904 Live a Longer Life and Reverse Aging with Dr. David Sinclair

Aging is a disease. Everyone gets old. But did you ever think of the symptoms of aging as a disease that can be cured? I'd heard about Dr. David Sinclair and his ground-breaking longevity research, and I knew he would be a fascinating person to interview about this idea. We ended up going really deep into the science of why we age, how to reverse it, and what is actually in our control. David told stories he'd never shared before, and I kept asking questions because I was so interested in what he was telling me. David Sinclair is a professor in the Department of Genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School. He is an inventor on 35 patents and has received more than 35 awards and honors. In 2014, he was on Time Magazine’s list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” and listed as Time's Top 50 in healthcare in 2018. In this conversation, we discussed all of my top questions on why we age, how much of it is reversible, and all of the ways I've heard to increase your longevity and health. David is a wealth of wisdom on all these topics, and he also shared some of the hardest times of his life, including watching his mother die of lung cancer and why that impacted his work so much. If you are committed to improving your health and living a long and healthy life, this conversation is a must-listen in Episode 904. Is it possible to reverse death? (7:42)What are the main ways to turn on the longevity genes? (9:30)How do you say no to all the food offers around you? (17:30)How did you get fascinated by longevity and anti-aging? (19:15)How did you recover from a major career setback? (37:06)What was the biggest lesson you learned from a year of being homeless? (49:28)How important are heat and cold therapy to anti-aging? (59:38)What is the ideal way to use fasting to improve your health? (1:05:42)How old do you think you’ll be able to live? (1:14:15)How much does inflammation play into the longevity of your life? (1:20:44)How our body’s built-in defenses against aging work (1:12)Why 3 meals a day is too much food for most people (10:09)The main benefits of a plant-based diet for longevity (13:13)Why it’s important to remember that there will always be another meal (15:10)Why death is so shocking to us even though it happens all the time (21:01)The molecule that has been proven to protect against a variety of diseases (29:34)The story that David has never told of how he was homeless after college (44:45)How cells lose their ability to stay young (55:32)Lewis’ experience doing a cold-exposure intensive in Poland with Wim Hof (1:08:45)Plus much more... If you enjoyed this episode, check out the video, show notes and more at http://www.lewishowes.com/904 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 904 with New York Times bestselling author and one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Dr. David Sinclair. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:38Lewis Howes?

  Buddha said, "To keep the body in good health is a duty. Otherwise, we shall not be able to keep our minds strong and clear." I am super pumped about this one. For whatever reason, I have been researching more and more about health and nutrition and about aging over the last few years. I think once I hit 30 years old, something in me started to say, "I'm not a teen, I'm not a 20 something anymore. I can't just destroy my body and eat whatever I want and look good. I've got to actually put in the right nutrients in my system. I've got to take care of my sleep. I've got to weight train. I've got to do all these things to help me not only look good, but most importantly, feel good and help me live a longer, healthier life."

• 1:24Lewis Howes?

  And Dr. David Sinclair is a professor in the Department of Genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School. He's one of the best in the world at what he does. Now, he has suggested that aging is a disease and that we may soon have the tools to put it into remission. Pretty crazy, I know. And he has called for greater international attention to the social, economic, and political risks and benefits of a world in which billions of people can live much longer and much healthier lives. He is an inventor on 35 patents and has received more than 35 awards and honors in 2014.

• 2:10Lewis Howes?

  He was on Time Magazine's list as the 100 most influential people in the world and listed as Time's Top 50 in Healthcare in 2018. He's truly doing incredible science and research to figure out how to reverse aging and to eliminate the disease of aging. Now, in this episode, we get into it. We go really deep. I ask a lot of curious questions. I have no clue about a lot of things with scientists, what they do, how they practice, how they research, what happens in their labs. So I go in deep and ask him about that. I think you're gonna laugh at some of these moments of my just curious questioning. We talk about the methods on how anyone can add more years to their life instantly with

• 2:55Lewis Howes?

  a few simple decisions that you can make. The benefits of putting your body under stressful situations like extreme cold and fasting to reverse aging. The importance of sticking to what you believe, even if you're surrounded by critics. A story of hustle and homelessness that Dr. David has never shared before. And what you can start doing right now today to improve not only your health, but the health of your family. This will literally save and transform your life if you listen to this fully and if you start to apply the science, the research, proven facts that have extended human life already. Please dive in. If you have friends that you want to have live a long, healthy life, you can save

• 3:39Lewis Howes?

  someone's life by sharing this link, LewisHowes.com/904. Just send a friend a link, send someone a link who you know maybe is struggling with their health, maybe someone who wants to improve their health, and someone you deeply care about. If you want to help people save their lives, you can send them this link, LewisHowes.com/904. And without further ado, I'm super pumped about this. Let's live a healthier, happier, longer life with the one and only Dr. David Sinclair.

• 4:13Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. We have the iconic Dr. David Sinclair in the house. Thank you so much for being here. Very excited about this. You are the master on talking about lifespan, talking about how to reverse aging, talking about how to extend our life, our health and everything. And something you said before we got on here and that I read in your book is that aging is a disease. Is that right?

• 4:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, that's what I think, yeah.

• 4:41Lewis Howes?

  That's what you think it is. Would that mean death is a disease as well?

• 4:46Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, death is the end product of aging.

• 4:49Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 4:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  So we've cured just about every other major disease. So you don't die from an infection. You typically don't die in childbirth if you're a woman. So now what's left is aging. And while we're whacking each of these diseases, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, trying to whack them on the head like a whack a mole game.

• 5:07Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 5:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  We forget that the main reason all these diseases occur is that our bodies are aging. If you don't get old, you don't get those diseases.

• 5:16Lewis Howes?

  Is that because your immune system is strong and so that it fights against disease essentially?

• 5:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, yes, it's similar, but it's not the immune system that you're thinking of. We actually have inbuilt defenses. We call them longevity genes that we can activate in our daily lives by doing certain things.

• 5:33Lewis Howes?

  Longevity genes?

• 5:34Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yes, that's what we call them.

• 5:36Lewis Howes?

  How many genes do we have?

• 5:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  Oh, we've got about 23, 24,000 of them.

• 5:40Lewis Howes?

  23, 24,000 genes.

• 5:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, but there's only about 50 really important ones for longevity.

• 5:46Lewis Howes?

  Okay. And what are the, one of those longevity gene?

• 5:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, the ones we study are called sirtuins, and there are seven of those. And they're in all parts of the body and they do all really crazy good stuff for us.

• 5:58Lewis Howes?

  Okay. And where do telomeres come into play?

• 6:01Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, they're part of it.

• 6:03Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 6:03Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, there are seven hallmarks or eight depending. These are causes of aging. So telomeres are one of those hallmarks. Other things are like the battery packs winding down, those mitochondria in our cells, we lose stem cells, all this other stuff. But here's the important point. We think, A, that there's a unified cause, a whole upstream cause of all of those things. We can talk about that. But also, the Surtuans, they defend against all of those. So while we used to think we'd have to develop eight different drugs to slow down aging, if you just tap into these longevity genes, they take care of everything.

• 6:40Lewis Howes?

  Really? They continue to regenerate good cells. They continue to fight against disease, or stress, or whatever it may be, or...

• 6:48Dr. David Sinclair?

  They do. They're really smart. They make proteins that act like traffic cops, telling the body how to fend against adversity. And they've been with us on the planet since life first arose.

• 7:01Lewis Howes?

  And it's seven of them?

• 7:02Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, the ones I studied, there are seven. There are others. There are seven Surtuans, and there are three classes of longevity gene. The ones I studied, those seven, and there's a couple of others that you can turn on.

• 7:14Lewis Howes?

  Why don't you study the others? Are they not credible enough?

• 7:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  We do, but we scientists, we like to specialize.

• 7:22Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, gotcha.

• 7:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  But in truth, even though 10 years ago, we used to fight with each other, "My longevity gene is more important than your longevity gene." It was ridiculous. "My worm's living longer than your worm." It was really silly. But now, we've realized, most of us admit that all these genes are talking to each other, and if you tweak one set, the others will be tweaked too.

• 7:42Lewis Howes?

  Right, okay. So these genes, when you say you study them, what does that actually mean? You're pulling, like, blood out of different humans, and you're putting them in a tube, and you're researching, and you're... What's actually happening to study these?

• 7:57Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 7:58Lewis Howes?

  Because I'm a non-scientist, I have no clue what that actually means.

• 8:01Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 8:01Lewis Howes?

  Is it like rats? Is it humans? Is it, you know?

• 8:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  You've got to come to the lab. You've got to see what's going on, because it's crazy stuff. We do anything we can to answer a question.

• 8:11Lewis Howes?

  You're cloning humans in there, you're doing all sorts of stuff, right?

• 8:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's crazy stuff. So we're driven by the question, not by the technology. So most labs will say, "Okay, I'm an expert in rats." I don't give a rats about a rat. I care about answering a question. And our question is, "Why do we age, and what can we do about it? And will that transform medicine?" And so what we do, if you came to the lab, you'd see we've got jellyfish growing, we've got mice that are living longer and running on little treadmills. Up in the lab, we have stem cells that we're growing. Uh, actually turning them back in time. We can reverse the aging of these

• 8:46Lewis Howes?

  Stem cells.

• 8:48Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Lewis Howes?

  So what does that mean? You you take a cell from a human? Like a like a sample, like a skin sample, like a blood.

• 8:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  Skin, brain cells growing in the dish. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:58Lewis Howes?

  Wait, brain cells growing in the dish?

• 8:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Lewis Howes?

  So like you take it from like a a living human?

• 9:02Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yes.

• 9:03Lewis Howes?

  You take a little piece of brain?

• 9:04Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yes.

• 9:05Lewis Howes?

  You put it in a dish and you reverse the age of the brain?

• 9:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  Correct.

• 9:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 9:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, that's what we do. Now we can actually grow little little brains in the dish too.

• 9:13Lewis Howes?

  From scratch?

• 9:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, well, you start with a network of cells and then you coax them into forming these networks and and it's like a mini brain. Yeah.

• 9:22Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so.

• 9:24Dr. David Sinclair?

  And we can age them forwards, make them older.

• 9:26Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 9:27Dr. David Sinclair?

  We think we understand what's driving the aging process.

• 9:29Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 9:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  And then we reset.

• 9:30Lewis Howes?

  And then you reverse it?

• 9:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 9:31Lewis Howes?

  So you can create a brain from nothing? A bunch of little cells that come together and create a a thinking brain?

• 9:38Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I don't know how much it thinks, but it'll it'll respond to stimuli. It'll Wow. It'll fire, yeah.

• 9:43Lewis Howes?

  And then you can make it older? Like Benjamin Button and then reverse its aging?

• 9:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 9:49Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 9:51Dr. David Sinclair?

  I'm telling you, it's it's crazy. But when I'm in the lab and and with my students, for us, it's just every day. It's like go to work and doing stuff.

• 9:57Lewis Howes?

  It's like, ah, there's a brain. It's getting older. It's getting younger. Yeah.

• 9:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, yeah. But now that I'm talking about it with you, it does sound bizarre.

• 10:02Lewis Howes?

  Fascinating for a non-scientist.

• 10:04Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, the the other thing that's weird about this profession, or anyone who wants to go into it, is that essentially you're an apprentice under me and you you work in the lab and you spend a few years learning how to do all this stuff. It's not easy. The first two years, basically, you screw up.

• 10:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  But it's weird that, to think about it, you get a bench in a lab and some chemicals and you have to make the chemicals yourself usually. And then your job is to discover something nobody else has discovered.

• 10:30Lewis Howes?

  Something new.

• 10:30Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's gotta be not not just slightly new, radically new. Cause I'm at Harvard. They don't give prizes for discovering something obvious.

• 10:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 10:38Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's gotta be shocking. And if it's not shocking, it's not worth studying.

• 10:42Lewis Howes?

  And haven't you discovered like tens or like thirty something, thirty five awards for new discoveries or something? Or thirty five patents? What do you have? Something crazy.

• 10:51Dr. David Sinclair?

  Some numbers like that.

• 10:52Lewis Howes?

  You've discovered a lot of new things.

• 10:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, yeah, yeah, if I didn't, I wouldn't have a job. There's motivation to always be doing cutting edge stuff. But what drives us and the reason I think we've been successful is that we're driven by the question, not by the technology.

• 11:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  And the technology comes second. So what I'll do is I'll say, okay, here's a question. We want to figure out why does cold improve health? Or why does fasting, not eating, improve health? How do you figure that out? Well, then you got to pull together teams of people. Molecular biologists, biochemists, mathematicians, computer software people. And we get in a room and we figure it out.

• 11:31Lewis Howes?

  Really? So what would you say? And your questions are, why do we age and how do we reverse it? Is that the two questions you're focused on the most right now?

• 11:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, yeah, that's, that's pretty good, yeah.

• 11:42Lewis Howes?

  Why do we age and how do we reverse aging?

• 11:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 11:44Lewis Howes?

