David Sinclair || Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To

how we live our lives. We also discuss the ethical implications of limitless lifespans and touch on the topics of death, evolution, genetics, medicine, and data tracking. This was a deeply personal episode as well as a highly scientific episode. I think you can really see David's humanity in this episode and his high ambitions to advance the human species. This was a really fascinating chat for me, and I think David's research has

enormous implications for every single human on this planet. So, without further I bring you David Sinclair, Doctor Sinclair, so great to chat with you today. Well, Scott, it's a real pleasure. I've followed you for many years and it's great to finally meet you. Yeah. It really is great, and I know we're going to have so much fun jamming on the intersections between the brain, mind, and longevity today.

So I've been really looking forward to this chat. I want to start off by asking you how old you feel inside? Gee. Mentally, I feel about somewhere between six and twelve. The six year old in me still wonders about the world, and I see the world with that kind of wonder. I have the ability to see things like I haven't seen them before, which is a good thing if you're a dreamer and a scientist and an entrepreneur.

I've got a twelve year old twelve year old in me because I actually now realize that life is serious and those twelve year olds at that point. I've realized that physically I haven't changed since I was twenty. In fact, somebody said my father actually told me my body looks better than it did when I was twenty, so I'm happy about that. So all in all, I'm not feeling

the effects of aging at all yet. Cognitively, in fact, I feel more energetic and smarter, way smarter and able to focus than I did any other than any other time. In my mind, Yeah, there was a certain sticky beak personality you had as a child. Can you explain to our audience what a sticky beak is, because our Australian audience will know what that means, but our non Australian aids can explain what that means. And you know it seems like you still have that in abundance. Well, it's curiosity,

but beyond your usual curiosity. I have to know how things work, and so I stick my nose into things, and so sticky bik comes from an Australian term for someone who just can't keep their nose out of other people's business, and literally that. There are birds that stick their beak into things. We had These still have magpies they called cralons in Sydney, and they stick their beak

into bottles. When I was a kid, we used to still get milk delivered in glass bottles with foil hoods, and they would stick their beak into the milk and drink the milk. So you come out and be fairly messed with by the birds. But that's what I am. I cannot avoid opening things up, seeing how they work. It's often a challenge to put these things back together, as I found out when I pulled apart a couple of cars as a teenager. But I'm getting better at it.

And even now when we talk about biology in my lab, we're getting pretty good at fixing damaged organs and tissues such as the eye able to regenerate those. So I'm making up for all the bugs that I pulled apart as a child. I think, Yeah, this is always fascinating to me. You know when I study the lives of creative people, people who make the history books, and there's this very common thread among them. They were dreamers. They were daydreamers when they were a child, and they also

like to take things apart when they were children. Also, serial killers as children had that characteristic as well. So there seems to be you know, it's like a non overlapping Van diagram, you know, like there's like parts of the Van Diagram that you don't share with your of course, but that you a fine line, right, but just just ravenous curiosity. I had to say that as a psychologist, you know that's that's that's true. But yeah, creative people,

there's a fine line between creativity and madness. I mean, there actually is a fine line there to a certain degree, as I found in my own research. You know, like really creative people. Often people will think they are mad or that their imaginations and grandiose ideas of the future are crazy until they actually make it a reality, and then people call them a genius. That's just a very common common theme across lots of creative people. You know, as you were a child, I was wondering how your

grandmother inspired you. It was very, very touching this poem by Alan Alexander Milne. Yeah, this poem now we are six that was read to you as a child. But now I am six, I'm as clever as clever, so I think I'll be six now forever and ever. It's a beautiful poem, And I was swarming how your grandmother inspired you as a child. Yeah. I have to be careful here because I have a tendency to get teary eyed when I talk about this. So this is a

person that essentially raised me. My mother was working full time, both by chemists' parents, and this is a woman who lived through the Depression as a kid and then World War Two in her thirties and had my father Okay, birth to my father when she was fifteen, and he was taken away from her to be raised by my grandmother's mother in law, and this was traumatizing for her, both experiencing World War and the aftermath of that in Hungary. When she's in Budapest and having a child taken away.

You know, I come along when she's in her early forties, and now she's just saying, Okay, I have to pour all my love and knowledge into this one child. And she did. But she also said, I have to use what I've been given to make humanity better than it was in the twentieth century. Humanity can do better than this, capable of great evil but also great wonderful, inspiring things that if there were a species looking at us from above, or a deity, they would be impressed with what we

could do, and so that meant a lot. I basically have spent most of my life, if not since I was four years old, trying to live up to what my grandmother had told me to do with my life. And you know, I think of her every day. She was a very unusual person. She was a philosopher, a great thinker. She couldn't handle small talks. She only wanted to talk about the universe and philosophy, and that's what I was raised on, and that was the basis of really how I got here today. Do you remember some

of your early childhood fantasies and dreams. I think you mentioned one point that you used to pretend that you were giving a large lecture or something, and I used to do that too. I related a lot, by the way, I related a lot to a lot of the things you said, a lot of your early fantasies. Yeah. I don't want to come across as being an egomaniac because I was a very shy childhood. Yeah, I have two personalities. A lot of us do. My childhood, I was very

insecure for a number of reasons. One, I wasn't very tall. I was put in school at the age of just when I was four, and other kids were five or six years old at that point, so I was a couple of years behind some of them. But cognitively I was different. I remember thinking that, and I spent probably up until college just being frustrated because people would treat me as though I was dumber than I actually was.

I remember being five and being talked to like a five year old, and so what are you talking about? I know more about this topic than you do, kind of that kind of arrogance. But it was annoying, and I really grew to dislike humanity because I was treated that way. I thought humans were horrible. You know, a lot of kids look at parents and they don't think much of them, to be fair, So that was me.

I used to cry when people gave me compliments about my long eyelashes because I thought they were telling me I was a girl, you know, that kind of silliness. Fortunately I grew out of that by the time I hit college, got some confidence, found that I had this other personality, which was if you'd give me a topic to talk about and put me in front of a lecture or on a stage, then I'm somebody very different than I love talking and I have no inhibition. I

hear a lot of comedians. I like that as well, and so I've worked very hard in my adult life to suppress the shy child who is insecure and just work on being this other person. And it's so far, so good. But there were days when I revert back to being that shy young kid who can barely talk to girls. Yeah, I'm constantly oscillating between those two states myself on a daily basis. No, I definitely, I definitely

can relate a lot to that. But there's also just you know, it's such a beautiful thing when you're given an opportunity to talk about something that you're so passionate about. So I'm giving you that opportunity today, brother, you know, and I hope you I hope you enjoy it, and I know our listeners will enjoy it. You know, you did say that from a very young age you were tormented by the idea that you know, death is inevitable and irreversible. So it sounds like you did think a

lot about death as a kid. I certainly don't want to say anything that too emotional, but I thought I was quite poignant that you were there at your mother's death, and I was wondering if you feel comfortable talking about that at all, and then maybe just how it affected your own sort of cognitions about death. How did that affect that who you are today? Yeah, these are great questions.

