EP #18 Why Aging is a Disease w/ David Sinclair

In this episode, David and Peter discuss aging as a disease, the technology needed to reverse aging, and tips and tricks to increase your lifespan. You will learn about: 01:27 | Is aging a disease? 18:20 | It's never too late to begin your Longevity Mindset 25:11 | How long until we reverse aging? 47:28 | Dietary changes to increase your health David Sinclair is a biologist and academic known for his expertise in aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a genetics professor and the Co-Director of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He’s been included in Time100 as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and his research has been featured all over the media. Besides writing a New York Times Best Seller, David has co-founded several biotech companies, a science publication called Aging, and is an inventor of 35 patents _____________ Resources Read David’s book, Lifespan: Why We Age- and Why We Don’t Have To Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about Abundance360. Read the Tech Blog. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  This limit to human lifespan, there is no biological limit. Of course, there isn't. We are the same stuff as a whale that can live a lot longer than us. We're built of the same stuff as tortoises and pretty much the same stuff as trees that live thousands of years. It's a software problem. I'm putting career on the line. It's a software problem. And what's interesting about biology is that software encodes the ability to rebuild the hardware. So we've got to reset the software. And when we do that in my lab, we find that tissues regenerate in animals. Our organoids, which are many human organs, regenerate. They fix themselves and they function like they're new again. So it's, in my view, 99% a software problem.

• 1:14Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:26Peter Diamandis?

  Hey, David. Good morning, good afternoon. How you doing, pal?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Peter, hey. Good, thanks. How are you doing?

• 1:33Peter Diamandis?

  Good. I would normally ask you what you have for breakfast or lunch, but I know you skipped those.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a struggling vegan. I'm not always successful, but I do strive, most of the time, to skip those meals.

• 1:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, as do I. But coffee is a mandatory. The question is, how much coffee? But we'll get to that conversation later. So I want to talk about a conversation that you and I have, and frankly, you've championed to a large degree, which is, is aging a disease? I just saw a Twitter poll recently that you retweeted and I did too on that. Before we get there, you know, some of the facts that are at both our fingertips that I think are pretty crazy. I just held my longevity platinum trip and one of the things that was shocking to me was that seventy percent

• 2:25Peter Diamandis?

  of all heart attacks have no antecedents. There's no shortness of breath, there's no narrowing on imaging. It's just all of a sudden, you know, someone literally dies from a heart attack from soft plaque. Crazy, right? Just and the other the other facts, you know, at Fountain Life, we do full body imaging and coronary imaging and in seemingly healthy adults, what we're finding is two percent of people have cancers they don't know about. And two and a half percent of people have aneurysms they don't know about. And so it's interesting. We're all optimists about our health, but yet we have very little insight.

• 3:11Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know. How do you think about that? It's crazy.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  I think of heart disease and cancer as largely largely avoidable diseases these days with with high technology. You know, the sort of things that Fountain Life are doing. And that's through genetic testing, looking at the DNA circulating through blood as well as new types of imaging. And the sort of things that you and I do, which is extensive blood work on a regular basis. But that's not able to be reached by most people. And it, you know, it's right now, it's it's a fair amount of somebody's salary to do all that. So it's it's it's not fair to me to say, oh, yeah, just do this.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  It will be fine. But we are heading towards a world where we will know much more about our bodies before we get sick. And one of the things that I've rallied against is the old concept, and you're a trained M D, you know this, of of medicine thinking of treating disease rather than treating the patient before they get disease. And so that we have to shift from that mindset to take care of people throughout their whole. Before they get sick, because what's driving most of these diseases, including sudden death from an infarction, unstable plaque or even soft plaque, is the aging process itself, and that's happening every day and depends on how we live our lifestyle.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  And that's largely slowable, that the way we live our life will actually slow down the ticking of that clock in my lab here behind me. We are routinely measuring that clock in mice and in human samples. It's very clear that some people age much more slowly than others, and eighty percent of that effect is not genetic, it's based on lifestyle. Just a personal note, I had one of my best friends die last week suddenly from a heart attack while he was driving home.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Professor at Cornell. And I've had, lost three people in the last couple of years, very close to me for the same reason. So yeah, we do need to take preventative action and measure things as best we can, and it'll only get better.

• 5:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, the stat, I was with a mutual friend of ours, Eric Verden, up at the Buck. And we were talking about this, the stat that he threw out is that genetics account for seven percent and lifestyle for ninety-three percent. And that's extraordinary because we do have control over our lifestyle. But the point you made, which, and I also, Brian Binney, who was the pilot who won the Ansari X Prize, made the flight, again, felt dizzy, went to sleep, never woke up, you know, at age sixty-nine. And people don't realize this, that heart disease does start early, and it is to a large degree preventable. Now, it is expensive, but this is where the work that you do,

• 6:02Peter Diamandis?

  and to some degree my companies do, is going to change the game. I'll give you one example, which I'm excited about.

• 6:10Peter Diamandis?