  Do you think, and so you say aging is a disease. Is, is death a disease as well then in your mind? Is it like, that just leads into, and can we reverse death? Is that a possibility?

• 11:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, no, not yet.

• 11:57Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 11:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  Not yet. So anyone who's had their head frozen, there's nothing I can do for you right now. But we can turn back the clock radically. Just in the last couple of years, we've figured out that there's a backup hard drive of youthfulness in the cell that we can access to reset it. So usually the earlier you start in turning on your longevity genes, the better. We've learned from studying mice and now humans for many years that if you're in your twenties, thirties, forties, you want to start.

• 12:28Lewis Howes?

  Turn it on now.

• 12:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  Do it now.

• 12:29Lewis Howes?

  Don't wait till you're eighty and then say, how do I go be sixty again?

• 12:32Dr. David Sinclair?

  But most people do. They wait too long.

• 12:34Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 12:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, because they're in denial that they're mortal. And, and we used to think that aging was, was a one way street. You couldn't do anything about it. We now know from studying twins that eighty percent of your health in old age is up to you, how you live your life.

• 12:53Lewis Howes?

  Right, your community, your positivity, your thinking, your food, the sleep you have, like all those things, right?

• 12:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, and the reason that they work, we've discovered, is because they turn on the longevity genes. That's the breakthrough.

• 13:05Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 13:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  So now we're artificially tweaking these longevity genes genetically or with supplements or hopefully medicine soon.

• 13:12Lewis Howes?

  Got you, but you could do it in more natural or organic ways is what I'm hearing.

• 13:16Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, right now, that's what we've got. And even if you just do the five obvious things, things like skip meals and don't smoke and exercise, that'll get you an extra fourteen years on average.

• 13:27Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 13:27Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's that big. That's not even using high tech.

• 13:30Lewis Howes?

  That's just, there's no technology, just like living a good life.

• 13:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 13:33Lewis Howes?

  So what are the main things to turning on the longevity that anyone can do without technology, without money, you know, science?

• 13:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. Well, okay, so we, we've, first of all, don't smoke.

• 13:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Dr. David Sinclair?

  That'll damage your DNA, that'll accelerate the aging process.

• 13:49Lewis Howes?

  Does that include like e-cigarettes and all these other vaping? Does that also include that?

• 13:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  I'm a big advocate for, for putting nothing artificial in your body, including vaping.

• 14:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Dr. David Sinclair?

  My mother died from lung cancer, so I'm pretty militant about it.

• 14:06Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 14:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  I don't think vaping is as bad in terms of the number of chemicals getting into your body.

• 14:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  But we've seen recently, it's probably not healthy anyway.

• 14:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, okay, so no smoking, that's one.

• 14:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's one. Next one is, don't eat so much, eat less often. So not malnutrition, of course. You don't want to get too thin, but this three meals a day plus snacks is ridiculous.

• 14:29Lewis Howes?

  It's been my life.

• 14:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  You look great.

• 14:32Lewis Howes?

  I need to get rid of that.

• 14:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, well, you're also working it out, but someone like me who's not an athlete.

• 14:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  The most exercise I do during the day typically is typing.

• 14:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Three meals a day is too much. Actually, one meal is enough for someone like me.

• 14:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 14:46Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, I'm now fifty, so my metabolism is way down.

• 14:48Lewis Howes?

  You look like you're thirty-seven.

• 14:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  Oh, thanks.

• 14:51Lewis Howes?

  It's great, man.

• 14:51Dr. David Sinclair?

  You might need.

• 14:52Lewis Howes?

  I thought you, you're like a hundred and you're like thirty-seven, you've already reversed the aging.

• 14:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I'm glad I don't look eighty, because that would really be bad for my message.

• 15:02Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so we got no smoking, eating less.

• 15:06Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. Next one would be the obvious, high intensity interval training. Lose your breath once in a while.

• 15:13Lewis Howes?

  Lose your breath? What do you mean? Just by like working out like?

• 15:16Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, become hypoxic. Tell your body that you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger or something like that. The reason all of this stuff works in terms of the diet and exercise, it's not that your blood flows more or that being hungry is just healthy for the body. It's actually that your longevity genes get turned on by these things. And why does that happen? Why does it happen in humans, in mice, even in yeast cells for bread and beer? The reason is that the body senses adversity and says, crap, we gotta fight back. We might die next week without food and we, you know, we're running away from tigers and lions. That's what this survival network, this longevity gene.

• 15:57Lewis Howes?

  So it turns it on when it feels like it's in survival mode?

• 16:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's it. We wanna be in survival mode and we spend our whole lives trying to reduce our adversity.

• 16:08Lewis Howes?

  Right, being comfortable.

• 16:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right. Don't be hungry, don't be puffed, don't walk, you know, valet your car.

• 16:16Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 16:16Dr. David Sinclair?

  Roll your suitcase, don't carry it, for goodness sakes. We've done the worst. No wonder we're getting sicker and sicker.

• 16:23Lewis Howes?

  We're in a world of convenience.

• 16:25Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, and it's the worst thing we could do for our bodies in terms of longevity. So those three things.

• 16:30Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 16:30Dr. David Sinclair?

  The other two, let's see, what else is there? Oh, the type of food you eat is important. There's a big debate, of course.

• 16:39Lewis Howes?

  They say like plant bases could extend the telomeres, right? If you're eating leafy greens, that's what I've heard, but.

• 16:45Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, well, among other things, it's also going to have a couple of really important types of molecules. One are the mono unsaturated fats, fatty acids. You get that from olive oil and avocados. Those are great. And we've just learned that that's a really important trigger for a certain longevity.

• 17:04Lewis Howes?

  Olive oil.

• 17:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Lewis Howes?

  I think when I had Gundry on, he was like, I drink a cup of olive oil a day or something like teaspoons of olive oil. He's just eating it. He's like, I'm trying to get as much in as I can, putting it on everything. So.

• 17:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, let's get back to that because there's a, there's a new discovery as of a week ago that says, we think we understand how that works. But in olive oil, there's also what are called the other, the other important component of a plant-based diet are polyphenols. Which are the molecules that plants make when they're under adversity, when they're stressed. And I believe that we've evolved to sense when our food is running out. So we get that signal when our plants are stressed. So you don't want to eat plants that are like this white.

• 17:46Lewis Howes?

  Withered.

• 17:47Dr. David Sinclair?

  White liquid lettuce you can buy, Californian lettuce.

• 17:50Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 17:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  You want these colored vegetables that have been a little bit stressed, a little bit dried out. Wine is a perfect example. It's full of polyphenols, one called resveratrol that we've worked on for 20 years. And it activates these longevity pathways really well.

• 18:04Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 18:04Dr. David Sinclair?

  So stress your food, organic.

• 18:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Dr. David Sinclair?

  Um, I am for a plant-based diet, but I do eat meat occasionally. It tastes pretty good, but, but you know, it's very clear. Dan Buettner is right. Where you go to the longest-lived places in the world.

• 18:17Lewis Howes?

  The blue zones, right?

• 18:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  Sardinia, right? The Okinawa island in Japan, they're not eating all meat. Um, and actually we know that if you eat a lot of meat, you shut down some of these longevity pathways.

• 18:28Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 18:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. So you actually, you might look good and grow muscle and that's great when you're young. You want to find a mate, you want to look good, you want to feel good. But in the long run, I don't think that's healthy, healthy.

• 18:39Lewis Howes?

  Really? So cutting down less and less meat at least, having more plants is the way to go.

• 18:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, that's, that's what I've done. I was on an Okinawa diet in my twenties and thirties.

• 18:49Lewis Howes?

  Which is what? Just rice and leaves and?

• 18:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's a bitter rice. You've got to watch out for white rice because it'll spike your sugar.

• 18:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 18:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  But it's a, it's a lot of tofu, miso soup, uh, green leafy vegetables, dark greens for these phytochemicals. Uh, and then what else was there? There was a bit of fish.

• 19:07Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 19:07Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. But, but also what's important is not a lot of food. And these days I'm stopping eating when I'm about 60, 70% full. And I'm trying to

• 19:16Lewis Howes?

  I just never feel full. Until I'm like eating so much and then I'm like, okay, I'm full.

• 19:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, you're a young, active, hungry man.

• 19:23Lewis Howes?

  Well, here's one of the things. I think one, when you eat slower, you start to get fuller, you start to feel it. And I've, I'm the youngest of four. And so as a kid, we didn't have a lot of money growing up in a small town in Ohio and there wasn't that much food. So I learned to like grab and just shove it in my mouth. And that became a habit that I've kind of stuck with and I'm not starving anymore. Like the food's available at any time, I can afford it and I have it all the time. But I think it's reconditioning my mind or a habit or a routine of like, and I'm not scarfing my face down right now, but you know, it's that mindset of, ah, what if I'm gonna go hungry?

• 19:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  For sure. Uh, we all suffer from that. Well, not all of us, but those of us who grew up in regular families, we were told to finish our meals.

• 20:05Lewis Howes?

  Right. Don't leave anything on the plate. There's hungry kids everywhere.

• 20:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  Fucking sisters, right? They're stealing your food. Uh, my wife grew up, um, in a very poor family, um, and, uh, even when she was a student, she could barely afford food. She would scrounge and buy potatoes. And at the dinner table, she'll kill me, kill me for this, but, uh, she will eat like it's gonna all go away tomorrow. But I have to, I have to remind her and everybody, everyone should know this. There's always gonna be another meal. There will be another meal. Don't worry. Uh, but we're conditioned to eat food when it's in front of us.

• 20:40Lewis Howes?

  I think it's a mental conditioning and it's also like you've, either your body's tricking you or it's your brain or it's your gut or something is tricking you like, I'm still hungry. Even though you've had 2,000 calories in 10 minutes, you're still like, oh, there's food. It's like turning something on or like, I want to eat that. I don't know why that is.

• 20:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's the reason that we're here. Our ancestors, uh, put on fat and they survived the famine. We don't have famines anymore. Thank goodness.

• 21:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:07Dr. David Sinclair?

  But we, we've descended from those people. So we've got the, the genes in our brain that say, eat, eat, eat.

• 21:12Lewis Howes?

  How do you turn that gene off?

• 21:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, you can, you can take certain types of food. I, I drink a lot of tea and coffee, hot water even, just to fill up my stomach. That works really well.

• 21:24Lewis Howes?

  Okay. Hot water, not cold water?

• 21:26Dr. David Sinclair?

  I just like the feeling of hot water. Cold water isn't as, I actually, it might be something about the heat. I've never thought about it, but for me, that's what works. So when I get a little bit hungry at lunchtime, I'll just, I'm basically drinking tea.

• 21:39Lewis Howes?

  Warm water, tea. Yeah, you put it like some, interesting.

• 21:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  But it's a fight all the time. You know, I fly a lot and, and people are bringing.

• 21:46Lewis Howes?

  Nuts and cookies and ice cream and.

• 21:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  And you gotta fight it. And it's really hard to fight.

• 21:52Lewis Howes?

  How do you say no?

• 21:53Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I do.

• 21:54Lewis Howes?

  You do?

• 21:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  But how do I do that? So I've trained myself to fight it. And the best thing that I do besides saying can have a cup of tea is what do I want to look like next week? What do I want to look, look like a year from now? What do I want to look like when I'm 80?

• 22:10Lewis Howes?

  So you, you tell yourself that. You ask yourself the question. I think it's also how do you want to feel tonight, tomorrow, next week, when you're 80. It's like look like and feel combination is powerful.

• 22:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right. Cause your, your mind is saying now is important and you've got to train yourself to say tomorrow and the next year is just as important.

• 22:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 22:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right. And that's more important.

• 22:30Lewis Howes?

  Okay. So was that the fourth thing or the fifth thing?

• 22:32Dr. David Sinclair?

  The fifth thing I didn't mention. Uh, there are a couple of things. Let's divide it up. One is get good night's sleep.

• 22:38Lewis Howes?

  Sleep is everything.

• 22:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  And then surround yourself by friends and people who'll take care of you.

• 22:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. That's like the blue zone way too, right? It's like be around a good community, get lots of rest and naps, move a little bit, eat healthy, right?

• 22:53Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, these are things that most people should know, but they don't do. So you and I are here to motivate people to do that. Uh, but the research that I discuss in the book is how to take that to a new level, how to optimize those things. And add some science in there.

• 23:09Lewis Howes?

  To reverse it.

• 23:10Dr. David Sinclair?

  Or getting there.

• 23:11Lewis Howes?

  I like this. Okay. Before you share that stuff, how did you get into this fascination or curiosity of reversing aging in the first place? Was there someone that inspired you? Was there a moment? Was there an event that something happened?

• 23:27Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, yeah, it was an event that I think we've all gone through, but we just forgot about. We learnt that there's such thing as death. We don't live in a Disney movie.

• 23:36Lewis Howes?

  Right, it's not all happily ever after.