So one thing I don't want to forget to say is that my grandmother told me at the age of four that everything dies, that my cat would die, which was horrific enough that she would die, my parents would die, I would die. Everything dies, and it's often painful. And my grandmother was like that. She never lied. She knew I never lie. This is what we believe in, but often it's brutal truth, and most kids forget about that because it's tormenting. And I haven't been able to get

that out of my mind. How cruel it is to be a conscious being with the knowledge what's going to happen to you, ends and family in yourself. So that was a driver for a lot of my life still is. Then when I had the experience of seeing my mother pass away, that was transformation as well, because I'd never experienced death up close and go to funerals, but you don't really know what the process is like. So my mother developed lung cancer when she was my age and

I was just coming to MIT from Australia. There's a big question whether I should come to it to the United States at all, because I needed to look after my mother. She had a big tumor in one lung. She had a lung taken out. It was quite a serious operation and I figured I may not see her again if I go to America, and my supervisor who was there in Sydney for my PhD, said you've got a bright future ahead of you. You have to go.

You cannot let this hold you back. And so I did that, and I'm glad I did because my mother lived for another twenty years and got to see five grand kids and travel the world. But on the day of her passing, which was a few years ago, now her last remaining long her one remaining lung I had given out and it was filling up with fluid, unbeknownst to any of us, and I'd flown to Australia and I wrote a eulogy for her, expecting to get there

too late. And I got to the hospital and she was there, smiling, sitting up in the bed, and my father and my brother were there, and I thought, oh, you know this false alarm. And I made a joke to her that I had written her eulogy and I would like to read it to her because I thought

she'd find it funny. But it was only probably two minutes later that she started coughing and suddenly couldn't breathe and literally choked to death, suffocated in front of us, and we only had time to say our last words in those last seconds, and I remember leaning in and she was starting to turn blue and choking it. It It was a horrible sight, and I whispered into her ear that I wanted to thank her for being the best mother I could ever have, and then that was it.

Then she's basically gone, and then you're just in shock. But what it left me with permanently was the realization that that's a bad day. Everything else that's a problem is not an issue. So every day now, when people say I have a problem or I have a problem, you know, it's always nobody died, So don't worry about the scratch in your car. It's going to be okay.

I just lost money, It's okay. But it also showed me the brutality of death, that there are very few cases where somebody dies peacefully in their sleep, and we're not prepared for that. We're not told that, And I kept thinking, why doesn't somebody tell us what it's like? And I think we're just shielded from that until we have to, unfortunately experience it in person. By as a child,

I was very just constantly just fascinated. And I think tormented is a good word for the idea and It's still mind boggling to me, the idea that one moment we can be alive with such potential, you know, and you know, self actualization potential, and then in a split second, for the rest of eternity, it's all wiped out, you know, all of our memories, everything forever, and you know it, especially if you don't have a large family, like I'm an only child and very close to my parents, but

they're getting very older, and I think, my gosh, when they're gone, you know, there's not gonna be many other people around that are gonna well, no one else that has all those childhood memories you know that we all share together, you know, and then when I'm gone, all that will be gone forever. It's a very sobering realization when you really think about the truth of the matter. You know, when you face it head on. Psychologists often talk about the best way to overcome fear of death

is is to face it head on. How have you made or if you have kind of made brutal realities as well as the beautiful realities as well. It's it's double edged sword in a way of death itself, you mean, of living. Yeah, when you yeah, great, questions. So just this idea, as you talk about in your book, about how in that moment of death, all of these things are wiped away. You know, what is the how have you made peace or even thought yourself the importance and

the meaning of life itself knowing that fact of death. Well, that's what drives me is the knowledge that we have a certain amount of time on the planet. Now, I don't need to say that if life was longer it would be less meaningful or urgent. I still think if I had a thousand years of life, that's only fifty times what I've looked already. That would go by twenty times. Sorry, that would go by in a blink of an eye.

So it's it's more just the knowledge that one day it will end, not how close it is, that drives me. And I'm driven by the concern that I that I will not leave and impact. So this is what gets me up in the morning and work, and I work

till midnight. Often it's the idea that I have a certain amount of time, whatever that is, whether it's eighty one hundred, even one hundred and fifty years, whatever it is, to make this world better and leave it different than how I found it, and you know, just trying to bend the needle a little bit of human history, just so that maybe it's that I fear that I might

be forgotten. You know, this is like you said, things vanish, your photos get thrown out, and momenttos that you think are important, your great grandkids, even your kids will throw them out in the trash. What is going to last? What is going to be around in a thousand years? Or maybe if I make a discovery or I changed the course of human history a little bit, then I'll

have made a difference. And maybe that's it. You know, I've never vocalized this, but it could be the fear of being forgotten that makes me do what I do as well, to be honest about what selfish reasons there are besides really the altruistic fact that I do want humanity to show that we're better than we were. Absolutely yeah, And I really want to get, you know, wrap my head around what the fear is there. It doesn't sound like the fear is death. The fear is not having

fully lived while you're alive. It feels like that's what people really fear. They kind of in their head they frame it as a fear of death. But with you, it sounds like there's maybe a fear of of not, you know, fully making the full impact that you have the potential to make. And does that sound about right? But that's definitely right. But it's interesting that I've achieved more in my lifetime than I thought i would, actually do better life than I thought I would, so that

actually gives me a lot of comfort around death. I'm not afraid of death because I've already done more than I thought I would. I've seen more change, I've made more discoveries than I thought I would. And it's really true. I don't fear death, and I've faced death many times and I know that it doesn't scare me. I've had planes that were going down and planes that almost crashed, and car you know, in my car, if you've ever seen me drive, you know I'm not afraid of death.

So that's not the issue, and at all you'd be surprised how little I fear death. It's really what you said, which is a fear of not realizing my potential, and my potential is growing. I've never been in such a strong position to affect medicine and human health and education that I have been at this year of fifty two cycles of the Earth around the sun. So my real

age hopefully is a bit younger than that biologically. But yeah, I seem to be either peaking or reaching my peak in my ability to change the way the world is for the future and perhaps forever, and that is comforting. But I would hate to die today because it really would be a waste of the foundation that I've worked on ever since I was aged four. And by the way, you do look about six years old now. People people always say I always look about ten years younger than

I am. By the way, it's all it's a camp It's like a phenomenon, and it's it's it's I don't I was worrying. Can you explain to me what's going on? Is it because my epigenetic Yeah? Right, So, we in my lab and some other labs in the world have come to the conclusion that a major cause of aging is your epigenome, which are the instructions that read your DNA that get messed up over time, and we can actually read that clock. We have a test in my lab. We're hoping to put this out for everybody. A bit

of self promotion. You can sign up for this biological test at doctor Sinclair dot com. Spill out the word doctor and we can bring this test everybody. So we can literally you can send in a mouth swad Scott and we will tell you biologically if your clock is ticking slower or faster than others, just from the MA swap, not even a blood test. But I would suspect that the reason you look young is because you are young.

I know I am young. My blood tests come back in my mid to early forties depending on which test I take, and I'm fifty two. I have no gray hair, I haven't lost my hair, there's no sign of wrinkles. I mean people often get bags under their eyes of my age, and that they haven't appeared yet. So I think that it is possible you and I are on a track to live much longer and healthier than others who say not looked after themselves. The good news is for everybody is that first of all, it's never too

late to change. The second important part is that how you live your lifestyle, how you eat, when you eat, what you eat, exercise, good sleep at a minimum. I forget about the supplements that I often talk about that is enough to get you another fifteen years of healthy life. And that's because the epigenome is compared to your genome, is eighty percent of what determines your future health. So don't panic. But I would say it's in your hands.

