“Age Reversal Is Coming.” Everything You Need To Know - Dr David Sinclair - #1141

Dr David Sinclair is a geneticist, professor at Harvard Medical School, and author. Can human aging actually be reversed? What happens if we treat aging as a disease rather than an inevitability? And how close are scientists to turning age-reversal experiments into medicines that could radically extend our lives? Expect to learn how scientists can reset the age of cells without causing cancer, whether resveratrol and NAD supplements actually work, why three meals a day plus snacks might be marketing, the best exercise protocol for longevity, whether GLP-1s are legitimate longevity drugs, and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline’s leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (0:00) How David’s Work Has Evolved(0:58) Can Scientists Actually Reverse Blindness?(5:53) How Does ER100 Work?(8:57) Is Aging a Disease?(10:14) What’s Next in Age Reversal?(14:00) How to Reverse Aging Without Going Too Far(17:10) What Most Longevity Experts Secretly Believe(20:48) The Biggest Levers for Reversing Aging(22:53) Can We Survive 2 Weeks Without Food?(32:55) The Most Effective Way to Fast(36:10) Does Calorie Restriction Actually Extend Human Life?(40:52) Is the Proteinmaxxing Movement Overhyped?(44:41) Could Sex Help You Live Longer?(47:57) Why Quality Sleep Is Essential for Longevity(51:01) Can Overthinking Shorten Your Lifespan?(55:05) What Longevity Drugs Does David Take Every Day?(56:48) The Truth Behind Controversial Longevity Drugs(1:13:51) Can Erectile Dysfunction Medication Treat Cancer?(1:17:46) The Hidden Danger of Heavy Metals in Supplements(1:21:45) The Benefits of Creating a Longevity Community(1:24:54) Sauna vs Cold Plunges: Which Is Better for Longevity?(1:31:34) Is Bryan Johnson’s Protocol Actually Working?(1:35:39) Are Vitamins a Waste of Money?(1:39:41) Could GLP-1s Protect Against Dementia?(1:46:23) What’s AI Doing to Longevity Research?(1:54:30) Can Your Mindset Affect How Long You Live?(1:56:55) The Two Things That Matter Most for Longevity(1:58:01) Which Longevity Methods Actually Work?(2:03:31) When Health Optimisation Goes Too Far(2:05:18) Where to Find David Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  The first ever podcast episode that I recorded in America was with you in 2019, Harvard Medical School in your office with what looked like the illustration of a snail on the whiteboard. And it was filmed on two iPhones, one of which I'd had to borrow from a friend and a single white USB microphone. And that was over seven years ago.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  And now here we are.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Remember it well, when you were 12, right?

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  I was 12. Yeah, correct. Yeah.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  It was very clear from those days that you were going to be a big success. You were smart, driven, came prepared. And look, this is beautiful now.

• 0:38Chris Williamson?

  Full circle. Yeah, I had, I didn't realize Starbucks Venti has way more caffeine in than the British equivalent. And it took my fucking face off. I was sat opposite you trying to think about Yamanaka factors and how important NAD and resveratrol in yogurt is. Meanwhile, my whole body was vibrating. But you know, you've done maybe more than almost anyone to make the biology of reversing aging a part of mainstream conversation. So I want to talk about kind of everything that's happened since we first sat down, the Yamanaka factors, what's happening with NAD and resveratrol, new discoveries. Before we get into that, though, what discoveries have excited you most since 2019?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Gee, a lot. I'm very lucky to have a lab where there's up to 40 people running around making discoveries. I go back there to recharge. It's like the Willy Wonka. You've been there. So you know what it's like. It's unparalleled. I wish everyone could come visit. The highlights would be, so in 2020, we published on the cover of Nature Magazine that we could reverse aging safely in an animal for the first time, a mouse. We cured its blindness. That was pretty big. Cover of Nature, it's what most scientists dream of in their lifetime. So that was a pretty big high. Since then, it's been rewarding to see that it's been repeated,

• 2:04Speaker 01

  not just by other labs, but in different animals, monkeys, it's been working in different tissues. So it's not just the eye anymore. Where we first tested it, it's pretty much working in every part of the animal's body. And then the big thing is we've now gone into people. So there are people getting their, hopefully their age reversed in their eye to cure their blindness, or at least improve their vision at the very least.

• 2:31Chris Williamson?

  Why start in the eye?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, good question. This is a gene therapy. So we're introducing genes that are very powerful. They're called Yamanaka factors, you mentioned them. And but we use a subset of them that don't cause any trouble. If you just use what Professor Yamanaka used, it's not going to be very healthy. It's actually quite dangerous. So we use a subset of those and we deliver them with a little virus-like particle. And the safest way to deliver a virus-like particle into a human is to go into a space that's enclosed, it's not going to spread. And the eye is where it's most being tested. And so we did it for safety reasons, not because it would work better in the eye. In fact, I told my student at the time, Wan Cheng, that he was crazy to try to cure blindness. Why not do something

• 3:18Speaker 01

  easier like the liver? But he said, you know, the eye is probably the best place to start for safety reasons. And he was right.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  I remember that, though. That was, we were talking about that in 2019 when I was in your lab. What has, there's been this recent release that came out last month. What's that? Why is that so special?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  The one about that we've gone into humans? Well, I think most people thought the aging field was a lot, lot further behind. Age reversal, you see online, oh, we've done this in human cells. We've done it in a mouse. But suddenly, there are people now getting what could be the world's first true age reversal drug. So for us, it was old news. We'd been doing this and expecting it for a while. In fact, we made the discovery back in 2016, 17. So it's, for us, it wasn't so, so amazing. But for the world, I think it was a shock to hear that people are actually getting this potentially age reversal drug for the first time.

• 4:19Chris Williamson?

  What would be the issue that somebody has in their eye which would be reversed? What's the sort of patient that this would face?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  So this is the, the thing that makes me super excited is that every piece of, or type of damage and disease that's, that's been tested in animals, not just mice, but larger animals, it's worked to improve the vision of either a disease or damage. So for instance, if you pinch the nerve, you laser it, or you give a mouse glaucoma, pressure in the eye, we can treat that effectively. And nothing reverses blindness currently, except for this treatment in animals even. And so that's what's exciting. Even macular degeneration, glaucoma, the two leading causes of

• 5:04Speaker 01

  blindness in the world, both of them are really, really easily treated by this new mechanism. We call the drug ER 100, which is epigenetic reversal 100. But yeah, pretty much any disease or injury could theoretically be fixed, treated by this technology.

• 5:24Chris Williamson?

  Any theoretically, any disease or injury could be treated by this?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Well, in the eye, but even beyond that, the liver, motor neuron, so ALS, the brain has been reversed in aging, memory comes back, even joints. There was a Chinese study that came out recently, looked very good. They used our technology to rebuild bone and cartilage in osteoarthritis. And so, you know, I don't know anything else that just rebuilds body parts like this.

• 5:53Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain how it works to a simpleton?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Not you, but I don't think anybody listening is a simpleton. But it's actually quite simple, the good news. We take three genes that are normally turned on early in life. And these three genes make factors that turn on a cascade of, of events that the cell uses to reboot itself. The simple way to think of it is that I hypothesize that the body has software that gets corrupted as we get older. So an old person still has information there. It's just that it's been corrupted, the software. We call that the epigenome. It's separate from the genome, which is the DNA. The epigenome sits on top of that and controls the DNA. So in my book, Lifespan, it's a little

• 6:42Speaker 01

  dated now, but you might remember, I chose a CD as the analogy. The epigenome is the reader of the music and the DNA is the music itself. And aging is a scratched CD. So for those listeners and viewers who don't really know what a CD is, they're all really cool things we could put 20 songs on. But a better analogy now would be, your phone has software, you know, a really old phone is slow, it can be corrupted, can get over, overused. And so we can reboot that. And we found that these three genes that we put in, which we call O, S and K for short, these Yamanaka genes, trigger a program that embryos normally use to reset their age, or something very similar to

• 7:23Speaker 01

  that program. Something you might not know, most people don't know this, is that when we're fertilized, and we've all been fertilized, we wouldn't exist. And then we need to reset this epigenome, the software needs a reset to go back to being young again. And that

• 7:38Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  It's, it's a fact. It's shocking, but true. Young, very young embryos are old, and then they get reset. So the, the software is really, it's not software, it's the way the DNA is folded in the cell. And every cell has to compact the DNA, because it's six feet long, has to fit into a microscopic little, little ball. And how that's compacted depends on what kind of cell you're going to get. So if you want to make a nerve cell, you compact different genes. And when you compact them, they switch off. But you need to read nerves that make nerve cells. So you open those up. And this, this bundling and opening of DNA is what the epigenome does. And my theory, called the information theory of aging, said that this pattern, pattern of bundle loop, bundle

• 8:23Speaker 01

  loop, which is different for every cell type, gets corrupted, gets eroded during aging. And that literally is aging. And we tested this and published it in 2023. And we created a mouse where we could disrupt those loops and bundles. And the mouse's cells lost their function, they lost their identity, the nerve cells forgot how to be nerve cells. And the mouse literally got old. We could speed up that process by corrupting that software, the epigenetic software. And then when we did that, which took us 13 years, we started working on reversing that process, which is how we get to here.

• 8:57Chris Williamson?

  People see aging as a certainty, but you call it a disease. Is it truly a disease? Or is that just a useful metaphor?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's just a word, really. So we can call aging whatever we want. But I prefer to think of aging as a disease, because otherwise, we're not really treating it. Most doctors don't think of old age as something that is preventable or treatable, even though now we, we believe we understand that it is very treatable, or at least slowable. So I think it's a useful way to look at aging as something that we should address, even starting early in life to try to slow it down at least. We all need to stick around for longer because the technology that's coming is incredible. And I proposed this in my book and even put it on the back cover. And it was, a lot of people were telling me that that's crazy. Don't say that, David. It's going to be scandalous. People

• 9:51Speaker 01

  are going to not take you seriously as a scientist. But I'm glad Matt, my co-author, Matt LaPlante, convinced me we should go for it. Actually, that was his main role besides writing was to say, David,

• 10:03Chris Williamson?

  Go for it.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Just do it. Because don't worry what your colleagues will say, because some of them can be pretty brutal. So we put it in there. And, and it's seemingly been embraced by a lot of people. And now you hear it quite often.

• 10:14Chris Williamson?

  What's the technology that's coming? If that's what we've done so far, what did the next few years have in store for us?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Well, there's a fork in the road. I don't know when it's coming, but it's similar to the singularity with AI or AGI. We

• 10:32Speaker 01

  When we show, and it's a matter of when, not if, that aging is reversible in humans, because it works in all these other animals. It'll work in us. We're basically just slightly more intelligent monkeys, and it works fine in the monkeys. That's going to be a turning point, I believe, for humanity. There'll be a lot of people who say, all right, now let's get on board, let's invest, let's blow this out of the water. There's already a lot of billions of dollars put into this, but it's going to be big like AI when that happens. But these technologies, let's say it works in the eye, and now we can treat, perhaps cure, most types of blindness. Then we're going to, we're already doing this. I should, you know, I can't talk about too much, but we're already looking at other tissues, the liver, for example.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  And maybe there's joints and hearing that we can also repair. Ultimately, where this is going, obviously, is whole body reset. And we can do this in mice easily, in my lab now, and others have done this.

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  Every cell in a single organism.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Well, we don't have the technology with the viruses and the genes to reset every cell. And that's a limitation of getting the genes into every cell. We can't do that. You can, we can basically at best get it into half of the cells, but still a lot of them.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  We've taken a path that's a little different now. You know, I was saying, we've been doing this for a while, and the world doesn't really know what we're up to in my lab. I can reveal that over the last five years, we've made breakthroughs in turning it into a pill. That's the next big thing that'll come out of my lab is revealing that we can give a mouse, an old mouse, something orally. So they don't chew on the pill. We give it down their throat for three days a week for a month. And we see that they are rejuvenated in many ways, including not just their memory, but things like even their skin quality.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  What is, what's happening? What's the pill doing to them?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Well, that's a lot of work. We're still trying to figure that out, but we.

• 12:31Chris Williamson?

  So you know it works, but you don't necessarily know why or how it works.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Well, we actually literally don't know how the genes that are in the eye of humans now work, really. That's a big question in my lab is trying to answer, where is this backup copy of software?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  But we do know it works. That's the hard part. And then figuring out how it works will be important to make these drugs even better and more powerful and more potent and longer lasting. But what we do know is that the epigenome is involved in the pill, not just in the gene therapy, because we can disrupt that polishing of the CD or the reset of the software. There are genes called teths, which make proteins that strip away chemicals off DNA. These are key to the epigenome reset in embryos as well as in our bodies. And we can get rid of them or inhibit them with a chemical.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And we can feed those to the mice or give it to the cells. And we have some good evidence. I hope my students don't kill me for saying this publicly, but we do have good evidence that the pill, let's call it, the cocktail does work through this epigenetic thing. It's not just, oh, the cells are getting stressed out by the chemicals and they fight back and they live longer. It's not that. It's truly through this reset mechanism. And we can show that by getting rid of these tet enzymes that strip chemicals off the DNA. And without that mechanism, the cells don't get younger, even with the chemicals.