• 23:38Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's not, it's shocking. When we're four or five, we're told this and we realise it. And we're in denial, you know, ah, no, that's not gonna happen, but. Uh, for me, I haven't been able to get that out of my mind.

• 23:49Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 23:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, it's cruel, don't you think, that we're sentient beings that, that know that this is all gonna end?

• 23:55Lewis Howes?

  We fall in love with, we love people, they take care of us and then they're gone.

• 23:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, and I don't wanna live forever. I would just like to leave the world a better place.

• 24:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Dr. David Sinclair?

  And I think one of the big things that we're missing in medicine is that aging is driving a lot of our sickness. And when we treat diseases, we're treating them far too late. Once you've got, well, I won't say which disease, but you know, take my mother, for example. Um, let's, let's use her lung cancer as an example. She could have not smoked, she could have done all the things we've talked about, she could have perhaps taken some molecules that we work on, uh, and not had lung cancer. By the time she had a tumor that was the size of a grapefruit in her lung, it's game over.

• 24:35Lewis Howes?

  She couldn't do anything.

• 24:36Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, and but we, but we've put billions of dollars trying to cure lung cancer, not prevent it.

• 24:42Lewis Howes?

  If we just prevented it, we wouldn't have to worry about it.

• 24:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  Prevention is easier.

• 24:45Lewis Howes?

  Prevention is very easy, right? So how old were you when your mom passed away from lung cancer?

• 24:51Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, I was twenty-five.

• 24:52Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 24:53Dr. David Sinclair?

  And, uh, uh, no, let me take that back, she was diagnosed when she was twenty-five.

• 24:58Lewis Howes?

  When she was twenty, when you were twenty-five.

• 25:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  And, uh, she went on another twenty years.

• 25:02Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 25:03Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, but it wasn't, wasn't really an enjoyable life.

• 25:06Lewis Howes?

  It was a.

• 25:07Dr. David Sinclair?

  They took out her, uh, left lung.

• 25:09Lewis Howes?

  So was she breathing from a tube, or was it like?

• 25:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, she could breathe, but she wasn't, she was always short of breath. Uh, there were times when she thought she was just gonna suffocate in front of us. Eventually she did, by the way, that was not pleasant. That's not something anybody wants. Yeah, and no one tells you what it's like to see your mother die or your parents die. It's horrific. Wow. I've never experienced another death, just this one, but it was not pleasant. And we don't talk about it. We deny it, you know, oh, they're gonna drift off into sleep. That's not what happened to my mom. It's suffering. It's pain, it's agony, it's suffering, right? Yeah, my mother was turned into a writhing lizard in front of me and all I could do was whisper into her ear. Thanks for being the best mom I could ever hope for. Oh, my gosh.

• 25:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  That was it. Couple of minutes later, she's turned blue and choking and. No way. You can't do anything for her? Right, that's it. You're helpless. You're helpless. It's, anyone who smokes, please, please work to give it up. It's just not, not a good ending. Wow. Were you, were you with her alone? Were you with family? Was it friends? Was it? Yeah, my father and my brother and I. I was also in denial because I flew from America to Australia to be with her. You're like, gosh, she's gonna get through this. Yeah, you tell yourself, she's always recovered, last 20 years, she'll pull through. And the doctor pulled us aside and said, we've x-rayed her lung, there's barely any lung left that's working. Oh, my gosh. You better say goodbye. And I said, what are you talking about? Oh, my gosh.

• 26:38Dr. David Sinclair?

  She's laughing in the bed, she's fine. And 10 minutes later, she starts choking and fluids building up in her lungs. And, you know, if you've ever seen somebody have something stuck in their throat, that's what it was like. Oh, my, you can't get it out? Can't get it out. You can't, you can't. She's drowning. Hyallic maneuver, you can't CPR, you can't try to. Well, I'm running around saying, help me, help me. And all the nurses are like, it's nothing we can do. Wow. So that's traumatic. So please, you know, let's try to prevent these diseases as long as possible. How old was your mom when she passed? So she was my age when she was diagnosed with lung cancer and then she lived till 70.

• 27:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  Wow, but she could have hypothetically, you know, if she'd been getting hit by a bus or something, she could have lived a long, much longer life if she didn't have the cancer. Oh, absolutely. And through my teenage years, I would shout at her, stop smoking, you're gonna die when you're, when you're in hospital, I'm not gonna come visit you. Oh, my gosh. You're only given one life. Because I'm pro-life. Everything about me is, we are so lucky to be alive. Yeah. You know, one in a trillion sperm from your parent, from your dad, and it's you. What's the chance? It's a gift. It is. Don't throw it away. And she was the opposite. She was like. You know, drinking and smoking and I've lived a good life. Don't, don't bother me. And she paid the consequences.

• 27:55Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh. Not only did she pay it, but you and your family had to like go through it also.

• 28:01Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, well, you know, I did go and visit her in hospital when your mom's sick, you know, everything's out the window.

• 28:06Lewis Howes?

  Of course.

• 28:06Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, but my father's the opposite. He's taking good care of himself.

• 28:10Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 28:10Dr. David Sinclair?

  And, uh, you know, now he's eighty, uh, perfect health, no, no aches, no pains, running around the world like a twenty five year old.

• 28:17Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 28:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  So that, that's the dichotomy there. If you do the right things, it's a very different ending.

• 28:23Lewis Howes?

  Now, were you already into anti-aging when she was diagnosed? Or was it before, way before that? Was it shortly after that or when? When did you become kind of obsessed with being the master of anti-aging?

• 28:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I've, I've got an obsessive personality.

• 28:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, I think anyone who's, uh, you know, be- become at the top of their profession has to be obsessed with something. They're not normal people. They're not normal. Um, at age four, I became obsessed with it, actually.

• 28:52Lewis Howes?

  Four?

• 28:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Lewis Howes?

  My, my first memory is four. I don't even know.

• 28:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, this is my first memory.

• 28:57Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 28:57Dr. David Sinclair?

  It is.

• 28:58Lewis Howes?

  See your mom's smoke and be like, I don't want to die.

• 29:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, you know, in the, in the seventies, early seventies, when I was a kid, uh, the smoke was everywhere. I couldn't stand it. But that, that was not really my motivation. It was that my grandmother, who helped raise me.

• 29:11Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 29:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  Told me, everybody's gonna die and so are you and so is your cat. And my grandmother was brutal. She didn't lie. She told it as it was. But she said, now that I've told you that, you know, here are my crying, my cat's gonna die.

• 29:27Lewis Howes?

  Santa Claus isn't real. My cat's gonna die.

• 29:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  It was my cat that was the problem at the time.

• 29:31Lewis Howes?

  You love this cat.

• 29:32Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, cuz it, she said, oh, your cat's gonna die before you're twenty or whatever. But then she said, now that you've realized that.

• 29:39Lewis Howes?

  My gosh.

• 29:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Here's the lesson. Make the most of life. Do your best to make humanity the best it can be and don't waste a second. And that, that was it for me. Okay, I'm gonna go for it.

• 29:52Lewis Howes?

  But when did you actually start researching? Like, okay, now, maybe you had this positive mindset. I'm gonna make the most of every moment. I'm gonna enjoy my life. I'm gonna learn quickly and not be stuck in these painful moments. Was it like middle school, high school where you're like, oh, mitochondria and telomeres and, you know?

• 30:10Dr. David Sinclair?

  So I was a pretty average kid. I liked to have a lot of fun and I didn't really take care of myself. Actually, you'd be surprised. I was I was pretty chubby as a kid.

• 30:19Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 30:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. But I got to college and two things happened. One was.

• 30:23Lewis Howes?

  Where were you in school?

• 30:24Dr. David Sinclair?

  I was in Sydney.

• 30:25Lewis Howes?

  In Sydney, okay.

• 30:26Dr. David Sinclair?

  So I went to, there aren't that many choices in Sydney. I went to, it's called the University of New South Wales, like the MIT of Boston. So I was there and I wanted to get a degree in what we used to call genetic engineering. And I thought, that's a cool thing. Everyone's going into computing. I'll do something. Because I've got also the personality that I don't like to be told what to do and I like to be different.

• 30:48Lewis Howes?

  You'd be unique, one of a kind, yeah.

• 30:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, I do.

• 30:51Lewis Howes?

  Me too.

• 30:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  So.

• 30:53Lewis Howes?

  I was a big dumb jock who never drank a sip of alcohol in college, who learned salsa dancing and guitar, who was in choir in the musical, like I was. Whatever you thought I was gonna be, I was like, I'm gonna do the opposite. So we have that in common.

• 31:07Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, probably your parents weren't there to tell you the opposite of what they wanted you to do.

• 31:10Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 31:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  So I went, I went to college and I realized two things. One was if I'm chubby, I'm not gonna get a girlfriend.

• 31:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 31:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  So I started working out.

• 31:20Lewis Howes?

  Survival bug.

• 31:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  I ate carrots for a month and shed fifteen kilos, whatever that is in pounds.

• 31:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  Got a best body I would have dreamed of. It's long gone. That was one thing. So I became healthy.

• 31:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  And I've been this weight ever since, basically haven't changed. It takes effort.

• 31:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  And the second thing I realized was that I think I could make a difference in the world. And I was playing cards with friends. We did a lot of drinking. They did a lot of smoking.

• 31:53Dr. David Sinclair?

  Typical college life. And there was a moment where somebody was talking about old age and laughing at old age and making fun of old people, which we do sometimes as kids.

• 32:05Lewis Howes?

  We're young, yeah.

• 32:06Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Lewis Howes?

  How old they are.

• 32:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  And I had an epiphany. I think I was eighteen years old and I said, do you realize everybody, hold it. No cards, shut the up. I've got a, I've got something to tell you. I've just realized that we are probably the last generation of humans to live a normal lifespan. Cause there's gonna be a breakthrough. And we're gonna miss out by one generation.

• 32:27Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 32:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  Out of the, how many hundred thousand generations leading up to us of primates? We're it, we're the last ones, we're pathetic.

• 32:34Lewis Howes?

  We're gonna die at a hundred or eighty or whatever.

• 32:36Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, and our kids are gonna live to a hundred and thirty, who knows what.

• 32:40Lewis Howes?

  And their kids are gonna be a hundred and sixty.

• 32:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, so then I thought, hey, that's what I wanna do. I wanna make that future be a reality in my lifetime.

• 32:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow, isn't that sad if just, give us another fifty years to be born? How much farther you could extend life, right?

• 32:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, I didn't realize how quickly the, the science would go. I thought that I'd probably be lucky to see a little bit of change in my lifetime.

• 33:03Lewis Howes?

  Like five, ten, twenty years, maybe more?

• 33:06Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, we already got fourteen, just on what we talked about. But the kind of breakthroughs that we've made now. Um, you know, I get criticized for looking too far into the future, cause I'm supposed to be Harvard scientist. But I think another five, ten years is easy. Look at my dad, he's doing all the right things, also taking some molecules that we've worked on in my lab. They're not doing any harm. I hope that he makes it past a hundred. It's a, it's not a clinical trial, clearly.

• 33:33Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 33:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  With one subject. Um, but, but he's a role model for what life can be and should be like.

• 33:39Lewis Howes?

  Right. So now, is this molecule, the same molecule that you worked on ten years ago that got a lot of credibility and then was debunked, I guess, by some researchers? And then now, in the last week, has come back to be verified as true?

• 33:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, one of them, yeah, so resveratrol is the red wine molecule. It's one of these polyphenols that plants make when they're stressed out. And that we found, uh, we, at least we thought that when you take this molecule over many decades, uh, or as a supplement, you'll be protected against a whole variety of diseases, including obesity.

• 34:15Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, really?

• 34:16Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 34:16Lewis Howes?

  Is that why everyone says, like, drink a glass of wine every night or something? It's gonna make you live longer?

• 34:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, that, that's basically because of me, but. There's other research, of course. Other people have studied red wine and found that people who drink red wine tend to live longer.

• 34:30Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, okay.

• 34:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  Dan Buettner will tell you all about the blue zones.

• 34:33Lewis Howes?

  Right, so this molecule, is it something you discovered 10 years ago? Or you started researching 10 years ago?

• 34:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, so remember these longevity genes, they make proteins that that tell the cell how to survive. And we can turn on the production of these proteins by being hungry and exercising and being out of breath. But we wanted to do it artificially because if you're an older person in a wheelchair, or you're like my mom and she needs...

• 34:58Lewis Howes?

  You're now doing HIIT workouts at 90.

• 35:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, you need a drug. You can't just expect them to run marathons or go hungry. So we wanted to figure out how does fasting, how does exercise work? That's another important question, a couple of questions. And we found that this sirtuin, number one, there were seven, number one was very important in mice if we turned it on. We can make mice with extra genes, by the way, in the lab.

• 35:22Lewis Howes?

  Can make them?

• 35:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  We make mice.

• 35:24Lewis Howes?

  From scratch?

• 35:25Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, from stem cells.

• 35:26Lewis Howes?

  From a cell, you can turn it into a moving mouse?

• 35:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, that's easy.

