EP #17 David Sinclair’s AMA: Age Reversal Breakthroughs, FDA Approval, and Living Forever

In this Ask Me Anything session, David and Peter discuss the latest age-reversal breakthroughs, getting approval from the FDA, and the possibility of living forever. You will learn about: 01:54 | Where are the breakthroughs & when are they coming? 06:46 | David Sinclair’s experience dealing with the FDA 19:16 | How are David & Peter going to reduce aging? David Sinclair is a biologist and academic known for his expertise in aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a genetics professor and the Co-Director of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He’s been included in Time100 as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and his research has been featured all over the media. Besides writing a New York Times Best Seller, David has co-founded several biotech companies, a science publication called Aging, and is an inventor of 35 patents _____________ Resources Read David’s book, Lifespan: Why We Age- and Why We Don’t Have To Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about Abundance360. Read the Tech Blog. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Every mile matters, whether you're driving your dream car or your daily commuter. The Mobile One team knows that. It's why we created Mobile One Advanced Clean Motor Oil. It cleans your engine in one oil change and helps extend engine life, delivering performance, protection, and cleanliness for vehicles of all ages. All to help keep your engine running like new, whatever you're driving. Visit mobileone.com/advancedclean to learn more.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are kicking the can down the road, but that's the point. Life is wonderful and the more times we kick the can down the road, the more life and wonder we have. And so, yeah, that's what it is. I don't think that we're going to be able to kick the can down the road for an infinite number of years based on technology that I can foresee in our lifetime. Now, I could be wrong because I didn't foresee reprogramming as effective as it has become and age reversal. So I'd never say never, but given my viewpoint right now, I think that 150 is achievable in many of our lifespans, but not immortality.

• 1:10Peter Diamandis?

  And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm going to do, this is the dent I'm going to make in the universe.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Mindset and Moonshots. My name is Nick. I'm Peter's producer and we have today here Peter and David. Hey, guys, how are you? Hey, Nick.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Hey, Nick.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  Cool. So we have fielded hundreds of phenomenal questions over the course of the past day from both David and Peter's Twitter. And I'm going to be the lucky one fielding through them and picking and bopping. So let's start off with some fun ones.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  David, I'm going to direct this one at you. Fans want to know, why has David not had a podcast since February?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Ah, well, I'm writing my second book. I'm editing a paper that's going to come out in... A big journal that's going to be high impact. And I'm working on making my podcast even better, better produced. And so, trust me, it's coming. I know that there's a lot of demand for it and I thank everyone for their patience.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  Cool, that's a fair answer. All right, let's dive into one that we had a bunch of. And I'll read it verbatim, this one is from Tony and Megan. They asked, and I'm gonna ask it to both Peter and David. Why is it taking so freaking long to have meaningful longevity therapies come to market? I feel like we're not making any meaningful headway and we're stuck taking supplements that give us five to 10 years if we're lucky. Where are the breakthroughs? When are they coming?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Well, some of them are already here, in my view. We've got some drugs already, metformin, rapamycin, that I strongly believe can slow down aspects of aging. So we already have some technology, it's not evenly distributed. It's not available to everybody because most doctors are unaware or unwilling to prescribe these medicines to people who are healthy. But the data looks good. Now, what about the new medicines that are in development? Well, one of them that I'm developing, actually a few of them, at Metro Biotech, a spin out from my lab from 10 years ago. Is pretty advanced, we're actually in phase two studies, we've had some positive data, we're looking to publish now, we've written up the manuscript.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  And so that is a study and a company that looks at NAD boosters for pharmaceutical use for diseases of aging. And that one, if all goes well, it's probably two to three years away. So that's the good news, also reprogramming of the eye to cure blindness, which we did in mice a couple of years ago. We're in non-human primates and that could go into humans as soon as next year. Now, the question is, why isn't it quicker? Well, it's because drugs are hard, super hard. You know, what industry can spend four hundred, five hundred million dollars and still fail? Not that many. And that's what it's like to develop drugs. And there's a lot of safety and efficacy that needs to go into these products.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Thanks to the oversight of the FDA here in the US and other countries under different auspices. And it's, there's a high, high hurdle, rightly so. We don't want something that doesn't work or can harm people getting on the market. But to get over that hurdle takes time and a lot of money.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  That's a fair answer. Peter, I'd love your take. And in your take, I want to include your opposing, somewhat opposing thoughts to David on how you feel about the FDA and bureaucracy.