• 14:01Chris Williamson?

  Do you think there's going to be a realistic upper bound to human life?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Well, the question is when. I think that ultimately there is no upper limit to human life. I just visited a bonsai garden in Japan where the trees are a thousand years old, and that's not even halfway through their life. So biology doesn't have limits. It's just a question of what our genome encodes and our epigenome. But, you know, we have control this century over our own biology. We don't have to just be at the whim of what evolution and the Serengeti gave us. And I see an no upper limit. Doesn't mean I think you and I will be immortals. That's right now beyond our imagination. Well, it's definitely imagination, but it's beyond technology that I can think of. But I do think that some of us will have a chance to live decades longer

• 14:48Speaker 01

  and probably the first person to live to 150 is already alive.

• 14:54Chris Williamson?

  First person to live to 150 is already alive?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not the only one in my field saying that. It's now realistic. I mean, think about it this way, it's hard to imagine the future, right? But a kid born today is going to live into the 22nd century. And we can't even imagine what the world's going to be like 10 years from now. So the longer you live, actually, the longer you get to live.

• 15:17Chris Williamson?

  Surely if someone took age reversal pills for long enough, they'd just become a baby. Is that not the way it works?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Well, we made sure that wouldn't happen. That was one of the things that Wan Cheng.

• 15:26Chris Williamson?

  Benjamin's gotten everybody into it.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that was the trick.

• 15:29Chris Williamson?

  Embryonic death.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yamanaka, Professor Yamanaka, won the Nobel Prize for making cells go back to age zero and making them into stem cells. But that's not going to help us. We don't want to strip away the identity of all our cells. We die within it a couple of days. And in fact, if you do that to an animal, it tragically does die or gets cancer. So what took us the longest time from 2014 to 2017 was figuring out how to reverse aging, but not so much that it loses the identity of the cell or erases it. And my student Wan Cheng famously almost quit the project. He was doing his PhD, he was in his last year, and nothing was working. He was either having no effect on the human cells in the dish

• 16:15Speaker 01

  or they were becoming cancerous. And he said, David, I don't know how to stop it halfway. And we came up with one last experiment that, thank goodness it works, because we wouldn't be talking about it now. We tried a subset, just three of the Yamanaka genes, and leaving one of these Yamanaka genes out was key. Without that final gene, it's called Cmic, we call it M. Without M, the M gene, cells don't go back 100%. They go back about 75 and stop. And that was the breakthrough. The stop was really hard to find, but it's there.

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  Or else you just turn everything into stem cells.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, or cancer. It's even worse. Well, maybe not worse, but it's definitely bad. You're not going to live longer or cure blindness. But that was a breakthrough. And Wan Cheng sent me the pictures of the cells that were younger and said, Eureka, I think we've done it. And it was a remarkable thing to witness.

• 17:10Chris Williamson?

  What do you think most longevity experts secretly believe, but can't prove or won't say publicly at the moment?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Gosh, that's a good question. I was going to say most of them secretly think that I hyped this stuff way, way more than I should, which is, again, not a fair thing, because my lab is eight years ahead of what we've published. But I think most aging researchers, I can say for a fact, behind the scenes, say this is going to be much bigger and more powerful than we expected. I've been told by some of my colleagues, don't say that number 150. It makes us look bad. You know, and I'll say, well, do you believe in it? Yeah, but we can't say that because we're scientists and we'll lose credibility. So, yeah, I think a lot of the scientists are very cautious by nature, by the profession. I'm considered an outlier, speaking my mind and what I believe in.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  But most scientists don't, because it's not something scientists typically do.

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  Why is it that you're seen as an outsider? Are you throwing more caution to the wind than other people? Is it that their criteria for evidence is different to yours? Is it that your lab has got access to information that other people don't?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Well, there's a few reasons. It's definitely that my lab has information that nobody else knows. And that's been difficult my whole career, knowing that something's true, but it's not published yet. So in the minds of my colleagues, it doesn't exist yet. And in fact, my book came out, in some cases, years before we published the work. So the public knew my lab's work before other colleagues had seen it. That's also rare. Another reason why I'm a bit of an outsider is I'm not doing this to be a scientist. I'm doing this because I'm on a mission and my life is irrelevant. I would literally die to achieve this mission. And so, you know, if I get criticized or if I speak my mind, I really don't care.

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  What's the mission?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  To impact in a positive way as many lives as possible. This was since I was four years old. My grandmother gave that mission to me because she lived through World War II and the aftermath in Europe. And she told me the horrific things that humans did and can do. And she was always saying, we can do better as a species. And I feel like I want to die knowing that I've done the most for humanity that I could possibly do. And if it upsets a few people, I don't care.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

  I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes, the easier that you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food sourced ingredients in a single daily drink. And that's why I've been taking it every single morning for nearly five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 Next Gen, backed by four clinical trials. And those trials, it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months, and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in people who already eat well. Plus, if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they will give you

• 20:27Chris Williamson?

  all of your money back. Right now, you can get 20% off a welcome kit and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. Longevity is a huge field, right? It includes everything. When you think about all of the different types of interventions that people can do, how do you chunk them into groups? Sort of what are the buckets that people should be thinking about is contributing to their lifespan?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I talk about this on my YouTube as well. So there's a lot of detail on there now, and I've relaunched it.

• 21:00Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations. Welcome back into the fray. I'm glad that you've stopped doing the wasteful work in your lab and gone into the serious work of YouTube videos.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was working on solving aging. And now that the clinical trials have started, I'm back to more important, more important things. But yeah, so what we talk about on the podcast is what are the major things that people can do to slow down aging and even reverse aspects of it?

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  But if we've got this technology coming soon, you're eight years ahead, everybody is doing the longevity escape velocity bet, right? For every day that I live, there's more days that I can hopefully live. So in the interim, those are the buckets, right? That's the stuff that people need to focus on now.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  For sure. I think anyone that doesn't focus on their longevity might miss the boat. It'd be tragic if you died a few days before, you know, some of these technologies came out. And this is, I'm not worried about you killing over any time soon. You're very fit. But you know, your parents, your grandparents, think about them. So try to encourage them to live the healthy lifestyle that we're going to discuss now. The buckets are lifestyle. So within that, there's the obvious things that we can talk about, which is what you eat, how you move, how you rest, your stress, these kinds of things. That's what you can do. And you should do it on a daily basis. It's what I do. Then there's drugs, which

• 22:18Speaker 01

  some of which may work. So that's metformin, rapamycin, some senolytics, and probably GLP-1 receptor agonists would fall into that bucket. And then there's supplements, which is the Wild West. There's a lot of things said about them. I believe in a few of them, based on a lot of animal research and some human data. Those are the three main things that you should do in your daily life to maximize your chance of getting these medicines.

• 22:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay, lifestyle stuff. Last time that we were talking, it was all about calorie restriction and primarily fasting as a route toward calorie restriction. How should people eat if they want to live as long as possible now with your 2026 data?

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Well, actually, what I've been saying, actually, on my podcast for now, what, four years, it hasn't changed. And my book, Lifespan, which came out, we were talking about when we first met in 2019, it, nothing in that book I've had to revise. It's all consistent.

• 23:16Chris Williamson?

  So there's no retractions from the book in 2019?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  No, no. And my lab's never retracted anything. And at this point, never been proven wrong, which is a blessing. And I knock on touch on wood. But that's good news, which means that the things that I've said before, people can go back and learn still. If this is the first time you're seeing me, you know, let's, let's start. So the, the main things about fasting are, we know from animals and some human data, but mostly from animals, that if you restrict how often you eat, and to some extent, how much you eat, you get longevity benefits. And we can talk about protein ratio to carbs to fats. That's also a whole big debate, as you know. But generally, I like to eat one meal a day, maybe two if

• 24:02Speaker 01

  I'm being social, but not three. I think three meals a day plus snacks is marketing. Breakfast being the most important meal of the day was General Mills, I believe, one of those companies, Kellogg's perhaps. But this is, you know, it's all marketing. Humans are not built to eat that consistently. I don't think cavemen were sitting around eating their big breakfast, saying, what are we going to eat for lunch? I think, you know, maybe if they just killed a mammoth, but generally they were pretty hungry a lot of the time. And our bodies have adapted to that. We're not meant to always be satisfied. And so I try to be hungry. And if I gain a little bit of weight, sometimes I travel and I eat well. And Serena and I, we do sometimes love to eat. I'll come home from travel and

• 24:47Speaker 01

  just, I won't eat for three days. Sometimes two weeks, I can go without food. It's not a big deal for me.

• 24:51Chris Williamson?

  Two weeks without food?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. I might munch on a, on a piece of celery or something, but that's not really nutrition. I will drink a lot. I'll drink a lot of low calorie, zero calorie drinks, a lot of tea, that kind of stuff. But I can go without food for two weeks. It feels great. After the first three days, I'm over the hunger feeling. I can see on my monitor, which I've got one on here.

• 25:15Chris Williamson?

  CGM?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  The CGM. Yep. I can see the great impact it's had, having on my body. I can monitor it on my rings. I do blood tests, which is important. You don't want to just guess what's working, what isn't. But yeah, I know two weeks sounds like a lot, but

• 25:30Chris Williamson?

  It is a lot. It doesn't sound like a lot. It is a lot.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  It is a lot. And I'm a regular guy. I, I'm not like some people that spend millions of dollars on their body and, and measure everything. I'm kind of lazy. I, I don't like being hungry. I like food. I like to snack. I like to stay up late. I'm a typical hedonist, if you let me go. And actually, up until a year ago, I actually hadn't fasted more than 24 hours. I just couldn't do it. This is painful. And I'm stressed. So if I'm stressed, I'm going to eat. But what I've learned over this past year is I can go beyond 24 hours. And once I'm over three days, something kicks in. Actually, we know molecularly, there's something called chaperone mediated autophagy or CMA, which is the deep cleanse

• 26:14Speaker 01

  of these misfolded and modified proteins that you want to get rid of for aging or slowing aging. And after those three days, you know, I start to feel amazing. My mind clears. I don't feel bloated at all. I don't even have to go to the toilet that often, except for all the tea. But you know what I mean? And yeah, I feel energized. And I'm measuring myself. So I'm making sure I'm not overdoing it. This is not for everybody. If you're skinny and you've got barely any fat, or you're elderly, it's not for you. But for me, I gain weight and muscle pretty easily. I can fluctuate. And so I watch my weight come down. I've got a scale that measures my weight. It's, I don't know if I can measure, say

• 26:55Speaker 01

  the name, or if it's forbidden, but I do like the Withings scale because it

• 27:00Chris Williamson?

  Smart Scale links to the phone.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  It would get you composition as well, if you hold the handle.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I've had one since 2013. So I've got all this data on my body weight and composition, which is awesome. And I'm trying to maintain that at the optimal level over these last 30 years.

• 27:14Chris Williamson?

  This two weeks thing is blowing my mind. What are you running on after 10 days? Why is malnutrition, are you supplementing with, with vitamins and stuff so that you don't get scurvy? Like, why are you not dropping dead?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  I am. I'm glad you said that, Chris, because it's important to say, I'm a scientist about this. I'm not just willy nilly giving up everything.

• 27:32Chris Williamson?

  Celery and green tea, surviving for two weeks, just bro scienceing it.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Well, no, I'm not doing that. I, the reason I'm using my hands is I travel and at home, I have a little carry pack with vitamins, supplements, and medicines that I've been using and know very well what I need. Every morning, it's a symphony of supplements and medicines. Actually, I know what my body needs. I know what, what works. So I do that. So that's not, not anybody can do that. So it's really important. If you do fast for long periods, make sure you, enough hydration, very important. We know that. But also, I'm making sure that I'm not deficient in any minerals or vitamins. And so I'm taking in things like vitamin B, vitamin C as well, and some nutrients that I know I can become deficient in.

• 28:17Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's happening inside of your body after, from day four until in the day 14? What's, what's going on?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Well, we know, actually, not from measuring me, but we know from many years of study, what happens to the human body. The first 24 hours, you're going to use up a lot of the, the sugar and then the glycogen in your liver. What I like to think is, my liver knows how to steady my glucose and give me the right amount of glucose, far more than my mouth does. My liver's smarter than my eyes and my mouth. And anyone that's fasted knows that your blood sugar, if you're eating is like this, and you go, oh, energy, oh, brain fog, energy, brain fog, oh, I'm sleepy in the afternoon. That's our normal life. If you're fasting, your liver just puts out just the right amount of ketones for your

• 29:06Speaker 01

  brain. Or you can drink some, some ketone drinks. Or it's making glucose or both. Your brain is, loves ketones. And if you do it too long, you will start to lose muscle. So I'm working out more than I do normally, to make sure I don't lose any weight. And so that scale will tell me if I'm losing lean mass, which I don't want to do. And I make sure that I don't lose it.

