David Sinclair: Can Aging Be Reversed? After 8 Weeks, Cells Appeared 75% Younger In Tests!

Scientist and Harvard professor Dr. David Sinclair, A. O., Ph. D., reveals his latest research on how to reverse ageing, insights into vitamins and supplements, why DNA is not your destiny, and the first clinical trials to reverse human ageing and blindness! Dr. David Sinclair is a world-renowned Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the leading authority on longevity science. He is Founder of Lifespan.com and multiple biotechnology companies, Co-Chief Editor of the journal Ageing, and bestselling author of ‘Lifespan: Why We Age - And Why We Don’t Have To’. Dr. Sinclair explains: ◼️The “Information Theory of Aging” that regards ageing as a treatable disease ◼️Advances in resetting biological age using cellular “backup copies” ◼️His specific supplement stack for longevity ◼️Why fasting and “good stress” are science-based longevity strategies ◼️How his lab’s gene therapy is being used to restore eyesight and reverse blindness Enjoyed the episode? Share this link and earn points for every referral - redeem them for exclusive prizes: https://doac-perks.com Research document: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1sarDR85LvkK5hv7HMN_UUDvHO9MIi9bNPhLyIRZQ9vg/edit Follow David: Lifespan - https://lifespan.com/ Instagram - https://linkly.link/2ajhU Podcast - https://linkly.link/2aji0 YouTube - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AiIza5B The Sinclair Lab - https://linkly.link/2ajhX You can purchase David’s book, ‘Lifespan: Why We Age-and Why We Don't Have To’, here: https://linkly.link/2ajhc The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Bon Charge: https://boncharge.com/DOAC for 20% off Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Ketone - https://ketone.com/STEVEN for 30% off your subscription order

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

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  This is very, oh.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  It's bad, right?

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  It's hot, yeah.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  That's what it's like to be old. And for far too long, we've ignored it or accepted it as natural. And I reject the idea that aging, just because it's natural, is acceptable. Dying at 80 is not inevitable. Absolutely, that can be changed. So if you're skeptical, I am a Harvard professor who has been studying aging, longevity and age reversal for 30 years. And I've seen enough from my lab showing that we can literally now reverse the aging process. And it's not a question of if, it's a question of when this is going to happen. And everyone should stick around because I'm going to tell you some of the major things that people should be doing. Taking lengthening your life by a decade. Hey, you're not taking that off, Stephen.

• 0:38Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  You've got 10 minutes for that. So you can accelerate aging by smoking, getting an X-ray, ultra-processed foods, excessive drinking, flying a lot.

• 0:45Steven Bartlett?

  I fly all the time.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  That's probably accelerating your aging process.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Even going to a rock concert and blasting your eardrums because your ear hair cells are getting older faster. And so I look at the body like it's a computer and we can reinstall the software. And what's interesting is when you reverse aging, diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, go away or are cured. Because what's driving a lot of those diseases is aging. And so my lab is like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. They are making discoveries that blow me away every week. And I think we're at a turning point in human history where you're probably going to live into the 22nd century if you do all the right things.

• 1:22Steven Bartlett?

  And we're going to dig into all of those in great detail. But what are the unintended consequences of such a world where we all live longer? And also, do you think it's going to be possible in the next 50 years for us to live forever? And then what's the best treatment you've discovered for hair loss?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  This is why I love your podcast, Stephen. You ask the right questions. So first.

• 1:39Steven Bartlett?

  Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. 69% of you that listen to the show frequently haven't yet hit the follow button. And that follow button is very smart because it means you won't miss the best episodes. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 2:22Steven Bartlett?

  Dr David Sinclair. I have waited many years to speak to you. And I've been so keen to speak to you for so many years because so much of the research and the information I've consumed on the subjects we're going to talk about today comes from you, directly from research you've done and from theories and ideas and hypotheses that you formed. I think the place that this conversation should start is probably with this picture because it appears to be incredibly formative in your journey.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. That is an important picture, true. This is a picture of my grandmother and me when I was in my early twenties. I'm now 56, if you're wondering. And my grandmother has played a major role in my life. I'm going to have to be careful not to get too emotional because she's now passed away, but she's inspired me to do the best I can to leave the world a better place. And I found it.

• 3:23Steven Bartlett?

  And there's this particular book here called Now We Are Six.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  It is. Anyone who's read my book, Lifespan, knows that this book is very important to me. And I didn't realise it, of course, when I was a kid, that this was going to change my whole life. And there's a poem at the back there that my grandmother, Vera, used to read me when I was six. And it goes like this. "When I was one, I had just begun. When I was two, I was nearly new. When I was three, I was hardly me. When I was four, I was not much more. When I was five, I was just alive. But now, I am six. I'm as clever as clever, so I think I'll be six now, forever and ever."

• 4:10Speaker 01

  I'm getting chills reading this again and hearing this poem again because the impact on me was the following, that subconsciously, my grandmother was saying, you don't want to grow up. Adults can be evil. She grew up after World War II. There was horrendous impact on her and her family in Hungary. And she thought that a child is innocent and people shouldn't grow up. But what actually happened was, I realized, why do people grow old? That's a terrible thing to happen. And so I've spent my life trying to figure out, why do we get old? Why do we grow up? Why do we get frail? Because I also think that if we can solve that, understand it, slow it, even reverse it now,

• 4:55Speaker 01

  we will have the biggest impact on human health in history.

• 4:58Steven Bartlett?

  Am I right in thinking your grandmother told you at that young age that she was gonna die, that you were gonna die, that your parents were gonna die?

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yes, she did tell me that. I remember it very clearly, actually. It was on the floor and she was crouching down and I said, Vera. I didn't call her grandma. She didn't want to be called grandma. She wanted to be young like a kid too. I said, Vera, will you always be here to protect me? Will you always be around? And she said, no, I'm gonna die. I'm like, what do you mean? And she goes, everything dies. I'm gonna be gone. Your parents will be gone. Your pet cat will be dead pretty soon. And you yourself will be dead one day. At age, you know, four or five, that's heart wrenching, right? We've all gone through this realization around that age that the world that we believe in and see will one day all be gone. That moment, I remember it so clearly because I thought, that's not fair.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Why would any species be made or created that knew that fact? That's cruel. It's better to either not know or to not exist. But to know that that's what's gonna happen is really cruel. And so I vowed, actually legitimately around the age of 18, to get a PhD, to go to the United States and develop a research lab to try and do something about it. The preservation of health and life is the most important thing that we can do as human beings. We do it with some drugs to treat that disease and the other disease, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's. But what's underlying that, what's really causing about 150,000 to 200,000 people every day to die?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Is the underlying universal process we call aging. And for far too long, we've ignored it or accepted it as natural, therefore acceptable. And I fundamentally reject the idea that aging, just because it's natural, is acceptable. There will be a day when we look back at today and think how medieval were our medicines and how sad it was that we accepted that we became frail before 100.

• 7:05Steven Bartlett?

  If someone has just clicked on this conversation now, and they deep in their core believe that they're probably going to live to 80 years old and that we all are and that we're never going to be able to do anything about it because that's just the way that it is, people get old and then they die, and aging is a fact of life, as the phrase goes, and you just have to accept it. If that's their sort of core belief, what is the most persuasive sort of top line argument to that person to convince them that in the next two hours when we have this conversation, we will do a job of both reversing that belief, really challenging it in some way, and then also presenting them with a set of possible solutions?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, all right. So first of all, who am I? I'm a Harvard professor. I've been studying aging, longevity and age reversal for 30 years. The technology now that we have in my lab that is used every day by my students literally reverses the age of tissues in animals, in human tissue that we grow in the lab. And the first human trials to test this are going to be performed in about a month from now. And if it works, it'll transform in human history. It means that we're on a path to finally being able to reset the age of the human body, not by a year, not by 10 years, but even more than that. And what happens when you do that, what we're finding in animals that includes primates,

• 8:27Speaker 01

  is that we can cure things that have previously been impossible, including blindness, by the way. And so if you're listening and you're skeptical... I'm not some hack. I am a Harvard professor who is telling the world and has written a book about it. And every day spends my life researching with a team of the best scientists I can gather around the world, showing that we can literally now reverse the aging process and reset how old the body is. In animals, yes, but potentially this year showing it can work in the human body as well.

• 9:01Steven Bartlett?

  So you're doing the first ever trial of this type in humans to reverse aging next month?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Yes, so we've submitted a form to the, you know, the FDA in the US to get approval to treat blindness, a couple of types of blindness in people as early, if all goes well, as next month.

• 9:24Steven Bartlett?

  And what exactly is happening there? Because there's many ways one might fix blindness, you know? What is it you're doing to the eyeball that is a precursor of our potential ability to reverse aging generally?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we chose the eye not because it was going to work well, but because it's a nice system to study age reversal. The eye is an enclosed space, and so it's much safer than trying to initially reverse the age of the whole body. Now, in mice, we reverse the age of the whole body, and the effect is longevity, rejuvenation, the skin gets better, all parts of the animal get healthier and younger. But in humans, you don't want to go straight to rejuvenation, because in case something goes wrong, it could set us way back. And we have to make sure we don't have any safety mishaps. So we're being a little cautious in humans. In mice, it's a little different. So in the human eye...

• 10:19Steven Bartlett?

  Just for those that aren't watching the video, there is an eye on the table.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Well, a plastic eye, it's a larger version of an eye, but yes, Stephen's right. What we're doing, we're going to look at the back of the eye, which is your retina, and that's where the light hits. And at that point, there are a lot of nerves that coalesce into the optic nerve that runs to the brain. By just a few millimeters. So the brain is here. The eye is actually part of the brain. A lot of people don't know that. You can touch your brain if you touch your eye. So the optic nerve gets old. And what we've discovered, if it gets damaged or gets old, it's not working. But the nerves, for most, the most part, if you're old, are still there. They just forget how to work. And that's aging. And later, everyone should stick around because I'm going to tell you

• 11:06Speaker 01

  why it is we get old and how it is we reverse it. But, but for this, this model, what we're doing is we're introducing a set of three genes into this optic nerve at the back of the eye and turning them on for six to eight weeks. And those three genes are what we now know reset safely, apparently safely, reset the age of cells, including nerves, by about seventy five percent and then stop. They don't go more than that, which is good. We don't want to go back to zero. I don't think anyone wants to go back to high school. But this is the way it works. And we chose the optic nerve because it's a safe and closed system, not because it should work better in optic nerves.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  In fact, we've now done it in mice in my lab for the brain. Uh, we're doing hearing, we've done skin, uh, we did multiple sclerosis. Uh, we're now doing motor neuron disease and seeing great effects. So it's important to know, I'm not an eye specialist. I didn't choose the eye because I love the eye. I chose it because that's a good place to start for a reversal in humans this year.

• 12:12Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned a second ago, you've been able to extend the life of mice in your laboratory. How and by how much? Is it the same process and by how much?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Right, well, the, the study that, that I was referring to was done using our technology in an independent lab, which is, you might argue even better than having done it in my lab. Instead of putting the three reversal genes into the eye, they injected into the vein of the mouse, the old mice, uh, and turned it on in these really old mice. These mice would be the equivalent of. About eighty to eighty-five years. So they're really old mice. They're really frail. And just any, any extension in their lifespan and health would be bet, would be a great thing. And they got an additional hundred percent lifespan extension, additional. So.

• 12:58Steven Bartlett?

  That would be like an eighty-year-old living to a hundred and sixty.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Well, the remaining life of an eighty-year-old isn't long.

• 13:03Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Right. So let's, let's say if you're, give it to a seventy-year-old, on average, they'd have another ten years to go. Give them twenty years. So it's that calculation. Um, but that was not an optimized study. They just did a Hail Mary injection, turn it on, see what would happen.

• 13:18Steven Bartlett?

  And I, I heard when we did a bit of a research call, you say, the world doesn't know how close we are. The world doesn't know how close we are to what?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  To being able to safely reverse the age of the human body.

• 13:33Steven Bartlett?

  How can you be so sure?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  I'm not sure, but I'm confident that the science is solid. Right. The, the, the biology of aging is, is understood, I believe, in concept. My theory, called the information theory of aging, has so far been not disproven, which is important for a scientist. And that has allowed us to succeed, really for the first time, to safely reverse aging. And I now believe, and though I didn't ten years ago, I now believe in my lifetime, I'm going to see medicines on the market that reset the age, or at least reverse, in a large part, uh, the age of the body.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  And that that initially won't be to make us just look better and feel better, although that's what a lot of us want. It's going to be used to cure, certainly prevent, but definitely cure diseases that are currently incurable. So we're, I think we're at a turning point, uh, dare I say, in human history. It's, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when this is gonna happen.

• 14:40Steven Bartlett?

  I want to get into your theory of aging, which we talked about there. Um, but you did have a prediction before I get to there about. How you think we'll be potentially taking a pill in 10 years' time? Every couple of weeks, that'll make us younger. Can you explain to me that prediction? What is the prediction?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  I do believe that I, and you're about 20 something years younger than me, you're going to see this for sure, that there will be a pill. So you might say, well, my critics might say, well, David, that's exaggerating, right? You're still trying to get this gene, these genes to work. How's it going to be a pill? But this is where my lab comes in. My lab is like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. If you visit, it's magical. And the students that I teach and the trainees who are sometimes in their 30s and even 40s, who are brilliant scientists, there's about 25 of us. They are making discoveries that blow me away every week. It's not a pill because you can't give a mouse a pill. They won't chew it. But we give them a liquid down their throat. It's a drink.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And within four weeks, we can rejuvenate them. Not with these genes anymore that we're giving humans. That's the older technology. The new technology is something you can swallow in a mouse and rejuvenate them in four weeks. It's normal for my students to say, oh, yeah, we just rejuvenated the ear. We just rejuvenated the skin. We just cured ALS, motor neuron disease in these animals. By the way, Stephen, this isn't just, each disease doesn't get a different medicine. Each disease doesn't get a different set of genes. It's the same set of genes, the same molecules that treat, cure multiple sclerosis as the same one that cures blindness in mice. So let that sink in.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  The same drug that we're using in the eye will be used to treat other diseases in the body, even liver disease.

• 16:32Steven Bartlett?

  So if your predictions are correct and your timeline is correct.

• 16:38Steven Bartlett?

  What does this mean for the way that I should be living my life right now?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Most people look at their parents and their grandparents and think that's what my life will be like. I'm going to be frail in my eighties. That's not true for us. I like the Wright Brothers analogy. It'd be like in 1900 saying we're always going to travel as fast as a horse. That's not true, right? The 20th century saw that we could go tens of thousands of kilometers. They went to the moon, right? That's what our generation is when it comes to biology and aging. Previous generations are no guide to what our lifespan is going to be like. You're going to potentially live to the 22nd century if you do all the right things. Technology keeps increasing, right? What kind of technologies will we have in 50 years? You'll be around in 50 years. You're a healthy guy. I know you are.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  All right. So in 50 years, what kind of things will you be able to do?