• 4:46Peter Diamandis?

  Well, so listen, the, the reality is what we're talking about is a radical departure from traditional medicine. Medicine has been, you know, you go to, we've all come to expect, we go to our doctor and we go for our once a year physical if we're lucky. And that doctor will listen to your lungs, your heart, and, and it's expected, you know, old age is something we come to expect and we don't fight against it. Uh, we expect it, we try and do a gentle landing, if you would. Uh, and the FDA is an organization built around safety. What I mean by that is they will value the lives lost if they approve a drug that kills people.

• 5:31Peter Diamandis?

  Those lives are much more valuable than all the lives lost by not approving a drug. Um, it's just the way it is today. And so, uh, until the science is rock solid, um, they're going to be hesitant to approve something. And it takes a huge amount of capital investments, billions of dollars and sometimes decades of time.

• 5:57Peter Diamandis?

  The reality is, you know, even the world of stem cells, stem cells are, we know that we exhaust our stem cell population, that when we're young, we have, you know, a hundred x, a thousand x number of stem cells in different, different pockets of the body from, from fat to muscle to neural stem cells, and they reduce, and we can supplement our stem cells. But today, you have to go outside the United States to do that because the science isn't there to have proven its efficacy and its safety yet. And we're going to get there, but until it's, you know, rock solid, you're going to a different jurisdiction to get those

• 6:41Peter Diamandis?

  treatments. It takes time to be available. And what we saw, I remember I was in Richard Mulligan's lab, David, back in, in the eighties, doing early gene therapy work. And gene therapy was, was imagined back then to be an extraordinary technology, and it was. But when it was first applied to the first patients, it caused the death of a number of children, and it stopped the entire field for decades. So people are cautious about taking shortcuts.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  David, do you have any pushback there? I mean, your interfacing with the FDA over the years is probably more than most people will ever experience in a lifetime, given your career. Are you friends, and I have to find a way to word this, so excuse the way I'm wording it, are you friends of the FDA in the sense that you're happy with how they work? Does it frustrate you at times that they move slow? Are you in alignment with Peter that there is a increase, or there should be an increase in speed of how they approve things coming up? Or what's your take?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Well, the FDA was surprisingly receptive.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  To the idea that aging can be treated with a medicine. And they are still of the opinion that if we can show that aging is slowable with a treatment, that they would strongly consider approving that medicine for the treatment of aging. And I didn't realize that that was true, but what the individuals at the FDA, the human beings in this bureaucracy as it is, have to deal with a big organization with lots of rules and procedures. And those rules dictate how quickly we can move. And their mandate is to protect the public so that there's not as much incentive to to get a drug on the market as there is to protect them.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  And that does lead to this being rather a slow process, that's for sure. Now, what I would love is if there was increased public opinion, pressure from all places, from politicians, from grassroots, to increase the dialogue and help the FDA find a way to make it easier for us to get a drug on the market that's based on aging research. Right now, we cannot make a drug for aging because aging isn't a medical condition. If it were, we'd have a lot more investment and a lot more success.

• 9:15Peter Diamandis?

  You know, David, one thing I hope for in the future is a right to try strategy, right? And in other words, I almost call it an accredited patient program. Where if as a patient, as a subject, I get permission from my physician, my husband, my wife, my kids, or whatever, that I want to try a treatment that isn't FDA approved. But, you know, I've got this disease called aging. And I want to try this, even if it's, you know, to be a subject. I think reinventing how we do this. Now, we do have investigation new drugs and we do have, you know, experimental protocols and so forth. But how do we we make it? More agile in that regard.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Peter, I love that idea that that you wouldn't be able to just go online and order up an experimental drug, right? That's that's too free because there could be accidents. And there's maybe abuse of that system for monetary reasons. That said, if there were a certification, whether it's an M D. Or something an M D. Can can get that would allow the use of experimental drugs. Right now, that that is possible, but it's not widely used. It's generally frowned on. If it was more widely available, if you have a terminal disease or something that doesn't have any current cure, why not try something that is at least already shown in phase one to be safe?

