us what it's like?
Speaker 1: And I think we're just shielded from that until we
Speaker 1: have to, unfortunately experience it in person. By as a child,
Speaker 1: I was very just constantly just fascinated. And I think
Speaker 1: tormented is a good word for the idea and It's
Speaker 1: still mind boggling to me, the idea that one moment
Speaker 1: we can be alive with such potential, you know, and
Speaker 1: you know, self actualization potential, and then in a split second,
Speaker 1: for the rest of eternity, it's all wiped out, you know,
Speaker 1: all of our memories, everything forever, and you know it,
Speaker 1: especially if you don't have a large family, like I'm
Speaker 1: an only child and very close to my parents, but
Speaker 1: they're getting very older, and I think, my gosh, when
Speaker 1: they're gone, you know, there's not gonna be many other
Speaker 1: people around that are gonna well, no one else that
Speaker 1: has all those childhood memories you know that we all
Speaker 1: share together, you know, and then when I'm gone, all
Speaker 1: that will be gone forever. It's a very sobering realization
Speaker 1: when you really think about the truth of the matter.
Speaker 1: You know, when you face it head on. Psychologists often
Speaker 1: talk about the best way to overcome fear of death
Speaker 1: is is to face it head on. How have you
Speaker 1: made or if you have kind of made brutal realities
Speaker 1: as well as the beautiful realities as well. It's it's
Speaker 1: double edged sword in a way of death itself, you mean,
Speaker 1: of living. Yeah, when you yeah, great, questions. So just
Speaker 1: this idea, as you talk about in your book, about
Speaker 1: how in that moment of death, all of these things
Speaker 1: are wiped away. You know, what is the how have
Speaker 1: you made peace or even thought yourself the importance and
Speaker 1: the meaning of life itself knowing that fact of death. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what drives me is the knowledge that we have
Speaker 1: a certain amount of time on the planet. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't need to say that if life was longer it
Speaker 1: would be less meaningful or urgent. I still think if
Speaker 1: I had a thousand years of life, that's only fifty
Speaker 1: times what I've looked already. That would go by twenty times. Sorry,
Speaker 1: that would go by in a blink of an eye.
Speaker 1: So it's it's more just the knowledge that one day
Speaker 1: it will end, not how close it is, that drives me.
Speaker 1: And I'm driven by the concern that I that I
Speaker 1: will not leave and impact. So this is what gets
Speaker 1: me up in the morning and work, and I work
Speaker 1: till midnight. Often it's the idea that I have a
Speaker 1: certain amount of time, whatever that is, whether it's eighty
Speaker 1: one hundred, even one hundred and fifty years, whatever it is,
Speaker 1: to make this world better and leave it different than
Speaker 1: how I found it, and you know, just trying to
Speaker 1: bend the needle a little bit of human history, just
Speaker 1: so that maybe it's that I fear that I might
Speaker 1: be forgotten. You know, this is like you said, things vanish,
Speaker 1: your photos get thrown out, and momenttos that you think
Speaker 1: are important, your great grandkids, even your kids will throw
Speaker 1: them out in the trash. What is going to last?
Speaker 1: What is going to be around in a thousand years?
Speaker 1: Or maybe if I make a discovery or I changed
Speaker 1: the course of human history a little bit, then I'll
Speaker 1: have made a difference. And maybe that's it. You know,
Speaker 1: I've never vocalized this, but it could be the fear
Speaker 1: of being forgotten that makes me do what I do
Speaker 1: as well, to be honest about what selfish reasons there
Speaker 1: are besides really the altruistic fact that I do want
Speaker 1: humanity to show that we're better than we were. Absolutely yeah,
Speaker 1: And I really want to get, you know, wrap my
Speaker 1: head around what the fear is there. It doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like the fear is death. The fear is not having
Speaker 1: fully lived while you're alive. It feels like that's what
Speaker 1: people really fear. They kind of in their head they
Speaker 1: frame it as a fear of death. But with you,
Speaker 1: it sounds like there's maybe a fear of of not,
Speaker 1: you know, fully making the full impact that you have
Speaker 1: the potential to make. And does that sound about right?
Speaker 1: But that's definitely right. But it's interesting that I've achieved
Speaker 1: more in my lifetime than I thought i would, actually
Speaker 1: do better life than I thought I would, so that
Speaker 1: actually gives me a lot of comfort around death. I'm
Speaker 1: not afraid of death because I've already done more than
Speaker 1: I thought I would. I've seen more change, I've made
Speaker 1: more discoveries than I thought I would. And it's really true.
Speaker 1: I don't fear death, and I've faced death many times
Speaker 1: and I know that it doesn't scare me. I've had
Speaker 1: planes that were going down and planes that almost crashed,
Speaker 1: and car you know, in my car, if you've ever
Speaker 1: seen me drive, you know I'm not afraid of death.
Speaker 1: So that's not the issue, and at all you'd be
Speaker 1: surprised how little I fear death. It's really what you said,
Speaker 1: which is a fear of not realizing my potential, and
Speaker 1: my potential is growing. I've never been in such a
Speaker 1: strong position to affect medicine and human health and education
Speaker 1: that I have been at this year of fifty two
Speaker 1: cycles of the Earth around the sun. So my real
Speaker 1: age hopefully is a bit younger than that biologically. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I seem to be either peaking or reaching my peak
Speaker 1: in my ability to change the way the world is
Speaker 1: for the future and perhaps forever, and that is comforting.
Speaker 1: But I would hate to die today because it really
Speaker 1: would be a waste of the foundation that I've worked
Speaker 1: on ever since I was aged four. And by the way,
Speaker 1: you do look about six years old now. People people
Speaker 1: always say I always look about ten years younger than
Speaker 1: I am. By the way, it's all it's a camp
Speaker 1: It's like a phenomenon, and it's it's it's I don't
Speaker 1: I was worrying. Can you explain to me what's going on?
Speaker 1: Is it because my epigenetic Yeah? Right, So, we in
Speaker 1: my lab and some other labs in the world have
Speaker 1: come to the conclusion that a major cause of aging
Speaker 1: is your epigenome, which are the instructions that read your
Speaker 1: DNA that get messed up over time, and we can
Speaker 1: actually read that clock. We have a test in my lab.
Speaker 1: We're hoping to put this out for everybody. A bit
Speaker 1: of self promotion. You can sign up for this biological
Speaker 1: test at doctor Sinclair dot com. Spill out the word
Speaker 1: doctor and we can bring this test everybody. So we
Speaker 1: can literally you can send in a mouth swad Scott
Speaker 1: and we will tell you biologically if your clock is
Speaker 1: ticking slower or faster than others, just from the MA swap,
Speaker 1: not even a blood test. But I would suspect that
Speaker 1: the reason you look young is because you are young.
Speaker 1: I know I am young. My blood tests come back
Speaker 1: in my mid to early forties depending on which test
Speaker 1: I take, and I'm fifty two. I have no gray hair,
Speaker 1: I haven't lost my hair, there's no sign of wrinkles.
Speaker 1: I mean people often get bags under their eyes of
Speaker 1: my age, and that they haven't appeared yet. So I
Speaker 1: think that it is possible you and I are on
Speaker 1: a track to live much longer and healthier than others
Speaker 1: who say not looked after themselves. The good news is
Speaker 1: for everybody is that first of all, it's never too
Speaker 1: late to change. The second important part is that how
Speaker 1: you live your lifestyle, how you eat, when you eat,
Speaker 1: what you eat, exercise, good sleep at a minimum. I
Speaker 1: forget about the supplements that I often talk about that
Speaker 1: is enough to get you another fifteen years of healthy life.
Speaker 1: And that's because the epigenome is compared to your genome,
Speaker 1: is eighty percent of what determines your future health. So
Speaker 1: don't panic. But I would say it's in your hands.
Speaker 1: And if if you don't do something, you're on track,
Speaker 1: on a very straight line track to dying at a
Speaker 1: certain age that I can actually predict with this test.
Speaker 1: But that what we go to do is then give
Speaker 1: people the knowledge to slow down, and we think even
Speaker 1: reverse that biological age. Wouldn't it be awkward though? If
Speaker 1: you're like eighty years old chronologically, but you're you look
Speaker 1: like you're thirty, and so like women are like hitting
Speaker 1: on you, do you know what I mean, they think
Speaker 1: you're third, Like thirty year olds are hitting on you.