• 29:31Chris Williamson?

  Is there not a concern to do with your gut? Is there not, is that, does there not need to be transit through the digestive tract? I don't know what happens if nothing passes through your stomach for two weeks.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I can tell you, your stool changes. There's very

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  I imagine it does. It turns fucking invisible.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  There's phantom poo, as it's called.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  A bunch of gas coming out. So yeah, that's what I meant. I'm not on the, in the bathroom as often. It's actually much more productive, unless you're productive on the bathroom.

• 29:59Chris Williamson?

  I do, I do find that the biggest obstacle to my productivity is the bathroom, actually.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Are you sure you're not tweeting way down there? But yeah, your microbiome, I think, and this is not proven by any means, but I feel like, just like your body, it helps to give your microbiome a shakeup, a bit of hormesis, which is a little bit of stress that's good for you. And I would love to do an experiment on myself as well, measure before, during and after, and see what happens to my microbiome.

• 30:32Chris Williamson?

  Go flora and stuff like that. Well, I mean, I know that some of the proposed positive effects for GLPs include slowing motility through the gut, which actually helps with things like SIBO or candida or H. pylori, because the pace, this is why everybody, every bro-lifter that's listening to this, you, you at some point in your life have glanced off the bottom of SIBO or maybe have it right now, because just the sheer volume of food that you're putting through yourself all the time, grazing, high protein, high starch, like, that's one of the proposed mechanisms, I think, that helps from GLPs. And I don't know, that's what, what I was interested, maybe creating this very, I was gonna say sterile environment, it's not, it's barren, this completely vacant environment for two weeks.

• 31:17Chris Williamson?

  I have no idea what that, does it, if you had a overgrowth, does it kill it all because it's not being fed? Does it allow it to create castles and cathedrals and, you know, armor itself?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know the answer to that. I do know that there's some really interesting things in bile that comes out more when you're fasted. One of the components is a type of colic acid, which is the black, black stuff that goes into your microbiome. And your microbiome converts that into a molecule that goes back into your bloodstream and turns on a longevity gene that we've been working on. It actually binds to the protein and makes the protein more active. It's called CERT1. If anyone's read my book, they know what CERT1 is. CERT1 regulates the epigenome, slows down the changes to the software. And so, long story short, it's, it's at least plausible, and there's a nature

• 32:11Speaker 01

  paper on this from another group that I reviewed, that when you're fasting, your microbiome is more actively converting bile into healthy molecules, as well as short chain fatty acids. There's a lot of literature on that. And these molecules go into your body and they signal adversity. And you know that I like adversity. Adversity is good for your health. There's abundance and adversity mode. They're both good, but you don't want to stay in one or the other. You'll, you'll accelerate your aging and you'll, you'll die. So you want to cycle between adversity and abundance and your microbes help you get through that.

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  What would you say, let's say that someone finds this quite seductive, what would be a good start? A one day fast, a three day fast? And what, what should they do? What would be a rough protocol to follow without having to be a conductor of supplements?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, if, if you're, if you've never fasted and you just wake up and you eat a normal breakfast, lunch, dinner, either you're obese or you exercise a lot, because that's gonna put on weight. But if you are willing to try, I would suggest skipping one meal and replacing it with a lot of liquids. So for me, I don't mind skipping breakfast. Not everybody wants to do that because they work out and they feel like they need some food. So you can, instead, you can skip dinner. I would just have a very early dinner. What I was doing for many years, probably 30 years of my life, was trying not to eat anything

• 33:46Speaker 01

  until late lunch. And you, you will initially feel hungry. This is the thing, don't give up, because it takes a few days for your body to get used to not having the food. It'll be screaming at your brain, I'm so hungry, I'm gonna die if I don't eat this bacon and eggs. But get, get through it. And actually, after two weeks, it'll become really weird to eat food in the morning or at night. Your body gets used to it, your brain gets used to it, but it does take a while. And the cheat code is fill your stomach with lots of liquids, not sugary drinks, not a lot of, of calories, zero if you can, or just a little bit. I do have a little bit of calories in the morning because it's good with my

• 34:27Speaker 01

  supplements, but a lot of water, so a low calorie drink like this, or water, tea, black tea, coffee is very good. They're both good. Actually, tea and coffee are both very good for you because they contain other molecules like polyphenols that, again, can activate these enzymes that protect us.

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

  Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out, there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us, become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline. They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves. Timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. This isn't just theory. In clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks, along with improvements in their overall energy. I've been using it for over two years, since my doctor recommended it to me way before I partnered with Timeline. And eat your heart out, Martin Shkreli, because

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  they've just dropped the price and it now starts at $99. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee, plus free shipping in the US, plus they ship internationally. And right now, you can get that $99 price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below. Heading to timeline.com/ModernWisdom, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's timeline.com/ModernWisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Have we seen any data that shows calorie restriction increases lifespan in humans? I know that this exists in rodents.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  A study that was sent, was it Macaques or something? And that didn't actually work because it was a two decade study. And the first version of the study, it turned out that they hadn't fed them the same diet and split it in half. They'd fed one of them a junk food diet and the other one had been given a healthy one. Then they ran it back and it seemed like the data was mixed there. What's the evidence about calorie restriction for longevity in humans? Is there any?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  No. There's a lot of anecdotal and historical evidence that fasting is good for you. And there have been some short-term studies over a couple of years. There was the calorie study that showed that you could improve a lot of health biomarkers in humans over that time, that had lasting effects, including on the epigenome. But nobody's really done a prospective study with placebo. It's very hard to do that, or even controls. So there's no proof, and I don't think anytime soon there'll be proof. But who wants to wait another 100 years till that happens? You can't. You've got to at least go based on the evidence. And in animals, it's incontrovertible that, that if you do it with nutrition, not just starving, it's very good for you. And that's why I do it. I would say with the

• 37:12Speaker 01

  monkey study, I know it very well because the two labs that disagreed about this, one is one of my best friends and the other one is my trainee. And they were-

• 37:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, you're like Switzerland in between the two of them.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't really get involved, but I did bring them together and they, they came to the conclusion that, yes, it did extend lifespan. It depended on the veterinary care and other, other environmental things. The University of Wisconsin, where the other lab is, Rosalind Anderson is the professor that I originally trained, what is it, 20 years ago? She runs the study now and her monkeys lived longer. And they also definitely incontrovertible evidence that they had less cancer and I think heart disease, but definitely overall disease burden in these monkeys was lower. And they lived slightly

• 38:05Speaker 01

  longer. But even if they didn't live longer, I would say still, look at the data on the diseases. I mean, who wants to get cancer and heart disease in their 60s and 70s?

• 38:15Chris Williamson?

  Why would high calorie turnover increase your likelihood of cancer and heart disease?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Well, there's a few different theories. The one that I like the best, that's the simplest, is that when your body is in a state of perceived adversity and running, building muscle, lifting weights, and hunger are signs of adversity. Also, eating plants that are stressed is a sign to your body that your food might run out. This has put your body in adversity mode. And this enzyme that I mentioned earlier called CERT1, which protects the epigenome, it responds to hunger and exercise. There's a molecule called NAD that a lot of your listeners and viewers would know about. This enzyme responds to NAD levels. But long story short is, when you're in adversity mode, your body switches from growth and reproduction into survival mode. And at least if you do that for some

• 39:07Speaker 01

  of your day or some of your week, you'll get some protection against the ravages of aging, epigenetic changes, DNA damage, all of these things that we know contribute to aging.

• 39:19Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that there would be a marked difference between somebody who restricted their calories by 30% over a year, let's say, and somebody who restricted their calories by 30% with big breaks in food? Calorie restriction versus calorie restriction through fasting, do you think that those two people would have different kinds of outcomes?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Hmm. So are that one is eating more than the other?

• 39:42Chris Williamson?

  No, they're both eating the same amount of calories.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Isocaloric.

• 39:45Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that, let's say that somebody has a hundred calories an hour for eighteen hours of the day. And another person has one meal that's eighteen hundred calories per day.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Um, there's a lot of evidence that eating within the time window is the one that's much healthier. Um, the friend that I mentioned earlier, Rafa, Rafael de Cabo down at the NIH here in the US. What he did, again in mice, but I think there's a lot of evidence that it would translate to humans. He gave mice roughly the same amount of calories, but he gave it to them all day and they had to gobble it all down quickly. It didn't matter what they were eating. It was different amounts of protein, carbohydrate fat. He was hoping to find the optimal diet, but he found that the group that ate within that window lived substantially longer than the ones that ate continuously.

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  I saw you quote tweet something about protein being overhyped. The protein maxing movement. What's your position on that?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, protein is good. I'm not against protein at all. I eat a lot of protein myself, actually, mostly from plants for reasons that I'll get to. But the, this die hard, be a carnivore, forget about the green stuff is, is definitely not consistent with the science of longevity. It's consistent with the science of bodybuilding and it definitely.

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  Which of course, as we know, is a superior science.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:07Chris Williamson?

  So the science of longevity.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, I, as much as it doesn't look like it, I really like bodybuilding over other exercise. I'm just busy. I used to work out a lot. I love bodybuilding and protein is essential for building muscle, no question. Okay. And you can get a lot of protein from protein supplements and meat. Where I think it's been overhyped is we know that plants are essential for providing polyphenols. And having a lack of branched-chain amino acids specifically is also very good for health. A lot of data on that, especially in animals, but some in humans. So branched-chain amino acids, some people listening will know what they are.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Valine, isoleucine, leucine, these are three of the twenty amino acids that are found in more abundance in animals than in plants. And when you give animals a lot of these branched-chain amino acids, uh, they live shorter than if you give them less. And this has been shown in short-term studies in humans. If you're a strict protein

• 42:07Speaker 01

  that has a lot of branched-chain amino acids in humans, they get better metabolically. But I'm not saying you can't eat meat or you can't eat protein. What I'm saying is just doing one or the other is not really the best way to live. I think the best way is to pulse it. Okay. So if you're working out, you want to build muscle. Yeah, you can eat, you can eat meat. I eat meat occasionally. It's not a problem. But you want to have a period of your life or your, let's say your day or your week where you're not eating meat or you're just not eating. Um, and that puts your body at least part of the time in this adversity mode.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  Should you be doing both? Let's say that somebody's doing OMAD or sixteen eight or some sort of fasting protocol. Would you still be looking to pulse protein intake as well separately to that?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, yes, yeah, the answer.

• 42:57Chris Williamson?

  Maybe go one day a week without protein as well?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Well, without protein, I don't think you'll live, right? You need some protein, but you're, you mean huge amounts of protein or you mean meat?

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  I mean, like you're saying that there's time for you to focus on protein and then there's time not to. You should be fasting. I'm wondering whether you should be fasting from protein from a macronutrient standpoint as well, in your opinion.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I don't try to fast from protein. I try to fast from a lot of calories and I also try to fast from a lot of animal protein, which has these branched-chain amino acids. And we know the molecular mechanisms, there's mTOR, which anyone who follows longevity will know about this mTOR. And if you're eating a ton of meat every meal or every, every day, uh, your mTOR is going to be active. And mTOR's role is to help cells divide, grow, build muscle. Great. That's what you want to do when you're young. You want to build muscle. You want to look good. You want to be strong. Even if you're older and you have sarcopenia, mTOR is good. But we know that animals that have active mTOR live shorter than those that have less active mTOR.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  So how do you get the benefits of both? Well, that's what I'm saying is have mTOR switched down. Plant protein mainly, don't eat a lot. mTOR will help you when it's switched off. But you can rev it up when you want to build muscle or, or run a marathon or something like that. You don't always have to be in one state or the other.

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Okay. Talking about exercise, has your exercise philosophy changed? What is the best exercise protocol for longevity in your opinion?

• 44:30Speaker 01

  No, it hasn't changed a lot. It's, I just keep seeing studies that, that say the same thing over and over again. And then people argue about the latest one. We know that the best health is a combination of weightlifting. Muscle is good for hormones. It's good for not breaking bones when you get older.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Balance is important. And then the other one is aerobic. VO2 max, we know VO2 max is correlated with very long life. Um, and so you do need to lose your breath, minimum three times a week, ten minutes. It's rare that people talk about sex as a, a way to exercise. I see your eyes bulging.

• 45:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm just waiting to see where you're gonna go.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Well, I was looking at, at a, at a tweet the other day, uh, at an X, whatever we call them now. And it was saying, oh, I think, I won't say who it was, but they said, oh, you can lose your breath ten times for ten minutes, three times a week by doing XYZ. And I thought, well, no one ever mentioned sex. So if you have an active sex life, count that as part of your daily longevity routine or your weekly longevity routine.