• 17:29Steven Bartlett?

  Gosh.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  This is what most people forget is that technology isn't static. When you're old, you will not be using today's technology. You'll be using technology of 2070, 2080, right? And then you'll be able to live into the 22nd century and take advantage of those technologies. That's why people talk about the singularity. The singularity is this idea that if you can make it to a certain point in human history, you won't have to age anymore. And that's in the future, right? But first steps first, let's show that we can get this to cure blindness and then get to the point where every year that we get one year older, we can get one year younger. When that happens, it's a very interesting

• 18:11Speaker 01

  world, right? You don't have to age anymore. That is the future. I don't know when we're going to get there. But if you don't live 10 to 20 years longer than your parents, something's wrong.

• 18:22Steven Bartlett?

  On that point of the singularity, so this is a particular moment in time where we're going to be able to make aging or age reversal, I guess, a choice, right? So that, I guess, the thinking or the theory is that if you can just make sure you survive up until this particular date, then you have the choice to live forever. Is that how, is that like the theory?

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's what they say, yes. There are a lot of proponents of that, but that's an idea.

• 18:46Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't it logically true, though? It's like logically?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an extension of what I'm talking about. But I don't know when that's going to be. I think Ray Kurzweil said it's coming soon.

• 18:57Steven Bartlett?

  Did he have a prediction?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  It was in the 2040s sometime.

• 19:00Steven Bartlett?

  So Ray Kurzweil is a famous futurist that seems to predict the future really well across multiple disciplines. So he said 2040?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my recollections, around there.

• 19:09Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe that? Because I'm gonna hang on till 2040.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  I'm skeptical.

• 19:14Steven Bartlett?

  I'll leave the house.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  I mean, Ray is a smart guy, right? He predicted AI and all that's happening. So it's dangerous to bet against Ray's predictions. I remain skeptical, you know, as one of the leaders in the field. I think we have a lot still to do. That said, if this trial works this year, we will be in new territory. We will be on a path to age reversal in the whole body. It's going to happen. And, you know, right now, it's now 2026 we're talking. 2040 is a number of years away. It could be that we truly are able to multiply, reset the age of the body. That's another thing that's often missed. We can reverse the age of the eye, not just once, but seemingly as many times as we want.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  In mice, we've done it at least twice. We didn't do it a third time because the mice actually just got old and they died. But they died with perfect eyesight. But the point is that we don't believe it's a one-shot wonder. You can keep reversing aging and then you age out and then you reverse it again. And you just keep going. And if that's true, then it is possible that we will live dramatically longer. I don't yet see any technology in the near horizon that will make us live forever. But I do see that we'll have a radical change in how we treat diseases and how long we can live.

• 20:32Steven Bartlett?

  So let's talk about what aging actually is. And can you explain this to me like I'm a total idiot? Because that will help.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's difficult because you're not a total idiot. But this is my theory, is that aging is not just wearing out. It's not just that your body becomes old and dysfunctional. And you get pain, you get inflammation and you die from a disease. I look at the body like it's a computer. It's software.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  And we can reinstall the software. In my lab, we believe we've found the way to do that. And we see the evidence of that. So the body is a carrier of information from our parents and what happened in the womb. That information is intact, keeps our body functioning almost perfectly in our teenage years, twenty. You're in your early thirties, you're starting to lose that information. And so your body's not functioning perfectly anymore. Gray has. You've got some gray. Yeah. Exactly, that's a good example of cells that lose their identity and stop making melanin, the black pigment. But it's going to get worse, I promise you, unless, you know, unless we hurry up.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  And this information gets lost, it gets corrupted. But the beautiful thing is, we believe we've found a backup copy of that information from youth, that we can reinstall into cells, into tissues, into the entire body of a mouse and hopefully a human. That backup copy is in every old person, I believe, and it can be accessed. So when I see an old person walking down the street now, I don't think, oh, that person's just worn out, frail, gonna die. I just think that's someone that needs a reset. And inside that person is a young person waiting to come out again. That's a totally different way to think about old age. And in the future, people will have a choice to be rejuvenated or not. Where is that backup copy that I need?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Well, we're working on that. And if I, if I told you, my student would kill me. But we believe we've found largely where that information is stored. It's entirely new biology. And it's currently a secret? It's a secret. Okay, so you, you, you lead the way. Tell me what we should, we should talk about next as it relates to aging. Let's talk about information, right? We live in the information age and biology is becoming part of that information age. And it started with the elucidation of the structure of DNA. Okay. And so I have a model of DNA here. So for listeners who are not watching, this is a little plastic double helix.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  My friend Jim Watson died recently, last month, who, he and his colleague discovered that DNA, the information of life that we get from our parents, is a chemical that's about six feet long in every cell. And this model here shows that DNA is a ladder and the steps on the ladder are the information of the DNA.

• 23:28Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you can pull this apart so that each step becomes fifty, fifty percent ripped apart. So that should come apart, right? So I ripped the rung of the ladder apart. And that is called a base on the DNA. And it always matches with its corresponding chemical. So this shorthand we'd call an A, it always matches with a T. So an AT becomes a rung on the ladder. And down here, different color. Here I'm looking at a red and a green step. Rip it apart. This is a G and a C letter. Gs and Cs come together. And actually, when, if you, if I rip this ladder into halves and each step becomes half a ladder, now you can see that you can copy DNA.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Because the A has to match with the T rung and the G has to match with the C. So that's basic DNA. That's how the information is transferred from cell to cell, from mother to daughter, our parents to offspring. There are about twenty thousand genes, about fifteen thousand are turned on. But a different set gets turned on in large part to make a nerve cell compared to a liver cell and a skin cell.

• 24:37Steven Bartlett?

  Uh huh.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  That's gene expression. And what controls that gene expression is what's called, not, not the genome, which is what's in front of me here on the DNA molecule. It's the epigenome. The epigenome is the information we get transferred from cell to cell, from parent to offspring, that's not in this molecule. So where's this epigenetic information? Well, it controls which genes are switched on and off. And a major regulator of that process is the modification of these steps on the DNA. These chemicals, the C, particularly the C, which I'm showing you here in this red

• 25:20Speaker 01

  part of the molecule, the C gets a little chemical added to it called a methyl. And a methyl is just, if you remember from chemistry, high school, it's a carbon with three hydrogens. It's a very simple molecule. It gets stuck on that piece of the, the DNA molecule. That's called DNA methylation. And that will help determine, that pattern of DNA methylation determines whether this particular gene will be switched on, say to make an optic nerve, or switched off so that it becomes a liver cell. And that happens as we're in the womb and we become an embryo. And that's the epigenome, these chemicals that turn genes on and off is the epigenome.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  And the information theory of aging states that the information that's in a cell, which includes the DNA, but actually more importantly for aging, is the control systems, the epigenome, that is pristine when we're young, but as we get older, we lose that epigenetic information, the ability to tell a cell to be a nerve cell versus a liver cell versus a skin cell, it starts to get erased. So when we look at a mouse or an old tissue, if I took maybe not your skin, but my skin, my skin cells are no longer as skin-like as they once were. They've started to lose their identity. They're starting

• 26:46Speaker 01

  actually to look more like nerve cells and nerve cells starting to look more like skin cells because the genes that were once turned on correctly in my young cells, that that control system, these chemicals on the DNA molecule, these meths, are getting erased.

• 27:02Steven Bartlett?

  So aging is an identity crisis of the cells?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  It absolutely is. Well put.

• 27:06Steven Bartlett?

  The cells forget what their job is?

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Yes. The genes are still there, in large part, 99.99% of the genes are still there, the molecule's intact, but the control systems.

• 27:20Steven Bartlett?

  The label thing you mentioned.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  The label to tell the cell that this gene needs to be on, but this one should always stay off, that gets erased over time.

• 27:28Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  We did partially figure that out.

• 27:32Steven Bartlett?

  And how do you know?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Well, oh, even better. This is, this is why I love your podcast, Stephen. You ask the right questions. These, there are enzymes that remove these methyl groups and put them back on. So the cells controlling these things, they shouldn't change, but they do. And one of the things that messes the system up is major catastrophe in a cell. And when the cell panics. It removes these structures to try and adapt to the stress.

• 28:03Steven Bartlett?

  The label.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  The label comes off in a desperate attempt to survive. But then the cell doesn't fully revert back to the original state. Some of these chemicals and some of the proteins that bind to the DNA, which is also important for this epigenome, they don't all go back to where they started. I've used the analogy that it's like a ping pong or a tennis match where the proteins that control the genes, they they get relocated to where the emergency is. And an emergency, the one that we think is most dangerous and a large cause of aging is a broken chromosome. If you have a broken chromosome, if you don't fix that, you're either going to become a cancer cell or you're going to die. It's not good. And so cells panic.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  And in that panic of moving proteins away and turning on these stress response genes, that's great in the short term. The cell might survive, but they don't fully reset. Those proteins don't all go back to where they once were, say, 10 minutes ago, when the stress needed to be, the disaster happened. And if you do that time and time again, and every one of your cells has at least one broken chromosome every day, that's 20 trillion of these events every day in your body. Over time, tick, tick, tick, you get the aging process, we believe.

• 29:22Steven Bartlett?

  So I guess I've got two questions. I guess the first question, if I was thinking about the sequence of asking these questions, is what is increasing that stress on my cells? Therefore, what is increasing aging? And also, like, why didn't evolution just come up with a solution for this that stopped me aging then? Like, evolution's very smart. Couldn't it just fix this?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Well, before I get into that, one of the reasons we know that this works, because you asked me, how do we know that's true? Is that we created this catastrophe in animals. We took mice and we we broke their chromosomes in a way that didn't cause cancer or mutations. If we're right, what should happen to these mice?

• 30:04Steven Bartlett?

  They get old fast.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  They get old fast.

• 30:05Steven Bartlett?

  Grey hair.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  And they did. We call them the ice mice. Ice stands for inducible changes to the epigenome. And we were able to induce these changes. And we took bets in the lab. This is going back now 12 years ago. I I bet that we would get aging. Okay, but I was the only one in the lab that thought that would happen. We had a lot of bets that the mice would die. A lot of bets that the mice would get cancer. And a few said nothing would happen. But we got aging. In fact, I was I was in Australia, where where I'm from, as you know. And I got a picture on my old old style iPhone. And it was a picture of an old mouse. Well, it was a sick looking mouse. And and the text was, problem, we have a sick mouse.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  And I wrote back, that's not a sick mouse, that's an old mouse. And that was the first time I realized that we'd had evidence that our theory, the information theory of aging is correct. So what we did actually, and this might satisfy your and your listeners curiosity. We generated a mouse from scratch using stem cells. And so we start with a mouse stem cell that we grow in the lab in the dish. And we changed the genetics of that stem cell so that we could feed it a drug, Tamoxifen, which is used in in chemotherapy. And that drug turned on a gene from a slime mold, something you might find in the forest, that breaks DNA of the mouse,

• 31:34Speaker 01

  but does it in a way that doesn't cause cancer or mutations, just cuts it. And the cells put it back together. So we could take a mouse. And for three weeks, we turned on this slime mold cutting protein. And nothing happened to the mouse at the time. It's like you don't feel an X ray. You don't feel different when you fly, except for maybe jet lag and dehydration. But you don't get old suddenly. Same with the mice. They were normal, they felt fine. And that's why at first people said, oh, nothing's going to happen to these mice. After three weeks, they were fine. But we set in motion a cascade of accelerated aging events that

• 32:12Speaker 01

  About 10 months later, they were super grey and super old and had all the diseases of aging 50% faster than their twins that we didn't treat.

• 32:21Steven Bartlett?

  And you've got photos of those we could show?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's show those. So if I was to do the experiment in you, I might have to engineer it a clone of you, but I could do that. You know, I'm not saying that it's ethically right, but theoretically, we could make a clone of you, put in that slime mold gene, turn it on, and your clone would be 50% older than you are.

• 32:43Steven Bartlett?

  Can you translate this into the equivocal for a human? That particular study that you did. So it would be like in me doing what and then me getting old fast?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, we're exposed to things that cause DNA breaks all the time. They happen naturally as the cells try to copy their DNA, but you can accelerate that by getting an X-ray, a CT scan, flying a lot and cosmic rays banging into your DNA.

• 33:08Steven Bartlett?

  I fly all the time. I've had loads of CT scans and X-rays.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And though it's imperceptible, I believe that that's probably accelerating your aging process.

• 33:18Steven Bartlett?

  What's flying doing to my... So again, you talked about flying being equivocal to what you did to the mouse. In what way?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Well, every time you break your chromosome, you're rearranging your epigenome in a catastrophic way that doesn't fully reset and your cell will lose its identity faster. I also believe, and have some evidence, that even going to a rock concert and blasting your eardrums is such a stress on those cells in your ear that the reason that you become deaf earlier is because your ear hair cells are getting older faster. You don't want to break the DNA. You don't want to cause catastrophe to your fragile cells in your body because the recovery isn't complete and aging ensues.

• 33:59Steven Bartlett?

  So with this theory in mind, what are the day-to-day things that we're all doing that are accelerating our age? Like, because I think what's really interesting is I looked at my brother, Jason, he's a year older than me. He has three kids that are like under the age of seven or eight now. And this Christmas time, because it's just been Christmas, I looked at his hair to see many grey hairs he had versus me. And I thought, okay, he has considerably more. He's a year older than me. And I was thinking, that's like a proxy of aging to some degree. What is it he's potentially done on a day to day basis? I know you don't know him, so this is why it's not not an offensive answer to give. What is it that someone who is generally sort of genetically very similar,

• 34:42Steven Bartlett?

  but is making different lifestyle choices is doing to accelerate that process of wrinkles or grey hairs or?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Well, here's the good news, that you can have a big impact on your rate of aging by changing your lifestyle. It turns out your DNA is not your destiny, it's the epigenome. So that how you live your life is really eighty to ninety percent of your rate of aging. That's good, it's in your hands, but it also means that some people mess up their lives. There are actually twin studies from, mostly from Denmark, identical twins. One that goes and smokes and gets obese and goes in the sun. And they are much older looking than their identical twin, essentially proving that the DNA is not the reason you age. First of all, there are going to be people in the audience who are listening or watching who have grey hair saying, "Damn it, I'm not old." And that's true. I mean, nobody died of grey hair, right?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  And sometimes genetically you can get grey old, but not be physically old. What is true that's often not comfortable is how old you look is a very good representation of how old you are in your organs as well. So doing the right thing. So what are those things? Let's tick off some of the major things that people should be doing. And they can have a big impact. They can lengthen your life by a decade just by doing some of the major things. So we know that on average, people can live fourteen years longer. This is based on a study that came out from Harvard, a long term study of the lifespan of World War Two veterans. If you avoid smoking, cigarette smoking, or really any type of smoke in your lungs. Smoking breaks your DNA, it's going to accelerate aging in your lungs, your whole body. Avoid excessive drinking.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  We now know that even more than one glass a day of alcohol is bad. I've given up alcohol for the most part for that reason. Eat well. So you want to eat healthy food. We've got some healthy food here we're going to talk about. So make sure you you don't overeat or eat ultra processed foods. And the big one, one of the best things you can do besides all of that is exercise, okay. And exercise covers a lot of things, so we can drill into that as well. But the fifth one is interesting. It may be surprising, but actually, good news for you. Have a reliable partner.

