David Sinclair: Reversing the Aging Process

Biologist and genetics expert Dr. David Sinclair is out to prove he can live past 100 years old, and he thinks you can too. On this episode Sinclair goes in-depth on the process of aging and the techniques you can incorporate into your life that help you live a longer, healthier life, including optimizing your diet, the benefits of exercise, the role of a positive attitude, the importance of sleep, the three supplements he takes every day, why it’s never too late to slow the process of aging, and so much more. Dr. Sinclair is a professor of genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School, and he is best known for his research on aging, with a focus on epigenetics. He’s been called one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time, and in 2019 he released the New York Times bestselling book, Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don't Have To. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The reason I'm talking to you today is to wake people up and realize there is no law that says we have to age. Now, if you forced me to give you a number, I'd love to live beyond 100. I wouldn't say no to 120, and I wouldn't say no to 150. Right now, there's a limit because that's what we've seen happens. But the people that live over 100 typically don't take care of themselves. A lot of them smoke, and some of them smoke and drink and don't eat good food. So what happens when you have great genes, which is 20%, plus people who do the optimal lifestyle and take the optimal supplements and take the optimal drugs? There's no reason why 120 needs to be the maximum human lifespan. There is nothing in biology that says that there is a limit.

• 1:00Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this show is to master the best of what other people have already figured out, so you can unlock your potential. To that end, I sit down with people at the top of their game to uncover what they've learned along the way. Every episode is packed with timeless ideas and insights that you can use in life and business. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes, access before anyone else, transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join us at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Today, I'm joined by Dr. David Sinclair, tenured

• 1:41Shane Parrish?

  professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an expert researcher in the field of longevity. Dr. Sinclair is also the author of the book Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To, and the host of the Lifespan Podcast. I've wanted to talk to Dr. Sinclair because I'm interested in learning about the things that I can do now that set me up to live a long and healthy life. We go deep on the process of aging, how, what, and when we eat matters, sugar, why stressing our bodies through exercise and saunas is important, the role of attitude, the importance of sleep, the three supplements he takes daily, on whether it's too late to slow the effects of aging, how long we'll live, how long we should live, and more.

• 2:27Shane Parrish?

  We also talk about Lyme disease, and I open up for the first time about my experience with it. If you're interested in living a long and healthy life, this episode is for you. The lawyers want me to remind you that Dr. Sinclair is not a medical doctor, and this episode is not medical advice. Please consult your physician before changing anything. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:53Shane Parrish?

  Marcus Aurelius said, "Death smiles at us all. All we can do is smile back." And I feel like you sort of get up in the morning and you look at the god of death and you simply say, "Not today."

• 3:05Speaker 00

  I do that, actually. I do bounce out of bed thinking every day is a miracle to be a functioning, living organism. And I know that time is short. We live for not even a blink of an eye in geological time. And so I live my life like that. Carpe diem is another motto that I would say to myself many times a day, actually. And working on aging and forestalling ill health and death certainly does act as a motivating force. Not so much for myself, honestly. You know, I'm not really afraid of dying, but I am aware that every day over 100,000 people die from aging itself, and it's something that I'd like to alleviate.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  If not extend lifespan by a century, what I would like to do is to at least have people live another 10, 20 years in good health.

• 3:55Shane Parrish?

  What is aging, biologically speaking, and why is it a problem?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Well, if I have to tell you why it's a problem, then we have a problem. It's one of the largest costs to our economy. Globally, it's more sick care than healthcare. There's a huge amount of suffering for the individual and of families. Anyone who's seen someone die understands that uh it's often not a pleasant process. And it can take many years and the final moments are extremely stressful for everybody and often painful. So you know, that that's in itself enough motivation. Um but you know, the economic reasons are are really important. We just calculated with colleagues in London who are economists.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  And they calculated that the US alone, just by slowing down aging by one year and making people productive, more productive for one year, would save over the next three decades eighty six trillion dollars, which we waste now on just keeping people alive in a sick state. Um and they're not productive, of course. Uh and so uh if you do it for ten years, it's three hundred and sixty five trillion dollars. That's a lot of money that can be used for education, uh additional research, healthcare, and even combating things like uh global warming, climate change. I can't think of a more important thing to be tackling right now uh as a species on this planet.

• 5:25Shane Parrish?

  What happens in our body as we age?

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that there's a growing consensus that what happens is we lose information that we got in the womb. Now, part of it was from uh genetics, right? We're we're carrying one copy in every cell of our mother and father's chromosomes. Uh but we're also, in fact, largely determined by what's called, not the genome, which is the DNA, but the epigenome. And the epigenome are the control systems that tell the cell which genes to turn on and off. And there's twenty something thousand genes, but they only use a few thousand to to specify how to be a nerve cell versus a skin cell.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  And this all gets laid down as we're embryos and eventually born. And this epigenomic information that tells cells how to behave, we think, breaks down over time. And that results in diseases, tissue dysfunction. So you know, you start to look older, you can't clear toxins, you can't think well, your nerve cells don't work well. You become less able to see at night. Eventually, you get diseases that kill you and.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  That's really the the major cause of suffering on this planet. And what we've done as a medical community is to look at the end stage of this process, and we call these things diseases, and try to treat them with drugs and, you know, basically putting Band-Aids on the problem, forgetting what got us to that point in the first place, which is aging itself, which I have proposed and is increasingly thought to be the case, that it's disruption of that epigenetic control system that tells the cells which genes to turn on and off.

• 7:09Shane Parrish?

  And and that's sort of the information loss. And I think one of the analogies you've used before is like a DVD player and a DVD getting scratched for those of us over forty, I guess.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I didn't realize you're over forty. You look young yourself. So whatever you're doing, keep doing that. Yeah, so the DVD or the CD analogy works well to older with older people. But anyone who doesn't remember, these were plastic discs with foil that had little pits that represented zeros and ones. And this is digital information. And that digital information in the cell is DNA. And it's not zeros and ones, it's A T C G chemicals. And they're strung out about six feet long of DNA in every cell. And that's about the same amount of information that you can fit on a DVD. Okay, so our cells are a DVD. But

• 8:02Speaker 00

  what aging is, I've proposed, is that it's like scratches that disrupt the ability of the machine, the laser beam, to read the right songs at the right time or the movie. And you get a horrible cacophony of music. And what we've discovered is that there are ways to, well, we discovered one of the main causes of scratches, that's broken chromosomes, which happens all the time in our bodies. Um, extreme cell damage also does that if we crush nodes. Um, but we've also figured out and recently published that there's a way, we think, to polish those scratches so that we can play that beautiful music of youth again.

• 8:42Shane Parrish?

  Uh, let's talk a little bit about sort of like reducing our biological age. And I think we're all interested to some extent, some people more than others in living a long time. But we all want that time to be full of vitality and productivity and not just living longer for the sake of of living longer. And I think that's where the biological age versus your chronological age sort of becomes important. One of the ways that I've heard you talk about before is fasting. And it's super interesting because fasting isn't new. I mean, it used to be a necessity for us, but now we're starting to learn about why it's helpful. Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of fasting? And how it relates to slowing down or even reversing aging?

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, these systems that tell cells how to read the genes at the right time, this epigenome. Um, there are gene, there are factors that control that. Um, and so a little, very little bit of biology here. DNA isn't just floating around the cell. It's actually looped into big loops that tell genes to be switched on. Uh, and genes that should be switched off are bundled up tightly. Um, and we call this stuff chromatin. And those, those loops of genes that are on and bundles of genes that are off are controlled in part by a set of genes called the sirtuins. And those genes make proteins that cause these loops and bundles, particularly they create these bundles to keep genes switched off because you don't want a liver, liver gene or a skin gene coming on in the brain.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  But that's what happens with aging, we find.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  It's me, the

• 10:21Speaker 02

  we don't need the jingle twice. Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights and rental cars.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Fine, no one deals more deals than please stop. Touche. Priceline.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  How about a latte?

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Maybe dark roast?

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Vanilla?

• 10:50Speaker 04

  Caramel?

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Blueberry?

• 10:51Speaker 04

  You could get them to agree on one flavor or give everyone what they want.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  With Keurig, there's over 500 K-Cup pie varieties of fresh, flavorful coffee. No effort, no grind, no settling.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Great coffee without the grind. Keurig.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  And so one way to make sure this process goes slower is to turn on these sirtuin, epigenetic regulators, to use a more technical term. And there are seven of these epigenetic regulators, the things that prevent the scratches. And we can turn them on with gene therapy. In mice, we do this, and if you do it in the brain of a mouse, they'll live longer. Do it in the body, they can live longer. But we can't genetically modify ourselves. So what we can, we've also found is that these genes get turned on by adversity. Adversity, or at least perceived adversity. If our body thinks we're going to run out of food, or we need to run away from a saber-toothed tiger,

• 11:57Speaker 00

  or we're chasing a mastodon, then our body says, oh, you know, times might be tough. Don't put all our energy and resources into growing bigger muscles. In fact, put that, some of that energy into surviving, hunkering down and defending the body against toxins, against damage. And that, we know, leads to longer life. It slows down this clock of epigenetic changes, which we can measure. And we also know that the ways to mimic adversity include skipping meals, eating less protein in general, being hot and cold. And then the big one is eating the right types of food.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  That, we all know, a healthy Mediterranean-type diet. And there are actually chemicals within those foods of a Mediterranean diet, in olive oil and red wine, that we found in my lab to activate these sirtuins, and probably also slow down the clock. But they certainly improve health. And then the last thing, Shane, that I think is really important is... What I'm working on is not about keeping people older at the end of life and alive for longer. It's the opposite. We're keeping animals and increasingly we're showing with people that you can keep them younger for longer so that when you're eighty, you can actually be sixty.