• 35:30Lewis Howes?

  That bakes and breathes and has a heartbeat?

• 35:32Dr. David Sinclair?

  Come to my lab, you can make a mouse.

• 35:33Lewis Howes?

  What?

• 35:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  We can make them glow green if we want. It's not that hard.

• 35:36Lewis Howes?

  You can take cells and they just kind of like form together and turn into a mouse?

• 35:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, we need another mouse to gestate it, but it's, yeah, it's pretty, pretty easy these days.

• 35:46Lewis Howes?

  Okay, this is crazy.

• 35:47Dr. David Sinclair?

  You can actually...

• 35:48Lewis Howes?

  I'm coming, I want to check it out.

• 35:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  You can take a skin cell of a mouse, turn it into a stem cell, make a sperm, make an egg, fertilize itself and make a mouse out of it.

• 35:55Lewis Howes?

  What? This is nuts.

• 35:57Dr. David Sinclair?

  Anything's possible these days.

• 35:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 35:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  So we engineered a mouse to have more of this sirtuin one gene.

• 36:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Dr. David Sinclair?

  And it was protected against a whole variety of diseases.

• 36:06Lewis Howes?

  Really? Were you, were you injecting with disease to like test that? Or just natural environment diseases?

• 36:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  So we, we have a lab where we...

• 36:14Lewis Howes?

  It's like other mice have the disease?

• 36:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  We let them age.

• 36:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  And that's the main thing. We have a lot of old mice and we test them if they're frail. We look at their strength, put them on treadmills, test their memory. We've got this whole floor in the building of mouse testing machines.

• 36:33Lewis Howes?

  How many mice are in the lab? Thousands?

• 36:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I don't want anyone to be upset because we do have a large number of mice. But our goal is to make them healthy.

• 36:44Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 36:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  Unlike a lot of other labs.

• 36:46Lewis Howes?

  You're not trying to kill them like most labs. You're trying to say, how can we keep them as healthy?

• 36:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  And our mice live, our mice live longer. So that we're one of the few labs where we do that. But yeah, so we, this, this sort of two in one gene. It makes a protein that helps the cell. So we found this red wine molecule, just coincidentally turns it on. So if you put the ends, we can put in the little test tube, where these little test tubes. And we put in the, the protein and we can test whether it's more active or not by how much it glows or fluoresces.

• 37:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 37:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  And then we tested thousands of molecules. And the one that worked the best was this one from red wine. It, it made it glow really brightly, fluoresce. And that was the beginning of this story where we found a molecule from red wine that turned on our body's defensive enzyme. And that, that was great. We, we put it on to yeast cells, they lived longer. I did that experiment in my dining room, actually. You can make yeast cells live longer.

• 37:40Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh, crazy.

• 37:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  We fed it to mice and they were much healthier. They were resistant to obesity and diabetes and cardiovascular problems. It basically made mice immune to a high fat Western diet.

• 37:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow, they could eat whatever and it wouldn't affect them.

• 37:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  And they lived just as long as those that were.

• 37:57Lewis Howes?

  They'd burn the fat quicker.

• 37:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, they were actually still fat. That was the crazy thing, but fat didn't, didn't hurt them. They're immune to the effects of being fat.

• 38:05Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 38:07Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 38:07Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 38:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  But, but then, and this is the one that my father started taking about a decade ago, same as me.

• 38:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  But here, here was what happened in, that was 2003 to 2006. Things were great. We started making better molecules. We made thousands of them. They went into human clinical trials, put it on the skin of patients with psoriasis. They were, actually it was a pill and the psoriasis got better.

• 38:33Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 38:34Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, we were on track to having a medicine for aging and diseases that are related to aging and inflammation.

• 38:40Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 38:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  But then everything fell apart.

• 38:43Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 38:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  So in two thousand and ten, a couple of companies published scientific papers that said it's all wrong. That this molecule resveratrol does not activate this enzyme. This fluorescence that we're looking at in this test tube was just an artifact. It was fluorescing for other reasons. It wasn't real. And yeah, my world fell apart. The company stopped working on it and it was hell.

• 39:07Lewis Howes?

  You stopped working on it?

• 39:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, we didn't. Well, for about two weeks I stayed in bed. It was horrific. I went into mild depression. My lab didn't know what to do. I had friends calling me, well, ex-friends, who called me and said, you know, I'm really sorry and didn't hear from them again. It was a tough time. And when you're, you know, and this is what I built my career on. I was known in the world for this. And then it went away.

• 39:31Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 39:32Dr. David Sinclair?

  And if you're a scientist and you lose your reputation, you're screwed because you're relying on grants and your colleagues' opinion of you to give you the money, to give you those grants.

• 39:42Lewis Howes?

  Their endorsements, their recommendations, things like that.

• 39:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, so.

• 39:45Lewis Howes?

  So if no one's recommending you anymore, no one's giving you money?

• 39:48Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, grants dried up. I had twenty people, vibrant lab, world-leading science, top of the world, gonna make this medicine. Bam. Most people left, no money, four people, tiny little lab. Even people in my lab said, I'm out of here. This is crazy. You're full of it. And there was one student who I had, his name's Basil Hubbard. And he said, you know what? There's something to this. I'm not gonna give up.

• 40:15Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 40:16Dr. David Sinclair?

  And, but the other people in the lab, one guy in particular was really mean. He just said, you're working on this BS stuff. This resveratrol stuff. But he figured it out. It took him three years to figure out that this.

• 40:29Lewis Howes?

  The intern?

• 40:30Dr. David Sinclair?

  He was a PhD student.

• 40:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay, I got you.

• 40:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  Basil. And just through grit and stubbornness and genius, he figured out that it was real. And we published in two thousand and thirteen, three years later, that there was good evidence that we were not wrong. So, okay, take a deep breath. I'm swimming, I'm not drowning anymore.

• 40:52Lewis Howes?

  This is three years of like depression or just figuring out how am I gonna get to my life, my career, everything back on track?

• 40:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, right. I was so mad with the world.

• 41:02Lewis Howes?

  I'm sure.

• 41:03Dr. David Sinclair?

  I said it.

• 41:03Lewis Howes?

  Screw everyone, I can't trust anyone anymore.

• 41:06Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, it was that because I devoted my whole life to this. I'd barely taken a weekend off in my life.

• 41:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 41:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  And to have that happen, it was like, you know, I could have retired at that point.

• 41:18Lewis Howes?

  How did you recover?

• 41:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, well, so the problem was I didn't want to die not knowing the answer.

• 41:26Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 41:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  Needed to figure this out.

• 41:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  And knowing that I was wrong was still better than not knowing at all. So we tried to figure it out.

• 41:36Lewis Howes?

  Cause it's better to be like, okay, I'm actually wrong. Here's the proof, here's the science. You can live with that is what you're saying.

• 41:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 41:43Lewis Howes?

  Knowing the truth. And then, okay, how do we solve it? What's the new solution, right? Where do I go next?

• 41:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, and we actually had evidence that we weren't, we weren't wrong. So that's why I got out of bed, went back to the lab.

• 41:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 41:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  And said, let's figure this out. Let's do some key tests that'll tell us either way if we're right or we're wrong. And it turns out, uh, we weren't wrong. And there was this study you referred to that came out a week ago that said, you know what? That mechanism that you discovered actually is really important for being activated when you're fasting, when you're hungry. What happens is when you, when you deplete fat, let's say you're hungry, you haven't eaten breakfast, you'll melt away some of the fat and you'll generate what are called free fatty acids. And some of them we can get from plants, from olive oil, mono unsaturated fatty acids, the good ones.

• 42:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  A lab discovered that the way resveratrol works is actually just mimicking those unsaturated fatty acids that we already know are good for you. And Dan Buettner in the Blue Zones would tell you, from the Blue Zones would tell you that these are what leads to long life.

• 42:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 42:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  And so it turns out resveratrol, if this is true, is basically mimicking gobs of olive oil, but without all the calories.

• 43:07Lewis Howes?

  Mmm.

• 43:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  So my father and I, you know, maybe we've been doing the right thing.

• 43:12Lewis Howes?

  So he's been doing, your father's been doing this for 10 years.

• 43:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 43:14Lewis Howes?

  Even though people try to say this isn't true, this is stupid, it's not actually doing anything, but he's been taking it consistently.

• 43:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, well, he's a scientist too. Everyone in my family is a scientist, including my wife. And people say, "Oh, are you testing this on your father?" No, he's a scientist. He can read this stuff for himself, and he's the one that made the decision that he believed in it. And, uh, yeah, I'm glad that he did because so far, so good.

• 43:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Okay, so that just happened last week. So 10 years, you've been waiting for this to be like proven again.

• 43:46Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, and we've always predicted, I've always said, resveratrol isn't the big, big story. The big story is, A, can we make a medicine, which we're still trying? But B, what, we call it the endogenous activator. What's in our own bodies that resveratrol is mimicking? And it's these monounsaturated fatty acids that come from when we're hungry or if we eat these healthy plants.

• 44:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow, okay. That's pretty exciting.

• 44:11Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's, it's damn exciting, but it, it's not as exciting as I thought it would be. Cause you know, in life, it's always an anticlimax, right? You think, "I can't wait until this in my life happens." And then it happens, you think, "Yeah, but tomorrow I've got something else to figure out."

• 44:25Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 44:26Dr. David Sinclair?

  Really, maybe that's just my personality. Are you like that?

• 44:29Lewis Howes?

  I'm very much like that. I remember, um, my whole life, I wanted to be an All-American athlete. Like I, this is one of my first memories, is like watching a football game on TV with my dad and him like continuing talking about these few guys on the Ohio State football team who are All-Americans. And, you know, you wanna, you want your dad's approval, and he's talking about a few guys on the team. And I'm like, "I wanna be an All-American athlete." You know, if these are the best of the best, that's what I wanna be. And all I did was obsess about being the best athlete I could be and becoming an All-American. And I remember I was in the, um, the Catalon National Championships 2005. And there's 16 athletes that go to the national championships for each event.

• 45:15Lewis Howes?

  But the top eight are All-Americans. So you gotta be in the top eight to qualify as an All-American. And the decathlon is a two-day event. First day, I have a pretty good day. Second day, I struggle a little bit. And it gets down to the last event, which is the 1500. And my coach is like, okay, you need to beat these two people. And if you get in front of them, you're gonna make it. And I literally crossed the line with like one other guy next to me that I needed to beat. It was like neck and neck. And I didn't know who went in front of the other. And so I'm waiting for like 30 minutes for the final results. And they make the announcements of the final eight, and I got eighth place. And I remember feeling like there's so much excitement.

• 46:00Lewis Howes?

  I'm on the podium, I'm like holding the trophy. I'm like, I did it. My childhood dream came true. And then probably 20 minutes later, I was angry, I was negative. We're all having dinner, celebrating, and I'm like, I don't wanna be around anyone. And I didn't know why that was. But that's like with every accomplishment I had in my teens and twenties. I kinda had that same nature where I was just like, well, it's not good enough. I need to go after the, become a professional athlete. I need to do it twice. I need to, I don't know why that is.

• 46:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, that's why you and I are sitting here. I think we never rest.

• 46:31Lewis Howes?

  Exactly, yeah. So anyways, but we have a lot in common. I'm like a scientist.

• 46:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  I'm gonna train you.

• 46:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly. Wanna go build a raft from scratch. It'd be amazing. Okay, so this paper came out, or this finding came out a week ago. You had a nice moment, but then you were like, well, on to the next.

• 46:53Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, right. I don't know why. I think it's because I was hangry at the time on a plane, drinking tea, but...

• 46:59Lewis Howes?

  When you read it, or you just found it, or?

• 47:02Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, actually, so the guy that trained me, so I went to MIT after Australia. Lenny Guaranty, he taught me how to be a world-class scientist. And he and I have been good friends, but frenemies kind of.

• 47:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:17Dr. David Sinclair?

  Butting heads scientifically, but we're very close. Anyway, like all mentors, I look up to him. His opinion of me matters.

• 47:24Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:25Dr. David Sinclair?

  And it was he who wrote an email to me last week. And the subject line was, "Wow!", exclamation point. And in there was this paper saying...

• 47:36Dr. David Sinclair?

  Damn, you were right. Yeah. But he didn't write anything. That was it. Wow. Those three letters.

• 47:40Lewis Howes?

  And the paper.

• 47:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  And the paper, that's it.

• 47:42Lewis Howes?

  And you knew what it meant, yeah.

• 47:43Dr. David Sinclair?

  That was it.

• 47:44Lewis Howes?

  Was he on your side after the whole paper came out seven years ago or eight years ago?

• 47:48Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, I gotta give him credit. He never gave up on me.

• 47:51Lewis Howes?

  He stayed with you.

• 47:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, but he's been through hell too. This field is really tough.

• 47:55Lewis Howes?

  Isn't that interesting? The people that have gone through the most crap, ups and downs, they're usually the ones that stick with you when you've got some type of public shaming.