And if if you don't do something, you're on track, on a very straight line track to dying at a certain age that I can actually predict with this test. But that what we go to do is then give people the knowledge to slow down, and we think even

reverse that biological age. Wouldn't it be awkward though? If you're like eighty years old chronologically, but you're you look like you're thirty, and so like women are like hitting on you, do you know what I mean, they think you're third, Like thirty year olds are hitting on you. But then you're like, look, I'm actually eighty, you know,

and then it's awkward when you reveal that information. I mean, people have like it's funny because people, I mean, people have very standard I know my question sounds cheeky, but there's actually a deep philosophical point here. I'm trying to make people have a very you know, they treat people based on their chronological age they don't treat people based on many other factors of how they could treat someone, you know, you know, even if like they're inner age

or their inner spe or their playfulness, you know. And I wonder if this research eventually is going to make us kind of look at chronologically age differently, maybe not make that such that number so prominent in our own mental schemas are psychologist schemas of what that person could be and their potential, because we have a bias against older people, you know, in terms of what we think

their self actualization potential is. We you know, old people over the age of seventy, and I've looked at research into this are very often very depressed because the young younger people shut them out of society, you know. So I am I am wondering to what extent this research can actually make us have more inclusion of people of all ages if that makes sense in society. It does make sense. And I think that how you look is more important than your actual age when it comes to

partnering them. I know that I get often treated like I'm in my thirties, especially by people who don't yet know me well. But I would think that what's probably going to happen is if you're seventeen, you look thirty, and that that will happen. It's not a question of if, it's just a question of when. Then you'll want to find people your own age who also look thirty. And no, I'm doing that myself with looking at people my age. There are a lot of people that still look young.

The question, though, is you'll want to have shared at least I'd prefer to have shared experiences. So if let's say I look twenty, I don't, But if I look twenty, would a twenty year old be attracted to me? I actually I don't know the answer to that. I'm not going to try it. But the issue is are you generation generationally different? Are you? You know, you start talking about in movies you saw as a child or whatever,

it is it too different? Would you be Would you prefer to be somebody who's actually been around for as long as you have? I think you probably would. Actually, Scott, I need to go blow my nose. Connect Absolutely, Yeah, I've never done it interview like this, So yeah, it's it's different. Oh in what way? I don't know. It's I've got it very I've not I've got an unusual mind in my head. I'm constantly pretending to be normal, but I'm totally way out of there, way out there.

So it's interesting for me also to hear my answers. So I haven't been asked these questions before. I think it's going to be It's going to be interesting for other people to see what goes on inside my head. There's all the strange stuff the I guess we're off Franco. But as a kid, I had no doubt that I would be in this this position and how crazy is that? It could have failed a million times? But I guess if the city sides, you end up where you want

to be. But you know, a kid from Australia, do you want to talk to Sure, we can talk about that if you if you don't think it sounds like I'm crazy lunatic, but it can come across that way. I can keep this part. It's actually really interesting because this is the psychology podcast after all. I'm happy to keep this. You know, there's something there, there's some seeds and this has been studied in the creativity literature to be a very common thing. You know. Joyama's not shy

to admit that. When he was about three and he heard a cello, he was like, wow, I want to play cello. You know. Jacqueline de Prey when she heard the cello on the Christmas BBC Christmas recording, which was very very young, she said, I want to do that. There's something there's something there right. Well, I think you have to be crazy to be a kid in City, Australia who dreams of changing the world. It's very unlikely. So you've got to be you got to be a

bit delusional. But yes, so there are remnants of me still in existence. I wrote down the ten ways I could be a millionaire by the age of thirty. I wrote down a bunch of inventions. I started a company in my garage making furniture. I was trying to figure out a way that everybody could be done. Everyone in the world could just give me one dollar, that's all

I needed. How hard could that be? And I wrote down One of my ideas was a network of computers that could act as a garage sale or a yard sale. And now it's eBay. So this is the kind of thing that I was trying to invent that would get me to a place where I could really make a difference in the world. I definitely am not a money seeker. I don't have a lot of material goods, but I'm not dumb enough to realize that money is a way

to influence the world. And I prefer to have money in my bank account and put it on things that I know are important and have somebody by giant yachts and waste the money. Well, I think that you just realized at a young age that what it would take to make an impact in the world. And you realized much younger than a lot of people, realize that you wanted to make an impact in a very mature way, not the sort of way that the average six year old wants to buy I'm going to be an astronaut someday,

or I'm gonna you'll be a fairy princess. Actually, you know, you actually, you know, started to think about that at a younger age, about what that would actually take. Yeah, well, what really happened to me was that I was people writing down the things I was saying about, lists of things I used to say that we're outrageous and and

well beyond my years of ocareculary or whatever. And so I grew up thinking that I was special anyway, So I try not to do that because it's not good being an adult thinking that you're special, but that that certainly helped me think that I could actually do what I've done in my life. Let's let's talk. Let's not talk a little about what you're what you're up to scientifically these days, unless you want to still talk about your childhood, in which case I'm down. I'm down for anything.

We can move on. Okay, I'm out with for anything. I tend to try to just be really authentic and just free flowing in these conversations, So I'm down whatever comes up. But I wanted I want to tell you about this funny New Yorker caption cartoon I saw. I don't know if you've seen this New Yorker cartoon where two guys are sitting at a bar and one guy says to the other one, see, the problem with doing things to prolong your life is that all the extra years come at the end when you're old. Have you

ever seen that cartoon? I have? Yeah, and it's dead rum. That's the that's the problem, exactly exactly. That's why I wanted to bring that up. Yeah, yeah, I was trying to think of like a funny way to have an entry point into you explaining to all of us why that is a really misguided way of looking at things. Right. So the signs that we have just to summarize is in my lab we have really no trouble driving aging

forwards and backwards. It's quite malleable. Now we do this in mice mainly, but we can do it in human cells. We can grow many brains in the lab, and we're driving aging in all directions. So that's the exciting part. What I want everybody to know is that we're not talking about extending the last years of life. We're talking about preserving the healthy years of life, and as a side effect, you get longevity. And I don't know how to make anybody live longer without keeping them healthy. In fact,

the goal is to keep them healthy. And the root cause of almost all diseases that we will get is aging itself, and we've been unfortunately ignoring them. That eighty to ninety major cause of illness on the planet up until recently. That is, it's changing very rapidly, and so we were sticking band aids on these diseases diabetes, heart disease, even cancer. And what we've realized is if you keep the body young, or even reverse the age of the body, which we can now do in the lab, that those

diseases either don't occur or just go away. The body can heal itself. And that's the future of medicine in the twenty first century. So I think if you fast forward to the future year twenty fifty, they're going to look back at today we've discussed and at the same way we do at the Middle Ages, where nobody would want to go back there. The idea that you would

just let your body naturally age is craziness. In fact, I'm one of the things that I put in my book is that aging is a medical condition and that

it's treatable. And when we have that mindset, then it really just changes the way we should look at the research, the development of drugs, and the way we treat patients as well, because what I cannot stand is when doctors say that they're patients and to me as well, well, it's okay that you're getting old, it's okay that you're getting sick, it's okay that you can't see anymore because you're just old. Well, you don't say that with other diseases, so why should we put up with it with aging?

We're not talking about living forever, that's not the point. But it is about increasing people's health far more and for far more holistically than we have the twentieth century. Which, yeah, you say the world is about to change. Indeed, it is a time in which we will redefine what it means to be human. For this is not just the start of a revolution, it's the start of an evolution.