Speaker 1: But then you're like, look, I'm actually eighty, you know,
Speaker 1: and then it's awkward when you reveal that information. I mean,
Speaker 1: people have like it's funny because people, I mean, people
Speaker 1: have very standard I know my question sounds cheeky, but
Speaker 1: there's actually a deep philosophical point here. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: make people have a very you know, they treat people
Speaker 1: based on their chronological age they don't treat people based
Speaker 1: on many other factors of how they could treat someone,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, even if like they're inner age
Speaker 1: or their inner spe or their playfulness, you know. And
Speaker 1: I wonder if this research eventually is going to make
Speaker 1: us kind of look at chronologically age differently, maybe not
Speaker 1: make that such that number so prominent in our own
Speaker 1: mental schemas are psychologist schemas of what that person could
Speaker 1: be and their potential, because we have a bias against
Speaker 1: older people, you know, in terms of what we think
Speaker 1: their self actualization potential is. We you know, old people
Speaker 1: over the age of seventy, and I've looked at research
Speaker 1: into this are very often very depressed because the young
Speaker 1: younger people shut them out of society, you know. So
Speaker 1: I am I am wondering to what extent this research
Speaker 1: can actually make us have more inclusion of people of
Speaker 1: all ages if that makes sense in society. It does
Speaker 1: make sense. And I think that how you look is
Speaker 1: more important than your actual age when it comes to
Speaker 1: partnering them. I know that I get often treated like
Speaker 1: I'm in my thirties, especially by people who don't yet
Speaker 1: know me well. But I would think that what's probably
Speaker 1: going to happen is if you're seventeen, you look thirty,
Speaker 1: and that that will happen. It's not a question of if,
Speaker 1: it's just a question of when. Then you'll want to
Speaker 1: find people your own age who also look thirty. And no,
Speaker 1: I'm doing that myself with looking at people my age.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of people that still look young.
Speaker 1: The question, though, is you'll want to have shared at
Speaker 1: least I'd prefer to have shared experiences. So if let's
Speaker 1: say I look twenty, I don't, But if I look twenty,
Speaker 1: would a twenty year old be attracted to me? I
Speaker 1: actually I don't know the answer to that. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to try it. But the issue is are you
Speaker 1: generation generationally different? Are you? You know, you start talking
Speaker 1: about in movies you saw as a child or whatever,
Speaker 1: it is it too different? Would you be Would you
Speaker 1: prefer to be somebody who's actually been around for as
Speaker 1: long as you have? I think you probably would. Actually, Scott,
Speaker 1: I need to go blow my nose. Connect Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've never done it interview like this, So yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's different. Oh in what way? I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: I've got it very I've not I've got an unusual
Speaker 1: mind in my head. I'm constantly pretending to be normal,
Speaker 1: but I'm totally way out of there, way out there.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting for me also to hear my answers.
Speaker 1: So I haven't been asked these questions before. I think
Speaker 1: it's going to be It's going to be interesting for
Speaker 1: other people to see what goes on inside my head.
Speaker 1: There's all the strange stuff the I guess we're off Franco.
Speaker 1: But as a kid, I had no doubt that I
Speaker 1: would be in this this position and how crazy is that?
Speaker 1: It could have failed a million times? But I guess
Speaker 1: if the city sides, you end up where you want
Speaker 1: to be. But you know, a kid from Australia, do
Speaker 1: you want to talk to Sure, we can talk about
Speaker 1: that if you if you don't think it sounds like
Speaker 1: I'm crazy lunatic, but it can come across that way.
Speaker 1: I can keep this part. It's actually really interesting because
Speaker 1: this is the psychology podcast after all. I'm happy to
Speaker 1: keep this. You know, there's something there, there's some seeds
Speaker 1: and this has been studied in the creativity literature to
Speaker 1: be a very common thing. You know. Joyama's not shy
Speaker 1: to admit that. When he was about three and he
Speaker 1: heard a cello, he was like, wow, I want to
Speaker 1: play cello. You know. Jacqueline de Prey when she heard
Speaker 1: the cello on the Christmas BBC Christmas recording, which was
Speaker 1: very very young, she said, I want to do that.
Speaker 1: There's something there's something there right. Well, I think you
Speaker 1: have to be crazy to be a kid in City,
Speaker 1: Australia who dreams of changing the world. It's very unlikely.
Speaker 1: So you've got to be you got to be a
Speaker 1: bit delusional. But yes, so there are remnants of me
Speaker 1: still in existence. I wrote down the ten ways I
Speaker 1: could be a millionaire by the age of thirty. I
Speaker 1: wrote down a bunch of inventions. I started a company
Speaker 1: in my garage making furniture. I was trying to figure
Speaker 1: out a way that everybody could be done. Everyone in
Speaker 1: the world could just give me one dollar, that's all
Speaker 1: I needed. How hard could that be? And I wrote
Speaker 1: down One of my ideas was a network of computers
Speaker 1: that could act as a garage sale or a yard sale.
Speaker 1: And now it's eBay. So this is the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that I was trying to invent that would get
Speaker 1: me to a place where I could really make a
Speaker 1: difference in the world. I definitely am not a money seeker.
Speaker 1: I don't have a lot of material goods, but I'm
Speaker 1: not dumb enough to realize that money is a way
Speaker 1: to influence the world. And I prefer to have money
Speaker 1: in my bank account and put it on things that
Speaker 1: I know are important and have somebody by giant yachts
Speaker 1: and waste the money. Well, I think that you just
Speaker 1: realized at a young age that what it would take
Speaker 1: to make an impact in the world. And you realized
Speaker 1: much younger than a lot of people, realize that you
Speaker 1: wanted to make an impact in a very mature way,
Speaker 1: not the sort of way that the average six year
Speaker 1: old wants to buy I'm going to be an astronaut someday,
Speaker 1: or I'm gonna you'll be a fairy princess. Actually, you know,
Speaker 1: you actually, you know, started to think about that at
Speaker 1: a younger age, about what that would actually take. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: what really happened to me was that I was people
Speaker 1: writing down the things I was saying about, lists of
Speaker 1: things I used to say that we're outrageous and and
Speaker 1: well beyond my years of ocareculary or whatever. And so
Speaker 1: I grew up thinking that I was special anyway, So
Speaker 1: I try not to do that because it's not good
Speaker 1: being an adult thinking that you're special, but that that
Speaker 1: certainly helped me think that I could actually do what
Speaker 1: I've done in my life. Let's let's talk. Let's not
Speaker 1: talk a little about what you're what you're up to
Speaker 1: scientifically these days, unless you want to still talk about
Speaker 1: your childhood, in which case I'm down. I'm down for anything.
Speaker 1: We can move on. Okay, I'm out with for anything.
Speaker 1: I tend to try to just be really authentic and
Speaker 1: just free flowing in these conversations, So I'm down whatever
Speaker 1: comes up. But I wanted I want to tell you
Speaker 1: about this funny New Yorker caption cartoon I saw. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've seen this New Yorker cartoon where
Speaker 1: two guys are sitting at a bar and one guy
Speaker 1: says to the other one, see, the problem with doing
Speaker 1: things to prolong your life is that all the extra
Speaker 1: years come at the end when you're old. Have you
Speaker 1: ever seen that cartoon? I have? Yeah, and it's dead rum.
Speaker 1: That's the that's the problem, exactly exactly. That's why I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring that up. Yeah, yeah, I was trying
Speaker 1: to think of like a funny way to have an
Speaker 1: entry point into you explaining to all of us why
Speaker 1: that is a really misguided way of looking at things. Right.
Speaker 1: So the signs that we have just to summarize is
Speaker 1: in my lab we have really no trouble driving aging
Speaker 1: forwards and backwards. It's quite malleable. Now we do this
Speaker 1: in mice mainly, but we can do it in human cells.
Speaker 1: We can grow many brains in the lab, and we're
Speaker 1: driving aging in all directions. So that's the exciting part.
Speaker 1: What I want everybody to know is that we're not
Speaker 1: talking about extending the last years of life. We're talking
Speaker 1: about preserving the healthy years of life, and as a
Speaker 1: side effect, you get longevity. And I don't know how
Speaker 1: to make anybody live longer without keeping them healthy. In fact,
Speaker 1: the goal is to keep them healthy. And the root
Speaker 1: cause of almost all diseases that we will get is
Speaker 1: aging itself, and we've been unfortunately ignoring them. That eighty
Speaker 1: to ninety major cause of illness on the planet up
Speaker 1: until recently. That is, it's changing very rapidly, and so
Speaker 1: we were sticking band aids on these diseases diabetes, heart disease,
Speaker 1: even cancer. And what we've realized is if you keep
Speaker 1: the body young, or even reverse the age of the body,
Speaker 1: which we can now do in the lab, that those
Speaker 1: diseases either don't occur or just go away. The body
Speaker 1: can heal itself. And that's the future of medicine in
Speaker 1: the twenty first century. So I think if you fast
Speaker 1: forward to the future year twenty fifty, they're going to
Speaker 1: look back at today we've discussed and at the same
Speaker 1: way we do at the Middle Ages, where nobody would
Speaker 1: want to go back there. The idea that you would
Speaker 1: just let your body naturally age is craziness. In fact,
Speaker 1: I'm one of the things that I put in my
Speaker 1: book is that aging is a medical condition and that
Speaker 1: it's treatable. And when we have that mindset, then it
Speaker 1: really just changes the way we should look at the research,
Speaker 1: the development of drugs, and the way we treat patients
Speaker 1: as well, because what I cannot stand is when doctors
Speaker 1: say that they're patients and to me as well, well,
Speaker 1: it's okay that you're getting old, it's okay that you're
Speaker 1: getting sick, it's okay that you can't see anymore because
Speaker 1: you're just old. Well, you don't say that with other diseases,
Speaker 1: so why should we put up with it with aging?
