Episode 153: Age Reversal Fueled by AI

Hi, everybody. It's Dan Sullivan here, and this is the next podcast episode of Exponential Wisdom, and I'm here with... The person who goes out in the world and checks out and comes back and asked me to comment on a lot of stuff. One of the things that really got us going a dozen years ago, Peter, was the whole subject of longevity. which I've now modified to age reversal rather than longevity because it's more immediate, it's more accessible, and it's more measurable.

than longevity but my experience is that you're talking about hundreds of places who are producing humanoid robots, but I think the big thing is just the millions of investigations now of medicine and technology that can allow people to be healthy as they live longer, healthy and fit. energetic as they live longer and one of your great pathfinders in your investigations is david sinclair at harvard yeah and he's always coming up with great breakthroughs so what's the latest yeah

So David has become a dear friend in many different dimensions. Those of you who don't know him, he wrote an incredible book called Lifespan that I commend to people. His next book is coming out to follow on to that. So David runs a lab at Harvard Medical School and his real pioneering work is the whole field of epigenetic age reversal. And you're right, you know, longevity is interesting terminology.

But, you know, when I ask people how many folks want to live to 120, no one raises their hand because our vision of living that old is you're decrepit in a wheelchair. Have you lost your mind and you're drooling? And who wants that? And you don't know anybody who lived that long. Yeah. But the idea of age reversal, of can I reverse my age by decades? Do I've got the aesthetics, the cognition, the mobility?

I had, you know, 20 or 30 years younger. I think if you love your life and you love, you know, the world we're living in, who wouldn't want that? So I just did a... Two and a half hour deep dive podcast with David Sinclair on my Moonshots podcast. And one of the best ones ever, for me at least. And it was a state of the union on age reversal technologies.

And in particular, we talked about the work that David is doing in his lab at Harvard on age reversal. And here's the scoop. A lot of the age reversal work that's been done has been using... Three out of the four Yamanaka factors, these are transcription factors, that you would typically introduce to cells in your body using a viral, like an adeno-associated virus, a virus that injects these genes into the cells.

And, you know, the challenge there is it's expensive in the early days. It could be brought down in price orders of magnitude if you're making hundreds of millions or billions of doses, which is the hope that it's all demonetized.

The challenge is getting those transcription factors into all of the cells, your 40 trillion cells, your body. And so what David started on a journey in the last few years is to ask the question, are there... molecules, chemicals, call them supplements or drugs, that if you swallowed the pill, it would activate the right factors to cause epigenetic reversal.

And so what's new here is his use of AI, which has really materialized for all of us and for him over the last three years. And so what he did was he built an AI imaging system. that could look at a cell and determine, is this a cell from a 20-year-old or a 90-year-old? And very quickly make that assessment by just imaging it. And then what he started doing was using an AI to look at trillions, I think he said trillions, I know it's multiple billions, but it might be trillions of molecules.

to extrapolate which of these might have epigenetic reprogramming impact, and then actually try those molecules on these cells, and then look if it reverses the aging. They came up with 100 particular molecules. They tested them in mice. They found three molecules that actually reverse the epigenetic age, make the mice

look younger, feel younger, be stronger, all of the attributes that they measure. And this is from just a pill that they give them or a dose they give them on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, three pills a week. And after four weeks, they see a maximal age reversal. And they're looking at taking this into humans very shortly. So his belief is that within the next five to 10 years,

we're going to effectively have an age reversal pill that is going to enable us to have epigenetic reprogramming. So pretty extraordinary. You know, he's one of... the teams that has entered our $101 million age reversal XPRIZE, our HealthSpan XPRIZE. So super excited about that. Yeah, so let me pause on my soliloquy there, on my monologue.

Well, not using pill. I mean, I guess I take a fair dose of pills, supplements and everything like that. But there's a test that's called glycanage, and it's about 30 or 40 years old. And it just is based on a particular protein in the body that's connected to 40 other connectors, as I understand it. When I was 73, my biological age was 74. And then I worked with it over a period of time. And three years ago, I was 78.