• 13:16Shane Parrish?

  Is there, there's so many different directions I want to go in here, but is there a point where fasting becomes, I mean, there is a point, unhelpful, right? Like if you don't eat, you will die eventually. Is it sort of like you skip one meal is good, you skip two meals is great, you skip six and you're back to good again? Or is there sort of like some sort of limit that we should think about in terms of maximizing the benefit if we are going to fast?

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, there's some real key points to hear. One is we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation. That would not be beneficial. And in fact, when, you know, ten thousand years ago or more, people were not living a long time from fasting because they were not getting enough nutrition. But in our world now, we can have, not energy drinks, but drinks that contain enough nutrients. We can make sure that we're not deficient. We can measure things with blood tests and we can make sure that we're not deficient. But the optimal, the second point is that the optimum is different for everybody, in part because we have different tolerances for not eating, but also because we have different microbiomes with different genders.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  We're just genetically different. And we know from studies in mice that you can take regular lab mice and mix up their, breed them in a way that you get a little bit of diversity in these lab mice and give them caloric restrictions so you don't feed them more than, I think it was forty percent what they would normally eat. And some mice breeds, strains we call them, lived a lot longer. Some of them died earlier. Then but practically, what should you do? Well, it seems to be a rule that if you fast at at least fourteen hours, you'll have a lot of health benefits, better metabolic stability,

• 15:10Speaker 00

  lower blood sugar levels, better cholesterol, these kind of things kick in. Um, a a popular one is the um, what sixteen eight, go for sixteen hours. So you skip one meal a day and have a late lunch or an early lunch, depending on which one you're skipping. And that uses the period of sleep as a fasting state. And then what I do is I skip breakfast and often I skip lunch, skip lunch as well. And so I'm getting actually more like twenty hours of fasting on a good day. I will say that today I had a little bit of avocado for breakfast because I had to get up really early. So I'm not perfect and I don't think anyone should strive to be perfect, but you do what you can. Now, there are other people

• 15:52Speaker 00

  that do a a week long fast. Now, now that's the other extreme. I wouldn't go further than a week, actually, given what I know. But once you've gone more than three days, there's a special type of recycling of proteins that's very beneficial called autophagy or autophagy. And that takes about three days. Now, I've never done that myself. I'm pretty wimpy when it comes to to these kind of things. I'm a hedonist by nature and very lazy. But I think that if you can go three days or four days, that would be occasionally, not it, not, of course, not every week, but you could do that every few weeks. And if you do a week long fast, um, you want to do that maybe four times a year. And those are the the rough guidelines.

• 16:36Shane Parrish?

  If we fast for two meals and then on the third meal, we eat as many calories as we would have eaten during the rest of the day normally, are we still getting benefits of fasting?

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:48Shane Parrish?

  Or does it sort of?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, we are. That's the great news. That so take me, for example, I have big dinners, um, because I'm I'm making up for the lack of food during the day. And so I'm not losing weight. Once you've hit a set point and you've got your your body weight and during COVID, I dropped from one hundred and fifty pounds to one hundred and thirty two. I'm now steady at that one hundred and thirty two, feeling great, eating tons of food that I always wanted, but it's packed into an hour or two of feeding. Now, how do we know that works? Well, we know from blood tests in humans that it it looks like it's beneficial. You get the kind of changes that. Are seen in younger people, things like I mentioned blood glucose and then there's hormone levels and stress levels, which I've been measuring in myself for a decade. So I can tell

• 17:34Speaker 00

  you for me, it works. But the the other thing that's important is that from animal studies that have been done over the last hundred years in mice and rats and dogs, it's very clear that it's not just what you eat, it's when you eat. And there's a very famous study that was done by a colleague of mine, Rafael de Cabo at the NIH in Bethesda. And he made three different types of diets for mice. One that had a lot of protein, the other had carbs, the other had fat, and he thought he would find the optimal diet for the mice. Turns out it didn't make any difference. What mattered was when he gave the food. And if he gave it to them just within this short hour long window every day, they lived dramatically longer, thirty percent longer.

• 18:17Shane Parrish?

  That's fascinating. Where does the notion that we should even eat three meals a day come from?

• 18:22Speaker 00

  I suspect, and I want to research this for my next book, it's, I think it's the the the food producers that they want that it become, you know, a saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And and then you've got the the the bars, the food, the snacks that we now eat in between meals. For some reason, doctors, nutritionists, were either educated or misinformed, or both, that the body is best when it's never hungry. And we know that is not the case. And just one point on the hunger. I typically am not hungry. Now, if if you start fasting, and you've never done it before, you will feel

• 19:05Speaker 00

  hungry. There's a hormone called ghrelin, which will cause that. Of course, it's not real. Hunger is just mental state. But after three weeks, you find, I found, that the state of hunger goes away. So during the day, I'm not not peckish. You know, I might eat some nuts or whatever, just to. So suppress a little bit of twang, but I'm not starving by any means. And I actually really, really enjoy my dinner as a result. But you know, I tell you this, Shane and your listeners, because if you try to do what I do tomorrow, you will fail. You need to slowly work up to it and learn the tricks like drinking water, drinking tea, fill your stomach with hot or cold water and fluids, and that'll help.

• 19:47Shane Parrish?

  I I found I used to eat out a lot before COVID because I used to travel a lot and I was always found myself in a restaurant. And I always found that I'd eat more in a restaurant for whatever reason than I would at home. So I I've always used this thing where I have two glasses of water before a meal. And that was a way to slow down or sort of at least reduce how much I was eating in the restaurant.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's a that's a trick you can use every day. I do it. I'm drinking. For those that are listening, I'm drinking some water here right now. Actually, it's a it's a supplement drink. But yeah, that's a really good trick. And also, you want to eat your carbs after you have protein because that'll prevent your glucose from shooting up too high. And glucose, I wouldn't say it's poison. We need glucose to survive. But this typical Western diet of spiking glucose after breakfast, and then it shoots back down and becomes now your hypoglycemic, as it's called, you start to get the jitters, brain fog. Now you eat again. And this cycle throughout the day, which is a typical Western diet, is really not very enjoyable. Once you realize that when you do what I do,

• 20:53Speaker 00

  your liver is making glucose throughout the day at a perfect level, and it doesn't go up and down much. And you can focus and you're not worried about where your next meal is and your brain's really optimal. And that, to me, I wish I'd started 20 years ago, eating less often because you don't just look better, you actually can perform better as well.

• 21:14Shane Parrish?

  I like that a lot. And it's not just physical performance, it's also mental performance, right?

• 21:20Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. You know, I'm not a physical guy, right? I'm sitting and typing mostly and using my brain. And I I'm way, I wouldn't say smarter, but I'm way more focused than I was. I don't get distracted. I don't have memory loss. And I'm also not wasting money and time on meals during the day either. But yeah, it's fascinating and it's been shown in mice to be true as well. And I think what's also likely is that my brain activity and health will be maintained for a decade or more longer by adopting this kind of diet.

• 21:54Shane Parrish?

  So let's talk a little bit about what we eat in terms of reducing aging or sort of reducing that biological clock. What are the best things to eat?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  I know it sounds a little bit repetitive, but it is individual, but you can make some generalizations. So first of all, the individual differences are obvious. There's your body type, but also your gender. And I think just as important, your physique. If you are into bodybuilding or you're an athlete professionally, that's very different than someone like me who's just using their brain and their fingers to make a living. So that there's that consideration and there are there are hacks that I'm helping develop that allows you to be in the adversity state, which is what we were describing, eating less, consuming less protein. And that's the adversity state that's longevity, but then have periods where you can have an abundant state.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  And so perhaps I would suggest trying on days that you work out, assuming you're not a professional athlete, having some extra protein, eat a little bit of fish, for example. But mostly for that adversity state, you want to be focused on plants. Why is that? Because plants have less available amino acids. Your body has to work harder to get them out, but they also have a ratio of amino acids that turns on some of these defenses that I'm talking about. A very important one is called MTOR, little M, capital T O R. And it's there to sense how much protein you're taking in. And if it's always sensing that you're eating protein, it will not Turn on the survival pathway that leads to longevity.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  So you'll look good if you're always eating protein because your body is, yeah, I got plenty of energy. Let's go for it. Let's grow. But if you never have that state of want, that adversity. Um, I'm convinced and the data shows it from population studies. That a carnivorous diet isn't a longevity producing diet in the, in the long run, right? But in the short run, of course, you'll feel better. Uh, and a lot of people argue with me saying, I feel great. How could this be wrong? But you know, remember, life is long. You want to look, look at ways that will extend your lifespan. Two, three, four decades from now. But I think you can have both. I think that it's all about pulsing it. Doing adversity and then occasionally having the abundance as well.

• 24:16Shane Parrish?