I want to talk to you about that as someone who studies what it means to be human, I thought we could maybe have a nice energy here in this kind of conversation. You know, from my perspective, what makes us human is our unique brain wiring, you know, and I think you probably would agree to a certain extent. And what emerges, well, not just the brain wiring itself, but the kind of consciousness that emerges from it, the self reflection and the self control, and the ability to

work out morality, the ability to have a character. You know, Turtles don't really have much individual differences in their character structure, you know, but humans differ widely in that. I am very curious to what extent you think what you mean by that? How would read it? First of all, let me just ask you what you mean by it. It'll redefine what it means to be human. And then I thought we could riff off that a little bit, right, So that's actually the lunch pad to the book that

I'm righting right now. Amazing. I didn't know that that's a great distance. So yeah, yeah, get me writing, and I can't stop. So the idea is that we need we now need to take evolution into our own hands. We've done as well as we could as a species that's come off the Savannah recently, but we still have all that baggage. We only lived fifty years in good health, sixty years if feel lucky, under good circumstances, because we didn't need to build bodies that lived longer than that.

Most people would die before that, either from war, predation, starvation, and dehydration. And so our bodies are built for the savannah going back two million years at best five hundred thousand years, and we haven't changed much really since then. Structurally mentally we have, of course, but the real problem is that we've built this world technologically, thanks to our ability to tools, tell stories, agree, socially, manipulate each other, explore.

These are all things that make us uniquely human. They've built this world around us sitting here in this beautiful air conditioning house or cars outside. It's totally artificial and it's great, but it's also killing us. We sit all day often for we don't exercise, We eat too way too much food, we eat the wrong foods. The Internet makes us mentally. I don't know you give me the word, but mental health issues are exploding in part because of

social media. But what I'm trying to say is that evolution is too slow to get us out of what we've built. We now need to engineer our way out. We need to take our own evolution into our own hands, and not just change our own environment to suit our bodies, but also change our bodies to suit the environment that we built around us. That way, we won't be suffering from all of these illnesses and short lives that we've

really constructed for ourselves. An interesting observation is that when we were on the savannahs or go back even just ten thousand years ago, we're typically cold and hungry. And we call this. I call this the metabolic winter hypothesis with red cronis nowadays we're barely ever cold, we're barely ever hungry, and our bodies become complacent. We have these genes in our bodies that protect us against aging, including our brain, and when there's complacency in our bodies, they

don't defend against diseases and aging. So we believe now, and there's a lot of evidence that the genes that we work on and co discovered are a large part of the reason why exercise. Being a bit hungry, being a bit cold, being a bit too hot is the reason that we get these long term health benefits and can actually slow down aging. Wow. You know, I've been trying to sort through this very vast literature. You you literally have a front row seat to the most cutting

edge scientific findings. I could bring up stuff you know, like like like you know sir too, Like where are we at with sir too right now? Like and activating that in humans. I know that you said somewhere in the next two years you're going to start control trial You're going to start trials and humans. Is that right?

We've been doing them for two and a half years already with the NAD boosters, and there being a number of clinical trials with molecules that activate some of the last height years, many of which have worked, some not for reasons that are technical and including about the problem that these molecules are insoluble generally. But yeah, we have

trials that are ongoing. There's a company called metro Biotech that is co founded a decade ago that's been working on this, making chemicals that limit the body's natural production of NAD, which is what is the fuel for the straitullons that defend our bodies. So instead of exercising or going hungry, you can take these molecules and we see that they mimic the benefits and animal studies and we hope will be the case for humans. And the good news though, is that if you have a healthy diet,

healthy lifestyle, then you take these molecules. The science says that they will be added benefits as well. But you can't expect the elderly to go run a marathon or go hungry too often, so you need these drugs as well. So far, we know that they're or at least the evidence says that they're very safe. They're just taken as a pill. That's a hard press pill. And yes, so we've tested in young people, old people, athletes, and now

we're looking at what are the effects. Now. The effects that we see ad mice are rejuvenation of many tissues. For example, the cardiovascular system rejuvenates response to exercise. You get new blood flow and muscle tissue growth of capillaries or capillaries, depending on how you say it. And then those mice can run fifty percent further like they were young again, in just four weeks of taking this one molecule called NMM, which, by the way, is that the

same molecule I've been taking for many years now. Now in the human studies, we're looking for these same effects, and we're in the middle of those trials right now, and so we should know the results sometime around the middle of next year, perhaps earlier, and then if we're lucky, then I'll be able to say, yeah, it looks like

they work. And then it's a question of getting those drugs on the market, because the idea is not to sell them as supplements, which is the wild West and not control, but to actually prove that they work, which takes time and money, a lot of time, a lot of money, but Ultimately the drugs could save many, many lives and ultimately be like a heart disease drug where millions of people take it and extend their wealthy lifespan as well. But initially, importantly, we cannot treat aging yet.

You cannot get a drug for aging because it's not considered a disease by the government, And until that happens, we have to work on individual diseases such as frailty. And there's one disease that we're targeting called Friedrich's a taxia, which is a genetic disorder that results in people in their early stages of life twenties thirties a wheelchair bound, and so hopefully if it works in those patients, then

it'll expand from there. I'm very interested in Alzheimer's. It's obviously a very hot area of people putting a lot of money into research on that. You said that you had taken some mice who have learned something when young but forgotten it, and you're able to rejuvenate their brain in such a way to exist cells where they got the memories back. Am I understanding that correctly? Yeah? Weak incredible, now, have you? Yeah, it does sound incredible when you put

it that way. But in my libe, it's just what we do. We just we like to say we make the impossible possible. That was like your version of beyonces I woke up this way. It's like, that's just what we do. That's awesome. I love it. It is it is, It is normal. In the daily workings of the lab. We have to kick ourselves sometimes to remind episodes. But that's what we can do, is we can drive aging forwards in a mouse or just let time take its course.

We can accelerate aging because we now understand what we think, We understand what drives the process, and we built mice that we can turn on aging more rapidly and that that speeds up research. It's not we don't it's the fun. Of course. It also tells us that we're probably right

about the aging process. And then we also engineer the mice so that we can turn on our reprogramming system that reverses aging in the brand specifically now, the paper that we published on the cover of Nature in December twenty twenty was reversing the age of the eye, and we targeted the optic nerve. We rejuvenated and reverse the age of the optic nerve and those old blind mice

could see again. Securing blindness was just the beginning. We've now moved into the whole brain and we've targeted the neurons in that system, and yes, what you said is correct. We can similarly reverse the age of those brains and the mice can learn again. Now, we're not exactly sure

if their memories come back again. That will require a different set of experiments that we're going to do, but we do know for sure that both in those accelerated aging mice and naturally aged mice, we can rejuvenate their ability to learn. Now, the question that we're going to answer next is can you treat a Alzheimer's defective brain and does that restore the ability to function again? And do the plaques and tangles and all the other crud that goes with the disease do they go away as well?