  You know, we have this enzyme in our liver, PCSK9, that generates our bad cholesterol, our LDL. And, you know, we've had these monoclonal antibodies that cost ridiculous amounts of money. It's like five, ten thousand dollars a year, and so it's not a first-line defense to lower your cholesterol by fifty percent. But we've just finished our primate studies, now going to humans on a vaccine against the PCSK9 enzyme, right? And it's, will be fifty bucks a year, and you can sort of do this preventively. And, I mean, you can talk about the CRISPR edit of the PCSK9 gene.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Well, this is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be done, and I commend you for for supporting that kind of development. You know, I talked about the the expense, and you and I talk about this a lot, is that it starts out for the rich, and let's call them the elites who are pushing the boundaries. That was that's true for all technology. The printing press wasn't available, books were not available initially, flight was not available to most people. And it's going to happen the same way here. Computers get cheaper, and biotech is going to get cheaper, and you're helping that. So what I'm looking for is, in the same way that you are reprogramming, so now we use

• 7:27Speaker 01

  gene therapy, we're in non-human primates now correcting vision, restoring the youth of the eye. That's still going to be a a therapy that is expensive. Gene therapies are by their nature, but my lab is working extensively, hurriedly, with passion.

• 7:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, hurry up, hurry up.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I walk in every day and push them harder on our behalf, those of us who are over the certain age. They do have molecules and combinations of molecules that can reverse aging without gene therapy, and so those chemicals could be very cheap. They could be a few cents a day, maybe a few dollars to reverse aging, but save trillions, tens of trillions of dollars overall in GDP costs for the US. And that's the kind of buck that you get.

• 8:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I know, it's it's great. I mean, picking up on the point you said earlier, I think people need to realize that, as you said, technologies in the beginning that are only affordable to the rich also in the beginning don't work that well. You know, the mobile phone in the beginning was a, you know, a hundred thousand dollar device, and would drop a call for a Wall Street banker on every block going down Manhattan. And then by the time it works really well, it's cheap and available to everybody, and hopefully the work that you're doing is going to democratize and demonetize these these things. And picking up on the trillion side, I'm sure, I know you know the stat that came out, I don't know, nine months, a year ago, that a single additional productive year of life...

• 9:03Peter Diamandis?

  For the human population is worth thirty eight trillion dollars, the global economy, which is, I mean, that's mind boggling.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  We calculated it, and by we, I mean Andrew Scott and other colleagues in the UK. We've calculated that it's actually eighty six trillion for the US alone, extending healthy life by one year. And if you do ten years, it's three hundred and sixty five trillion for the US. And so this is, the only way of saving that much money is to stop military spending, which obviously we're not going to do. And this is money, remember, that can be used for developing new medicines, education, tackling climate change, pushing technology forward. You know, the idea that slowing aging is going to bankrupt us and overpopulate us turns out to be patently false, demonstrably false.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  And so that's why you and I think that this is one of the challenges of our time, over the next five to ten years, to be able to achieve cheap, safe, effective age slowing and age reversal.

• 10:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I don't think, I mean, it's a moral obligation, and I think people need to realize that. And there's such a pushback, you know, I think people don't realize there are so many institutions that exist today that don't want that because they've built their entire existence on the fact that we die and the fact that we are not living longer. But it's the single greatest gift you can give humanity and any individual.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Well, it is, and you give a lot of talks, and I'm curious how you have your audiences respond. Mine, what I've learned over the last twenty five years is that it's all about framing the question. If I ask people, how long do they want to live? Most people will say, oh, over age ninety or a hundred, come shoot me. It often offends the ninety year olds, a hundred year olds in the audience. And I'm also on record saying, nobody who's healthy, who has friends, wants to die tomorrow. Nobody, no matter how old they are. Age is irrelevant, as long as you're healthy and happy. And that's what we're aiming for. But also, if I frame the question differently, it is, if you could be healthy at a hundred

• 11:22Speaker 01

  and twenty. Would you? And almost everybody wants that. And so it's not the longevity that people want. It's the health that leads to longevity. And the good news, the technology does that. We'd, I don't know how to make someone live longer without keeping them healthy, do you?

• 11:37Peter Diamandis?

  No, I, I think, I think we need to define for a second the term of lifespan and health span, right? And I think really what you and I speak to, to a large degree constantly is health span, is, is retaining your cognition, your aesthetics, your mobility. So you're thinking clearly, you look good, you're moving well, you know, past a hundred. And I had, I've had the same experience. I literally was at a event at the Vatican onstage with a, uh, guy, an elderman, a rabbi, a priest, a cardinal, it sounds like the opening of a joke. And there's this audience of, of probably about three hundred scientists and physicians.

• 12:18Peter Diamandis?

  And Tony Robbins was there with me and I, I asked them, how many of you here would like to live past a hundred and twenty? And it was like crickets. It was like maybe twenty percent of the room raised their hand and I was like shocked. And, you know, this was in the earliest days of my asking that question. Of course, I reframe it now in a different way. But there's another, you said it beautifully, which is, uh, you need to have friends, right? You need to have people you care about. Uh, and the notion that, uh, having, you need to have your future and your mind and heart be larger than your past. If you have nothing to live for, why live? And I think that whole psychology is so, so critically important.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Right. Uh, and you're, you're the expert at this. You, you inspire people to have goals, which is really what gets us out of bed in the morning. Anyone who doesn't have a passion or a goal in life, just find one. It's, it's essential for health and longevity and in my view, and happiness. And it can be small, it can be large, but you need one. And it's actually now proven that those who have goals and companions who support them, those two things are the ones that live the longest. In fact, that was even more important than diet, uh, in this long-term Harvard study.

• 13:35Peter Diamandis?

  Beautiful. Good, I've got both of those in spades.