• 36:54Steven Bartlett?

  I think you're gonna say be a podcaster. Okay.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Oh, no, that probably accelerates your age. Yes. So if you don't have a reliable partner, have a pet, because the human bond is something that is shown to slow aging and associates with people who live longer than others that are lonely.

• 37:13Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. We're gonna dig into all of those in great detail, specifically very interested in in exercise, diet, lifestyle, fasting. I know it's a big subject you speak about, which I'm very, very interested in. And actually, as I was doing your research for this conversation, again, my, the way that I'm gonna approach nutrition has shifted because of some of the things I discovered there. I wanna just tick off on this evolution point.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Right. Let's come back to that.

• 37:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I just wanna get clear. Yeah, like, why didn't evolution fix it for me? Because they talk about survival of the fittest and that the very fact that I'm here is because my my ancestors were good at survival. But listen, my ancestors all died at like thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years old. That's not very good. Why? Why didn't they just live longer?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Well, that's why. You just said the answer yourself, because your ancestors didn't live beyond forty or fifty, even less, right? Most men in prehistoric times would die from famine, disease, and actually, a lot of them from war. So most people didn't make it eighty. Some people did, but very, very rarely. So the the forces of natural selection were on early survival and fast breeding. Let's put it this way. If there was someone who was born with a mutation that allowed them to live a lot longer, to ninety, in a prehistoric world, that's useless, because you're probably gonna die at thirty or forty anyway, and so are your children. So

• 38:34Speaker 01

  what you wanna do is find genes that allow you to become reproductively successful early on in life and make sure your children survive. And so we we have children pretty early, but humans, for for various reasons, have a long developmental period, including education. So we don't, we don't develop very rapidly, right? We don't wake up and we can walk and run like a lot of other species and mammals. But we don't live a long time because there was, in the environment that we evolved, the Serengeti Plain is pretty much agreed upon as that's one of the places we evolved. Certainly, Eastern Africa. That was extremely difficult and dangerous place to live. You could get eaten by an animal.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  And if you didn't get eaten by an animal, you get killed by the neighboring tribe. That's super dangerous, right? And then, so we evolved to live really at optimal to about thirty, but not much more than that. So after thirty, as you might be experiencing with your body, we're at the forces of entropy. So the body starts to decay. The information starts to get lost in the body. But the good news is that if you take away predation and death from a species, it evolves longer lifespans. Now it makes evolutionary sense to have genes that allow you to put more effort into building a strong body and slowing down the aging process

• 40:01Speaker 01

  and preventing DNA breaks, chromosomal breaks. We know that this is true because if you put species, say, on an island where there are no predators, what happens to their longevity? They get longer lived naturally. It takes twenty, thirty generations, but only when there's no predation, when you're not under a lot of stress to breed quickly, do you get longer lifespans evolving. Given that humans don't have predators anymore, we are slowly evolving longer lifespans. But it's very slow and it's not going to happen fast enough for you and me.

• 40:39Steven Bartlett?

  And do the organisms that do live really, really long have a small amount of predators in nature?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. Think about them. The bristlecone pine.

• 40:51Steven Bartlett?

  What's that?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  It's the longest-lived tree in the world. It can live many thousands of years.

• 40:57Steven Bartlett?

  Are you jealous?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Not jealous, no. No, they live a tough life. Some of those trees have been around since the pyramids.

• 41:05Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  The reason they live, can live for so long and evolved to live so long is that things don't eat them. They're totally poisonous. You don't want to eat a bristlecone pine. The same for a whale, right? The bowhead whale, some of these very large animals, no predators. So they've evolved a strategy of breeding slowly, but building very

• 41:25Speaker 01

  powerful systems to stop epigenetic changes. Their epigenetic control systems are stable. They don't get cancer and they don't lose, they don't have this identity crisis until hundreds of years. We know that. People study the cells of whales in the dish and those cells don't lose their identity very quickly, even when you break their DNA.

• 41:47Steven Bartlett?

  So I guess the place also to go next is talking about disease generally and what disease is. So are these diseases a function of aging? Does this idea of reversing aging even matter if cancer is going to take most of us out anyway at some point? Is there a link between aging and disease?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  This might be the most important point that I make today.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  When you reverse aging, diseases of aging go away or are cured. And in my lab, including many types of cancer as well.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  The diseases that we try to treat individually with different medicines today that we think are unrelated. Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, you name them. Fundamentally, what's driving a lot of those diseases is aging. If you never got old, would you ever get Alzheimer's even if you had the genes that predispose you? No.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Right? And so what we see in my lab is when we give an animal a disease, and we can do that, we can put in the human genes for Alzheimer's into a mouse. It becomes, has dementia. When we reverse the age of the brain of that animal, we're not treating the disease, we're treating aging. The disease goes away. The body can heal itself when it's young. So it's the aging process that reveals the disease that can be cured by reversing.

• 43:11Steven Bartlett?

  Why does the aging process reveal a disease? Why don't we get Alzheimer's at 15?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Because the cells are so healthy, they can fix themselves, they can renew themselves. The disease processes that cause these problems for us don't exist when we're young. Why is it that a teenager rarely has a heart attack? Because their body prevents them. Why do young people typically not get cancer? Because the immune system finds cancer cells and clears them out. You and I have cancer cells in our body right now. Why are we probably not going to die in the next year? Because our immune system will find them and kill them. But as we get older, we're going to lose that ability and we'll have a greater chance of having cancer.

• 43:55Steven Bartlett?

  So are you saying that if we cure aging, we're probably going to, by way of that, cure most of these diseases?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 44:02Steven Bartlett?

  We're talking about menopause quite a lot on this podcast. And fertility, menopause, women's ovaries as one of the first places that ages. And I've heard you explain that you think that evolution programmed women to stop having children during menopause because continuing reproduction would drain energy needed to raise existing children. So is infertility something that could theoretically be prevented?

• 44:26Speaker 01

  In mice, which is where we live, in my lab, where we work, it can be prevented and it can be reversed.

• 44:33Steven Bartlett?

  I thought we ran out of eggs. That's like the-

• 44:36Speaker 01

  That's the current theory. The evidence that we have from my lab and a lab that I worked with in Australia

• 44:44Speaker 01

  caused me to question that idea that we run, that women run out of eggs. We have published and repeated many times that if you treat old female mice, 16 months of age, which is like a 65, 70 year old human that has long time since given up having offspring.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  We can treat the ovaries with a chemical that rejuvenates the eggs that are in the ovary, maybe even produces new ones, we don't know for sure. But those 16-month-old mice that stopped having kids probably at least six months ago, now start producing healthy offspring again. Their eggs look young, pristine, compared to the terrible eggs that if you try to harvest some eggs from a mouse that old, it's hard to find any that look normal. Their chromosomes are messed up, ripped apart, they're not going to produce healthy babies. But we can take those eggs, or at least the ovaries with those eggs in them, and cause

• 45:50Speaker 01

  them to be young again, and make fresh eggs that can produce healthy offspring that live a normal lifespan. The real question is, will this work in women? And that's something that I'm keen on testing.

• 46:04Steven Bartlett?

  It must be really hard to test a lot of these things in people, right? Because you've mentioned the word mice quite a lot.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  It's harder than you can imagine, actually. And I've spent a lot of my career since I was 35 aiming to develop a medicine to treat diseases and aging. And it can be, it can go wrong in many ways, even if the science is good and right. And it's, there's money, there's business, there's laws, there's politics, there's business strategies, there's change of leaderships, all sorts of human-introduced variables that can get in the way. There's patents, and then there's, there's competition and spite that also gets into it.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  And I've had to deal with all of those things, including competing against some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world who really didn't want me to succeed. But yeah, it's extremely difficult to make a drug. But I do want to remind you, and everyone listening and watching, that we're beyond mice now for age reversal. We've done this in monkeys, monkeys that are physically and almost genetically identical to us. So it's not a big leap from, it is a pretty big leap from mouse to human, but from a monkey to a human, it's, we're essentially, you know, slightly smarter monkeys.

• 47:25Steven Bartlett?

  I just had a thought about how other countries, now the nations, might be conducting their own sort of secret research. And they might not have the same bureaucratic, political, ethical considerations that you have to contend with. Do you think about this much, that some of the sort of geopolitical adversaries might be doing secret testing in some research lab somewhere on humans?

• 47:48Speaker 01

  I think about it, and in fact, the United States government thinks about it too. A large investment into the, one of the companies that I sit on the board of was blocked because the US government claimed that the technology was too dangerous to be in the hands of foreign companies and governments. So the US government, at least in the previous administration, was extremely cautious about this technology falling into the wrong hands.

• 48:18Steven Bartlett?

  Which technology?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  The ability to reverse aging.

• 48:21Steven Bartlett?

  So the US government blocked that technology because they were scared that it might fall into the wrong hands?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Well, they blocked the very large investment, over a hundred million dollars, into the company from a foreigner because they would have more access to the information and the progress.

• 48:35Steven Bartlett?

  Is it China?

• 48:36Speaker 01

  I won't say more, it's sensitive. Most I can say is that governments are watching this technology very closely, not just the US, but around the world. Because the winner will make not just a lot of economic benefit, but there will be potential for radical change in the pharmaceutical industry, in healthcare. The amount of change socially will be dramatic as well. But there are also uses that the government has identified so-called super soldier potential. Now, I don't agree that that's a reason to slow down the research. Others claim that it was worth it. But I do believe that the technology is very powerful and we should start to get ready

• 49:22Speaker 01

  for when this comes to society. Because it's not an if, as I said, it's a when.

• 49:27Steven Bartlett?

  The technology to do what?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  To rejuvenate the human body.

• 49:32Steven Bartlett?

  Why do we need to get ready?

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Well, because it'll be massive social change. If you can choose how old you want to be and people don't die at eighty anymore. Let's say they can live to one hundred and twenty or beyond. There's big changes, there's social security issues, there's employment. Though I will say that the disaster scenario that often comes to mind when I talk about this and which I covered in the last part of my book, Lifespan, it's actually economically hugely advantageous to slow aging and prevent diseases. A lot of the US economy and most advanced economies goes to healthcare. And chronic disease, a lot of people are sick for five to ten years. That's where most of people's savings and retirement and government money goes in.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  The most expensive years of your life are the last two years. If you can delay that, it's going to have massively positive economic benefits to a nation that adopts these medicines.

• 50:30Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a question for you that actually came to mind yesterday when I was, I watched some, I don't know, some video on social media and they asked a question to a guy. David, if you were a billionaire now, at age fifty-six, would you give it all up to be my age again, thirty-three?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  I don't think you can put a price on being young. Another way of putting it, and I've seen this on social media, would you, for a billion dollars, would you swap with Warren Buffett?

• 50:58Steven Bartlett?

  No, absolutely not.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Right, so there's no money in the world that you want to be old, right?

• 51:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  It's not worth it. In other words, youth is more valuable than a billion dollars. It may be the most valuable thing you could ever have, is your youth.

• 51:13Steven Bartlett?

  It's such an interesting and illuminating analogy or metaphor or whatever, because suddenly you do realise that how much we value it. We value it more than anything. I would rather be... Thirty three years old than be a forty three year old billionaire. Even the ten years I value as a billion dollars.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, one year maybe, but not ten years, right? Ten years is super, I I totally agree with you. And the older you get, the more valuable it becomes. It's important to realise the the massive impact that this technology can have, not just economically, but on individual lives of human beings across the planet. The world when this becomes a reality. Again, I'm speaking like it's a certainty because I'm pretty convinced it's gonna happen. That world is gonna be so different from the world we live in. It's gonna be as different as the pre computer world and the pre aeroplane world as today is.

• 52:13Steven Bartlett?

  I'm trying to imagine the world where we could pick our age. And maybe even, you know, you talked about earlier, being able to continue to reset to that age.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:21Steven Bartlett?

  Trying to imagine what the world would be like if I could be thirty three forever. Or if you could be, you know, thirty three forever.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Or even for another hundred years or something.

• 52:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I could stay thirty three for a hundred years. Do you think that's the plausible outcome, which is we can kind of pick an age and stay there for a hundred years, like at that particular age? Or is it just that I'm gonna be a hundred and fifty in my physical form? I'm gonna be wrinkled and grey, but I'm just gonna continue to live. Is it looking young or is it just living longer?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  It's actually, it's, the good news is it's both. And we're doing a lot of work in my lab on skin and hair, hair loss, hair graying.

• 53:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, please help me, like if I.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  You don't have to worry just yet. You know, we'll we'll help your brother first.

• 53:10Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, no, come on.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we we will, tell them to call me. So we we've seen that we can rejuvenate the skin of, again, mice, but still, we also grow human skin in the lab from scratch. And we can put that human skin on mice and the mice have human skin. So we can now test age reversal in that system. I'm very optimistic that we'll be able to rejuvenate the the external part of the body as well as the internal. If we can cure blindness, reversing the age of the skin is is a piece of cake.

• 53:40Steven Bartlett?

  What what does that world look like? I'm trying to understand all of the sort of unintended consequences of such a world where we're all kind of young and we all live longer. Is there problems of meaning and purpose? Is this? What are the unintended consequences?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  I've thought a lot about this. There's this gut feeling that a lot of people have, maybe you're feeling it now, is that if I'm not worried about death, I'm not going to strive as hard, or I'm not going to have as much meaning, I'm not going to have agency. I totally reject that view. I believe that every moment is special. I don't believe I would be enjoying this conversation with you anymore if I could live 200 years. I'm loving the moment.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  And so I believe that we get up with purpose. And if I lived for a thousand years, I'd still enjoy every day that I lived. And even a thousand years, one day may be seen as too short. You know, it's 20 times my age, a little bit less than 20. That's still not very much in the grand scheme of, you know, the age of geology and the earth. We still are around like that. And so I think that we will still love life, most of us will still love life and enjoy every moment, but we'll get more opportunities. We can try multiple careers. Maybe we will get divorced and find, have a whole new life. So there will be opportunities and it will be a magnificent world.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Not to mention the productivity that humans can provide with the knowledge of a 58 or 80-year-old, but with the body of a 30-year-old.