And my bed my hypothesis, as we should call it, is that the brain will actually become younger and younger as well. And that's what we saw with the eye. You couldn't tell the difference between the treated old eye that was rejuvenated and the functioning structure of a young eye. So it all goes back and all the crowd and the bad stuff with aging vanishes, and hopefully that's true

in our brain experience too. I mean, look, this does sound incredible to someone not working in the lab every single day, But I also think about ethical issues, which I'm sure you think about a lot, and you talk to ethicists and uh, philosophers of biology I think are real you know, some of that literature is relevant here as well. Let's say we get to the point where we're able to reset reset everyone anyone's entire epigenome. Let's say who, But there's only limited number of people who

who that? Who can get that? That service is not you know, democratized. How does society decide who is worthy of getting a longer next and we're talking not talking about it, just a little bit of a longer life. What if we get to the point where, you know, you know, there's like two classes of humans. There are those that are destined you know, to kind of live to eighty one hundred and those that are going to

live to a thousand. You know what, when we think about a thousand years from now, when we have if we have these two classes of humans if it's not completely democratized. You know, this just raised lots of ethical issues. So what I'm sure you've thought, You've thought about this a bit, and it's one of some of your thoughts on this. Yeah, well, every day I think about this. There's no way I'm going to let that happen. No way,

it's not going to be the future. I was talking to a movie producer yesterday about making a movie about that. It'll stay as science fiction if I have anything to say about it. Now that the treatments, often new technologies cost more. The Wright brothers playing in a plane used to be much more expensive than for the elite going in a rocket. Of course is you need a lot of money. But the idea is to bring the cost down,

and that's what I'm going to do. We're working now in my lab to take what is currently a gene therapy to reverse aging, to make it into appeal that might cost a few cents a day, and you give that to somebody for a month, they go back five years, give it to another couple of months ago, bout ten years. And we actually now know that at least in the

mouse experiments, that that does reset the body. You don't need more treatment, and then you just age out again, and then eventually you're just rinst and a repeat and keep cycling back. And we don't know how many cycles you can do, but hopefully it's himebooks we'll see. We also are excited that actually just today we got great data that showed that any concerns about safety were not valid, and so we're pushing forward quickly and safely as we

can into treating humans. In the next couple of years, we're going to be treating some animals just to make sure it's some extra safety. You have to do that the government requires it. Of course, what about the two classes, so you know, I want to bring the cost down

to where everybody on the planet can afford it. There's a drug called net form in which is given to take diabetics, which only I do take that, yes, because there's a lot of evidence from looking at tens of thousands of diabetics who have taken this drug that it's very, very safe and that it seems to protect susceptible people from cancer, heart disease, frailty, and Alzheimer's disease. So for a few cents a day, that's for something that has

almost no risk. Hey, it's a no brainer in my book, but a lot of physicians, most physicians are hesitant to prescribe a drug for type two diabetes to someone like me who doesn't yet have type two diabetes. That's another story, but I think that that's the wrong way to view medicine. But when it comes to the two societies, it could happen if the gene therapy is the only treatment that becomes available because the gene therapies are expensive, there's no

denying that. But what's exciting to tell you about is that there are hundreds of labs who are now working on what we've just discovered, the ability to reverse aging by reprogramming the epigenum. Somebody is going to make a breakthrough and it's going to become very cheap to reprogram the body and hopefully very safe as well. So I'm not worried about that dystopian future. It's very unlikely that it's going to stay expensive for long. I'm just trying

to think through all the psychological implications as well. You know, a big part of people's meaning in life is their ability to struggle and their ability to overcome struggle. I see that they're on the horizon. Maybe some pills that will mimic fasting and the kind of benefits of that. Will there be pills someday that mimic exercise, Like, are we going to make really lazy humans that live a

thousand but have no meaning in their lives anymore? We have a pill that it lets you learn everything immediately. I'm sure you think about this too. Do we don't want to strip too much of what it means to be human, you know, yeah, yeah, you're right. We do need some adversity, and that actually right now, the best way to live a long time is to give your body some adversity. That's what exercising being a bit hungry during the day is all about. But can we mimic

that in a pill? Will? I believe we already are. I'm taking the ENEMM molecule, which in mice literally in the mat exercise, those mice were running on a treadmill because they were physically fit without having exercised before. I'm extremely fit on a treadmill and I don't do a

lot of exercise. So you know, at least based on an end of one experiment, which is not valid, and some friends of mine who do run marathons, who have seen at least these anecdotal changes in their body and their time funt of times that we could already be there to have these exercise pills. So let's say we do have that. What does that mean, Well, it doesn't mean it's an excuse to just sit on a couch

and eat potato chips and watch movies. Because if you want the best bang for the buck, and we know this from the mouth from the mouse experiments, if you run those mice that also get the pill of the water with the molecule, they run even further. Those were the ones that broke the machine. We wear a treadmill that stopped running in our lab because they just kept running. The software wasn't written for mice to ever run more than three kilometers. So yeah, it's not an excuse. You know,

I wouldn't mind not having to exercise so much. It is painful to do that. What I thought you were going to get to Scott was, if you're going to live along time, does that take the meaning out of life? It's totally against what I believe in. I do not think that the agency of life and the enjoyment of life has much to do with how many years you have just to be a knowledge that it's finitely sufficient. Let's use an example and I'll turn the question over

to you. If you could live two hundred years, would you be sitting here enjoying this conversation any No, I really I think that if you waved a magic wand or you like and you're like Scott, I just reset your whole epy genome. I think I actually would be more motivated and excited to do as much as I possibly can in my life, because that means that I would have double the potential capacity to make an impact on the world. It actually would affect my psychology. It

would affect psychology. I think about this all the time because I think a big part of sometimes I get sad and and not depression level, but I really do kind of feel unmotivated and sad some moments because there's such a bittersweet nature to the briefness of it, and it's so hard for me to decide, you know, out of all the choices that I can make in a day, you know, it can be overwhelming to be like, which choices do I make in this short short life for

living that are going to have the biggest impact. It's too much stress. It would alleviate that stress to a certain degree. Yeah, well, you and I are not normal individuals. There are plenty of people who have extremely tough lives and have gone into careers that are unfulfilling or difficult, even painful, brutle. So what I would I've said that there should be something called a skilled vertical where everybody

gets paid to retrain for two or three years. And if life is that long, you can do that many times. And if you get into the wrong career or you're born into poverty and couldn't get out the first thirty forty fifty years, you have a chance at another life. And everybody should be given a chance to do what they love and find a purpose more. Oh, I completely agree. And you know that's another thing too. I would. I would definitely like every fifty years, I would switch careers.

That'd be a comedian. That's another dream of mine as being a stand up comedian. Someday I have dreams of, you know, going back as I used to be an opera singer. Yeah, anyway we can, we can, you know, just change to have a full life, hold on you were an opera singer. Yeah, I was a professional opera singer that actually at Carnegie mell And I stayed opera, computer science, and cognitive science. That was an interesting combination. Yeah,

definitely not a normal individual. No, that's amazing. Have you have a song on there? Yeah? Well I did release some some tapes of some like stars from my amis that I sang in college and things, and I did release that on Twitter about a year or two ago, and people seem to really like it and that was fun. Yeah, I want to check it out. Oh yeah, I'll send you. I'll send you a recording of Missinging Stars. The really frustrating thing is there's so many things one can do

in one's life. And I always thought to myself, I did I thought about it as a kid, I said, I don't want to live one life. Why can't I live fifty lives in one body? You know, because it's just so short, you know, like like like who says I have to live one life? You know? So that's that's what motivated me in college. But then when you get older, you start to realize there are constraints when

you're when you're younger and more idealistic. Maybe you don't see such constraints, but yeah, yeah, I was talking to this the Sounded movie producer. I'm very successful when you could argue the most successful person, and they said that they get depressed thinking that they will not achieve all of the ideas that they have in currently, that life is too short to just to make use of all of these ideas, whether it's movies and music, new projects,