• 13:41Peter Diamandis?

  I'm curious, one of the mindsets I talk about is having a longevity mindset. Because I think you can will yourself to live and will yourself to die. And I'd love to, you know, you don't use that terminology, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think a longevity mindset means.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Well, I've witnessed it. My father, who I wrote about in my book Lifespan, and who recently flew out from Australia to be with me in Boston and helped me teach a course at Harvard to those students. He, he had to change his mindset. He was a typical sixty-seven-year-old at the time, which is a mindset, as I understand it. I'm gonna retire, I'll have a good ten years, hopefully, and then the rest is hellacious and I don't even want to think about it, but it's gonna happen. And my career is over and I'm not sure I'm gonna do much, but just sit around and maybe do some gardening. Now, that was sixty-seven.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  He's now, well, he became mid-seventies and realized, he actually, after adopting these longevity lifestyles that I talk about, and which includes, we'll get to fasting, eating well, exercising, the usual stuff, but also some supplements.

• 15:04Peter Diamandis?

  Sleep, yes, yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  He gets a lot of sleep, he has a very good social group. He hangs out with one of my ex-girlfriends, which keeps him young. True story. And, and so, the supplements, you know, a lot of people know the supplements that I take myself, he takes those as well. And together, some combination of those has allowed him to get through his seventies in a very healthy way. He's got no diseases. He's got, he started a new career. He went back to work. He's helping raise his grandkids. In fact, one of his grandkids is living with him. And he loves life. And he's had to change his mindset. His mindset is, hey, he told me last night, over, over the internet, a video conference,

• 15:49Speaker 01

  hey, I've decided to get a puppy. You know, that's, his mindset is... I'm gonna live over a hundred. I've seen that I've made it through my seventies. I'm getting younger. Literally, he's getting biologically younger as he gets older. He's now eighty-three. No diseases, not even any pain. He's got super amount of energy. His brain is actually sharper than it used to be in his forties because he's not distracted by by his kids. And so he's loving life like he never did before and realizing that the idea that you have this finite limit, you need to just give that up and say that anything is possible because science is also advancing at such a rate that we don't know what's going to be possible even five years

• 16:32Speaker 01

  from now. Five years ago, I didn't know it was possible to reverse aging safely. Now we know at least in animals it is, and it looks like it will be in primates with which we are one. And so the longer you live, the longer you will live. That's already true, but it's going to be exponential. And so that we do have to have a mindset of we need to love what we do, multiple careers, and not have a limit because that does place limits on us mentally as well as physically.

• 17:00Peter Diamandis?

  This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now, glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High prolonged levels of glucose, what's called hyperglycemia, leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to sexual dysfunction to diabetes, and it's not good. The challenge is all of us are different. All of us respond to different foods in different ways. Like for me, if I eat bananas, it spikes my blood glucose. If I eat grapes, it doesn't. If I eat bread by itself, I get this prolonged spike in

• 17:45Peter Diamandis?

  my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil, It blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app. So Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24/7. I wear it all the time. It really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat, remain conscious of the food that I eat, and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics. You know, on this podcast, I only recommend products and services that I use, that I use not only for myself, but my friends and my family, that I think are high-quality and safe and

• 18:27Peter Diamandis?

  really impact a person's life. So, check it out. Levels.link/peter. Give you two additional months of membership, and it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually, this stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine. Today, it's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead, and hope you'll consider as well. You know, one of the other, I agree 100%, and it's beautiful. And one of the things that I do, and I know you inherently do this, given your world, your life, who you spend time with, is actually taking in all of the breakthroughs constantly

• 19:11Peter Diamandis?

  that are going on. There's a shocking number of breakthroughs going on across the wide range of the hallmarks of aging, and the technologies coming our way, and the tools of AI. And so, it's when you're deluged by all this positive news in the health tech and biotech world, and you substitute that for all of the news from the Crisis News Network, my name for CNN, it allows you to just be optimistic, because it's accelerating, right? I mean, you must feel a palpable acceleration of the amount of publications and breakthroughs and technologies in this field.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Right. Well, my head is spinning, and...

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Even I can't really keep up. I'm using AI to feed me the papers that I need to read or look at. Social media helps. Before I get out of bed, I know this sounds really bad for my social life. Before I get out of bed, I've probably read the abstracts of twenty different papers in this field of advances, and that's just the beginning of my day. And I'm not exaggerating. There's a deluge. I get feeds for that. And these are big breakthroughs. We used to think it was exciting to extend the lifespan of a yeast cell by ten percent. That was when I was, you know, in my twenties. Nowadays, you can't open up a major journal typically without seeing something relevant to aging

• 20:37Speaker 01

  and a breakthrough in understanding why we age and how to slow it down and even now reverse it. And it's a wonderful age where we can do, instead of one experiment per month, which is how I did my PhD, we can do a million in a day. The genome is now hundred to two hundred dollars instead of being two billion. And even reading the DNA methylation clock from a cheek swab or a blood, which is one way of measuring your biological age. Speaking of democratization of technology, it's a few hundred dollars at best for a consumer right now to measure their biological age through a blood test or a cheek swab. My student just developed technology that brings that down by at least two orders of magnitude. It would probably go three to make it just a few dollars. I mean, it'll

• 21:19Speaker 01

  keep coming down to where the cost of sending the sample in will be more than the actual test itself.