• 48:03Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 48:03Lewis Howes?

  I noticed that as well. That's crazy. So that's good. So you had a few people that kind of stuck with you and said, hey, listen, like, this is gonna hurt for a few years, but eventually you're gonna do something else and then people are gonna forget or they're gonna move on and...

• 48:16Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, well, he's not that touchy feely, but he was very supportive and, you know, we're both the two guys that drove this field of sort of twins, these longevity genes. So we're comrades.

• 48:29Lewis Howes?

  Got you. You're frenemies, but you're like, we need each other to push it forward and to validate our research.

• 48:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right. Your enemy is, you know, my enemy.

• 48:39Lewis Howes?

  Right. Okay. It's interesting. Now, you told me a story before we got on about how you were homeless for a year in the UK. Is that right?

• 48:47Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Lewis Howes?

  Can you tell me, how did this happen? You're in Sydney in school and then you moved to the UK and you're, what, sleeping on the streets, eating rats that you made from scratch or something or what?

• 48:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, kind of with, without the rats, but basically that kind of food. Yeah, this is, this is a story I haven't ever told anybody.

• 49:08Lewis Howes?

  Why not?

• 49:10Dr. David Sinclair?

  It just doesn't come up. I don't, I don't know. I'm not the kind of guy that boasts about this kind of stuff. But it's, uh, so my, my accent is a little bit Australian, a little bit UK. And so I spent a year and a bit in Wales, in Cardiff, in the middle of winter.

• 49:23Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 49:24Dr. David Sinclair?

  So Cardiff in the middle of winter.

• 49:26Lewis Howes?

  My ancestors are from Wales.

• 49:26Dr. David Sinclair?

  Are they?

• 49:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Dr. David Sinclair?

  Do you know any Welsh?

• 49:28Lewis Howes?

  No, I don't.

• 49:30Dr. David Sinclair?

  Crazy language.

• 49:31Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 49:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  Tried to learn a bit, but they sing their their sentences. So that's why my voice is a bit more like that. Anyway, that's not important. What's important is that uh I like to take a lot of risks, especially when you're young, you've got to take a lot of risks in your twenties, thirties. Go for it. So when I was twenty three, I said, I'm gonna go to the UK and do some of my PhD research. And there was one guy in Cardiff that knew how to do some stuff. So I said, I'm gonna come and work for you. He said, great. I got no money. And I said, that's great. I got no money either. Uh, but I'll figure it out. But I had a few thousand dollars.

• 50:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  Like, you know, from delivering pizzas.

• 50:07Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 50:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  And so I bought a ticket, flew over there, stayed in his house for a few weeks, but he said, you can't live here. I've got my own family to deal with. He was a bit of a grumpy guy anyway, and I didn't want to live with him. So what I figured out was if I go to the bar, the pub, we'd call them, at night, and play games. So they used to have these little consoles where you play Trivial Pursuit and you'd make friends. And after they were drunk, I'd say.

• 50:34Lewis Howes?

  Can I crash?

• 50:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, have you got a place? And they'd say, we don't have a bed, but we've got this beanbag if you wanna come come around. So I'd do that and I'd stay there for a week or two and then I'd have to go find another place.

• 50:46Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 50:47Dr. David Sinclair?

  Usually. Um, and I was eating uh these cans, these tins of uh tuna.

• 50:52Lewis Howes?

  Tuna, yeah. Bubblebee tuna. Or ramen, ramen. So for a year you did this?

• 50:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 50:57Lewis Howes?

  So you had no, you weren't paying rent anywhere for almost a year? Were you making money as well, like a little side money or?

• 51:04Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, I think I still got, it was fifteen thousand dollars a year, but the problem was that the pound versus the Australian dollar was twofold. So uh my dollar was half the value.

• 51:16Lewis Howes?

  So it wasn't enough to pay rent. You were just like, okay, I gotta eat food. I gotta get the bus. I gotta do whatever. Yeah.

• 51:20Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 51:21Lewis Howes?

  You know what's funny? Gosh, we have a lot in common. The one time that I almost slept in the streets, I was in Philadelphia. I had no money. I went to a conference and I met someone from LinkedIn who was like, you gotta come to this event. You're gonna meet some great people. I was probably twenty two, twenty three. Just got done playing professional football, trying to figure out how to get a job, how to find some connections. And this guy I met named Ben Stern was like, come to Philadelphia for this conference. You can stay with me on the couch. So he ends up, um, I stay on a, in a hostel for two nights and he's like, can you stay with me the last night on the couch? Cause I only had enough for two nights in this hostel. It was fourteen dollars. And I took a Greyhound bus to get there. It took like thirty hours. It should have been like six.

• 52:05Lewis Howes?

  And the last night, I'm like, okay, tell me the address, let me know, I'll meet you at your place and I'll crash on the couch. And he, um, his phone dies. So I never get his address. I never get a hold of him. And I'm in the hostel. I didn't have the money for the hostel and they wanted to give me a bed. So I'm walking around the streets of Philadelphia with, uh, my suitcase and a jacket on. And it's like three AM, three thirty. And I'm like, what am I gonna do? There's like benches. Maybe I'll sleep on a bench. Cause my Greyhound bus was leaving like later that next day. And I don't drink, right? But I was like, for some reason, I feel like if I go into a bar, I'm gonna meet someone. And I'm gonna build a relationship and maybe they've got some couch or something. And I did exactly what you said you did.

• 52:49Lewis Howes?

  I met some people. They were playing darts. I went in there and I was like, let me play some darts with you. And, um, I just like built a relationship after thirty minutes. I said, hey, I don't have a place to crash. Do you guys have like a couch or something? And they had a futon that had been coming there. I let myself out in the morning and that was it. But that's how you sleep, uh, not in the streets and you meet friends at bars.

• 53:07Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. It's a tip to everybody who's watching.

• 53:10Lewis Howes?

  That's it.

• 53:10Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's how you survive.

• 53:11Lewis Howes?

  That's how you survive. Go to the bars.

• 53:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. So Benjamin Franklin said he slept on the floor and knew that he could survive. If you can get through that, then the rest of your life is easy.

• 53:20Lewis Howes?

  Just sleep on the floor?

• 53:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Lewis Howes?

  No pillows, no sheets, sir?

• 53:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. And that's how I've lived my life, at least up until fairly recently, which is I know what it's like to be poor and not have anything. So I'm gonna go for it. Cause the worst that can happen is I just go back to that.

• 53:36Lewis Howes?

  What was the biggest lesson you learned about yourself, uh, with a year of being homeless?

• 53:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, being homeless isn't. So bad, it's a lot of fun. Um, but also that I I have grit. And I I grew up in a pretty easy family. I was in the suburbs of Sydney. My parents weren't wealthy, but they certainly weren't starving. Um, I didn't know if I had what it took to survive. So that was my real test.

• 54:00Lewis Howes?

  You needed that experience.

• 54:02Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. Yeah, and everything after that was easy.

• 54:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Well, except for being like debunked, fake debunked by your, you know, researchers and peers.

• 54:10Dr. David Sinclair?

  Physically, I can handle anything. Mentally, I'm not that strong.

• 54:14Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 54:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I try, um.

• 54:16Lewis Howes?

  Do you think this made you more emotionally mentally strong going through this like worst case scenario for your career?

• 54:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  I like to think so. Um, but I still get beaten up.

• 54:29Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 54:30Dr. David Sinclair?

  Even, you know, in my fifties now.

• 54:32Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 54:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  We we just had, I just had ten years of work with fifteen labs collaborating with me guiding them. And it's fifty-five scientists. We submitted this research, we wrote it up, it took a year to write.

• 54:47Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 54:47Dr. David Sinclair?

  We've sent it to a journal. And as a scientist, your your work gets reviewed by your peers anonymously. So they they can write whatever they want.

• 54:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  So what happened just before the holiday break was there were four people who wrote comments about our work. Three of them said, this is paradigm shifting, brilliant, got to be published, will change the world kind of stuff.

• 55:11Lewis Howes?

  And you didn't know who those names were?

• 55:13Dr. David Sinclair?

  I didn't.

• 55:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 55:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  There was one that wrote, this isn't exciting. We we already knew this, which is not true. And the journal said, we're gonna side with the one naysayer.

• 55:23Lewis Howes?

  Oh, that's the worst.

• 55:25Dr. David Sinclair?

  That that really was a blow.

• 55:27Lewis Howes?

  Isn't it crazy?

• 55:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  I felt like someone hit me in the head with a with a baseball bat.

• 55:30Lewis Howes?

  Isn't it crazy? We but we also focus on the one negative when there's thousands of positive reviews of a book or something and you see one negative and you're like, why?

• 55:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, we got rejected, so that's ten years of work.

• 55:42Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh, with fifteen different labs working on this, is that right?

• 55:45Dr. David Sinclair?

  It was everything. And I had had this in my mind that we're gonna get it into this world-class journal. And I talked to the journal and they said, we're we're waiting for it, let's do this. And that was the future. It was supposed to be this and nothing else. And then to have it rejected. And editors, usually they go with the majority, majority rules.

• 56:05Lewis Howes?

  Why would they go with one?

• 56:07Dr. David Sinclair?

  I still don't know. That's what it doesn't make any sense.

• 56:10Lewis Howes?

  Is there a way to resubmit?

• 56:11Dr. David Sinclair?

  We're gonna challenge it. So I'm writing up a defensive letter, an appeal, as we call it.

• 56:16Lewis Howes?

  Gosh.

• 56:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  But yeah, I thought I was resilient and nothing could could get to me, but that did.

• 56:23Lewis Howes?

  It's kind of like being a Olympic gymnast. It's like you could have your best performance, but if one judge didn't like the way you pointed your toes.

• 56:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Lewis Howes?

  And they give you a nine point two as opposed to a nine point nine, you could lose. Based on an opinion of one person.

• 56:38Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 56:39Lewis Howes?

  I don't like that. That's not like, I thought science is like black and white.

• 56:43Dr. David Sinclair?

  Oh, boy, there's a lot of politics.

• 56:45Lewis Howes?

  Really? But it's like, if you've got, here's the proof, fifteen labs, independent case studies and like triple checking, I don't know.

• 56:54Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's how it's supposed to work. That's why this was such a blow, because everything I thought about how science worked was thrown out the window in this case.

• 57:03Lewis Howes?

  Why do we even have science if?

• 57:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  It'll get published, don't worry.

• 57:07Lewis Howes?

  But I mean, if you can't prove something through science,

• 57:11Lewis Howes?

  why do we even do it then? It seems like.

• 57:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, we can prove it.

• 57:13Lewis Howes?

  Defining to me.

• 57:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, what will happen is either we'll get it, we'll get this appeal and that'll be great, hopefully. Cross your fingers. But we're gonna have to rewrite it potentially for other journals, which will take us a long time. So the world won't find out about this for a while.

• 57:30Lewis Howes?

  Man, can you just write it yourself and publish it on your website and say, this isn't published in a journal yet, but here's all the research, here's all the proof, here's the studies.

• 57:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  You can.

• 57:41Lewis Howes?

  It's just not looked at as credible.

• 57:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right. No one will give you credit for it. Now, there are what are called pre-publications. So now we can put our work online. And in fact, you can go online and see this work. If you go to a place called Bio Archive, RXIV, and type in my name, you'll see that the work is publicly available. But most people don't see it and the press can't comment on it.

• 58:05Lewis Howes?

  But I mean, how how many of these journals have published things that people said, yes, this is true, but it wasn't true? You know what I mean? It's like

• 58:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, quite a lot. Probably a third of what's published turns out to be wrong, but that's true for all science. That's evolution.

• 58:21Lewis Howes?

  Why do they publish it? I mean, it's like

• 58:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, we do our best, right? We can always be wrong. You know, even even Newton was wrong. Even Einstein was wrong until quantum mechanics overturned it all.

• 58:33Lewis Howes?

  We're all wrong.

• 58:34Dr. David Sinclair?

  All science is wrong.

• 58:35Lewis Howes?

  But right until we're wrong.

• 58:36Dr. David Sinclair?

  We are, but but those steps along the way are stepping stones to more knowledge. Uh, but science goes forward and backwards in little steps, but overall it's it's forward.

• 58:50Lewis Howes?

  Seems exhausting. Gosh, just wanna hang out with the rats.

• 58:54Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, it is. I mean, you try not to make a mistake. You try not to conclude things that are wrong.

• 58:59Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 58:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  Because that'll damage your reputation. Fortunately, so far in my career, that hasn't happened.

• 59:03Lewis Howes?

  That's why it takes so long to do the research, right? It's why it takes so many trials, so many rechecking, years and years.

• 59:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, most labs don't spend 10 years on a project. You'd spend maybe two or three.

• 59:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 59:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  This was the big one for me.

• 59:15Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh. This is sad.

• 59:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  This was figuring out why we age.

• 59:20Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 59:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  Oh, that's not important.

• 59:23Lewis Howes?

  Was there anything new in there uh that you discovered in the last year that hasn't been out yet? That hasn't been talked about?

