Aging is Now Optional w/ David Sinclair | EP #60

In this episode, filmed during Abundance360, Peter and David discuss David’s groundbreaking research on reversing aging through epigenetic changes, emphasizing that aging is not just damage to the body but a loss of information. They talk about age reversal as a possibility,rejuvenating brains and regaining lost memories. 03:06 | Reversing Human Aging: Possible? 22:28 | Rejuvenating Brains With Science 38:48 |Reversing Aging Through Diet David Sinclair is a biologist and academic known for his expertise in aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a genetics professor and the Co-Director of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He’s been included in Time100 as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and his research has been featured all over the media. Besides writing a New York Times Best Seller, David has co-founded several biotech companies, a science publication called Aging, and is an inventor of 35 patents Read Sinclair’s latest study,Chemically Induced Reprogramming to Reverse Cellular Aging _____________ Get Peter's new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic – a 2-in-1 probiotic and prebiotic that supports digestive health, gut immunity, skin health, heart health, and more. Try Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic, and make sure to use the code MOONSHOTS at checkout to get a 25% discount. _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:01Peter Diamandis?

  Do you think there is an upper limit to human aging?

• 1:04Speaker 04

  It's not even a question.

• 1:08Speaker 04

  Let me explain.

• 1:12Speaker 04

  I thought that that wasn't fair, to have consciousness and to know that we're going to be sick and die and watch everyone else die. I was inspired by my grandmother, who told me that humans can do better. My PhD supervisor said, "Why would you go study aging? It's not even a real science." And thank goodness, I didn't listen to him. Aging isn't just damage to the body, like we wear out. It's actually a loss of information. There will be a day, I believe, where you'll be able to rejuvenate your brain and get back memories, get your ability to learn again. I'm no longer talking about slowing aging. I'm talking about true age reversal. Multiple times, there's a backup copy of information in every cell. And that fact that there is a backup copy changes everything. There is no law that says we must age. Remember that.

• 1:58Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. One of my favorite conversations from Abundance 360 this year was a fireside chat with Dr. David Sinclair, known around the world as one of the leading, if not the leading thinker on age reversal and epigenetics. David is a professor at Harvard Medical School who studies aging and longevity. He had just published an epic paper in Cell about the work he's done over 13 years on how to accelerate aging from epigenetic changes and then reverse that aging. In this segment, we're going to be diving into the work that he's most recently done and where he thinks it's going. You know,

• 2:39Peter Diamandis?

  I'm a fan of David, a big fan. I've donated to his lab. I've written about his work in the book that I wrote with Tony Robbins called Life Force. I promoted his book Lifespan, David Sinclair's book, probably more than I've promoted my books. He's one of the most exhilarating thinkers, a dear and beautiful soul. We're going to be visiting David during my longevity platinum trip this coming August and going to his lab. And I'll probably have a follow on podcast when we dive into some of the deep science that he's doing. He's an individual that during this conversation will answer the question, is there an upper

• 3:20Peter Diamandis?

  age to how long we live? What is the latest on the epigenetic reprogramming that has been able to reverse the aging of tissues? And he's someone with whom I'm working on a Healthspan X Prize. Super excited about this. All right. So settle in, get ready. What would you do with an extra 20 or 30 years of healthy lifespan? You're about to find out. Enjoy this episode from my private summit, Abundance 360 with Dr. David Sinclair. Welcome, David.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me back. Hi, everyone.

• 3:56Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you to you and Serena for flying in from India. It was a long flight. How long was that?

• 4:01Speaker 04

  I don't know. Too long.

• 4:06Peter Diamandis?

  Well, the topic of longevity has grown to one of epic proportions. And I think, I want to hit on a point I made earlier. The idea of human health span extension, of age reversal, was kind of a taboo subject a while ago, wasn't it?

• 4:27Speaker 04

  Well, not too long ago. Yeah, when I started in this field in the early 90s, it was considered the end of my career by many people. So my PhD supervisor said, "Why would you go study aging? It's too complicated to understand. It's not even a real science." And thank goodness, I didn't listen to him.