• 45:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  But also.

• 45:40Chris Williamson?

  Sufficiently vigorous sex can be.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  If you can go for ten minutes vigorously, that's a good start for longevity.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh. There's sometimes restrictors for that, um, that aren't simply cardiovascular, but go on.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Well, you can supplement it with, um, you know, just running on a treadmill, going outside, rowing, sport, all of this stuff, just as long as the, the way to know if you're exercising enough to build up your VO2 max is you shouldn't be able to carry out a conversation easily like this. You're panting. Uh, that's my judge. I need to do a lot more of it. I, these days I tend to do a lot of my exercise aerobically, running to catch a plane. I admit that I'm not the perfect role model for exercise. But I do know what the science says, and that is the combination of the, the weights, the balance and the aerobics.

• 46:29Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh. What about zone two? You haven't mentioned low and slow.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Well, if you can't do fast and quick and hit, uh, low and slow is fine. Walk, move, get up. Uh, I'm, I'm always walking around my office. I have a standing desk. I rarely sit down. So that kind of exercise is very good, certainly for balance, um, overall metabolism. So yeah, I, I try not to sit at all. Um, I'm sitting now, but I rarely sit during the day. It's one of the things people find weird about me. They come to my office and I'm, I'm, I'm pacing, I'm twitching, I'm often chewing gum.

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  That's not the same as zone two though, right?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  No, no, need to do a little bit more than that. Um, what I like to do is a sport. You know, tennis could get you there. I do a lot of gardening, so I'm carrying stuff.

• 47:19Chris Williamson?

  Gardening is a sport?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my sport, actually. It's my big hobby.

• 47:23Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Lifting a lot of heavy plants and building walls and hammering and drilling and all that stuff. Yeah, a little bit, you know, kayaking is something that I like is good. I'm not out of breath, but I'm out, you know, I'm getting a good workout.

• 47:39Chris Williamson?

  Sleep and recovery and rest. What?

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Chris Williamson?

  What is the most up-to-date data saying around that from a longevity?

• 47:47Speaker 01

  It's still the same. Um, it's, you do need to watch your sleep. If you're not getting quality sleep or sleeping for that long, it's going to affect your metabolism. Figure out how much sleep your body needs at a minimum. You can do that using some of these rings. It's very good for that. Some people need eight hours, some people need seven hours. Typically, if you're younger, you need more. The good thing about getting older is you need less typically. But it's also about quality. Um, I can get away with five hours sleep and my HRV is still in the eighties, nineties. Because I'm getting deep sleep. I'm not drinking caffeine late in the afternoon. I practice as best I can, relaxation, meditation, practices, breathing. And that gets me to sleep and into REM and deep sleep pretty quickly.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  I also take a supplement that my partner Serena makes. And, um, it's got L-theanine and some other stuff that also I know from my own experiments gets me into deep sleep quickly. And so my efficiency is typically according to these rings in the nineties, ninety percent, sometimes close to a hundred. And then I can get away with less, um, which is nice because I travel a lot.

• 48:55Chris Williamson?

  I think that's the big learning that everybody who starts using a wearable takes away from it, which is you're sleeping way less than you think you are. Like, well, you know, I was in bed for eight hours. It's like, no. You thought that you went to bed eleven, but it was actually sort of eleven thirty and you were reading or watching TV until nearly twelve and then your actual efficiency was maybe eighty-five percent. So that seven hours has turned into five forty-five or six or something. And yeah, it's stark. I've got maybe fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand nights on Woot tracked, right, over the years. And it's, you're just always sleeping less than you think you are. Like, if you don't have money to buy a wearable, just the rule is you're sleeping less than you think you are. That's it.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. And especially if you're, you're eating late, drinking coffee or tea late, uh, or matcha. Caffeine and alcohol are big ones for bad sleep, um, not just stress. Having a hot room or too many blankets is another mistake that a lot of people make.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  You can get those beds that cool.

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  Eight sleep, eight sleep is, anyone that's not using an eight sleep, it's medieval. I understand they're expensive, but there's no one that I've got to do. Yeah, they're a partner on the show or whatever, but like this has got nothing to do with it. Every single person that I've got to try it can't believe that what life was like before they had a, a cooled. And there's other cheaper versions out there. I'm sure eight sleeps the best, but there's, there's other ones that you can get. Trying to cool your bed from outside of your bed, when the job of your bed is to keep the temperature in the bed the same is kind of a little bit like fighting against the tide.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, exactly. And you should wake up every morning feeling totally rested, excited about the day. If you're waking up and like, oh, I need a coffee. Oh, I need a shower. You're probably not getting the sleep that you need.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. You mentioned stress as well as kind of the fourth pillar when it comes to lifestyle. What does that look like? How do you, how do you come to think about stress as a longevity doctor?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you can measure cortisol, for example, um, or DHEA cortisol levels. We're all stressed, you know, the, the old days of sitting around a campfire are not really. There anymore. We're driving to work. We're worried about income. And so what we want to do is learn to to deal with the daily stress. The world is changing faster than ever. So what what I've learned personally is really not to let worries of life get me down. I try not to focus on them. I have a happy place, which is an orchard on Cape Cod. And my mind, when it's stressing out and I feel my body tense up, I take myself there.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  I breathe. I'm amongst the trees. If it gets really bad, I go there physically and do some work. But yeah, it's it's all about learning not to ruminate. And a lot of us A types, I'm sure you in your success are like that. What did I do wrong? I could do that better. I'm worried about tomorrow. I'm worried about next week. I'm worried about 10 years. Don't do that. It took me 50 years of my life to figure out, don't do that and how not to do that.

• 52:06Chris Williamson?

  How do you stop worrying?

• 52:08Speaker 01

  You have to train yourself. It's like, don't be an idiot. Stop thinking about it. It's not going to kill you if you distract yourself with something else. Overthinking something is is a real

• 52:21Speaker 01

  issue for modern life. And so I don't do that anymore. If I find myself overthinking, I'll just say, I'll think about it later, put it off to the side. And I used to be the kind of guy that I had to text back immediately and email back immediately. Put it aside, I'll get to it.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

  I think a lot of people are riven by

• 52:40Chris Williamson?

  the overthinking intrusions that they just can't get their brain to focus on what's in front of them. There's always this concern. There's always this situation that could be a little bit worse, this thing that could make life a little bit harder that's coming down next. And yeah, you're kind of being puppeted by these ghosts of the future that haven't yet come about.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the thing. What you realize when you get to my age, I'm now 57, is that it's never as bad as you think. And what I do now is I depend on myself. I know that these big problems in my life, and I've had big ones, deaths and issues.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  You get through it. You trust yourself, you know. You know, maybe when you're a teenager and you're in your twenties, you don't know that you can get through these things. I'm at an age where I know I'm not going to die. I'm going to get through it. It's going to be okay. If I have a problem, I'll solve it.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  The sooner you can realize that, that you are capable of anything, if you put your mind to it, then you shouldn't stress about problems that come up.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body. And that is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, kidney function, and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test 20 markers. Function runs over 160. It's huge. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives inside of a simple dashboard. So you track trends over time, make sure you're moving in the right direction. And this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is $365 per year. Just $1 a day to actually know what's happening inside of your body.

• 54:27Chris Williamson?

  And right now you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. That's functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. Okay, let's talk about your current drugs stack. What are you taking? How's your daily stack changed versus what you were doing when you wrote the book?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  It hasn't changed. That's the amazing thing. I thought I'd have to change things depending on the science, but the science has held up. So in the morning, and if you go to page, what is it, 304 of lifespan, it's still still there. And I still do that. Resveratrol, it's been back and forth, controversial. It's not controversial in scientific circles. There's a few naysayers, but they make a living out of it. Resveratrol is from plants that are stressed and they activate certain one, this resetter of and slower of the epigenome noise. So I've been taking about a teaspoon, call it a gram of resveratrol every morning, almost every morning for the last, gee, probably 20 years. Doing all right. It seems to help in clinical trials.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  It's been tested in a number of clinical trials. I mix it with either a little bit of olive oil. That's my calories. Or Greek yogurt or vegan yogurt. And it's been good to me. I also take that with NMN, which is an NAD supplement. It's a precursor. We studied both in my lab. And we just resubmitted a paper. This is something I can reveal. We just resubmitted a paper to be published that showed that NMN is very good for the health of old mice and can extend the lifespan of mice, particularly females. And so that'll come out probably.

• 56:15Chris Williamson?

  Resubmitted?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we we had reviewers' comments, criticisms, spent another year working on it to please them and send it back. We'll see what they say.

• 56:25Chris Williamson?

  What was the controversy? Because I know since the last time we spoke, there's been some furor around resveratrol, some more furor around NAD, maybe NMN as well.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:36Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain what happened?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. These are all typhoons in a teacup or whatever it is. I can't stop drinking your drinks. Very good.

• 56:45Chris Williamson?

  Good. That's all I needed.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  The, so let's start with resveratrol. I try not to bore everybody. Certain one is an enzyme. I'll use my hands. It's an enzyme that carries out reactions that stabilizes the epigenome so it doesn't decay. So think of it as stopping the corruption of the software. More certain one is better. So there are two ways to activate certain one

• 57:08Speaker 01

  with with a pill rather than exercise and dieting. And if you do all of them, I think it's the best. So you can either take resveratrol and that we showed in 2003, a long time ago, I'm old, activates certain one directly. So the enzyme is removing chemicals from the epigenome and making it stable. And it can do it slowly. You know what a Pac-Man is? You're old enough. So it's chewing away the chemicals, stabilizing things faster, the better. Whereas virtual, we know binds physically to the enzyme and now makes it chomp faster. Okay. The controversy that came up was that Pfizer, a team at Pfizer,

• 57:49Speaker 01

  not the whole company, just a group in the company, put out a paper in 2010 that said, whereas virtual doesn't do this. It it must be an artifact. It's doing something else that makes it look like this. So we then spent three years testing that and found exactly how it works to the atomic level. We could even block it by changing an amino acid in this protein. And we actually have a study now that we've made a mouse that has this block. And resveratrol doesn't make the mouse healthier anymore. It doesn't live longer. So that's as good as evidence that you could get that we were right in the first place and Pfizer was wrong. And we've put out papers since and others have shown that we were right. So no controversy.

• 58:32Chris Williamson?

  Going head to head with Pfizer is no small task.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  It was brutal. That was one of the hardest things in my life because I remember trying to trying to defend myself in public. It was on NBC. And I said, I'm not sure what Pfizer is doing, but our chemicals don't kill mice and they activate the enzyme. And the comments were brutal. Sinclair thinks he's better than Pfizer. Pfizer knows what they're doing.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  I will say that I don't have ill will towards those scientists because it's the job of scientists to challenge theories.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  What I do have a problem with is the the people who still say it's wrong and are trying, you know, just to get at me.

• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  What's the remnant? If you've put something out which pushes back against Pfizer, what is the remnant argument?

• 59:21Speaker 01

  There isn't one. The the problem is that the what I've gotten to see in my career over 30 years is the media loves the negative story. But the redemption story isn't as popular. So it's never come out in these journals like Nature. They put out the negative story, but they never did the, oh, we were, that was wrong. So it's just a matter of reporting. But in scientific circles, everyone's read our science paper from 2013 and it's not debated.

• 59:52Chris Williamson?

  That's put into that the evidence is put to rest in your opinion?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's at the atomic level unless you want to complain about atomic theory, you know, we're done here.

• 1:00:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay, and what happened with NAD NMN?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  So yeah, the, let's bring everyone up to speed on what NAD is. So certain one also can be activated by giving it fuel, which is NAD. So one chomps with NAD.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  And in fact, this is not often known. The chemical that it takes off the epigenome structures is donated to NAD. So without NAD, you can't take the chemicals off. And more levels of NAD make it work faster and better. And if you give it to cells, you see more stable and healthier cells.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  There was dogma that NAD levels went down with aging and that boosting it back up was healthy. So the second part is true. We have shown in cells, in animals, and even in humans for the last, and by we, I mean the field, not just my lab, that raising NAD levels above normal baseline is very good for humans. Okay, I can give you examples. Shelley Basin, you could look up in PubMed, he's got a couple of really good papers giving NMN, which is the precursor to NAD, to people that are either obese or have pre-diabetes or even super fit ones. Maybe the super fit isn't published yet, but he's done the work

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  and reported about it. You see improvements from lipids, a whole bunch of lipids, cholesterol, blood pressure, body weight. So raising NAD, I think most people would would say that it's good for humans and animals. Okay. And again, we're going to publish that it's good for longevity too. Where the debate that came up, I think you're talking about the one that was maybe a few months ago. Somebody showed that human blood levels in white blood cells, the white blood cells don't have less NAD as you get older. So some people who love to make a living of being naysayers, especially towards my career, jumped on that and said, the whole theory is wrong. If white blood cell NAD levels

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  don't go down with aging, then the whole theory must be incorrect, which is, as you can tell, is complete BS. In fact, we've known for probably a decade that that was true. And it doesn't affect the theory. We know that raising NAD levels in humans either by exercise or by supplementation is good for you. So it was crazy to say the whole theory fell apart. It was just a way to get clicks, I think.