  And you mentioned a Mediterranean diet earlier. Is there anything that we've learned about? What we know about what we eat and like high fat versus low carb versus all of the stuff that to maximize? Our longevity.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the, the amazing thing about the state of knowledge of humanity right now is that. Over the last few thousand years, humans have figured out. To eat less often. There are states of fasting. Most religions do that. But also the types of foods. Uh, Mediterranean diet is a good example. There's a Okinawan diet, which is a Japanese island that. Has mostly plants, um, and a little bit of fish. But mostly it's not overeating and there's not huge amounts of animal fat and animal products and dairy. In a typical long-lived population. Uh, that I just described. So that we've known for a long time and. You know, it, it's crazy that we're debating this. Mediterranean diet is just known to be healthy and.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Vegetarian and vegan diets are also conducive to longevity.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  But the other thing that's amazing about our state of knowledge is that. People like me have discovered genes that control aging. So two ones are the ones that we work on this mTOR gene that I mentioned. Those diets are turning on those defenses that we discovered, not because we were studying diets, because we were studying yeast cells and worms and fruit flies. But now we understand in this unified theory of aging, that by eating these types of foods, you're making the body think that times are tough, turning on the defenses that for the long run will be conducive to longevity and forestall these diseases that will kill us. And in the short run, you'll actually feel better and in the term, in terms of body composition will actually look better, too.

• 26:03Shane Parrish?

  Assuming we're eating like, let's say, a green pepper or red pepper, is there a difference between organic and inorganic, or ones that have undergone stress and ones that haven't undergone stress in terms of how our body processes that?

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. The other reason to be focusing more on plants is that they make molecules that are very healthy for us. And again, we scientists have figured out that those molecules aren't just being antioxidants. You know, that's the theory of the 1980s. What we've realized is that in addition to be being antioxidants, they actually turn on those longevity pathways, the sirtuins. They work on mTOR. There's another one called AMPK, which senses blood sugar and energy. And by eating plants that in general make these molecules, and especially plants that are stressed themselves or have adversity, which heightens the amount of these molecules

• 27:00Speaker 00

  production, we can ingest them and trick our bodies into thinking that there is adversity, right? We've evolved, I believe, this is my theory with Conrad Howard, is that we're sensing the plant world and when our food supply might run out, we need to defend our bodies against the environment and that leads to longer life. And the theory came from our discovery that resveratrol from red wine and 19 other plant molecules that are produced by plants when they're stressed, turn on these sirtuin defenses. And we're trying to figure out, how is that possible? Is it just a coincidence? And then we came up with this theory that we've evolved to sense our food supply.

• 27:40Shane Parrish?

  I want to come back to resveratrol later, but just for people listening, don't run out and grab a glass of red wine. I think you'd need like 100 glasses of red wine to get the amount that you would.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  You would.

• 27:52Shane Parrish?

  You would need.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:53Shane Parrish?

  We'll come back to supplements in a second. Are organic plants stressed more than inorganic plants or unorganic? I don't even know what the opposite of organic is.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  I suppose it's non-organic, but plants are definitely organic. But yeah, they're grown organically, so they're they're under more stress. They wouldn't have as many herbicides on there. They're not grown in perfect conditions. The best ones are locally grown ones that are in a local garden where the environment, the temperatures, the there's diseases, there's caterpillars. That's the best kind of environment to get your food from. And if they don't look pretty, that's not a bad thing often. The other thing you should look for is bright colors. Nutritionists have known this for years, that they're very healthy if you eat those bright orange, dark green, red fruits and vegetables.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  The reason that I think colors are good is that they are indicators of of stress. If you stress a fruit or a leaf, you've probably seen it changes color, gets brighter. And those are chemicals that protect the plant, but also are produced in combination with what these these health promoting molecules are involved in. You know, I wanted to mention a word that may be foreign to to your audience, which is xenohormesis. And this is a coin, a term that Conrad and I coined. Xeno means across species and hormesis is this idea that what doesn't kill you makes you live longer. I mentioned that word because if you can remember it, you'll live that lifestyle.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  You want to induce hormesis, which is a state of want adversity. And you can also get that from other species as well as do it yourself by like doing what we said. Don't eat as much. Eat plants that don't have as much protein, which is being sensed. And then other things that you can do, like temperature changes and exercise. These all put the body in that state.

• 29:54Shane Parrish?

  I like the idea of adversity and I want to explore that in different paths, including exercise and some other ways that we we cause adversity. There's two things I wanna I wanna go into on food before we we move to a new topic. One is. Is there a notion to eating things in season? Like, I go to the grocery store, apples are there 365 days a year, but they're not ripe on a tree 365 days a year. They have a season, they have a time. Should we be eating with that season? Or is that a good thing that these plants and fruits are available 24/7, 365 now?

• 30:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so it's known that if the plants are in season and otherwise healthy, they're actually, they have the energy to produce these molecules. So, yeah, in season, but grown under conditions that are not perfect. Okay, the off-season apples, the ones that are a little bit flowery, I would avoid those. They don't have the abundance of nutrients and chemicals that we want. But, yeah, it's, so organic in-season vegetables and fruits is the way to go. And that's what I have turned to in my lifestyle, increasingly so as I get older. And then increasingly regretful that I didn't do it earlier. For those of you who are not watching this on video,

• 31:12Speaker 00

  I'm now drinking a cup of hot matcha tea, the green tea, the very concentrated green tea. Those leaves that are grown often in Japan, they come from green tea plants that are put in shade conditions before they're picked. And it's that lack of light that causes it to become bright green, but also produces molecules that are healthy. There's one called, for short, ECGC, which is known to be a xenohormetic molecule to turn on the body's defenses. And pretty much every morning, I start my day with one of these. And it's a great way to start because there's, of course, no sugar in here. It's boosting my body's defenses, but it's also filling up my stomach. So I don't feel the need to eat breakfast.

• 31:55Shane Parrish?

  When you say boosting defenses, you mean from the antioxidants?

• 31:58Speaker 00

  No, actually, so ECGC is slightly antioxidant, but it's actually. It inhibits and turns on the right enzymes that are known to invoke longevity in animals and probably in ourselves as well. It's another one of these, you know, hermetic molecules in the same class as resveratrol, olive oil, or components of olive oil. And there's a whole bunch of them. And, you know, we can talk more about these when you want to get to the supplementation.

• 32:26Shane Parrish?

  Let's talk about sugar before we get into some other adversity states. What do we know about sugar and its effect on our biological age?

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Not that much. So the biological age right now is measured a number of ways. You can do a panel of forty blood tests. Inside tracker is just one that I use. The other more more epigenetic related, so back to the scratches on the CD. You can measure those scratches. It's called the DNA methylation clock or the Horvath clock, named after Stephen Horvath, a scientist at UCLA. And these are the chemicals that get added or subtracted from the DNA molecule that tell genes to be on or off. And the sirtuins that I work on help control that process. And you can read these with a DNA sequencing machine and DNA sequences.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  You know, we're using all the time now in the lab. And by reading those chemicals where they are and how they've changed over time. For instance, Shane, I could take your blood or a cheek swab and tell you biologically how old you are relative to others, your age. And so your birthdays don't matter as much for your health as your actual DNA methylation age or your scratches. Now, we can measure that, but to your point, we haven't known about the clock long enough to know if glucose or sugar directly impacts that clock. What I can say is that people that eat a Mediterranean diet have a slower ticking clock and people that exercise and do the kind of things that I'm telling everybody today

• 34:04Speaker 00

  to do in general have a lower biological age than those who do all the terrible things. Don't exercise, smoke, become obese. These are ways to greatly accelerate the rate of aging.

• 34:17Shane Parrish?

  How would a listener go about testing their biological age?

• 34:21Speaker 00

  There are some companies that have just started up that measure this from a blood sample. Uh, it's fairly expensive. It's a few hundred dollars at least. Uh, my student, one of my students at Harvard has developed a technology where we can measure this clock very cheaply, um, for at least ten times less than that. And, uh, we're about to release a product, uh, in this sometime this year that would be a cheek swab, which is far easier than a blood test, of course. And so just for a lot less money and hopefully more, more often you can look at your biological age and say, well, is my new diet affecting my age? Have I slowed it down? Am I reversing my age, which is increasingly doable?

• 35:05Speaker 00

  There's a website if people want to sign up. I hope it's okay if I've mentioned that people often want to know.

• 35:09Shane Parrish?

  Please do.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks, Shane. It's called Tally Health, T A L L Y, health.com. And there's a waitlist, but get on that because we're also looking for people to help us try and figure out through experimentation what happens when you eat certain things or take certain supplements. Um, and so we'll guide you through that. We'll give you your credit score for your body. And then the goal is to use science to slow down and reverse the ticking of everybody's individual clock so that, you know, getting fourteen, fifteen years extra life is not that difficult. Just by doing the things that I'm talking about today, you'll get an extra fourteen, fifteen years on average. But then I want to help people get twenty years, thirty years beyond what they would have otherwise had.

• 35:53Shane Parrish?

  You, you mentioned exercise and I know some people love exercise. I'm not one of those people. I sort of, um, do it, but I, I don't love it. I don't look forward to it. I, um, is there any hope for me? Like, is there a point at which I can maximize the advantages of exercise, but not, not anymore? Like declining utility?