• 4:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So remember that for our students out there watching. Was it, what was it that got you to move into that direction? Was it a personal passion? Was it an inkling?

• 4:56Speaker 04

  It was definitely more than an inkling, and still is. If any of you have read my book, you'll know that it was...

• 5:03Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, how many folks up here have read lifespan? Yes?

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Thank you. I appreciate that. And Peter, I think you know the answer to the question. That's why you asked it. I was inspired by my grandmother, who told me that humans can do better. And that's what I love about what Peter does here. That's the vision. It's that we can always do better. There's a bright horizon that we need to get to. We need to steer humanity in that direction. I've felt that way my whole life. That's why we're friends, among other reasons. And so she said, when I was four years old, that everybody I knew, including my pets, were going to die, and it's not going to be pretty, and then I'm going to die. And as a four-year-old, that was a bit of a shock, to be told that.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  And we all, we all learn this around the same age, but we forget about it because it's too painful to live every day, knowing that fact. As sentient beings, as conscious animals, it's really a burden that we bear. And I also, I thought that that wasn't fair, to have consciousness and to know that we're going to be sick and die and watch everyone else die. That was at age four. And then at age around 15, 16, I thought this new technology called genetic engineering could actually tackle this problem in a way that had never been done before. So I set my sights on that.

• 6:21Peter Diamandis?

  Let's go to January 12th. You published a paper in Cell. You published a few landmark papers, this one being amongst them, that showed the ability to control aging using epigenetics in mammals. Just, you know, what were the major points of that paper? Because it definitely, it cemented your work and this concept of the information theory of aging.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the information theory of aging, as it's called, I formulated when I was still in my twenties. I woke up in the middle of the night with this idea. I guess it was delivered to me by muses. I wrote it down in my notebook, and I still have that notebook in my office, and I've been going off that playbook ever since. And that's the idea that aging isn't just damage to the body like we wear out, it's actually a loss of information that we inherited from our parents and built on during development. And yeast cells have that problem, and we just finally published, when was that, 25 years later, that we mammals have the same issue.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  And by understanding, I think, a large part of why we age, we were able to control the aging process in a colony of mice, driving them forwards and backwards in their age and making them get diseases, and now we're even reversing those.

• 7:47Peter Diamandis?

  That's spectacular. So one of the questions we asked everybody when they walked in here was, to put on their badge, how old do you think you will live? And, you know, I think that 90% had hit 120 or higher, but I think what's happened is society has trained us to have certain expectations, right? You know, if your parents or grandparents had made it to 75 or 80, you expect that. And when you hear the oldest living human being is 122, 123, you think, okay, there's a brick wall there. One of the questions I'd love you to share, or the answers I'd love you to share is, do you think there is an upper limit to human aging?

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Well, I know there isn't.

• 8:31Peter Diamandis?

  You know there is not?

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's not even a question.

• 8:40Peter Diamandis?

  Drop the mic moment.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  Let me explain.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  There are lots of reasons why I give that answer. To me, it's self-evident, but for some people it isn't. And there are critics of this idea that we can live beyond 120. But one of the best examples is that we've been able to extend the lifespan of every species that we've tried to extend the lifespan of, and we're no different from those species. That's point one. The second is that there are many species who are very similar to us genetically, biologically, that live a lot longer than we do. The best example would be the bowhead whale, but a lot of whales live longer than us. And, you know, they have children, they're conscious, they produce milk. So we just need to mimic what they have that allows them to live so long. And I think we have a much better idea now of how to do that.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, there is no law that says we must age. Remember that.

• 9:35Peter Diamandis?

  So, one of the things that's going on, we've spent the last few days talking about

• 9:40Peter Diamandis?

  massive advances in AI and quantum computing and sensors, networks, big data. And the realization is we're in a period of very hyper-growth of these technologies. And, you know, as Ray Kurzweil, who will be speaking tomorrow morning, talks about the bridge to a bridge, that your job is not to live now to do something that's going to get you an extra 100 years. It's to get you the next 10 healthy years to intercept those technologies. Do you agree with the idea, David? I think you do, but maybe your timeframe is different, that this next decade is very different than any time ever?