• 21:24Peter Diamandis?

  [laughing]

• 21:26Speaker 01

  That's to plug the company. It's called Tally Health if you want to sign up as one of the early users.

• 21:31Peter Diamandis?

  I'm excited.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Get in line for that. But my point is that we are in a world where things are changing so rapidly that you want to stick around, if not anything but curiosity.

• 21:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, what's the most exciting time ever to be alive? I mean, the only time more exciting than today is going to be tomorrow. And I agree with you. The deluge is exponentially accelerating. And I ended up building an AI system myself that searches the world's news for converging technologies impacting health span and longevity. And I think everybody listening knows where it's longevityinsider.org. And I get ten to fifteen journal articles, tweets, you know.

• 22:15Peter Diamandis?

  Anyway, magazine articles about this, what are the breakthroughs? And it's staggering. And what's amazing, and David, you've mentioned this slightly a little bit earlier. You know, five years ago, really 10 years ago, the idea of working in the field of longevity or aging, or an idea of age reversal was a death knell. Now it's the hottest subject. I mean, how many graduate students do you have competing for positions in your labs? I mean, it must be staggering.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  It's hundreds per position. But, and we're fortunate that there are a lot of new labs opening up in this field. It's blowing up in a nice, big way. There's probably more than $10 billion now committed to investing in aging research and drug development, just in the past couple of years. And so there's a lot of opportunity for young people. Not all of them will end up in my lab. I have a lab of about 20 people, so we're short on space. But it is really exciting to me to see young people jump in. We actually, as a field, made a mistake. About 20 years ago, we thought, even 10 years ago, we thought that the people we want

• 23:27Speaker 01

  to target with the message of get on board, get with us, get with the program, call aging a disease, were people over 70, 65, maybe 50s might listen, we're not sure. Turns out those that are 18 to 30 are the ones that are most passionate. And I didn't see that coming, but it's really been heartwarming. And I think it bodes really well for the future of humanity.

• 23:51Peter Diamandis?

  So for people who are listening who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, you know, is it the message that it's not too late to start?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 24:04Peter Diamandis?

  Definitely not too late, just to be clear.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Here's the thing to remember is that aging is something that's really malleable. We know from twin studies that those who change their lifestyle can have a dramatic effect on their ultimate longevity. Animal studies have shown you can intervene at the equivalent of eighty, ninety years old and still have the benefit. And that's with relatively old technology, these age slowing molecules. Now we're reversing age. We can take a blind mouse and make it see again in a week. Now, these are the kind of technologies that are coming online that will allow someone who is of any age to be rejuvenated. And we can now multiply rejuvenate tissues. We haven't published this yet, so it's a scoop. It's not just a one-time reset.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  We're actually, this is in a mouse, though. We reverse the age of their eye, and I've got to give credit to Bruce Cassander's lab here at Harvard. We reverse the age of the eye of the mice. They get their vision, they age out again, and we just hit them again with the reversal, and then they go back again. And so I see a future where, you know, a ninety-year-old goes back to being fifty, they age out till they're sixty, and then they just keep resetting every decade. That technology, we can do this in mice. We're not that biologically different in terms of our aging process as a mouse is. In fact, the process of aging, as I've shown in my research, is similar all the way from us back to a yeast cell.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  So I'm very optimistic that these technologies of age resetting will work in the very old as well.

• 25:40Peter Diamandis?

  I love it. A few pointed questions here for fun. So I'm curious, I've had conversations with Ray Kurzweil about this idea, extensively about longevity, escape velocity, right? The point in time in which science is adding a year to your life, greater than a year for every year that you're alive. So it's divergent and you escape. And then I've also had this conversation with George, George Church, a mutual friend, working with us together on our age reversal X Prize, which maybe we'll talk about. And they both gave me a number of when they think we'll reach longevity escape velocity. And I am curious if you're willing to offer one.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  I already know how to ostensibly make someone

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Less aged than they currently are. And I can work with them to make them more than a year younger within a year. So I would say we already have knowledge how to go back more than a year every year. Now, the critics will say, well, David, you're just measuring the epigenome and you're measuring some biomarkers. That's not proof. And the answer is, yeah, you're right. But we're certainly not far away from a future where we're able to, if nothing more, stop the aging process. And I truly believe that.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  If you look at my biological age, based on a number of measures, I'm at least a decade younger than my chronological age, my birthday candles would tell you. And I'm not that good at exercise. I could probably be a lot younger if I tried. So I really think that we're on this cusp. If you ask me in, what, 1903, are we close to flying? I'd say, yeah, we got the technology, it's just a matter of when, and it's probably going to happen in the next few years.

• 27:40Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. So you didn't actually give me an answer. You gave me a sort of answer. So I, but the question needs to be a finer point because you're right. It's like, could you theoretically now? When will you? So I guess the question is, when will a set of treatments exist that might allow age reversal and be accessible to some segment of the general, you know, public?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  All right. 10 years.

• 28:08Peter Diamandis?

  10 years. Beautiful. So that's what, that's what Ray, that's what Ray said. George had it at about 15, but both of those numbers are shocking. So, I mean, when I'm on, when I'm speaking to anybody interested in this area, I'm saying, listen, your job is not to live for 50 years. Your job is to live healthfully for the next 20 to intercept all the technologies coming our way during that period of time.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so my father's on that trajectory. He's 83. He'll be around. All goes well, at least for another ten years. So I'm, I'm, talk about motivation. It's not just about how long do you want to live, it's how long do you want your family to live? And when you phrase it like that, you know, who wouldn't give a lot of money to spend extra year with their parents?