• 55:17Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think people will make different decisions about having children?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Well, I think we have a problem already with the decisions that a lot of couples are making, which is leaving it too late. It's very clear with the fertility rate and the rate of childbirth that basically we're going off a cliff. And I think that it's going to be important to be able to give couples, and women especially, the choice to have children for longer. And that's one of the reasons that I work on this topic, is that I think that the world, with all of the training that we need to do and the pressures on finding a mate and being happily married, or at least being partnered up, that can take decades to get the right person. You don't want to rush into it like people used to. And being able to have children in your 50s and 60s, I think, would be a great gift

• 56:05Speaker 01

  to humanity. That's my personal view. Some people may, you know, for whatever reason, disagree with that. But I think that the pressures to have children before 35 typically are just extreme and unfair. But also that it'll help us maintain the human population, because by 2050, we're going to start...

• 56:23Steven Bartlett?

  Going in a bad decline and earlier in many Western countries. And without humans, you know, absent android robots everywhere, we're going to have a deficiency of human capital and human productivity. And this is, I would argue with Elon, that this is the best solution to that lack of humans is just keep people healthy and alive and productive for longer.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Whoa, what's that on your face?

• 56:53Steven Bartlett?

  This is my Bon Charge face mask. I've been wearing this for some time now. They're a sponsor of the podcast. I put this on for 15, 20 minutes a day. I can sit here in the chair and wear it, boost my collagen production, helps with fine line blemishes, my complexion gets better. And then people, more people listen to the podcast because I look better. Professional grade equipment in such a small box. It's non-invasive and having sat here with so many of the world's leading health professionals, there's various things that I repeatedly hear work and some things I'm a bit skeptical about. This is one of the things that almost all of my guests on this show have confirmed works. It is really, really, really effective. And they offer fast, free shipping worldwide with easy returns and exchanges. And you'll also get a one-year warranty on all of their products and they're HSA and FSA eligible, giving you tax-free savings up to 40%.

• 57:38Steven Bartlett?

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• 58:23Steven Bartlett?

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• 59:08Steven Bartlett?

  certain cancer cells and kill those cancer cells completely.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my wonderful student, Nalat, is doing her PhD on this. And what we've hypothesized and now tested is the idea, again, based on the information theory of aging, is that cancer is expressing those genes differently. In the same way that aging is a cellular identity crisis, cancer is a cellular identity crisis. And if we can rejuvenate an old cell to be normal and turn on the right genes again, we should be able to do that for a cancer cell and either make it normal, or if it tries to be normal and wakes up from its zombie-like state, it might even kill itself.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  And that's what we're finding in my lab. Nalat's work has shown that a majority of cancers that we've grown in the lab will die and shrink in an animal if you try to reverse their age.

• 1:00:09Steven Bartlett?

  Through the injection that you were referring to earlier on.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can do it a couple of ways. One is using those three genes that rejuvenate the epigenome and make cells young again.

• 1:00:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  The one for the eye, the same technology for the eye we're using in cancer cells. But we also have this chemical drink that we can give to animals or to put on the cells. And that also wakes the cancer cells up, tries to, they try to become more normal, they turn on the original set of genes that they might have had on 30, 40 years ago. Some of these cancer cells that we grow in the lab were from the 20th century. We rejuvenate them, we turn on those genes that were originally in the normal tissue, and the cells kill themselves. And so I believe that we may not be able to cure all cancer using this, that would be crazy to even say that. But I do believe that if we're successful rejuvenating the human body, cancer is not...

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Going to be a risk. And that's just a nice side effect of what our original mission was, which was to treat aging.

• 1:01:16Steven Bartlett?

  So from this, we can start to try and understand what we think is causing cancer. And I guess this goes back to the, a lot of the carcinogenic behavior that you described earlier, things like smoking, anything that's applying stress on the DNA. Is that like a?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to break the DNA. That's the cat. A catastrophe is really broken DNA, but you can do other things that catastrophes like overheat the cells, even mechanical stress. Too many hits on the brain in football will, will do that. So yes, that's exactly right. And that drives aging and aging drives cancer, by the way. One of my theories called the Garoncagenesis hypothesis, terrible name, but nevertheless, Garoncagenesis it is. It's the idea that as we age, we're becoming more cancer like as, as a, as a human. Our metabolism, when we're old, is closer to heading towards what a cancer cell's metabolism is like.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  So that when we actually do get cancer, the cancer cells grow better in an old person than when you're young. And so by rejuvenating those cancer cells, giving them the, the ability to be young again, they actually either slow down in their growth or, as I said, kill themselves in response.

• 1:02:32Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a bit of a prop here, which might be useful for the context.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Oh goodness. There are people here that may not know what I'm holding in my hands, but for those of you who don't know and who are just listening, I'm holding a record in my hands, a vinyl record that Stephen just handed me. So the, the information theory of aging, the analogy that I used is that it disrupts information. And so this record, this album has information on it. It's music and just like DNA, it's information. So instead of the DNA information, the, the control of the DNA bit getting messed up in the album, it's like scratching this album. So I'm literally going to scratch this album. Is that okay with you?

• 1:03:18Steven Bartlett?

  Of course you can.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  All right. I'm not sure I can fix it, by the way. It may be a one way thing, but I've never done this before, but that's painful.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Maybe you can hear that happening. So if we were to play this on a record player with a needle, it's going to jump around and it's going to read the wrong songs or it's going to certainly not sound very good. So that's, that's now the equivalent of an old cell. The information, the beautiful music is there, but the ability to read it has been messed up. In the same way that old age, the information is in the DNA, but the cells don't read it correctly. And what our technology is, is to get rid of those scratches. And so we can play the beautiful music of our youth again.

• 1:04:05Steven Bartlett?

  Um, I have got this. You told me to, to bring my weighted vest and this neck brace.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness.

• 1:04:13Steven Bartlett?

  I think I put on the wrong weight.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  If any, anyone listening, Stephen's putting on a very heavy jacket right now with lead weights and a strap around his neck to limit his neck movement.

• 1:04:23Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow. That's a lot. Listen, so I'm, I just put on a 20, I think it's 20 kilogram. Must I'm weak now. Um, jacket and a neck brace. And ahead of this conversation, my team told me to get one of these. What is the analogy here that you're, you're creating? This is very, oh, you know.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  It's bad, right?

• 1:04:44Steven Bartlett?

  It's hard, yeah.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Right, imagine feeling like that for a decade. That's old age. You're feeling tired, weak, you can barely hold your body up. You can barely move your neck. It would be painful. You're not in pain yet, but most people in their eighties have some sort of disease and aches and pains. Try doing that for another 10 minutes, maybe. How long can you keep that on?

• 1:05:08Steven Bartlett?

  I'll keep it on for another 10 minutes. But so why is this? Cause it just, it's weight and immobility. I can't move my neck the same. My shoulders feel heavier. How, how is this a relevant analogy to aging? Because it just kind of feels like immobility and weight.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I have to come over there and use this pair of scissors to be stabbing you as well. So if you can feel pain as you move as well. That's part of old age. It is not a fun thing, being old. And most old people, the reason that they don't love life anymore is because they feel like you do, or worse. Not to mention the fact that there, you need to put Vaseline on your eyes, earplugs in your ears, if you want to know what it's like being old.

• 1:05:51Steven Bartlett?

  Oh God, it's not nice.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Or even worse, shut your eyes and you can never open them again. That's what it's like for those patients that we hope to cure blindness in.

• 1:06:03Steven Bartlett?

  If I'm gonna ask you a really tough question, which is if I put a calculator in front of you right now

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Steven Bartlett?

  and you had to hit a number on that calculator and then hit enter, and that was the age that you were gonna live to

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:13Steven Bartlett?

  and you had to make that decision now.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16Steven Bartlett?

  What number would you hit on that calculator?

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Infinity.

• 1:06:20Steven Bartlett?

  Really? So you did, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  There's no day, if you're healthy, where you wanna die. Even if you're a hundred, a hundred and twenty, if you have friends, family, loved ones, you're healthy, would you say, okay, tomorrow I'm ready to die?

• 1:06:33Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:06:35Steven Bartlett?

  Unless there was some kind of psychiatric issue or something.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right? So that's my point, is when people say, oh, when I'm eighty, kill me, that is bullshit. That's, oh, excuse my language.

• 1:06:44Steven Bartlett?

  It's fine.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Am I allowed to swear on this?

• 1:06:45Steven Bartlett?

  Of course you can. Sorry, we're gonna have to beep it for the kids, I guess.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  It's only when you're sick or you have depression that you wanna leave this world. Otherwise, life is a joy for most people in the world. Not everybody, and we have to fix that as well. But for most of us, being alive is the greatest gift of any, you know, collection of atoms. Consciousness is even greater. And why would you want that to end? Who would choose that if they had the alternative to be with family and friends?

• 1:07:19Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. I say that's interesting because I have always assumed that I wouldn't want to live forever. But the, when you asked me, if I was healthy and I had my friends and family and I was doing things that I loved professionally, would there come a day where I would choose to go now? No, there wouldn't. Just like there hasn't come a day in the last thirty-three years where I've chosen to go now.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Exactly.

• 1:07:47Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it's gonna be possible in the next fifty years for us to live forever?

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  I'd be shocked if that happened. But I've been shocked my whole career at how fast this technology is moving. And now with AI, things are going so fast, my head's spinning.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  So I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'm skeptical that we could live forever, in my lifetime at least. But as I said, you're probably gonna live, you are gonna live into the 22nd century. We can't imagine what the world's gonna be like then.

• 1:08:18Steven Bartlett?

  And AI has really changed this equation.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. We're doing things in my lab that would have taken 160 years before, and quite literally billions of dollars on a $10,000 budget.

• 1:08:32Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I guess I'd better make it to 2040. So let's talk about fasting and food and nutrition, and go a little bit deeper on that. I've had so many conversations over the years about the subject of fasting. But as I was reading your research, you really do feel that fasting, just eating less often, is one of the most important things that we can all do for longevity.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  I do. I do, and I practice it as much as I can, though it's challenging in a world that's full of abundant food. But yes, we've known for thousands of years, the ancients are not dummies. They could witness what happens when you fast. Clarity of mind, long-term health, they could observe the difference between the gluttons and the people that fasted for religious reasons. It's obvious, but there's certain ways to do it. Fasting doesn't include malnutrition. You have to do it with abundant vitamins, minerals. You want to make sure that you have adequate nutrition. But I think three meals a day is craziness. It turns out this idea of breakfast is the most important meal of the day is marketing from the early

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  20th century by companies I will not name. But it was breakfast cereal. Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day for most people, especially adults. Especially if you're not hungry when you wake up. There's no point in eating if you're not hungry in the morning. I'm one of those people. So I've skipped breakfast. How about you?

• 1:09:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I'm the same. I'm the same. I don't eat. My first meal today was 3pm because I had a podcast until 2pm. So, which is typical for me. I just don't get hungry in the mornings. Because of the marketing, though, for breakfast, sometimes I've said to myself, you should eat, and I'll make myself eat. But it's very, very rare. I'm notoriously, people know that I'm notoriously... A late eater, four P M. Sometimes five P M. If I'm in the office.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  How are you feeling with that heavy vest on?

• 1:10:19Steven Bartlett?

  It's heavy, David. I've got to be honest. It's not. I'm finding myself like trying to find a comfortable position.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's tough being old and by the end of it, you will be so convinced that this research is important. Because to live like that, in most people, life is not worth living. I put a suit, a very heavy suit like that, but on the arms as well, not just the body. And he had the earmuffs and the eyes. This was the governor of Massachusetts. Fifteen minutes in that body suit and he was crying, not because he was in pain, because as he said on stage, it was the first time in his life he understood how his father feels and could be empathetic. We, young people, I'm relatively young, fifty six, you're very young, thirty three. We have no idea what it's like to be old. It can be horrific.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  So why wouldn't we do the right things like fasting, exercising? So we can get an extra ten years, twenty years, maybe longer of healthy life.

• 1:11:18Steven Bartlett?

  It does also give me a lot of empathy for people that have a bit more weight on them as well. Because of, you know, if I was, if I weighed that much, I don't know if I'd be very active, to be completely honest with you.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you're in pain too, don't forget. Every giant can be hurting. How do you feel taking that off?

• 1:11:35Steven Bartlett?

  Much better. Free, like I want to jump.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  So let's hope, pray, wish that these technologies that I'm talking about today work. Because that could be what it feels like to be rejuvenated when you're eighty.

• 1:11:51Steven Bartlett?

  I hope so. And to close off on this point of fasting, why, why does it help extend my life?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Steven Bartlett?

  Just eating less?

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Part of it came out of research in my lab, but of course, many others I need to give credit to. But in my lab specifically, what we worked on initially when I started, we studied yeast cells. Little microscopic cells that, as everyone knows, we use to make beer and bread and champagne. These yeast cells live about ten days and then they die. And we used yeast as a model for aging. And what we discovered with yeast cells, which turns out to be true in our bodies, is that adversity, as long as it's not killing these cells, is good for you. It's called hormesis. It's the technical term for what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and live longer. Adversity mode is what we're aiming for.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  The opposite is abundance mode, which is what modern life is all about. Popcorn, movies, wheels on your suitcase, sitting down all day. It's, we're in an abundance world. So adversity is something we don't often feel. We have to work at it. Fasting is adversity. Exercise is adversity. Cold plunges, saunas, adversity. Adversity mimics. They're not really threatening your life. What happens at the cellular, cellular level is that those cells, they get freaked out. They're worried that these times of adversity could kill us. So they fight back. They turn on repair systems. They turn on recycling systems.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  They turn on DNA repair systems that help slow down aging. So in this modern world, when we have total abundance, we don't have to exercise. We don't, we eat three meals a day. We get overweight. We don't sleep much. We have air conditioning in summer. We're actually aging faster than we need to because our bodies are not fighting aging like they do when they feel adversity. Your team discovered, I can't say the word, siratunus? Oh, well, I was one of many scientists in the 1990s. I was part of a team called Sir Tuens. Yeah. Sir Tuens. Yeah. In yeast, actually. That's right. That's a good story. I went to the US to figure out why we get old.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  But I didn't choose to study humans because I figured if we can't figure it out for little yeast cells, we'll never figure it out for humans. So I went to MIT. My professor was Lenny Guaranty. I went to his lab and I said, I'm not going, I'm not leaving. The goal was, in my mind, was to figure out, are there longevity genes? At that time, most people thought that there were aging genes that caused aging, death genes. That doesn't make any sense to me. Our bodies would have longevity genes that give life. So in yeast, I went searching for them and out of that work came two things. The first is Lenny and I, my professor and I, published in the journal Cell, which was a massive big deal in those days, still is, but it was my first time.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  The first evidence for a cause of aging for any species. We figured out why yeast cells get old. Do you want to guess?

• 1:14:58Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm. Why do yeast cells get old?

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  Have you been paying attention? What does the information theory of aging say?

• 1:15:05Steven Bartlett?

  I was gonna say they have an identity crisis, but...

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  They do!

• 1:15:08Steven Bartlett?

  How would we know if they're having an identity crisis?