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  So, we're already many decades ahead of where I thought we would be technologically from when I started. I thought I was working to help my children and future children and grandchildren. But it turns out that the pace of discovery has gone way faster. And that's partly due to technology. We can now do an experiment that analyzes billions of genes in the same timeframe in a day that used to take us years of work and billions of dollars. And that allows us to do very quick experiments. The other thing that makes me super positive about this is that...

• 10:56Speaker 04

  We've made, I think, we've made a major breakthrough in our understanding of not just why we age, but also how to control that process. And the turning point in my career was the discovery that there's a backup copy of information in every cell, in every body's cells, and that that backup copy can be accessed, and there's a switch that you can flip that allows cells to reset their biological age and function again as though they were young, because literally they are young again. And that fact that there is a backup copy changes everything. We're no longer, I'm no longer talking about slowing aging, I'm talking about true age

• 11:39Speaker 04

  reversal multiple times, and I don't get laughed offstage anymore when I say that.

• 11:44Peter Diamandis?

  Do you want to give it up for that? I mean, the idea that we aren't tied to the tyranny of aging and death is extraordinary. It changes everything. Hey, everybody, Peter Diamandis here. I've been asked over and over again, what do I do for my own health? Well, I put it down in this book called Peter's Longevity Practices. It's very readable in just an hour. In the book, I cover longevity diet, exercise, sleep, my annual found upload, meds and supplements, longevity mindset. It's literally consumable in just an hour's time, hopefully to incentivize you to make

• 12:29Peter Diamandis?

  a difference in your life, to intercept the technologies coming our way. If you want this, it's free, just check out the link below and download it right now. The evidence that you have for this backup copy, there are a few things you speak about in your book and your podcast, could you speak just a few examples there?

• 12:46Speaker 04

  Right, let's see, we've got some visuals we could call up, actually. So let's call up the slide with the four faces on it, the top right on our guide here.

• 12:59Peter Diamandis?

  Slide six, I think it is.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Yep, that's a good one. All right, so let's do a show of hands. So how many of you have heard of the epigenome, or at least epigenetics?

• 13:11Peter Diamandis?

  Hopefully, everybody's raising your hand.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  Okay. All right, we're done.

• 13:15Peter Diamandis?

  They're all good students.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  All right, so the concept is that, what we've realized is that most of disease and disability is not driven by our genes, it's actually controlled by the regulator of those genes, which is the epigenome. One of the best examples of that are these people here. So these are individuals from two sets of twins. These are in Denmark, a very large study of Danish twins, looking at the effects of genes versus environment, or epigenetics, which is what responds to the environment. And so if we click the button forward once, you'll see that the identical twin of these two individuals, hopefully you can see, looks a lot younger and is actually younger biologically. We can now measure that.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  And it turns out that by living a healthy lifestyle, often you hear about doctors recommending these things. We know a lot about how to slow down the aging process. You don't just look younger, you actually are biologically younger. And that's why if you exercise, you eat right, you eat less often, you take the right supplements, you will be biologically younger and you will actually stave off disease until much later. So what does that actually mean? If we go back one slide, the concept is information. So the main type of information that we know about is the genome in the DNA, but there's also another level of information that's just as important and even more complex, that's the epigenome. And those are the structures that control how the DNA is bundled and shaped, and which

• 14:45Speaker 04

  genes out of the 25,000 get turned on and off when we're forming an embryo and we develop. And those genes can be switched on and off depending on how we live. If we put our bodies in a state of perceived adversity or adversity that isn't too damaging, the epigenome will actually respond and be more stable. So the idea is you want to stabilize your epigenome so that your cells remember how to function youthfully for longer. The analogy, as shown in this slide, is a compact disc. Hopefully, all of you remember what those things are.

• 15:14Peter Diamandis?

  Barely.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Incredible technology, you could fit about 20 songs on there. When I teach at Harvard, the kids are like...