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Well, I feel for you. I'm the same. Um, I'm lazy, as I mentioned. So, let's see. So, so what, what's recommended by doctors who know what they're talking about? It's, you want to have two types of exercise at least, three if you can. So what are they? There's, there's yoga, Pilates, that's, you know, for joint stretch, that's the basics. Important for longevity. You don't want to break bones if you fall over. The other is weightlifting. You want to exert your muscles, grow muscles, at least maintain your muscles. By the time you're my age, you know, I'm fifty-two now, I'm losing more than one percent of my muscle mass every year. If I don't exercise, so lifting weights, that's important. Then the third type is aerobic.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  And the minimum amount to have benefits, um, pretty substantial benefits, though, would be to lose your breath at least once a week, preferably three times a week for ten minutes. So that's not a lot, but even that, I'll admit, is hard for people like you and me to do. But it's not as though you have to go running for an hour or cycling for hundred miles. It just a little bit goes a long way. And what's happening when you exercise is that, again, it's turning on these defenses that your body thinks is needed to survive. But I'll, you know, I'll tell you something more personal, and this is, this is not medical advice. It's not science.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  But I do everything really well, except two things, sleep and exercise. Those are my advices. I try to sleep, but I work a lot. I travel a lot. Um, but I know I'd be better if I could sleep seven hours a night. I'm more like five to six. The other thing that I don't do, that I prescribe or recommend is exercise. And I rarely lose my breath. I try. I used to have a treadmill pre-COVID and I would do that, but because of the pandemic, I'm not doing a lot of that. So I probably lose my breath maybe two days a week, not, not as much as I'd like. But my biological age is still getting younger, so I think it's possible to, to hack it.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Some of the molecules that we work on, resveratrol, there's one called NMN, which we can talk about it later, but it's an NAD boosting molecule that also turns on serotonin. I've been taking that. Um, and so my, my health has never been better. You could argue maybe it would be even better if I exercised more, but I'm pretty happy with my biochemistry. My blood biochemistry is equivalent to a twenty year old. I'm fifty-two. So I think there is hope for us. That's a long answer to to your question.

• 38:44Shane Parrish?

  But wait, isn't sleep super important to longevity? Like, as we age, okay, so here's some notions that I bring to this, right? Like, my baggage with sleep is like, as we age, we tend to sleep less. And everything that I know about sleep tends to tell me that sleep is super important for mental functioning, for age, aging well, for all of these like, health benefits associated with sleep. And you're telling me you get four or five hours, and you're fifty two, and you have a twenty year old biological clock. So maybe sleep isn't that important?

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Maybe, maybe. I might be fifteen years old if I could get more sleep, but we will never know. But I what I know is that those sort of genes that I talk about all the time, and I've been studying for thirty years, they control the clock. And then the disrupted clock affects them because it's a big cycle. And if you get that out of whack in an animal, they will, if you don't let them sleep, they will age prematurely. If you stop a rat from sleeping for just two weeks, it will develop diabetes. It's really important. So I don't think there's any argument that sleep is important. But can you hack your way around it? Maybe that's what I'm showing. But I don't want to give the impression that I think that that's the best way to live life. I mean, I got I got up at five thirty

• 40:01Speaker 00

  this morning. I went to sleep probably at one o'clock. That's not a good way to live. I am tired. I do fine. I've got caffeine. I've got my NAD boosters, which do help me get through the day in the morning. But ideally, I would want more sleep. I think that I'd have better memory and focus if I did that.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  How about a latte?

• 40:52Speaker 04

  Maybe dark roast?

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Vanilla?

• 40:54Speaker 04

  Caramel?

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Blueberry?

• 40:55Speaker 04

  You could get them to agree on one flavor, or give everyone what they want. With Keurig, there's over five hundred K-Cup pod varieties of fresh, flavorful coffee.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  No effort, no grind, no settling. Great coffee without the grind. Curate.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  There are two hacks that I'm doing that allow me to get away with less sleep now. Um, I've included meditation at night into my daily life most days. Um, and that's been very helpful. Um, and the second is that I have a bed that reduces my body temperature in the middle of the night and I get deeper sleep, which also seems to help.

• 41:38Shane Parrish?

  Are you using an eight sleep?

• 41:39Speaker 00

  I am, yeah.

• 41:40Shane Parrish?

  Uh, what's your setting profile on that? I use one too. What's your, what's your, do you, do you do warm, cold, warm? Or are you like cool, cold, warm? Like, how do you set that up?

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Depends on the season. Um, I'm in winter now in Boston, which is my, my apartment's very cold, but so these days I, I, I started out a bit warmer than usual. But what I normally do would say, uh, I get into a coolish bed. And then the next stage is drop me down lower and lower. And then half an hour before waking up, it'll shoot up to, um, as warm as I can handle it. But yeah, I, I like to drop the temperature down and I, I sleep better that way.

• 42:20Shane Parrish?

  So coming into this conversation, one of the notions that I had is one of the reasons that we, we tend to age or accelerate aging as we get older is that we tend to sleep less. And I guess that's not the case, right? Because I always thought, oh, like, you know, I see this with my parents right now, right? Like they're sleeping less than they used to. And I just assumed that that was part of aging, but also what accelerated our aging.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you're right. And, and that's the problem. Once you start like getting less sleep, you will age and your age will give you less sleep. And that's why it's important to, to maintain that, that, you know, sleep health. But you know, NMN, which is this NAD boosting molecule that I mentioned earlier. That is part of the sleep-wake cycle. And one of the hacks that I, I, I think is, is really beneficial is that by taking NMN in the morning, I'm simulating or stimulating the morning response. And I get the alertness and the energy that I would have had if I'd had more sleep. And I can reset jet lag. You know, I'm, I'm a scientist, so people might say, David, you can't mention anecdotes, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  I haven't had jet lag for a decade because I've been able to modulate my own body clock by using these chemicals, which, as I mentioned, are activating sirtuins and controlling the clock. Now, most people don't know that, but I think if, if you have paid attention to the kind of things that I'm saying out there, you would know that it is possible to hack the clock.

• 43:56Shane Parrish?

  I want to go back to the theory of adversity before we come to supplements and sort of like some of the stuff that you do. And with adversity, there's other ways that we can introduce stress to our bodies, like hot tubs or saunas. What do we know about saunas and hot tubs? Like, there seems to be a strong correlation, at least with saunas, to longevity. Why is that?

• 44:19Speaker 00

  Well, so I'll admit, when I started writing my book, which is, which was a number of years ago, the editor said, oh, you should talk about saunas and hot tubs. And I said, this is a serious book. Come on, I'm not gonna put that fashion in there. But I was wrong, actually. There, there's now a lot of evidence that being in a sauna is good for heart health at a minimum. There's a lot of studies of thousands of, mostly men in Finland that do sauna bathing, as they call it. And they are protected dramatically, like they are exercising. But how does that work? Well, You know, there's lots of theories, it's hard to prove, but one theory is that we have what are called heat shock proteins in our body that get turned on when the body's too warm.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  And we know actually if you turn on heat shock proteins in animals, they live longer. And they do that because they help fold proteins correctly. And misfolded proteins and the recycling of proteins is very, very important. It's one of the reasons that I eat a plant-based diet mainly is to turn over that protein um uh cycle. But yeah, so that's one. Cold is different. We think it's working through a process that is called browning of fat. We have white fat on our back that turns beige or brown by being cold. And then that revs up our metabolism and this brown fat also seems to secrete uh little signals that make the rest of the body healthy.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  But it's still early days. We only discovered, we scientists only discovered that brown fat exists in humans about a decade ago. So we're really not sure how this works. But I I can tell you from having talked to a lot of people that do saunas, sauna bathing, uh cold tubs, and myself included, that it does have benefits on blood biochemistry. And even if it doesn't, you feel great. Um and you know, these kind of things, if they make you feel great, you know, why not do those with the potential to extend lifespan as well?

• 46:17Shane Parrish?

  I feel like we've been doing some form of like hot therapy for thousands of years through baths and saunas and you know, we're quick to dismiss this stuff, but I also feel like there's a reason that it sticks around. Uh even if we can't, even if we don't understand that reason at this point, that we still use it. I use a sauna like two or three times a week and it it's super helpful for not only my mental health, um but my sleep and I feel like it has a huge impact on my physical health, but feelings aren't scientific, right?

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Right, right. But but you know, the the I would say there's enough data to say, yeah, you're probably protecting yourself at a minimum against cardiovascular disease by doing that. But I also find that that my my lungs benefit from breathing breathing in that really hot air in the sauna.

• 47:04Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, and then in my case, I I walk out and it's like minus thirty Celsius, so I get the hot and the cold right away. So I I'm trying to live forever here.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  And if you don't, it'll feel that way. But yeah, it's all about stressing the body. And sometimes it's the differential that counts. There's a therapy called hyperbaric oxygen therapy where you go into high pressure and breathe in oxygen. And then they cycle it. Often they cycle it, not always, where you go high pressure and then low and high. And what I think is going on is that it's not the high pressure that's important, it's the decrease that you're becoming pseudo-hypoxic. Your body thinks it's running out of oxygen when it's just coming down from a high level. And my lab has shown in mice that pseudo-hypoxia is a real thing. And is probably mimicking exercise.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  And the kind of benefits that people are reporting are similar to exercise, except you're lying down. I've done it a few times. It's really quite enjoyable. You get to watch, you know, you'd appreciate this. I watch Schitt's Creek on, while I'm in one of these tubes. And you know, I'm getting seemingly a workout just by lying down.

