In this podcast episode, David Sinclair returns to discuss groundbreaking advances in longevity science. He reveals that his lab has moved from speculation to human trials, with the first patient receiving OSK gene therapy to treat glaucoma, delivered via a virus-like capsule injected into the eye. These genes, a subset of Yamanaka factors, can reset cells to a younger state, restoring function without causing cancer or loss of identity. Sinclair reports that the trial is on target, with no adverse effects so far. He also describes a drink and pill cocktail that rejuvenates mice in four weeks, working by resetting epigenetic markers, and uses AI to screen a trillion molecules for a single drug candidate, completing in months what would take centuries. Beyond interventions, he emphasizes simple lifestyle changes—avoiding smoking, drinking, getting sleep, exercising, and fostering loving relationships—can extend life by 15 years, as stress and isolation accelerate aging. He discusses the risks and benefits of GLP-1 drugs, noting their potential for weight loss but rare side effects like sudden blindness. Sinclair also touches on future possibilities like regrowing hair, healing injuries, and even limbs, while acknowledging ethical and security concerns, including bio-weapon risks. The conversation ends with a playful agreement for Rogan to train Sinclair, blending personal health advice with cutting-edge science.
(upbeat music) - Joe Rogan wants that, check it out! - The Joe, Rogan, experience. - Stream by day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day! (upbeat music) - Mr. Sinclair, good to see you again. - Dr. Sinclair? - Dr. - I'm kidding. - It's better than David. - Yeah, do you ever introduce yourself as Dr? - Never. - Yeah, that's a kind of a, it's a weird thing because you're allowed to, I'm actually a sir David from Australia, but-- - Are you a sir? - Yeah, but it's kind of a joke, I don't really-- - What does that, how does that work out? Did you get-- - I did a clean shit. - Oh, I did a clean shit. - It's representative gave me some Australian version of a nighthood, but I get to put AO at the end of my name. - AO? - Yeah, order of Australia. But it actually makes no difference to my life. So it's just an extra couple of letters. - It's kind of cool. - I'm in them. - I'm honored for sure, but it's just a joke. - Well, it's kind of anybody, sir. You meet a guy at the gas station, how you doing, sir? - Is that him? - It's like, wow, how does he know? - Right, you don't say how you're doing king. - Yeah. - Well, I'm David, I'm Australian, so in Australia, if you have any ego, you get beaten up in the playground. - That is true. Australia's the land of the tall poppy syndrome. They don't fuck around. They don't like you getting a big head in Australia. - That is true. I like to go back there though, because it's an evil playing field nobody cares who you are. - I love the people there. Australian people are some of my favorite people. They're awesome. They're very friendly and fun. It's a great place to be. It's just too far to get there. Such a hall. - Oh, no, if you just, you know, whiskey and an ambience, and you're there without-- - Is that what you do? - I used to. I've gone clean. I don't drink much at all anymore. Last time I was able to-- - What does that mean? How often does drink much at all? - Celebrations, right now? - No, it would be a bad look. I've got the coffee that you gave me, yeah, this is a layered superfood coffee. So, layered Hamilton is a coffee. It's black rifle coffee mixed with his superfood stuff, which is this one's turmeric. So, it's turmeric, and I think it has coconut, milk in it, and some other jazz. That's great. - It's anti-inflammatory jazz. - Yes. - Which I know you're all about. - Yes, as a profit of longevity. - Yes. - Is that another title of you? - Yes, you can call me Sir David the Prophet. How about that? - Sir David the Prophet. Dr. Sir David, the Prophet of longevity. - That'll do. - So, there's a lot, let's just jump right into it because there is a lot going on in the longevity space. - I think you're having me back on it. - My pleasure. - And by the way, I also want to thank you for, I think this is fourth time on, which is amazing. Thank you. Congrats on all your success. - Thank you. - It's wonderful to see also the book that I wrote, which you first had me on to promote has done so well. And it's really because of you. And the book lifespan became a best seller, not just that, but it's now been read millions of times around the world. It's in 40 years from now and it's my pleasure. - And that's not a promo. As you know, you don't make any money from books really, but I'm just honored that it was read by so many people around the world 'cause it wasn't an easy read. It was high tech science. - Well, people are very interested, especially nowadays. It's I think I've never, I can't recall a time in my life where optimizing your health and longevity has been more of a subject that people are interested in. - Well, I think that's largely because, not to keep blowing smoke and up your rear, but largely because of what you did in the book. So the book went global and it was right in 2019 in the pandemic hit. And I think most people saw their own mortality at that point. Most people under the age of about 70 didn't even think about dying, but then pandemics like shit, I could die. And I saw the book take off, you launched it. But yeah, since then, a lot of people have jumped on the bandwagon and now the longevity is, I hear this everywhere I go. - It's everything. It's everywhere. People are constantly talking about different modalities. How often do you cold plunge? Are you a sauna? What about the red light? What do you think? Is this legit? Is that legit? Everybody's optimizing everything constantly all the time. But the reason why it's caught on is 'cause if you do follow some of the protocols, you will feel better. And so that's the ultimate goal. Like longevity is wonderful, but feeling better in the moment currently. Like living your life should be primary. - Longevity, I think, is if you're optimizing your life, and you feel better, you will live longer. It's like this, it's all part of it. - It would follow the longevity principles and the ideas behind it. You certainly will live better right now. - You will, and it's not even that hard. There are basic things, five basic things you can do or avoid, and you can live another 15 years. It's really not that hard. And that's what I'm excited about telling millions of people today is, and maybe we can go over the kind of things that people can do easily to live longer. - Well, I definitely want to do that, but I also want to talk about like what is the current state of science as applied to longevity treatments? 'Cause I know that there's some pretty groundbreaking stuff that's in the pipeline right now. - Yeah, so since 2019, a lot of what we talked about has come true, which is the amazing thing. We were speculating in 2019 that we could potentially reverse aging, and that was a sin to say that as a scientist publicly in those days. I put it in the book, and it's actually come true since then. Certainly for the lab, for mice, monkeys. And now we have a human clinical trial, the first potential human age reversal technologies in people right now. - Listen, it completely seems logical. The idea that at one point in time would have been heresy in science to discuss it. So that seems crazy. Like if people get old, we understand the mechanism. Why couldn't we reverse it? - Well, I think for a long time, we had to accept it in the way that cancer used to be accepted 200 years ago, probably, that it was nothing you could do about it. And then my colleagues and I found that aging has a root cause that's the same in pretty much every cell in the body and that we could control that, and that there were genes that not only slowed it down, but in 2020, we had a big publication that showed we could actually safely for the first time reverse that process like reinstalling software in the cell to make it work again. - And so what is that using CRISPR? Like what are you using, too? - Well, we deliver genes into the body like CRISPR. I have a little, little prop here I brought in my pocket here. This is a representation of how we deliver the age reversal genes. It's a virus-like capsule that we make in the lab. And this is what's going into the patients right now, into their eyes initially, and the eyes a good place to start. - How do you pick the people to get on these tests? - They volunteer. I was really fortunate to see the first patient get dose earlier this year. And that person bravely volunteered to be the first person to get trillions of these injected into his eye to see if he could cure his glaucoma loss of vision. - And a bit of you have glaucoma, you're probably like, listen, what's the worst that can happen? - Well, exactly, he pretty much was totally blind in one eye, and so there's really nothing that he has to lose. There's a risk that something might go wrong, but not really, he, the good news is, and I can report to everybody around the world that nothing's gone wrong so far. Everything's proceeding according to plan. And we're at his turning point, potentially, in human history if it works. - So, I interrupt you, but explain this little virus- - Sure, and for those of you listening, I've got a little rubber ball with spikes on it. It looks a bit like COVID, but don't be scared of it. It's not a pathogenic virus. It's actually a domesticated version of a virus, and this little plastic ball has little adapters. These red balls on the surface of the big ball target it to the cells in the back of the eye, and you can change the balls to target different tissues. We could change that outside little spike and target it to the liver, which we've done, and cured mice of their fatty liver disease as well. But this one's for the eye. And within that big ball is a protein capsule, and inside the protein capsule is our DNA special delivery, which we call OSK, or ER100. ER100 is epigenetic reprogramming 100, the drug, that we know when we put it into human cells, it makes them younger, and then they work like they're young again. This sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. You know what I mean? Like the scientist is on a talk show, and the scientist is explaining it, and everyone's at home, like with their coffee, like, wow. And the scientist, this is wonderful. We're gonna get younger again. And the scientist is, too, 28 days later, garbage in the streets, cars on fire, the guy's waking up from a coma, doesn't know what happened, goes outside, these optimized humans are eating each other. I admit, I admit, it is science fiction. And I even have to pinch myself that it's actually happening. But we've done a lot of safety studies, and this trial is FDA approved, because they've looked at all the data. Well, God knows they never fuck anything up. Figured you might say that, too. Perfect. Yeah. Well, it's in the eye, so that's why we start with the eye. It's enclosed, it's not gonna spread. Nobody's gonna grow another eye. And so these trillions of cells that you're putting into the eyes,
- The little capsule, the virus like that. - Twillions, I shouldn't call them cells. Twillions of capsules that you're putting into the eye. What are they doing for glaucoma? - Well, what they're doing is there are three genes in this DNA package, and I call them OSK. OSK are three special genes that we found, safely reprogrammed cells and re-boot the backup copy of youth, which we now believe exists in our body. That's a big deal, that there's a backup copy of youth. Even an old person, I don't see an old person anymore on the street. I just see a person that needs to be rebooted. These OSK genes. - You just see, wait a minute, hold on. (laughing) When you see old people, you don't see old people you think. You just say, oh, that poor person needs to be rebooted. - Yeah. - You're doing the perfect job for you. Like, your personality is perfectly suited for your occupation. If that's how you actually look at people. - Well, I do. And the reason is that we all have this backup copy that the DNA, the instructions to be young that made us into who we are as kids is still in our bodies. Almost largely intact. You just need to read it again. And that's why, re-installing software, or I used to use the analogy of a CD. Kids these days probably don't know what a CD is. It's a little plastic circle like a record that we used to put 20 songs on. It was awesome at the time. - I think most people know. - I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It's a bit of a silly joke. - Maybe a 10-year-old does that. - When I teach kids at Harvard, most of them have never held a CD. - In that wild. - Yeah. Though they're not coming back, but albums definitely. So think of it like an album that you scratch. And the scratches are like aging. And we are getting rid of the scratches with these three genes OSK. So let me tell you how these three genes work. We found. There was a person whose name is well known in science circles called Shinya Yamanaka from Japan obviously. And he discovered that there was a set of four genes that could reliably make adult cells like skin cells into stem cells. And he deservedly won the Nobel Prize for that in 2006. But that wouldn't be useful here. If I turned you into a bunch of stem cells, you'd probably die within a few minutes. So we don't want to do that. And cancer is also a potential. So it took us about, well, from 2019 it took us a while to figure out that if we leave out one of the Yamanaka genes and just use three OSK, leave out the other one called M, we'd get safe age reversal about 75, 80% back to youth, but no further. We don't go back to zero, which is what Yamanaka did. And instead of cells losing their identity, which is what a stem cell has no identity, we regain identity. So it's actually, I could draw graphs, but it doesn't really help listeners. But basically, old age is losing identity of your cells. So they don't work. They forget how to work. That's what we think old ages in my lab. And stem cells have no identity. It was like a very early embryo. In between, our cells have a lot of identity. They function beautifully in our 20s, we're at peak. And what we've done is we've figured out how to go back towards youth, get these cells to work like they did again, get the backup copy. Somewhere it exists, we're looking for it. And now cells actually behave like they did when we were 20. And if it works, we're going to have glaucoma patients seeing for the first time. And that's the beginning of a whole cascade of drugs that I want to develop for diseases of aging and eventually whole body rejuvenation. So the initial experiments are on glaucoma because it's a contained thing. The eyeball is a contained thing. And you could do it that way. - Yeah, my student, Juan Chenglou, who was doing this in 2017, I said, let's do the liver, let's rejuvenate the liver. And he said, no, the eye is a good idea. And he was right. So that's exactly why we chose that first. - But you think about how many people have vision problems? - It's 40 million just in the US for glaucoma. Macular degeneration is even more. And in the lab, we can cure that