• 28:50Peter Diamandis?

  It's, it's crazy, right? There is, there is nothing more valuable than our health. And health is the new wealth and at the end of the day, you're going to spend the money one way or another on health. And the question is, do you want to spend it at the end of life, fighting a multitude of diseases in and out of the hospital? Or do you want to pay the attention and prevent this diseases from happening in the first place? I mean, it's that, that cut and dry. How old do you want to live, pal? I mean, that's not a fair, I don't think it's a question I can ask, ask you without, with a straight face because of all the conversations we've had.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, he, here's the thing, I, I've been changing my views over the years. I could have told you very honestly, if you asked me, let's say, ten years ago, let's say, when we were hanging out at, at the TED Med Conference in San Diego, how long do you want to live? And I, I would have honestly said, I'm not doing this because I want to live longer. I'm doing this because I hope future generations will live longer. And I really believe that. I'm now at a point where I've had a lot of fun biohacking my body, measuring things, taking things, getting younger, feeling better, arguably looking better.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  And I'm just having so much fun doing this. I, I don't want to, to stop doing that. I'm not afraid of death. You know, anyone who's seen me drive my Tesla around knows that's true. That's one of the reasons I got autopilot. So, you know, it's, it's not, I'm not personally scared of, of what's to come, but I am.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Now, I'm hoping that I'll be able to stick around for another fifty years, maybe a hundred years, to help push the field forward, to see what happens, to help inspire others as well and train others. And so I'm now more of, you know, I'd love to live to a hundred and fifty if I could, before I really didn't think about it.

• 30:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's interesting, right? I remember when I was in medical school, not far from where you are right now, I watched this television show on Long Live Sea Life, and, you know, bowhead whales are living to two hundred years, and Greenland sharks, four or five hundred years, and sea turtles, potentially longer. And I remember thinking, you know, if they can live that long, why can't we? It's either a hardware problem or a software problem, and we're going to solve that. And I see this decade as that time where we're making that, that we're getting the tools to do that. But then I stop and I think, you know, there appears to be some kind of a existing limit in the one twenty timeframe that has

• 31:32Peter Diamandis?

  never been statistic, there's, you know, no one's, we haven't seen any examples out of billions of people, anybody living longer than that.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got into that. Yeah, that's a bunch of, bunch of baloney.

• 31:44Peter Diamandis?

  Good. I'm glad to hear that.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  That's ridiculous. That's not, that's not even logic to use that argument. You know, it's, it's eighteen ninety-nine. Let's look at the statistics of human flight. What are you going to project? It's impossible to fly, because it's never been done, right? But this limit to human lifespan, there is, there is no biological limit. Of course there isn't. We are the same stuff as a whale that can live a lot longer than us. This will build the same stuff as, as tortoises, and pretty much the same stuff as trees that live thousands of years. It's a software problem. I'm putting my career on the line. It's a software problem. And what's interesting about biology is that software encodes the

• 32:28Speaker 01

  ability to rebuild the hardware. So we got to reset the software. And when we do that in my lab, we find that tissues regenerate in animals. Our organoids, which are mini human organs, regenerate. They fix themselves and they function like they're new again. So it's, in my view, ninety-nine percent a software problem. And that's the good news, because you can reboot software pretty easily. We do this all the time in my lab. And what blows my mind, in a, in a paper that we published in twenty twenty- Was that we discovered that there is a backup copy of the original software in the body that you can access and flip the reset switch and it all comes back to life.

• 33:08Peter Diamandis?

  December, December 2020 cover issue. I remember it well. It was epic.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  It was, it was fun to discover and a shock. And, and actually that was one of the biggest moments of my life because of my career. Cause we didn't know if there was a backup copy. It's, it's one of those gifts to humanity that it exists. We don't exactly know how it's encoded, whether it's in a protein or on the DNA or some other thing we haven't thought of yet. But a hundred percent, we know that it exists and we can tap into that now.

• 33:38Peter Diamandis?

  I love you for that, buddy. Thank you for your passion and, and your extraordinary, extraordinary work. Let me flip the conversation slightly to the morality of living longer. Cause if you ask the general public, many of them would say, you know, it's immoral or it's not fair. We don't have enough resources. It's overpopulation and they come up with a multitude of reasons of why it's a bad thing to live longer. And I just, for those who might be having a dinner conversation that goes that direction, I'd like to forearm them with the opposite.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, read, read the last third of my book. It's all about that. I wrote it because a lot of these same points were brought up. And there are some very simple answers in, in my view. And I've debated bioethicists. Leon Cass was someone who advised the Bush administration, who I debated on, on public radio. So that I've thought a lot about this. So that the summary would be that ethically it is our.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Duty to uh to allow people to choose when they die. We don't get choose when we're born, but I think everybody has a right to choose how long they live. It should be a human right. Uh if there are tools to do that, you get a choice. You don't have to take the technology or use the technology, but I want everyone to have that choice. So it's also, I think, not just a right, it's your obligation to live as healthy and as long as you can. To do the right things, I do that not just for selfish reasons. I'm not vegan just because I want to live long. I don't want to be a financial and other other burden on my on my kids.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  You know, who hasn't had parents that have cost them a lot of time, money and angst, sorrow, desperation.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Because their parent uh didn't look after themselves or was sick for ten years. I've had a parent that was suffering for twenty years. Now, you know, I'm I'm not upset, this was just the way life went for my mother. But she did smoke, she didn't take care of herself. And I would say that, having seen the difference between my mother and my father now. It we have an obligation to our family to look after ourselves. And that's that's my view on the ethics of it.