• 59:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, yeah, well, it's in my book, but other than that.

• 59:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  That might be why the journal's angry that some of it ended up in the book, but uh I maybe I jumped the gun.

• 59:41Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 59:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  So what we what we think we've discovered here is that uh cells lose their ability to stay young because they lose information.

• 59:50Lewis Howes?

  So they lose information?

• 59:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. So there are two types of information in our cells. One is the genetic information that we get from our parents, of course, DNA. But there's another level of information that's just as important, but we just don't talk about it. It's called the epigenome, which is the instructions to tell the cell which of those 25, 23,000 genes to read. And if you read the right ones at the right time, you'll be a nerve cell or a skin cell.

• 1:00:15Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:16Dr. David Sinclair?

  Because you don't want to read all 20, 30,000 at once, so that doesn't work.

• 1:00:19Lewis Howes?

  Doesn't work.

• 1:00:20Dr. David Sinclair?

  So the epigenome is like the pianist that plays the piano. And what we think we've figured out is that aging is that the pianist becomes demented.

• 1:00:29Lewis Howes?

  Demented.

• 1:00:30Dr. David Sinclair?

  Just can't play the tune right anymore.

• 1:00:32Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:00:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  The wrong genes come on.

• 1:00:34Lewis Howes?

  What is that, what is that called? The pianist? What's that called?

• 1:00:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  The demented pianist?

• 1:00:39Lewis Howes?

  What's it called?

• 1:00:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  The epigenome.

• 1:00:41Lewis Howes?

  The epigenome. Okay, so the epigenome becomes demented.

• 1:00:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yes.

• 1:00:45Lewis Howes?

  Loses function in some way.

• 1:00:48Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, and we can cause that to happen. One of the main reasons that it happens, we think, is chromosomes break every day. A trillion times in our body every day. And in the process of having to open up the DNA and fix it and put it back together, the epigenome gets messed up and we lose the ability to read the right genes.

• 1:01:07Lewis Howes?

  So how do we stop it from breaking?

• 1:01:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, you can't always prevent it. Start by not smoking. Start by not getting burnt by the sun.

• 1:01:16Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:01:17Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Lewis Howes?

  Don't be in the sun for too long?

• 1:01:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  No. No, I mean, we know that ages your skin. Any Australian will tell you that.

• 1:01:23Lewis Howes?

  What about like, what's the amount of time we should be in the sun without aging? Or is it always have sunscreen on at all times? Isn't that have chemicals that affect this? I mean?

• 1:01:32Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, there are some people will tell you that zero is the best.

• 1:01:36Lewis Howes?

  Zero sun?

• 1:01:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, that's what some people say.

• 1:01:39Lewis Howes?

  Isn't vitamin D supposed to help you live longer too?

• 1:01:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, yeah, they would say to take a supplement instead, but I'm not that.

• 1:01:45Lewis Howes?

  This is human nature, right? Like?

• 1:01:47Dr. David Sinclair?

  Sun, for me, it makes you feel good, a bit of UV, but you don't want to overload the body. It's very easy to overdo it.

• 1:01:54Lewis Howes?

  So 10, 20 minutes in the sun.

• 1:01:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  When your skin's starting to tingle, don't get, don't get red. But in Australia, we used to pull pieces of skin off our.

• 1:02:02Lewis Howes?

  Like blisters, right? Yeah.

• 1:02:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. So I've only been burnt maybe once or twice in my adult life.

• 1:02:11Dr. David Sinclair?

  For, for good reason.

• 1:02:12Lewis Howes?

  Don't stay in the sun too long.

• 1:02:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, right. Unfortunately, it ends up, you know, you look white and pasty, but for Caucasians anyway.

• 1:02:22Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:02:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  But that's the price you pay. If you sun tan a lot in your twenties, by the time you're 40 or 50, you will look about five, 10 years older.

• 1:02:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:02:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  Now, it's not all about vanity, but skin cancer is also an issue.

• 1:02:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  In Australia, we learn a lot about that.

• 1:02:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So you can be in the sun, just put protection on is what I'm hearing.

• 1:02:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's right.

• 1:02:43Lewis Howes?

  It's like, or just stay inside all day.

• 1:02:45Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, no, put protection on.

• 1:02:47Lewis Howes?

  I mean, it's like enjoying Mother Nature. You can go to the beach, you can go on hikes, just wear a hat, put sunscreen on your face, your arms, your hands, right?

• 1:02:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 1:02:56Lewis Howes?

  Okay, just make, okay, cool.

• 1:02:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, you gotta go outside, uh, for sure. I mean, otherwise, what's, what's life?

• 1:03:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, okay. Now, I just did this trip to Poland with Wim Hof, where with a group of guys where we did this intensive breathing and ice therapy training, where we were in the ice for 10 minutes up to our neck, breathing and exposing ourselves to the cold. We also hiked four hours in a mountain. There was about 50 miles an hour wind at the top, minus 22 Celsius, and with no clothes on, just shorts, hats, gloves and shoes. So exposing our legs and our chest and our face to the wind and the cold, pelting us with hail, essentially, at the top. How important is heat therapy and cold therapy to aging? Or anti-aging?

• 1:03:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  I want to hear all about this story. This sounds fascinating. Louis definitely tell, tell us more about that. Uh, but yeah, so when I started writing the book, uh, my editor said, you gotta talk about this cryotherapy. Uh, and also sauna, and that's, that's not science, can't be real. Uh, so I looked into it, uh, and we'd also, actually, I must admit, we'd done some work on cold already. Uh, one of these sort of two and protective genes, not number one that I talked about, but number three responds to cold and actually turns on healthy production of what's called brown fat. So the more I looked into it and the more I can ponder my own research, I thought, maybe being cold does help your health.

• 1:04:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  And so I, I write about it, but I think that the data, it's not as strong as, as fasting and exercise, but it, it's believable that what, what you're doing when you're cold, or actually when you're hot, is turning on those protective longevity genes. Yeah, yeah, I mean, not internally, you're not gonna freeze internally in big cold. But on your skin, you're gonna, and just under your skin, you're gonna have what's called brown fat, which is full of energy-producing and heat-producing mitochondria, the battery packs of cells. And those mitochondria are really dense, and it's one of the reasons that they're brown, not white fat. And the brown fat, it's not like normal fat where you're just storing energy.

• 1:05:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's actually metabolically active, so it's burning energy. But it's also seen to be healthy because it's secreting these little proteins that tell the body to stay young. We don't know what they all are, but there's a lot of evidence that having it.

• 1:05:25Lewis Howes?

  Stay young.

• 1:05:26Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, yeah, so brown fat is found mainly in babies.

• 1:05:29Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:05:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  Because they can't shiver. Little babies, did you know that can't shiver?

• 1:05:33Lewis Howes?

  Why can they shiver, though?

• 1:05:34Dr. David Sinclair?

  I don't know. It's weird.

• 1:05:35Lewis Howes?

  How old do you become until you can shiver for the first time?

• 1:05:38Dr. David Sinclair?

  I don't know. I'd have to guess, but newborns don't shiver. And they have to use this brown fat, they're full of it. But as we get older, we lose it. In fact, when I was, twenty years ago, when I was just starting out, people thought there was no such thing as brown fat in adults. And then they did P E T, PET scans, and found that this brown fat was mostly in people who were cold and experiencing cold, and found across the back mainly.

• 1:06:06Lewis Howes?

  So you can recreate brown fat as an adult?

• 1:06:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yes, or beige fat. You can turn your white fat into brownish fat by being cold.

• 1:06:13Lewis Howes?

  By, do we know how much cold therapy you need to do? Is it once a month? Is it once a week? Is it daily? Is it for a certain amount of time?

• 1:06:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, we're still figuring that out, but it seems like the more, the better, unfortunately. So what you were doing sounds perfect.

• 1:06:26Lewis Howes?

  So like every day, doing a cold shower, an ice plunge for a couple of minutes a day, or just something like that, helps generate brown fat, which is a layer of mitochondria, dense mitochondria under the skin, which helps you burn more fat?

• 1:06:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Lewis Howes?

  Is that what it is?

• 1:06:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's a good way to put it.

• 1:06:44Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:06:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's designed to keep you warm, but it also is telling the body, hey, times are tough. We could, we could freeze to death.

• 1:06:51Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  Adversity, right? What doesn't kill you makes you live longer.

• 1:06:56Lewis Howes?

  Oh, that's a good one. So put your body through pain throughout your life as consistently as possible, like controlled pain, right? Going in a sauna for fifteen minutes and pushing an extra minute, like that feeling of adversity, going in cold, working out hard, doing something where it's a, you're not gonna kill yourself or hurt or break a leg, but it's like discomfort. Is that what I'm hearing?

• 1:07:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's the most important lesson. We call it hormesis. And it's basically, your body will be complacent if you don't tell it to work hard. And the problem with our society is, everything is designed to be

• 1:07:33Lewis Howes?

  Comfortable.

• 1:07:34Dr. David Sinclair?

  Comfortable. That's what we strive for. You know, I was, I was coming here, uh, flying out, and I'm looking at all the roller bags and thinking, and I'm carrying my two bags here, and I'm thinking, should I put it down? No, I'm gonna walk with my bags, that's what people used to do. But, you know, these days, everything is all about comfort. Constant food, don't exercise, don't be cold, ever. It's crazy. We're, we're killing ourselves. We're accelerating our aging process. So you've got to get out of that comfort zone.

• 1:08:04Lewis Howes?

  We're killing ourselves by being comfortable.

• 1:08:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 1:08:06Lewis Howes?

  So is there too mu- like if I'm cold therapy, and hot, and fasting, and doing a HIIT workout, is there such thing as too much discomfort in your life that will start to age you?

• 1:08:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  I don't think so.

• 1:08:19Lewis Howes?

  So I could fast, be in the cold and the heat, two minutes of sun, like do all these things in a, in a day, do it consistently, carry my bags everywhere, and you think it'll make me younger?

• 1:08:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  I think your, your rate of aging will be slowed down dramatically.

• 1:08:36Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:08:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  Skip a meal or two a day.

• 1:08:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  As much as you can. Yeah, I mean, there's no question in my mind that this would work. Give you an extra, at least fifteen years, maybe twenty-five.

• 1:08:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:08:47Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's, it, it's not, it's not rocket science.

• 1:08:50Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:08:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  If you do that to a rat, if you give it cold, or you actually give it less food,

• 1:08:56Lewis Howes?

  it starts to

• 1:08:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  If you come to my lab, you'll see mice. We've got mice that are on a regular diet that can eat whenever they want.

• 1:09:03Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh. Food just laying around, just eat as much as you want.

• 1:09:06Dr. David Sinclair?

  And those are not fat mice because they're on a lean diet. The ones we give the high fat diet, they die thirty percent faster anyway. They age rapidly. But let's say even if you're lean like you are and eating well, but you're eating a lot, right, constantly?

• 1:09:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  If we do that to a mouse, they will age at the, what we call the normal rate. So they'll be two years old, they're getting frail, they get gray hair, they're looking old. And then they'll die about six months later on average. The mice that are on this calorie restricted diet that either get less food in total or only eat for a few hours a day. They're running around the cage, no gray hair, they're super active, they stay young.

• 1:09:48Lewis Howes?

  So don't eat?

• 1:09:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, you gotta eat.

• 1:09:50Lewis Howes?

  It's fasting, it's, it's, what do you like, intermittent fasting? Are you gonna do like the twenty-four hour fast? Do you like a three day fast? What do you think is ideal for most people?

• 1:10:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, yeah, scientifically, I think going for three days is great. So.

• 1:10:04Lewis Howes?

  Scientifically.

• 1:10:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  Peter Attia, hats off to him, that's his profession, he can do that.

• 1:10:09Lewis Howes?

  What's the prolong or what's the diet? What's this guy?

• 1:10:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  Peter Attia?

• 1:10:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  I don't know what his diet is called.

• 1:10:17Lewis Howes?

  Does he have like a program for this or no?

• 1:10:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  I don't think so. He's a, he's a doctor who's experimenting on his body in severe ways.

• 1:10:25Lewis Howes?

  And three days is like what he does?

• 1:10:26Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, he goes for a week without food, he just drinks water. And.

• 1:10:31Lewis Howes?

  It's probably got skin and bones though, right?

• 1:10:32Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Lewis Howes?

  It's probably not the best for high performance of like.

• 1:10:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  No, no, no, if you're an athlete, forget it.

• 1:10:37Lewis Howes?

  So what if, if you're an athlete, if you wanna work out and do HIIT training?

• 1:10:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Lewis Howes?

  What, what do you think is scientifically right? Like one day fast and then intermittent fasting and skipping meals?

• 1:10:48Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, so I get asked this every day. And the simple answer is do as much as you can and the more the better. In general, without losing your energy. But the other fact is that nobody knows the true answer. Anyone who says this is the way to do it.

• 1:11:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:11:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  Is BSing you.