Speaker 1: We're not talking about living forever, that's not the point.
Speaker 1: But it is about increasing people's health far more and
Speaker 1: for far more holistically than we have the twentieth century. Which, yeah,
Speaker 1: you say the world is about to change. Indeed, it
Speaker 1: is a time in which we will redefine what it
Speaker 1: means to be human. For this is not just the
Speaker 1: start of a revolution, it's the start of an evolution.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about that as someone
Speaker 1: who studies what it means to be human, I thought
Speaker 1: we could maybe have a nice energy here in this
Speaker 1: kind of conversation. You know, from my perspective, what makes
Speaker 1: us human is our unique brain wiring, you know, and
Speaker 1: I think you probably would agree to a certain extent.
Speaker 1: And what emerges, well, not just the brain wiring itself,
Speaker 1: but the kind of consciousness that emerges from it, the
Speaker 1: self reflection and the self control, and the ability to
Speaker 1: work out morality, the ability to have a character. You know,
Speaker 1: Turtles don't really have much individual differences in their character structure,
Speaker 1: you know, but humans differ widely in that. I am
Speaker 1: very curious to what extent you think what you mean
Speaker 1: by that? How would read it? First of all, let
Speaker 1: me just ask you what you mean by it. It'll
Speaker 1: redefine what it means to be human. And then I
Speaker 1: thought we could riff off that a little bit, right,
Speaker 1: So that's actually the lunch pad to the book that
Speaker 1: I'm righting right now. Amazing. I didn't know that that's
Speaker 1: a great distance. So yeah, yeah, get me writing, and
Speaker 1: I can't stop. So the idea is that we need
Speaker 1: we now need to take evolution into our own hands.
Speaker 1: We've done as well as we could as a species
Speaker 1: that's come off the Savannah recently, but we still have
Speaker 1: all that baggage. We only lived fifty years in good health,
Speaker 1: sixty years if feel lucky, under good circumstances, because we
Speaker 1: didn't need to build bodies that lived longer than that.
Speaker 1: Most people would die before that, either from war, predation, starvation,
Speaker 1: and dehydration. And so our bodies are built for the
Speaker 1: savannah going back two million years at best five hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years, and we haven't changed much really since then.
Speaker 1: Structurally mentally we have, of course, but the real problem
Speaker 1: is that we've built this world technologically, thanks to our
Speaker 1: ability to tools, tell stories, agree, socially, manipulate each other, explore.
Speaker 1: These are all things that make us uniquely human. They've
Speaker 1: built this world around us sitting here in this beautiful
Speaker 1: air conditioning house or cars outside. It's totally artificial and
Speaker 1: it's great, but it's also killing us. We sit all
Speaker 1: day often for we don't exercise, We eat too way
Speaker 1: too much food, we eat the wrong foods. The Internet
Speaker 1: makes us mentally. I don't know you give me the word,
Speaker 1: but mental health issues are exploding in part because of
Speaker 1: social media. But what I'm trying to say is that
Speaker 1: evolution is too slow to get us out of what
Speaker 1: we've built. We now need to engineer our way out.
Speaker 1: We need to take our own evolution into our own hands,
Speaker 1: and not just change our own environment to suit our bodies,
Speaker 1: but also change our bodies to suit the environment that
Speaker 1: we built around us. That way, we won't be suffering
Speaker 1: from all of these illnesses and short lives that we've
Speaker 1: really constructed for ourselves. An interesting observation is that when
Speaker 1: we were on the savannahs or go back even just
Speaker 1: ten thousand years ago, we're typically cold and hungry. And
Speaker 1: we call this. I call this the metabolic winter hypothesis
Speaker 1: with red cronis nowadays we're barely ever cold, we're barely
Speaker 1: ever hungry, and our bodies become complacent. We have these
Speaker 1: genes in our bodies that protect us against aging, including
Speaker 1: our brain, and when there's complacency in our bodies, they
Speaker 1: don't defend against diseases and aging. So we believe now,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of evidence that the genes that
Speaker 1: we work on and co discovered are a large part
Speaker 1: of the reason why exercise. Being a bit hungry, being
Speaker 1: a bit cold, being a bit too hot is the
Speaker 1: reason that we get these long term health benefits and
Speaker 1: can actually slow down aging. Wow. You know, I've been
Speaker 1: trying to sort through this very vast literature. You you
Speaker 1: literally have a front row seat to the most cutting
Speaker 1: edge scientific findings. I could bring up stuff you know,
Speaker 1: like like like you know sir too, Like where are
Speaker 1: we at with sir too right now? Like and activating
Speaker 1: that in humans. I know that you said somewhere in
Speaker 1: the next two years you're going to start control trial
Speaker 1: You're going to start trials and humans. Is that right?
Speaker 1: We've been doing them for two and a half years
Speaker 1: already with the NAD boosters, and there being a number
Speaker 1: of clinical trials with molecules that activate some of the
Speaker 1: last height years, many of which have worked, some not
Speaker 1: for reasons that are technical and including about the problem
Speaker 1: that these molecules are insoluble generally. But yeah, we have
Speaker 1: trials that are ongoing. There's a company called metro Biotech
Speaker 1: that is co founded a decade ago that's been working
Speaker 1: on this, making chemicals that limit the body's natural production
Speaker 1: of NAD, which is what is the fuel for the
Speaker 1: straitullons that defend our bodies. So instead of exercising or
Speaker 1: going hungry, you can take these molecules and we see
Speaker 1: that they mimic the benefits and animal studies and we
Speaker 1: hope will be the case for humans. And the good
Speaker 1: news though, is that if you have a healthy diet,
Speaker 1: healthy lifestyle, then you take these molecules. The science says
Speaker 1: that they will be added benefits as well. But you
Speaker 1: can't expect the elderly to go run a marathon or
Speaker 1: go hungry too often, so you need these drugs as well.
Speaker 1: So far, we know that they're or at least the
Speaker 1: evidence says that they're very safe. They're just taken as
Speaker 1: a pill. That's a hard press pill. And yes, so
Speaker 1: we've tested in young people, old people, athletes, and now
Speaker 1: we're looking at what are the effects. Now. The effects
Speaker 1: that we see ad mice are rejuvenation of many tissues.
Speaker 1: For example, the cardiovascular system rejuvenates response to exercise. You
Speaker 1: get new blood flow and muscle tissue growth of capillaries
Speaker 1: or capillaries, depending on how you say it. And then
Speaker 1: those mice can run fifty percent further like they were
Speaker 1: young again, in just four weeks of taking this one
Speaker 1: molecule called NMM, which, by the way, is that the
Speaker 1: same molecule I've been taking for many years now. Now
Speaker 1: in the human studies, we're looking for these same effects,
Speaker 1: and we're in the middle of those trials right now,
Speaker 1: and so we should know the results sometime around the
Speaker 1: middle of next year, perhaps earlier, and then if we're lucky,
Speaker 1: then I'll be able to say, yeah, it looks like
Speaker 1: they work. And then it's a question of getting those
Speaker 1: drugs on the market, because the idea is not to
Speaker 1: sell them as supplements, which is the wild West and
Speaker 1: not control, but to actually prove that they work, which
Speaker 1: takes time and money, a lot of time, a lot
Speaker 1: of money, but Ultimately the drugs could save many, many
Speaker 1: lives and ultimately be like a heart disease drug where
Speaker 1: millions of people take it and extend their wealthy lifespan
Speaker 1: as well. But initially, importantly, we cannot treat aging yet.
Speaker 1: You cannot get a drug for aging because it's not
Speaker 1: considered a disease by the government, And until that happens,
Speaker 1: we have to work on individual diseases such as frailty.
Speaker 1: And there's one disease that we're targeting called Friedrich's a taxia,
Speaker 1: which is a genetic disorder that results in people in
Speaker 1: their early stages of life twenties thirties a wheelchair bound,
Speaker 1: and so hopefully if it works in those patients, then
Speaker 1: it'll expand from there. I'm very interested in Alzheimer's. It's
Speaker 1: obviously a very hot area of people putting a lot
Speaker 1: of money into research on that. You said that you
Speaker 1: had taken some mice who have learned something when young
Speaker 1: but forgotten it, and you're able to rejuvenate their brain
Speaker 1: in such a way to exist cells where they got
Speaker 1: the memories back. Am I understanding that correctly? Yeah? Weak incredible, now,
Speaker 1: have you? Yeah, it does sound incredible when you put
Speaker 1: it that way. But in my libe, it's just what
Speaker 1: we do. We just we like to say we make
Speaker 1: the impossible possible. That was like your version of beyonces
Speaker 1: I woke up this way. It's like, that's just what
Speaker 1: we do. That's awesome. I love it. It is it is,
Speaker 1: It is normal. In the daily workings of the lab.
Speaker 1: We have to kick ourselves sometimes to remind episodes. But
Speaker 1: that's what we can do, is we can drive aging
Speaker 1: forwards in a mouse or just let time take its course.
Speaker 1: We can accelerate aging because we now understand what we think,
Speaker 1: We understand what drives the process, and we built mice
Speaker 1: that we can turn on aging more rapidly and that
Speaker 1: that speeds up research. It's not we don't it's the fun.