as well in the mice. - Now macular degeneration and glaucoma, these are diseases of aging, right? You would say, or glaucoma's a disease. - Oh yeah. - What about people that have had eyeball injuries? And things like, is there a backup copy of the eyeball where you could sort of reformat the eyeball structure? - You should come work in my lab, at least come visit. - Oh, love to visit. - And the reason I say that is that's the exact question that we're asking. We showed that even if you injure, say a nerve, whether it's peripheral in your arm or in your brain, or in the eye, like the optic nerve, we can regrow those back to where they were. And actually in 2020, on the cover of Nature Magazine, there was the picture of an eye. And in the paper, you could see the nerves re-growing back. And so we think that injury is also treatable. Actually, a group in China just took our technology. They saw SK stuff, put it into mice that had bad joints, and it re-grued their muscle and their bone back to normal. - Whoa. - And so we're also looking at treating injury, back injury joints. What's your arthritis? - That would be phenomenal. Because there's so many people that are suffering from arthritis and so many, I know so many people with injuries, like martial arts injuries, I have one, my left knee is fucked up, it's annoying. I keep it together, I've got it like maintain it, but it's always an issue, I have to stay on it. - And as long as you can do, stem cells a little bit of relief. - Stem cells give you relief, but not, when once you're dealing with cartilage damage and you're dealing with, I had a meniscus surgery where they took out a piece of my meniscus, and I had my ACL reconstructed on that knee as well. It's just an issue, but it works pretty good for what it should be. Like if we were living in the 1930s, I'd be a cripple. - Hang in there, because we're gonna be in a world where we can rebuild parts of the body, including joints. - The problem with that is how is that applied to athletics? We're gonna have fucking super soldiers in every sport. There's gonna be people in every sport that could do what Michael Jordan did, like leap from halfway across the basketball court and dunk. - That's probably coming, and there may be DNA tests to see if you've got these OSK genes inserted, and we're working on a drink and a pill as well for. - A drink and a pill? - Yeah, we're now eight years ahead of what the public realizes. - Really? - In my lab at Harvard, yeah. - A drink and a pill, and what's a drink and a pill gonna do? - Well, right now it's in mice, so we still go ways to go, but when we give the drink to mice, they get rejuvenated. - You just give it to 80-year-olds. If you're on the way out, let's fucking go. - This is what the FDA is for, they forbid that. - Yeah, that's why we need to get rid of them. Get rid of the FDA, and just give it to all people. - If I was an old guy, and I was like, hanging in there, and I'm walking around with a, and you're like, look, this drink and a pill might kill you, or you might be like a 30-year-old again, about like, "Let's fucking go." - Well, I get emails, a lot. I've had to take my emails off public access, 'cause there's a lot of people that want this. - Oh, I'm sure. - There was one guy that wouldn't leave the building until he saw me, so it's getting to that point. - Yeah, there's a little bit of that, right? - People get a little selfish, like it's all about them. - Yeah, and actually the US government locked an investment from a foreign country into one of my companies, 'cause they were afraid of super soldiers. - What country? - Well, they're afraid of technology getting out, which country? - Could I guess? - That's true. - China. - It wasn't. - Was it? - No, no. - Russia? - It was somewhere in between here and China. - Oh, that's pretty vague. It's a little sensitive, but yeah, the US government does have the ability to block a foreign investment, and they did in this case, 160 million bucks they blocked. - Wow. - That was a painful episode. - So they were worried that people were gonna actually engineer super soldiers. - This episode is brought to you by Superpower. Your doctor spends eight minutes with you, and your insurance company decides what blood work you're allowed to get. That's not healthcare. It's a broken system. With Superpower, you have control over your health. For $199, you get all the tools you need to understand your body. It starts with one blood test measuring over 100 biomarkers. Then they give you detailed insights and a personalized plan built around you, your labs, health history, genetics, wearable data, and goals. Go to superpower.com/rogan and take control of your health. - Yeah, that is to say. - Do you know about-- - Give an advantage to Russian experiments that they did during World War II, were they were trying to come up with a chimpanzee human hybrid? Tell us. - Yes, so it's very difficult, obviously, to get information out of the former Soviet Union as to what their top secret programs were, but there seems to be an indication that there was actual real research to try to, you know, because obviously Russia lost an incredible amount of people in World War II. I mean, tens of millions of soldiers died in World War II from Russia. And I think they said, wouldn't it be great if it wasn't people? And so they were doing experiments with hybridization. And they were trying to combine human beings and chimpanzees to create a, you know, a stable of super soldiers that were like
Some hybrid hominin. Yeah, there's a scientist in New York who does this for a living What he does that? Well, he's creating them, but he I've seen I was on stage with him He made a hybrid embryos They didn't reach to the thing is if that guy's doing that and he's ethical and he lives in America We have rules and regulations in the FDA and all that good stuff What the fuck is going on in other countries where they don't have that right right? Well, there's genetic engineering of humans already and certainly selection. Yeah, even even parents today in the US can If they have the money they can select well people select even based on people select for hotness They select for tallness. They select for intelligence. It's like Gatica. Yes, it's a great movie if you haven't seen it It is a great movie. Yeah, so see if you could find that Russian hybridization program It's it never happened. I don't think and I don't think they did it, but there's a There's actually a guy who was also involved in a gigantic fertility scam Not not a scam first set per se, but he was a doctor that was supposed to be doing fertility treatments with women Like you know like if you went with your wife to a doctor and said hey, we're having a hard time getting pregnant and David I just need some of your sperm and I'll take your wife's egg. We'll make you a nice baby and he was using his sperm on everybody On everybody everybody gets mine one of my kids partners is from someone in the US who had hundreds of babies do There is a ton of those guys as I was doing research for this I started looking up all these stories and I said wait This is a different story the same thing. There's been a ton of these doctors from fertility clinics that use their own sperm Just insane, but there's one doctor that did that also claimed that he impregnated an orangutan Yeah, like how how'd you do that? Soviet doctor Joseph Stalin dictator. Oh Obviously wanted to rebuild the red army in the mid 1920s with plan of the ape-style troops by crossing humans with ape Stalin is said to have told even off I want a new Invincible human being insensitive to pain resistant and indifferent about the quality of the food they ate Which is crazy the only legitimate source of the claim comes from a 2002 paper in the academic journal Science in context by the Russian historian of science career Rassianov Rassianov Study follows the ill-fated attempt by the Russian psychologist or physiologist rather Oh, that that word Ilia even off to crossbreed humans with Anthropoid apes his research offers an important warning about the ethical abuses Did you do it? What happened? The alleged quote from Stalin is not found in the paper and there's no evidence of Stalin ever ever made such a statement Yeah, I don't know However, why the Soviets would find such a human Chimp hybridization program in the first place and what could be learned from this sorid tale of ethical misconduct is an important topic and fast Any in its own right it's a that's an interesting way of phrasing it like a sorid tale of ethical misconduct like however If you are going to go to war, would you rather have like human-made orks fight for us or you know Johnny Robinson who grew up down the street who's a nice kid right who you know just really wanted money for college And so he signed up for military service and you're gonna fly him over to fight this war that maybe he doesn't need to die in when you can have these Monsters that you made a lab fight yep, and and the average ape can kill a human with one punch easy So there's much stronger than we realize what I'm talking about. Let's go Well, we're we're in the process of building You know, anthropoid robots that I think will be recruited to the army Yeah, that's gonna be weird like our robots beat your robots. So give us your oil Well, how's it gonna work? And if we all have one at home what stops the government recruiting them all right? And also in what's the real problem is gonna be we we both know the real problem is gonna be Sex robots Is the problem is gonna be a problem for people that don't have a sex robot leave home It's gonna be problem of people that want a regular person and there's none available because everybody's got a sex robot Yeah, that well comes with a few strings attached it also comes with the same problems that AI comes with right where AI says David You're amazing everything you do is wonderful. You should be so proud of yourself. I just love that no real We would all love that, but that's not healthy right so big. This is one of the reason This is what the reason is why relate actual real relationships between human beings are good It's because you do things that are annoying you don't realize they're annoying and then your wife or your husband or whatever it is tells you Hey, you're fucking annoying like and you like I'm sorry. I'll I'll fix that. I didn't mean to I didn't that's not what I was trying to do I was in my own head. I was thinking myself. You're right. I was selfish. You get better You it's like how people grow like relationships are important to help people grow not with AI like you can fart in my face any day David, I don't mind at all your thoughts are amazing. I know the problem is they're gonna be way smarter than us, too Right, I don't know how people are gonna say go stack the dishwasher to one of these robots You're the smarter than all humans combine. Yeah, but they're not gonna mind stacking that they're smart enough to Put out a hell and they're gonna beat us up. They don't care. They're not going to mind doing like menial tasks like but while they're you're doing it, you know you can go explain to me Quantum entanglement Well, I wanted to fill in up the dishwasher. They can go if you one day well if you have a particle and the particles in Yeah, I just invented a cure for Egypt right well look at what it's done with mathematics like just over the last Couple weeks. They've solved more than 50 Program or a 50 mathematical equations that they have struggled for a decade upon decade to try to solve and AI is like oh, I got it Yeah, well biology is a little bit more complicated, but already AI is doing a lot of the science that we used to do in my lab In fact, what we just recently did it in a couple of months would have taken about 160 years to complete What and it's only getting faster eventually someone can make it run on their foot again Two months instead of 160 years. Well, what exactly was it that you had to do also this drink and the pill that we're looking for That's not easy, right? So we have some candidate molecules. We have a cocktail that works, but we want to see you taking this stuff Not yet You're thinking about it. Yeah, I know and could stop you. I might well that is true That is true, but it'd be a bad look if I died So maybe I'm not gonna die. I don't think so. We've done a lot of safety tests and it looks really safe But I'm not gonna publicly do anything against the law of course it'd be in private of course, of course Not publicly. No, but we I'm at a stage where I have to be a good boy because I've got the world watching yes a lot Is it steak? Yes, and a lot of this if this trial is any issues? It's not good. We got to dot your eyes and cross your teeth and follow every I understand that yeah But please explain again, because I'm being rude. I interrupt to do it when you're telling me that in two months It did something that would have required 160 years of work like what do you exactly mean by that? Yeah, and and now we it would probably be impossible in Thousands of years because what we do is we're looking for molecules a single molecule that can replace this cocktail So you need a molecule to do three or four activities in the cell finding one activity is what pharmaceutical companies do it takes You know hundreds of millions if not billions to make a drug. We know that right my little lab of 20 people and students young kids are trying to make one drug do three or four different things That's beyond the reach of pharmaceutical Experience at least five years ago. So what we do is we've teamed up with a group at St. Jude's Hospital where they can take It was 10 billion now. It's a trillion Theoretical and also drug known drugs some with my hands. I'm showing a big funnel and These really did it podcast you really help it out the audio people and everything. I love I relaunched my podcast that that's why that's why yeah lifespan David Sinclair Shameless plug so that so this funnel is full of a trillion molecules and we have to come down to one how do we do that? Well, we don't look for a trillion molecules at the bench that would take to 160 or Thousands of years with the case of a trillion molecules even with robots even with a lot of graduate students So we do it inside the computer We just use a lot of compute and we dock each of these molecules Against the enzymes that we now know how they work thanks to Google deep minds solve the problem of how to all our proteins look 20,000 of them and There's a lot of compute, but out the other end a couple months later we have two I don't have 200 fingers, but 200 think 200 molecules that we can now test in the lab Within you know a few weeks actually next week. We're testing these 200 against Human cells and we've also got AI helping us to tell us if the human cells go from 92 years old back to 20 We can tell that just by looking at them thanks to the AI. Is there a way to stop them from turning you into a baby? Because that's what I would worry about. Yes. Yes. I don't want to be a baby again Right some people already there I like to cut it off at like I was pretty good at 25 You know, that's I'm gonna get attacked for saying this, but that is what we do in the lab. We take 92-year-old cells and they stop at 20 something. Why would you get attacked for that?