and that's sad. And that's the reason we were talking is too Maybe maybe we can figure something out. Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, you have mentioned that there's another revolution taking place in terms of technology and our ability to collect data. Very very interest in that because that really will change that the face of medicine rate. You know, right now you go ask your doctor for a blood test for a full panel and they'll say, well,

do you have the preconditions? Do you have this? This? Then I know then I can't let you take the blood test. Hopefully there's a future where we're not held back by such silly roles. Well, yeah, it's all about money. Really. The insurance companies don't want to pay for things that are currently at present unnecessary. Now they may ward off of disease twenty thirty years from now, but that doesn't come into the calculations apparently, So I insist that my

doctor give me tests. There are two ways to do it. Actually, you can just badge your doctor and say I want this and this. The problem is that you need to know what to ask for, and most people don't have time or the knowledge to do that. Alternatively, and this is in full disclosure a company that I work with. They're at least in the US, but actually globally you

can do this. You can go to inside tracker dot com and this is a blood testing service that will come to your house, or you go to quest or lab Core in the US and they will analyze your data. A doctor will look at it. There's an AI system that will look at you compared to one hundred thousand other people and give recommendations as to how to optimize your health. And they also tell you by luge curses.

Their product at an inside Tracker is it called inner age, but they do it from They measure forty three parameters in the blood and eighteen of those are known to associate with different lengths of longevity and help and they use that to then tell you eat this, take that, do this, And I actually have been doing it for about twelve years and since I started doing it, I've been getting younger every year. I'm one of the early investors in the company, so you know that's in full

disclosure as well. It's slowly a conflict. But there's nobody like it in the world that does it. So that's why I talk about them so much. Well, you have to measure things. We've been going too long just taking

things and hoping for the best. And so with these new tests, the one that I'm doing, the mouth swab the doctor syncla dot com on and the blood test at inside tracker dot com, then we will know if supplements are helping or not, lifestyle changes are helping, and that's important because we wouldn't drive a car without a dashboard. You need the feedback to know what's working. And it's also motivational. Right you're with a psychologist, Do you understand

that without negative or positive feedback, people just give up eventually. Yeah, it's very true. But tell me more about the future of like data tracking. Will we be able to track on a second by second basis throughout your entire life? Collect a multitude of data. I realized you had like a biosticker at some point. Are you wearing it right now or your biosticker? No? Not today. I took it off because there was a photo shoot for my upcoming podcast that I'm putting out. But this is normally on

my chest and I would press it. It's a little inch by inch thin sticker. It's about a non button, flashes green, connects with your phone and is measuring the body at one thousand times per second for vibrations, for heart, for temperature, for motion, and actually motion of the body is much more informative than waving a ring or a

watch around. That's quite different. And it's also FDA approved, which is night and day compared to these other devices, which means a doctor can put one of these on you and send you home from hospital a week or two early and just monitor you at home, setting a lot of money for the hospital. And so this is going to be the future. I just have a front row seat on that. So when I talk about this, people say, oh, you know what, I want to be

monitored constantly. But think about the trade off. What you're getting is like you're getting you adopted to have an alert if you're going to have a heart attack, you're being told if you are developing a cold or a flu. If you have an upcoming flu, you could go get medicine that will stop it from coming. They might say, oh, you can develop in shiet ales. You need to quickly get the vaccine, which you need to take very early

on in the course of that disease. We will always in the future have a guardian angel for help as I call it, that may put things like heart attacks, make those things history. Also, you could imagine it's type to algorithms like inside Tracker or my test, the age test from the mouth swap. And what you're doing is having a constant view of your physiology, your age, your

blood buyer markers. Eventually, these are the chips under the skin that constantly wantit you and you can make pills at home from a machine that you can have in your kitchen or have them airlifted by a drone in an emergency. That's the what we live in and just those technologies Alloyd will extend I span five to ten years. Not to mention the lifestyle changes that I talk about

in my book and we touched upon today. Yeah, you know, this, this idea of weird, I keep I keep going back to it throughout this whole There's like a thread running through this whole podcast because I actually the prior guest on my show was my colleague Colin to Young, and the whole conversation was how the field of psychology is rethinking mental illness and rethinking social deviants, rethinking mental illness as some sort of just deviations from normality, just like

completely rethinking all that. Our field of psychiatry is going through a very significant change right now to more dimensional classifications and not not having social deviants as like an automatic indicator. You know, I tend to walk around my friends think my friends make fun of me. You know, I walk around and I carry a bag with me, Like even going out to the dance club and I'll bring my blood pressure monitor. I'll bring my cardia cardia

EKG sixth lead machine. Now look, I have like the oxygen monitor, and people like, what's how you're doing with all this stuff? You know, we're out of a dance dance club. Now look, now look, I know it's it's no like, I know it's weird. I know it's and I'm aware that a lot of things I do are people call me quirky. Okay, quirky. I appreciate that more than weird. But I just feel like there's a future where, like, you know, it's maybe weird now, but but but you're

you're saying, you're making me feel better. First of all, there's a future where it's gonna be like, yeah, obviously we're collecting data and maybe not in such clunky ways as we have now. Hopefully it'll be more discreet, you know, you know, ways of tracking data, but they can let us know, you know, if there's going to be you know, far far down the horizon potential issue. I mean, there should be. We should be able to detect cancer much much sooner, or the potential for the growth of these

certain cells mutations much much sooner than we're currently doing. Right, We're gonna we're gonna walk back someday and look at the very archaic you know that we didn't. Right, Oh, it's a revolution. It's happening right now. You can already get these tests if you know the right people, that you can detect cancer years before it would even show up as anything as an illness and kill those cells with chemotherapy or you know, oncology approach. That's the future.

I mean, it's here, the technologies here. Rolling it out is going to take a few years, but the next five years, we're going to barely recognize medicine as it's practice now. And like you say, looking back, we're going to think that the idea of going to a doctor once a year for annual physical and they ask you to cough and ask you how you're feeling, that's medieval. That's ridiculous. We should always be monitored for for illness. And the technology is already here. It's just a matter

of rolling it out, integrating it. So you're like from the future. You're like someone from like the future who's taken a time machine and come back like, oh, you're weird, David. But it's like in the future, we look at the humans today as weird, probably like they're probably we did it time we do. I have not been to the future, and if I had, I would not admit it. I'd have a lot more money if I'd come from the future, trust me. But the truth is that I spend my

day imagining the future. Yeah, but what I've been trying to figure out is what's controlling all of those things. I like the idea that there's fundamental truths in biology equations that are true. That a yeast cell is going to age for the same fundamental reason we age. We're

all living things. What's going wrong and what the main clue happened in nineteen ninety five actually, when we realized that these atoms are important for the aging process in yeast cells that we use for baking and through it. Now the two winds. They got their name because of a gene called SIR two in this YaST cell, and it's an acronym silent information regulator number two SIR. And

you might notice that I is very important information. So the regulation of information was controlling the aging process it used. What it was doing was stabilizing the epigenome, basically telling the E cell which genes should be on and off to be healthy. And that became just regulated over time. And one of the drivers of that misregulation and mess

up was DNA damage. And so now the theory pass forward to twenty twenty one is that we have a lot of evidence from animals people that this is true for ourselves, that DNA damage drives changes to the epigenome, and that leads to cells losing their identity. So what I'm saying is that at the tippy top cause of aging, it boils down to a loss of information. I could write an equation for you. It's basically the entropy loss of information. So what information am I really talking about.