• 15:22Speaker 04

  What are you talking about? This is ridiculous. So if you're young, it's like resetting a computer or pressing the buttons on the side of your iPhone. So what the analogy is that the digital information is the DNA, and that's the music. But you need to read it. It's not just pits on a metallic disk. The epigenome is the equivalent of the reader of that information, and the songs are the genes. And aging, I believe, and our new paper presents very strong evidence, this is the case, that aging is akin to scratches on the CD, so that the cells still have the music, the genes, but they're just not read correctly at the right time and the right place, so that your cells forget how to work. So we see that brain cells become more like skin cells, and skin cells become more like

• 16:07Speaker 04

  kidney cells. We become a melange instead of highly differentiated, functioning youthful cells. And so that's the information theory of aging. And what we found out in this paper is what drives that process in large part is broken DNA. Avoid X-rays, CT scans, if you can help it. Don't fly too much.

• 16:25Peter Diamandis?

  If you can help it.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, don't do what I do. And live with ways that actually prevent those breaks, because that disrupts the epigenome we showed. But here's the cool point, is that we've discovered you can polish off those scratches and get back the beautiful music of cells and their youth.

• 16:41Peter Diamandis?

  So that's extraordinary. There's a concept that has been talked about for some time of longevity escape velocity, that there's a moment in time that for every year that you're alive, science can extend your life for more than a year. And I think the numbers that people talk about today is that we're, for every four years, we're adding a year of life. Where are you on this? And where do you think, what do you think will reach longevity escape velocity? How far out are we?

• 17:11Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  Well, so we get about three months for every year we stay alive currently without breakthroughs like the one I'm talking about. Let me give you an update on where we are today.

• 17:25Peter Diamandis?

  Please, and whatever you're willing to say, I know some of it's amazing.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  And we can extrapolate from here, but remember it's not linear. There's one thing you know from this conference. The journey has been a rapid one. We made this discovery that you can reset the age of cells, human tissue, mouse tissue, living mice. What is it now? It's about five years ago. It was published three years ago. We started working on mice. We reset the eyeballs of mice to be young again. They got their vision back.

• 18:05Peter Diamandis?

  That was the cover.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  They got the cover of Nature.

• 18:08Peter Diamandis?

  December 2020.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  Third row, far right slide. Yeah, we were very fortunate. Nature was bold enough to put the title "Turning Back Time" on the cover of their magazine. Very honored by that. And this is the paper that changed everything for my lab, for my outlook about aging. And what we've done since then is we've formed a company called Life Biosciences, and they've been pushing ahead for all those years. We've done extensive studies in mice. We needed to know if it was safe. It's very safe. We've never seen anything negative after years of work and driving this process. We found that those three genes, O, S, and K for short, these are gene regulators that

• 18:52Speaker 04

  set off a cascade of events during embryogenesis to make a young human. Turns out, lucky for all of us, I think, is that those three genes also set back the clock in adult cells without causing tumors or any disease.

• 19:06Peter Diamandis?

  And without bringing them back so far that they've lost identity.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  And this is the thing that blows my mind is you'd think that if you just keep it on for a long time, you'd go back to zero, age zero, which you don't want. It's not true. They go, cells go back about eighty percent and stop. There's a barrier that prevents them from going back to zero if we leave off that other gene. It's a gift to humanity.

• 19:30Peter Diamandis?

  For sure.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  And so now we're at the point where we're conducting, at Life Biosciences, a Boston-based company, non-human primates, these are green monkey studies. I should say that the reason that there's an iris on this cover is that we show that you could reverse blindness due to glaucoma and also old age by resetting the age of the retina back to youth. And those mice got their full vision back again. So the, think about this, your body, if this is true, the body is, looks old, but it's actually, it just needs to be reset. So I don't think of an old person now as an old person, I think it's just a body that needs to be reset.

• 20:09Peter Diamandis?