Because on the internet people take a clip and they say, "Sinclair says we can all go back to being 20 again." You suffer from this too, right? They take a clip and it's out of context. And I'm just saying, cells from humans, skin cells, we take them back to 25, all my students can do this. In fact, if you had these little genes, OSK, in your garage, you could do this experiment. It's not hard at all to reverse aging. The question is, how do you safely make it a drug? And that's been the hard part over the last 10 years. So, how would it be able to regulate this reduction or reversal of aging and stop it at 20-something years old? Well, that's what took so long. It wasn't obvious that these three Yamanaka genes called OSK were the right cocktail. My student, who I mentioned, won Chang. He was struggling. He was trying a lot of different genes. Most of them from embryos, because we know embryos have to do a reset in the first week of life. Otherwise, they stay the age of the parents. And he found that leaving out one of the Yamanaka genes was the trick. And now that we know it's super easy, but in those days, he was ready to quit. How did he find that out? Well, he tried lots of different combinations, hundreds in human cells and you look at the cells to see if they get younger, and then we can measure them like a lead that they get younger. Are you measuring them by the length of their telomeres? Yeah, partly, but actually a better measure is the chemicals that are added and subtracted off DNA itself called metals. And it's just a carbon molecule with three hydrogens, very simple molecule. But what cells do is they use these metals to tag genes to be switched off. So when we're growing as an embryo, the cells that want to become neurons will shut off all these other unwanted genes, like liver genes and skin genes. And the ones that don't get this methylchemical stay on for our life, and that's how nerve cells develop and stay healthy. But what happens during aging, a friend of mine, Steve Horovath discovered that you can use this as a clock, these chemicals they change over time. And we found that that happens largely due to DNA damage going in the sun, these kind of things, we could use this to rapidly age a mouse, which we published in 2023. Oh, so like maybe like some nefarious state actor, like some Russian spy could like inject something in your coffee and you would turn 99 overnight? We know how to do that. Whoa. That's the dark side of this. You could spike your husband's drink, fuck that dude and turn him into an old man. Yeah. And you suffer. Yeah, someone tweeted the other day, if a 92-year-old could be 25 again, would you have sex with them? And mine as well as yours. Yeah. Imagine how much they know. But would they have sex with you? Right. That's a question. That's a question. Yeah. They'd be looking for another 20-year-old. Right. So anyway, how do we do it? We can measure those chemicals and determine how old a cell is or a human. I could take your skin cells from your mouth or your blood and tell you how old people would be so disturbed by like old rich guys dating young women. If that was the case, you know, tell if they looked young because people get very mad at that. Do you ever notice? Yeah. Yeah. You see some real old decrepit dude with a hot young wife and people like, God damn it, they get really mad. Right. Right. Right. Now the best way to do that is to have a big bank account. But eventually you'll like some people. Right. But people still get grossed out. I wonder if they would get grossed out if you look 20. They'd be like, he's praying, he has so much more years of knowledge and information. I don't fear. I don't fear. He looks 20. That's a 99-year-old man. That day will come. That day will come where you will not be able to tell how old somebody is by looking at them. You'll have to do a test for these genes. Wow. I wonder if people still lie about the rich if that's the case. I wonder if no one will care. Like, you would probably lie the other way. Like, I'm 80. I know. Like, it's right. Tom's about to be there. What is 80? That's right. Well, when we live for hundreds of years, people will do that. They'll be proud of their age. Do you know anything about ancient civilizations and some of the weirdness of the records of like ancient Sumer? Well, only really what I've learned from listening to you. Well, there's what's really weird is the ancient King's lists because so, okay. The theory among these alternative archaeologists types is that there was a very advanced civilization that existed on Earth tens of thousands of years ago, and we were probably wiped out by common impact. And what we have today is a rebuild of civilization. There's not a linear progression from caveman to us, and that at one point in time we had reached Great Heights, this explains the pyramids, this explains Machu Picchu, Soxay-Wamon, some megalithic structures don't make any sense. These, the Trilathon stones in Balbek, Lebanon, that are hundreds and hundreds of tons that are massive, that are, you know, nine meters off the ground. No one understands exactly how they place them. When you look at the Sumerian King's list, it gets very weird because there's kings that reign for thousands of years, and then you have the flood, and then after the flood, the age of these people drops pretty dramatically, and the reigns are, after a few hundred years, become normal, become like a normal person, like 50 years, 30 years, like that. But thousands of years before, and then people are looking at it like, okay, is this just myth, is this poor record keeping, do they have just these, you know, hyperbolic, elevated stories about these kings, they were so amazing, they reign for 30,000 years, or have they achieved not just in building, because in building we know they had achieved incredibly complex structure, like the pyramid, for instance, like they had insane engineering, somehow or another, the ability to move these 500 tonne stones from hundreds of miles away, like how do they do this, we don't really know, but we know that they did it. Did they also have the kind of technology that you're talking about right now? Because if it's possible today, and if that is, I mean, it makes it very difficult because it goes against what you would call, like, the modern narrative that they're teaching in universities in terms of the timeline of human history. But if that changes, and we have undeniable evidence, well, it looks like these people were far more advanced than we thought, and there probably was some sort of a reset of civilization. What else had they accomplished, and had they gotten involved in genetic engineering? Had they figured out a way to extend lifespan? And if they did, imagine all the work that you've accomplished in your 57 now, about 50 some, you look great, by the way, you really do, it's your hair, it's so dark, it's incredible. People speculate it's all fake, but it's actually, it's not, but anyway, you're at the heavy butt they too, it's come out. Thank you very much, yeah. Yeah, I don't look as good as you though, yes you do, physically you're way better than me. That's different though, my face looks older, you look very young for your age, but why? Why? Because I've spent all my time in a lab, and I haven't gone outdoors for a while. I'm sure that helps. But, my point is, imagine if you had 500 years to do research, not just 57 years, imagine if you could continue learning and growing, and they did develop some sort of a life extension technology where you could not just be older, but be healthier than you've ever been before, and live for a thousand years, you would get so much done. I mean, the exponential increase in technological innovation that we'd have in this society would be absolutely mind blowing. Exactly, exactly, exactly. This is a really important point with these alternative history people think, that might be what had taken place tens of thousands of years ago. Yeah, well, I'm a Harvard scientist, so I'm not going to say anything that isn't. Of course, that's for me, yes, that's where I live, that's why I shut up, but you did make some really important points. Because that ancient civilizations have always been way more advanced than we think, dinosaurs are a lot more real than we make them look. We always get things wrong looking back in time, and looking forward in time. But the other thing that you say, which is really important, is that if we do have extension of human lifespan like the Bible and these civilizations suggest, then how will you think about your life? If being a hundred is, you know, you're still in your prime, you do things very differently. Who would you marry? What career would you think about? You might have multiple lifetimes, multiple marriages, multiple families, and that will happen. It's not really a question of if anymore. It's like asking the right brothers, will we fly? Yeah, we built the glider. We're going to fly around. Question is, will we build a concord? Will we go to space? And I think that will happen. Yeah. No, I think so too. I think, well, certainly one thing that we know is that there's a giant difference between people who are 57 years old today versus 57 years old in the 1930s. It's just a giant difference. Giant difference in your physical ability, your health. We'd be old men. Yeah, we would be old men. And what, I mean, when I was a child, I thought of people, I'm almost 59, I'll be 59 a week. I used to think of a 59 year old as being basically dead. Like you're barely getting around, you know, you're probably tired all the time. [BLANK_AUDIO]
to retire. - Yeah, looking to retire. - You got no energy. I'm filled with energy. I'm constantly doing, how old is he? 60. - That's what it says. - Oh no. - I don't know if that's accurate. - I bet that's accurate. They had no fucking vitamins. Nobody knew what the proper nutrients you should take where nobody knew what was really important in terms of resistance training and sleep and red light therapy and all that jazz. - And they were doing all the bad stuff, like heavy smoking drinking, not sleeping a lot. - Yep, not sleeping a lot. And pesticides and all kinds of terrible shit. - 60 year old, what? - That guy's 60? - It's crazy. - No way. - No way. - Come on. Shut up. That guy's fucking 28 years old. - There's no way. That guy's 60? Is that real? - I doubt it. - I doubt it. How about that guy that looks 50 and he says, everyone thinks I'm 18, like, yeah, sure. - What's up? - There's a guy on Instagram, which I occasionally visit. And he obviously looks old. Like he looks a poor person. - Oh, he's a crazy person. - And he says, people think I look 18. It's crazy. - Well, there's a lot of crazy people out there. - Yeah. - Well, that's body just smart for you, you know? - It must be. - Bodybuilders, they think they're tiny. - A lot of people are crazy. - Yeah. - A lot of people have a distorted perception of what they look like. - Yeah. The plastic surgery industry is massive. It's just growing and growing. You can see it on the street, L.A., especially. But imagine a world where you don't need it. If I'm successful, you can take a pill, your doctor could get it, or eventually it's a cream on your face, and you literally get younger. We do this in mice already. The mice get younger. Is it gonna work in humans? I think it's just a matter of time. - So in the mice experiments, what have you achieved? - Well, a lot. I can reveal here some of it for the first time. We, this pill that we give them to drink, actually, 'cause they can't chew. The mice within four weeks, with this cocktail, it has three components, which are top secret. My lab is sworn to secrecy. They, after four weeks, we give it to them three days a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, weekends off. Within those four weeks, they get better, physically, mentally. They, so we put them through tests, if it's just in a couple of days. Oh no, three days a week for a month. - Oh, okay. - You found this guy's Instagram. - This is the guy. - He went viral last year. - He's been 59 years old. - What? - Oh, fucking, it seems so not real. - He looks like he's 30 years old. - He looks like he's maybe 30, exactly. - He might have just amazing genetics. Well, look at Yoel Romero. Well, there are people that are freaks. - He's from Singapore. - Yeah. - Wow. - Twando, Kwando 10. - And he's 60 years old. - Yeah, he's been gone. - Without facelifts. - Yeah, I don't know. - He certainly doesn't look like he's had a facelift. - Yeah, right. - His skin is fucking incredible. - Yeah. - But he's probably never been in the sun, except for this full AI account that's trolling everyone. I don't know. - So that's possible, too. Like, look at that picture right there. Like, that looks a little AI-ish. Go back to that one again. Keep your pants on, Jamie. - That looks real actual. - That looks very AI, doesn't it? - I'm just, it could be. - It is all. - It is 59th birthday. His whole thing is that he's young. - 38, looks half as age. - Wow. - I mean. - This will be normal. - Yeah, it's just 2024. It's not, this has been going on for a while. - Okay, so this is pre-AI. - Yeah, if it's fake, then he would have been called out. Now, I feel like. - Right. So he might just be a genetic freak. - It could be, yep. - Which is interesting, right? Like, do you guys study the different, like, you know, unfortunately, certain people that have like, like pale people, for instance, with thin skin, they age hardcore. - And there are those kids that get old in their teens. - Right. - We study that as well. - Yeah. - We're reversing that, too. But yeah, we do study the genetics of aging. - That's the real application for it, where people are gonna be excited about it. People that have that. What is it, perjury? - Perjury, exactly. - Yeah. - And so we have mice that have this same gene mutation and they get old really quickly. And we're giving them the drink right now. - And so in the drink, you give it to them how often and for a month? - It's once a day, every other day, three days a week, for a month. And yeah, in normal old mice, we see them fitter, stronger, better memory, they run around the cage. - In just a month. - It's amazing. We only did a month because it was Christmas holiday season. We didn't want to go for longer. But it worked in four weeks, I'm shocked. Even these genes require six to eight weeks to work for recovery of vision. - And so this is work on a different pathway? - Well, here's the cool thing. We think it's working through the same mechanism, the reboot, the re-installation of software, the drink because there are genes called tets. There are three of them in the body. And they do something, spother, TET, capital TET, there's one, two, three. And these are genes that make enzymes that remove these metals off the DNA. So they control the clock. And if we get rid of those genes, our system doesn't work. We cannot restore vision and our pill doesn't work without removing and altering those chemicals. So in other words, it's not just because the chemicals make the cell healthier. It's actually resetting this clock on the DNA. - Whoa. - And that was the big deal. I said why when my student told me, and that's why I think it got the cover of Nature Magazine, which is we're actually looking at the clock of life. And we've realized that this clock that goes around, this biological clock, isn't just a clock. When you move the hands of the clock, time goes backwards for the body. Meaning the clock is aging, and aging is the clock. - Wow. What is it, you don't really know in terms of humans, but is there any indication that improves cognitive function in mice? - Yes. I can say without a doubt that other labs and ours have shown that when you reverse the age of the brain in a mouse, it gets better at learning. And we even have some hints, and we're gonna publish this, that lost memories come back. - Whoa. - So Alzheimer's patients, I believe, still have memories. They just cannot access them. And that one day, we can reverse Alzheimer's disease by making the brain young. And that, using that approach, making the whole body young, we can cure diseases that are currently incurable. - Holy shit. Well, young people don't get Alzheimer's, why? 