• 48:16Shane Parrish?

  So, physical stress is good. What about mental stress? Does mental stress have a benefit? Or, you know, I tend to think it would only be a drawback, like this low level of persistent mental stress would be bad for you. But maybe if it's intensity and it comes in intensity and then dies to nothing and then comes again, it would be good for you. How do we think about the relationship between stress, mental stress in this case, and longevity?

• 48:43Speaker 00

  It's important not to mix up the two uses of the same word. So, stress that I'm talking about, hormesis, is biological stress, making your body and your cells think that there's adversity. Psychological stress is just a different beast. It shouldn't even be called the same word. But let's focus on that. Now, we know that a little bit of excitement and thrill is very beneficial. But you can have chronic stress, depression, you know, just the kind of stress that leads to cortisol surging through your body. This is not healthy at all and would reduce lifespan. We know from animal studies that those that are under social stress will be unhealthy and die sooner.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  So, if you are experiencing that. Try to figure out how to reduce your psychological stress. Meditate, breathing exercises, uh, just try to avoid worrying too much. This is really important. And I can speak again from experience. I was a very agitated, anxious person in my teens and twenties. By my thirties, I went to Harvard and I thought, if I continue worrying like I have been, I am going to die young and that's not going to be a good look for someone who works on aging. So I've learned to not worry so much. I focus on what I can do in the day. I focus on the fact that I'm never probably ever going to run out of food because I live in a wealthy country. I'm not going to run out of shelter.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  I'm going to have friends and family and that's all I need to exist. So what's the worst that can happen? Still not that bad. And that's a good way to live life, I think.

• 50:21Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I think it was Buffett, Warren Buffett, who, who at one point said something along the lines of the key to his age was the fact that he has no stress in his life.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, when you look at centenarians, the people that live over a hundred, they have that in common. They have a good sense of humor. They don't worry too much in their lives on average and they also have good partners. It's been shown by studying hundreds of people over their lifetimes that one of the most important, if not the most important factor is to have a reliable partner. Um, a pet can substitute for that if you don't have one of those at the time. Um, but yeah, you want companionship. Uh, that really does reduce your stress levels and leads to longevity, it's been proven.

• 51:04Shane Parrish?

  Does attitude affect our biological age? Like, would a positive outlook help you live longer than a pessimistic one?

• 51:11Speaker 00

  It does, it does. Well, we don't know cause and effect. We're looking at associations, but people who live a long time tend to have a sense of purpose, are driven by a mission. And so that is great advice is to work towards a goal. And, you know, clearly you and I are like that. And I think that also helps focus the mind, reduce stress. If you're actually working towards. Something bigger than yourself, you'll have that mental state and you won't be so focused in on yourself and anxious.

• 51:42Shane Parrish?

  I don't want to go too deep on supplements. I think you talk at length for over an hour in lifespan, which is your podcast on supplements, the third episode, I think. I do want to talk about three in particular that seem to keep coming up across a lot of people I know who are super focused on health. You bring up Enemyn, Resveratrol and Athletic Greens and you take those every day. Talk to me about those three and why you take them and what they do to your body in the context of slowing or reversing aging.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Right. So let's take them one by one. Resveratrol is a small, what's called a polyphenol. It's produced by many plants to survive. It's produced by grapes and it's concentrated in red wine. It should be a white powder. It shouldn't be brown. If you buy it and it's brown, throw it away. I take a gram of it every morning with rare exceptions when I'm traveling and I forget it. But I mix it with a little bit of yogurt because it, just a little bit, like a couple of teaspoons. Or today I had a bit of avocado because resveratrol is insoluble in water and often people take it and it doesn't get absorbed. So do that. Why does it work? Well, we have shown in many animal studies and people have now shown

• 53:00Speaker 00

  in human studies that it's activating one of the main sirtuin pathways called SRT1. And it does that like an accelerator pedal. The chemical resveratrol will bind to the enzyme and make it work faster. Now, that's the accelerator pedal for SRT1. The gas or the petrol is NAD. NAD is a molecule that we need for life. Without it, we're dead in 30 seconds. And NAD isn't something that you can

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Well, you can swallow it, but the best bang for the buck is to eat molecules that the body uses to make this NAD molecule. And the one that I choose to take is called NMN, short for nicotinamide mononucleotide. But think of it as M and M's, but just flip the letters around. Don't eat M and M's. You won't live longer. You can eat M and M's, but if you want to live longer, don't do that. But the NMN is important because it's the immediate precursor to make NAD and the body makes NAD very rapidly. And I know from clinical trials that I've been involved with that taking a gram of NMN, which I do every day, raises NAD levels in whole blood, in the cells in the blood,

• 54:12Speaker 00

  probably in the rest of my body as well. It's hard to test that without a tissue sample. I'm not, I'm not going to give up my brain anytime soon. But the doubling of that NAD is important because as we get older, we make less of this chemical. We have about half the levels of NAD in our skin, for example, as I, I, I have half the levels if I didn't supplement that I would have made when I was 20. And so I boost those levels back up to being youthful. And then the idea is that the sirtuin defenses are activated. And that's enhanced by the diet that I have as well as a little bit of exercise. Now, the third one you mentioned is athletic greens because I'm on a vegetarian slash vegan diet.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  I describe myself as, as a newbie struggling vegan. I need nutrients and so athletic greens is full of vitamins and, and plant-based whole foods that ensures that I don't lack those nutrients because if you're just eating a vegan diet, and I've also given up dairy, you want to make sure that there's adequate nutrition. So you know, I'm, I'm on one meal a day, basically OMAD. But I want to add another couple of letters, which is A N, OMAD, A N. I just made that up by the way, Shane, so trademark that. I'm a Madden, let's call it. Adequate nutrition, put that on the end, and that's what Athletic Greens does for me.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  I do take one other drug called Metformin, which is a type two diabetes drug that has been shown to associate with longer life and less diseases in old age by looking at type two diabetics. And there's a stunning, stunning fact that type two diabetics that would normally have a short lifespan, when they take Metformin, typically at two grams a day, I'm on one gram a day, by the way, they actually have less diseases and live longer than people that don't have type two diabetes.

• 56:04Shane Parrish?

  Why did you give up dairy? You mentioned that you stopped, stopped dairy. What, what caused you to do that? And then did that have any impact? Cause you, I know you monitor your body quite a bit. Did that have any impact on you?

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Uh, seemingly it did, yeah. Uh, and so I changed one or two things at a time and have a look how it goes. And I'm an experimenter. I, I love dairy. I, I was eating a lot of cheese and red wine. My diet, two or three days a week was a cheese board and a couple of glasses of red wine, maybe more. And she was looking at what I eat and she actually said, that's not very healthy. And so I've adopted her lifestyle, which is not so much meat, cheese, dairy. And I've looked at my blood biochemistry and I'm actually now younger and healthier than I've ever been since I've been measuring it over a decade and that's more like 14 years.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  And I can plot various parameters, testosterone, glucose, uh, the list goes on, inflammation, uh, blood type, blood cell composition. And for most of those markers, I'm better than a 20 year old for, for health. And, uh, and I think a lot of that's due to my new diet that I've adopted because I can just see things getting better and better over time.

• 57:23Shane Parrish?

  I interviewed Alan Campbell, who was the former personal chef for Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen. And we talked at length and, and sort of about diet and eating for peak mental and physical performance. And it's interesting to me that you mentioned cutting out dairy and seeing this go because the three things that he mentioned carry the most bang for the buck for, for cutting out were gluten, dairy and sugar in terms of your sleep, your physical performance, your mental performance. Do you have any thoughts on that?

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. I really do. So I'm I'm I'm a lazy guy. I like meat, right? So I'm an average person. Uh, and so I've I've I've done this over time. I'm not great at it. And I I'm just mention that because sometimes people say, I can never give up alcohol. I could never give up meat. It's not true. And so I I at least I found it not to be true. First thing I cut out was a lot of carbohydrates. I used to eat bread. Every day I would just put, if I ate something, it would be on toast. Okay, that's my life. I cut that out and I found immediate improvements in my biochemistry levels, particularly my glucose levels.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  The next thing I cut out was uh was meat. I I worked towards a Mediterranean diet, had fish. And eventually now I'm I'm no meat. And and that improved my numbers even better. Cholesterol, um, what do you call it? Triglycerides all came down. And I have a familial history, genetics of hu- heart disease. I have what's called LP little a. High levels. LP little a is the worst. About thirty percent of us have this and we're destined, if we don't do something, to have a a short lifespan. That was very important, was the cutting out meat. And it's not just the protein. It's also the fat that comes along with the steak and whatever that I was eating. And then the third change was the the dairy.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  I did that just to see what would happen. I figured it wouldn't matter. I'm not allergic to dairy. I'm not lactose intolerant. But it did have an effect. It made things even better. And what I think is going on, Shane, is that I was eating a large amount of protein, not just fat, but eggs and all that stuff. And now that I have less protein, I think that mTOR pathway that's really important for longevity um in animals and probably people. Is really kicking in in a way that had never done so before.

• 59:52Shane Parrish?

