Maybe You CAN Make More Time

The Stoics remind us that time, especially the time we’re healthy and able to actually enjoy life, is our most valuable resource. But knowing that isn’t enough.🎥 Watch Robert and Ryan's conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvzsEopZ94Q📕 Grab a copy of The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious by Robert Rosenkranz | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/💡The Wealthy Stoic: A Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Happy, and Free explores how stoic ideas can be applied to personal finance, wealth-building, financial mindset, and how it can help you overcome common financial obstacles and challengesGet The Wealthy Stoic: A Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Happy, and Free & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just got back from the beach with my family. It seems like almost a tradition now that one of us makes a trip to the emergency room while we're there. My son got in a little go-kart accident and a sort of theme park thing, and I had this health issue that I won't go into. And so, we ended up going, hey, you know what? If you're gonna go, I'll go and get this other thing checked out at the same time. So, that was fun. Two people at the emergency room slash urgent care. Well, we went to urgent care, and then they sent him to the emergency room, and I stayed at the urgent care. It was a whole thing, but it all worked out. We're all good. Everything was fine. It's funny, though, right?

• 1:24Ryan Holiday?

  Like, the Stoics talk about memento mori and acceptance, but does that mean they just don't take care of themselves? Marx realized as a doctor, and presumably this doctor's job, however rudimentary his understanding of health is, his job is to keep him alive, right? Marx realized he isn't trying to die sooner than he needs to, and neither should we. This is why we take care of ourselves. This is why we take care of our health. This is why we eat right. This is why we exercise. This is why when something is worrying us, we go to the doctor. And that's sort of what today's episode is gonna be about. If you remember, we ran a chapter from The Stoic Capitalist a few months ago. That's an interesting book by Robert Rosenkranz. He's a self-made billionaire investor.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  Entrepreneur, philanthropist, and been very influenced by Stoic philosophy. The last chapter we ran was about how you can make more money, but you can't make more time. But then, of course, you can make more time to a certain degree by taking care of yourself. Certainly, you can make less time by not taking care of yourselves, not making good choices, and by wasting time. After you can make more money, you can't make more time. It's the next chapter. Maybe you can make more time. They were nice enough to let us run this section of the audiobook. As I said, Robert Rosenkranz is a billionaire pioneer in the private equity space, hedge funds, and the insurance industry. He's also a patron of the arts.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  He launched an acclaimed NPR program called Open to Debate. He funded the Impetus Grants, which extend human health spans, has done a number of other interesting things. We had a really interesting episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I should believe it was a two-parter. I will link to that. And we carry his book, The Wealthy Stoic. And we carry his book, The Stoic Capitalist in the Painted Porch. Also, if you want to think more about how the Stoics think about money, our course, The Wealthy Stoic, A Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Happy, and Free, I think is really interesting. It is not telling you how to make more money necessarily. It is telling you how to think differently about money, which of course, is also what The Stoic Capitalist is about. And today's episode is about, check all of that out.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  Enjoy. Have a good weekend.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Maybe you can make more time. The Stoics lived in an age when little could be done to prolong life or to mitigate the ills of the elderly. Stoic writings on the subject deal mostly with accepting bad health and death with equanimity. In this context, they invoke the distinction between things within one's control and outside one's control.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Cognitive behavioral psychology meanwhile encourages making reasoned choices that are in one's interest. Everyone considers good health as perhaps their most important interest, but many question if it's within their control, its genetics and luck. Awareness that one's own behaviors and choices will have an important influence on health outcomes is a starting point. The stoic emphasis on time as our most precious resource, especially the time we are in good health and can enjoy life to the fullest, helps turn an awareness into a priority.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Unless we have such awareness and prioritize making more time, it is very easy to opt for day-to-day choices that ultimately impair health and shorten life. You know intellectually that diet and exercise matter, that smoking and excessive sunlight are health hazards, but mustering the will to do things right is a very different thing. A smoke satisfies an urge, a couple of drinks help you have a good time, a creamy dessert tastes delicious, lying in the warm sun is pleasant and you look better with a tan.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  On the flip side, exercise can be boring, a healthy diet can be dreary, doctor visits scary, medical tests unpleasant, necessary meds you've been prescribed may have annoying side effects. Obtuse, slow-footed institutions like hospitals and insurance companies can be endlessly frustrating to deal with. Indeed, our entire medical system is activated only when things go wrong. It does very little to prolong the period when things are going right.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Making the right choices requires a good measure of mindfulness, of self-possession, and a habit of long-term thinking. If you are burdened by anger, fear, jealousy, and other corrosive emotions, if the people and situations in your daily life leave you frustrated and stressed, your mental state will undermine your physical health. But if you can use reason to regulate your responses, you will be better both mentally and physically. In Stoic philosophy, this would make you a progressor toward wisdom. Cognitive behavioral therapy promotes a similar way of thinking.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  In either case, you will be far more likely to make the small daily adjustments and sacrifices needed to extend your health span. Quite literally, to make more time. I first encountered the idea of health span in 2016, when the topic of one of our public debates was "Lifespans are long enough." Among the debaters was Brian Kennedy, director of the Buck Institute of Aging Research in Novato, California. He made the important distinction between lifespan, the total number of years we live,