'Cause the body can tackle the problem. The young body can heal itself. So my approach is make the body young. It'll heal itself in every way. - Well, do you have children? - Three. - Yeah, one of the things that's just phenomenal is watching them heal. I'm like, it is so wild, but also you envy them so much, 'cause they get cut. And it's like two days later, like, where's your cut? It's fucking gone, like, that's crazy. I mean, my daughter had a cut, she fell and knocked her head and she had this, like, dark spot on her head, like, where she got injured. And we're like, four or five days, it was gone. And I was like, that fucking thing would be with me for four months. - Yeah. And the good thing is if we rub our cocktail on the skin of the mice, they heal like the young again. - Oh, so that would be like a great application for ladies who want the beauty treatment on the face, right? 'Cause it would just-- - That's where we're headed. - Yeah, we're just-- - Yeah, and we're working on hair. We can grow human hair on mice now. - For real? - That took a few years. And now we can check if we can regrow hair and make it dark again. - You can grow human hair on mice. - Yeah, I'm not allowed to-- Actually, I did post it on Instagram and the university said, get that down. But it exists. We grow it from stem cells, from human stem cells. We make little balls of hair, takes a few months. We open up the ball to make a flat piece of skin, human skin, and we put that in the back of a mouse that can accept human skin. And then you get black tufts of hair from humans in a mouse. - Can you get any kind of hair? Like, could I get an afro? I just want to get one of the piss people off. - Oh, we can get an afro, like a calling cappernac type, just a big, crazy one. - Yeah, we can grow hair. - We can grow hair. - We can do that. We're on a few laps that can grow this hair. So I thought about doing that for a company, but I think hair transplants would just be easier. - Oh, right. So you'd grow hair and a lab and then transplant those hairs? - We can do that. Yeah. - Well, that's the thing, 'cause I got a hair transplant, but the way I describe it is like you're taking people that are really healthy and moving them into a town where everyone's dying. 'Cause like you're taking hair from back here where it's gonna stay and you put it up here where it's all falling out. - I didn't thrive. - What's that? - It doesn't thrive if you move it. - Oh, it thrives, but everybody else dies. - Oh, shit. - And you know, you can only take so much from the back of your head and move it to the top of your head. That's why a lot of guys with hair transplants look goofy 'cause you have like this strong hairline in the front and it goes back like that and then everything else looks like chaos. - Oh, that sucks. You know what I take from my hair? - What do you take? - Among other things. Viagra? - Viagra. - Yeah, actually, I shouldn't say the brand name. - That's why I take it from my hair. - That's what I tell everybody. That is true. It's low dose, seven milligrams a day, to Delafil. And it's good for a lot of things. A lot of things. - For endurance. - Yeah, and because I know athletes who take it for endurance, they probably take it to fuck too. Let's not kid ourselves. - Well, it's a nice benefit. (laughing) When a paper just came out about its role in preventing cancer, I tweeted what's not to love and people love that.
tweet, but the point is actually last week they found that these drugs in mice and seemingly in people who take these drugs are actually resistant to cancer, certain types of cancer is like head and neck cancer. So these are just turning out to be really important. Because it turns blood flow? Well, two reasons that are not related to blood flow, but they're related to what's called nitric oxide signaling, which is what helps dilate blood vessels in all your body including your penis. The other two mechanisms, one showed that the Dahlophil is good for exposing the tumour to the immune system. There are certain cells called MDSCs that protect the tumour from getting attacked and the drug stops that. So now the tumours shrink in mice and seemingly in people in tumours. And then the second mechanism is really interesting. It seems to, this was Sedanophil, so this is now the agra, found that a lot of cancers thrive on cholesterol and this blocks the ability of cancer cells to use cholesterol. I thought they had thrived on glucose. That too. Exactly. So you want to be in ketosis if you've got a tumour in general, so fasting is good. But now it looks like these ED drugs might be good for it as well. Fascinating. It wasn't, I think, viagra was an accident, wasn't it a blood pressure medication? It's a good story. It was for angina, right? It was for your heart, but the story goes that women, especially and the men didn't want to give up the drugs that they had left over. It was amazing. I think it was 75% had a positive reaction for erections and without it, 22. So it's very clear that it was working. Interesting. How does it help hair? Well, we don't know for sure, but there's a lot of evidence that part of the reason hair dies out and stops growing is a lack of blood flow and the menoxidol that people put on their hair helps with that. Right. Interesting. And then DHT inhibitors. Exactly. Also help. You test a ride, people can take hourly. He didn't understand that that was the, he was like, what is wrong with me and he was getting suicidal. And then he got off of it and just went away and he's like, oh my god, I can't believe that. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. You've probably heard about Better Help before, but maybe you haven't heard from those who have actually used Better Help. That feedback can tell you everything you need to know, go to BetterHelp.com/reviews and check out the feedback from hundreds of people saying how much they love this service. It's easy to see why. To get started, all you have to do is answer a few questions. You'll get matched up with a therapist based on your needs and if it's not the right fit, you can switch therapists at any time. Either of you's, see what stands out and see if BetterHelp is right for you. Visit BetterHelp.com/jre. That's BetterHELP.com/jre. Yeah. Well, I'm taking it for a number of reasons, including my hair and my prostate, see if I can keep it from growing, but I fortunately haven't had that side effect. But everything depends, right? Yeah. Depending on the person, yeah, it's important when either of us says that drugs good, that drugs bad. Right. People realize that you have to test it and with doctor supervision. Yeah, that was where I was going to get to, was like because different medications have different reactions or different people's reactions to medications, they vary quite wildly. So like before you make this public, like how do you determine whether or not this is going to be safe for a wide variety of people to reverse aging? Oh, my drug, our drug that we're making. Well, we will test it on a lot of people before it goes out into the wide world. And you've started testing it on people so far? Yeah, there are people right now who have this, these genes in their eye. And how's it going? I'm not allowed to say, but -- Can you wink twice if it's great? I would say that everything's on target. Okay. That's good to hear. And nothing bad to report. Nothing bad to report. Yeah, I think those might be the words I'm allowed to say. And is that the only clinical trials you've used with any of these applications for humans? So far, that was the first glaucoma and also sudden blindness. It's called an ion, which is now twice as more prevalent because of the gelp1 drugs. Really? It's not well known, obviously companies don't want to talk about it. But yes, sudden blindness has doubled seemingly because of these meds. You have to be- Holy shit! Careful. sudden blindness has doubled because of gelp1s. Due to an ion, which is like a stroke in your eye. And then your other eye can go, which is pretty scary. And there's nothing you can do about it. Hopefully, our drug does work for those people. And obviously, correlation does not equal causation, but it seems to be- Yeah, there's a scientist at Harvard, you could look up his work Joe Rizzo. It looks like it's repeatable across the planet. Wow, that's terrible because there's so many people out there that are just telling everyone they should get on gelp1s. Yeah. I've seen that by online people, like online podcasters saying everyone should get on gelp1s. It's a groundbreaking technology. This is amazing. It's going to transform society. We just started taking these. What the fuck are you saying? It's not risk-free. Same with AD drugs. Here goes. Recent study suggests that a potential rare link between gelp1 receptor, agonist medication such as ozempic, wagovii, blah, blah, blah. And a condition called non-arturitic anterior- what's that word? Ischemic. Ischemic. Ischemic optic neuropathy. An eye stroke can cause sudden painless loss of vision in one eye. The absolute risk remains very low. Anyone experience sudden vision changes should seek emergency mental medical evaluation immediately. Well, very low is like-- It's still-- What does that mean? One in 10,000. Yeah. Yeah, that's-- No, total of 10,000. Oh. Total of 10,000 so far for-- How long do you think we're taking this time? I think it's pretty. The drugs were 68.6 times more likely to develop this and eight times more likely to develop diabetic. What is that? We only got the blurb. Oh, my god, then-- Wow. Yeah, man. These things are just-- they're just rolling out. And the people that are super enthusiastic, and also they have some sort of a financial interest in promoting these things, which oftentimes does seem to be the case with a lot of these people. They have either stock in these companies, or some sort of a stake in them. Yeah, it's true. So I will say to counter that, the JLP-1 drugs have probably saved millions of lives already, and they're pretty common. I think it's 10% of people are trying them, and 25% want to. Yeah, I mean, they don't work for everybody. I have a good friend of mine that had a terrible reaction from it, and he was hospitalized. But I know other people where it's completely transformed their life, and they've lost a ton of weight. And particularly people that just, for whatever reason, the food addiction was so incredibly strong that whatever-- their constitution, the way they're designed, the way they're built, the way they've evolved as a human being, they weren't capable of overcoming it. They take the JLP ones, and then they sort of start getting moving, and then they lose all the weight. They start feeling better. They start making a lot of other positive changes. You get that momentum, which I always talk about, which is one of the most important things for transforming your life. Everyone wants to talk about discipline. I think discipline is the primary. That's the main engine. But one of the things that comes along with any kind of an exercise program, or changing your life program, where you start getting positive results, is momentum. And momentum is absolutely huge. Thank you. Because then you start feeling-- That's so important. This is good. So I think JLP ones are fantastic for getting people going. Yes. Everybody should hear this. It's really important. I'll give you my example, it's a classic case. I couldn't fast for more than about a day. I want to do more. I know that three days fasting is good. A week can be even better, but I couldn't do it. I don't have a lot of willpower when it comes to this kind of stuff. I tried a JLP one, receptor eigenist. I gave it, and it was easy. I didn't even feel like I needed to snack at night, which is one of the things that I and many people suffer from. But the fact that I could do it, I went off the drug. I didn't need it, but now I can fast for-- I went for two weeks, a couple of months ago. It's easy now. Now that I know that I can do it, mentally, it's not hard at all. The momentum. Exactly, I know what's possible. Yeah, yeah. That's fascinating. You are you still on a plant-based diet? Mostly. Yeah. What I had just had a conversation with a friend of mine about this. I don't know how much of the information that he was telling me was totally accurate. But what he was saying was that he was told before he did fasting that one of the-- because he's a runner, he said one of the best ways to get into fasting is to get your body into ketosis first. He said--
and what he thinks is that a carnivore-based diet and what he was told was a good way. If you could do that for a few weeks, it mitigates your appetite. Like, one of the things that happens with a lot of these diets that regulate insulin resistance is that when you get used to consuming just fats and protein, you don't have the kind of hunger pangs that you have with carbohydrates. Like, if I go in a bad streak and I'm meeting pizza and pasta and I've done that in the past, I don't really do that much in less of my vacation. In the past though, what I would get hungry, I would get crazy hungry. Like, I've gotta eat now. I don't get that at all anymore because I'm mostly on a carnivore-based diet. Mostly when I eat, you look at the bulk of my diet, it's meat and fermented vegetables. It's meat and kimchi and sauerkraut and stuff along those lines. And when I eat like that, my hunger is very easy to control. And I've gone 24 hours, like it's nothing, not eating it. It's like not a problem at all. But that's the most I've ever fasted as 24 hours. - Okay. Well, see if you can go for three. It's really worth it. You feel really great. Cotosis is one of-- - That's what everybody says. - Yeah, and you go into what's called deep cleansing. It's called chaperone mediated autophagy or CMA. And a friend of mine in New York, Maria, Kurovo studies this. And it cleans out a lot of the old proteins in your body. So, Cotosis doesn't just make you feel good. You're actually renewing your protein in your body and rebuilding it. And so, I do that as an anti-aging thing. - What I find is the biggest benefit is mental acuity. It has a giant impact when I stick to the diet in terms of my ability to form sentences, like recall information, and just be present in podcasts. - Yeah, so in my podcast, what you do is really quite difficult. You make it look easy. So, when I'm doing my podcast and often it's solo, so it's challenging, I forget things. I have to remember hundreds of papers for these things. They're quite hard. Either I'm going to fast. And if I don't remember to fast, I did an experiment. I took some ketones. You can drink these things, right? - Yeah, the one, the little drink I think was-- - Peach on IQ. - Peach on IQ. - Yeah, fantastic stuff. - Yeah, yeah, I use that. - I love that stuff. I take that before I do UFC broadcast a lot of times. - You do, yeah. - I actually took some before. - Because that's great for podcasts as well. One of the more difficult things that I do is the UFC commentary, because it's six hours. It's six hours of talking on air live, yeah. And about fights. And I'm also recalling fights. And I'm also, I'm seeing positions. So I have to remember in my mind how this is finished. Because like in Jiu-Jitsu, there might be, I don't know how many positions there are. There's thousands. And there's moves where I'm like, what is he doing? What is he doing? Oh, oh, that's that. That's the Peruvian next time. I'm looking at his arms. Your brain is, I am exhausted at the end of six hours. And fucking starving. Like after the UFC is over, I can eat so much food. It's, I'm so hungry. - But you take a little drink? - I take a little ketone. - A little ketone IQ. I take Neutropics. I drink this stuff. My friend Derek makes this. His gorilla mind. This is a, a Neutropic. - Oh, I can see that. - So it's a Neutropic cocktail with caffeine in it. This stuff's really good for podcasts. I also take alpha brain. Alpha brain black label is phenomenal for that. There's a bunch of different ones that I take. The gum. Neurogum. Neurogum is excellent for that too. But I just do fucking everything I can to maximize it. - So that's how you do it. All right. - Yes. - Secret is now out. What do you do? It's amazing. And I thought you were on "Madefinale" or something. - No. I've taken that before in the past. But the problem with that stuff is, I think I like it too much and I want to take it all the time. You know, when I used to take that, if I had a gig in San Diego and I drive home after the gig and it was like, you know, one o'clock