Glycan age was 66 and now I'm 81 and my glycan age is 59. Love it. Okay. And my goal for 100 is that I have the health and fitness of a 50-year-old. You know, it's not extreme. People say, well, when are you going to stop? I said, when I get carded, I'll stop. I like that. I said, just almost to where they said, can we see some identification? Yeah. But the big thing, when we first went on the first longevity trip to Boston and to New Hampshire and to New Jersey and New York,

I was saying, you know, this is going to be the biggest industry in the world. And the reason is because this is the one thing that just about everybody wants, with the exception of some people who don't want to live anymore. But I think that the desire for youthfulness is the great aspiration for everybody. I think it's the largest market on the planet. When I'm on stages in front of family offices and wealthy individuals or the general public, and I say, listen,

I want you to imagine you're 80 years old, okay? Not you as an 80-year-old because you're atypical in that regard. Like you said, we bonded over this passion for longevity, over age reversal. If you're 80 years old and I said, listen, I can grant you 30 additional healthy years or can reverse your age by 30 years, what would you pay for that? The honest answer from everybody is the majority of their net worth. Yeah, sure. Warren Buffett was speaking at

where he went to school. And some student asked him the question, Mr. Buffett, is there anything that you'd give your entire fortune for? And Warren Buffett said, how old are you? 21. He said, I'd give my entire fortune for 21 knowing what I know now. Yes, so true. Yeah. So true. You read all the myths, you know, going back to the Greeks and every story, this desire for youthfulness. Yeah, I mean, this is so embedded in our DNA, I can't imagine that there's anything more prayerful.

As you know, Dan, you mentioned every year I run what I call my longevity platinum trip. And I gather the top 45, 50 scientists and entrepreneurs who are on the cutting edge of... this whole age reversal revolution, people who are... East Coast this year. Yeah, we're Boston, Cambridge, New Hampshire this year, the last five days of September. And we'll spend the weekend with David Sinclair, I'll be in his lab.

plugging in with him very deeply. And then with George Churchill, also at Harvard Medical School, and Dean Kamen and such. And every year you can just feel the up-leveling of the work. And it's crazy. You know, I can feel and see it. And like I say to people, your job right now, because we're entering this health span revolution, is don't die from something stupid before we get there. I've mentioned this, I think, in the past.

Sir Denis Asab is the CEO of DeepMind, who is a brilliant AI researcher, but with a bio background has said his objective is to cure all human disease within the next 10 years. And then you had Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, who said in January of this past year that he expects... that AI could lead to doubling the human lifespan in the next 10 years. So it's not just you and me being crazy. There are other people who believe in that. Yeah.

One of the things that I really know about this, you talked about dying stupid. I was coming back from Buenos Aires where I'm rehabilitating my whole left leg with stem cells. Really, really great progress, but I had an injury and didn't... really pay proper attention from physical therapy and that over the years 50 years ago so it's a 50-year thing and everything adjusted to me having a injured left leg and so there's a lot of repair that has to go on

So it's about a two or three year project. But I'm starting to dream about running again. I hadn't had any running dreams. So I think it's affecting me neurologically and psychologically. But anyway, I'm convinced that people die of two things. The first one is no testing. Yes. They just didn't get tested and something happened to them. Or too late testing.

With the quality of testing today, especially since AI has entered the picture, there's no reason for this. I mean, I have complete top to bottom every three to four months. You know, little things pop up, which if you catch them right now. But if you go 10 years, 15 years beyond where the test could have really given you a chance, you're committing slow suicide. It's like driving your car with your eyes closed.

or flying a plane without any instruments. Or only looking in the rearview mirror. Rearview mirror, yeah. It's really funny. And I have these conversations with entrepreneurial clients. They said, all that stuff you're finding out, I wouldn't want to know that stuff. And I said... Don't you worry, you will. Yeah, that's the challenge. You know, you're going to find out one way or another. You want to find out when you can do something about it super early. So, you know, I'm going...

to Orlando, to our headquarters for Fountain Life. And I will do my full upload, right, 200 gigabytes of data, you know, redo my coronary clearly scanned for soft plaque, my full body MRI. all my blood biomarkers. You know, I'm really well characterized. I mean, I do testing almost every month, but I also do performance testing for my VO2 max and my zone two training. There's a performance center there where I measure all this.

My goal is to improve on myself like you do. So Fountain Life is where I do that, and people can learn more about Fountain Life at fountainlife.com. Oh, by the way, super cool. I just had the president and first lady of El Salvador.

go through. And he gave me the most glorious quote saying it was like, you know, a 10 out of 10 experience, the best he'd ever had. I'm happy to hear that because it would suck if he didn't have that experience. But it really is. And CNN is coming to cover us next week. Anyway, long story short, this is the place you don't want to skimp on your health. You want to know what's going on inside your body.