  Polished. So this is a big deal because, I mean, one of the critiques about the work that you and other individuals in this field have done is it's all done in mice, you know, that's great, but we're humans, you know, mice get all the benefits, but, but non-human primates is a big deal. We share ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of our genetic code with them.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  We do, and, and, so I've, I've had a sneak peek at the, at the results, and I would say things look rather promising at this point.

• 20:43Peter Diamandis?

  It's a big deal, guys. It's a very big deal.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  And so it's my prediction that we'll be, in the next eighteen months or two years, testing our first age reversal clinical trial in humans to cure blindness. And those studies are actually being planned right now, and the material to do that is being manufactured.

• 21:07Peter Diamandis?

  How are you guys feeling about your longevity mindsets now?

• 21:15Peter Diamandis?

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• 21:57Peter Diamandis?

  that are delivered in a patented capsule that actually protects it from the stomach acid and ensures that all of it reaches your colon alive with 100% survivability. Now, if you want to try Seed's Daily Synbiotic for yourself, you can get 25% off your first month's supply by using the code MOONSHOTS at checkout. Just go to seed.com/monshots and enter the code MOONSHOTS at checkout. That's seed.com/monshots and use the code MOONSHOTS to get 25% off your first month of Seed's Daily Synbiotic. Trust me, your gut will thank you. All right, let's get back to our episode. You know, we're going to be, thank you, we're going to be visiting your lab during

• 22:41Peter Diamandis?

  the longevity platinum trip in August and September. How many graduate students do you have there? What's the setup that you have that we'll be meeting?

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know if you had this experience, but every day I go into my lab and I'm surprised how small it is. It's just as, like Elon Musk says, if you have dedicated people who know really how to make a difference and look forward rather than today, they can achieve anything. And so I've got this small group of around 20 Bright eyed young PhD students and postdocs who perform all this magic. And it's a pretty small lab, it's about a thousand square feet, we do it all there. And yeah, it's, to me, it's amazing to walk in there and I never get tired of showing people around because it's like magic. You go in and you see, actually, I think the next slide might be interesting.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Click to the right and what you'll see is that we're now growing our human brains. Have any of you seen?

• 23:39Peter Diamandis?

  Organoids.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  To grow these organoids, probably many of you have seen this. So on the left, we have cerebral organoids growing from human tissue. We can now, I think we're the only lab now that can make these brains get really old. We can make them 70 years old within a matter of weeks. Now they develop dementia, we can measure that with these electrodes on the right. We grow them on these little electrodes. And then we can, and we do reverse the age of those little organoids and they get their thinking ability back. Whatever that is, we do see the electrical activity come back. Sometimes they grow little eyes as well, it's kind of cool.

• 24:12Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  But why do we do that? It's not just cool, it actually tells us that the whole brain is reversible. And we've actually done this now in mice, we haven't published this, so you've heard it here first. That we can reverse the age of an old mouse's brain, so they have dementia. We spend three weeks reversing the age of the brain. We just give them an intravenous injection of our therapy, turn it on for four weeks. And those mice have a young brain and they have their ability to learn again. So I imagine a day where we will have an infusion either in our eye or in our whole body. And we just take a drug to turn those genes on. We use doxycycline, just your antibiotic.

• 24:48Peter Diamandis?

  As a trigger for those genes.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  Just a trigger. We don't need an antibiotic, it's not used as an antibiotic, it's an on off switch. But we can reset the body and so after the eye, we're going to go after hearing and dementia.

• 25:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  And there will be a day, I believe, where you will be able to rejuvenate your brain and get back memories, get your ability to learn again.

• 25:07Peter Diamandis?

  Wow, let's give it up for that. Are you guys hearing the same thing? I just want to jump up and down here. I mean, so, listen, I've asked Ray Kurzweil, I've asked George Church, and now I'm asking you this idea of a longevity, escape velocity target date. Let me give you a couple of decades and tell me, you know, as a betting man, under/over, within the next decade, in the second decade, in the third decade?

• 25:41Speaker 04

  Do you mean escape velocity of the singularity?

• 25:45Peter Diamandis?