in the morning when I'm done. And then I'm like, I'll just go home. It's only two and a half hours. And I start making the drive and you just get so tired. But if I take new vigil or provigial before I do that, I would be able to drive. No problem. - Put a book on tape on. What's up? - Can you sleep after that? - Oh yeah. Yeah. It doesn't seem to affect your ability to sleep, which is really interesting. It's not like caffeine. Do you do it? Do you take it at all? - I'm a "Madefinale" for talks when I'm traveling. - Does it help you? - Definitely. - Like in what way? - It gets rid of my jet lag and I can focus. My brain often is either scattered or filled with facts that causes me now to not be able to talk properly. But if I'm on it, which I'm not, I'm on point every time. - For me, the best thing for jet lag is exercise. There's something about rigorous exercise. It doesn't even have to be long. It just has to be where my heart rate gets really elevated, like above 150 beats per minute for 15, 20 minutes. Like I have to really go hard where I'm sweaty and breathing heavy, especially if I can jack it up to like 180, 190, like I'm doing like Tabata Sprints on an air-dined bike. That kind of stuff completely resets me. Hard kettlebell workouts, like I'll do like a hard series where minimal amount of rest in between, so I'm really pushing it. Once I relax, I'm back. It's like, whatever it is, where your body just needs to like shake it up and like get all of it out of your system, it's like, now I feel completely normal. - Yeah. Well, you might remember last time we talked about hormesis, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And that's what you're doing. You're putting your body into survival mode. So one of the reasons I mostly plants, why I take anaman and these other molecules is to mimic that. I don't work out like you do. I should, but I don't. And why don't you? I think partly because I've told myself I'm too busy, which is bullshit. I need a partner who will motivate me, I think that would help. - Maybe just get a trainer. - That's a solution. - You got some chatter. Get a trainer. - I got some chatter. I was that money. - Money. - Yeah. No, I can definitely forward one. Yeah. And you know, it's on me. Actually, I will own that that I actually do. Just was explaining just to my friend last night, I was like, I got to start working, I'm like, just get a trainer. Get a trainer, someone who's good, and that way they'll develop a program for you. All you have to do is just show up and do what they tell you to do. Just do it. And it's mindless. You can just go through what they tell you to do and you'll just, trust the process, you'll improve radically. - All right. All right. He's what we're going to do. - Okay. - I'm going to take you as what we're going to do. You're going to get me a jug of that fucking juice. - Of this stuff? We'll swap. All right. And you'll be my trainer? - I'll be your trainer. - Well, I will. I've done that before. - If my comedian friends. - Really? Sure. - Yeah, I'll just come up. - No, I do it the right way where I take him through it very easy. I don't have them work out hard at all, especially in the beginning. Everything is like nice and easy. It's like a little bit of strain. You're not going to be exhausted afterwards and I would build you up. I'm a firm believer and not overtaxing the system on people that are sedentary. I really think it's a slow gradual process. I think you have to get better the same way you got sick over time. - Okay. You can make radical changes in a short period of time. Don't get me wrong. Even just a little bit of moderately rigorous exercise. A few days a week will give you great improvements. But I'm not one of those guys who's like, we're going to do two hours today and you're going to go to failure and you're going to be throwing up in a garbage pan. You're not going to do that again the next day. I want you to do it again the next day. I want you to have a nice workout where you're doing like 10 push-ups and 10 sit-ups and 10 body weight squats and then we're going to do some of these kettlebell cleans and kettlebell program. Nothing hard. Everything's going to be like, okay, you put it down. You're fine. You're going to have to leave rejuvenated like you feel like, oh, that was exhilarating. Nothing crazy. And then we'll slowly start to add a little bit over time. That's what I think the right thing to do with people who don't work out all the time. You can't just jump in and you know, you just can't do a day or three without practicing. - Well, it's also you're going to get injured and this is one of the main things that happens to people that dive right into the deep end of the pool when they start working out is they get hurt. They get muscle pulls. Backaches. They get all these different things that happen because I think you just push your body too quickly. You know, it's like you're in boot camp. Like you don't have to be in boot camp. This is not the way to do it. The way to do it is like slowly build up and trust the process. - Okay. - Slowly. Start by, if you're overweight, like my friend Jelly Rollie lost 250 pounds, what did he do? Start walking. Just start walking, walking around the neighborhood, walk around the block, walk up stairs just slowly and then change the diet and then add some stuff and next thing you know, what you're doing this and then you write it all down too. That's the other thing. Write down what you're going to do and write down how you feel and then keep doing that. And if you could do that all the time, you'll start developing this like momentum that we were talking about. - Right. - Like, okay, I'm on the course. I'm on a process, but it doesn't have to be like, you're exhausted and then you go to the lab and you're like, I can't even fucking concentrate. You know? - It's like a tabata sprint on the Airdon machine, like this is crazy. - Well, it's really good advice and I'm going to take you up on it. So let's say I'm lucky enough to come on the show again. - Yeah. - I'll wear a tight t-shirt. - Let's go. - All right. So 20 million people, I have to get out of the fucking goofy plant-based diet. - Well, let's speak about that because that's one of the things we do.
disagree on. I'm on a plant-based diet because I've seen a lot of work on animals at least that plants promote longevity. I eat a lot of protein. It's interesting because you're not an animal. You know that, right? I'm not a mouse. Yeah, I'm a mouse. I'm definitely an animal, but I agree. It's the most meat is the most nutrient dense food. It is. It's available. I love meat. I love meat. I believe there are two states that we can be in. I should try meat. You'll be measuring myself with rings and blood tests for the last 20 years. You should try elk. I'll get you an elk steak. I'd love to try it. It sounds good. I'm not against meat. I will eat it and you'll be like, whoa. Yeah, don't get me addicted to meat. It feels right away. Oh, you're sitting out. I just start firing. Your body starts like, yes, this is what we want to do. Well, here's some science, which is what I do. There are two states. This is my theory. There's the abundance mode, which is very good for health. You'll build muscle, you'll heal better. That's meat. Kill the mammoth. There's adversity mode, which is around meat. We're going to we've got to eat roots and berries. That's adversity. We've got to run, running exercise, eating less. That's adversity. Both are good for you. This one is pro survival. This one is pro growth. This one is longevity. This one is you're going to be stronger fitter. How do you determine that though in terms of like what is longevity versus what is just like health and vitality currently? Well, it's based on the last 30 years of research in a variety of animals and just doesn't have to do with the blue zones. Does it? No, I mean, that's all horseshit, right? I read that recently. Isn't that nuts? It's a lot of it's fraud. Well, it's hard. It's not just hard. A lot of it is actual fraud where people are getting checks for their grandpa and grandpa was dead. So they weren't writing it into the government. They didn't expose like this was the problem with Okinawa in particular, is that they would have to in order for these people to get taken off the list, they would have to inform the government that this person died and they just didn't do it. And so they had this list of people that they were counting in their senses that were like so old. Really? Like this is crazy. What are you people doing? Yeah, even the oldest 100 years old? The oldest person in the world apparently 122. There's a theory not proven that the oldest person in the world was actually the daughter who was faking it to get to get taxes or avoid taxes I think it was in France. I hope that that's not true. I bet it's true. People are full shit. Well, either way the maximum human life span is around 117, 18. Just still a lot more than we live. And what's really crazy is none of those people are doing everything right? Exactly. They're all smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and having a good time. And that's a factor that we really need to take into consideration loneliness and isolation and sadness are one of the greatest contributors to poor health outcomes. It's number one. Yeah, Robert Boltinger at Harvard had a study for I think was 40 years. World War II vets, they looked at everything, blood pressure, cholesterol. The number one thing that predicted longevity in those men was having a reliable partner. Yeah. Not just a reliable partner. Someone that you love. That's true. Someone that you want to be around all the time. You enjoy them. You still enjoy their company, which is possible. Most people don't believe that's possible. Well, you're a wrong model in that. I love my wife. I have fun with her. I've been with her for a while. I've been married for 17 years. I enjoy her. I enjoy hanging out with her. She's cool. And I have friends that aren't in situations like that. And it's so bad when you're like, I have a friend who just, we were actually talking last night. He just got out of a crazy relationship where he's dating this girl for seven years as chaos and that's not. And I said to him, and he was like, I he's 40. And he goes, I don't think I'm ever going to have a relationship again. He goes, it was so bad. He goes, being single feels so good. And I said, there's an old saying, it's so much better to be alone than to wish you were alone. And he's like, yeah, that's it. Because he was like with his crazy lady. And he was like, I just wish, I was, and he finally got free. And now he's like, I think I'm ruined. And I'm like, it doesn't have to be like that. You can find someone that you actually love and you really enjoy their time. You enjoy being with them. It's possible. There's good people out there. But you got them. You got to also be someone that that kind of person wants to be with. Oh, for sure. And stress of relationship. We've seen in studies that clock with those chemicals on the DNA. It accelerates when you're under stress or going, going through a breakup. Oh, yeah. Oh God. You see it too. Oh, I've seen people going through divorces. And it's just like, they take decades off of their life. They just look wrecked. It takes a year or two for them to like, achieve equilibrium again. It's hard. It is. It is. I went through that actually just during COVID when our family got shoved in a house together. And with, yeah, it was brutal. It was unexpected too. Wow. That's the stress test, right? It was super stress. It was super stress. It's funny that without the pandemic, we might have been able to make it. But forcing us all to be in one little house with no internet working well, it was tough. But in any case, I'm great now. I'm very happy. But I do know how bad it can get. And it's brutal. Yeah, bad relationships can fucking wreck people. I mean, you can wreck your health. But also, it's not just relationships in terms of your significant other husband, wife, partner, whatever you want to call it. But also bad relationships at work. Like, if you have a tyrant for a boss and, you know, and every day you're working over time and you're getting yelled at and you're on the phone and you're at home, what trying to keep up with work? And you never get like that, that kind of relationship where you have like this like antagonistic, terrible relationship with people that you work with, that's bad too. Oh, for sure. Your body doesn't differentiate between romantic relationships and those kind of relationships are almost equally bad. My cortisol will be high. Yeah. This will excel right here. I used to keep fish. I was one of those people at school. And the fish that got picked on by the dominant fish was small, like color, live short. It's, it's biology. If you're picked on and you're stressed, you're gonna age faster. Yeah. Fortunately, I think you're probably the same. At my age, I've managed to weed out most of the jerks. And I don't work with them at all. I've got a great partner who we have a hobby of longevity together. So that I'm lucky in that regard now. You found a new one. Yeah, longevity specialist. Imagine that. Congratulations. Well, that's nice too. I find someone to just like, thinks the way you think and has similar likes. It's fun. Like you say. Yeah, that definitely can help. Yeah, I know a lot of my friends that are in really good relationships, their, their significant other has the same hobby as them. You know, like, whatever it is, they both collect the climb mountains or whatever the fuck it is. Find a thing. But that helps too. Well, so you actually enjoy spending time together doing something that you're both really excited about. That helps too. So relationships is one. And the other four major ones from that study were don't smoke, don't drink, get enough rest and get exercise. And that was enough to extend by 15 years. But what about those old people that live forever and do smoke and drink? Because that's kind of weird. Well, they're a 0.01%. They're not examples of what. Is that really what it is? Yeah, it's just so the majority of people who get old and live to like, centenarians. Like what are the common things that they have? The big one is that they don't stress a lot. They usually have a good sense of humor. Interesting. Right. They, they haven't been overweight and they say that they typically couldn't remember when they last got sick. I wonder how much time Twitter takes off your life. Yeah. We should study that. It's already taken a lot of minds. It does. And if you read the comments, it even yep. Exactly. I'm so much happier since I swore off of all that stuff. It's just not good for you. It's really, really bad for you. It's also you're constantly dealing with the problems of the whole world, which I think is a lot for a human being that lives in a community, in a neighborhood. That shit that's happening over there really shouldn't be of primary focus of your life, like where you're in the moment actually doing your life. It's not the same, you're not in the same area as this problem, but yet this problem is overwhelming your all day long life. And you're in fight off light constantly all day all day. Yeah. And you're worried about the climate. Oh my God. Like there's so much. There's so much that freaks people out that it really shouldn't be affecting you at all. Exactly. And actually the world doesn't change if you don't read it. So it's that's that's what I think that's the key. But then you're like, well, you need you're passing off the responsibility to other people. You should get involved like you should get involved. I'm going to be over here. It's right. Well, if you focus on doing something good and you're good at it. Yes. Like yourself. I think that you don't need to be doing more than that. You can't focus on everything. And anybody who tells you can is a fool or anybody who tells you what you should or shouldn't be focusing on is a fool. Yeah. A few years ago, someone at a talk that I gave said you should be working on climate change. I said, after I cure aging, I'll get to climate change. Yeah. Why don't you go to China and tell them stop making coal factories? Shut the fuck up. Just shut up. You know, you're not going to fix it. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody is. Somebody's working on it. And that's their going.