• 1:11:07Lewis Howes?

  Cause everyone's different and we all have different needs and.

• 1:11:10Dr. David Sinclair?

  Different bacteria in the gut, different energy levels, different genes, different lifestyles.

• 1:11:17Dr. David Sinclair?

  Different professions and so for someone like me, I'll tell you what works for me is so I'm I'm often sitting probably for half the day. I got a standing desk. That's a start.

• 1:11:29Lewis Howes?

  Right. You're not working out.

• 1:11:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  No, no, I work out once a week for a few hours. That's about it. As much as I can do. So for me, what I do is I I very rarely eat breakfast. Um, I'm not hungry in the morning anyway. I try to skip lunch with my cups of tea. I would say I'm about seventy percent successful. Um, I might have a little nibble of something in the afternoon because I can't focus well.

• 1:11:55Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:11:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  But then I have a normal dinner. I go out to dinner and I'm living normally.

• 1:11:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  That works for me. And I think for for an athlete, at at least skipping one meal would would be good.

• 1:12:06Lewis Howes?

  Be good. And then maybe one day a month not eating or something, right?

• 1:12:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

• 1:12:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Dr. David Sinclair?

  Going for a whole week though.

• 1:12:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, twenty four hour fast could be good once a month.

• 1:12:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, one thing though about that three day fast, I've never done it myself. But what happens, we know is that it kicks in what's called the the the super cleansing autophagy pathway, which

• 1:12:26Lewis Howes?

  Kills the bad cells and

• 1:12:27Dr. David Sinclair?

  And gets rid of the the bad proteins that have accumulated.

• 1:12:30Lewis Howes?

  Three days.

• 1:12:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  You need to go for three days to really get the deep cleans, unfortunately.

• 1:12:34Lewis Howes?

  You've never done it though, huh? You don't need it. You look like you're thirty. So you're fine.

• 1:12:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  Maybe I could be twenty, who knows? But uh, yeah, I I'm like, I'm just a schmo. I I'm not as will, I don't have the the willpower that you guys, I couldn't go hiking in the snow.

• 1:12:49Lewis Howes?

  Right. It's, I think you could. It's a mindset. You could do it.

• 1:12:53Dr. David Sinclair?

  Really? Well, tell us about that. How did that feel?

• 1:12:58Lewis Howes?

  Life changing. Like to know that I could hike practically naked. The only thing is at the top, like when I took my gloves off to take a video, like then I started to really freeze. So I think the extremities need to be covered. And I think you should have supervision if you're gonna try this. I want to try this by yourself. But since I had warm gloves on, I think I was able to do it. But I remember hiking the last twenty minutes. It was like a cliff coming off the side. The wind was whistling, you know, fifty, sixty miles an hour and can't see much.

• 1:13:34Lewis Howes?

  And it's really cold. Like it was cold going up most of the mountain for the first three and a half hours, the last thirty minutes. It's just like there was no trees to protect you from the winds.

• 1:13:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Lewis Howes?

  It was a lot colder.

• 1:13:45Dr. David Sinclair?

  Are you shivering?

• 1:13:46Lewis Howes?

  I was sweating still. I was sweating, so I had sweat coming down from the hat. Cold. Like, you know, you're generating heat. And it just, it wasn't fun at the top, like it, it started to hurt.

• 1:14:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  And you lose feeling in certain parts of your body?

• 1:14:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, like my chest is like stinging and cold, but I think I got enough brown fat underneath me that I was like generating heat. I had a good layer of fat in my stomach, so I think that helped. But you know, I went with a group of guys, so it was like this bonding experience, we're all in this together. I think if I did it alone, I probably would have stopped at one point. Where there was like a lodge at the top and then there was another thirty minutes, I think I would have stopped and be like, I did enough. Like I proved it, I did three and a half hours, I got close to the top. But we were on a mission to reach the summit. And doing it together, I think a positive mindset in general, maybe this isn't scientific, but I think having a positive attitude can get you through a lot of adversity.

• 1:14:46Lewis Howes?

  And what you speak out of your mouth can dictate the direction that you go in your life. And again, this probably isn't scientific or research, but if I say to myself as I'm getting to the top, I'm cold, I'm tired, I don't know if I can make it, ah, this is stupid, what was I thinking? I'm probably going to convince my body to start getting colder and shutting down and looking backwards. But because we were like, man, it's sunny out, like we were just saying, we're warm, it's hot, it's sunny, this is a great, nice hike. Like we just kept speaking like these positive words. And we convinced ourselves, we believed it, our bodies started to believe it.

• 1:15:28Lewis Howes?

  Whatever we did, we were doing it together and we got to the top and I think what we say dictates a lot of our, our, our energy and our actions. So I don't know if that's proven science or if that's just.

• 1:15:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, yeah, you probably have to do that a few times to, to live longer, but yeah, but psychologically it's changed your life.

• 1:15:48Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. I, I, I was trying to think, like it was a five day trip and I was like, are there other weeks in my life that were better than this week? We, you know, going to the national championships to become an All-American was a big dream of mine and like every day leading up to it, but I was still in class. I was in school. It wasn't all fun. You know, playoffs in college football were like great weeks leading up to these games, right? But this was like every day we were taking on new challenges with a group of people. I don't know, something about it was really special. And Wim Hof was like this crazy character who's also helping a lot of people.

• 1:16:25Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, he's great.

• 1:16:26Lewis Howes?

  And he's getting people to get uncomfortable, which is going to help them fight disease, live longer, all these things that you talk about. Whether he knows the science 100% or not, he's doing things to get people to get uncomfortable on a consistent basis. And I think that helps people in general, so.

• 1:16:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, physically and mentally?

• 1:16:43Lewis Howes?

  Physically and mentally. We're doing breathing exercises every day. As you know, most people are very shallow breathers and that probably affects, I don't know, if you're shallow breathing your whole life, I don't think that can help you live longer, I'm assuming. I don't know the science. But just taking deep, full breaths all the time and allowing the body to relax. It was so peaceful. I didn't look at my email once in a week. I didn't think about social media. I was just present, breathing, going through hard challenges, and it felt so peaceful and relaxing. I mean, it was discomfort and then like peace, discomfort and then like, ah.

• 1:17:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right. Well, you need to experience adversity to be able to have the calm. Like we have in our lives. We know what suffering is. So that's why, you know, even on a bad day, it's still a pretty good day.

• 1:17:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:17:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  I get home and my wife, who's wonderful, she'll say, how was today? And after my mother died, I now say, even though it's a bit morbid, nobody died today. It was a great day. And that's, that's what my, my cutoff.

• 1:17:49Lewis Howes?

  If someone dies, it's not a, not the best day.

• 1:17:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right. And if you've been through that, then all the other stuff is just minor.

• 1:17:56Lewis Howes?

  Average, average pain. Yeah.

• 1:17:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  So the lesson here is, uh, push yourself. Do things that you don't think you're capable of doing. Experience adversity, it'll, it'll help you physically, but even more so mentally.

• 1:18:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. How old do you think you can get to live, like personally? With all the research you've done now and with potentially in the next 20, 30 years of science that you're going to discover? Like if nothing happens physically with like a bus or something?

• 1:18:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Lewis Howes?

  How long do you think you personally can live if you optimized everything?

• 1:18:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Lewis Howes?

  What's possible, not what's gonna happen, but what's possible.

• 1:18:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, right. Well, before I tell you that, um, I'm not doing this to live longer.

• 1:18:35Lewis Howes?

  Right. You don't wanna live forever.

• 1:18:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  I wouldn't mind. Uh, I'm not looking forward to, to a horrible death.

• 1:18:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  But, you know, that's not my goal here. It's not that I'm worried about myself. I do wanna leave this planet having done something meaningful. That, that's what drives me mainly. Uh, but I'm also a scientist. I'm experimenting. I wanna know stuff. Remember, you know, I told my friends we're the last generation. So I'm trying to accelerate knowledge at Harvard and at home.

• 1:19:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  So I, I do these things to myself. I measure myself glucose levels, a whole bunch of parameters to see what's going on. Not as proof, but as indicators of what other people may test. And, uh, so I know from my own body that I'm still pretty young. Um, I still need to do the definitive age test. We can now look at exactly how old.

• 1:19:27Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:19:27Dr. David Sinclair?

  We are.

• 1:19:27Lewis Howes?

  Like a ring of a tree?

• 1:19:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  It is. We've just, it's called the Horvath clock. It's the pianist, you can measure how old the pianist is. Within a few percent. So you can actually predict when you're gonna die now.

• 1:19:38Lewis Howes?

  Shut up.

• 1:19:38Dr. David Sinclair?

  Really?

• 1:19:39Lewis Howes?

  Have you, have you predicted?

• 1:19:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  I gotta do it. I gotta do it.

• 1:19:43Dr. David Sinclair?

  I've done a primitive form of that, which is, in full disclosure, it's a company that I own a little bit of. But, so this company takes blood tests. Can I say the name?

• 1:19:53Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:19:54Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's called InsideTracker. I mention it because people are gonna write to you about it.

• 1:19:58Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:19:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  So InsideTracker does blood tests and they measure a bunch of things. And I've been doing that for about 12 years. So I know I'm tracking myself and everything's staying young.

• 1:20:08Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:20:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  And they can estimate your age. It's a rough estimate, so.

• 1:20:11Lewis Howes?

  It can estimate your age by taking a blood sample?

• 1:20:13Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, and measuring things in there that go up and down with time.

• 1:20:17Lewis Howes?

  It's probably like a three-year swing either side or something, or it's pretty close?

• 1:20:20Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, it's an indicator of how well you're doing with your body. And.

• 1:20:26Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:20:27Dr. David Sinclair?

  I actually took a test a few years ago, many years ago, and I was, they came out as 58. And I freaked out.

• 1:20:35Lewis Howes?

  Because it made you older than what you are?

• 1:20:36Dr. David Sinclair?

  I was older than I was. I was 48 at the time.

• 1:20:38Lewis Howes?

  Oh, so what did you change?

• 1:20:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I upped some doses of molecules, took a couple more, and stopped eating badly. And the next test came out at 31.

• 1:20:51Lewis Howes?

  What? Shut up. What do you mean stop eating badly? Like sugars and candies and cakes, or is this like?

• 1:20:58Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I wasn't strictly intermittent fasting. I'd eat lunches, I had more fat than I do now. I'd eat pizza and things like that.

• 1:21:05Lewis Howes?

  I love pizza.

• 1:21:06Dr. David Sinclair?

  Gosh. But I've turned it around. I've never been unhealthy, but this was a real.

• 1:21:12Lewis Howes?

  That was a wake-up call.

• 1:21:13Dr. David Sinclair?

  I have terrible genes. My father's side, we all died in our 70s usually.

• 1:21:19Lewis Howes?

  So what does it say that you can live to? You don't know yet.

• 1:21:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, so I haven't answered your question. So that, that doesn't, that says that I've probably got another 20 years extra, right?

• 1:21:29Lewis Howes?

  Extra than the average lifespan?

• 1:21:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, based on that blood test. We'll see. But what could we live to? So here's the good news, is that if we just continue on the trend that we've been on for 200 years, and it's been perfectly linear, so you can keep stretching it out. A child born today in the US can expect, not hope, but expect 50% of them to live to 104.

• 1:21:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  And in Japan, one hundred and seven.

• 1:21:58Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:21:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  If we keep going up. Now, that's not going to happen by accident. That's going to take researchers like me to figure it out. And a lot of.

• 1:22:05Lewis Howes?

  And them doing the work and people actually not eating horrible and smoking and doing the things that help.

• 1:22:10Dr. David Sinclair?

  Hopefully, that'll help too. That's why I'm I wrote the book is to help people live longer.

• 1:22:14Lewis Howes?

  But just a hundred years is their lifespan now.

• 1:22:17Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, yeah, that's the predicted trajectory. That's without any radical breakthrough.

• 1:22:23Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:22:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  Without, you know, fixing the pianist. Now, if we can fix the pianist and truly reverse aging, like a reset switch, then

• 1:22:32Dr. David Sinclair?

  who knows, you know, we we could live to one hundred and twenty, maybe longer.

• 1:22:37Lewis Howes?

  Me and you or?

• 1:22:38Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:22:39Lewis Howes?

  People born today.

• 1:22:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I'm going as fast as I can. And we've got, we've had a big breakthrough in the last year. Uh, that we found the reset switch, we think, in the cells to to reset the age.

• 1:22:51Lewis Howes?

  So what's the next step? It's like you guys are researching this for the next five, 10 years, figuring out how to do that, reset it?

• 1:22:57Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, we know how to do it in a mouse pretty easily. That worked first time. That was easy.

• 1:23:01Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:23:02Dr. David Sinclair?

  And one of my students, another brilliant student, he decided to reverse the eye, the age of the eye. So he took old mice that were basically blind and made their eyes young again so they could see, just like they were young again. Yeah.

• 1:23:18Lewis Howes?

  So you could do that with people too?