• 1:02:26Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What's the status? I'd looked at something to do with it was a pharmaceutical, then it was a supplement, and now I don't know what the level of access is with NAD and stuff at the moment. How's that classified?

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or just a final thought, there is a really good study that showed that people who have lower levels of NAD in their muscle, I think it was not as metabolically active as those that have higher levels and or they had metabolic syndrome. Anyway, we could check it out, but but there is some good correlations between NAD levels and age-related conditions. Want to be accurate. All right. So the FDA thing. Basically, it was that there's a rule in the US that if any molecule, whether it's natural or synthetic, goes into a human clinical trial, before it's on the market, people can't put it on the market

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  because then it negates the reason to do a clinical trial. And we need clinical trials to know if things work. Makes sense. The law makes sense. Where things got crazy was a company that I started called Metrobiotech started a clinical trial with NMN. And a little later, people started putting NMN on the market. And I've always said publicly, you can read it, fine, let's do both. Let's do the clinical trials, make a drug, it's going to be pure, it's going to be tested, and there'll be supplements that are less rigorously produced for people that are not sick. But for the sick ones who have diabetes or need a drug, we'll have that. Happy world. The legal team at Metrobiotech made a decision

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  without my approval, actually with my disapproval, to write a letter to the FDA pointing out that it that there was this law that they shouldn't have simultaneously sales and clinical trials. I objected. The FDA initially said you shouldn't be selling NMN on the market in the US according to that law, though they didn't enforce it. And then it was recently reversed.

• 1:04:36Chris Williamson?

  So now it is enforced?

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  It no, I mean, the opposite. The FDA, I believe, says it's okay to have NMN on sale now.

• 1:04:44Chris Williamson?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  There was a court case that I think resolved that.

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  Are you still taking the baby aspirin?

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am. That's controversial, too.

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  One baby aspirin a day?

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, eighty one milligrams, though eighty one is is only because a trial did eighty one. It's not magical.

• 1:05:01Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  But yeah, you could take a hundred probably. But talk to your doctor. Do you want to talk about aspirin in detail?

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Sure.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  The reason for the controversy is if you dig into it, and you know, I do this because it's my living. Most people don't have time. The American Medical Association weighed the risk of having stomach bleeding and other complications versus lowering the amount of risk of cardiovascular events, and came to the conclusion that looking across everybody, it doesn't make sense. But I'm totally against the word everybody when it comes to health. Everybody's different. So I believe in precision medicine. And there's a group of people, for example, that where it does make sense to take baby aspirin. It's

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  been shown that there can be benefits. And it's those people, just as an example, who have high levels of lipoprotein A, LP little a. I'm one of them. So I continue to take baby aspirin. But these are decisions to make with your physician.

• 1:06:07Chris Williamson?

  What else? Because I can't work out whether we call resveratrol a supplement or a drug or a pharmaceutical. I'm sure you can get it in pharma grade, but what else from the not foods consumption stack are you taking? Because aspirin would definitely be in the sort of meds category, I suppose. What have we missed off?

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Well, there's a whole website devoted to what people think I take every morning.

• 1:06:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Set the record straight. What is it you're taking?

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Well, that will I'll have to come back for another show, or people can listen to my podcast.

• 1:06:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Because it's a whole, it's a whole box of things, and I'm not taking them all the same day. But I still like alpha lipoic acid for mitochondrial health. So I've been taking that for over a decade now. I did a PhD on it, so I know a little bit about its benefits. But that was a long time ago. Let's see, CoQ10, of course, because I'm actually on a statin. I might switch to a PCSK9 inhibitor because it's more effective. But my family is very high cholesterol.

• 1:07:08Chris Williamson?

  I'm on Repatha.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:07:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  You like it?

• 1:07:11Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I've actually stopped taking Repatha because I want to see if it's causing some brain fog.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:07:18Chris Williamson?

  That is sometimes associated. It's anecdotal. But I noticed ApoB went through the floor. Fucking brilliant. Brought everything back in line. Isn't that lovely? Yeah, brain stopped working quite in the way that I wanted it to. Okay. Well, let's see what happens if I take a little bit of a break and let's see if brain comes back in line with where I want. But I found Repatha largely it's every, I've got the every two weeks one rather than the monthly. And that's been good. But I've also been taking Telmisartan as well because I've got, I didn't realize this until, I guess, I've done a lot of health discovery since the last time that we sat down. I have every polymorphism under the sun for somebody

• 1:08:00Chris Williamson?

  that's going to have high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Like just a really perfect suite of hyper absorber, hyper retainer, all of the dispositions that you want.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Are you on Zetia?

• 1:08:13Chris Williamson?

  No. What's that?

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Uh, the drug, that's the common name. I thought I'd use it. It is the drug that blocks uptake of cholesterol. So the combination of a statin and the Zetia has been shown to be very effective at lowering cholesterol.

• 1:08:30Chris Williamson?

  The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentous. Their co-founder, Jeff Byers, played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Momentus around a higher standard. Every product from Momentous uses evidence-backed ingredients, transparent doses, and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sport. So what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. It's why Momentous is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms. It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription

• 1:09:15Chris Williamson?

  and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I did carnivore toward the back end of 2024, meat and fruit, technically, for six, nine months or so when I was recovering from living in a house with toxic mold. It was really brutal, but I actually felt phenomenal, looked great, shredded, jacked in the gym, energy was good, little on edge, like a little adrenaline-y all the time, but that's maybe to be expected, right? Without any starch or carbs to sort of really bring you into land. And I managed to get my cholesterol up into the 400s, which

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  400s?

• 1:10:01Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Yeah, it was really impressive. It was kind of like a personal, only briefly.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  You had creamy blood.

• 1:10:06Chris Williamson?

  And then brought it back down. But

• 1:10:09Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of what I've come to you. You're right to say that.

• 1:10:14Chris Williamson?

  Everybody is different. Everybody has a different system. And the fascinating thing, when you do these sorts of playing around with self experimentation and intervention, is you find out there's something that can make you feel amazing, make you look amazing. It's like in all of the subjective metrics that I care about.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:32Chris Williamson?

  Shit's going great, except for the one that might kill me pretty quick. And then I went and did a clearly scan, which is fucking unbelievable technology, by the way. The basically this special type of contrast scan is able to look inside of the arteries of your heart and look at plaque buildup without having to do anything invasive. It's magic. And I'd had a small, very small, but mild amount of plaque progression.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Eek.

• 1:11:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I need to put the kibosh on this. Regardless of how jacked and alert I feel, I need to eat a much more sort of Mediterranean, low fat, low protein diet.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  And I know it's not proven, but I do like the idea of plaque reversal. So there's two ways that we know of that might do it. One is reducing your LDL so low that it reverses. So Repatha, that kind of drug, there's an oral PCSK9 inhibitor just come on, has come on the market, which I've got a prescription for. I'll try it out. That's one way. And then the second one was based on a study that had a thousand people in China. I know it's not the perfect study, but to me, it looks like it might be true. And given that this substance is so safe, the downside is it cost me a few bucks. Natto kinase. Do you know about natto kinase?

• 1:11:56Chris Williamson?

  No, what's that?

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  So do you know what natto is?

• 1:12:00Chris Williamson?

  It's natural?

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  No, you're lucky. Anyone who's been to Japan probably has seen at breakfast in hotels, they serve this goopy bean sticky substance that if you lift it up, it looks like cobwebs.

• 1:12:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  And it smells like vomit. So Serena eats this stuff. I don't know how she does it. I have to hold my nose. That stuff, it's Bacillus subtilis and some other bacteria eating soybeans. They found that there's an enzyme in that stuff that if you swallow it, it can remove, well, at least it looks like it can remove plaque. Hence natto kinase, kinase is the enzyme, natto is the food. And so I swallow, depending on the day, about 10,000 units of this stuff every morning.

• 1:12:50Chris Williamson?

  And some sort of capsule?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Yes, just a capsule. You swallow it.

• 1:12:53Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  In the morning. And I'm going to measure it. I typically do an ultrasound on my carotid every year. Similar, it's like the clearly, it's just on your neck. And you can actually do your intermediate thickness, which is important. Tell your doctor if they do that, tell me my IMT. And that is a number that will tell you very similarly how you're doing cardiovascularly for your whole body. And I'm going to see if natto kinase makes a difference.

• 1:13:20Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating. What's all this hype around erectile dysfunction medication?

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  That's a lead in question. Well, yes, it's recently come into social media because it was found that these ED drugs are also good for some types of cancer and can change the immune system so that it goes from protecting the cancer to killing it. And I tweeted out what's not to love and it, millions of people saw that. But I'm serious. I take, what is it? Cialis is the common name to fill every morning, a low dose. It's just a little bit. And I do that because in 2012,

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  we published a paper that showed that one of the most pernicious causes of aging is low blood flow. And that we could reverse that with NMN through Sirtone, more blood flow. And it's really underappreciated how much a lack of blood flow leads to diseases, especially your muscles and your brain. And so I take this low dose in the hopes, an expectation that I will, if I get dementia, it will be a decade later. And now add on that cancer killing, it's an amazing drug. And it was actually not even developed initially for these.

• 1:14:46Chris Williamson?

  It was an angina medication.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:14:48Chris Williamson?

  Do you know the story of why they realized it had that side effect?

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Was it, was it pulmonary hypertension?

• 1:14:57Chris Williamson?

  When, when they were doing the trial, typically you do a meds trial and patients come back into the lab and you ask them to give the drugs back and nobody has an issue. But none of the guys wanted to give the drugs back anymore. And the nurses noticed that the patients, when they were doing their interviews, were sitting cross legged and they had this strange, the contorting of the posture to try and hide the fact that they all had hard ons.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Chris Williamson?

  And they said, hey, we, the angina thing, we're not so sure about, but we've done some wonderful stuff to the penis.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  Well, I can say taking a low dose, the good news is it doesn't make your penis get erect without warning.

• 1:15:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  That isn't a problem.

• 1:15:38Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  But the low dose really, let's put it this way, I haven't had any downsides yet.

• 1:15:43Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  There's, there's one other thing, Chris, I want to say, which before I forget in my old age and my lack of blood flow is. So there's a, there's a study in mice at least that hints that lack of blood flow to hair follicles is a reason that you lose hair. And so my hope scientifically is that continuing to get blood flow in my hair follicles will keep my hair.

• 1:16:06Chris Williamson?

  More hard ons, less balding. That's the equation.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't, I don't know which one I'd choose if I had one, but.

• 1:16:12Chris Williamson?

  That's true. I guess a lot of guys don't have that choice. Human had said something to do with the perfusion of the prostate as well. That opening up blood flow is especially given how close you are to ground zero, might be a, like a useful side effect. I don't know, man. I said, my favorite conspiracy theory about this, I, I hope that it's working. I hope that it's a, like, pretty much all gains intervention that everybody can use. But my favorite conspiracy theory about why erectile dysfunction medication is being pushed so hard is that it reduces any of the stigma of any one guy having to take it. It's that darling, I've got to take it. It's important for my hair. Dr. David Sinclair told me that it would stop me from going bald.

• 1:16:55Chris Williamson?

  And also, you know, a great grandma, she had, she had Alzheimer's. It's very important for my neurodegeneration. You don't want the prostate, you know, granddad, he had the prostate thing. So it's the ED, you don't need to worry about that. It's normalizing.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  There's a lot. I think you're a hundred percent right. And I'm sure there have been some wives like, honey, why are you eating 10 of them?

• 1:17:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What about omega threes? You know, omega threes commonly touted as something that's very important for people's longevity. Why do you come into land on omega three levels and supplementation?

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  I take an omega three. The, the data looks really pretty good that if you have some of that, it's anti-inflammatory. Whether or not it totally prevents heart disease, it's controversial now, but.

• 1:17:41Chris Williamson?

  Have you got a brand that you prefer?

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I won't say it.

• 1:17:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay. I'll tell you what I use. Nordic Naturals 2X are the best.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  I do like, I do like them.

• 1:17:53Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Their products are really pure and distilled. You want to avoid the cadmium and lead products.

• 1:17:59Chris Williamson?

  The what, what?

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  The ones that have heavy metals.