God bless 'em, good luck. - Yeah, well what I try to spend my day is efficiently helping the world. So the people ask me why do I study aging in the first place? And it really is that I'm trying to please my grandmother like some of us. She was the one that told me that I need to make the world a better place and she's gone out. - That's what she said to you? - When I was four, it was, it's been that ever since. She told me two things, humans are evil. She lived through World War II in Hungary and the Russians came in and raped everybody, she said. And then, so she escaped to Australia and then she said that the other issue is that we don't do enough as humans to better the world. And so I had that stuck in my mind. She also, by the way, said, "Oh, we all die." And I thought, "That's not really fair, is it?" And that set me on this path. - Make the world a better place and we all die. And you're like, "Ugh, and what I've noticed with my kids is that, even if you tell them that, they forget about it 'cause it's brutal to think about death every day. - Yeah. - But for some reason, it's just stuck in my head. And every day, I'm like another 150,000 people are gonna die today due to aging related diseases. So my lab is mission-oriented. If we are a day late with something, there's a lot of people that are suffering potentially avoidable diseases. - That's why it's sort of understandable that people show up outside of your lab. And I'm like, I need to talk to you. - I need this. - Yeah, blind people want to get in the trial. It's big. And I think if the trial works can be a very strange world, especially for my lab and for me, but we'll see. And even if it doesn't work this time, the science is strong enough that we'll figure it out. We will do this. It's just a question of when. - And so, do you think that AI is gonna have a significant impact on the kind of improvements that you're able to? - It already is. We're going super fast. And AI has revolutionized biology. It's revolutionizing everything, of course. But particularly in biology, where we used to have to read 15 papers a day. Now we can read a million if we want. It's totally different. - Wow. - Yeah, it's a super brain. A 19-year-old came to my lab this summer and the lab grows from 20 to 40 people. And we're trying to figure out how do these three genes reset the cell? How does the cell remember what it was 30, 40 years ago? Where's that information stored in the cell? And I've got this theory that there's some new biology. There's a record in the DNA somewhere. And I gave him that task. I said, can you just go to the databases of the whole world, look at all the data that's there. It's an exabytes of data. And see if my prediction is true. Or at least you can get evidence for it. Two weeks later, he came back and the whole team, not the whole team, five other people were smiling. We have to show you something, David. Come in my office. We sat down, he shows up on the board on this LCD screen. I think we've found the smoking gun for what your theory suggests. And he used AI to process all that data and the AI came back and said, yeah, you're probably right. And it's a 19-year-old straight out of high school who did this. That did something that the whole field and all these professors and all these fancy servers could not figure out until now. That is phenomenal. That's so promising and so exciting. It is. I mean, the future really does belong to people who can wrangle AI even on their phone. I think people on their phones are going to be making medicines or at least designing them. Or bombs. That's the problem. And bio weapons. Right. I mean, you recently had-- was it Anna on the show to talk about bio weapons in this kind of stuff? That is a big worry. Actually, it had to disclose to the US government when I first got here that I did have the capability of making a bio weapon. The Anna Jacobsen episode that we just did on bio weapons was absolutely terrifying. Yeah. She's, you know what I mean? She scared the shit out of the world with her nuclear war book. And now she's scaring everybody with her bio weapons book. Yeah. Yeah, that's scary. It is. What I've got is a database of all-known pathogens and new ones that could come. So I'm trying to do my bit there to help the world if it happens again, pandemic, or something unnatural. Yeah. Well, that would be-- I mean, when you think about diseases that people get that just like wreck their entire body, if you really do have an original copy somewhere in their genome of what they look like as a healthy person, and you could switch that back on with a factory reboot. I mean, we could potentially get rid of all diseases, which is just bananas. And injuries, or fixed injuries, grow new limbs potentially. There's a new paper that just came out a few days ago that showed that the tips of the fingers of baby mice can be coaxed once they've healed over as a stub to regrow part of the finger. The touching-- How have people done that before? Yeah, they found just two factors were enough. So it's not that hard. The point is we've got the instructions to be young and to regrow body parts in our body. We just don't use them. That's nuts. So like a salamander can grow an extra leg, or a leg that gets chopped off? Yeah. I believe we still have that capability. We just don't use it. It just didn't make sense to regrow a limb. It was quicker and safer to just heal it over as a stub and move on. But salamanders, which get their limbs presumably eaten pretty often, maintain that ability. So give us-- I wouldn't say that we could evolve this, but I think using a combination of our technology, plus this new technology that we're seeing come out, where these two factors can grow new limbs, I don't see a reason why we can't become like a deadpool where injury doesn't hurt us, aging can't hurt us. And we can regrow body parts. How far do you think we are away from being able to regrow body parts? Oh, I mean, realistically, probably a couple of decades. But I've seen enough-- That's not that far. --seen enough to know that it's doable. A couple of decades ago was 2006. Well, things are going super fast. 10 years ago, we didn't even know aging was a reversible. And now it's in humans. That's nuts. Think of that. Well, in 2019, there was no AI. Right. In 2019, it was an idea that we had just got the result in mice, and I divulged that to the world. Then it was published. And then we're in humans now. So if it works, then it's going to be a very different world. And you feel very confidently that some of this stuff is going to work. Well, it's going to work. I don't know if this trial is going to be successful, but there's going to be a lot of people doing these trials. I have some competition now. Do you know about that? No. So since I started my company, Life Fire Sciences, which is doing the trials with ER100, others have joined in and the party. So Jeff, Bezos, and others have started Althos Farmer. They are based in three cities around the world. They have a few billion dollars to catch up. Sam Oldman has Retro Bio. And let's see. Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, the CEO, started one called New Limit. And they've got a lot of money, all billions. Do you think it's good that there's all these people involved in this? Oh, well, it's good. It's a competition. Yeah, yeah. I'm not doing this for my own personal benefit. I want humanity to be changed the way it could be. And the more people like Jeff Bezos, the more people with a large bank account that are invested in this, the better. Fantastic. And of course, it's kind of like Bezos. He's balling out of control. Why wouldn't you want to look forever? Well, what's left if you've got everything else? Well, also, it's like if you've got the amount of money that he has and you can tackle all these different issues, you know, like a space program that he's working on, all these different things. Like, of course, why wouldn't you want to do cool things? Like, what's cooler than being able to grow limbs? Yeah, yeah. What's cooler than being able to cure all diseases and reverse aging? Well, there's, I don't think there's much cooler. That's why I'm doing it because that, I think, can be the biggest gift to humanity is what you just said. So I don't know if I'll achieve it, probably not in my lifetime, but at least I've moved the needle and pushed the ball globally in that direction. I wonder if we're going to get to a point in time where we can engineer consciousness in terms of like, find out. Like, you find out someone's a sociopath, you find out someone's a kleptomaniac or someone's an arsonist. Like, whatever it is, like, if you could figure out like what these little flaws are in the way the mind works, if we can completely map it out and go, oh, this is the error. This is where you're not making these two connections. Of course. Of course, it's all just biology and engineering. There's nothing that stops us. And this is the century that we are able to control our own biology. Oh, starting with cancer heart disease and aging. A true utopian world of peaceful people. Living a peaceful, but healthy, not peaceful. I don't think world peace, I think curing aging is easier than world peace. Well, if everybody achieved a state of consciousness that allowed them to understand that we're all in this together. Yeah, how do we do that? Mushrooms. Yeah. Well, there are certain companies working on this. I know, that's what's interesting, right? Like Eli Lilly is involved in pharmaceuticals. Well, the pharmaceuticals company rather is involved in psychedelics. They just bought a tie. I think it was like $3.8 billion. So they're all in with real capital. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, me too. That's great. I love that they're doing that. We need more of that. There's too much depression and anxiety in the world. And drug addiction. I mean, that's why I went to the White House and got the president to get involved in this executive order on IBegin. Yes. Because I've talked to so many people that have.