Speaker 1: Of course. It also tells us that we're probably right
Speaker 1: about the aging process. And then we also engineer the
Speaker 1: mice so that we can turn on our reprogramming system
Speaker 1: that reverses aging in the brand specifically now, the paper
Speaker 1: that we published on the cover of Nature in December
Speaker 1: twenty twenty was reversing the age of the eye, and
Speaker 1: we targeted the optic nerve. We rejuvenated and reverse the
Speaker 1: age of the optic nerve and those old blind mice
Speaker 1: could see again. Securing blindness was just the beginning. We've
Speaker 1: now moved into the whole brain and we've targeted the
Speaker 1: neurons in that system, and yes, what you said is correct.
Speaker 1: We can similarly reverse the age of those brains and
Speaker 1: the mice can learn again. Now, we're not exactly sure
Speaker 1: if their memories come back again. That will require a
Speaker 1: different set of experiments that we're going to do, but
Speaker 1: we do know for sure that both in those accelerated
Speaker 1: aging mice and naturally aged mice, we can rejuvenate their
Speaker 1: ability to learn. Now, the question that we're going to
Speaker 1: answer next is can you treat a Alzheimer's defective brain
Speaker 1: and does that restore the ability to function again? And
Speaker 1: do the plaques and tangles and all the other crud
Speaker 1: that goes with the disease do they go away as well?
Speaker 1: And my bed my hypothesis, as we should call it,
Speaker 1: is that the brain will actually become younger and younger
Speaker 1: as well. And that's what we saw with the eye.
Speaker 1: You couldn't tell the difference between the treated old eye
Speaker 1: that was rejuvenated and the functioning structure of a young eye.
Speaker 1: So it all goes back and all the crowd and
Speaker 1: the bad stuff with aging vanishes, and hopefully that's true
Speaker 1: in our brain experience too. I mean, look, this does
Speaker 1: sound incredible to someone not working in the lab every
Speaker 1: single day, But I also think about ethical issues, which
Speaker 1: I'm sure you think about a lot, and you talk
Speaker 1: to ethicists and uh, philosophers of biology I think are
Speaker 1: real you know, some of that literature is relevant here
Speaker 1: as well. Let's say we get to the point where
Speaker 1: we're able to reset reset everyone anyone's entire epigenome. Let's
Speaker 1: say who, But there's only limited number of people who
Speaker 1: who that? Who can get that? That service is not
Speaker 1: you know, democratized. How does society decide who is worthy
Speaker 1: of getting a longer next and we're talking not talking
Speaker 1: about it, just a little bit of a longer life.
Speaker 1: What if we get to the point where, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, there's like two classes of humans. There are
Speaker 1: those that are destined you know, to kind of live
Speaker 1: to eighty one hundred and those that are going to
Speaker 1: live to a thousand. You know what, when we think
Speaker 1: about a thousand years from now, when we have if
Speaker 1: we have these two classes of humans if it's not
Speaker 1: completely democratized. You know, this just raised lots of ethical issues.
Speaker 1: So what I'm sure you've thought, You've thought about this
Speaker 1: a bit, and it's one of some of your thoughts
Speaker 1: on this. Yeah, well, every day I think about this.
Speaker 1: There's no way I'm going to let that happen. No way,
Speaker 1: it's not going to be the future. I was talking
Speaker 1: to a movie producer yesterday about making a movie about that.
Speaker 1: It'll stay as science fiction if I have anything to
Speaker 1: say about it. Now that the treatments, often new technologies
Speaker 1: cost more. The Wright brothers playing in a plane used
Speaker 1: to be much more expensive than for the elite going
Speaker 1: in a rocket. Of course is you need a lot
Speaker 1: of money. But the idea is to bring the cost down,
Speaker 1: and that's what I'm going to do. We're working now
Speaker 1: in my lab to take what is currently a gene
Speaker 1: therapy to reverse aging, to make it into appeal that
Speaker 1: might cost a few cents a day, and you give
Speaker 1: that to somebody for a month, they go back five years,
Speaker 1: give it to another couple of months ago, bout ten years.
Speaker 1: And we actually now know that at least in the
Speaker 1: mouse experiments, that that does reset the body. You don't
Speaker 1: need more treatment, and then you just age out again,
Speaker 1: and then eventually you're just rinst and a repeat and
Speaker 1: keep cycling back. And we don't know how many cycles
Speaker 1: you can do, but hopefully it's himebooks we'll see. We
Speaker 1: also are excited that actually just today we got great
Speaker 1: data that showed that any concerns about safety were not valid,
Speaker 1: and so we're pushing forward quickly and safely as we
Speaker 1: can into treating humans. In the next couple of years,
Speaker 1: we're going to be treating some animals just to make
Speaker 1: sure it's some extra safety. You have to do that
Speaker 1: the government requires it. Of course, what about the two classes,
Speaker 1: so you know, I want to bring the cost down
Speaker 1: to where everybody on the planet can afford it. There's
Speaker 1: a drug called net form in which is given to
Speaker 1: take diabetics, which only I do take that, yes, because
Speaker 1: there's a lot of evidence from looking at tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of diabetics who have taken this drug that it's very,
Speaker 1: very safe and that it seems to protect susceptible people
Speaker 1: from cancer, heart disease, frailty, and Alzheimer's disease. So for
Speaker 1: a few cents a day, that's for something that has
Speaker 1: almost no risk. Hey, it's a no brainer in my book,
Speaker 1: but a lot of physicians, most physicians are hesitant to
Speaker 1: prescribe a drug for type two diabetes to someone like
Speaker 1: me who doesn't yet have type two diabetes. That's another story,
Speaker 1: but I think that that's the wrong way to view medicine.
Speaker 1: But when it comes to the two societies, it could
Speaker 1: happen if the gene therapy is the only treatment that
Speaker 1: becomes available because the gene therapies are expensive, there's no
Speaker 1: denying that. But what's exciting to tell you about is
Speaker 1: that there are hundreds of labs who are now working
Speaker 1: on what we've just discovered, the ability to reverse aging
Speaker 1: by reprogramming the epigenum. Somebody is going to make a
Speaker 1: breakthrough and it's going to become very cheap to reprogram
Speaker 1: the body and hopefully very safe as well. So I'm
Speaker 1: not worried about that dystopian future. It's very unlikely that
Speaker 1: it's going to stay expensive for long. I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to think through all the psychological implications as well. You know,
Speaker 1: a big part of people's meaning in life is their
Speaker 1: ability to struggle and their ability to overcome struggle. I
Speaker 1: see that they're on the horizon. Maybe some pills that
Speaker 1: will mimic fasting and the kind of benefits of that.
Speaker 1: Will there be pills someday that mimic exercise, Like, are
Speaker 1: we going to make really lazy humans that live a
Speaker 1: thousand but have no meaning in their lives anymore? We
Speaker 1: have a pill that it lets you learn everything immediately.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you think about this too. Do we don't
Speaker 1: want to strip too much of what it means to
Speaker 1: be human, you know, yeah, yeah, you're right. We do
Speaker 1: need some adversity, and that actually right now, the best
Speaker 1: way to live a long time is to give your
Speaker 1: body some adversity. That's what exercising being a bit hungry
Speaker 1: during the day is all about. But can we mimic
Speaker 1: that in a pill? Will? I believe we already are.
Speaker 1: I'm taking the ENEMM molecule, which in mice literally in
Speaker 1: the mat exercise, those mice were running on a treadmill
Speaker 1: because they were physically fit without having exercised before. I'm
Speaker 1: extremely fit on a treadmill and I don't do a
Speaker 1: lot of exercise. So you know, at least based on
Speaker 1: an end of one experiment, which is not valid, and
Speaker 1: some friends of mine who do run marathons, who have
Speaker 1: seen at least these anecdotal changes in their body and
Speaker 1: their time funt of times that we could already be
Speaker 1: there to have these exercise pills. So let's say we
Speaker 1: do have that. What does that mean, Well, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean it's an excuse to just sit on a couch
Speaker 1: and eat potato chips and watch movies. Because if you
Speaker 1: want the best bang for the buck, and we know
Speaker 1: this from the mouth from the mouse experiments, if you
Speaker 1: run those mice that also get the pill of the
Speaker 1: water with the molecule, they run even further. Those were
Speaker 1: the ones that broke the machine. We wear a treadmill
Speaker 1: that stopped running in our lab because they just kept running.
Speaker 1: The software wasn't written for mice to ever run more
Speaker 1: than three kilometers. So yeah, it's not an excuse. You know,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't mind not having to exercise so much. It
Speaker 1: is painful to do that. What I thought you were
Speaker 1: going to get to Scott was, if you're going to
Speaker 1: live along time, does that take the meaning out of life?
Speaker 1: It's totally against what I believe in. I do not
Speaker 1: think that the agency of life and the enjoyment of
Speaker 1: life has much to do with how many years you
Speaker 1: have just to be a knowledge that it's finitely sufficient.