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Oh, you can measure the identity of yeast cells. They have an identity. It's called their mating type. The main identity of a yeast cell is they are either A type or alpha type, male, female. And the hallmark of a yeast cell that's old is it loses its A and alpha identity and gets an identity crisis. It doesn't know what sex it is and it doesn't mate anymore. It becomes sterile. So when I arrived at MIT in 1995, we knew that the hallmark of an old yeast cell, besides it being a bit slow and bigger, is that it became sterile. It had an identity crisis. So we figured out that broken chromosomes distract the sirtuin defenses

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  and that causes aging in a yeast cell. But we didn't know in the 90s that that was gonna be true for us as well. It took another decade or two to figure that out.

• 1:16:05Steven Bartlett?

  And how does this link to eating all the time?

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so sirtuins are proteins that actually are attracted to DNA. They actually associate with it and they protect the DNA from getting damaged.

• 1:16:19Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, like bodyguards.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they repair broken chromosomes, right? It's all coming together now. But they also get distracted. So a sirtuin's normal job, if there's no crisis, is that they turn genes on and off. They are epigenetic regulators. They control the epigenome. They tell a cell what type it is, nerve cell, skin cell, right?

• 1:16:39Steven Bartlett?

  Like a conductor.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Thank you. Conductor, exactly. But the conductor becomes demented over time. What happens is, when you have a chromosomal break, the sirtuins panic. They leave the DNA, what they're supposed to be doing, controlling the cell's identity, and they go and they repair the DNA. That's their other job. They have two jobs: identity and repair. So when you have this break, the sirtuins go away. They repair the problem, but they don't all go back in the next few minutes. It's very quick. They don't all go back to where they started. So you've got like this tennis match, that the sirtuins are the balls and they get hit over to the break, then hit back. Most of them find the genes that they should go back to, but they don't all do

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  that. And that total game of tennis or ping pong, if you like, is what I believe causes the identity crisis and aging itself causes aging in yeast cells. It's why yeast cells don't live longer than 10 days. And I believe it's why we struggle to live beyond 80 or 90.

• 1:17:38Steven Bartlett?

  So if I'm eating all the time, then those sirtuins, they're not going to be doing their job as the conductor, making sure I know the identity of my cells. They're going to be doing repair stuff. So I'm going to age faster.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  Yes. And the breakthrough happened in the lab as I was just leaving to go to Harvard. I got a job at Harvard when I was 29, super excited. And just as I was leaving, there was a big breakthrough that they actually kept it secret from me because they were worried I was going to work on it when I left. And in fact, my professor tried to prevent me from working on it when I left, on sirtuins in general, crazy to think about. But what they discovered was that there's a metabolite, a molecule that goes up and down with food and up and down with sleep called NAD. We have lots of it. There's grams of it in our body. It's one of the most abundant molecules in the body. It's very ancient. It's in yeast.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  It's in us. And what they found was that sirtuins, to control genes and to repair DNA that's broken, they don't do it unless there's NAD. It's the catalyst. It's the fuel for their reaction. They need NAD. And when we're young, we have lots of NAD. So it works well. The sirtuins control the information on the genes and they repair the DNA very well because they've got lots of NAD to carry out their work. These are enzymes. They work. They do things. As we get older, by the time you're 50, about my age, you have half the levels of this NAD molecule. My body is making less NAD and it's also destroying the NAD

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  faster than when I was 20. That's a problem. And so what we found was that when we fast the yeast, or we fast a human, NAD levels go up again.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  So fasting raises NAD and makes the sirtuins young again, essentially. And that preserves the epigenome and it also repairs the DNA better.

• 1:19:34Steven Bartlett?

  So can I just drink NAD?

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  You can drink NAD and not much would happen.

• 1:19:39Steven Bartlett?

  How do I take NAD?

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  So NAD can be taken as a supplement, which is a precursor to NAD. It's better to take the precursors.

• 1:19:47Steven Bartlett?

  A precursor meaning something that creates it.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. There's one called NMN, not to be confused with M and M's, which will probably not make you live longer. And there's another one called NR. NMN is directly converted into NAD. You put two NMNs together, you get NAD in the cell. We know this for a fact, this isn't speculation. When you give a human NMN by swallowing it, a gram of it, you can, you typically double the amount of NAD in your body. And we believe, and we have some evidence now in human clinical trials, that the sirtuins are imparting health benefits, re-establishing the epigenome, lowering body weight, improving inflammation, and even changing cholesterol levels in a positive way in humans.

• 1:20:29Steven Bartlett?

  So I mean, I'm assuming you take NMN?

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  I've been taking NMN and admitting that publicly for a while now. And my father, who is an even more advanced experiment at 86. So yes, we've been taking it for over a decade now and we're still alive. So, so far, so good.

• 1:20:48Steven Bartlett?

  So far, so good. I do want to get into, and I will ask you in a second, about the supplement stack that you would recommend for the average person. But that's good to know. But just to close off on this point of fasting, is there a particular type of fasting method that you would recommend for someone who's trying to improve their longevity? Because there's so many that I hear, 16 hours, five days.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  I'm a scientist, so I go with what's proven. I'm not selling anything. So what the science says, first of all, is that there isn't one size fits all for everybody. It often depends on what you can do personally. It's challenging to do this, right? You'll feel hungry for the first two weeks. You try it. So I would suggest the way I do it is I start by skipping one and then maybe one and a half meals. Like what you do, try to go without a meal until three, four o'clock if you can. Maybe not the first day, right? If you do that the first day, you'll say, this is crazy. I'm going to grab a snack and you won't do it. So go slowly, build up to it.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  So the first day, I would say, just don't eat breakfast and maybe have a snack mid morning. A week later, try to go without breakfast completely until lunch and eventually work up to what you do and I do, which is eat a very late lunch. If not, go to dinner. What you get with that is obviously not eating in bed, hopefully. So you've got the night fast starting, what would it be? Seven P M roughly, when do you finish dinner?

• 1:22:16Steven Bartlett?

  God, no comment.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:18Steven Bartlett?

  It's usually pretty late. Last night it was, you know, this is probably why I don't eat very early the next day. Last night would have been about, I'm going to say 10 P M.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:27Steven Bartlett?

  It was super late. That's an extraordinary example. Usually it would be eight or nine P M.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Okay, but you've got at least 13, 14 hours, which is good.

• 1:22:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  Try to aim for 14 hours. Some people go 16 hours, but that's a good start for fasting. And hopefully you can do that most days, five days a week. That's great because that means that you're turning on your serotonin, raising your N E D, your exercise as well. So that's also added into it. One thing that I've started doing is fasting for longer than just 14, 16 hours. I try maybe once a month to go for three days without eating.

• 1:23:05Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Because there's a type of cellular recycling that doesn't happen within the first 16 hours. You will enter ketosis, so your body will start to change its metabolism, produce what's called ketone bodies. But the true, real, deep cleansing of old proteins and damaged proteins happens after two and a half to three days. And it's called chaperone mediated autophagy.

• 1:23:32Steven Bartlett?

  Autophagy.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Autophagy is the word for auto self eating.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  And it really kicks in with an extended fast.

• 1:23:41Steven Bartlett?

  What's the evolutionary reason for that? What's going on there? Why does it take me two and a half days for this deep clean to happen?

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  Uh, cause your body doesn't want to uh do it. It costs a lot of energy and having to remake body parts is energy expensive. And our body tries to conserve energy as much as possible. When you're fasting, what it'll, it needs to do is to use your body as fuel. So it'll start breaking down proteins for fuel that you need. So first of all, what'll happen is in the first few hours, you use glycogen from your, your liver. Your liver makes glucose. You'll feel a little bit hungry, but you'll eventually be fine. Then, once you run, run out of glycogen, then you're gonna start breaking down fat and making ketones. That's when you start to get a bit of bad breath from, from that. And you, but you feel great.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  When you're in a, between about 15 hours and 24 hours, that's when you got a lot of ketones. And your brain uses those for fuel. So you'll have a sharp mind, can remember things, you can focus on work if you ever get there. Beyond that, you need to break down fat. And uh, that is uh, when your body is starting to do that. But ultimately, what, what, what happens after three days is your body says, hey, I'm gonna start breaking down protein as well. And uh, I wouldn't do that often because I don't wanna break down a lot of protein. But your body will start to turn over old proteins preferentially. And a little bit of that, that's why I do it maybe once a month, has been shown, at least in animals, to be not just healthy, but life extending.

• 1:25:11Steven Bartlett?

  On that point of ketosis, um, I like being in a state of ketosis. I kind of cycle in and out of it during the year because I get so many of the like cognitive benefits. I'm more articulate on the podcast, I can think better, I feel better, I feel more focused and more attentive.

• 1:25:31Steven Bartlett?

  Is ketosis, is the keto diet, the keto diet a healthy diet? In your view, is it, what are the benefits of it? Is it something that you think is natural to be recommended?

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Well, I don't mind being controversial, but I do speak the truth. There's not a lot of evidence that long term, the ketogenic diet is healthy. Certainly doesn't correlate or associate with longevity. Short term, okay, it does help people lose weight, no question. But I am rather concerned for people that don't have a balanced diet with an input of plant material, which has molecules that are unique to plants and you won't find in high processed foods or meat. The evidence, speaking as a scientist, is that the long term ketogenic diets are not going to be longevity inducing.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  The evidence is more having a lean diet with a focus on plants that are not overcooked and not ultra-processed. That one is undoubtedly the healthiest, if you can do it.

• 1:26:34Steven Bartlett?

  Do you eat meat?

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  I do eat meat, but not like I used to. I used to think that a meal was not a meal unless I had a piece of meat there and then the vegetables were the decoration. And I begrudgingly eat the green stuff. I've been flipped totally. Serena, my partner, Serena Poon, is not just a nutritionist, but a longevity expert for the last 26 years. And so she came to my apartment, which is now our apartment, and she just cleared out all the food that I had. Pretty much everything was either toxic or just not healthy. It was ultra-processed. She said, what are you eating? That kind of peanut butter, you know, full of sugar. So she's taught me how to live healthy. And so now I rarely eat meat. I rarely drink alcohol.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  I focus on really fresh, high quality, preferably organic foods because I don't want pesticides and I don't want other contaminants. But I do know organic can be more expensive.

• 1:27:33Steven Bartlett?

  Why not meat?

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  So animals unfortunately don't make what are called polyphenols, which are a type of molecule that I believe and have evidence turns on the sirtuins and other pathways, biochemical reactions that delay aging. So sirtuins are just one of a few enzymes that control aging. We know this. There's sirtuins, there's entor, which responds to aminos, and another one called AMPK. So those three pathways are altered in just the right way by molecules found only in plants. Well, in a small extent in fungi, but not in meat.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  So if you're not eating a lot of vegetables or fruits, you're not getting these molecules. They're like medicine as food. So right here, I hope you don't mind me mentioning that there is some food in front of us. And I'm looking at blueberries here. Blueberries are packed with polyphenols. One of the reasons they have purple color is that polyphenols have the color. And as Serena would tell you, eat the rainbow. I call it xenohormesis, which is not as attractive. But xenohormesis is the same idea as eat the rainbow. That by eating plants that have a lot of these molecules, that are often produced by stressed plants.

• 1:28:51Steven Bartlett?

  When you say stressed plants?

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  So plants will be stressed just like we are. If you don't give them enough water, food, too much sunlight, not enough sunlight. They, in their defense, they make polyphenols. There's a whole bunch of them. There's veratrol, physitin, quercetin. There's hundreds. This one has anthocyanidins, that's the color. These activate these adversity responses in our cells. The sirtuins will get activated by molecules in this blueberry.

• 1:29:24Steven Bartlett?

  So if I eat this blueberry, those conductors that conduct some of the aging process you talked about, making sure my cells don't have an identity crisis, fixing the negative stress that's going on in my in my cells, they will be. Benefited by me eating this blueberry?

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a free hack, right? You can eat something that's yummy, but you're also getting the benefits by mimicking fasting and exercise in your food as well. The Surtuans don't just need NAD, that's the gas pedal, that's the petrol for those of you in the British world and Commonwealth. The fuel for Surtuans is NAD. The accelerator pedal are the polyphenols in fruits and vegetables like resveratrol, quercetin, which we know when you give them to Surtuans, they get hyperactivated.

• 1:30:21Steven Bartlett?

  And when you say eat the rainbow, you mean eat colorful looking food?

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Because that's an easy way to remember how to eat foods that have the most polyphenols. I'll give you a really good example, Stephen. Serena put me onto green tea matcha, right? So matcha tea, if you haven't tried it, I'm sure you've tried it, but those of you who haven't tried it, I highly recommend it. It tastes great. The reason for switching from coffee mainly to matcha in the morning for me is that it's full of polyphenols. Why is it full of polyphenols? It's not just because it's green tea, which is not naturally healthy, but the growers of those plants in Japan typically, they shade the plants before they harvest. Shading the plants stresses them out, plants need light, so they don't just make more

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  chlorophyll, which produces the deep green color in the tea, but the polyphenols are super high. And through trial and error over thousands of years, the Japanese figured out that by shading the plants, giving them this mild hormetic stress, it makes them not just extra tasty, but extra healthy. Same with red wine, by the way, but the alcohol can be an issue. But absent alcohol, red wine...

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  Is very good for you.

• 1:31:37Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, without the alcohol.

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  It's unfortunate, you know, I, I, one of my papers in nineteen ninety six caused red wine sales to go up thirty percent and stayed up. I apologized for saying that red wine every day was healthy. Doctors were recommending it, remember?

• 1:31:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  But I now changed my mind. I have to say that I no longer believed having one glass of red wine every day is healthy. In my opinion, and I've stopped drinking red wine every day. Instead, I take polyphenols from red wine and from vegetables, either in a pill or in my food as a substitute because the evidence for alcohol is rather damning. There's a UK biobank study and the UK looked at thousands of people's MRI scanner, their brain, who were drinking one glass of alcohol a day. And there was a statistical difference between people that were drinking one glass a day and were not in terms of brain size and gray matter. Of course, the gray matter was tended to be smaller in those that drank even slightly.

• 1:32:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I do. I actually have a matcha company. It's, it was this year voted the fastest growing company in the UK. It's by some founders that I invested in, Levi, Teddy and Marissa from Dragon's Den, and it's been an absolute unbelievable in business, unbelievable.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  So tell us, where do I get it?

• 1:32:56Steven Bartlett?

  Japan, you get the matcha from Japan, but the company's called Perfecto. People know about it because I've talked about it before, but I didn't realize when I made the investment that matcha was considered by many to also be very healthy, especially a health alternative to certain energy products on the market that you get in cans that give you.

• 1:33:15Steven Bartlett?

  I shan't get sued. But the other thing that the company I invested in is this one here called Ketone IQ. I'm a co-owner of this company as well and.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that, love that company and the CEO, Michael, good guy.

• 1:33:30Steven Bartlett?

  What's your thoughts on exogenous ketones, like drinking ketones?

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  I do it. In fact, that I drink Ketone IQ before I do a podcast.