  So, when we will have the ability to go and get a mechanism that will allow us to basically age in place or age in reverse, so that we're no longer, you know, if ever you're alive, we're extending our lifespan for more than a year?

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Well, it's already here, it's just not available widely.

• 26:10Peter Diamandis?

  It's already here, ladies and gentlemen. At least if you're a mouse.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  Well, so, I'm not talking about our therapy, that one is, that's hardcore, that's a rocket versus the Wright brothers. But there are technologies now, and some published papers, that...

• 26:28Peter Diamandis?

  Are you talking about, like, rapamycin?

• 26:30Speaker 04

  Rapamycin and combinations, so Greg Fahy has done good work, continues to do good work on combinations of molecules that have age reversal properties. So I believe that there are already molecules and drugs that you can use to reset your age somewhat, not go back to being 30 years old again, if you're my age. Our ability in my lab, and presumably scientists across the world, if they're smart, to use AI to answer questions that we were not able to. You know, I wake up and, poor Serena, my partner who's here with me, knows I read papers first thing in the morning, usually. And so, that is a real tax on my brain, but I can only cover 100 papers a morning.

• 27:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, there's 7,000 papers published in the medical science every day.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that alone, the ability to synthesize that every day would be great, and we're doing that now. But just ability to ask AI how to find the best molecules that can mimic the OSK gene therapy, you can ask AI that, you can get decent answers. So we are going to have... Exponentially exponential increases in the pace of this field. So it's not just AI helping us be superhuman. It's also the funding level, the amount of money that has gone into certain companies in this area since we published that paper in Nature. Uh, there's been investment um in the billions of dollars.

• 28:00Peter Diamandis?

  You're Milner and Jeff Bezos, Evolution, I was showing him some of the companies earlier that are capitalized.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the reason is perhaps to state the obvious is that this is an area that's no longer the backwater of biology, it really, it's pharmaceutical development. And those that capture that land will be the dominant industry of this century.

• 28:22Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. Um, and one of the points I remember in discussion with you and George Church was that it's likely that a real rejuvenation uh uh therapeutic will, if it works for one tissue in organ, will work for the entire body.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  That's also lucky, but it's true. Uh, that's what we find in animals. Now, we haven't, I haven't injected myself yet. I'm probably not going to do that for a few years. But in in mice, uh, I'm shocked that what works in the eye in the optic nerves, the nerve cells, works in the epithelial cells in the retina, works in the outer layer of cells on the retina, works in the kidney we just published, the muscle. You know, if it works in all those different cell types, um, I think it's a universal process of biology to be able to be reset. And uh, so that's why I'm I'm not exaggerating when I think a whole body reset is coming.

• 29:18Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. One of the things that we talk about on the on the longevity platinum trips usually is this idea of gene therapies using these basically these molecular robots, the adeno-associated viruses. And where you can target your virus towards particular tissues.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Well, that's what we do. We have a domesticated virus, the AAV, which is already used and approved by the FDA. Our system's a little bit more advanced, the one that we co-developed with George. And that is, it's a two-part system where you need both parts, but it's also inducible. So, right now, as far as I'm aware, nobody else is developing a product for, in the clinic, that is, has an on-off switch. I think that's important for two reasons, to make that happen, even though it's triplely expensive.

• 30:06Peter Diamandis?

  Can I, just as you're setting this up, you're saying we're gonna put these three genes, the OSK genes, in all the cells in our body, but we're gonna have to turn it on, otherwise it's inactive.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  It starts out off, correct. Yeah, and that's what we did in this paper in Nature and this new one in Cell, is that we have exquisite control over when these genes come on, for safety reasons, but also because we now know, in the mice at least, you can reset multiple times. So that you'll have this treatment, your body will be filled with these genes, they'll be off, and if we get sick, or if we get injured, or if we get too old, we can take a course of an antibiotic for a couple of months and get reset every time. Or if we're in the emergency room, they give you an infusion of doxycycline, on come these repair genes, your nerves regrow, your spine regenerates, et cetera.

• 31:00Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. Amazing.