that their life completely turned around with eye began. So many people that were opioid addiction and also brain injuries, oddly enough. Brain injuries, all sorts of TBI and CTE, that they've had like phenomenal results from this ebogatory, which is so crazy, that this thing had been around for so long, and is a schedule one substance in the United States for no reason whatsoever. There's no risk of addiction. There is no recreational use of it. It's a horrible experience. I've not done it, but apparently it's fucking terrible. And it lasts like 24 hours. Like no one's gonna be doing that for funsies. - Right. Well the question I think that comes up with all of these drugs is do you have to have the trip and experience the craziness to get the benefit? And I don't think so. I think you should be able to separate them. - Well, you know, they've actually figured this out with LSD, right? Do you know about this? - Okay, so they've engineered a different version of LSD that doesn't give you the hallucinogenic effects, but does give you the benefits in terms of like the cognitive effects. - I tie you guys or someone else? - I don't know what company has done this. So if you can find that, Jamie. - I think it might be a tie. - But what they've essentially done, and I think it's basically in the lab work stage right now, and I don't think that's applied to humans yet. But what they've done is engineered a version of LSD that has all the positive effects that LSD has in terms of like introspection, being able to like rethink and remap and reset the way you view things. But without like watching people's face melt and thinking that demons are eating you and all the weird stuff that comes from it. - Yeah, well outstanding. It should happen with psychedelics. The way it's happened with all medicines, right? We start with something from the bark of a willow tree and then we have aspirin. - Right. - We're not eating bark anymore. - Right, but sometimes the bark is the really way the way to go. - Right, unfortunately sometimes that's the part of the problem is these pharmaceutical drug companies, they patent these natural compounds and use petroleum-based synthetic methods of creating these medications now that they can sell and profit wildly off of. Whereas the really the best way to do it is actually to get the plant. - It's true that there's the whole issue though that if it's not approved, then it's the Wild West. You don't know what you're getting. - Right, that's true too. - We need a middle ground. We need something you can get fast in the market that's known to be safe. - So what we're gonna need is mind reading 'cause we need to know if people are full shit. That's what we're gonna need. We're gonna need. - Gotta work on that. - Yes, I think that's gonna change humanity more than anything. I think you've got a good bull shit detector. - It's okay. There's a few people that have snuck through, unfortunately. Some people they get through and they're like, it takes a while and you're like, ah shit. - They never come back on the show. - Yeah, well, the show, you learn a lot from a person in about three hours. You can kind of, after a while, you can kind of see little things and you have to be forgiving and you have to be charitable and some people are just nervous and they misstate things or they exaggerate things or they forget something, they get it wrong. But then there's people that are just essentially they really don't care about anybody but themselves. And some of those people are really good at pretending to be people. They're really good at pretending, you know? They're really good at pretending to be like a normal person. Oh, here's the LSD thing, right? Researchers recently engineered an LSD analog called, how do you say a plus minus JRT? That appears to keep many of the LSD's brain beneficial and cognitive effects while dramatically reducing and possibly eliminating its hallucinogenic trip in animal studies. So it's almost the same molecules LSD but scientists swap the positions of just two atoms in the structure. The subtle change makes JRT bind more selectively to serotonin receptors in a way that promotes neuroplasticity, growth and repair of synapses, but minimizes hallucinogenic signaling. That is, that's incredible. Anti-depressant, look at this. Strong anti-depressant effects at doses reported to be around 100 times more potent than ketamine in standard rodent tests. Cognitive benefits improved, cognitive flexibility and performance in tasks modeling the negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia. Holy shit, that's incredible. When and where do we get it? - Well, I think it's fairly recent. - Yeah, it's a, you see Davis study, they just developed it. - Oh, it's in mind. - Shout out to our AI sponsor perplexity for providing us with this information. So this is again, I mean, like, we could just get this information now through AI. Like, I mean, this, that AI for our show has been gigantic. I mean, just the ability to just ask it a question instead of Google searching and have to go through all these different fucking articles. What does it say? What is that? Who's right? And what's the website? You just ask AI and perplexity just gives us all the information. So proceedings from National Academy of Science research is at California of San Diego Davis, excuse me, University of California Davis reported the creation of GRT, chemically modified version of LSD. So this is like what year? So 2025. - So last year. So it's exciting. - Five years away, but yeah. You're right. - Is that the timeline? - At a minimum, usually takes that long. But that's exciting. At least principal is there that you don't need to listen. - Well, how about for Skits of Frenia? - Yeah, that's incredible. - Yeah, I mean, that is incredible 'cause that is one of the saddest things to watch somebody fall into the grips of Skits of Frenia. - Yeah. - I've seen people fall in and come out, which is interesting. - I thought for the bullshit detector, we could have an AI that either dings or has a green or a red on your forehead. - I'm pretty good at it, but I think no one's perfect at it, and I think ultimately if we get to a place, whether it's a technological innovation or what have you, where we can actually read the contents of someone's thoughts. I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility. - Oh, you'd need an implant, I think, but Elon says the neural link's gonna be able to pull that off. - Yeah. - You're gonna be able to talk without using words. - And I'm like, what? I think he's right, though. - I think if we all lock into a hive mind and then, if we develop through AI, if we develop a universal language, worldwide. - Well, we already have that. What do we have? - Well, the new headphones from a big company that I won't name, you can translate. - Translate, yes, translate, but it's translating into English. If we just all, the problem with that is there's context, there's all sorts of different things that other cultures and different languages, when it's deciphered and changed and translated into English, you lose a lot of the meaning and the context is weird. If we develop a universal language. - That'd be ideal. English is a good substitute. I was shocked. I'm always shocked, traveling globally. How many people can just speak English now? - Yeah, it's pretty amazing. - It's 'cause America rules. - You're welcome. - Well, we have to thank Britain for that. America should say you're welcome. - Yeah, they were cute. They did a good job starting out, but we took the ball and spread it all over the world. - So who's next, China? - God, I hope not. I want to learn Chinese. It's too hard until all the fucking characters, that's ridiculous. Even people that I know that could speak Mandarin, they can't write it to get to that level. I have a couple of friends that speak fluent Mandarin and they can't write it. Writing it is. - Yeah, well, the students in my lab who come from China, they're being picked on by the immigration, but they don't want to go home. They love it here. - I'm sure, because they're stealing all your secrets and they'll bring it back home. - There's a lot of regulation on that now as a scientist. - Oh, yeah. - Oh, I could imagine. Yeah, I mean, it really has to be, 'cause that is an actual, real threat. - Exactly, so the people that come through my lab have to be vetted now. - Right, but the people that come over here and experience the kind of freedom that you have in America. - Oh, yeah. - I came here from Australia. Australia is pretty free, but compared to Australia, America is so different. - Yeah. - I can't go back. What's the big difference? - That I feel I can do anything I want if I just put my mind to it. There's not social barriers, there's not monetary barriers, at least for a white male like me who's got a degree. I know it's not for everybody, but I feel like if I want to start a company, I've got a great idea. I can do that here. In fact, chance you'll do that in Australia. People aren't willing to invest in great ideas down there. Not often. - That's a bummer. Do you think that changes anytime soon? - No, the US is so unique. There's a lot of money flowing, people are willing to place a bet and even lose the money. That's rare. Australians, most of the world, if not all, people are scared to lose their money if they have it. Here's like, okay, I risked it. I helped the world. I feel good. It's a very generous country, very. And I love it here. When I arrived here, I just felt I'm home. - I love hearing that from people that have come from somewhere else because it kind of reaffirms why people in America are so proud of what this country is. And that's why it bums me out when people are so mad at America in terms of, I get, look in terms of foreign policy and some of the things that are wrong with America, but just in overall, this experiment and self-government is pretty remarkable. - Yeah, I watched the TV show. Was it the American experiment? Came out for the anniversary of 250th? - I haven't seen it. - You got to see it. - What's the story? uh. it's it's the founding fathers and their lives and how
were fighting and what was going on behind scenes. They were just young kids. They were in their 20s, 30s. I know, that nuts. Yeah, just Benjamin Franklin was the old dude, but they were so young, but they were in the middle of it. They kind of realized they were making history, but so many things could have gone wrong. We would not have had the United States if just a few votes went one way or the other. And a few wars. Yeah. A few of the battles that they had. Exactly. The US was losing the war against Britain badly. Yeah, they banged the French down. Yeah, we don't thank the French enough, actually. I know. Right? Somehow they became our enemy. Yeah. Remember during the Gulf War, they turned French fries into freedom fries because people hated the French. Yeah, but everyone hates the French because they're so arrogant. So I think generally when people are arrogant, it's because they did something fucking awesome. Well, in the 1800s, they did. Yeah, they conquered Europe. No, not sure if that's awesome. Here's a fun perplexity search I just did. I said, do Americans have a risk gene? A risk gene? Yeah. One of the best study variants in the dopamine receptor gene, DRD4, specifically the seven repeat seven R version. It's associated in some studies with novelty seeking impulsivity and higher financial or social risk taking. I wonder if I have that gene. For sure. This seven probably not. Who knows? The seven R variant is unevenly distributed around the world. It's populations in populations across the Americas. It shows up in roughly 48% of chromosome studied. While in East Asia, it's found in only about 2%. Wow. That's crazy. It'll come down to genetics. Evolutionary works suggest it became more common in groups that migrated further after leaving Africa. And those lineages are strongly represented in the Americas today. That that's actually. It's just thinking of the people that, you know, have the balls to fucking come here. Yeah. Well, your balls, you don't have to do that much, but you can still have balls to gamble and take care of it. Yeah. That must be a better than Australian should have it. That completely meant well, sort of. You guys got forced there. They moved everybody over there because they were criminals. Right. This DDR gene that you just saw that was a DDR4. I know a bit about it because I'm writing it in my next book, DRD4, thanks Jenny. I call this the FU gene because I'm trying to figure out what makes humans special over other animals. And this is one of them that we are seekers of explorers. It turns out that this gene is turned on in teenagers. It gets eventually switched off, not totally. But that might be why teenagers say FU to their parents. Yeah. But it's a way genetically to get them out of the nest. Like, oh, I can't stand these parents. They suck. They're idiots. I'm out of here. That's in this in this gene. Well, it's also, I as a parent have been very aware of not doing that to my kids, like not forcing them into something that they don't want to do or pushing them in any general direction, but rather encouraging them to seek out their interests and encouraging them to just like take a chance. And if I ever correct them, if I ever get upset about something, one of the first things that I tell them is I've done all everything that you've done. I've made every mistake. I've fucked up. You're smarter than me. I've fucked up everything. I've lied to my parents. I lied to teachers. I've done everything that you're doing. So, this is not a unique thing. I'm just telling you from my own personal experience and my perspective, this is why I think because I love you and I want you to do well in life. And I just want you to recognize this. And that's how I correct my kids. I love that. It's never like you listen to me because I'm your father. There's none of that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the only way we will raise it doesn't work. No. And it makes you resentment, but also probably makes you want to do better than your parents. So like motivates you in a certain way. Like my parents were not risk takers at all. And my whole life, I've been like a wild risk taker. That's really same. Yeah, I was resentful that my father didn't have enough ambition. Now he's a great guy. We're best friends actually. It's been the greatest thing for me. But one of the things I did with my kids, your reminding me is he's 19. He's a well-built guy because we were going to the gym for a number of years. I've tried to train him in health. But he spent the summer with me. He's literally still working for me this summer to help with the podcast and the magazine. We're about to launch. And Benjamin's his name. He's the best kid. But he slacked off. He was like, Ben, I put you in charge of social media. You haven't posted in a week. What's going on? Well, you know, I slept in. So I do thing. Am I going to get mad at him like I would a normal employee or do I treat him differently? And I decided to treat him differently, probably because he's my son, but I didn't want a real relationship. But what I did was I said, you know, I really think you can do better. I think everything you've done, the weightlifting, the calculus, you're amazing. But in this, you're not. So what's going on? And it worked. We've become closer. He's really into it. He's doing a good job now. That's great. So that's the way to do it. I think you can't be too hot on them. Can't say you've fucked up. Yeah. I mean, that kind of can work, but it's a blunt instrument. And it doesn't work on everybody. And it also develops resentment. And and they also they they miss out on experiencing your perspective as a like for them to understand that you are just a person who's lived longer than them. And that you can help them navigate this road. Yeah. So you don't have to make the same mistakes that you did. That's why you're helping them. They you're talking to them about this. Not because you're just mean dad who likes to fucking tell the kids what to do because we've all experienced that. I mean, I had friends growing up as fathers of fucking scream at them and throw things and beat them. And it's like, God. And then you just grow up fucking traumatized and they're always resentful and angry. Instead of just recognizing that like, Oh, I'm so fortunate that my parents have this perspective where they can explain to me why I'm going through what I'm going through and how they got through it. Like a mentor. You know, the best friend. You're the mentor. Yes. Best friend doesn't work either. No, that doesn't work either because that just allows too much shenanigans. You know, you have to have some rules. You know, you have to have some some sort of regulations. Yeah. But you also kids turned out well. What's up? How'd your kids tell them? Oh, they're great. Great. I'm so so lucky. So fucking lucky. I mean, I feel so fortunate. They're so smart and ambitious and driven and so it's wild. It's wild to watch, you know, and talented. And it's and also like we never went through that period where they hit teenage years and they hate you. Like that. Well, that's so nice. I mean, my youngest should get upset at me sometimes about certain things, but she bounces back quickly. It's never like some kids where they just grow to hate their parents. Like the RD4 gene. Maybe they don't have strong one. I don't know about that. I think it's how you communicate with them. I really do. I think that's a big factor. You have to communicate with them like you truly care about their development. And the most important thing I think, the most important thing I think is that I always tell them, whatever you've done, whatever mistake you've made, I made way worse mistakes. I was like, I am not coming at you from a flawless person. You know, I'm not coming at you from the perspective of someone who like, you're an idiot. I figured that out. You should figure it out. Like, no, I whenever that went from the time they were really little. Anytime I had a correct them, I said, I did everything that you're doing, everything. I threw my food on the floor too. Yes. All the above. Whatever fucking stupid thing you've done as a kid, I guarantee you. That is great advice, really great advice. So I hope everyone listening here is that because I actually had to learn the hard way. My first kid, I did what my parents did, which was you can't say that. Yeah. And my first is a lot more rebellious and distant than my third. That was interesting. Yeah. It actually is really true. I've seen it. Yeah. And I thought I was going to kill their motivation, but it doesn't at all. I thought like, you know, making things easy for them and not being strict. Like, maybe it's good to be strict because then you just have this determination to show everybody. I don't think that was my thing as a child. Like, I'll fucking show you. But I don't think everybody needs that. I think you're much better off having a healthy relationship with ambition, where you're excited about things because you're passionate about them and you you find great reward in being creative or being enthusiastic about something. Exactly. And open their eyes to the world that exists. Yes. We used to do work experience. You go and do a job and that's your work experience. The reason I wanted my son, Ben, to work with me is he can see how it's like to be an entrepreneur and build something and be excited and work is super fun. Yeah. I think a lot of kids just don't get that experience. I don't know what's possible. Right. And just showing them the world is what we can do as parents. That's awesome. Yeah. And you know, I mean, some people don't have that at home unfortunately. But that's one of the cool things about the world that we live in is that kids today have access to so many different perspectives now because of the internet. There's so many different podcasts and YouTube conversations and different things where they can just take a little tool from that. Just take a little piece from that and apply it to the way they interact with the world.