  That's really interesting. And the only other thing I want to mention about Alan Campbell and just out of just so people don't get the wrong idea, he's also super plant forward with a little bit of fish. So it's mostly plant based diet. And it's just interesting how you you've both sort of like come into the same sphere, I guess, if you will, from very different approaches in terms of that. And I always find that stuff interesting because it makes me think that there must be something there.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Well, I don't like plants. I mean, I'm now learning how to enjoy plants, but for me, they were a side dish. But here's the thing, there's a lot of debate, especially on social media about meat versus plants. I would love meat to be lifespan extending. That would be heaven, but it's not. You just look at those populations and people that live a long time. They are generally smaller women who don't eat much, who eat vegetarian. I mean, that's the fact. We can debate it all day, but there are these scientific facts that we have to pay attention to.

• 1:00:55Shane Parrish?

  Is it ever too late or too soon to sort of like start to slow the effects of aging? If not, like, how do the, how do you stage interventions at different points in your life?

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I would say, don't start too early on certainly supplementation. We don't want teenagers that are malnourished and eat too little, but I would say, speaking of myself, because I'm not a professional nutritionist, but I do know the science. I would, if it was me, start doing the meal skipping in my twenties, but make sure I've got enough calories coming in. I'd start the supplements in my late twenties. Before that, you've got a lot of NAD already. Your body's already defending itself when you're young. It's your late twenties, thirties, things start to kick in. But what about your question, which is more important, which is when is it too late for people? Um. I've never seen it too late. There are animal studies you can, I could point to that

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  show that you can have, uh, affect this mtor pathway with a drug called rapamycin that extends their lifespan, even if they're the equivalent of seventy years old. And, um, no, there's a point where you're so frail and so sick, you're probably on death's door, that it's unlikely, you know, just that you should start exercising and fasting, probably, though that's really at the, the final stages. If you're still, let's say, a relatively healthy seventy, eighty year old, my father is a good example, these changes to your lifestyle can have rapid benefits. But do it in consultation with a doctor because you might not, um, you know, benefit from fasting if you need body weight, if you have other existing conditions, it's important

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  to take those into consideration as well.

• 1:02:37Shane Parrish?

  So talk to me a little bit more about your father. Is he eating mostly a plant-based diet too?

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. So he and I are very similar. Um, people think I'm experimenting on my dad, but I'm not. He's a scientist. He reads the science. And we've come up with this protocol, which is the, uh, very low glucose. We don't eat a lot of sugar. We try to avoid desserts, low carb, don't eat a lot of meat. He, he would eat meat very occasionally, but mostly it's plants. Um, he doesn't eat much during the day. He mainly eats dinner and he's, he's lean now. And what else? He does more exercise than I do, so he's better at that. He does aerobics. Uh, he goes a couple of times a week to the gym and does rowing and weightlifting. What else is it? He takes the supplements. So he's on resveratrol, NMN, metformin, uh,

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  and that's his cocktail. He doesn't take athletic greens just yet. Uh, but he's a super healthy eighty-two year old. He was not on that path. In his fifties, my age, he was overweight. He had high cholesterol, looking at dying in his seventies. In his mid seventies, he went on this protocol and is now an eighty two year old that's fitter than most people that age. He has no diseases, perfect mental health, his eyesight hasn't changed in all that time. And so, yeah, I mean, we're looking forward to this experiment being a successful one. But if nothing else, he's a beacon of hope that you can start late and have big effects.

• 1:04:01Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned teenagers. Is there a link between when we start puberty? Like that that sound to me, when we think of puberty, it sounds like rapid aging, almost like a concentrated dose of aging. Is there a link between when we start, how long we live? And is that true that puberty is sort of like this rapid dose of aging?

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  Well, I'm going to speak as a scientist with an opinion. And that opinion is based on all the science that I've read. And I read a lot of papers. Before I get out of bed, I'm reading science, science papers. Here's what I believe. Now, I don't want parents to get upset with me. I certainly don't want people to worry. But here's what I think will turn out to be the case. The biological clock, this, the scratches on the CD that we talked about earlier, they start at conception. The egg and the sperm come together, even an embryo, even a fetus and a young baby, they're aging. We can measure this on this clock. And certainly teenagers are aging.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  Now, we know that obesity and lack of exercise, lack of nutrition, lack of plants is unhealthy. And I would not be surprised if the teenagers are, by the time they hit their twenties, on average, are older biologically than they were twenty, thirty years ago, when I grew up. Because we are, we were moving, we were generally not so overweight, we were not eating as much sugar. And that's probably accelerating our kids aging rate, meaning that twenty, thirty years from now, forty years from now, that is still going to echo in their health. Because the clock, unless you do something radical, doesn't go backwards.

• 1:05:41Shane Parrish?

  You track a lot of your data, right? With you have an Oura ring on, I think you use an age sleep. You're testing your biological age. Are we starting to think of biological problems almost like engineering problems? Where we optimize for specific data points in the hope that those data points are correct?

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Well, absolutely. You know, I was at the forefront, I was kind of this biohacking guy, scientist interested. And I was out on a limb as one of, you know, maybe 50 people in the world that do what I did. Now there's millions of people around the world that monitor themselves with rings, with beds, with, you know, with watches. There's plenty of fitness trackers you'd be aware of. They are all part of this global movement to not fly blind with our health. We can track things, we can see what works, what doesn't. And it was crazy that for up until recently, we would be driving the equivalent of driving a car without a dashboard. Who would do that? You know, you might have a check engine light, you could overheat.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Same with our bodies and going to the doctor once a year for an annual checkup. Now that we can monitor ourselves every hour, soon every, every second, eventually every thousandth of a second. That world that we're entering makes this old world of going to the doctor once a year seem medieval. And it is. What can happen in a year? You could get cancer, you could have heart disease, you could have a heart attack. Now we have the devices, some of us use them increasingly, eventually everyone will have them. We'll know ahead of time if we have cancer, if we have heart disease, if we're going to have a heart attack next week. And stave off those things and prevent them from happening.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  And that is a revolution, separate from what I'm working on, that will extend lifespan, I believe, by another decade.

• 1:07:34Shane Parrish?

  It's super interesting to me because we have all of the tools available to us now. We're not using them where I could walk into my doctor's office and I could tell them what I'm feeling or the symptoms that I'm experiencing, but then they could pull up on their iPad or whatever, like all of my biomarkers to see and to gather more data, but we don't, we choose not to use that at this point or we're not ready for it. I mean, privacy concerns aside, but how do you think about that? Like, we will get to this point where I have like a device in me. I'm sure during our lifetime that I'm showing up at a hospital and instead of filling out paperwork or answering questions, they're just looking at it and they're being like, okay, now we have the data to back up some of these decisions.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  100%. There's no question. You can take that to the bank that that's the world that's coming. And I wrote about it a few years ago and COVID-19 has accelerated that. I was predicting telemedicine and, you know, wellness at home and this whole revolution. I thought that would be 10 years away and it's here now. So why isn't it so common? Well, partly it's education and podcasts like this are helpful, but it's also that it's expensive. So we tend to forget that these watches and rings are hundreds of dollars. These tests, these blood tests are also hundreds of dollars and our doctors are reticent to be doing all these tests because the healthcare

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  systems want to save money ultimately, right? Forgetting that ultimately they will save money by keeping people alive and healthier for longer. What's fascinating is that I have this collection of data that I can call up on my phone and it's all graphed by this inside tracker group that you can, you can do others. And my doctor, I thought he would say, oh, I don't want to trust that data. I only trust the data that I gather on you. But the opposite was true. I actually I was zooming with him because we don't tend to go to the doctors much anymore. And I called up my data on the screen and he loved it. He was into it. He said, oh, this is so great. I wish I had this on every one of my patients. But yeah, you're right, that they, the doctors generally don't do that because it's expensive. But we can now do that and then show our doctors and they are grateful.

• 1:09:43Shane Parrish?

  Well, it's so interesting because it it's expensive in the moment, but it's super preventative. I if we go with the assumption that most medical care costs are at the end of life or from chronic diseases that we might be able to avoid, that then this, these costs tend to be upfront and they're massively preventative. So they actually would save healthcare systems lots of money in the long run. But we we never look at that because we look like to treat things. And so like as a computer scientist, I look at this and I'm like, not only can we prevent problems before they happen, but now we can start to get this amazing quantity of data where I can be like, you're showing up with this thing and you feel this way.

• 1:10:25Shane Parrish?

  Well, we know from twenty million other people who've shown up with this thing in this way, that it's not what you think and it's something different. And then we can save a lot of money and time there as well.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  For sure. And those technologies exist. I've been wearing what's called a Bio Button. I have no affiliation, so if you want to look them up, they're called Bio Intellisense. And this is an FDA approved device that doctors can send home with their patients after surgery to monitor their heart as well as their movement, their vibration, their temperature. And that data that comes in is actually very informative beyond the heart. They can tell if you've got a flu versus a common cold versus depression, COVID-19. And that's going, the world will be, you have something stuck on or under your skin that will tell a nurse or a doctor or some sort of AI system

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  that something is wrong and it needs fixing well before you would ever have a problem noticeable by yourself or a doctor.

• 1:11:27Shane Parrish?

  A lot of money seems to be going into life extension recently. I'm thinking of Altos Labs with Jeff Bezos and some others committed about $3 billion, which is the biggest seed investment I've ever seen in my life. And they hired some of the world's top scientists. It seems like it's set up to commercialize, I can't even say this, the Yamakata factors.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  Yamanaka.