• 31:08Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Tony and I were blessed to be able to provide you, to give you, gift you a quarter million dollar donation for your lab. Where are you, what, if you had unlimited funding, which hopefully you will, you don't yet, where would you be experimenting? Where would you be going next?

• 31:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would put a lot of effort in the next generation of age reversal technologies. Right now, it's a gene therapy, which means it's going to be expensive and hard to fulfill our dreams of changing humanity. That said, what we want to do is we want to turn those gene therapies into a pill. And so you can take a course of a pill and get the same effect. And it's actually easier to distribute molecules than it is viruses. So I would expand that group and screen millions of molecules for those ones that, in combination, could be taken.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  Either you could have a cosmetic company, you could have probably one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies. That scenario, I think, is super important to get ahead of.

• 32:20Peter Diamandis?

  Hey, everybody. This is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog.

• 32:59Peter Diamandis?

  One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you, as an entrepreneur, can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to diamandis.com/blog and learn more. Now, back to the episode. One of the questions that people ask you and me all the time is, is this just a treatment for the wealthy? And we saw the study done by London School of Business, Oxford, Harvard, that reducing

• 33:41Peter Diamandis?

  age one year in the global population adds $38 trillion to the global economy. So it really is an uplifting of humanity. So. You think we will get, as we get to volume, we will get to a point where this is accessible, affordable, and made available to everybody?

• 33:58Speaker 04

  Or I'll die trying. Yeah, that's the goal. I'm really optimistic. I already have some molecules in the lab that show signs of age reversal. But there again, I want to build a Concord real fast.

• 34:14Peter Diamandis?

  Let's hit on a few other quick things. Rapamycin?

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 34:19Peter Diamandis?

  Are you taking it?

• 34:20Speaker 04

  On and off, yes.

• 34:24Peter Diamandis?

  I'm taking six milligrams once a week. Metformin?

• 34:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. Daily when I remember.

• 34:34Peter Diamandis?

  When you remember, yes. Well, Serena, I'm sure is there to help out when she can. You've gone vegan. Have you always been vegan?

• 34:41Speaker 04

  No, I was a pseudo-Mediterranean about two years ago, and, which I thought was healthy. Red wine, cheese. It was a great life, but unfortunately, I was losing my memory and I really wasn't that... I mean, I was about seven or eight years younger than my actual age, according to InsideTracker, a testing company. I met Serena Poon, who's here in the audience, who Peter's been referencing, I've been referencing. She's, among other things, a nutritionist, but also a longevity expert, and a lot of things I don't know she does, and one of those things is what to eat. So she turned me on to veganism now. I would say I'm a struggling vegan. I still have butter and milk occasionally.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  I'll occasionally have some alcohol, but I do try to be plant-focused as much as I can. And I do, it turns out, I love plant stuff. I love hummus and bhava ganush and all that stuff. So I don't just eat salads. But what surprised me when I switched to listen to Serena is that I measure myself in many ways, as I think you all know. I went back another two years in my biological age, just in a couple of months after switching to that diet. So I've been convinced. Now, I think there are a lot of people who say, whoa, I gotta have my meat, gotta have my alcohol. I would say just try to temper it, especially the alcohol.

• 36:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. My father used to say, "Pine, methronidist, and everything in moderation." Talk about mitochondria. I mean, the powerhouse, you know, the whole NMN-NAD complex, but...

• 36:13Peter Diamandis?

  The number of mitochondria fall off as we age and the efficiency of them.

• 36:19Peter Diamandis?

  What's that's one of the hallmarks of aging.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is. So there are there are about a dozen hallmarks now. We keep adding on and that these are really underlying causes of aging. Mitochondrial dysfunction is one of them. Though I think that epigenetic changes drive a lot of these, including mitochondrial effects, because when we reset the age of the cell, the mitochondria get rejuvenated, which is good news. Now, these power packs decline, NMN and boosters of NAD rejuvenate mitochondria, and that's been shown to be highly beneficial in animals and now in people. And so one of the things that you want to do is make sure that your battery packs, your mitochondria stay healthy and numerous. And that's one of the reasons exercise and fasting are beneficial is that your body boosts mitochondria.