• 1:18:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So I, I mean, I remember this. My mom would tell me this 25 years ago when I was a kid and she would be taking, and there would always be this line of low quality cod liver oil back in the day. Low quality omega three supplements aren't really that good for you. So this is like, you know, mythological fucking ancient wisdom.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  It really is. And actually, while we're on the topic of contamination, I and other labs have measured supplements and they're often contaminated with things. And I even got sucked into a lawsuit because I said, I tested this product and it, or this type of product, and it had contamination. But I do want to say at the risk of some litigious activity against me that NMN and these NAD precursors can have contaminants in them. Now, I don't sell, I don't market anything. I don't get any money despite people using my name and even video across the internet. So I have nothing to gain or really lose by this. Well, I've got a lot to lose, but nothing to gain.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  NMN can have things like, well, first of all, I think the study that was published, it's worth looking at by Andrea Meyer.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  She's out of Singapore. She found that a lot of the NMN supplements didn't have NMN in it. And if they did, it was a low amount. And we found in my lab, which I don't think is in Andrea's paper, is that there is endotoxin in NMN bulk and supplements. Endotoxin comes from bacteria, causes inflammation. It's part of the purification process, but they don't get rid of it. And we found out the hard way, we were feeding it to mice to make them live longer, which is not going to work if it's contaminated.

• 1:19:44Chris Williamson?

  Hang on. So even the NMN that you were using in your lab that you thought was pure, was so contaminated that it was infecting the study participants?

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:19:54Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  So we've had to really work hard with manufacturers to get it really pure.

• 1:20:00Chris Williamson?

  How hard do people need to work if, if somebody's taking an NMN supplement now? Is there anywhere that a normal person can go that's not going to risk being contaminated?

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Well,

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  if I ever mention a brand, it's going to be, it'll blow up the internet, might bring it down. But I will say that to help the viewers.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  The, and the listeners of this show, I would go for a company that has a strong reputation, that provides the analytics. So sometimes they give the spec sheet and you can see the purity. And, um, you know, some companies, they've got such a big reputation, they're not going to risk adulterating it or putting something else in it, giving you less. Um, GMP is important always. Any supplement should be, uh, good manufacturing practices, um, USB label. Look for those badges of purity. Um, and if your company that you like doesn't share the analytics online, you can write to them and say, can you please share that batch?

• 1:21:01Chris Williamson?

  Because it's not cheap.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  And they often do that.

• 1:21:02Chris Williamson?

  Right. They're not cheap interventions for people. And if you're spending a lot of money on something, you want to make sure that it's actually, uh, the worst thing is, I'm taking this thing that I think is going to make me more healthy and it's actually making me sick.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  That's the real problem. Um, and so what, um, and I'm going to do a shameless plug, if that's okay. Um, I'm launching a community, a website community for us to figure this stuff out together. I'll be testing products. We'll learn what works together. Um, and I hope that it becomes the world's largest longevity community.

• 1:21:33Chris Williamson?

  What does the, what, what's the community built around? What is it?

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's called lifespan.com. So my show is lifespan. This is the website version. My goal ultimately is to fix healthcare across the planet. We've done a top-down government, big industry, HMO. Um, we know that doesn't work. The US especially is spending close to 20% of GDP on the healthcare and got some of the worst healthcare. So got to do something. So grassroots movement lifespan.com will be a community that comes together to learn what works, what doesn't. Um, and eventually where I want to take this is that we, we change how healthcare is done. And with AI, with knowledge, with, you know, we're also

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  funding medical research and testing of brands. So we know what's pure and we'll find new medicines together. I want to share in the profits of that with all of the members. So that's being launched soon.

• 1:22:30Chris Williamson?

  That's cool.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  It's probably launched by now. Um, there's for members, so that there's an unpaid versions. You can do show notes and you can see some, uh, some stuff. But if you, um, pay the eight dollars a month, um, we've pulled together something really interesting. We've got this community that we've built, but also there's information that will basically complement what we've been talking about today. There's a magazine, world's first magazine written, well-written by people who are doing the research. So you don't have to rely on some, uh, newspaper or reporter who doesn't know anything, who also wants clickbait. Um, I actually brought a copy of this magazine. I had it printed in hard copy just for you.

• 1:23:12Chris Williamson?

  Oh, let's get it. I want to see.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  You haven't seen it. This is, this is being hidden here. This is lifespan magazine, first one I've given out to anyone. And this is a gorgeous magazine that every member gets online.

• 1:23:27Chris Williamson?

  What if aging isn't damage, but lost information, a radical idea now entering human trials?

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Oh, that's, that's the paper from nature that I thought I'd give you as well in 2020 that changed everything.

• 1:23:38Chris Williamson?

  This is so cool. Thank you.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Have a look inside. I'm so proud of how it looks now. Um, this is going to be coming out every month and it's got about a hundred pages of the real science, the real stories of what it's like and what we're learning before it even comes out in journals and in the media.

• 1:23:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, this is cool.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Inside is.

• 1:23:59Chris Williamson?

  It's very beautifully put together. Beyond your birthday, Steve Horvath on the science of epigenetic aging. I know Steve Horvath.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Steve discovered the epigenetic clock.

• 1:24:08Chris Williamson?

  Can a simple, simple multivitamin mineral supplement slow down aging? This is awesome. Congratulations.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm very proud of the team. It's a, it's a small but mighty team that we really, we're really driven by mission. We want to change the world and we want everyone to join us in it.

• 1:24:24Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. Uh, okay. Other interventions, other stuff that's happened. Cause since we, since we first sat down, the world of longevity, biohacking has really sort of, it's not exploded. I think it's, I think it's become more sophisticated. You may say otherwise. The evidence may say otherwise, but at least from the like self-experimentation, uh, you know, 2017, 18, 19, it was a lot of the biohacker's handbook. It was, you know, Ben Greenfield's friend of the show, sticking ultrasound things on his penis to see if he can improve his, his erection quality and his orgasm length and stuff. And

• 1:25:03Chris Williamson?

  then it seems like it's really come on, data-backed, a lot more, um, evidence-based crowd stepping into this.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Well, thank you to you. For example, uh, guys like you are bringing scientists like me and people who know what they're talking about. So the people can hear it from the horse's mouth. Whereas before it was just somebody hyping and selling stuff which you couldn't trust.

• 1:25:28Chris Williamson?

  It's true. I mean, what's been interesting has been to see, at least in, in Greenfield's case, like how right he was about tons of stuff super early on.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, though I didn't mean to imply Ben was one of those people.

• 1:25:39Chris Williamson?

  But there's so many, even, uh, uh, Timo, Timo Arena, was it that wrote the biohacker's handbook? It's his coffee table book. I've still got my house in Newcastle. And I look at some of that and it's the same as the bodybuilder thing. So many bodybuilders stumbled onto a particular way to look at health or dieting or whatever, that a decade later, science then comes back around and says, oh yeah, that's the way. But then also there are a lot of people that throw shit at the wall and much of it doesn't stick.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:07Chris Williamson?

  One of the most, uh, popular interventions that people are talking about, contrast therapy, sauna and ice baths. What does the evidence say around cold and heat exposure for longevity?

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  Increasingly, we're learning, um, in 2019, when you and I first met, there was very little evidence actually. Um, and you're right, biohacking was something that was looked down upon, especially by doctors. Um, and the public didn't know what was going on. Uh, then came the pandemic and most people saw the mortality and it's like, what are we going to do? And it's amazing to see what's happened since that it's become mainstream and even doctors have had to learn about this because their patients are coming to them with more knowledge than they have, especially with AI now. Um, but we are, we are in a world now where the individual can know more about a certain topic than their own physician, which is incredible. Um, that does include sauna and cold baths. When we

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  met 2019, there was a little bit of data in saunas and nothing on cold baths, except a mouse dunked in the cold. Um, now there's much better evidence. Um, I put it in my book lifespan because, uh, I was told by the editor that that would be interesting, but I was hesitant because there was such little data on saunas and, and nothing on ice baths really. That's different now. I can now say as a scientist, scout's honor, I was a scout, I forget how we do it. Um, that definitely sauna, there's a lot of evidence, mostly, uh, Nordic men have been studied, uh, less women. But if you do regular, what they call sauna bathing in Finland, a few times a week, your rate of heart disease

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  can be much less and, and that is reproducible. So that, I think saunas are great. Um, I try to do some of that myself, um, as hot as I can bear. Ice baths, contrast, it makes sense scientifically, hasn't really been studied, but, uh, cold therapy, we do know it can activate brown fat, which is very good.

• 1:28:11Chris Williamson?

  What does that mean?

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Well, so we, we actually going back in history, 30 years ago, we didn't know that we adults, humans had, uh, brown fat. Babies have brown fat. It's a highly metabolically active type of fat in babies that keeps them warm because they can't shiver initially. Um, and then using PET scanning, people at Harvard, some friends of mine discovered that adults can have brown fat on their own bodies as adults. Um, often they're in the back. You can get it, more brown fat by, by doing cold bout, cold plunges and being cold. Um, and.

• 1:28:49Chris Williamson?

  Do you want more brown fat?

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Yes. So I was going to say the, the brown fat's full of mitochondria, which are healthy. They, brown fat seems to secrete factors that are good for health. Um, but yes, people that have more brown fat tend to have better metabolism in general. And they also burn more energy, which is good in today's world where there's too much food around. So yeah, in general, yes, brown fat is considered very healthy. Um, but the older you get, the harder it is to, to make and convert from white to brown or beige. And, uh, so my view on that is, and that's true for mice. I'm not sure it's true for people, but let's say it is. I still believe that the earlier you start to build up your brown fat reserves, the better. Because by the time you're in your eighties, it's hard.

• 1:29:35Chris Williamson?

  Cold exposure is a good way to do that.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right. Um, I don't know if it's true, but I like to experiment with sleeping a little cooler. And as I wrote and have said a few times, turn down the temperature, don't sleep with a lot of blankets. We've already talked about eight sleep beds. That is a way probably to burn more heat, more, more energy, but it might help if you're feeling cold during the night, uh, build up brown fat. That is a might. You will get more brown fat if you cold plunge, um, and do those kinds of things, roll around in the, the snow. It is controversial though. I did see a little bit of pushback against Wim Hof and what he was saying. It may not be as spectacular as what he's claiming.

• 1:30:21Chris Williamson?

  The evidence for heat seems to definitely be stronger than the evidence for cold, like

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:30:25Chris Williamson?

  10 to one, 20 to one.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:30:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And I, it's strange because the immediacy of the reward, if anyone's had a cold shower or used a cold plunge, you feel really good. As long as you stay in for a little bit, you feel so good afterward. But.

• 1:30:42Chris Williamson?

  I'm, I like to do it. It's fun or whatever, but I would probably take a sauna 20 times over taking a cold plunge, if I'm gonna try and do something for my health.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  I'm the same. I do a hot every, every day, including a steam shower. But I cold plunge probably once every two weeks at best by, by turning on the cold tap.

• 1:31:04Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of Brian Johnson's approach to longevity?

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  Well, it's totally different. Putting the two of us side by sides, some people do, it's, it's not the same animal. I'm doing science, I'm doing the research, I'm figuring out the molecular mechanisms. He's a complement to that. He is self experimenting. It's not a clinical trial, obviously, he will admit that. But where I think Brian shines is in a couple of areas. He's very courageous. I like that he stuck his neck out. I have a lot of admiration for those people who are brave that way. He's also been helpful, bringing a spotlight to the field of longevity. And I remember a lot of my colleagues, my highbrow colleagues in longevity,

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  really said he's the worst thing that's, that's happened to us, to this field. He brings a bad name to longevity. But I disagree. I think that he, that we as a field of scientists had a marketing problem. As much as we talked about longevity, it wasn't getting through. Up until 2020, almost nobody had used this word even. Brian came along, I came along, but definitely Brian got a lot of attention. And I think it's been helpful to wake people up from their stupor. Not everybody, but a lot of people just live their lives and eat whatever they want, do a little bit of exercise. Brian said, we can be much better about this. We can science the heck out of this.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  And I love that approach. And so I think it's complimentary. I'm saying, let's do real science, clinical trials, molecular, but also with an N of one, doing pre-treatment, post-treatment, see what happens under doctor supervision. We can learn some things too.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think Brian deserves a lot of credit for, for that, for bringing attention to what's possible.

• 1:33:02Chris Williamson?

  You've got a highly unsexy field. I'm not saying Brian Johnson's the sexiest guy on the planet, but he's definitely made an existingly unsexy field at least a little bit more sexy. What, knowing what you know about his approach to the fundamentals for longevity, have you got any smell test or sort of lick your finger to work out where the wind is coming from? Or you think, oh, he might really be on to something there. Is there something that he might be out ahead of where the, the data or the research or the science is at the moment?

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  Not really. I, I don't pay as much attention to him as I probably should or could. I do look at some of the, the blood work that he posts. And there's a particular test that's called the Dunedin pace of aging, which is a measurement of your epigenome changing. So we, Steve, in the magazine, Steve Horvath discovered the epigenetic clock. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's chemicals on the DNA that change with time. These are like the scratches on the CD or the software corruption. You can measure that. You can do it before and after, or you take it every, you know, three months or every year.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  And Brian has published publicly his results. And you can determine what is representative of your pace of aging. And his was, I recall, something like point four something. And one would be you're aging one year for every year.