• 1:11:51Shane Parrish?

  Yamanaka factors for cellular reprogramming for age reversal. Now, that's different than sort of the area that we've been talking about a lot today. But the initial results from that, those biomarkers seem to indicate that we're on to something with a few short bursts of these drugs, at least in the mice. How do you think about that? And is that also the future so that we control sort of like part of our aging? And then what we don't control, we can use drugs to reverse or slow down?

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  We were working on this for a while, based on the idea that we could find genes that would polish the scratches on the DVD. And we came across a set of three genes called O, S, and K for short, which are three of the six or so Yamanaka factors. And about a year ago, we published that we could reverse the age of an animal. And we restored eyesight to a blind old mouse and killed glaucoma in that animal. And we are now working towards human clinical trials. In Canada, we have a non-human primate study for safety to see how that goes. And within the next 18 months, if all goes well, we will be reversing aging in a human, if all goes well. So that discovery, in part, you know, there are a few other colleagues that are in this,

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  but not a lot, led to a huge interest in this epigenetic information theory of aging that we started off talking about. And the idea is that we can truly reset the age of the body. And diseases of aging like Alzheimer's and heart disease, even cancer, will go away if we become young again. My company's called Life Biosciences. It's here in Boston. Altos has come along three years later and they're working on this too. But the goal is a great one. I wish them all the best of luck. I hope that they are hugely successful because it could be transformational for our species on the planet, the ability to finally control the rate at which we age, not just in the forwards direction, but in reverse as well.

• 1:13:55Shane Parrish?

  Want to switch gears a little bit and talk about Lyme disease. Your daughter had Lyme disease. I had Lyme disease in the summer to the point where I couldn't even get out of bed. Basically, I had full on Bell's palsy. I like couldn't open my jaw. I couldn't stand still for more than 15 seconds without being in massive amounts of pain. And to go into the medical system, just briefly. We're about preventative care. So you show up and it's like, oh, you have Bell's palsy. It's not a heart attack here. Take some prednisone and like go home. And it's like, well, no, I'm a healthy, you know, 40 something year old male. What's causing this? Like, why aren't we going deeper to figure this out?

• 1:14:39Shane Parrish?

  And I'm curious as to what research you did and what you learned about Lyme during the process that most people don't know.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, Natalie, my middle child contracted Lyme. I think it was about seven years ago now. And I was exposed to the, how the medical system works when you have an infection. First of all, it was very hard to diagnose. She had headaches. Who knows what's causing that, right? And I Googled it. I searched it and I said, it's probably Lyme disease. We took her to the emergency room and they said, well, it might be this, it might be that. Could be leukemia, whatever, you know, but we'll do a Lyme test. Okay. I think I had to insist, but they did a Lyme test.

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  But the problem with the system was that it took three days to get a result that was out, that was ambiguous because it's using 1980s molecular biology technology. It's primitive.

• 1:15:40Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  It's called a Western blot, which we don't even use anymore much. And then because it was ambiguous, the insurance company said, no, we have to have a definitive result before we start treating your daughter with antibiotics. Meanwhile, Natalie is losing her eyesight. Yeah, no, you, like you've said, you can't focus. And she got to the point where I've now been told that she had a chance of dying that was pretty high, 40, 50% at that point. It was in her brain and we were not treating her because the test wasn't definitive. So that was, that was disturbing. And I also told the doctors, give me a sample of her DNA or, you know, spinal fluid.

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  And I've got my lab across the street. I'll go sequence the DNA and I'll find this organism if it's there. And they refused to give me a sample. So, you know, I'm traumatized at this point as a parent. And I, when you're traumatized, you'd like to do something about it. And so I started a company. That was a spin out of AI that we were doing in my lab. We built our own little mini supercomputer out of GPU. You know, graphic processing units. Um, and we were able to figure out how to find any organism in the blood of a human being. And this company now has a product that is being used, for example, by liver transplant patients.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  That are immunocompromised because of the drugs. And we can track the infections that they have, like viruses that come out of their liver. And rest of the body. So that's now a reality. It's not mainstream, but eventually it will be. And when that's possible, you know, you go to a, go to a shop, a pharmacy, or you go to your doctor, or at home. You do an immediate test. You don't know what's causing the problem. It'll say, oh, we've detected. Lyme disease. And by the way, three months ago, you had the rhinovirus, whatever, you know, you can see all that stuff now. And that's going to be a world that's almost here. But when it arrives mainstream. The idea of waiting four, five, six days for a result for something that could kill you. I mean, that again is medieval science and, and medicine.

• 1:17:45Shane Parrish?

  I'm the, the same way, Al. I mean, I had to advocate for a test and it was only, uh, actually a friend. Who gave me a test. My family physician wouldn't give me a, a Lyme disease test, um, despite all the symptoms that I had. Did your daughter end up taking doxycycline?

• 1:18:01Speaker 00

  Right. It was so severe, she had to have, uh, an IV treatment, uh, for many weeks. I think it was at least three weeks that were. It was delivered at home by her mom to. Get rid of it. How did you treat yours?

• 1:18:15Shane Parrish?

  Doxycycline. Yeah, so I just did a cycle of that. I mean, it seemed to instantly, not instantly, but over a period of maybe two weeks, like it went back to, you know, gradually, like I had facial paralysis on half my face and, you know, so it started with, I could stand again, I could open my jaw a little bit more. The last thing to come back was sort of the facial paralysis and it was scary. I mean, it was really, and it was scary that you had to be an advocate of your own health too, in a system which you don't know how to navigate, which I also thought, you know, as a parent, you feel, as somebody who shows up at a merge with like a face that doesn't work, you also feel it in a different way. Is there any lifespan effect

• 1:19:00Shane Parrish?

  of Lyme disease after treatment?

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

  No one knows. Doxycycline, in my recollection, I have to check on this, people who are listening can search for this in pubmed.org, is lifespan extending? So maybe, it's a short course that you took, but maybe there's some upsides. But the problem with Lyme is particularly if you don't get it early, it can become chronic. It's, lives in your joints, comes out, causes a lot of joint pain. That would be not a state that would be conducive to longevity. Any increase in chronic inflammation is anti-longevity.

• 1:19:35Shane Parrish?

  I like the notion, you mentioned yoga earlier, I'm just circling back to that now, but like you sort of mentioned, well, there's, there's exercise in terms of like lifting weights and running and exerting yourself that way, but there's also preparing today to live a much longer life that might be well into your hundreds. And part of that preparation is you need to stretch and have joint flexibility and, because doesn't like hip surgery correlate to death? Like you break your hip and it, you basically, like there's a strong correlation to people who do that and then their lifespan is, is almost over at that point.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  It is. Yeah, the chances of dying after you break your hip as an older person is about as bad as late-stage cancer. And every 19 seconds in the US at least, someone breaks their hip. So it's a massively Untalked about problem, a colleague of mine at Harvard um made, I guess, unnecessary light of it, but his motto is the secret to living longer is hanging on to the handrail. And his point's well taken, really, that that it's pretty easy to prevent deaths sometimes. My grandmother, who I wrote about in my book, was really influential in my life, died that

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  way. She tripped on a little bump in her rug, broke her up her femur, went to surgery, not enough oxygen in the brain, and then the next five years, she was basically a vegetable, and then died. Um, you know, not a very pleasant way. So, yeah, it's avoidable, right? If you maintain your hip strength, if you can, muscles, flexibility, you also want to make sure your household doesn't have ripples in the carpet and don't walk on stairs, don't climb ladders. That kind of thing can save lives, you know, and it's not that difficult. And Shane, this is the point I want to make is eighty percent of our longevity and our health in the future is in our own hands. Only twenty percent is genetic, which we

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

  cannot yet do much about. And some of these changes are very simple. Skip breakfast, have tea instead. Work out, maintain your muscle strength, do yoga, flex a little bit, touch your toes in the shower if you can. These can add years, if not decades, to your life just by changing things in a in a small way. You don't need high tech to make a big difference.

• 1:22:02Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, it's interesting. We always look for that one thing, right, that that causes somebody that decision, the drama, the movie moment that, you know, causes somebody to be successful or get results or live longer. And what we, you know, what we miss is the magic that happens on a daily basis. It's this slow incremental progress that is too too little to notice in the moment. But by the time you notice it, it's so great that you're looking for that one magical moment, that one factor that that caused it.

• 1:22:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is a lot of work, I'll admit. You know, it's been daily since my thirties. But it's been worth it. It was an experiment, I should say, but um I didn't know if it was gonna work. So far, so good, right? I'm fifty two, I'm not dead yet. But it's it's every day making the right decisions or better decisions about what to eat. Of course, what not to eat. Going to the gym or your, you know, your home gym when you don't really feel like doing it. That's really hard. But these are the the the decisions every day that need to be made to reap the decades of benefits later in life. And there is no instant cure yet. We're working on it. Reset the age with a pill. Gene therapy, we're working on that, but that's not there yet. And the other thing that that really is important to know is that

• 1:23:18Speaker 00

  there are additive, there are additive benefits. If you eat, exercise, do hot and cold therapy, mental state, if you do all of that, plus the supplements, they're additive. It's not that take a supplement and you don't need to do any of the others. In the animal studies in my lab, when we gave NMN, this molecule that I take every day, to a mouse that was um sedentary, didn't have a wheel, didn't run. It could run further, okay? And we we actually have human data that's looking really promising in that direction as well. But if we exercise the mice and gave them the NMN, then they could run double that again. And so if you really want to optimize, you've got to do more than just take a pill.