• 1:23:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, that's the next step. That's a few years away, but we're working. I'm an entrepreneur, as you know, and so I'm trying to push this out of the lab as fast as possible.

• 1:23:27Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:23:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  But if it works on the eye, what else could it work on? Probably everything, I think. Now, is it safe? We think it is. We've given it to mice for a year and no problem. No cancer showing up or anything.

• 1:23:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:23:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  But you don't want to push it too far. You don't want to go back to being an embryo. You'll be the world's biggest tumor.

• 1:23:44Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Wow. Wow. So what do you think you could live to personally?

• 1:23:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, I'll, you know, I'm trying to avoid the question. Because my my peers, my colleagues.

• 1:23:55Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:23:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  Hate it because it's it's unproven, it's.

• 1:23:58Lewis Howes?

  Got you, got you. But just like, you know, obviously, it's not proven, but just. And if all goes well, you know.

• 1:24:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  Alright.

• 1:24:05Lewis Howes?

  Don't get sick and all these things don't happen.

• 1:24:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  Alright, so so.

• 1:24:09Lewis Howes?

  No traumatic events.

• 1:24:10Dr. David Sinclair?

  People are gonna rewind this video when I die, aren't they? So I'm on a trajectory to live well beyond eighty because I'm healthy.

• 1:24:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  My father's an example.

• 1:24:20Lewis Howes?

  He's eighty.

• 1:24:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  He's eighty and young.

• 1:24:21Lewis Howes?

  You should live at least ten years beyond that.

• 1:24:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right. So at least that, I should be healthy into my nineties. Be nice to break a hundred. Uh, with the technologies and some of the medicines that I'm working on and one of them that I'm actually taking. Maybe beyond a hundred, that would be nice.

• 1:24:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:24:38Dr. David Sinclair?

  In a healthy way, playing tennis.

• 1:24:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow. In a healthy way, beyond a hundred.

• 1:24:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  A lot of people do that.

• 1:24:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  Um, it's not for everybody, but but you do see people in their hundreds that are still working and happy.

• 1:24:50Lewis Howes?

  How much does inflammation uh play into your the longevity of your life?

• 1:24:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  Oh, it's huge. It's huge. It's one of these hallmarks that if inflammation's going up too fast, that's basically your clock.

• 1:25:01Lewis Howes?

  You're aging.

• 1:25:02Dr. David Sinclair?

  Accelerated, yeah.

• 1:25:03Lewis Howes?

  So how do we get rid of inflammation?

• 1:25:06Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, there are a number of ways. One is do these things and turn on your longevity genes, which are anti-inflammatory. Uh, other ways, I I'm still taking a little aspirin every day.

• 1:25:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  The data still looks pretty good for that.

• 1:25:21Lewis Howes?

  Taking an aspirin?

• 1:25:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, eight one milligrams a day.

• 1:25:24Lewis Howes?

  That just takes away inflammation?

• 1:25:25Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, mostly in in your blood vessels.

• 1:25:27Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:25:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  Um, but you need to take it for a long time, of course, I think, to stop that. Whereas Veratrol is anti-inflammatory. Um, and remember how I said those mice have beautiful arteries, no fat on them.

• 1:25:39Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:25:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  So that's good.

• 1:25:40Lewis Howes?

  Huh.

• 1:25:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, but basically, it's that. And but overeating and being obese is gonna massively turn up inflammation.

• 1:25:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:25:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, within a few weeks, you'll you'll do it. Just eating bad food for a few weeks will turn it up.

• 1:25:54Lewis Howes?

  And fasting will kill inflammation.

• 1:25:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  Exactly. But you might say, well, if your immune system isn't overactive, what about getting sick? Turns out your immune system gets heightened, but inflammation, chronic inflammation gets dampened. So when you talk to a centenarian and say, did you used to get sick? They say, can't remember last time I got sick.

• 1:26:16Lewis Howes?

  Centenarian?

• 1:26:17Dr. David Sinclair?

  Centenarian, people who live over a hundred.

• 1:26:19Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:26:20Dr. David Sinclair?

  So that's a hallmark.

• 1:26:21Lewis Howes?

  They don't remember when they got sick.

• 1:26:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  They don't get sick. They rarely get even a sniffle or a cold.

• 1:26:26Lewis Howes?

  How is that possible?

• 1:26:27Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, they have massive immune systems. So even if someone sneezes on them, that virus is attacked and killed. But here's the thing, since I've been eating and living the right way over the last few years, since that terrible scary test, I haven't gotten sick.

• 1:26:42Lewis Howes?

  No sickness?

• 1:26:43Dr. David Sinclair?

  Not once.

• 1:26:43Lewis Howes?

  No cold, the flu?

• 1:26:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  No. And I'm on planes, people are sneezing on me. I've got, we've got three kids, they're always sick.

• 1:26:50Lewis Howes?

  What if you got like, what if you ate something that had like food poisoning that would fight against that too? Or is that kind of hard to?

• 1:26:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  Good question. I don't know.

• 1:26:57Lewis Howes?

  It's uncooked chicken or something, you know, it's like.

• 1:27:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  I haven't had food poisoning recently, but it might just be that I can afford better food now.

• 1:27:04Lewis Howes?

  That's good. I like that. Wow. This is all fascinating stuff. And I know you've got more in your book, lifespan, why we age and why we don't have to. Make sure you guys get this book. Really powerful research and science. I got a couple of questions left for you. This is called the three truths. I ask everyone at the end of my interviews. So I want you to imagine you're, it's your last day on earth and you're 150, 200 or however old you want to be. And you've done tons of research, you've written every book you want to write, you've answered every question that you can think of while you're alive. You publish all this information, but for whatever reason, you've got to take your work with you. So no one has access to your work anymore, your research. All your content is gone. It's going with you to another world.

• 1:27:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  That sounds like hell. Okay.

• 1:27:50Lewis Howes?

  Just imagine. But you get to leave behind three lessons or three things you know to be true from everything that you've learned in your life. You can write it down on a piece of paper. Everyone would have access to these three truths. And this is the only three things you could share that they would have access to. What would you say are your three truths?

• 1:28:11Dr. David Sinclair?

  All right. Right, the first one that I live by is all about maximizing human potential. It believe that we're way underutilized. But for the individual, what you have to think every day is do something that's worth writing, uh, writing about. Or write something that's worth reading. So have an impact. That's, that's my lesson is don't settle for mediocrity. Do something spectacular and don't listen to the naysayers.

• 1:28:45Lewis Howes?

  Okay, is that one?

• 1:28:47Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's one.

• 1:28:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:48Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, the next one would be,

• 1:28:51Dr. David Sinclair?

  uh, do something that scares you every day. Uh, send off an email that you wouldn't be, you'd be afraid to do. Um, and along with that, when you're young, take risks like, like we did. You can fail. That's okay. You will fail. But it'll make you, it'll open you up to more opportunities.

• 1:29:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  Um, but also you'll be a stronger adult, stronger forty, fifty year old.

• 1:29:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Okay, that's two.

• 1:29:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  Ah gee, the third one, I haven't pre-prepared this up. But this one's from the heart. I've described to you what it was like to see my mother pass away. And I spent my life arguing with my mother. Right? I regret that.

• 1:29:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, so as a parent now myself, let me tell the younger people.

• 1:29:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45Dr. David Sinclair?

  Tell your parents how much you appreciate what they've done for you. Tell them that you love them, assuming that you do, if they're good people. Because there will be a day, most likely, when they'll be gone and you won't have a chance to hug them anymore or see them anymore because they're gone. And when they're gone, you think, how is that possible that somebody can be there and not there within a matter of two minutes? That happens. And, uh, yeah, I just wish that I'd, uh, told my mom more about how much I appreciate her.

• 1:30:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  So I've dedicated the book to her because she cared more about herself than her kids.

• 1:30:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow, special. Those are good three truths. I love those. I want to acknowledge you David for a moment for being obsessed about helping people. And I think your commitment and dedication to. Doing, I mean, I don't know what I've done for 10 years consistently, but doing research for 10 years on one thing and trying to get the most out of it and writing these books and taking the time to come on my show and just being obsessed about helping people to leave a better, leave this world a better place. I think it's really admirable and I appreciate you, I acknowledge you for just showing up every single day and doing the work, even when your peers criticize you and even when the media does this. Like, I know how not easy that is when you're shamed publicly. It's not easy to keep going. But

• 1:31:02Lewis Howes?

  I acknowledge you for pushing through any insecurities or emotional traumas that you faced to try to help people like me and everyone watching to live better. So, thank you for, for all that you do. And I want to make sure people get the book. Lifespan, where can we connect with you online?

• 1:31:19Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I have a website called lifespanbook.com.

• 1:31:22Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:31:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  I have a newsletter, so that's keeping things up to date, new stuff I write about every few weeks. And I'm on social media, Instagram and Twitter, Facebook.

• 1:31:32Lewis Howes?

  Where do you hang out the most personally on social media?

• 1:31:36Dr. David Sinclair?

  Instagram and Twitter.

• 1:31:38Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool. What's your Instagram?

• 1:31:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's David Sinclair PhD.

• 1:31:43Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool. So we'll connect with you there. Make sure you guys send us some messages over on Instagram. This is my final question. It's what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:31:53Dr. David Sinclair?

  Again, off the cuff. So I would say, I would, if you asked me a few years ago, I probably would have said something a little bit self-centered, which is greatness is somebody who is recognized internationally for, for something important. But I don't think that anymore. I'm married to a woman who has a PhD from MIT in genetics.

• 1:32:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  Who could have been a superstar scientist, but instead chose to do nonprofit work and raise a family and put up with me.

• 1:32:32Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:32:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's greatness.

• 1:32:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:34Dr. David Sinclair?

  So it doesn't, you don't have to be internationally recognized. You just need to make a difference in people's lives.

• 1:32:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow. I love it. David, thanks, man. Appreciate this.

• 1:32:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Thanks, Louis. Thanks for what you do too.

• 1:32:43Lewis Howes?

  Thank you.

• 1:32:46Lewis Howes?

  My friend, I'm so happy that you listened to this episode. I'm telling you, if you apply just two or three of these things that Dr. Davidson Claire has mentioned, it's going to help you live a happier, healthier, longer life. It's going to allow you to be able to experience more beautiful moments with your loved ones, with your family, with your friends. It's going to allow you to extend time so you can pursue your dreams and experience more life experiences. That's what this is all about. We're here for a limited amount of time, but what if we could extend that time? And I want you to have all the tools available right here with Dr. David Sinclair's information. And make sure to check out his book. I was going through some of the chapters in his book and he really breaks it down in details, the exact

• 1:33:31Lewis Howes?

  things to eat, the supplements, all the different stuff you need. So make sure to check out his book as well. Hey guys, I've got this movie also. I've been working on it for a couple of years. I'm super passionate about it. It's called Chasing Greatness. It's kind of like the secret on steroids and it's all about how to achieve greatness in your life. We've got some incredible people featured in this documentary movie and I want you to get access to it. Go to greatness.com right now. You can watch the trailer. You can see what it's all about, see who's in the movie and opt in. We're going to be giving it away for free before we're selling it online later. But you can watch it for free. Just go to greatness.com and sign up right now to be notified of when you can start watching this for free. Check it out. Greatness.com.

• 1:34:15Lewis Howes?

  And I want you to live an incredible life. You know, there are ups and downs every week, every day, every month, every year. There are seasons of life that are beautiful, that are expansive, and then are seasons of life that teach us our biggest lessons. And this podcast. Podcast is your place to feel safe, to feel at home, where you can always come back to. Whether you're going through some of your darkest challenges right now, or you are exceeding at your highest level of greatness right now, and you're using these tools to further that success. This is your home. This is a place for you to feel safe. I want you to know I've always got your back. I'm always thinking of you.

• 1:34:58Lewis Howes?

  Every time, I get pitched all the time by people, and I'm always thinking, will they serve you at the highest level? Is the information they have valuable enough for what you are going through specifically? And I'm always doing my best to give you the best in the world. I hope you know that. I hope you feel my love. I hope you know I'm proud of you. If someone hasn't told you lately that they love you, that they're proud of you, that they're glad you're on this earth, I am. And I'm super grateful that you spend some time with me every single week on the School of Greatness Podcast. So if this is your first time here, welcome. Please subscribe over on Apple, over on Spotify, and anywhere you listen to the podcasts. Leave us a review. We've got over 6,000 five-star reviews,

• 1:35:40Lewis Howes?

  and those always warm my heart, and they help us spread the message and get out there more people. And you can always text one friend. Text one friend. You know, the reason we've crossed over 150 million downloads is because of you. One person at a time, sharing it with a friend that you love. This is all about saving lives and transforming people's hearts. And you have the power to do that by sharing it with one friend. So share with a friend, do it in the WhatsApp group, post it on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and tag me at Lewis Howes when you do. I love you so very much. The Buddha said, "To keep the body in good health is a duty. Otherwise, we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear." As always, you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.