It's not the genetic information that we struggle with. There are mutations, for sure, going out in the side, you'll get mutation. But what's really driving aging. We find, in my mind, is that it's the other type of information, the epigenetic information, which are the systems that read the DNA. I think of it as the software of the body

that gets corrupted over time. I've used the analogy that if people can remember a compact disc, the DNA would be the music and codeed and the software the epigene is the reader of that music, and over time you get scratches on the CD, so you can't read the information that well. And so what we've discovered was that not only can we accelerate that process by scratching up the CD or causing DNA damage that accelerates this process in animals and watch them get hold, but we found

that there's a backup copy of that information. Essentially, you can either polish the CD or another analogy would be you just reboot the software and now the system runs like it should. And that's how we got those blind nice to see again. That's incredible. Yeah, Well, often people wonder how is it possible? How could it be so simple?

And it was a lot of trial and error. We failed for many years at this, but we hit upon a combination of using three genes that we turn on when we're embryos and keep us young when we're embryos, but we don't use them when we're adults. And so we turned on those three genes in the mouse's eye. We're in human cells or those mini brands, and we find that those three genes are sufficient to reset the

age of the cell in a safe way. The cells don't become cancers, they don't lose their age back to zero. They go back about seventy percent in age and stop. And then we take away the system. We turn it off, and the cells and the eyes age out again. And it was that simple. And the cool thing about it is a that there is a backup copy. We didn't know where. If there was, we still don't know where it is. By the way. We just know it exists somewhere in the south, and that it was really simple

once you know how to do it. And what this really means is it's like the right process. It's you dream a flight for ten thousand years, maybe a million years, and all you need to do is to do a bit of math, strap on an engine, do some wind tunnel experiments, and you do it. And once you've done it, then you know the future is inevitable. It just depends on how long it takes to build a seven four seven and go to the moon. But you know that it's going to be possible. Well, what's the biggest hurdle

right now? To be being able to boot up that backup again, the full backup of like the whole epigenome, you know, a full body research. Yeah, I mean that that'd be nice. Well, I mean that's what we work towards in my life every day. This is our goal. Can I like reset only like the good bits? Can we like leave out you know, like that time I was an asshole you know in college? Like, can we just like not reset that one? Yeah? Yeah, well I think we can. We're going to retain our memories. We're

going to retain our wisdom and our current personality. That's the prediction. But we're going to regain the ability to think and store memories liking like we did when we were young. And that's true for other parts of the body. Muscle strength. We just achieved muscle age reversal. We have age reversal of skin, so that we're ticking off the organs one by one and tissues. But we've also done

the whole animal. We can express as we say, turn on these three embryonic genes in the whole animal, and we know for sure that it's safe in those animals. We turned it on at high levels for a year and didn't turn it off. Usually the treatments only four to six weeks eight weeks of the most, but we kept it on for a year. No sign of any adverse effects in those mice. Now the holy grail would be to know if those mice live longer or they younger.

We don't know, because the journal and the reviewers of our paper made us kill them to check on the number of tumors inside, and it turns out they had, if anything, a trend towards having fewer tumors than the untreated or mice. But now we're repeating that experiment. But one of the problems with current technology is evenly distributing gene therapies across the body. It tends to accumulate in

the liver mainly. And so give us another couple of years and we should be able to do that, and then we can do that experiment in a really clean way, and hopefully we can keep resetting those mice and make a mouse live for a couple of decades instead of just two years. Yeah, I saw it. With this three gene combination. You said you can reset cells by in my seventy five percent was a number I heard, and you can measure the age of the cell and the body.

So like measuring that, you found that there was not like a full reset, but seventy five percent a bad Yeah, it's even more remarkable than that. So we do use mark chemical marks that control the epigeneon as a clock. Stephen Horrobath that UCLA is the guy that gave his name to that horrorbad clock, as we call it. But what is exciting about what we can do is we

can measure those changes this cheeks world. But what we also know is that that's just the an indicator of what's truly going on in the cell, and that is that the music of our lives on that CD, truly, that the music of our lives gets replayed from a younger state. So what does that mean. We've got twenty thousand genes. Let's say there's two thousands that become misregulated during aging. We found that the majority of those get reset back to the level that they should be when

the eye was young. So think about this, that there are genes that come on when they shouldn't during aging in the eye and genes that got shut off when they shouldn't during age in the eye, and the reset restored those exactly near exactly to where they should be. So that cell somehow knows that a gene that came on should go off, and a gene got shut off should come back on. How does it know that? We don't know that. That's what we're chasing right now. I

think that's the Nobel prize if someone wants to get it. See, this is the thing that's very interesting. You know, some people have argued, critics have said, well, there is a biological limit how long we can live. You know this some of This is kind of just pipe dream kind of stuff. One twenty two or whatever some people put a number on it. You've made the case that there's no in theory, you know, in principle limit to how

long we can live. Isn't it possible that, I mean, can't we leave open the possibility that there will be such a discovery that that causes a real phase shift in our whole understanding of aging. And really, does you know not not just take it an extra fifteen years, but opens up a window to like every fifteen years going to the doctor and like getting something that a therapy that makes that reverts back fifteen years. Oh yeah, yeah, I planned to make that future happen within our lifetimes.

I mean, you give me chills. You give me chills, But it's you know, what do you say? I'm sure you have. You have your critics right who say that's impossible and possible. Well, they used to. I used to get in trouble for being the guy that was quoted to say the first person of the one hundred and fifty years is already born. But though they've quietened down, not with this paper that we just showed you can

reverse aging and reset the body. It's harder for people to argue that we might be experiencing a seizement shift in being able to control the aging process. I'll give you give you an example how things have changed. It was just five years ago that I gave a talk at Stanford University and I was hesitant to use the word age reversal. It had never been said in academia,

at least not amongst the elite scientists. And I did it. Anyway, five years later, everyone talks about age reversal if you're not talking about aging, so you're actually getting left behind in the field. So that's a seismic change in the way we think and talk about this process. And a

lot of scientists coming in from outside. There are at least four Nobel Prize winners I know that are now working on this problem, and there's plans for thousands of scientists to be funded to work on this exact problem of how we set the body. So you know, I may not succeed. I hope I do it, but someone's going to succeed, and it's not going to be another fifty years into the future. It would be shocked if

it took that long. But we are in a time when those critics are being less and less vocal, and I think it's because they've had a oh crap moment, which is there isn't a limit to biology. I mean that no one has ever proven me wrong that there's some limit. That the oldest person to live is one hundred and twenty two. But that's like saying humans could never go faster than horseback riding. Of course, there's a limit break through the technology. We can achieve anything that

we set our minds to. There is no limit to human ingenuity, and there are plenty of species that live much longer than us, that are warm blooded and give milk to their babies and are conscious, and of course talking about whales. So this is not it's not miracle, it's not crazy science, it's not a dream. It's actually we see it in the world around us. It's just a matter of technology and investment to make it happen.