• 36:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'll just add, you know, uh one of the concerns people have is overpopulation of the planet. And if you look at the charts, uh it may be exactly the opposite. You know, Elon, who now has, I guess, on record, ten children.

• 36:22Peter Diamandis?

  Goes on to to point this out for uh for different reasons. But, you know, fifty years ago, uh fifty years ago, the average uh children per family globally was something like five point six. It's now dropped down to below two point four. The US is below the replacement rate, as is Japan by a large margin and many parts of Europe. And it may well be that we have a massive underpopulation on the planet. And, you know, just go fly across any country and look out the window. Yes, we have our mega cities, but the majority of the planet is is underpopulated.

• 37:00Peter Diamandis?

  And yes, we need to feed, clothe, provide energy, clean water to everyone, especially as as people become wealthier. They want better quality of healthcare, better education and and better food sources. But we can do that, and that's what technology does, you know. Uh, it's from everything from cellular agriculture to solar. Uh, this is the direction we're going, but saying to a group of people, thou shalt not have the right to live a longer, healthier life. That doesn't sound like a an ethical option.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Well, no, and even doctors should feel that that um that their mission is to prolong life. There is no great greater or nobler cause than the prolongation of life. This is Francis Bacon, uh, sixteen fourteen.

• 37:50Peter Diamandis?

  We add to a pro- prolongation of a healthy life, yes.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, even better. Um, and that includes mental health. You gotta keep the brain young, otherwise there's no point. Uh, but your point is well taken, which is that what we're doing in this field, addressing either eighty or ninety something percent um of the cause of ill health on the planet, um, is the right thing to do for our species and for the planet. Also considering how much we could save, um, and how much is wasted right now on what I call sick care rather than healthcare.

• 38:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's devastating, devastating. And and by just make one point, United the United States ranks forty second. In terms of of population longevity on the planet, it's insane.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Well, this is because technology is distributed unevenly. And that we need to figure out a better way. I'm from Australia originally. Where everyone has free healthcare. And it works great, you know, because people who get sick. Are a major burden on all of us. We forget that's not just isolated. And it impacts all of us socially as well. So really what we want is is cheap. And effective. Not just medicines that treat diseases at the end stage, these, you know, Band-Aids or what I call whack-a-mole medicine. We want these cheap medicines to make it possible for us to get through our sixties without the fear of cancer. And our, you know, seventies and eighties without heart disease.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  These are medicines that are right on the on the cusp of. Being available. There are some medicines such as metformin. And low dose of rapamycin that are already on the market and are being used to prolong health that way. And these are the drugs that I think are going to have. A huge impact on the future of humanity in the same way. When antibiotics and vaccines were discovered.

• 39:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, thank you. Let's let's let's jump in for a few minutes into what you and I both do that others can do. That is effectively cheap and reasonably. Affordable for everybody and then talk a little bit about. What the next layer of activities are. To maximize. So let's go back and forth. I'll start with sleep. I didn't get enough sleep last night, but I prioritize it. I used to in medical school shoot for. Five and a half. I considered my stability point, but. I just sat down with Matt Walker for for an hour and. The stats are staggering, you know.

• 40:24Peter Diamandis?

  There's nobody who can actually sleep under six hours and have. Have good health. We need at least seven. Closer to eight hours to be able to do that. I use an eye mask. I use a cooling blanket. I use a.

• 40:41Peter Diamandis?

  Basically a process of. Bringing the lights down. And ultimately getting myself to bed at the same time every night, which is like nine thirty because my eyes pop open at five thirty, six forty, five forty-five. Similar for you?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so exercise and sleep are my downfalls. I have work on it as well. I was talking with our mutual friend Tony Robbins about this and Serena Poon. We were on also on a podcast, um, uh, in Instagram Live, to be specific. And we were comparing our sleep patterns. And after that, we followed up with our, uh, our actual sleep measurements. We're all measuring it. And, uh, I thought I was bad. I was getting an average of about five point five. Serena, I think Tony was less than five and then Serena was four point something. So here we are professing get sleep. And we are, you know, the worst offenders of probably most people.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  So I think that, um, I freely admit that I'm not perfect and I am striving. You mentioned some, some hacks. Uh, I have a bed that reduces my body temperature. So I get better sleep, deeper sleep. I also, I use other things such as dimming lights as well. But I really, I do need to do better. One of the things that's not well appreciated is why is it so important to get sleep? Now, there's two things. New discoveries have said that it's a way of cleaning the toxins out of the brain. There are draining channels that pump when we're asleep. That's important. That's even true for flies, fruit flies. The other thing is that these longevity genes that we've worked on for years called the Surtuans

• 42:21Speaker 01

  control not just our longevity clock, our biological clock, but they also control our 24 hour clock. And when either of those clocks gets messed up, they affect each other. And so by sleeping well, you also slow down your rate of aging.