• 1:34:36Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  And, you know, if you're two, then you're doubling your rate of aging. So you're gonna die early. According to that, that's one of the lowest pieces of aging I've ever seen for a human. So that's pretty impressive if that's maintained. He could live decades longer than the average human.

• 1:34:52Chris Williamson?

  Supposed to.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  Then he would if he didn't take care of himself.

• 1:34:56Chris Williamson?

  Is that taking into account telomeres or no? Would that Dunedin pace of aging?

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  No, it's not. No, I don't believe so. It's just looking at the, what's called DNA methylation pattern on the DNA.

• 1:35:09Chris Williamson?

  What do you think are the biggest wastes of money that people spend on longevity?

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Oh, well, the overdosing of vitamins, particularly B vitamins. I think that if you're on a vegan diet, yeah, you should make sure you're not deficient in any B vitamins.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  Generally, if you're taking a lot of multi, what do you call it? Multi vitamins. It's excessive and it can actually be toxic if you have too much. So vitamin C can be pro-oxidation, not antioxidant, if you take a lot continuously. So overall, I'm not, I'm not for multi vitamins. I do believe you should measure your vitamin in your blood. And if you're deficient, you should make sure you're not deficient. But overdosing on vitamins, especially B, you know, you could do IV, some people do that. I think, yeah, you'll get a short term hit, but I, I nibble on my B vitamins. I don't take the whole thing.

• 1:36:11Chris Williamson?

  I tried, again, the self experimentation over the last couple of years, recovering from this, this mold, complex illness stuff has been interesting, to say the least. And the start of last year, one of the potential culprits for why I was feeling so shitty was methylation. So did a bunch of genetic testing, came back, I've got four different polymorphisms that make me suck at B vitamins. Like one in the blood, one in the brain, one in the methylation and one in the something else. One of the potential put forward explanations was, well, your mимcallicular volume, your MCV is high, it's like just like 101 or whatever, which is just above the upper range. Oh, well, maybe this is something to do with Bs. I was like, okay, well, I'll try some intramuscular

• 1:36:53Chris Williamson?

  methylated B12, like 500 micrograms, a tiny, tiny, teeny tiny little dot. It's almost like gotta put a huge needle in your leg to put this teeny tiny amount of B vitamins in. I didn't realize that you can get something if you push it too far called B12 induced confusion. So you can actually just make yourself confused and your brain gets very slippery. Given that this was the thing that was trying to push back against. What I'm saying is, I know what happens when you push B vitamins too far. And I actually did that the week, it was the biggest week of the show last year where I had Rogan. I was on Rogan on the Thursday and then recorded with Naval Ravikant on the Saturday. And I went into it going, I've like poisoned myself with fucking B vitamins and now I can't think straight. It was fine. It was, it all ended up being great in any case, but yeah, okay.

• 1:37:37Chris Williamson?

  So spending too much money on vitamins, multi vitamins is one of the biggest wastes. What else?

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Well, at the risk of being sued, I would say.

• 1:37:47Chris Williamson?

  It's a big Q.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  I'm not sure about, again, I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just not sure about certain laser therapy.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Serena, my partner loves shooting lasers at her body, but I.

• 1:38:03Chris Williamson?

  For skincare?

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Internal as well.

• 1:38:07Chris Williamson?

  How do you shoot a laser internally?

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:38:10Chris Williamson?

  Which, which hole does it go in?

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it, it shines on your skin back and forth. So I don't know if that is doing anything. I'd like to see some data on that.

• 1:38:18Chris Williamson?

  Is that like red light stuff?

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  It's red light, but it's different colors and wavelengths.

• 1:38:22Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yes. Yeah, I've seen those things. Those huge big panels that people can stand in front of.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  Well, the red light is not crazy. So certain infrared, I've got near infrared panels. I have that, actually, I'd shine that in the shower sometimes.

• 1:38:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  And that, the science is coming around to confirming some benefits there. So I think that's fine. And the red light saunas, I'm gonna get one and see how that goes.

• 1:38:45Chris Williamson?

  But the yellow lights and the others.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, these other things. It looks like it's 4th of July in, in the house. But I'm not sure about that one.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  But you know, you have got to be careful what you say is BS now turns out to be true.

• 1:39:04Chris Williamson?

  This is where the biohackers get it right, dude. This is where the biohackers get it right.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, even peptides, you know, now we're seeing a lot of them are actually really helpful.

• 1:39:11Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about GLPs, because, you know, this has been, this wouldn't have even been a discussion. Right? Three letters that I'd never have even heard put together the last time that we sat down 2021 and certainly not in 2019.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:25Chris Williamson?

  What's your opinion on GLPs?

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Uh. In general, I'm very favorable that the number of studies that come out are showing that they're actually quite useful, especially microdosing for healthy people.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  If you're obese, it's it's it's almost a must. Go talk to your doctor. I think if you can't lose weight alone, please consider using these. I think obesity is the fastest way to to an early grave. It certainly ages you faster. But if you're if you're like you and you're already already close to optimal, are they useful? I think so, that there are off target things besides obesity and metabolism that seem to be important. Brain health, um, immune system. New things are cropping up all the time. It's as close to a longevity drug as we probably have right now, given what we're seeing. Yeah. It's still early days because we we need to do long term and there are some downsides. There is increased risk of

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  but low uh risk of kidney issues and even blindness. Um, don't panic. It's it doesn't happen very often, so it's still really rare. But there it's not perfectly safe. So I just want to make sure people know that it's not like going out injecting uh candy into you or anything.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  But I do think that

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  uh and I have taken GLP ones um small doses to see how I would feel, what would happen. I definitely didn't have hunger. That was obviously what would happen and I lost weight more easily. I didn't take it long enough to be able to tell if other things were benefited. It looks like uh there's protection against uh dementia from those who are on the weight loss drugs.

• 1:41:08Chris Williamson?

  And this is from a mechanism other than just calorie restriction. There's something else.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  It's hard to tell, right? Because most of the people on them are already overweight. But yeah, I saw a study recently. Um, I don't remember the journal, um, but I'll look it up and and post it online on my social, uh, but I did see one that had really good evidence that it was not due to weight lost. It's just, uh, I would say in general, whenever I go to a longevity conference and there's a company like Novo Nordisk or Lilly, like you should see this latest study. We've shown that it does this thing that we didn't expect at all as a side effect.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  And it's funny, these companies are now calling themselves also longevity companies. It's become that fashionable as well.

• 1:41:55Chris Williamson?

  I suppose anything that

• 1:41:58Chris Williamson?

  anything that reduces morbidity technically in one part, I mean,

• 1:42:03Chris Williamson?

  people that make helmet, bike helmets are longevity companies, you know?

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  You're right, and it's it's a word that's unfortunately getting overused like anti-aging was thirty years ago. And we'll have to come up with something else to distinguish.

• 1:42:15Chris Williamson?

  Something sexy. Huberman says he thinks Retitutide will be a trillion dollar drug. Do you reckon about that?

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  I think it's possible. Uh, if the oral ones really look good, that they may actually be uh even more interesting. But yeah. What is it? Something like ten percent of Americans have either tried it or been on these drugs?

• 1:42:38Chris Williamson?

  I think forty five percent of Americans say that they would. Jerry, can you uh chat G P T whatever the the numbers are of G L P users and desired uh users in the USA to find that out? Uh, but yeah, I mean, what is it? Obesity is twice as big of an issue as malnutrition as a as starvation now globally. There's a billion people that are obese and half a billion people that are starving. It's like the number one leading cause of malnutrition globally is obesity. Currently, around about eleven percent of US adults, twenty nine million Americans ever used a GLP, fifteen percent. So that means that only what's that about?

• 1:43:21Chris Williamson?

  Two thirds of people who have used one are currently using one. And ninety one percent of Americans are aware of them. Uh, twenty percent of US households. Can you say uh how many people want to? Uh, I'm sure that this is from the most recent book that Johann Hari brought out, saying that it's a forty five percent of Americans would either have tried or want to try them.

• 1:43:56Chris Williamson?

  About forty percent of US adults have obesity. Yeah, I will say that my number is correct.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:02Chris Williamson?

  That sounds great. Um. Yeah, I I mean, the off target effects of this, oh, it seems like people don't want to drink alcohol so much, though it seems their cravings for video games and porn get curtailed sometimes. I mean, I we're getting into not just like neurobiology, but the framing of your own sense of self. What is your mission? I am the sort of person that is disciplined. I'm the sort of person that can do hard things. I don't need to eat that food. I'm not going to have that junk. What is the snowball effect that turns everyone into kind of a micro David Goggins because they're working hard in one area of their life and diet is

• 1:44:48Chris Williamson?

  usually the first frontier that people get stuck into when it comes to discipline, right? I on both sides of it, whether it's good or bad. And okay, well, maybe I'm going to get up on time. You know, I didn't eat the junk food last night. I'm on a bit of a roll. Yeah, maybe it was pharmacologically uh assisted with what I did with my discipline around food. But I'm getting up on, or maybe there is some you know, super magic wizardry that's going on inside of the brain. I don't know, but it's definitely interesting and fuck, like

• 1:45:15Chris Williamson?

  it does feel the one, the one problem is it feels like an artificial solution to an artificial issue, which is we shouldn't have a food environment which is so hyper palatable and calorie dense and attractive that we now need to medicate our way out of this.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is dystopian for sure.

• 1:45:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  But it's a blessing that that obesity is declared a disease and then companies worked on it. And now we have these meds. I want aging to be the same. Aging should be declared a disease. We work on drugs and then we treat it. And in the same way that GLP ones now are saving the world, the same will be true, I believe, twenty, thirty years, that people will say, why didn't we treat aging earlier?

• 1:45:53Chris Williamson?

  What common health advice today do you think people will laugh at in fifty years' time?

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  eating three meals and snacking that this

• 1:46:08Speaker 01

  you go to the you go to the supermarket and there's health bars down the whole aisle aisle that you're supposed to never be hungry. That's going to be seen as extremely toxic. You you your body needs to feel hungry sometimes, uh, have a break from food. So this this trend of you're a bad parent if your child feels hunger is going to be looked at like, oh, what were you doing to our kids?

• 1:46:33Chris Williamson?

  Do you think A I is going to make bigger inroads into longevity research? I don't know what. I mean, again, you know, seven years ago, when we sat down, A I, you with your snail, you're drawing of a fucking snail on the whiteboard. There was no A I to be found.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  I don't remember what the snail was.

• 1:46:50Chris Williamson?

  I asked you about it at the time and it was something to do. It was explaining. It was some nerd stuff. This is how the molecular something something.

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I remember we we we said, Chris is coming. Let's draw a snail.

• 1:47:01Chris Williamson?

  Draw a fucking snail. He's the idiot British guy will get him in and he'll be convinced that it's actually something really important. What's A I doing to longevity research?

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you asked me, do I think? I know it's having a big impact already on research. My lab is thriving on it. It's going way faster. We just did something in a few months that would have taken us a hundred and sixty years. And that was that's using old technology. These days we can do. I'll tell you, I'll tell you a story that's funny. On Friday, I had a meeting with a student that just came to my lab over the summer. And he's been here maybe three weeks. And he's nineteen years old. And I gave him a task. I said, according to the information theory of aging, if you look at all this data that's out there that nobody's looked at in a certain way, it should have this signature. And uh and if it has that signature,

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  we might be right. We might have found the backup copy to the software. And I said, okay, that that's your task. Go go do that, thinking, you know, how

• 1:48:02Chris Williamson?

  It'll be busy for the next five years. Yeah.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

  Exactly, because I've had about three people in my lab try to do that and they were not really successful. And he came in on Friday, uh, and he's with his team and his mentors and we sat in my office and they've all got this big grin on their face and they threw up on the L C D screen in my office the results. And this wasn't just the usual, I wrote some code in R and ran it. And and we got some graphs. This was truly using A I. He was using one of the the the the leading A I models. And he presented it like it was already published work with beautiful graphs and looking at terabytes of data that's out there in a new way. And he found something that

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  professors and the experts in the field have missed for the last ten years. And it's right there. There's this signature goes, I've given it a new name because I didn't know what to call it. This signature, I'm calling it the reverse tail. I said, what the heck is a reverse tail? And he said, uh, well, I called it this because of that. And I said, dumb name. We'll think of a new name for it. But it's amazing.

• 1:49:08Chris Williamson?

  The idea of shit branding.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll work on branding later, but the fact that you found it is incredible. And that's a nineteen year old. Uh, he just finished high school and with A I, he's going to revolutionize biology, I believe. And that's just one kid. Imagine when whole teams are doing this.

• 1:49:24Chris Williamson?