Speaker 1: Let's use an example and I'll turn the question over
Speaker 1: to you. If you could live two hundred years, would
Speaker 1: you be sitting here enjoying this conversation any No, I
Speaker 1: really I think that if you waved a magic wand
Speaker 1: or you like and you're like Scott, I just reset
Speaker 1: your whole epy genome. I think I actually would be
Speaker 1: more motivated and excited to do as much as I
Speaker 1: possibly can in my life, because that means that I
Speaker 1: would have double the potential capacity to make an impact
Speaker 1: on the world. It actually would affect my psychology. It
Speaker 1: would affect psychology. I think about this all the time
Speaker 1: because I think a big part of sometimes I get
Speaker 1: sad and and not depression level, but I really do
Speaker 1: kind of feel unmotivated and sad some moments because there's
Speaker 1: such a bittersweet nature to the briefness of it, and
Speaker 1: it's so hard for me to decide, you know, out
Speaker 1: of all the choices that I can make in a day,
Speaker 1: you know, it can be overwhelming to be like, which
Speaker 1: choices do I make in this short short life for
Speaker 1: living that are going to have the biggest impact. It's
Speaker 1: too much stress. It would alleviate that stress to a
Speaker 1: certain degree. Yeah, well, you and I are not normal individuals.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of people who have extremely tough lives
Speaker 1: and have gone into careers that are unfulfilling or difficult,
Speaker 1: even painful, brutle. So what I would I've said that
Speaker 1: there should be something called a skilled vertical where everybody
Speaker 1: gets paid to retrain for two or three years. And
Speaker 1: if life is that long, you can do that many times.
Speaker 1: And if you get into the wrong career or you're
Speaker 1: born into poverty and couldn't get out the first thirty
Speaker 1: forty fifty years, you have a chance at another life.
Speaker 1: And everybody should be given a chance to do what
Speaker 1: they love and find a purpose more. Oh, I completely agree.
Speaker 1: And you know that's another thing too. I would. I
Speaker 1: would definitely like every fifty years, I would switch careers.
Speaker 1: That'd be a comedian. That's another dream of mine as
Speaker 1: being a stand up comedian. Someday I have dreams of,
Speaker 1: you know, going back as I used to be an
Speaker 1: opera singer. Yeah, anyway we can, we can, you know,
Speaker 1: just change to have a full life, hold on you
Speaker 1: were an opera singer. Yeah, I was a professional opera
Speaker 1: singer that actually at Carnegie mell And I stayed opera,
Speaker 1: computer science, and cognitive science. That was an interesting combination. Yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely not a normal individual. No, that's amazing. Have you
Speaker 1: have a song on there? Yeah? Well I did release
Speaker 1: some some tapes of some like stars from my amis
Speaker 1: that I sang in college and things, and I did
Speaker 1: release that on Twitter about a year or two ago,
Speaker 1: and people seem to really like it and that was fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to check it out. Oh yeah, I'll send you.
Speaker 1: I'll send you a recording of Missinging Stars. The really
Speaker 1: frustrating thing is there's so many things one can do
Speaker 1: in one's life. And I always thought to myself, I
Speaker 1: did I thought about it as a kid, I said,
Speaker 1: I don't want to live one life. Why can't I
Speaker 1: live fifty lives in one body? You know, because it's
Speaker 1: just so short, you know, like like like who says
Speaker 1: I have to live one life? You know? So that's
Speaker 1: that's what motivated me in college. But then when you
Speaker 1: get older, you start to realize there are constraints when
Speaker 1: you're when you're younger and more idealistic. Maybe you don't
Speaker 1: see such constraints, but yeah, yeah, I was talking to
Speaker 1: this the Sounded movie producer. I'm very successful when you
Speaker 1: could argue the most successful person, and they said that
Speaker 1: they get depressed thinking that they will not achieve all
Speaker 1: of the ideas that they have in currently, that life
Speaker 1: is too short to just to make use of all
Speaker 1: of these ideas, whether it's movies and music, new projects,
Speaker 1: and that's sad. And that's the reason we were talking
Speaker 1: is too Maybe maybe we can figure something out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. You know, you have mentioned that there's
Speaker 1: another revolution taking place in terms of technology and our
Speaker 1: ability to collect data. Very very interest in that because
Speaker 1: that really will change that the face of medicine rate.
Speaker 1: You know, right now you go ask your doctor for
Speaker 1: a blood test for a full panel and they'll say, well,
Speaker 1: do you have the preconditions? Do you have this? This?
Speaker 1: Then I know then I can't let you take the
Speaker 1: blood test. Hopefully there's a future where we're not held
Speaker 1: back by such silly roles. Well, yeah, it's all about money. Really.
Speaker 1: The insurance companies don't want to pay for things that
Speaker 1: are currently at present unnecessary. Now they may ward off
Speaker 1: of disease twenty thirty years from now, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: come into the calculations apparently, So I insist that my
Speaker 1: doctor give me tests. There are two ways to do it. Actually,
Speaker 1: you can just badge your doctor and say I want
Speaker 1: this and this. The problem is that you need to
Speaker 1: know what to ask for, and most people don't have
Speaker 1: time or the knowledge to do that. Alternatively, and this
Speaker 1: is in full disclosure a company that I work with.
Speaker 1: They're at least in the US, but actually globally you
Speaker 1: can do this. You can go to inside tracker dot
Speaker 1: com and this is a blood testing service that will
Speaker 1: come to your house, or you go to quest or
Speaker 1: lab Core in the US and they will analyze your data.
Speaker 1: A doctor will look at it. There's an AI system
Speaker 1: that will look at you compared to one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: other people and give recommendations as to how to optimize
Speaker 1: your health. And they also tell you by luge curses.
Speaker 1: Their product at an inside Tracker is it called inner age,
Speaker 1: but they do it from They measure forty three parameters
Speaker 1: in the blood and eighteen of those are known to
Speaker 1: associate with different lengths of longevity and help and they
Speaker 1: use that to then tell you eat this, take that,
Speaker 1: do this, And I actually have been doing it for
Speaker 1: about twelve years and since I started doing it, I've
Speaker 1: been getting younger every year. I'm one of the early
Speaker 1: investors in the company, so you know that's in full
Speaker 1: disclosure as well. It's slowly a conflict. But there's nobody
Speaker 1: like it in the world that does it. So that's
Speaker 1: why I talk about them so much. Well, you have
Speaker 1: to measure things. We've been going too long just taking
Speaker 1: things and hoping for the best. And so with these
Speaker 1: new tests, the one that I'm doing, the mouth swab
Speaker 1: the doctor syncla dot com on and the blood test
Speaker 1: at inside tracker dot com, then we will know if
Speaker 1: supplements are helping or not, lifestyle changes are helping, and
Speaker 1: that's important because we wouldn't drive a car without a dashboard.
Speaker 1: You need the feedback to know what's working. And it's
Speaker 1: also motivational. Right you're with a psychologist, Do you understand
Speaker 1: that without negative or positive feedback, people just give up eventually. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very true. But tell me more about the future
Speaker 1: of like data tracking. Will we be able to track
Speaker 1: on a second by second basis throughout your entire life?
Speaker 1: Collect a multitude of data. I realized you had like
Speaker 1: a biosticker at some point. Are you wearing it right
Speaker 1: now or your biosticker? No? Not today. I took it
Speaker 1: off because there was a photo shoot for my upcoming
Speaker 1: podcast that I'm putting out. But this is normally on
Speaker 1: my chest and I would press it. It's a little
Speaker 1: inch by inch thin sticker. It's about a non button,
Speaker 1: flashes green, connects with your phone and is measuring the
Speaker 1: body at one thousand times per second for vibrations, for heart,
Speaker 1: for temperature, for motion, and actually motion of the body
Speaker 1: is much more informative than waving a ring or a
Speaker 1: watch around. That's quite different. And it's also FDA approved,
Speaker 1: which is night and day compared to these other devices,
Speaker 1: which means a doctor can put one of these on
Speaker 1: you and send you home from hospital a week or
Speaker 1: two early and just monitor you at home, setting a
Speaker 1: lot of money for the hospital. And so this is
Speaker 1: going to be the future. I just have a front
Speaker 1: row seat on that. So when I talk about this,
Speaker 1: people say, oh, you know what, I want to be
Speaker 1: monitored constantly. But think about the trade off. What you're
Speaker 1: getting is like you're getting you adopted to have an
Speaker 1: alert if you're going to have a heart attack, you're
Speaker 1: being told if you are developing a cold or a flu.
Speaker 1: If you have an upcoming flu, you could go get
Speaker 1: medicine that will stop it from coming. They might say, oh,
Speaker 1: you can develop in shiet ales. You need to quickly
Speaker 1: get the vaccine, which you need to take very early
Speaker 1: on in the course of that disease. We will always
Speaker 1: in the future have a guardian angel for help as
Speaker 1: I call it, that may put things like heart attacks,
Speaker 1: make those things history. Also, you could imagine it's type
Speaker 1: to algorithms like inside Tracker or my test, the age
Speaker 1: test from the mouth swap. And what you're doing is
Speaker 1: having a constant view of your physiology, your age, your
Speaker 1: blood buyer markers. Eventually, these are the chips under the
Speaker 1: skin that constantly wantit you and you can make pills
Speaker 1: at home from a machine that you can have in
Speaker 1: your kitchen or have them airlifted by a drone in
Speaker 1: an emergency. That's the what we live in and just
Speaker 1: those technologies Alloyd will extend I span five to ten years.