• 37:02Peter Diamandis?

  And your fasting regime right now, is it has it changed at all? Are you still one meal a day or are you?

• 37:08Speaker 04

  I try. I ate a little bit of lunch, as you saw. I really try. Serena will tell you, I struggle. Yeah, you know, it's really hard. I agree that just having one meal a day is a challenge. I think it's okay if you're not perfect. I try to skip breakfast. I try to skip lunch. I'm not always successful. But in general, my average day looks like most of my calories are eaten within a six hour window.

• 37:34Peter Diamandis?

  Do you feel you're getting enough protein to keep your muscle mass? We've talked a lot about the importance of muscle and reversing sarcopenia as we age.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. I do. So I think if you if you don't pay attention to what you eat and you just eat lettuce leaves, you're not going to do it. But we're Serena and I are very careful. We focus on legumes and we we those plants that have high protein content and nutrition. And that's the key. You need to educate yourself on what to eat, not just when to eat.

• 38:02Peter Diamandis?

  I think I promoted lifespan more than any of my own books. It was just such a beautiful book.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  You're very kind.

• 38:09Peter Diamandis?

  And I think it's important. It's waking people up to the possibility to give them hope and to give them a mindset. You have another book you're working on.

• 38:21Peter Diamandis?

  When do we expect that? What's it going to be about?

• 38:24Speaker 04

  Well, also, congrats on your book, Life Force.

• 38:28Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  It's sold very well, and I think deservedly so.

• 38:30Peter Diamandis?

  There's a whole chapter in the book that Tony and I wrote about David.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, thank you again for that. That was kind. And if you haven't read Life Force, well worth it. So, yeah, the book two is "Everything That You Wanted to Know That Wasn't in Lifespan Will Be in This One." So I'm thinking about calling it Lifespan Two. It's really a journey through

• 38:53Peter Diamandis?

  Second Life.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Through time. That's a good one.

• 38:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 04

  A journey through time, looking at what makes us human, what's in our genetic makeup and our epigenetic makeup that we can learn from in how to live our lives through this tumultuous time where society is trying to not just kill us, but make us age rapidly. Our lifestyles of sitting and eating and lack of exercise, stress, even social media is really bad. These are things that put the body in a state of complacency. And this book will be, in the same way Lifespan was the textbook, this will be the guidebook of how to live in today's world and beyond.

• 39:36Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. You know, you pinned a tweet in which you talk about the factors that are counter to a longer, healthier life. Smoking, for sure.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  That's the worst.

• 39:50Peter Diamandis?

  The worst. Alcohol intake.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  Again, new data says alcohol is worse than I even thought, so...

• 39:58Peter Diamandis?

  So if you want your Resveratrol, take the pill, not the red wine.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Definitely.

• 40:01Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Waist size.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  What? Waist size?

• 40:07Peter Diamandis?

  Waist size.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so people who are overweight have, in general, an older epigenetic age than those who stay at a BMI between, say, 21 and 24. So that's a fact. So if you want to age slower, maintain your BMI in what's considered a healthy range.

• 40:28Peter Diamandis?

  Inflammatory CRP levels. Yep, I think it's.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:34Peter Diamandis?

  Inflammation is the underlying killer for so much.

• 40:36Speaker 04

  For sure, for sure. And there are foods that you eat that can be inflammatory. For instance, some of us have a reaction to dairy or to certain grains. Be careful about that. You don't want that. Your gut is very important for inflammation. You don't want bacteria getting into your gut, lodging in your bloodstream or in your brain. That can cause these diseases that we all know of. So, yeah, keep inflammation low. And one of the best ways to do that is to not just eat well, but also make sure that you're not allergic to things in your environment. And you can do blood tests to make sure that's not happening.

• 41:11Peter Diamandis?

  David, it's an honor to call you as a friend. I'm grateful to have you here. Thank you for all you're doing.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  Likewise, sir. Thank you, sir.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  Let's give it up for David Sinclair.