• 10:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, exactly. In fact, David Faganbaum, I don't know if you know David, he he's he cured his or didn't cure, he's treating his Castleman's disease using rapamycin. And so there, you know, the numbers are interesting, right? There are 3,000 FDA approved drugs, and there are 12,000 diseases. And his work right now is saying, can we can we fund looking at which of those 3,000 drugs might have a dual use for the 9,000 diseases that don't have a treatment, right? They've already they're already on the market, they're already in production, they're already shown to be safe in in humans. And so it's a rather than

• 11:23Peter Diamandis?

  developing a brand new treatment. So his his efforts called called Every Cure. And it's he just announced it at the Clin Global Initiative a couple of weeks back.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  David and Peter, what is your personal preference to when you feel comfortable enough to try something? David, you probably have a lot of exposure to this because you're constantly testing things in the lab. When do you say, OK, you know what, I'm good enough to put myself on the line here? And Peter, likewise, I'd like to know for you.

• 11:54Peter Diamandis?

  I consider myself a chief guinea pig for a lot of of what's out there. Tony Robbins, who's a dear mutual friend of both of ours, and I think about that all the time. It's like, huh, interesting. So, um, listen, if it's, I'm probably not likely to be the first human ever to take something, but I will be an early user of it. Let's leave it at that.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm the same. I'm an experimenter. I'm a scientist. I also feel that if I'm going to be talking about something, I need to have experienced it myself. I would really never talk about something unless I'd I'd tried something. And so I never recommend anything. I'm not even an M D. I'm a P H D. But I will talk about my own experience in a way that will allow others to think about it themselves.

• 12:47Peter Diamandis?

  Same, yeah. I think it's important. I think it's important as we're as we are speaking about this field and what's becoming available to to explain either that it's something I do do or the reason I haven't.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Right. And actually, a New York Times article was written about my lab and me. And they said, I think it was posed to the effect of, well, David, you're conflicted because you're studying this molecule in the lab and you're taking it. Aren't you going to be biased? And if there's something bad, you'll hide it. And I'm thinking to myself, I want to be the first person in the world to know that there's something wrong with this molecule because my father's taking it. I'm taking it. And I will tell the whole world to stop taking it if I see something. And I want to be that person to find it ASAP. So it's actually, it's flipped is that I'm looking for problems with these treatments because if I'm taking them or I tried them, I need to know if there's a

• 13:50Speaker 01

  problem. And so, you know, you can trust me that you'll hear from me first if there is something that's negative.

• 13:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'm Ahmed Foreman. I've just started rapamycin, five milligrams for my own body weight. And I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of physicians about it and felt that the, you know, it's always a risk reward situation. And I just felt like at this point, the reward side was higher than the risk.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. And the older you get, the more so. But we tend to underestimate the risk of aging. We don't think about it as much as we should. Aging is really, really risky. In fact,

• 14:30Peter Diamandis?

  It's known, it's known to cause death. Yes.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  It runs in my family.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  David, do you mind if I cut in? I build off of that for a moment. So one of the questions that came in was, uh, let me find it here. Um, it was, uh, are we effectively, I'm gonna shorten what they said, but are we effectively just kicking the can of dying here? And are we just prolonging it, say, 120, 500 years, whatever the case may be? Um, or is the proposition that we're going to live forever? And, um, what's your take? And Peter, what's your take?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Uh, all right. Uh, yeah, we are kicking the can down the road, but that's the point. You know, life is wonderful, and the more times we kick the can down the road, the more life and wonder we have. And so, yeah, that's what it is. I don't think that we're going to be able to kick the can down the road for an infinite number of years based on technology that I can foresee in our lifetime. Now, I could be wrong because I didn't foresee reprogramming as effective as it has become and age reversal. So never say never, but given my viewpoint right now, I think that 150 is achievable in many of our lifespans, but not immortality. Peter?