Speaker 1: Not to mention the lifestyle changes that I talk about
Speaker 1: in my book and we touched upon today. Yeah, you know, this,
Speaker 1: this idea of weird, I keep I keep going back
Speaker 1: to it throughout this whole There's like a thread running
Speaker 1: through this whole podcast because I actually the prior guest
Speaker 1: on my show was my colleague Colin to Young, and
Speaker 1: the whole conversation was how the field of psychology is
Speaker 1: rethinking mental illness and rethinking social deviants, rethinking mental illness
Speaker 1: as some sort of just deviations from normality, just like
Speaker 1: completely rethinking all that. Our field of psychiatry is going
Speaker 1: through a very significant change right now to more dimensional
Speaker 1: classifications and not not having social deviants as like an
Speaker 1: automatic indicator. You know, I tend to walk around my
Speaker 1: friends think my friends make fun of me. You know,
Speaker 1: I walk around and I carry a bag with me,
Speaker 1: Like even going out to the dance club and I'll
Speaker 1: bring my blood pressure monitor. I'll bring my cardia cardia
Speaker 1: EKG sixth lead machine. Now look, I have like the
Speaker 1: oxygen monitor, and people like, what's how you're doing with
Speaker 1: all this stuff? You know, we're out of a dance
Speaker 1: dance club. Now look, now look, I know it's it's
Speaker 1: no like, I know it's weird. I know it's and
Speaker 1: I'm aware that a lot of things I do are
Speaker 1: people call me quirky. Okay, quirky. I appreciate that more
Speaker 1: than weird. But I just feel like there's a future where, like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's maybe weird now, but but but you're
Speaker 1: you're saying, you're making me feel better. First of all,
Speaker 1: there's a future where it's gonna be like, yeah, obviously
Speaker 1: we're collecting data and maybe not in such clunky ways
Speaker 1: as we have now. Hopefully it'll be more discreet, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, ways of tracking data, but they can let
Speaker 1: us know, you know, if there's going to be you know,
Speaker 1: far far down the horizon potential issue. I mean, there
Speaker 1: should be. We should be able to detect cancer much
Speaker 1: much sooner, or the potential for the growth of these
Speaker 1: certain cells mutations much much sooner than we're currently doing. Right,
Speaker 1: We're gonna we're gonna walk back someday and look at
Speaker 1: the very archaic you know that we didn't. Right, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's a revolution. It's happening right now. You can already
Speaker 1: get these tests if you know the right people, that
Speaker 1: you can detect cancer years before it would even show
Speaker 1: up as anything as an illness and kill those cells
Speaker 1: with chemotherapy or you know, oncology approach. That's the future.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's here, the technologies here. Rolling it out
Speaker 1: is going to take a few years, but the next
Speaker 1: five years, we're going to barely recognize medicine as it's
Speaker 1: practice now. And like you say, looking back, we're going
Speaker 1: to think that the idea of going to a doctor
Speaker 1: once a year for annual physical and they ask you
Speaker 1: to cough and ask you how you're feeling, that's medieval.
Speaker 1: That's ridiculous. We should always be monitored for for illness.
Speaker 1: And the technology is already here. It's just a matter
Speaker 1: of rolling it out, integrating it. So you're like from
Speaker 1: the future. You're like someone from like the future who's
Speaker 1: taken a time machine and come back like, oh, you're weird, David.
Speaker 1: But it's like in the future, we look at the
Speaker 1: humans today as weird, probably like they're probably we did
Speaker 1: it time we do. I have not been to the future,
Speaker 1: and if I had, I would not admit it. I'd
Speaker 1: have a lot more money if I'd come from the future,
Speaker 1: trust me. But the truth is that I spend my
Speaker 1: day imagining the future. Yeah, but what I've been trying
Speaker 1: to figure out is what's controlling all of those things.
Speaker 1: I like the idea that there's fundamental truths in biology
Speaker 1: equations that are true. That a yeast cell is going
Speaker 1: to age for the same fundamental reason we age. We're
Speaker 1: all living things. What's going wrong and what the main
Speaker 1: clue happened in nineteen ninety five actually, when we realized
Speaker 1: that these atoms are important for the aging process in
Speaker 1: yeast cells that we use for baking and through it.
Speaker 1: Now the two winds. They got their name because of
Speaker 1: a gene called SIR two in this YaST cell, and
Speaker 1: it's an acronym silent information regulator number two SIR. And
Speaker 1: you might notice that I is very important information. So
Speaker 1: the regulation of information was controlling the aging process it used.
Speaker 1: What it was doing was stabilizing the epigenome, basically telling
Speaker 1: the E cell which genes should be on and off
Speaker 1: to be healthy. And that became just regulated over time.
Speaker 1: And one of the drivers of that misregulation and mess
Speaker 1: up was DNA damage. And so now the theory pass
Speaker 1: forward to twenty twenty one is that we have a
Speaker 1: lot of evidence from animals people that this is true
Speaker 1: for ourselves, that DNA damage drives changes to the epigenome,
Speaker 1: and that leads to cells losing their identity. So what
Speaker 1: I'm saying is that at the tippy top cause of aging,
Speaker 1: it boils down to a loss of information. I could
Speaker 1: write an equation for you. It's basically the entropy loss
Speaker 1: of information. So what information am I really talking about.
Speaker 1: It's not the genetic information that we struggle with. There
Speaker 1: are mutations, for sure, going out in the side, you'll
Speaker 1: get mutation. But what's really driving aging. We find, in
Speaker 1: my mind, is that it's the other type of information,
Speaker 1: the epigenetic information, which are the systems that read the DNA.
Speaker 1: I think of it as the software of the body
Speaker 1: that gets corrupted over time. I've used the analogy that
Speaker 1: if people can remember a compact disc, the DNA would
Speaker 1: be the music and codeed and the software the epigene
Speaker 1: is the reader of that music, and over time you
Speaker 1: get scratches on the CD, so you can't read the
Speaker 1: information that well. And so what we've discovered was that
Speaker 1: not only can we accelerate that process by scratching up
Speaker 1: the CD or causing DNA damage that accelerates this process
Speaker 1: in animals and watch them get hold, but we found
Speaker 1: that there's a backup copy of that information. Essentially, you
Speaker 1: can either polish the CD or another analogy would be
Speaker 1: you just reboot the software and now the system runs
Speaker 1: like it should. And that's how we got those blind
Speaker 1: nice to see again. That's incredible. Yeah, Well, often people
Speaker 1: wonder how is it possible? How could it be so simple?
Speaker 1: And it was a lot of trial and error. We
Speaker 1: failed for many years at this, but we hit upon
Speaker 1: a combination of using three genes that we turn on
Speaker 1: when we're embryos and keep us young when we're embryos,
Speaker 1: but we don't use them when we're adults. And so
Speaker 1: we turned on those three genes in the mouse's eye.
Speaker 1: We're in human cells or those mini brands, and we
Speaker 1: find that those three genes are sufficient to reset the
Speaker 1: age of the cell in a safe way. The cells
Speaker 1: don't become cancers, they don't lose their age back to zero.
Speaker 1: They go back about seventy percent in age and stop.
Speaker 1: And then we take away the system. We turn it off,
Speaker 1: and the cells and the eyes age out again. And
Speaker 1: it was that simple. And the cool thing about it
Speaker 1: is a that there is a backup copy. We didn't
Speaker 1: know where. If there was, we still don't know where
Speaker 1: it is. By the way. We just know it exists
Speaker 1: somewhere in the south, and that it was really simple
Speaker 1: once you know how to do it. And what this
Speaker 1: really means is it's like the right process. It's you
Speaker 1: dream a flight for ten thousand years, maybe a million years,
Speaker 1: and all you need to do is to do a
Speaker 1: bit of math, strap on an engine, do some wind
Speaker 1: tunnel experiments, and you do it. And once you've done it,
Speaker 1: then you know the future is inevitable. It just depends
Speaker 1: on how long it takes to build a seven four
Speaker 1: seven and go to the moon. But you know that
Speaker 1: it's going to be possible. Well, what's the biggest hurdle
Speaker 1: right now? To be being able to boot up that
Speaker 1: backup again, the full backup of like the whole epigenome,
Speaker 1: you know, a full body research. Yeah, I mean that
Speaker 1: that'd be nice. Well, I mean that's what we work
Speaker 1: towards in my life every day. This is our goal.
Speaker 1: Can I like reset only like the good bits? Can
Speaker 1: we like leave out you know, like that time I
Speaker 1: was an asshole you know in college? Like, can we
Speaker 1: just like not reset that one? Yeah? Yeah, well I
Speaker 1: think we can. We're going to retain our memories. We're
Speaker 1: going to retain our wisdom and our current personality. That's
Speaker 1: the prediction. But we're going to regain the ability to
Speaker 1: think and store memories liking like we did when we
Speaker 1: were young. And that's true for other parts of the body.