  That's wild. That's wild. So have you, has there been anything as far as you're aware in the field of longevity that's been uh generated or inspired by A I that has gotten itself to trials, testing and and fully published as a world changer? Or is we still at the frontier of that not reading, meeting the real world yet?

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  We we're we're undergoing this revolution, so tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday. But we're now at a point where Almost somebody on their phone can discover a drug candidate. Whereas it would have taken a pharmaceutical company years and hundreds of millions of dollars. It's that world. We can go from now that Demis Hassabis has and his team, not just him, has cracked the code for protein folding. We now know all the chess pieces. We were guessing and it took years to find out what one chess piece looked like. And there's over fifteen thousand of these pieces now.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  These are all now modeled in three D. Now we know not just how they look in three D because they used to be one dimensional based on the DNA. Now we've got three dimensional amino acid structures. Now we're seeing how they fit together. Computer is actually smart enough to figure out which ones dock with each other. And eventually we'll figure out how they're all working together. An artificial AI version of a cell. We can do in silico experiments at the molecular level now. And dock trillions. Last year it was billions. Now this year it's trillions of chemicals. Real drugs and imaginary drugs.

• 1:51:08Chris Williamson?

  Kind of like a virtual environment. It's like a virtual lab.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:11Chris Williamson?

  Are these accurate? So if I run the synthetic lab, is it one to one with the real world?

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  It's not one to one, but it increases your odds exponentially.

• 1:51:23Chris Williamson?

  Because you don't need to do test, test, test. Okay, maybe this you can discount a lot. And then the interesting ones get moved into the real world?

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, and the old way of doing it, which felt really modern was you have libraries of little plates, hundreds of these little plates with ninety six or sometimes three eighty four little wells and each one has a different chemical that's physically in a freezer somewhere. You have to pull it out, give it to the robot. The robot then does its work overnight, tests it on cells, take a picture of the cells. This kind of work is, is, is slow compared to today, which is we don't even need to have the fridge. We can make up trillions of potential drugs, test them, run it for a few weeks. It'll tell us here's the top two hundred and probably at least half of them are pretty good.

• 1:52:12Chris Williamson?

  It feels fucking primitive.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  And now we can do that experiment with hundreds instead of trillions. And trillions is impossible, by the way. The most pharmaceutical company would screen would be in the millions. Now we do trillions. And then you can even order them online. That's the thing that blows me away. We got a set of two hundred that we think can reverse aging using AI. And then I thought, oh, it's going to take us a long time to synthesize these two hundred. No, we just order them up. The company can make them for us in a matter of weeks. Now we've got them in the lab. We're testing them on human cells. We've developed an AI system that can tell us whether the ninety year old cells, skin cells from a human are going back to being twenty or anything in between, just by looking at them. We paint them with dyes, different colors.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  And then where we're at is hopefully in the next month or so, give it two months, we will have a set of chemicals that can replace the current cocktail that reverses aging in the mouse that if you're paying attention earlier, not you, but listeners, if you've just joined us. I was talking about, we've got things that we can give a pill or a swallowing thing, a drink to a mouse. Swallowing thing, a drink to a mouse and it reverses its age. We've got that, but it's a cocktail. A very secret cocktail, but it's got at least three things in it. We want to bring it down to one and turn it into either a supplement or drug or a patch or a

• 1:53:43Chris Williamson?

  Dermal thing.

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  And some kind of cream or all of the above. But we're getting really close to being able to have the single molecule that can truly safely reverse aging in human cells. We'll test it on the mice and we'll run from there.

• 1:54:00Chris Williamson?

  How big of a role is expectation in how someone lives? If somebody thinks about aging as being associated with frailty and degeneration, can that actually make them live less long?

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  Oh, you mean mentally if they're, yeah, that's well studied. If you're optimistic and you're enjoying life and you don't just get retired, just retire and be bored. Yeah, mental attitude is huge. Robert Volding, a Harvard scientist, has found that the mental attitude and your social life is as important as your blood pressure and cholesterol, if not more important. And the one thing that was the best was have a reliable partner. I went through a divorce. It was horrific during COVID and I believe that it took years of my life. So it felt like it anyway. But it was, it was a shock. I didn't know it was coming, but it's brutal. Anyone that is young, getting married, just beware.

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  We all change over decades. So that's a, something to keep in mind.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  But the point there is the amount of stress and cortisol that runs through your body when you have a really big life event, moving house, breakups, death in the family, your own illness. These are age accelerators. And on the other hand, we've talked about today, the kind of things that keep you healthy. The exercise, the diet, the social life, the sleep, the relaxation. These are all we know are likely to not just slow aging, but eventually keep you disease free. And I do, I do want to mention that often people think, oh, I don't want to live longer because I don't want to be old for longer. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about still being young and vigorous in your nineties. My father's almost ninety, he's eighty seven now. He'll be here on Friday from Australia.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  It'll be, I think, second or third time he's come to the US. He was just in Japan. This is not a typical eighty seven year old. He is living life probably better than he did in his forties. He's out every night with different people, mostly women that he's excited about. Now they're good friends. I won't, I don't want to disparage my father. He's not a dirty man, but he, he is a very sociable guy. And in his forties, he was raising me and I wasn't easy to raise. I was a pain in the gut. He will, he will say he's never had a better time in his life than now at eighty seven.

• 1:56:24Chris Williamson?

  If you were thirty five or forty again, and you could only do two or three things for longevity, what would they be?

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  Definitely don't overeat, be lean, watch your weight, have a BMI of around, let's say twenty two, twenty four. Make sure you, you don't get overweight.

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  Obviously don't overdrink and don't smoke. These are clearly really the worst things you can do, having lost a mother to smoking. So don't eat too much, right? Try to skip meals, work out, maintain a very good body mass and exercise. Those are the fundamentals. Everyone will tell you that. What I didn't realize till I was in my fifties was how important food is. I thought vegetables were a garnish for meat. I love meat. They taste, meat tastes great. But I've, I've switched over to being more plant focused and I've seen a great improvement in my overall health and biomarkers. So those are good. Learn not to stress. We've talked about, that took me a long time to, to learn that as well. But I've never been healthier because I've, it's been slow, but I've learned how to do all these things really well.

• 1:57:31Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to do a lightning round. So in a sentence or two, give me your review on these interventions for longevity. Okay?

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:57:38Chris Williamson?

  Creatine.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  We're doing, how are we, how are we scoring?

• 1:57:40Chris Williamson?

  Just however you want. Give me a review. Yes, no, like it, don't like it, useless, buy it, whatever you think, whatever you don't.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  All right. So creatine.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  In favor of it and take it.

• 1:57:52Chris Williamson?

  Stem cells.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Interesting. And if you have a certain condition like a joint that needs repair can be helpful, but it's not long term solution.

• 1:58:05Chris Williamson?

  CPAP machine.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  Really important for folks that have anoxia, lack oxygen at night for the brain. Though you could try other methods, which is lose weight, don't drink, get a thin pillow, try to sleep on your stomach.

• 1:58:23Chris Williamson?

  Hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  In favor, there's good evidence that certainly cycling up and down in pressure is good for the brain and blood flow. And I've done it myself and have seen improvements in wound healing in others. So yeah, in general, it's, it's a plus.

• 1:58:41Chris Williamson?

  Blue light glasses.

• 1:58:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  You you mean yellow, uh, blue light blocking glasses? Um, I prefer to turn down the brightness of the lights at night and have a TV that's not so bright. But yes, I think they were much more fashionable five years ago, but I still use them. So yes, but definitely in general, watch out for bright light at night, but try to get violet and blue light in the morning. It's very important. A friend of mine in Japan found that if you don't see violet light, uh, in your mouse, you get, uh, shortsightedness.

• 1:59:19Chris Williamson?

  So early morning light can be, uh, protective, like for your eyes?

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And we live indoors and we we don't get enough of it from LEDs.

• 1:59:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay, glucose monitors.

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  Love them. They're really good. Yeah, I I I think that we should all be empowered by our own data. Um, anyone who says I don't want to know about my biology, I think I don't agree with that. The CGMs have been very useful personally. I can see how I react to foods and I was surprised. Um, grapes send me through the roof, white rice through the roof.

• 1:59:51Chris Williamson?

  I remember the grape thing.

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  Potatoes not? Yeah. And it's still true. I'm wearing one right now. I wear them fairly regularly. The other thing that surprised me about CGMs was I gave one to my son, who at the time was, I think, seventeen. And we had a competition who can, uh, have the best blood glucose levels. And he would eat a lot of bad stuff. It changed his life. He is eating much healthier. He's now aware of what food does to his body. Now, I'm not saying go give it to children, but I do think there's an education and a behavioral change that can come with CGMs that, as I think you mentioned earlier today, can really, really make a difference.

• 2:00:30Chris Williamson?

  Therapy.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  You mean just general, uh,

• 2:00:34Chris Williamson?

  Talk therapy, psychotherapy.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  Well, I think it depends on the person and the therapist. Um, I think that talking about your problems can really help. Um, I think it can be overused. Um, as a friend, um, I've, I've tried everything. Um, I didn't find a lot of the therapists to be that useful. I found it better to read books and listen to experts and, um, but I do think therapy is very important. I've, um, had kids that benefited from therapy. It's very hard being a teenager these days, uh, with the pressures. So yeah, a thumbs up for therapy, though. Make sure you have a therapist that is well qualified and provides benefits rather than just listens to your complaints.

• 2:01:19Chris Williamson?

  Grounding.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 2:01:21Chris Williamson?

  Grounding, uh, walking on grass, negative electric discharge.

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't think that's scientifically based, but I do think getting out in nature and touching, uh, nature, smelling nature, listening to nature is very valuable. And our body will turn out to respond in ways that we don't even understand yet.

• 2:01:46Chris Williamson?

  Marriage.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  Be careful who you marry. Um,

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  know that it's not always forever. Know that people change over decades. Um,

• 2:02:01Speaker 01

  know that it's a long-term investment. Be loyal, never lie. And if kids are involved, try to work it out.

• 2:02:10Chris Williamson?

  Mouth taping.

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  And, uh, mouth taping, uh, so I, I do snore if I, uh, have a thick pillow or eat certain supplements at night, I've found. So I have tried mouth taping and Serena says I make even more noises, gasping. So I don't use mouth tape. I, I do use those nose strips because she thinks they help.

• 2:02:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:39Speaker 01

  But no, I haven't had success myself with mouth taping.

• 2:02:42Chris Williamson?

  Testosterone therapy.

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  Uh, I prefer natural versions. If you can't raise it naturally, yeah, for older people, there's been a lot of benefits. Um, I mentioned Shelley Basin as a scientist that's worked on NMN. He's also done a lot of testosterone work, which shows benefits, but it doesn't extend lifespan. There was no evidence that it does that for longevity.

• 2:03:02Chris Williamson?

  How do you, you talked a lot today about supplements, lifestyle interventions, breast recovery, what the future is going to look like, AI, GLPs. Something that we never got to talk about when me and you first sat down with the perils of over-optimization. I think that it was so frontier-y in 2019. Everything was new and exciting and you couldn't really be drowning in data in the same way as you can now. And I wonder what you've come to believe about

• 2:03:35Chris Williamson?

  the negative health implications of caring too much about your health, of over-optimizing, the neuroticism taking away not only your enjoyment from life, but the effects of supposedly all of the interventions that you're actually trying to do. How do you come to think about over-optimization?

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Well, obsession about anything is possible and also deleterious to health. Uh, so if you have those tendencies, be careful. You know, it's true for anything, social media use as well. Um, and I, I can be obsessed. What, what I've done myself, which I recommend is treat it like a hobby. It's fun. It's not too serious. You're not going to die if you didn't sleep well last night. Um, and, you know, everything's a challenge. Uh, my meals are an experiment. Um, not always. Sometimes it's a failed experiment. Um, but I live my life like it's a journey and it's fun and I'm testing things. Um, and so don't

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  get too obsessed if you are not perfect, when none of us are ever perfect. And none of us are going to live forever, in my opinion. So enjoy the journey. Do as best you can. Don't stress.

• 2:04:49Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. David Sinclair, ladies and gentlemen. David, you're awesome. I appreciate you. Seven years later, why should people go to check out everything that you've got going on?

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  Uh, well, the big one is lifespan.com. Become a member, get the magazine, learn how to live longer and we'll learn together. We'll do some big things together. Um, and I'm on social media. You can see what I do.

• 2:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Podcast season?

• 2:05:09Speaker 01

  Podcast is big. Uh, so that's on YouTube and all, all podcasts. Uh, that's called Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair. We have, we're building, we're about half a million followers, not like you, but we'll get there.

• 2:05:20Chris Williamson?

  You're doing good.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  We did take some time off to do the trials, but we're back and, uh, even better now. So join us there too. Thank you, Chris.

• 2:05:27Chris Williamson?

  Appreciate you, mate.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  Likewise.

• 2:05:28Chris Williamson?

  Till next time. All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude, yes. So good.