Well, going back to your talk that you gave on the 30 extra years, almost all the clients in Coach were just about 3,000 active rating. Amazing. And when I see them, they say, well, how much does it cost? And I said... Right off the bat, you're asking the wrong question. I said, if you were at your optimum for the next 30 years,

But it required you to invest in it every year. How much would you be willing to invest? I said, it's not a cost. It's an investment. I said, if you're thinking cost, your brain is not ready for this. Yes. Yeah.

I do think it's the same way for Fountain or Abundance 360. You're investing in yourself more than anything else because we're about to enter the most extraordinary period of human civilization, right? the decades ahead. I want to see as much of it as I possibly can. Yeah, it's amazing. You know, we mentioned in passing the XPRIZE we have in this area. We raised $157 million and launched $101 million.

healthspan XPRIZE to extend muscle, immune, and cognitive function by 20 years. Yeah, muscle is really the big one. Yeah. It is. Yeah, I'm doing a PA. I've got a really great, he's got a really great gym. It's called Longevity Gym here in Toronto. And he's taken a lot of standard stuff and put it into coordination, art machine.

all that. He's got a really nice attitude about it, but he says there's one indicator, and I never knew this, so I'm just, since we're talking about these things, so. Please tell me. He said when you have the machine where it measures the push of your legs. And he said one of the greatest indicators of a long life is three times your body weight.

They do it five times. It takes about 10, 15 seconds, and then you rest, and then 10, 15 seconds. But it's both push out and resist. It's coming back like I'm 305%. I'm just a little bit more. But I can work on that. But he said that the strength of your legs is one of the greatest indicators of how long you're going to live. For probably a couple of reasons. You know, the muscle mass itself correlates with longevity. But the great killer...

in elder years, is a fall, a fracture, and pneumonia. And the death rates while you have pneumonia in the hospital following a fall and a fracture are... like 30% to 50% depending on how old you are. Do not go to hospitals. Yeah. Hospitals are not the place you want to be, that's for sure. I think auto deaths are like, what, 40,000, 45,000 a year in any way. Hospital deaths caused by hospital is around 200,000. And that's from the AMA.

So, you know, we talked about robots before. I can't wait for robots to invade the hospitals to make sure that everything is precisely done. And, you know, you're not operating on the wrong leg and you're not giving them the wrong medication.

for sure it's kind of insane so peter uh question yeah we got together 2011 2012 where are things standing on the age reversal from the predictions that you would have foreseen and you were talking to all sorts of people that you're still talking about yeah so i had started my first longevity company with Bob Hurri and Craig Venter around the 2012-2013 timeframe. And this was focused deeply on genomics and on imaging.

A lot of that was not dying from something stupid alone. The last 10 years, so 2014, 2015 through today, the transition has gone from a focus on diagnostics. To a focus on diagnostics, yes, but if you're going to a diagnostic longevity center, that's table stakes. That's like everybody's got that. It's now the therapeutic side.

That's the most exciting, right? So, for example, at Fountain, we have two centers and soon we'll have a center in Miami, so three centers in Florida. And Florida has just passed the regulation to allow for stem cell therapies in the state. So we're going to be flowing in a number of stem cell therapies into the fountain centers. So you don't have to fly to South or Central America for the therapies. You can do it locally.

And one of the things that we recommend is that before you get stem cell therapeutics that you really should be fully characterized. Make sure you don't have a cancer growing in your body and such. But there are a few other technologies we're going to be bringing in to Fountain. One is the work of Hans Kirstead at Immunus. And this is amazing. Basically, he is...

characterized the stem cell exudate, all of the 440 factors being put out by young stem cells. And he's been able to generate not the cell, but all of the exudate into a drug that has... just had extraordinary impact on aging adults, reduced their inflammatory markers by 50%, reduced their immune age down to like 30 years old, increased muscle by 7%, reduced pain.

So that's available through the fountain centers right now. There's another one, Dr. Zhao, who is the CEO of Throne Bio. You can go to T-H-R-O-N-E. bio.com. We'll be bringing that technology in-house as well. And what he uses is what's called stem cell re-education. So he basically will do a... therapeutic plasma exchange. He'll pull out your cells from your body, replace your plasma, but then he takes your cells and he co-incubates them for, I think it's like 16 hours with young stem cells.