• 7:45Speaker 01

  and health span, how many of those years we remain healthy and free from disease. The idea really took root for me during the onset of COVID, when, as an older New Yorker living in an epicenter of the pandemic, I felt personally vulnerable. Exiled from my office, I had more time to read, and picked up a book by David Sinclair, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Harvard Medical School and a biomedical entrepreneur. His book, Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To, was my introduction to the science.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Soon after reading it, I arranged to meet him at Harvard and get a tour of his lab.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  In modern medicine, age-related research is overwhelmingly focused on the major diseases that tend to increase with age: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, not on aging itself. Sinclair is prominent among the growing legion of doctors and scientists who are digging deeper into the fundamental question of how we age in the first place. Why do the trillions of cells in our bodies become less resilient over time, more vulnerable to disease, and less able to perform their specialized functions?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  A practical goal of this research is to slow or reverse the aging of cells, potentially delaying the onset of major diseases and extending human health spans by 10 to 15 years. As a result of experiments in his lab, Sinclair has come to believe that cells age because of information loss in the epigenome, the biochemical signaling and marking system that is closely coupled with the body's DNA. The epigenome activates and guides stem cells in the creation of specialized cells—skin,

• 9:52Speaker 01

  liver, brain, muscle, nerve, etc—to replace cells that are diseased or that otherwise cease to function. In his lab, Sinclair has been able to both accelerate and slow down the aging process in mice. In one dramatic experiment published in 2021, he actually reversed the aging process in old, blind mice, enabling them to recover the information needed to generate new, functionally young retina cells and regain their eyesight. The success has been replicated in primates, and the techniques will shortly be applied in human trials.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  As I learned of this, I felt I had found something to support, a potentially vast contribution to human flourishing, and yet, a field in which I might make a difference with gifts I could afford. To school myself in some of the scientific basics, I took Harvard's Molecular Biology course via distance learning as COVID was winding down. Then, during about a half-year of investigation, I sought out top researchers in the field. Some of these scientists, for example, Tom Rando at UCLA, approached the question by focusing on stem cells. Others investigate senescent cells

• 11:20Speaker 01

  that stop dividing but remain alive and produce harmful toxins, Jim Kirkland at Mayo. Others researched the role of the immune response mechanism, Tony Weiss-Kore at Stanford. Still others study centenarians who are disease-free at age 100, near Barzagli at Einstein Medical School, to identify key genetic mutations they have in common. My study convinced me that this field was radically underfunded relative to its potential to improve the quality of life.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Many major foundations regard longevity research with deep skepticism. The same is true of major universities, where the notion of "health span extension" gets confused with images of frail residents of nursing homes, not of "effective people extending their prime productive years by a decade or more." Longevity research is sometimes seen as retrograde, a threat that could increase the burden on the planet by adding several billion old people to the global population. Another progressive concern is the worsening of income inequality and racial injustice. Treatments to extend health spans will be expensive,

• 12:41Speaker 01

  and richer white people will be the first to benefit. Meanwhile, academic economists worry that an aging population, with more retirees relative to the number of workers, will be fiscally unsustainable.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Each of these concerns is open to debate, but I have enough experience to know that public opinion most often aligns with the techno pessimists. In precincts where techno optimism tends to prevail, like Silicon Valley, longevity research is a hot topic. In the past decade, it has spawned dozens of startups and spurred investments from some of tech's wealthiest individuals, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The most interesting startup is Altos Labs, founded by Rick Klausner, a brilliant scientist

• 13:41Speaker 01

  organization builder who has led both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Cancer Institute. He has modeled Altos on Bell Labs, the legendary Cold War technology invention factory, and with $3 billion of committed capital funding, the company has been luring top scientists from academia with million-dollar salaries and promises of research autonomy. It describes its mission as "to restore cellular health and resilience through cellular rejuvenation programming to reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life."

• 14:25Speaker 01

  For my part, I've joined the board of the Buck Institute, the leading independent nonprofit research center in the field. I also contribute to Sinclair's work, as well as Rando's and Barzilai's, through our Healthspan Extension Initiative at the Rosenkranz Foundation.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  So far, my biggest commitment has been as lead funder of a round of impetus grants, masterminded by Martin Bors Jensen, a young biotech innovator in the San Francisco area.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  These are grants to support around thirty-five research scientists with longevity-related projects selected from more than a thousand applicants. If successful, these experiments can have a dramatic impact, but are too unorthodox or speculative to get funding from the National Institutes of Health, NIH. The first round of impetus grants in late 2020 has already generated more than a dozen published papers, including some potentially major breakthroughs. In 2023, Saudi Arabia's H evolution Foundation, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salam

• 15:40Speaker 01

  al Saud, agreed to match my grant. I am confident we will be making a real contribution, both to the basic science of aging and to the careers of some of its brightest and most creative researchers. H evolution was established in 2021, and under the leadership of Dr. Mahmoud Khan, has already emerged as the second-largest funder of longevity research in the world, after the NIH. I have developed a productive working relationship with H evolution and was honored to join the board of H evolution's U.S. arm.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  There is extraordinary personal satisfaction in supporting scientific research that can plausibly enrich human flourishing by enabling people to live healthy and productive lives for an extra decade or more. In true selfish philanthropist fashion, I have gained tangible personal benefits as well. By following the recommendations of top anti-aging scientists over the last few years, I am objectively skiing better, playing a more competitive game of singles tennis, and seeing demonstrable improvement in my long-term memory. So, yes, you can make more time.

• 17:11Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.