• 1:23:58Shane Parrish?

  And it's about consistency, right? Most of us try it for a couple of weeks and then we're like, I haven't seen the results and then we quit. And it it's sort of like the equivalent of Sisyphus, like rolling that boulder up a mountain, getting halfway there a- and then, you know, just like putting your hands up in the air, watching it roll down back to the bottom. You have to be consistent over a long period of time. And and to that point, like growing old seems like a distant event in the future. I mean, it happens slowly and then all at once. We don't seem to think about it until we're really late in the game or we have a loved one or somebody goes through something. Why is that? And is there anything that you you've seen effective at bringing that forward for people?

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  Uh, well, this is what I, what my mission is. The reason I'm talking to you today is to wake people up and realize that you shouldn't just wait till. Something traumatic happens in your life, whether you get sick or your parents or your grandparents. And it's important to realize now that you can do things for those people in your lives, your life and and yourself. Now typically, I we we wait until it's it's too late for those people. Uh my parents, my mother is a good example. My mother died young from lung cancer. She was a smoker who didn't take care of her body at all. And I watched her live the last twenty years of her life in a really painful state. She had one of her lungs taken out through her ribs. That's not what you want for your mother.

• 1:25:22Speaker 00

  Um I wish that I had the knowledge that I have today that I'm applying with my father to her life. And she might even be around today if we had done that.

• 1:25:32Shane Parrish?

  That's the hope, right? But you have to wanna make the changes too, I think.

• 1:25:35Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:25:36Shane Parrish?

  That's the key point. A lot of people don't, right? They they they wanna, for whatever reason, they don't wanna act on it. It it so so to sum up, maybe like uh and get a little more philosophical here a little bit, like our average lifespan right now, I think is about eighty. If we do the right things in our life, like we eat healthy food and not too much of it, we get enough sleep and we stress our bodies a bit with exercise or saunas. And we don't get too much mental stress. We add, I think, about uh another ten to fifteen years to our lifespan.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, fourteen is the number that was in that Harvard study um that I was referring to. Yeah.

• 1:26:15Shane Parrish?

  Is there anything that you've seen that says that there's a physical limit on like that we we have to actually die? Like, can we ultimately live to two hundred, two fifty?

• 1:26:27Speaker 00

  Well, of course we can. There is no law that says we have to age. Uh right now, there's a limit because that's what we've seen happens. But the people that live over a hundred typically don't take care of themselves. Uh a lot of them smoke and and some of them smoke and drink and don't eat good food. So what happens when you have great genes, which is twenty percent? Plus, people who do the optimal lifestyle and take the optimal supplements and take the optimal drugs. There's no reason why a hundred and twenty needs to be the maximum human lifespan. There is nothing in biology that says that there is a limit. And there are many species that live a lot longer than us, not just trees that live that thousands of years, but warm-blooded mammals.

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  Take the bowhead whale that can live over two hundred years. That's very similar to us. Our genes are almost identical compared to, you know, a banana and a yeast cell. These are living, breathing mammals with, you know, milk and they're they're conscious beings and they live two centuries or more. Why, why can't we? We just need to learn how they do it. And I think it's all about slowing down these scratches, slowing down that clock. And we know that by looking at whales and other species that live a long time, the ticking of that clock goes very slowly. Now, they they don't, you know, they don't have supplements. They don't have to do the kind of things that we do. We're trying to hack our bodies right now to give us some of the benefits that whales naturally have.

• 1:27:52Shane Parrish?

  Do you think like that we you will see a person live to a hundred and fifty today?

• 1:27:57Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh, I think the odds are against me, but I do think that somebody born today will live that long because the technology is just going so quickly. And remember, they're going to live into the twenty second century. Who knows what that's going to be like? We can only imagine. Um, I would like to, um, I I'm not in any rush to leave this planet. I'm having a lot of fun. I think I'm helping people, doing my best at least. But, you know, realistically, and nobody's asked me that question, Shane, but honestly, I think the chances of me making it beyond a hundred and fifty are slim. Um, I was born probably one generation too early, but our kids and their kids are going to reap these benefits that we're talking about now.

• 1:28:37Shane Parrish?

  When you think about it, what's your expectation of your age realistically?

• 1:28:41Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I haven't set a goal.

• 1:28:43Shane Parrish?

  You must have one, though.

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  No, I don't. I I mean, I'm not worried about my own death. I mean, I I'm not a fan of being a burden on my kids or suffering, but I really don't mind. If I die tomorrow, I'm I'm not going to cry about it, obviously, but um, I live my life like every day is a blessing and I'm happy to have every day.

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say no to a thousand years. A thousand years isn't that much, actually. Geologically speaking, I'm fifty years old now. That's just twenty times my lifetime. Fifty years went by in a blink of an eye. So what's twenty blinks? Not that much. So I would love to live centuries. I don't think it's likely. I think eventually people will. I have high levels of the FU gene, and I do like to show the naysayers to be wrong. And I would love to be able to live to one hundred and thirty, just so I could say, "Hey, remember when you said it was impossible?" And that, you know, that's my rebellious gene in me, but

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  no, that's not why I do this, obviously. Although, I do joke that, you know, I've had plenty of naysayers and enemies over the years, and I do like to joke, and it's seriously, it's actually a joke. I don't believe this, but it is fun to think about that one way of

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  getting ahead of your enemies and the naysayers is to outlive them. And there is a little bit of truth to that, that science progresses one funeral at a time. And as the old god is dying off, we're seeing more rapid progress in the way scientists and doctors think about what we can do for patients.

• 1:30:32Shane Parrish?

  Have you thought much about the implications of living longer? And like what that means for society and housing and money and fiscal policy and politics and?

• 1:30:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's important. I think about it a lot, and we need to have less impact on the planet. I think that technology can solve anything we want. We just need to put our minds to it. And that includes being able to grow food that isn't wasting water, using up too much land, degrading the soil. We can do this. We have the knowledge. It's just a matter of investment and willpower and incentives and capitalism being, you know, conducive to making that happen. But yeah, we waste a lot. Half of the food in the US, by the way, is thrown out. So to say that we have a food shortage is ignorant of that fact. But what we want to do is to produce food and not throw it away. And that's one of the reasons I've focused recently on

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  shelf life of vegetables. But that's just one small part of a whole load of things that needs to happen. One thing that always comes up from a crowd that I would talk to about this is, what about overpopulation? And if you do the math, it turns out that even with slowing down aging and making us live to one hundred and twenty, we're not going to overpopulate. We're going to level out at about ten billion people, uh, whether we live longer or not. The big impact is reducing fertility or fertility rates, birth rates. And that's plummeting across the planet, particularly in the developed, uh, developing world. And already in the developed world where you and I, Shane, live, um, US, for example,

• 1:32:07Speaker 00

  replacement rates of children are now negative without immigration. That's true for Europe, uh, it's true for Australia, uh, Japan, really bad for that, uh, bad for the economy, that is, and China increasingly worried about replacing their population. So staying alive for longer in a productive way, not an unproductive, unhealthy way, but productive people who have wisdom, who have knowledge, and who can impart that wisdom and be leaders of the community rather than burdens on the community. That's a massive change that we will see probably in our lifetimes of people being, you know, centenarians and still running companies. That will come back in trillions of dollars in benefits to the economy and just the US economy alone.

• 1:32:52Shane Parrish?

  My hunch is that we're gonna, i- if you could live to a hundred and twenty, like, I feel like we're just gonna leapfrog things, right? Like, we're not gonna go from average lifespan of eighty to eighty-one to eighty-two to eighty-three to eighty-four. I feel like we're gonna go from like eighty to a hundred and ten to like one fifty, because technology is also gonna progress over all of these years, right? So if you, if you get the, the first wave of this, you might actually be able to ride the technological boom to over two hundred.

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a fact that for every year that you stay alive, you get to tack on another three months of life. But that's going to change. We're gonna get an extra four, five, six months of life. If the age reprogramming work that Altos is doing and I'm doing works, you could get an extra year of life every birthday.

• 1:33:44Speaker 00

  And what does that mean? That's a very interesting world. Now, we can measure the blood clock. There are treatments that include stem cells. There's some hormones, so DHEA, metformin, growth hormone combination, and others that I'm aware of, not yet published, that purport to reverse aging more than a year, in a year. There was a publication just now of a molecule called, uh, what? Alpha-ketoglutarate. That molecule seems to control the clock, that according to this blood clock, send people back eight years in age biologically in just seven months. Now, there's a lot of skepticism. It needs to be repeated. But even if that's partly true, we are going to be in a very different world where we can control the age that we are

• 1:34:29Speaker 00

  in a way that we only dreamed of.

• 1:34:35Shane Parrish?

  That's beautiful. Thank you so much for your time today, David. This was a fascinating and insightful conversation.

• 1:34:41Speaker 00

  It was great to chat. And I thought the questions you asked were really spot on. And I thought our conversation's gonna be very useful for a lot of people. Thanks again.

• 1:34:52Shane Parrish?

  The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street. I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. Email me at [email protected]. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog/podcast. To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog/tribe or check out the show notes. Can you do me a small favor? Go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. Till next time.