And we're gonna also rethink how we how we perhaps live our lives, and what choices we make when we're younger. I'm really fascinated with this idea of antagonistic piotropy, which George Williams in the fifties came up with I'm just I'm I'm utterly obsessed with this idea. And I know, I know you can you know what's good for you

when you're young and cause problems when you're older. But it is the reverse I wanted to ask you, is is there a reverse kind of a fact of that where sometimes we can make decisions when we're younger that are that hurt us, but that will benefit us, you know, when we're much older, kind of the reverse of that, like, will we be able to make decisions and know what things that we can do that which don't seem so pleasurable in the moment, you know, for twenty thirty years

when we're young, but will really really save it up for us to live a much longer life. Well yeah, well currently without lifespans, we already know that if you epstein is when you're young, in your thirties for sure, maybe even in your twenties ill rewards. I'm talking about not overeating and even skipping meals when you're younger that will have long term benefits. I wish that I had gone to essentially one meal a day when I was twenty. I think that would have added five to ten years

to my current trajectory. Instead, I skipped breakfast in my twenties and didn't start skipping lunch fully until I was fifty. I did cut out desserts when I was forty, so that you can suffer at when you're younger, and the science says that that will reap rewards later in life. It's true for exercise, which many people don't find pleasurable too.

I think you could speak better than me about practicing good mental health as well, because big stressed and releasing cards all into the body is pro aging and sleep. Aging and the sleep cycle are intimately tied up. The thutuins control lifespan and your sleep patterns, so you want to make sure that they're in the best of condition. Well, that is something I did want to bring up with you, because you know, you're in the front lines of a certain literature and I'm on the front lines of a

different kind of literature. And the kind of literature on the front lines on is showing very clearly that certain kind of meditative practices really do have an effect on epigenetics. You know there is and to me this is very interesting, the extent which the mind can can cause longevity, you know, in terms of kind of mind practice. Of course, we

know that reduce stress in general is important. That's like a trite thing to say at this point, but I'm talking about certain kind of meditation practices you know, can can cause these kinds of epigenetic changes and and do effect our inner age. What what what one of these tests would would would would measure as our inner age. So you know, I can hold you up on that literature too. I can city papers. I'm sure. I'm sure you do know a bit about a bunch of them.

I need help all the time. There's no way any one of us can keep up with the full scientific literature. So we'll support each other. And I need to learn more about how the effects with the brain on human aging.

That what I can tell you is that in mice you can manipulate parts of the brain, that's the hypothalamus, which is at the base of the brain, that you actually can that is sufficient by reducing inflammation in that organ to extend up the lifespan of the animal, proving at least in mice, and I would say very likely in us that the brain is a central hub for

long jeity. And I'm also very curious about the results where if you look epidemiologically at lives of people that live a long time, what do they have in common? And one common thread from the study at Harvard that was done since the nineteen thirties was that having a loyal, trustworthy partner was very important for lung journey and that we can only guess, but I'd be curious as to

what you think might be going on there. So, so two things that are really incredible when you look at their effects on mortality rates and actually do a better job predicting mortality than all cause mortality of physical ailments combined. Our loneliness, you know. Loneliness is a bigger killer than obesity, you know, and high blood pressure. That's fascinating. But also

the words that you use on Twitter. So I don't know if you're aware of that recent research, but there's this whole team when I was at University of Pennsylvania there right down the hall for me, so we would always talk to each other, the World Well Being Project, and they were able to look at county by county data on whether and classify whether or not the language that people used on Twitter predicted mortality rates of of a county by county level, and they found that negative

like curse words and negative thinking and uh and and and and uh and lots of like angry aggressive kind of language was a better predictor of mortality rates than the entire everything combined, you know, physical And this is I think really dramatic and and I can send you

this paper. It's a really, I think a profound paper suggesting that our kind of our positive thinking are kind of you know the contents of our mind may have a much bigger effect on activating some of these genes than than we have ever given them credit for in the past. Yeah, it would be interesting to see how we could test that hypothesis, because it's it's hard often to separate associations and make sure it's a close and effect.

This is where my mind goes once course, of course, can we give can we give mice cell phones and see what they tweet and don't see how long they live? Well, this is the thing is that there's some things with my we can't ask mice to meditate, you know, there's some things that we just can't do on mice we can just have to do in humans. But it's just very, very clear that you know, having feeling like you're socially supported, feeling like you're valued, that you have some meaning in

your life, some purpose to your life. I mean, there's the classic there's a classic study with people in elderly homes by a Harvard researcher Ellen Langer, finding that just giving older people a pot of a plant to take care of, they lived longer than the control condition of those that weren't given this thing to take care of. So things like that do suggest asked that the mind is so integrably intertwined with with our mortality. Well, if there's one thing I've done well in my mental state

is to focus on the positive. Every day I wake up and I'm excited to be alive. I'll write to people through text wishing them a great day. It's a it's a really positive world that I live in. And it wasn't always like that. Like I said, when I was a teenager, I even had suicidal thoughts it was not worth living. And I've just slipped that around and said that I've seen my mum die, today's not so bad.

Just be positive and it works. You really have to have often, you have to work at it because I think the mind likes to foment bad thoughts, but you can get over it. I'm living proof that that's possible. So hopeful. I think I'll end this interview today with this tweet, tweet that you wrote to experience happiness. Stop loving material things, love living things, especially ones that love you back. You know, I think that you know one of the one of the tragedies is that we have

extra life span. But but levels of depression and anxiety and loneliness are skyrocketing. So just extending human life is not going to be the answer. We need to We need to work together. Brother psychologists need to work together with biology geneticists to have a whole body approach. In my opinion, and I just love the work that you're doing. It's so revolutionary. I want you to keep dreaming. And you know, do you have any parting sort of want

to talk about any like upcoming exciting collaborations. It's all you're doing something with Stephen Frye. I don't know if you could talk about that. I saw your starting a podcast which looks great. Do you want to talk about any of this stuff? Well, Stephen will kill me if if I talk about it. But it is something that you would not expect the two of us to do together. Amazing. So I'm excited about that. I love comedy. The yeah,

I know you're good at it. I can talk about so that the company that I'm building to democratize wellness and allow people to know their age and reverse it slow down, that I'm working furiously on. I'm excited about the biotech companies that are working on these drugs for the eye and the brain for the rest of the body, and you know, stay tuned and hopefully one of them, if not all, are going to have a big breakthrough.

So it's a very busy life. I've got my second book that I'm writing, and my podcast I'm going to put out in an eight part series that's going to cover the big questions that everyone who's read my book and even those who haven't followed me on Twitter are begging me to get into details on it. There's a real thirst for facts now because it's hard to know who to trust. Most of the information is biased or complete lies. And guys like you, Andrew Schuberman, myself, like treatment.

There's a bunch of us Matt Walker now for sleep, women definitely need more women's scientists to step up reach out to me. I know how to do this. I help Andrew build up his and now he's helping me

build up mind. This is a future where I'm excited because instead of hearing about science through a newspaper which used to be mangled and twisted and often negative and often equal handed, which is not true for science, the public can hear directly from US scientists who read the literature and even up to date can say, you know, it just came out yesterday, instead of the public waiting ten twenty years to actually learn about what's happening at

the forefront. It's an exciting future. I feel really blessed to be able to be part of that and use my communication skills to help people live longering, better lives. Yeah, are weave by saying I feel great gratitude that my existence intersected with your existence in this brief period of the universe history. It was a really wonderful privilege for me to talk to you today, David, and I encourage you to keep dreaming and keep doing great research. So

thank you for being my podcast today. Thanks Scott Well likewise, I want to say what you do is great I followed you and I just adore what you do and I know a lot of people appreciate it. Thank you, thank you, thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com. We're on our

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