• 42:37Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting. Uh, let's get to, uh, to exercise next. Uh, it's a weak point for anybody busy. Um, but, uh, one of my takeaways from this longevity platinum trip I, I just finished because everybody was, was over and over and overstating.

• 42:55Peter Diamandis?

  Exercise is one of the most important, if you would, compliments to any longevity plan. And if it was a drug, it'd be a multi-trillion dollar drug. How far are we from exercise memetics that can help maintain muscle mass?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think we're already here. It's just not well-known. So the first thing is that exercise plus these memetics gives you a double bang for the buck, based on animal studies and some hints in human. One of the molecules that we've worked on for many years, resveratrol is an exercise memetic, makes mice run further, gives human more energy. The one that's more recent from my work is called NMN, not to be confused with M&Ms, please don't switch those out. NMN is a precursor, and Peter, you're-

• 43:53Peter Diamandis?

  I'm imagining everybody who knows your work and who's read David's amazing book, Lifespan, yes.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  So with NMN, the mice run further, and it's even better if they exercise. But we have, we have new data from Metro Biotech, which was spun out of my lab 10 years ago, and using a molecule that also raises NAD in muscle and other tissues, those people had increased endurance, as well as lower other parameters such as cholesterol and blood pressure. So again, probably an exercise memetic. You know, I'll let you in on a little bit of a secret, working with the military, who are helping sponsor these trials, I'm now allowed to say that.

• 44:38Peter Diamandis?

  I saw the news when it came out, when it was leaked, yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Well, I went on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he asked me about that, and I got in huge trouble for even mentioning it. And that's all I did, I mentioned it. And then, then the military put out their own press release a couple of years later, and I thought, okay, all right, now I can talk about it. But we're also, and we're just increasing the number of patients there, being tested by a lot, by another 100. But that-

• 45:06Speaker 01

  That study's gone really well, and so I think that this NAD boosting is one of these exercise memetics. Are we going to be in a world where we just pop a pill and we're just as fit as we would otherwise be? We're a long way from that because exercise does a lot of things. There's an interesting new molecule called LAC Phi, which is a little lactate plus phenylalanine amino acid, which was shown in a recent paper that that is what stimulates hunger after exercise and one of the reasons it's hard to lose weight after you exercise or if you exercise. And so there are these discoveries where we're able to manipulate our physiology and our mental state as well.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  And those things, I think, together will help us, but also products that you mentioned, like the PCSK9 inhibitors are also helping people lose weight and bring their metabolism back to more of a healthy lean state as well. And I just want to encourage people to try and lose weight if they are overweight because there's really few things that really accelerate the biological clock. It's smoking, it's lack of sleep, but it's also obesity. So try and bring your body down to a BMI of around 25 or less, it really helps.

• 46:20Peter Diamandis?

  A brief note from our sponsors. Let's talk about sleep. Sleep has become one of my number one longevity priorities in life. You know, getting eight deep uninterrupted hours of sleep is one of the most important things you can do to increase your vitality and energy and increase the health span that you have here on earth. You know, when I was in medical school years ago, I used to pride myself on how little sleep I could get, you know, it used to be five, five and a half hours. Today, I pride myself on how much sleep I can get and I shoot for eight hours every single night. Now, usually I'm great at going to sleep. If I'm exhausted, you know, I've worked a hard day, I'm right out. But if I'm having difficulty, and it occurs, I'm having insomnia or my mind's overactive

• 47:01Peter Diamandis?

  and I need help to get that eight hours, I turn to a supplement product by Life Force called Peak Rest. Now, Peak Rest has been formulated with an extraordinary scientific depth and background, includes everything from long-lasting melatonin to magnesium to L-glycine to rosemary extract, just to name a few. This product is about creating a sense of rest. And really giving you the depth and length of sleep that you need for recovery. It's a product I hope you'll try. It works for me and I'm sure it will work for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforce.com/peter to get a discount from Life Force on this product.

• 47:41Peter Diamandis?

  But you'll also see a whole set of other longevity and vitality related supplements that I use. We'll talk about them some other time. But in terms of sleep, Peak Rest is my go to supplement. Hope you'll enjoy it. Go to mylifeforce.com/peter for your discount. For those interested, I mean, my exercise protocol, I will do all I can to get 10,000 steps in. I'll take my conference calls there. I can't do my podcast there because of the noise, but I'll take walking meetings wherever I can. And then I'll do a heavy weight workout once a week at the gym. And then I've just got a catalyst suit. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the catalyst suit. It uses electro muscular stim in a whole suit you're wearing.

• 48:27Peter Diamandis?

  And a video, it's, it's, check it out. It's catalyst with a K, but it's, it's a pretty cool technology that I use for exercising at home. Sort of, sort of the exponential tech version of it.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Peter's wearing a suit that electrically stimulates his whole body.

• 48:45Peter Diamandis?

  Let's go to, let's go to diet. Let's begin with the fact that sugar is a poison.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is true. Do you watch how much sugar you eat?

• 48:55Peter Diamandis?