And those young stem cells that are across a membrane, so the cells don't cross, but all of the growth factors cross, turn your stem cells and your immune cells to a much younger age. and then put those back in the body. And he's had people who have alopecia, the loss of their hair from immune function, regrow all of their hair. I've seen videos, and there are incredible videos on his website.

of people who have ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. So basically couldn't move their arms, can now completely reach up and move. So amazing results. And I think this is the age of... longevity therapeutics, not just diagnostics. And that's one of the things that we're focused on now. That's what's different over the last 10 years, Dan.

Yeah, and I think that the easy use of AI has just speeded up lab work. Oh my God, yeah. Talking about David Sinclair, he could not have done this scientifically before he had this. No, it is very much AI. for imaging and ai for molecule design and for testing and it's robotics one of my friends who's the ceo of in silico medicine alex of rankup is his name he's built A lights-out robotics lab. So imagine an AI that designs longevity experiments and...

Throughout the day, these robot arms are running the experiments. They get the data. They feed it back to the AI. The AI iterates on the experimental design, feeds it to the robots. And it's 24-7. You know, it's crazy. Bring it on. Yeah. Yeah. Bring it on is right. Yeah. But it all comes back to mindset, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. The longevity mindset is so important. You know, one of the things I also tweeted.

There's been all this conversation around the U.S. debt and us bankrupting the country. And maybe we want to talk about that in one of our next podcasts. I think the one thing that the U.S. could do to basically get the U.S. back into cash flow positive, you know, profitable as a nation is extend the healthy lifespan. yep you know if people were at the age of 70 or 80 like you you're my poster child young man were

as excited about life and building businesses and companies and earning revenue as they were when they were in 50, that would just drive incredible productivity for the nation. Yeah. Yeah. Countries are harder than companies. Which are harder than individuals. But I do want to say to everybody listening, your lifespan and your health span is in your hands. Right. You are more empowered now than any time ever in human history to add decades onto your health.

I wrote a book at the beginning of this year called Longevity Guidebook. You can get it at my cost at longevityguidebook.com. We gave it out to all 3,000 of our clients. Yeah, thank you for buying 3,000 copies of it. And I quote you in it from your work.

One of the things is that it doesn't have to be expensive. You know, just exercise and sleep and what you eat and mindset. One of my favorite quotes, one of the favorite... articles and data sets, I quote, is out of the National Academy of Sciences that said in a study of 69,000 women, 1,500 men, that was adjusted for socioeconomic factors.

that optimists lived 15% longer than pessimists. And I love that stat, right? You get a double dividend for being an optimist. People like hanging out with you and you live longer.

And you're more choosy who you hang out with, too. Yes. And how's A360 looking for next year? Oh, amazing. I mean, you probably have the big three. You have robotics, you have AI, and you have age reversal. Yes. Those are the subjects. The triple play. Yeah. And we had the leaders from the AI industry, the top robotics companies. Yeah. And David Sinclair will be there as well. And thank you for the incredible support. And 3,000 members. So out of curiosity.

For the 3,000 members and coach, you're the tip of the pyramid. So people have to go through a number of layers of coach before they can... be coached directly by you. I consider myself blessed. It's like Boy Scouts, Tenderfoot, Eagle, you know, you have to go through it. So yeah, we have three levels, Signature for 10 times and Free Zone. Actual in-person live workshops, I do the

free zone. And we're about 110 right now. It's been up about four or five years. But I do 24 10 times two hour workshops on Zoom. And we get 50, 60, 70. But I'm testing out new tools, new thinking tools. I love your thinking tools. for sure we're up to about 250 now and we've got 67 back as patents and we have 70 right now funny thing about you know when elon had his doge experiment With the federal government, they gave the offer that any federal employee who wanted eight months' salary...

if they just quit. But it actually backed us up a little bit because the Patent Bureau has 10,000 clerks and 3,000 of them decided. Take the offer. And we were sitting there in stage four, and I said, you know, I'm for what he's doing, but it's hurting me right now. Yeah. Well, the good news is, you know, there's gov.ai in the U.S. It's just getting announced. in which a multitude of the government divisions are rolling in AI to cut through all of the paperwork and the processing and so forth.

I mean he's created a lot of new things but that little four-month experiment while he was there is huge. Because I think about 12 states now are going to introduce it. And you're just going to see a vast differential in states. Interested people want to go to a state that... supports entrepreneurism and supports sorts of interesting things anyway yeah

Great catch up. We could do this monthly and you'd have great news. It is. It's crazy. Great new news. So we've chosen good subjects, Peter. Yeah. Yeah. All right, buddy. I'm grateful to have you in my life. Thank you for all you do. Yeah. Ditto. Take care.