• 15:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so it most definitely kicking the can down the road. The analogy is now I was, you know, on a vacation with my family and we're having so much a fun time. It's like, let's stay an extra week. If you're enjoying life, uh, you know, adding decades to it. But let's not forget, we're in the steepest part of the exponential curve. You know, in terms of what's coming in AI and robotics and quantum computation, that's, that's just on the edge of, uh, of our capabilities. So, yeah, I may not want this mortal body, uh, five, you know, not five, you know, 50 years from now. I may want a upgraded body.

• 16:29Peter Diamandis?

  But the idea of being able to see my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, to go to the moon, go to Mars, to see what happens next.

• 16:40Peter Diamandis?

  Is extraordinary. I don't, you know, Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity, right? The point at which the speed of technological change is so rapid that we're unable to predict what's next. And that number is circa, you know, the early 2040s. Let's not forget, that's 20 years from now. I mean, it's not like 100 years. It's 20 years from now. So, uh, part of what we're talking about is intercepting the technologies that will give us longevity escape velocity, but beyond that, the technologies that will allow us to connect our minds to the cloud. Maybe it's uploading ourselves. Um, I'm not a huge fan of freezing myself. Are you, David?

• 17:22Peter Diamandis?

  Um, yeah, so I definitely want to get immortality, or at least extreme longevity.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Is that a real thing, Peter? Like an Austin Powers freezing yourself thing?

• 17:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, sure. There's a lot of people. Yeah, cryonics is the technology. It's the notion that if I freeze myself and I don't rupture the cells, and there are ways to do that, that hopefully technology, super advanced technology, you know, 100 or 1,000 years from now will be able to bring me back and restate my neural structures and my memories and so forth. But that's, that's a subject for another conversation.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Hold on, I have a question. David, uh, have you ever visited, or Peter, have you ever, this is a very interesting question, visited a facility where people are frozen? I mean, is this a, I, I, I thought that this was all hearsay.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Uh, I have not.

• 18:09Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, either have I, but there are a number of them. Uh, and people, I mean, the first person, I just saw an article about this. The first person frozen, uh, was about 50 years ago. And there are companies today that, uh, you'll wear a bracelet and, um, at the moment of death, uh, when your body, when your, your brain function ceases, they will come in, uh, and they'll pull out your blood, replace it with effectively an antifreeze and, uh, and freeze you. And you can have the choice of freezing your entire body or copying off your head and just freezing your head, because it takes less energy to do that.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  It, it may actually work. I didn't think it would, but actually, given that we can now reset the age of cells, I can imagine that you can quickly unfreeze a person and get their cells to begin the rejuvenation process that we seem to be able to control now. And yeah, so I think it, I wouldn't do it myself, at least currently, but I think that it's not as crazy as it once seemed. But I would rather stay alive by being alive, and I think the technologies to do that are increasingly here.

• 19:21Peter Diamandis?

  It's a fun subject to think about, but I'd rather put my energy and focus into extending the healthy human lifespan.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  You know, Peter and I are very much into democratizing technologies, and cryonics is not going to be for everybody. It's a very small few people, number of people that can afford this. So that's, again, not a good reason to focus our energies on those kind of technologies.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  I have a lot of deep appreciation for that answer. I have a great one I want to end it with, but Peter, this one was directed at you. Somebody wanted an update on, I didn't even know this was public yet, the Age Reversal Prize, and I'm not sure if David, you know about the Age Reversal X Prize that Peter has, but obviously, and let me just cue this up for everybody listening, David's efforts are substantially documented, realized, and very public right now. He's, in my opinion, the leading world expert on anti-aging at the moment. And, you know, Peter, I think that you're now going to actively join this fight through one of your efforts. Do you want to share how?