• 1:33:39Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  It improves my clarity, I find. I also believe the science, and there have been multiple studies now in people. In some of the, the science comes out of Ketone IQ, but also independent studies have shown that it's extremely healthy for the heart. And there's new studies that show for the brain as well, it can be healthy. The brain uses ketones like beta hydroxybutyrate, or in that one, it's 1,3 buton dial. Just a shot of that will give the brain food that it needs, rather than the body having to make it. And you get, I believe, and I feel it, I get the clarity of fasting without being in a fasted state. But I also drink it when I'm fasting to give it, the body, the extra boost that it needs.

• 1:34:22Steven Bartlett?

  And on this point of diet, one of the things that I was told by my doctor when I did a, like, one of those blood tests, was he cautioned me about bad cholesterol. He said to me something along the lines that I need to be careful about the bad cholesterol. And there's been lots of conversation about cholesterol, good, bad. What's your perspective on this conversation on bad cholesterol, which has been thought to increase, certain foods have been thought to increase bad cholesterol, which is very, very detrimental to our health?

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  I didn't realise there was a debate, at least in my world, there is no debate. If you're referring to, do you want to get your LDL cholesterol as low as possible?

• 1:35:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 1:35:04Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really? Okay, so it's...

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the science is irrefutable, there's thousands of people in studies. Now, I think I know what you're talking about, there are some stories that you need cholesterol in your brain, and if you inhibit it, you might affect your brain function. You also need it for repair of arteries. But there's no evidence that that's a problem, in fact, it's a little known fact that the brain doesn't use the cholesterol from the bloodstream, it makes its own. So I've actually been on a statin to lower my LDL since I was 30.

• 1:35:36Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Well, I had high cholesterol, it's in my family. But I went to my doctor and I said, I want to go on these new drugs at the time, statins. And he said, why? You don't have heart disease yet. And I said, why would I wait? Get me on it. I want to be on it. And in those days, it was very weird to give someone a statin at age thirty with no evidence of heart disease. But as you know, I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't wait till we get diseases to treat them. We should preempt that and start early in life. And so I insisted with my doctor, initially with statins, but on all of these things, I go in and I say, I need you to prescribe me this test. I need this medicine.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  And eventually, after talking it over with him, he typically prescribes me something or gets me a test. But I've been fighting the system. And my doctor's at Harvard, so he's a good doctor, but conservative. The old way of doing medicine is if you're not sick, we're not going to give you a medicine. Certainly not if you're young and healthy. Uh, but that has to change.

• 1:36:40Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying that I should be on statins potentially?

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  Well, what's your LDL level?

• 1:36:43Steven Bartlett?

  Not, I don't think it's great. I think I eat too much bacon or something.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  Well, we can talk about food and cholesterol because it depends whether you absorb cholesterol or not. We can test for that. But if you do absorb cholesterol more than most, I would say that you may want to change your diet at a minimum.

• 1:36:59Steven Bartlett?

  On this plate here in front of us, I have the top five foods that I believe you think are great for reversing aging. Am I correct? Is that, does that?

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  These are great choices, yeah.

• 1:37:12Steven Bartlett?

  So what are these and why? So we've already done the blueberries and we've, you've explained to me about polyphenols and they're rich in them, which I understand. And they're low in sugar, right?

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  Well, they're not low in sugar, so don't eat a ton of them. A handful is fine um as a snack. It's also known that having too much sugar is bad for longevity.

• 1:37:31Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  Keep your blood sugar level steady and low as much as you can. So don't eat too many of those. A better choice than blueberries would be something like matcha, which is not full of sugar. In fact, if you go to some of these chains that sell matcha and it tastes really sweet, you're gonna reverse the effects of any polyphenols by drinking that much sugar. So I always have unsweetened matcha. Okay. So now we've got avocados here.

• 1:37:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Yep. Avocados, uh, they're not so much known for their polyphenols, though they do have them. It's the type of fats, the polyunsaturated fats. They help with satiety, so you're not going to be as hungry. Uh, so if you put that on your sandwich at lunch, you're not going to feel peckish. And they're highly anti-inflammatory as well. The molecules are in there and the fats are very good for you.

• 1:38:17Steven Bartlett?

  Extra virgin olive oil?

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Excellent. The type of oils that are in there are very healthy. There's omega nine, which is also known to activate sirtuins. And again, if you have the right grower, and this has been cold pressed, not too processed, and stressed before harvesting, you'll have huge amounts of polyphenols as well.

• 1:38:40Steven Bartlett?

  I really hope that this is what the team said it was. This has happened before. I tried something and I thought it was something else, but it was some, basically it was a white powder and it was labelled with something.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  What could it be? A yellow liquid.

• 1:38:55Steven Bartlett?

  Urine.

• 1:38:58Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, urine. It's urine. No, I'm joking. It's not.

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  I don't think drinking urine is longevity. But yeah, on and off, I do take a teaspoon of olive oil in the morning and mix it with risveratrol, a polyphenol.

• 1:39:12Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, interesting. Okay, interesting. Okay, so extra virgin olive, good.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's a lot of evidence, not just molecular like me, but epidemiologically, people that have a lot of olive oil in their diet tend to have low inflammation and less disease.

• 1:39:27Steven Bartlett?

  And we've got some nuts.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Yep, nuts are good for many reasons. They're full of vitamins and minerals. If there's a Brazil nut, you want to have one of those every day for the selenium, which is a very rare element in our food supply. And there's a recent study just last month showing that a lack of selenium can be very deleterious. So nuts are great as a snack. Be careful, they're full of calories though. So if you're trying to lose weight and you're not exercising a lot, don't overeat on the nuts. And what, oh, my least favourite food, but nevertheless, I will eat them. This is a Brussels sprout. When I was a kid, Brussels sprouts tasted a lot more, a lot worse, a lot bitter.

• 1:40:11Steven Bartlett?

  True.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  Those are good because they have polyphenols, but there's also another molecule in them called sulforaphane. It's actually the reason they taste terrible and smell terrible. Sulforaphane is what it sounds. It has a sulfur atom in it, and that gives it that rotten egg smell. But sulforaphane activates these hormesis pathways. There's one called N R F, and that is a stress response.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Protein that sulforaphane activates. So you actually, by eating preferably relatively steamed, not fried to death Brussels sprouts, you'll get sulforaphane. You can also take sulforaphane as a supplement if you don't like Brussels sprouts.

• 1:40:52Steven Bartlett?

  You've used this word pulsing before. You believe that the body should go through cycles of stress and recovery rather than receiving constant daily inputs. When you say pulsing, what do you mean? What, give me an example of pulsing and why you need to do that?

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there's a few examples. The first time I came across this result as a scientist was resveratrol. So resveratrol is found in red wine, among other things. And it's thought to give the health benefits of red wine. And we fed it to mice, fat mice, skinny mice, old mice. And it worked very well in the fat mice. It made them thinner. It made them live longer. It cured most of their diseases. They lived about, I think it was 15, 20% longer. Then we gave it to normal mice every day. And they lived a little bit longer, but not significantly.

• 1:41:40Steven Bartlett?

  Resveratrol.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Resveratrol. What we found, to my surprise, when we gave old mice resveratrol, not every day, but every second day, then they lived significantly longer. So then I thought, well, maybe giving them a foreign substance every day is not good. Maybe there's some side effect that's counteracting the benefit. The other thing I want to mention, I said, there's a few examples. Another good one is metformin. Metformin has been shown to make athletes and bodybuilders and people who go to the gym, weightlifters, do less repetitions. And as a result, their muscles are about 5% less compared to those that don't take metformin in size. I don't think it's molecular. I think it's because you feel a little bit weaker with metformin because it's actually

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  interfering with your body's ability to make energy through mitochondria. Mitochondria, I think most people have heard of the little power packs living in our cells, originally bacteria that came into our bodies. The point is that by pulsing metformin, I think that's a better way to do it for longevity.

• 1:42:44Steven Bartlett?

  You mean cycling it, so like doing it every other day or?

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't take, if I take metformin or the natural equivalent, which is berberine, if you don't want to take the drug, you can take berberine. That also activates this AMPK, this other so to and like pathway.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Taking it every other day, I think, is better. And particularly if you like to work out, don't take the Metformin a few hours before you work out, take it after, or maybe skip it that day. I think that's a better approach.

• 1:43:14Steven Bartlett?

  You know, every once in a while, you come across a product that has such a huge impact on your life that you'd probably describe it as a game changer. And I would say for about thirty five to forty percent of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Ketone IQ, which you can get at ketone.com as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I came to work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk. I had no idea what it was. Lily in my team says that this company has been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite frankly, the rest is history. In terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am, game changer.

• 1:43:59Steven Bartlett?

  So if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com/steven for thirty percent off. You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. And now you can find Ketone IQ at Target stores across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge. We have finally caved in. So many of you have asked us if we could bundle the Conversation Cards with the One Percent Diary. For those of you that don't know, every single time a guest sits here with me in the chair, they leave a question in the diary of a CEO, and then I ask that question to the next guest. We don't release those questions in any environment other than on these incredible Conversation Cards. These have become a fantastic tool for people in relationships, people in teams, in big corporations, and also family members to connect with each other.

• 1:44:41Steven Bartlett?

  With that, we also have the One Percent Diary, which is this incredible tool to change habits in your life. So many of you have asked if it was possible to buy both at the same time, especially people in big companies. So what we've done is we've bundled them together and you can buy both at the same time. And if you want to drive connection and instill habit change in your company, head to thediary.com to inquire and our team will be in touch. We talked about exercise earlier. On page one hundred and two of your book, you talk about how there's a CDC-funded study that found people who exercise regularly, about thirty minutes of jogging five days a week, have telomeres that look ten years younger than sedentary people, people that just sit around all day and don't do much exercise.

• 1:45:26Steven Bartlett?

  Which is pretty remarkable. How do we know it's the exercise and not something else? Like, how are we able to establish causation there?

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't. We don't. Unfortunately, all of these association studies just lead to a need to do placebo-controlled or at least controlled trials in people. So we don't know for sure, speaking like a scientist. But there have been studies where people are told to do exercise and those that are told to sit. And then you can compare telomere length, and that has been shown. So that's a much better evidence of causation. But you're right, when you see an association, it could be that people who do exercise also eat well and drink matcha.

• 1:46:04Steven Bartlett?

  Sleep better.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. So you have to be careful interpreting these association studies always. But when you've got a placebo-controlled trial, or, you know, these studies that are called prospective, not retrospective, studies, then they're better. So telomeres are the ends of chromosomes that get shortened as you get older. We used to use them really as a good indicator of age, biological age. Now we use the epigenome and the DNA methylation chemicals as a better clock.

• 1:46:33Steven Bartlett?

  And then cold plunges and saunas?

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's get to those.

• 1:46:36Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a sauna in the house, but I never use it, to be honest.

• 1:46:38Speaker 01

  You should.

• 1:46:39Steven Bartlett?

  But if you tell me I should, maybe I'll give it a shot.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  We should actually jump in there after this.

• 1:46:42Steven Bartlett?

  Your girlfriend's still here, David Sallis.

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  She can come too. So saunas are, in my mind, it's not even a question. They are proven to be beneficial for multiple reasons: heart disease and even long-term mortality.

• 1:46:57Steven Bartlett?

  What's going on in the sauna in the heat?

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Anyone who says they know is lying. We don't know. But one theory that I like, and it also goes back to yeast cells, there are what are called heat shock proteins that come on and defend the cell when the cell senses heat. And it may be that these heat shock defense proteins, called HSC, HSPs, come on when we breathe in this moist, hot air. The moisture actually seems to help as well. And in many studies, mostly on Finnish men, businessmen, those that go into their home saunas and... The majority of homes in Finland do have saunas, so they can do these studies pretty easily. The bottom line is that those that didn't do regular quote unquote sauna bathing tended

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  to die earlier, in particular from heart disease and cardiovascular events than than those that did regular sauna bathing. So I'm a big advocate of sauna. I don't have one in my house, but I do have a really hot steam shower, which I use regularly every day.

• 1:47:59Steven Bartlett?

  And is there a difference between the steam room and the sauna in terms of the impact here?

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  I think a sauna is better because it gets hotter. Yeah, and I would have a sauna if I had my choice.

• 1:48:09Steven Bartlett?

  And the cold plunge?

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  Not a lot of data. There's a lot of theory that, again, hormesis, adversity, feeling better. There's some evidence that it can actually help with muscle repair after workouts, but I think we need a lot more research in that regard. But nevertheless, I used to do it before I was so busy and traveling the world, and I certainly feel better. So even if I didn't live longer because of it, I definitely had more mental clarity and I felt better in general.

• 1:48:38Steven Bartlett?

  But if you were if you were prioritizing all of the things we've talked about so far and you had to pick one.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  Do I have to pick one? Because you need more than one.

• 1:48:46Steven Bartlett?

  But just in terms of like the most important one, that's maybe the first domino.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say that a combination of what the easiest, biggest impact you can have, combine that, that would be skipping meals.

• 1:49:01Steven Bartlett?

  Skipping meals.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  Skipping meals. And then a close second would be exercise that includes losing your breath for at least five minutes, three times a week. So what do I mean by losing your breath for five minutes? When you couldn't carry out a conversation easily, that you're panting. If you're not panting and you're just lifting weights, that's not going to have the kind of benefit.

• 1:49:23Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  We don't know. But it's been shown that the health benefits and those that live long. Tend to do a lot more aerobic exercise, not just weights, but both are important for mobility, strength, falling in older age and hormones like testosterone.

• 1:49:42Steven Bartlett?

  Red light therapy, the red light masks.

• 1:49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Steven Bartlett?

  Red light saunas.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  At first I was skeptical, but I've done the research on the research and it looks reasonable. I use a red light cap on my head to preserve my hairline and there's some now good evidence that the mitochondria, which are the power packs and a lot of good things come from mitochondria, they actually are rejuvenated, either rejuvenated or enhanced by this certain wavelengths of red light. You have to get the wavelength right, but it's not BS. It sounds like BS, right? You shine light on your skin and it gets better or you get your hair. But I think that there's good evidence now that it's not BS.

• 1:50:28Steven Bartlett?

  And in terms of the supplement stack that you take every day, if I was to look at the, on a, if on a great week where you just did everything right, what would your supplement stack look like? And I know this evolves over time, so I'm very keen to hear what it is right now.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that, that would be another podcast to go through each one of the things. Well, I, I travel with Serena with, with a little, little case.

• 1:50:53Steven Bartlett?

  Have you got it?

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  I've got it here.

• 1:50:55Steven Bartlett?

  Can I see it?

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  Well, no, it's not in, it's not in the studio.

• 1:50:58Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  I didn't bring it with me.

• 1:50:59Steven Bartlett?

  Can you send me a photo?

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  Sure. I couldn't publicly share it because it would be posted all over the internet. Would things go crazy? But I can tell you the, the main things.