Speaker 1: Muscle strength. We just achieved muscle age reversal. We have
Speaker 1: age reversal of skin, so that we're ticking off the
Speaker 1: organs one by one and tissues. But we've also done
Speaker 1: the whole animal. We can express as we say, turn
Speaker 1: on these three embryonic genes in the whole animal, and
Speaker 1: we know for sure that it's safe in those animals.
Speaker 1: We turned it on at high levels for a year
Speaker 1: and didn't turn it off. Usually the treatments only four
Speaker 1: to six weeks eight weeks of the most, but we
Speaker 1: kept it on for a year. No sign of any
Speaker 1: adverse effects in those mice. Now the holy grail would
Speaker 1: be to know if those mice live longer or they younger.
Speaker 1: We don't know, because the journal and the reviewers of
Speaker 1: our paper made us kill them to check on the
Speaker 1: number of tumors inside, and it turns out they had,
Speaker 1: if anything, a trend towards having fewer tumors than the
Speaker 1: untreated or mice. But now we're repeating that experiment. But
Speaker 1: one of the problems with current technology is evenly distributing
Speaker 1: gene therapies across the body. It tends to accumulate in
Speaker 1: the liver mainly. And so give us another couple of
Speaker 1: years and we should be able to do that, and
Speaker 1: then we can do that experiment in a really clean way,
Speaker 1: and hopefully we can keep resetting those mice and make
Speaker 1: a mouse live for a couple of decades instead of
Speaker 1: just two years. Yeah, I saw it. With this three
Speaker 1: gene combination. You said you can reset cells by in
Speaker 1: my seventy five percent was a number I heard, and
Speaker 1: you can measure the age of the cell and the body.
Speaker 1: So like measuring that, you found that there was not
Speaker 1: like a full reset, but seventy five percent a bad Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's even more remarkable than that. So we do use
Speaker 1: mark chemical marks that control the epigeneon as a clock.
Speaker 1: Stephen Horrobath that UCLA is the guy that gave his
Speaker 1: name to that horrorbad clock, as we call it. But
Speaker 1: what is exciting about what we can do is we
Speaker 1: can measure those changes this cheeks world. But what we
Speaker 1: also know is that that's just the an indicator of
Speaker 1: what's truly going on in the cell, and that is
Speaker 1: that the music of our lives on that CD, truly,
Speaker 1: that the music of our lives gets replayed from a
Speaker 1: younger state. So what does that mean. We've got twenty
Speaker 1: thousand genes. Let's say there's two thousands that become misregulated
Speaker 1: during aging. We found that the majority of those get
Speaker 1: reset back to the level that they should be when
Speaker 1: the eye was young. So think about this, that there
Speaker 1: are genes that come on when they shouldn't during aging
Speaker 1: in the eye and genes that got shut off when
Speaker 1: they shouldn't during age in the eye, and the reset
Speaker 1: restored those exactly near exactly to where they should be.
Speaker 1: So that cell somehow knows that a gene that came
Speaker 1: on should go off, and a gene got shut off
Speaker 1: should come back on. How does it know that? We
Speaker 1: don't know that. That's what we're chasing right now. I
Speaker 1: think that's the Nobel prize if someone wants to get it. See,
Speaker 1: this is the thing that's very interesting. You know, some
Speaker 1: people have argued, critics have said, well, there is a
Speaker 1: biological limit how long we can live. You know this
Speaker 1: some of This is kind of just pipe dream kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. One twenty two or whatever some people put
Speaker 1: a number on it. You've made the case that there's
Speaker 1: no in theory, you know, in principle limit to how
Speaker 1: long we can live. Isn't it possible that, I mean,
Speaker 1: can't we leave open the possibility that there will be
Speaker 1: such a discovery that that causes a real phase shift
Speaker 1: in our whole understanding of aging. And really, does you
Speaker 1: know not not just take it an extra fifteen years,
Speaker 1: but opens up a window to like every fifteen years
Speaker 1: going to the doctor and like getting something that a
Speaker 1: therapy that makes that reverts back fifteen years. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I planned to make that future happen within our lifetimes.
Speaker 1: I mean, you give me chills. You give me chills,
Speaker 1: But it's you know, what do you say? I'm sure
Speaker 1: you have. You have your critics right who say that's
Speaker 1: impossible and possible. Well, they used to. I used to
Speaker 1: get in trouble for being the guy that was quoted
Speaker 1: to say the first person of the one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years is already born. But though they've quietened down,
Speaker 1: not with this paper that we just showed you can
Speaker 1: reverse aging and reset the body. It's harder for people
Speaker 1: to argue that we might be experiencing a seizement shift
Speaker 1: in being able to control the aging process. I'll give
Speaker 1: you give you an example how things have changed. It
Speaker 1: was just five years ago that I gave a talk
Speaker 1: at Stanford University and I was hesitant to use the
Speaker 1: word age reversal. It had never been said in academia,
Speaker 1: at least not amongst the elite scientists. And I did it. Anyway,
Speaker 1: five years later, everyone talks about age reversal if you're
Speaker 1: not talking about aging, so you're actually getting left behind
Speaker 1: in the field. So that's a seismic change in the
Speaker 1: way we think and talk about this process. And a
Speaker 1: lot of scientists coming in from outside. There are at
Speaker 1: least four Nobel Prize winners I know that are now
Speaker 1: working on this problem, and there's plans for thousands of
Speaker 1: scientists to be funded to work on this exact problem
Speaker 1: of how we set the body. So you know, I
Speaker 1: may not succeed. I hope I do it, but someone's
Speaker 1: going to succeed, and it's not going to be another
Speaker 1: fifty years into the future. It would be shocked if
Speaker 1: it took that long. But we are in a time
Speaker 1: when those critics are being less and less vocal, and
Speaker 1: I think it's because they've had a oh crap moment,
Speaker 1: which is there isn't a limit to biology. I mean
Speaker 1: that no one has ever proven me wrong that there's
Speaker 1: some limit. That the oldest person to live is one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty two. But that's like saying humans could
Speaker 1: never go faster than horseback riding. Of course, there's a
Speaker 1: limit break through the technology. We can achieve anything that
Speaker 1: we set our minds to. There is no limit to
Speaker 1: human ingenuity, and there are plenty of species that live
Speaker 1: much longer than us, that are warm blooded and give
Speaker 1: milk to their babies and are conscious, and of course
Speaker 1: talking about whales. So this is not it's not miracle,
Speaker 1: it's not crazy science, it's not a dream. It's actually
Speaker 1: we see it in the world around us. It's just
Speaker 1: a matter of technology and investment to make it happen.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna also rethink how we how we perhaps
Speaker 1: live our lives, and what choices we make when we're younger.
Speaker 1: I'm really fascinated with this idea of antagonistic piotropy, which
Speaker 1: George Williams in the fifties came up with I'm just
Speaker 1: I'm I'm utterly obsessed with this idea. And I know,
Speaker 1: I know you can you know what's good for you
Speaker 1: when you're young and cause problems when you're older. But
Speaker 1: it is the reverse I wanted to ask you, is
Speaker 1: is there a reverse kind of a fact of that
Speaker 1: where sometimes we can make decisions when we're younger that
Speaker 1: are that hurt us, but that will benefit us, you know,
Speaker 1: when we're much older, kind of the reverse of that, like,
Speaker 1: will we be able to make decisions and know what
Speaker 1: things that we can do that which don't seem so
Speaker 1: pleasurable in the moment, you know, for twenty thirty years
Speaker 1: when we're young, but will really really save it up
Speaker 1: for us to live a much longer life. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: well currently without lifespans, we already know that if you
Speaker 1: epstein is when you're young, in your thirties for sure,
Speaker 1: maybe even in your twenties ill rewards. I'm talking about
Speaker 1: not overeating and even skipping meals when you're younger that
Speaker 1: will have long term benefits. I wish that I had
Speaker 1: gone to essentially one meal a day when I was twenty.
Speaker 1: I think that would have added five to ten years
Speaker 1: to my current trajectory. Instead, I skipped breakfast in my
Speaker 1: twenties and didn't start skipping lunch fully until I was fifty.
Speaker 1: I did cut out desserts when I was forty, so
Speaker 1: that you can suffer at when you're younger, and the
Speaker 1: science says that that will reap rewards later in life.
Speaker 1: It's true for exercise, which many people don't find pleasurable too.
Speaker 1: I think you could speak better than me about practicing
Speaker 1: good mental health as well, because big stressed and releasing
Speaker 1: cards all into the body is pro aging and sleep.
Speaker 1: Aging and the sleep cycle are intimately tied up. The
Speaker 1: thutuins control lifespan and your sleep patterns, so you want
Speaker 1: to make sure that they're in the best of condition. Well,
Speaker 1: that is something I did want to bring up with you,
Speaker 1: because you know, you're in the front lines of a
Speaker 1: certain literature and I'm on the front lines of a
Speaker 1: different kind of literature. And the kind of literature on
Speaker 1: the front lines on is showing very clearly that certain
Speaker 1: kind of meditative practices really do have an effect on epigenetics.