  I do. I'm usually, I just took off my CGM. I use a continuous glucose monitor to monitor it. And listen, I'm not perfect, but it is, I think twice about eating sugar. And people need to realize the body did, you know, humanity did not evolve over the last hundred thousand years in an environment that had all the sugarcane and all the sugar. It's an inflammatory molecule. It causes hypercholesteremia, neuroinflammatory, cardiac inflammatory. It's not good for you, to say the least.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've avoided it as much as I can since my, since I turned 40. I don't eat desserts unless I steal it. And then I I I look at sugar again at like it. It's not going to kill me, but I do think of it as a poison. It helps me. Get over it because our bodies crave sugar. It's what how we evolve. It's a good source of quick energy, but it does it. One of the things that it also does is it. Covalently um very tightly attaches to proteins and makes them malfunction or even become toxic. Uh. And so one of the the readouts of for type two diabetes. Is uh what's called uh glycated hemoglobin or H B A one C, which is a glucose attached to.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Our hemoglobin protein, but what most people don't remember is. That hemoglobin is just one protein. Out of twenty something thousand that also get attacked slash attached to glucose. And uh and that's bad for the body. So keeping levels steady as well. Is uh and as low as possible without feeling tired is is a goal. So practically what I do. I'm wearing a CGM right now. Down here on my tummy. I won't show you that for obvious reasons. Um. But I I like to see as steady levels as I can. That also doesn't just mean I'm going to be healthy. But it's also means that I don't get the the rushes and then the brain fog during the day and. That used to be my life. I would eat and then I'd get hungry and eat hungry and with my glucose doing this.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  And it's no way to get through life. I can now just power through the day. My liver takes care of my sugar levels for most of the time. I don't feel hungry and I just think and I can focus.

• 51:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, no, it it is amazing. I I use a I use levels as the. Uh the system, the app that I use, uh uh they work with Dexcom. And it's interesting, right? If so, both of us do a seismic intermittent fasting. I think you do more than I do. I will try and. Uh and fast six o'clock at night through one the next day. I'll have a late lunch and a dinner. But you have an extraordinary amount of energy. Uh more than people realize when you're able to do that because you're not, you know, blood's not flowing to your gut and. Uh people need to try it. It's it's a fascinating feeling. I mean, I I literally felt hyper. When I started that the first time.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. It's it's a fallacy that you get tired because that's what happened when you when you start. Because your liver is lazy. It won't make glucose. For probably the first two weeks. So power through that that zone, drink a lot of water, tea, coffee, whatever gets you through, fill up your tummy and you'll find that you end up having more energy than you've ever had in your life.

• 52:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's it's amazing. So we hit sleep, exercise, diet. I think mindset is is clearly one of the most important things as well. And that comes with love, community, hugs and and just, you know, purpose in life.

• 52:27Peter Diamandis?

  And then, you know, we can talk about it some other time, but there's a whole slew of, I call it, don't die from something stupid category, which is, you know, imaging yourself in a way, you know, this is through Life Force, through Fountain Life, through InsideTracker. These are ways to understand what's going on inside your body so that you can be data driven in in the decisions that you make.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, so I I work with top athletes and other well-known people who want to optimize their body for performance and longevity. And I cannot do anything scientific or even effective without measuring something. And I I either use InsideTracker, I've been involved with them for many years and I into just full disclosure, I I put an early investment in that company. There are other measuring companies, Tally Health is one I'm now developing for biological age. There's like the whole Life Force Group, they do a lot of measuring. So what I made the case of for in my book was that we need a dashboard on our bodies

• 53:42Speaker 01

  as good as or better than we have for our cars. And we wouldn't drive our cars without a dashboard, it would be crazy. We wouldn't know where we're going, how fast we're going, if we're running out of fuel. Why do we do that on our bodies? Why do we go to the doctor for an annual physical? This is medieval. We need our bodies to be checked up a thousand times a second, which is what you can do now. With monitors like, you know, Levels Health provides, that's just glucose. The future, as you know, is that we're going to be monitoring thousands of analytics constantly.

• 54:12Peter Diamandis?

  And it's all going to your AI that is optimizing your life if you wanted to. If you don't, if you want to be a couch potato, that is your option, but you should have the option to actually maximize your health. Buddy, I am grateful for our time. I'd love to come together and on our next conversation, do a little bit of an AMA. We both have a large Twitter audience. I think both of us have asked them what they'd like us to talk about. So on our next session, why don't we take some conversation from the community? But I wish you an extraordinary day and week ahead, pal. Appreciate you.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, Peter. And likewise, what you do for us, people at the forefront of technology, is you inspire us and give us the resources to make the impossible possible. Thank you.

• 55:05Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you. I'm proud, by the way, everybody, to be a benefactor to David's research in his lab along with Tony Robbins. We love what he does and counting on you so much, David. All right. Take care, buddy.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  You too. Bye.

• 55:21Peter Diamandis?

  Bye. Everyone, this is Peter again. Before you take off, I want to take a moment to just invite you to subscribe to my weekly tech blog. Today, over 200,000 people received this email twice per week. In the tech blog, I share with you my insights on converging exponential technologies, what's going on in AI, how longevity is transforming, adding decades to our life. In the tech blog, I often look at the 20 meta trends that are going to transform the decade ahead and share the conversations I've had with incredible tech thought leaders on how they're transforming industries. If that sounds cool to you and you want to try it, join me. Go to dmantis.com/blog, enter your email, and let's start this weekly conversation.

• 56:01Peter Diamandis?

  Let me share with you the incredible progress we're seeing in the world of technology and the positive impact it's having on our lives. Again, that's dmantis.com/blog. Looking forward to sharing my insights and incredible breakthroughs I'm seeing with you every single week.

• 56:31Speaker 00

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