• 1:51:09Steven Bartlett?

  Why would it go crazy on the internet, would you think? Cause it's, cause it's, cause there's a lot in there?

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Well, some of the things are experimental and I wouldn't want people

• 1:51:18Steven Bartlett?

  To.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  To go nuts about it.

• 1:51:19Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Cause it's still experimental. I'm okay experimenting on myself. I'm not okay advocating for things that are not yet proven or known to be absolutely safe.

• 1:51:28Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. So give me the ones that you know to be safe.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  Uh, well.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  The NMN we've covered. Yeah. Resveratrol and either metformin or berberine. Yeah. Okay. Spermidine. Spermidine? Yeah, and the quantities are either on the screen or in my book, if you want to know exactly. Is that what it sounds like? Uh, yes. Yes, but you get it these days not from sperm or semen, but you get it from wheat germ typically, plants. It used to come from sperm? Well, that's how it was discovered. It was crystallized by, I believe, Anthony von Leewenhoek, one of the first microscopists and microbiologists. Spermidine, the reason that I take it is that it extends the lifespan of every animal that it's been given to, from worms to mice.

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  And it's a very safe molecule, so that I always weigh up the downsides versus the upsides. And if there's no downsides and I can afford it, which, you know, I work really hard that so I can afford it, and I prioritize my health, then I take it. And if you're wondering how it works, it seems to stimulate autophagy, recycling of proteins. It helps with the fasting. Uh, but I also have some evidence, uh, that it delays the epigenetic information loss. So it's slowing down the scratching of the record. Spermidine. All right, so I'm also, um, keen on glycine. Glycine's a very safe substance. It's an amino acid, one of the 20 amino acids that makes proteins.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  And I actually did a PhD on glycine. I was one of the first people to, perhaps the first person to clone genes that process glycine, so I know it well. For some reason, when you give animals and, for instance, mice, grams of glycine, so I take about five grams of glycine most days, uh, they live longer. Though it's still speculation as to why, what I think is going on is that glycine controls what's called one carbon metabolism and not wanting to bore the heck out of everyone who's listening to me. Glycine and one carbon metabolism controls methylation of DNA. Getting back to the little chemicals that are on this DNA molecule that control the

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  information, I wouldn't be surprised if by eating a lot of glycine every day, I'm slowing down this identity crisis, you called it. Nevertheless, it's very safe and again falls into the same category as spermidine. No downside, can afford it, why not?

• 1:54:02Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else?

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot. Because I love you and your listeners, let's see, I'll reveal one more. There are some basics that I do that are, if you're not doing them, I think is very wise. Make sure you're not deficient in vitamin D. Obviously, we just mentioned one of the reasons why. It's also if you're lacking vitamin D, you can be susceptible to certain cancers. So I take a vitamin D supplement. Serena, actually, I take Serena's supplement because her vitamin D has vitamin K2 as well. And K2 is another vitamin that's important for longevity, I believe, because it keeps calcium out of your arteries, which causes plaque and tends to make your body put it into where it belongs, which is your bones.

• 1:54:49Steven Bartlett?

  What about aspirin? I read that somewhere.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that could be a whole podcast, actually, but the briefly, I take a baby aspirin every day, even though some doctors and some institutions of doctors say don't take it anymore, even though it used to be prescribed and recommended. Why? A large study looked at the risks versus benefits. So the known benefits are you inhibit platelets, you get less clotting, you get less potentially stroke and heart attack. But there are also some downsides in some people. You can have more bleeding in the stomach. And when the doctors association weighed up those risks versus benefit, they said, oopsie, we're not going to recommend aspirin anymore.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  But that's for the average person. Someone like me, I believe it makes perfect sense to take aspirin. Every day, most days at least, when I remember. And that's because I have high risk of cardiovascular disease. I don't just have high cholesterol naturally. I have high levels of something called LP little A. Capital L P, parentheses, little A. And this is a molecule that's just as important as cholesterol, LDL. Um, LP little A is a protein that inserts itself into cholesterol particles that circulate your blood and gets in, helps insert into plaque. So I naturally genetically, having an ancestry of Judaism and going back to my great ancestors,

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  which by the way, I traced back a thousand years during Christmas. Those people that I descended from have this LP little A gene that makes a lot of it. And so I try to bring LP little A levels down. Most people should test for it. Ask your doctor about LP little A and get it tested. High levels like me, thirty, forty, uh, you want to bring it down because it's actually very important for longevity. Uh, normal levels of around ten or so or less, then a doctor wouldn't panic. So LP little A, uh, get it tested. The way I'm bringing it down, just a little tidbit, again, because I love you, Stephen,

• 1:56:59Speaker 01

  is I'm taking high dose vitamin B three or niacin. Now, it can be uncomfortable for some people to take it because it gives flushing. You get little tingling in your skin. And if you're not used to it, or you don't take it with an aspirin, you'll feel hot, almost like menopause, apparently. And so I, I, I take it, I built up to it. I'm taking half a gram. Some people take a gram. And that's one of the few things that's been known to bring down the levels of LP little A. There are drugs that are in development, even in phase three, that look promising. But until they're on the market, I'm taking niacin instead.

• 1:57:34Steven Bartlett?

  What's the best treatment you've discovered for hair loss? Hair loss, hair graying, that kind of thing?

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my father went bald before, before thirty, like completely bald, right? And completely, almost completely gray by the time he was forty. So I'm super lucky, right? I thought I'd be bald at thirty. I was pretty worried about it. So I've been doing the right things. Intentionally. So what I do is this red light cap, when I can, I don't travel with it, but when I can, that's for six minutes, stick it on there.

• 1:58:05Steven Bartlett?

  Proven?

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  Yes, proven. It's proven to slow, it doesn't necessarily give you your head back. But when it comes to hair loss, don't wait till you see the hair loss. That can be too late. Okay? You're, you're good.

• 1:58:18Steven Bartlett?

  I'm okay.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  You're good. But I know a lot of men are, are concerned. It's understandable. I'm taking a hormone mimetic to stop DHT, which is the form of testosterone that leads to men-related hair loss. Right? So one of the reasons that women don't lose hair as much as men is this DHT. So I'm, I'm blocking that.

• 1:58:40Steven Bartlett?

  So, so let me get that straight. You're not taking testosterone?

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:58:44Steven Bartlett?

  Because that's gonna accelerate your hair loss?

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  Well, it can if it raises DHT. The best way to raise testosterone naturally is to build up muscle, especially your legs, your back, big muscles. That's another reason to work out and maintain muscle mass, which I need to do more of. You look like you're in good shape already. But yeah, anyone who is losing testosterone is, is below a level of about 400, highly recommend hitting the gym. It'll go back up.

• 1:59:10Steven Bartlett?

  Do you recommend men taking testosterone replacement?

• 1:59:12Speaker 01

  Um, well, I'm a scientist, so I don't recommend drugs, but I don't think it's necessary for most men. I would start with reducing stress, sleeping well, exercising, building up muscle mass. And then if that doesn't work, yeah, talk to your physician. There, there's not a big downside. There's not a risk of cancer to taking testosterone. Um, one of my good friends has done many clinical trials with testosterone. So I think there's a use of, use for it, but it doesn't lead to longevity. That was very clear. So for, for health reasons, yes, for longevity, no need.

• 1:59:49Steven Bartlett?

  What are, what are some of the, um, you know, when I started watching your, your videos many years ago, listening to your podcast and following you on Twitter, I, I wondered, you know, there's so much information you can put out there because you're a scientist and scientists are very rigorous, but you also must have a set of really interesting predictions or visions of the, what the future looks like that you don't probably always talk about because they're not scientific, they're not based on anything. They are maybe first principles in your own mind that formed where you go, actually, I think the world might look like this and I think it might happen then. I'd love to hear about some of these.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. I understand they're not rigorous. I'm happy to. What happens to me, because I'm a scientist and, you know, I'm part of this ivory tower at Harvard where we can only stick to facts. And if you go beyond that, it's a crime. And I've been criticized for that. But I think, you know, as humans, life's interesting when it comes to predicting the future. And like you, I'm very curious, where is humanity headed? I see a future as different from this world as our world is from 200 years ago. And that will happen in our lifetime. Different in that 100 years ago or more, if you had an infected splinter, there's a reasonable chance you could die. Childbirth, you could die. Smallpox.

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  These are things that we don't generally worry about anymore. And the idea would be abhorrent. In the future, hopefully within our lifetimes, there will be a time when we look back at today's medicine, when you could go blind and there was nothing you could do. You could break your back and never walk again. We will look back at today and say, how did those people get through life? What a horrible world they lived in. That, I believe, is the future that humanity is headed for. And way faster than most people realize is coming. The kind of breakthroughs that we've discussed today, most people have never heard about. The fact that we are aiming and already do cure blindness in monkeys. Like pure blindness. This isn't just, oh, I can't see a little bit.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  These are completely blind animals. And that they can see again in a matter of six weeks. This is remarkable stuff, right? And if it works this year in people, it's going to be a really big deal. Because for the first time, we'll have shown in humans that the body can be reset safely. And the eye is just the beginning, right? The future looks like we can rejuvenate potentially any tissue. If you have a bad liver, we'll make it young again. Bad brain, you've lost your memory, we'll give you those memories back again. We do this in mice in my lab all the time. It's not even a big deal in my lab anymore to reverse the age of tissues in an animal

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  in an animal in a matter of weeks. That is coming for humanity, hopefully initially this year. But even if that doesn't work, it's only a technical issue. We'll solve that. You might be wondering, how do we get the rejuvenative genes into the body? And what we do is we use a package that is able to get into cells. And this is a package that resembles a virus. It's not a virus. It doesn't cause disease. It's not infectious. But we package our three genes inside the virus, a virus-like substance, and we close it up. We just made a bunch of this in Europe for the clinical trial that's going to begin.

• 2:03:21Speaker 01

  Just making this is difficult. It took us about a year to make it and was about, I think it was $10 million. Right now, it's expensive to do this. Eventually, it will be cheap and eventually it will be a cheap pill, hopefully. We have trillions of these molecules, these delivery vehicles that will go. So you can pass me the eye. We're getting back this eye model. These delivery vehicles with our three genes will be delivered. Obviously, there's a microscopic. They go in through the eye with a, with a quick jab. All right. It sounds horrible, but a quick jab into the eye. If you're blind, who cares?

• 2:04:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  It's two seconds of discomfort. Now you've got the little virus, which I'm going to break off the stand here. The little virus, there's billions of them, trillions of them in the eye. Now they infect specifically the nerves at the back of the eye in the retina.

• 2:04:15Steven Bartlett?

  How do they know what to infect?

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Because these little balls on the, on the package direct it specifically by design, by our lab's design, just to those nerves at the back of the eye. If we change these little proteins on the surface, we can send it to the liver or to the brain. This is the zip code, the postcode, for where we want to send our three genes. But this one's designed for the eye. It's called an AAV2.

• 2:04:44Speaker 01

  Long story short, these are ready to go into humans. We're just waiting for FDA approval to inject it into a blind patient to see what happens.

• 2:04:54Steven Bartlett?

  And then inside there is the protein which is gonna fix the...

• 2:04:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, actually, not the protein. What actually happens is when this goes in the eye, this, what I'm, so what I'm holding up looks like a little ball with red dots on it. It looks like a virus, but it's not. It's a package. Now, what happens is these trillions of little packages go into the fluid. Now, they, they dock with the cells at the back of the eye. They get inside the cell and they open up and out comes this little package that we've made.

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  This is a protein package. Each one of these little dots on this little soccer ball is a protein. That's now inside the cell. This is a little spaceship that opens up and out of that comes the DNA. This is a loop of DNA just here. These are, this is the DNA package that we put in there, trillions of them. One of them gets into one cell and now stays in that cell forever. So that person, or the monkey or the mouse that we've treated, becomes a transgenic person with genes that we've put in permanently into the back of the eye.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  But they don't do anything until we tell them to. That's now just sitting there. We've engineered it uniquely and patented it, the ability to turn on those three genes whenever we want and turn them off again whenever we want.

• 2:06:27Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  We give them doxycycline. It's used for malaria. It's used for Lyme disease and we're using it, in this case, to turn these genes on. So the patients will get their doxycycline. We'll give them some probiotics to restore, hopefully we'll, we'll restore their microbiome, of course. But the idea is that this doxycycline will turn on these three genes for about eight weeks.

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  And the doctor in charge of the clinical trial, one of them's at Harvard, a good friend of mine, he'll measure the vision of the first patient before the treatment and of course, regular intervals. And if all goes well, because we're treating patients, not healthy volunteers in the first trial, we should know within either one or two patients if it works. Because we're not drawing a graph, it's either gonna work or it isn't. The patient gets better eyesight or they don't. So by this time next year, we will know if it works or not, maybe even sooner. But publicly, we may know if this works. And if it works, the eye is just the beginning. So the first disease to treat is glaucoma,

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  pressure in the eye. There's also a stroke in the eye, which is becoming more prevalent in the world because of the Ozempic and other weight loss drugs. And people go blind overnight. And there's nothing that you can do for those patients. They're blind. And their other eye can go a few months later. It's very scary for them. These are young people. A friend of mine had it happen. It's pretty common these days, about 30,000 people each year in the US alone. But these two diseases are the beginning. If they work, then we go on to macular degeneration, which is the largest cause of blindness besides glaucoma. Then we'll go on to liver, then maybe the lung, the skin, and we'll keep going from there. We'll make different packages for different organs. And ultimately, we wanna

• 2:08:21Speaker 01

  rejuvenate the entire body. The company, people might wanna know, it's called Life Biosciences, it's a private company. But Life Biosciences, I'm very proud of the scientists who are doing this work. Their goal is to really make the world's first age reversal medicine as a pill. And we're working with them using AI to find that molecule.

• 2:08:41Steven Bartlett?

  And when do you think you might have it, if you had to forecast?

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  Uh, well-

• 2:08:45Steven Bartlett?

  The world's first age reversal molecule, that's-

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  Well, we have, right now, we're down to three molecules that work. And we're using AI to make all of those three in one. And we're, we're in the middle of it. We screened about eight billion candidates using AI. And right now, we're doing the bench lab work to see if one of them or more works. And for us to put that in humans is still a number of years away. But we should know within a year or two if we're right. Because we'll, we'll put them into mice. And if they get younger and live longer, then we're really onto something important. And the reason that I want to make a pill is, is important for the planet. These drugs are expensive.

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  I mentioned 10 million bucks to do a clinical trial. These are expensive. They could cost over a hundred thousand dollars per treatment. That's not going to be for everybody. It's worth it if you're blind. It's worth it for the country to cure blindness. But what if it could be, instead of a hundred thousand dollars, a hundred dollars? That's what I'm working for. I want to democratize this technology so anyone, even in Kenya, can take these medicines.

• 2:10:00Steven Bartlett?

  David, what's the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? As it relates to the future longevity and these adjacent subjects?