Speaker 1: You know there is and to me this is very interesting,
Speaker 1: the extent which the mind can can cause longevity, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of kind of mind practice. Of course, we
Speaker 1: know that reduce stress in general is important. That's like
Speaker 1: a trite thing to say at this point, but I'm
Speaker 1: talking about certain kind of meditation practices you know, can
Speaker 1: can cause these kinds of epigenetic changes and and do
Speaker 1: effect our inner age. What what what one of these
Speaker 1: tests would would would would measure as our inner age.
Speaker 1: So you know, I can hold you up on that
Speaker 1: literature too. I can city papers. I'm sure. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you do know a bit about a bunch of them.
Speaker 1: I need help all the time. There's no way any
Speaker 1: one of us can keep up with the full scientific literature.
Speaker 1: So we'll support each other. And I need to learn
Speaker 1: more about how the effects with the brain on human aging.
Speaker 1: That what I can tell you is that in mice
Speaker 1: you can manipulate parts of the brain, that's the hypothalamus,
Speaker 1: which is at the base of the brain, that you
Speaker 1: actually can that is sufficient by reducing inflammation in that
Speaker 1: organ to extend up the lifespan of the animal, proving
Speaker 1: at least in mice, and I would say very likely
Speaker 1: in us that the brain is a central hub for
Speaker 1: long jeity. And I'm also very curious about the results
Speaker 1: where if you look epidemiologically at lives of people that
Speaker 1: live a long time, what do they have in common?
Speaker 1: And one common thread from the study at Harvard that
Speaker 1: was done since the nineteen thirties was that having a loyal,
Speaker 1: trustworthy partner was very important for lung journey and that
Speaker 1: we can only guess, but I'd be curious as to
Speaker 1: what you think might be going on there. So, so
Speaker 1: two things that are really incredible when you look at
Speaker 1: their effects on mortality rates and actually do a better
Speaker 1: job predicting mortality than all cause mortality of physical ailments combined.
Speaker 1: Our loneliness, you know. Loneliness is a bigger killer than obesity,
Speaker 1: you know, and high blood pressure. That's fascinating. But also
Speaker 1: the words that you use on Twitter. So I don't
Speaker 1: know if you're aware of that recent research, but there's
Speaker 1: this whole team when I was at University of Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: there right down the hall for me, so we would
Speaker 1: always talk to each other, the World Well Being Project,
Speaker 1: and they were able to look at county by county
Speaker 1: data on whether and classify whether or not the language
Speaker 1: that people used on Twitter predicted mortality rates of of
Speaker 1: a county by county level, and they found that negative
Speaker 1: like curse words and negative thinking and uh and and
Speaker 1: and and uh and lots of like angry aggressive kind
Speaker 1: of language was a better predictor of mortality rates than
Speaker 1: the entire everything combined, you know, physical And this is
Speaker 1: I think really dramatic and and I can send you
Speaker 1: this paper. It's a really, I think a profound paper
Speaker 1: suggesting that our kind of our positive thinking are kind
Speaker 1: of you know the contents of our mind may have
Speaker 1: a much bigger effect on activating some of these genes
Speaker 1: than than we have ever given them credit for in
Speaker 1: the past. Yeah, it would be interesting to see how
Speaker 1: we could test that hypothesis, because it's it's hard often
Speaker 1: to separate associations and make sure it's a close and effect.
Speaker 1: This is where my mind goes once course, of course,
Speaker 1: can we give can we give mice cell phones and
Speaker 1: see what they tweet and don't see how long they live? Well,
Speaker 1: this is the thing is that there's some things with
Speaker 1: my we can't ask mice to meditate, you know, there's
Speaker 1: some things that we just can't do on mice we
Speaker 1: can just have to do in humans. But it's just very,
Speaker 1: very clear that you know, having feeling like you're socially supported,
Speaker 1: feeling like you're valued, that you have some meaning in
Speaker 1: your life, some purpose to your life. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: the classic there's a classic study with people in elderly
Speaker 1: homes by a Harvard researcher Ellen Langer, finding that just
Speaker 1: giving older people a pot of a plant to take
Speaker 1: care of, they lived longer than the control condition of
Speaker 1: those that weren't given this thing to take care of.
Speaker 1: So things like that do suggest asked that the mind
Speaker 1: is so integrably intertwined with with our mortality. Well, if
Speaker 1: there's one thing I've done well in my mental state
Speaker 1: is to focus on the positive. Every day I wake
Speaker 1: up and I'm excited to be alive. I'll write to
Speaker 1: people through text wishing them a great day. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a really positive world that I live in. And
Speaker 1: it wasn't always like that. Like I said, when I
Speaker 1: was a teenager, I even had suicidal thoughts it was
Speaker 1: not worth living. And I've just slipped that around and
Speaker 1: said that I've seen my mum die, today's not so bad.
Speaker 1: Just be positive and it works. You really have to
Speaker 1: have often, you have to work at it because I
Speaker 1: think the mind likes to foment bad thoughts, but you
Speaker 1: can get over it. I'm living proof that that's possible.
Speaker 1: So hopeful. I think I'll end this interview today with
Speaker 1: this tweet, tweet that you wrote to experience happiness. Stop
Speaker 1: loving material things, love living things, especially ones that love
Speaker 1: you back. You know, I think that you know one
Speaker 1: of the one of the tragedies is that we have
Speaker 1: extra life span. But but levels of depression and anxiety
Speaker 1: and loneliness are skyrocketing. So just extending human life is
Speaker 1: not going to be the answer. We need to We
Speaker 1: need to work together. Brother psychologists need to work together
Speaker 1: with biology geneticists to have a whole body approach. In
Speaker 1: my opinion, and I just love the work that you're doing.
Speaker 1: It's so revolutionary. I want you to keep dreaming. And
Speaker 1: you know, do you have any parting sort of want
Speaker 1: to talk about any like upcoming exciting collaborations. It's all
Speaker 1: you're doing something with Stephen Frye. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you could talk about that. I saw your starting a
Speaker 1: podcast which looks great. Do you want to talk about
Speaker 1: any of this stuff? Well, Stephen will kill me if
Speaker 1: if I talk about it. But it is something that
Speaker 1: you would not expect the two of us to do together. Amazing.
Speaker 1: So I'm excited about that. I love comedy. The yeah,
Speaker 1: I know you're good at it. I can talk about
Speaker 1: so that the company that I'm building to democratize wellness
Speaker 1: and allow people to know their age and reverse it
Speaker 1: slow down, that I'm working furiously on. I'm excited about
Speaker 1: the biotech companies that are working on these drugs for
Speaker 1: the eye and the brain for the rest of the body,
Speaker 1: and you know, stay tuned and hopefully one of them,
Speaker 1: if not all, are going to have a big breakthrough.
Speaker 1: So it's a very busy life. I've got my second
Speaker 1: book that I'm writing, and my podcast I'm going to
Speaker 1: put out in an eight part series that's going to
Speaker 1: cover the big questions that everyone who's read my book
Speaker 1: and even those who haven't followed me on Twitter are
Speaker 1: begging me to get into details on it. There's a
Speaker 1: real thirst for facts now because it's hard to know
Speaker 1: who to trust. Most of the information is biased or
Speaker 1: complete lies. And guys like you, Andrew Schuberman, myself, like treatment.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of us Matt Walker now for sleep,
Speaker 1: women definitely need more women's scientists to step up reach
Speaker 1: out to me. I know how to do this. I
Speaker 1: help Andrew build up his and now he's helping me
Speaker 1: build up mind. This is a future where I'm excited
Speaker 1: because instead of hearing about science through a newspaper which
Speaker 1: used to be mangled and twisted and often negative and
Speaker 1: often equal handed, which is not true for science, the
Speaker 1: public can hear directly from US scientists who read the
Speaker 1: literature and even up to date can say, you know,
Speaker 1: it just came out yesterday, instead of the public waiting
Speaker 1: ten twenty years to actually learn about what's happening at
Speaker 1: the forefront. It's an exciting future. I feel really blessed
Speaker 1: to be able to be part of that and use
Speaker 1: my communication skills to help people live longering, better lives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: are weave by saying I feel great gratitude that my
Speaker 1: existence intersected with your existence in this brief period of
Speaker 1: the universe history. It was a really wonderful privilege for
Speaker 1: me to talk to you today, David, and I encourage
Speaker 1: you to keep dreaming and keep doing great research. So
Speaker 1: thank you for being my podcast today. Thanks Scott Well likewise,
Speaker 1: I want to say what you do is great I
Speaker 1: followed you and I just adore what you do and
Speaker 1: I know a lot of people appreciate it. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, thanks for listening to this episode of The
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way
Speaker 1: to something you heard, I encourage you to join in
Speaker 1: the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com. We're on our
Speaker 1: YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some
Speaker 1: videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well,
Speaker 1: so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being
Speaker 1: such a great supporter of the show, and tune in
Speaker 1: next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.