• 20:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, sure. And David is very much involved. He and George Church are my co-conspirators, if I would, are scientific co-chairs of a $101 million Age Reversal X Prize. And the question we've asked, I mean, we've been talking about the idea, is, could we do, and it's not launched yet, to be very clear, we're majority funded. David and I have been having a conversation every few days on the rule sets, getting them really honed in. I hope to launch in early part of 2023. But we talked early on about a longevity prize, but the problem with the longevity prize, like, can you add 30 healthy years in a person's life,

• 21:06Peter Diamandis?

  which we will, is you have to wait 30 years to see if you have a winner. But can you in fact reverse aging in someone? In this case, the rules we're thinking about is can you give a therapeutic that lasts for less than a year, but reverses biological age by 20 years or more? David, do you want to add your thoughts there?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, the goal is to inspire companies and labs, individuals to work on methods to safely reverse aging in multiple tissues and organs, to rejuvenate the body and make it function better. And this kind of prize money will be a huge incentive. I think it's going to have a big impact on the field and drive innovation in the same way other X prizes have done so. And so I'm super happy to be involved.

• 21:58Peter Diamandis?

  We're looking at, you know, we're trying to decide where, what the focus will be. I, you know, David and I are honing in on cognition, on muscle, on skin, on immune system. I mean, these are the things that as you age, you want to look good, you want to move well, you want to think clearly, you want to have able to have a good immunity in a, in a world of COVID and influenza. But, you know, this is about getting the smartest people on the planet to focus on one of the biggest problems, one of the biggest grand challenges on the planet, which is extending the healthy health span. And David, on a previous episode, you mentioned the economic impact for adding one healthy year on a person's life. What was that number again? It was staggering.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Well, for the US alone, it's 86 trillion dollars in the long run of doing that.

• 22:48Peter Diamandis?

  So, so David, where should people go to find you?

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, I'm active on social media, so find updated news there. My podcast is still available and I'm working on season two. And that's on all podcast outlets. My book, I think a lot of people got inspired by, and I was inspired by yours too, Peter. My book is called Lifespan, Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To. And I didn't get to talk a lot about what I do on my, in my daily life, which supplements and that kind of thing. But that is outlined in large part on page 304 of Lifespan. So check that out. That's the cheat sheet, but please do read the science as well.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  All of the future that's coming. So that's where to find me. Um, that is a good spot. Other than that, um, I'll be, I'm working on a, on a TV show that, uh, I'll let you know how that goes. I do want to be able to show people the insides of our bodies and how we work and how to improve our bodies in our daily lives in a way that no show has ever done before. So stay tuned for that too.

• 24:00Peter Diamandis?

  Nick, do you have a last question for us?

• 24:01Speaker 03

  I do, and I'm going to direct it at David and then Peter, we'll, we'll have you recorded on this too. David, the question that came in, I thought it was novel, is, uh, are you happy? If so, why? And was there ever a point in your life in which you weren't? And what did you do? Because, uh, I like this because a lot of your research is pending on this fulcrum of whether or not people can resolve that.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Okay. Uh, am I always happy? Uh, no. Uh, most days I'm happy because I'm doing something that I dreamed of doing and I'm fulfilled. But I have down days, I have days where I get attacked by large pharma, by colleagues. Uh, I've learned to have a thicker skin, so I don't get full-blown depression, but it's still, it's still upsetting. Uh, but I've learned to trust in myself and be resilient and get up. Um, I find that having teenage kids is the most challenging thing in life. And I have three of those and I'm still trying to be a great dad. Uh, so I'm a struggling vegan and a struggling teenage dad. Uh, so that, that's who I am outside of research.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  David, thanks for being on the show. Um, let us know what you think. Rate, review and give us a follow. Find David across all socials. He's very active. And I think, um, we're just really blessed to have had him. Peter, do you want to share any closing notes?

• 25:19Peter Diamandis?

  David, uh, it's a truly a pleasure to call you a friend, a co-collaborator, co-conspirator on this journey we're ahead of, uh, and have a beautiful day, pal.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you too. It's great to have you as a co-pilot on, on this final frontier of biology. Appreciate it.

• 25:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Appreciate you too. Take care, pal.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Every mile matters. Whether you're driving your dream car or your daily commuter, the Mobile One team knows that. It's why we created Mobile One Advanced Clean Motor Oil. It cleans your engine in one oil change and helps extend engine life, delivering performance, protection, and cleanliness for vehicles of all ages. All to help keep your engine running like new, whatever you're driving. Visit mobileone.com/advancedclean to learn more.