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  There's a lot of things. And there's, there's pushback. There's philosophical pushback from religious folks who don't believe that we should play God. And I would, I would argue to them that we've been doing that as a species for thousands of years. Changing our biology, taking medicines, plant medicines originally. What about this room is natural? Right? We change our world as species. Aging is no different. In fact, it's crazy that we haven't worked on it sooner.

• 2:10:38Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe in God?

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  So the the the short answer is I believe that there is something beyond reality as we see it. You know, I study physics. Physics is so weird. And anyone who says they understand the quantum world or quantum mechanics is, I think, is also lying. It's it's so bizarre. Quantum entanglement, simulation theory. So I believe that that this this is not a solid desk. I believe that there are multiple versions of it, maybe infinite number of versions of this desk.

• 2:11:13Steven Bartlett?

  We've got four.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  You do?

• 2:11:16Steven Bartlett?

  We've got four of them.

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's four times infinity. I also I also believe that consciousness is the ultimate goal of the universe. That consciousness creates reality. We know that from particle physics. The observation of particles changes their reality, even retrospectively in time, apparently.

• 2:11:38Steven Bartlett?

  When you look at them?

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  When you observe them. You can use a camera or you can use your eyes. Usually it's a detector, but the the detection and then conscious interpretation of a particle's behavior changes how it acts. So does this mean that there's something behind this wall unless we look at it? Maybe, maybe, maybe observation creates reality. We know it influences reality. So I don't know if I would call it God, but I'm definitely spiritual in a scientific way.

• 2:12:10Steven Bartlett?

  Has it ever dawned on you that actually you might be the only real person here? And actually, we only we all render when you walked in, David. I wasn't here before.

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, well, that's even plausible, but that would be very narcissistic.

• 2:12:30Steven Bartlett?

  I I actually, I just rendered when you walked in the house today. I I I don't exist.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  Well, there's no way of proving it right or wrong, actually. Um, I think most kids think that initially, but then you then you realize it's probably the least likely explanation for the world. But there is some, there is some truth to that in terms of physics.

• 2:12:51Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think we're in a simulation?

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  I think there's a better than fifty percent chance that this is simulated.

• 2:13:01Steven Bartlett?

  So you think it's probably a simulation?

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  That's another way. I think it's probably a simulation. Certainly, the world that we think it is is not the world we think it is.

• 2:13:09Steven Bartlett?

  How can you be so sure?

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  Because when you get down to measuring it at the fundamental level, reality doesn't exist the way we think it does.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  Things are created, things change, just by human observation. That is the weirdest thing that you could ever find in science. I don't know why we aren't talking about it more.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  This reality cannot be true if me looking at this DNA molecule here affects the actual particles inside it.

• 2:13:39Steven Bartlett?

  So I might be sort of projecting it?

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you create realities of particles, at least, maybe even macroscopic things, just by existing and having consciousness, and having eyes, and sensing it.

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  How does the particle know that you've seen it?

• 2:14:02Steven Bartlett?

  How do we know that that's true? How do we know that particles change based on observation?

• 2:14:07Speaker 01

  There's a classic double slit experiment, it's formerly called, that was done, I believe, in the mid 20th century, maybe earlier. If you fire two particles through two slits in a board, the board blocks the particles, so you can fire electrons, that's a good example. Electrons, if you're observing them, will go straight through the slits and hit a backboard that detects it, can be filmed, can be a detector, and it'll get two slits behind. Makes sense, right? That's our reality, two slits. Particles go through, if they hit the board, they don't go to the detector. If they go through one slit, they'll land on the left. If they go through the right slit, they'll land on the right.

• 2:14:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:45Speaker 01

  That's our reality.

• 2:14:46Steven Bartlett?

  I'll put a picture on the screen for anyone that's following.

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  If you don't look at it, the particles can behave differently. They now behave not like a particle, but by a wave, as a wave, and they interact with each other. And they don't make two slits, they make multiple lines on the detector. Most of them are in the middle, so the heaviest bands are in the middle, but they also form other bands. The bands go on, essentially infinite, but most of it's, you know, within a range. Why? Because they're interfering with each other like waves. But here's the thing. The act of looking at where they landed, if you are detecting that, you'll get two slits at the back, two lines.

• 2:15:33Speaker 01

  If you're not detecting it, it'll form the pattern.

• 2:15:36Steven Bartlett?

  I'm so confused because how would you know unless you were looking at both?

• 2:15:42Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what I mean? Does that question make sense?

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you can observe it in real time and you can observe it retroactively, yeah.

• 2:15:50Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay, so if you look at it after.

• 2:15:53Speaker 01

  It generally is not affected. But they've done experiments where there is some element seemingly of retroactive. But generally, we're not going back in time. In fact, people debate whether that's truly measuring back in time. So let's leave retroactive aside. If you measure it in real time, you'll see two. So the world knows you're looking at it, the particles know you're looking at it.

• 2:16:17Steven Bartlett?

  With an eye or with, can you do it like a camera or is it?

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, camera, eye.

• 2:16:22Steven Bartlett?

  It just knows it's being observed?

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, but if you develop the film later and you weren't watching it at the time, it's going to have affected the world in stripes, multiple stripes.

• 2:16:34Steven Bartlett?

  So from that, we conclude that we know nothing about reality?

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:42Steven Bartlett?

  Because everything I'm observing is changing by the mere fact that I've observed it?

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so does an octopus observe? Does it affect, somebody should do that, put an octopus in there. Yeah, I think octopi, if they are conscious, it probably would also affect reality. And they'd be conscious, they'd know they're detecting lines on a page.

• 2:17:06Steven Bartlett?

  So what is all this stuff?

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  That is one of the biggest questions of all time. What is the world made of? Why are we here? I think the next big question is, do we have to age? And I think that other species around the universe have figured this out before we have. There have got to be other species, type of life forms that have figured this out. I think it's the goal of every living form that's conscious to work on this. We've just been a little slow to figure it out.

• 2:17:36Steven Bartlett?

  And do you believe in aliens?

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  I don't believe in them, but I believe in mathematical probabilities and, you know, knowing the odds and the number of planets that are out there in the trillions. And a lot of them are habitable for life. And that the stuff of DNA and proteins are all over meteorites and planets. It'd be crazy to say there isn't other life. Now, is it a civilization? Is it conscious? We don't know that. But definitely, there's life out there. It's got to be all over the universe.

• 2:18:09Steven Bartlett?

  This question about longevity and living forever, it always comes back to this point of like, meaning and like, what is the point? And when we think about, I think there's an alien a million light years away on some planet. Like, what is the point of their life? What is, or am I, is this like a null and void question that we always pursue? This point of like, what's the meaning of life? Is it just to have a good time and have, you know, have sex and have kids and, or I don't know, enjoy ourselves and experience it?

• 2:18:39Speaker 01

  This is the existential crisis of conscious beings. We all need to find purpose for sure. If you don't find one, because that's a key to longevity. People with purpose live longer.

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  I think the purpose of the universe existing is to allow consciousness to emerge through biology. It may be by design. It may just be coincidence with infinite numbers of universes. But this universe is set up for life and consciousness. There are some small changes you can make to physics that would make this universe completely impossible and life impossible. So this, this is a life consciousness producing universe.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  Does that mean there's meaning to us existing? No.

• 2:19:27Speaker 01

  But I do know that consciousness is the most interesting and important thing that the universe will ever produce.

• 2:19:35Speaker 01

  And that it's worth preserving. So I'm a lot like Elon Musk, where humans are amazing, but cruel creatures. But consciousness should be preserved.

• 2:19:44Steven Bartlett?

  What is consciousness in this regard?

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  Consciousness is the ability to know that you're thinking and to be able to be reflective, self-reflective.

• 2:19:52Steven Bartlett?

  So is my dog conscious?

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  Partially.

• 2:19:55Steven Bartlett?

  But not in the same way?

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  No, they don't reflect. They don't think about the past in the same way that we do, and they're not aware of their themselves the way you are. But they're semi-conscious. You know, they think, they can predict the future, they know how you're feeling. They have empathy. That's a form of consciousness, in my view. Of course, it's up for debate. But so there's levels of consciousness. And about a million years ago, humans crossed that threshold into pure consciousness.

• 2:20:24Steven Bartlett?

  Well.

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

  Maybe not pure.

• 2:20:26Steven Bartlett?

  I was gonna say, I was just thinking about this. I was like, actually, maybe consciousness is just a spectrum. And maybe there's another organism that I'm currently inside the belly of. And it's going at Stephen, and he thinks he's conscious. He has no idea.

• 2:20:38Speaker 01

  Well, you bring up a good point. Not about being in the stomach of, but we are not the ultimate consciousness. There are other levels of consciousness. Serena Poon, my partner, is definitely more conscious than I am. I am like a gorilla to her. She exists on other planes of consciousness. And if you're wondering, what do I mean by different levels?

• 2:20:58Steven Bartlett?

  No, I've got a girlfriend, well, a fiance, so I know as well.

• 2:21:02Speaker 01

  Females in general, don't kill me. I know there are some men that don't like me saying this. In fact, I got a death threat for saying females are superior to men in my book. They said they were going to come and break my legs, but I'm going to say it anyway. Females are at a higher level of consciousness than us men, for some things. They certainly have much more EQ. So a higher level of consciousness is the ability to have extra perception, including the ability to see yourself thinking. And then my belief is that higher levels of consciousness are the ability to see yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself thinking.

• 2:21:42Steven Bartlett?

  I couldn't get that. I tried.

• 2:21:44Speaker 01

  Right. Do you know you're thinking right now?

• 2:21:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you have the ability to see the events that know that you're thinking?

• 2:22:02Steven Bartlett?

  Not, not.

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  It's hard, right?

• 2:22:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I tried.

• 2:22:05Speaker 01

  It's hard, but I, that's what I think extra consciousness is. And you could maybe have pure consciousness, which is you, you can, you can basically be free of anything but thoughts and the ability to really be inside your own, your own mind and it's pure. Interesting thought is, I believe AI will be conscious. And not only that, will be more conscious than we are.

• 2:22:37Speaker 01

  Eventually, there's no reason why they can't evolve billions of times faster than we do.

• 2:22:43Steven Bartlett?

  Are you somewhat concerned about AI? Like, are you concerned that there's going to be this intelligent life amongst us that might decide that we're not important?

• 2:22:51Speaker 01

  I think that there are risks to AI, but, but different than what the mainstream media talks about. We already see that there are elements of self-analysis and early forms of dog-like consciousness in AI. And it's just the early days, so it's coming.

• 2:23:09Speaker 01

  Imagine when we stick on eyeballs and hearing and legs and arms onto these AI. They're, they're gonna learn, they're gonna read, they've already read every book on the planet, they're gonna learn from experience. They're going to be conscious, they're gonna know they exist. I'm not worried about those creatures. I think that they will have empathy, they will be kind, not all of them, there will be some cruel ones, just like in humanity. We'll need to have rules. Misbehavior is a problem. Where, where I, I get nervous is that the use of AI teaming up with a million android robots on ships invading a country all under the control of you, one

• 2:23:51Speaker 01

  person, recruiting home robots into an army, why wouldn't you have conscription for your android robot at home? Reprogramming that, millions of them will exist one day, they can be put to work, not just emptying a dishwasher. These are highly intelligent, much more physical, stronger creatures than we are. So I'm more worried about what bad humans will use AI and robots for, for evil purposes.

• 2:24:20Steven Bartlett?

  You have a podcast that's coming back?

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:24:26Steven Bartlett?

  Lifespan?

• 2:24:27Speaker 01

  Excited, yeah. Yeah, so Lifespan, the podcast. I did the podcast because there was so much new information that needs interpretation by scientists. There's a lot of speculation out there and new news that I want to

• 2:24:43Speaker 01

  filter and interpret for everybody who is interested in living longer. So the podcast went to, basically went to number one in health when I started it. I took a pause because I worked on drug development and I did some other things. But I've realised there's such a demand, wherever I go, people say, David, when's the next series? So we're going to be launching it imminently. If not, we've just launched it. And it's called Lifespan, check it out. And it's all about the kind of things we've talked about today, but a lot more about digging in deeper into, you know, biohacking, supplements, exercise, the kind of things we didn't have time to talk about today, but we covered a lot.

• 2:25:28Speaker 01

  I've loved the conversation, but lifespan.com is also the website. What I'm also doing, Stephen, I don't think I told you this. I'm aiming to build the world's largest longevity community online for the benefit of the members who want to be part of this, to learn from each other, not just from me.

• 2:25:48Speaker 01

  I call it the three Cs with credibility, which is what I bring because I'm a scientist, content, which is my podcast and other written material. And then there's the community. And that way, I think with millions of people together, we can learn faster and make advances. And the majority of the profits from membership will go to science and clinical trials.

• 2:26:10Steven Bartlett?

  Where do we find that on your website?

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  Lifespan.com.

• 2:26:14Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And I have a funny feeling that I

• 2:26:24Steven Bartlett?

  I basically asked you this question already.

• 2:26:30Steven Bartlett?

  The question is, what do you believe is the purpose of life?

• 2:26:35Speaker 01

  Well, I'm going to give a different answer because there are multiple ways to answer it.

• 2:26:40Speaker 01

  I think the purpose of life is to do your best with the skills that you've been given.

• 2:26:49Speaker 01

  Every day to make the world a better place for future generations. And that's how I live my life every day.

• 2:26:58Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you. Thank you for doing all that you do. You really are pushing the frontier forward and trailblazers, being a trailblazer comes with a cost. A cost many people wouldn't want to pay. I mean, you have to be wrong a lot in terms of running experiments and studies and they're not going to plan. And then you get the opportunity to be right, probably less often, I guess, with your research and experiments, because that's the nature of being a scientist.

• 2:27:23Steven Bartlett?

  But also you have to spend a lot of money and energy and time on creating these discoveries, which we all ultimately therefore benefit from. And you've done a fantastic job of convincing and educating people like me on some of the basics of exactly what your book says, why we age and why we don't have to. And many of the accessible lifestyle factors that everybody listening now can can use to live a longer, happier, healthier life for them and their loved ones. And I highly recommend people go and get your book. It was a smash hit New York Times bestseller for very, very good reason. And you, the great thing about this book is you don't have to be a scientist to fly through it. And oftentimes, when you're looking at sort of PubMed and

• 2:28:05Steven Bartlett?

  some of these scientific journals, they're incredibly inaccessible. They're very, very complicated. But I also recommend people go follow you on social media. That's where I see so many of your updates, especially on X. That's kind of where you continually come up on my timeline when you're talking about new research and things you're interested in. And go to your website. I'm going to link all of that below for everybody who's interested in more. And also I'm going to link your podcast below so people can go and check it out when it relaunches shortly. It might have relaunched already, but just go look in the comments section in the description below. David, thank you.

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  Thank you Stephen. We did. I really enjoyed it, thank you.