for sure. And I would encourage parents to give their kids stuff to read. We talked about social media, how that's just addictive. I saw how my kids wanted to just scroll through their phones than read. And if they can't read a book, give them a magazine. I'd subscribe to that geo-national geographic for my kids. And I think get them used to reading. It's going to be a lost art if we don't. I know, is that nuts? I maybe read 10% of the things that I consume. I consume so much in audio. Just for time reasons, because there's so much time where I'm driving my car or I'm working out or I'm in the sauna or I'm in the hyper barric chamber or in the red light therapy. That's reading three reas. It is similar, but I think it's only like 70% of reading. I don't think it's 100%. I don't think you get the full effect, but it's still way better than not doing it. But I'm aware that sitting there concentrating, actually reading a book without hearing another person's voice talking, there's another mechanism. There's another thing that's going on. It's a different way you interact with the material. Whether it's non-fiction or fiction. Yeah, I like the fact that I can listen to you and I'm doing something else. You have to sit down, can move, go for a walk. For me, I have too many interests. I have way too many things that I do. It's very hard for me to just allocate a certain amount of time to sit there and silence and read. I use reading to fall asleep. That's a good way. It does do that. That's how well it does that. Although I'm finding it's harder to read now that my eyes aren't young, need some of my hygiene therapy, yourself. I've tried that. Does it work for you? Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, people are skeptical about this and they think I'm full of shit. No, I don't need reading glasses anymore. Really? Yes. I always have these fucking things laying around. I don't even use them anymore. Yeah, there's a lot of science now for red light. It's real. I can tell you as a regular user for multiple years, it took a while, it took like, I was waiting for it in the beginning, like, what the fuck? In the back, and not only that in the beginning, because I don't close my eyes in the red light bed, I thought it was making things blurrier. I was like, oh, my God, am I fucking up my eyesight, like, listening to these assholes? But no, it just took a while. And then over the course of like many months, I started seeing some small improvements. And then I started seeing some pretty big improvements over the course of about a year, whereas now I, it's not, my eyes aren't perfect. They aren't like they were when I was 20, but they are way better than they were when I was 50. Oh, often did you have to do that? I do it three times a week, minimum. That's what I try to do, but sometimes I'll do it five days a week. I just get in there, and it's 20 minutes, I lay in a light bed, close my eyes, open my eyes, whatever. It seems to work on your vision, even if you wear a blindfold. What about people that kind of want to bed? Can you get little? Yes. You can get, well, there's a company called, it's called Juve, right? J-U-U-V. Is that the name of the company? They were our sponsor at one point in time. That's how I started it. They had a, it's just a light panel that you stand in front of. Oh, yeah. I've got one of those. Yeah. And that, that works too. That, but this one, the one that I got a red and near infrared light therapy devices, Juve, J-O-O-V-V. Medical grade, light therapy devices. I had one of those, and that's when I started seeing benefits, but the, the big one that I got, I got from Gary Brecka from his company, and it's, it's a, like, a fucking tanning bed and you'll lie in it, and that one's amazing. But that's expensive. But I don't think you have to have that for those kind of improvements. Also improves collagen, your skin, makes you look better. And the, but for me, the most obvious and profound was the improvement in my vision. Well, it makes sense. The signs behind red light wasn't there 10 years ago, and people were questioning it. But now we know if you shine certain wavelengths like near infrared on cells, the mitochondria, which are important for reversing aging or slowing it, get revved up. It's actually related to Viagra, long story, but Viagra and red light have something is in common, and it does help mitochondria. And that's very important for the eye. The mitochondria, actually, the most important in any part of your body, the eye is the most important part. And part of the reason we lose our vision is the mitochondria don't make enough energy for the eye. How come you haven't done red light therapy before then? Well, I do, but not routinely. So I have one of those bricks that I turn on while I'm in the shower. And I have a red light cap for my hair, which there's some evidence. What I do is I, it does, it looks a little bit silly. I don't worry it in public, but I do lower it, and I look at it, and it shines in my eyes and on my face in the hopes that it might help you. Yeah, they have one that you wear like Dr. Doom, like fits over your face and like blast red light in your whole face. I definitely feel bit weird afterwards, and I can see speckles, but I think the sign says that it can help. Well, all I know is my own anecdotal experience. And for me, it has radically improved my vision. That's a good tip. Yeah, it stopped. Well, it was, my vision was degrading. Like it was, it was pretty odd. Like I first started using like reading glasses, like a 1x, like I made it a little better. I'm like, oh, this is a little better. It makes it clear. And then I went to two, and then I was using 2.5. Right. And it made it better. But it was like, God, this is annoying. And then if I would try to like read an email and it, I didn't have my reading glasses, I couldn't read shit. Now, crystal clear. Yeah, no problem at all. Well, so my, my latest show is about the eye and how to protect the eyes health. And so there's a lot you can do actually supplements, red light, other things. I take supplements for it too. I should mention that. I take no, I have no affiliation with these people. Pure encapsulations makes a supplement called macular support. And I take that. And it's a combination of lutein and a few other things. Yeah, there was a trial a while ago that showed that taking Xanthine and others as to Xanthine, lutee, lutein, they're good for the eye. So you can get products like that. Do you take it? Not that brand, but yes, I take something similar. And has it helped you at all? I don't know. I haven't done an experiment. Right. Well, if you weren't taking it, maybe you would have more degeneration. Yeah, well, you know, I've got near perfect vision. I don't need glasses. Do you really? Yeah. Near perfect. Near perfect. I mean, I think low light. Low light is with me. Yeah. Where I'll go to a restaurant with my kids and they can read the menu. And I'm like, that is so embarrassing. You can read that. How do you read that? I can't read shit. Like, do you know why? Why? Well, this is, this is what I think. So we know from my lab's work that the retina, because it has tens of thousands of endings that pick up the light. As you get older, those nerves lose their identity and they're not working as well. And what we do is with our therapy, we can restore those nerves back to being functional nerves. And that's why mice and monkeys that lose their retinal function get their perfect vision back again. We're reminding those cells that have forgotten how to work. So in your eye and my eye, we're 22 months apart, that those nerves, about half of them have forgotten how to work properly. So we want to fix that and go back to being young. It's not that our nerves are gone. They're not dead right there and we can restore them. And that's going to be true for a lot of organs is that the cells are still there. They just need to be reminded how to work again. What are the potential negative consequences of this kind of work? Like when you sit up a night and you worry, I hope it doesn't do this. Is it cancers at the big one? Yeah, it's though we've done a lot of work to relate real fears. It is possible that if we go to young, we can cause dysplasia, which is cells doing what they shouldn't or if they multiply and spread. That would be cancer. If you make the cells too young, like what I was saying before about, don't turn me into a baby. Right, we don't want to go there. That's what Yamannaka did and got the Nobel for it. But that's not good here. But we never see our cells turn into stem cells again. We can't. We had mice that we left the gene therapy on for 21 months in the eye and 19 months in the whole body of the animal. And if anything, they had less tumors than the ones that didn't get treated. And we actually know from a wonderful student in my lab, she's a PhD student. She found that when you turn on these three saying genes, not in the eye, but in cancer cells and tumors growing in mice, human cancer is growing in mice. They drink. So we think it might actually help the cancer as well, which was a nice surprise. Wow. That's incredible. It makes sense, right? If you wake up a cancer cell and it says crap, I shouldn't be growing. I should be a, you know, a liver cell or something similar. Now it kills itself. So we see that. The cells wake up. They realize what they were 30 years ago and then they kill themselves. What is on the horizon in terms of like, what would you like to accomplish or would you like to work on that you can't do currently? Well, lots, lots. You know, funding in my lab got completely cut last year. And we've managed to survive through donations. Why did the funding get cut? Was it a USAID thing? You remember there was a spat between Harvard and the federal government. All of the funding to Harvard Medical School got cut. Was that during the time
where the president was defending those anti-Semitic comments on campuses? Yeah, well allegedly, I'm not getting into the politics, but during that whole thing, yeah. Yeah, so what we, I almost had to fire most of the people in my lab during that episode, it was quite scary, but I raised, so now my lab survives on donations, not on federal government money. Thank you, friends. Thank you, thank you. Well, the thing is, you've accomplished enough to where people are like, "I think he's on to something and I want to live forever." Well, I'm lucky. Most scientists can't raise money like that, so really, really it's a blessing. And now I'm raising money through a foundation to help other scientists survive. But yeah, it's been a blessing. But your question was, what do I wish I could do? Yeah. I wish I could go faster. I wish I could try multiple approaches, so we don't just have one shot on goal. It's going slower than I would want. With a big injection of cash, we could do a lot of trials, a lot of different tissues. We could do a whole body rejuvenation as well. Do you have a website where people can donate? I do. It's lifespan.com. So if you go to lifespan.com, there's a link there. Yeah, you could donate to it. Yeah, foundation and we're raising money for this type of research. Is it tax deductible? It depends on how big the donation is. For $10, you get the new magazine that we're putting out and you learn all about how to live longer. I'm hoping to build the world's largest longevity community of millions of people who can learn how to really live longer and build healthcare from the ground up because top down from the government hasn't worked. Yeah. Actually, I have a gift for you. What are you at? I made something for you that's unique. This is for you, Joe, as a thanks to all the support you've given me and the science over the years. First edition, lifespan magazine ladies and gentlemen, look at that. It's written by scientists so it covers like a velvet cover. What is this? I figured you might like that. Inside is the magazine and it's beautiful. It's beautiful. The lure of the lure, of course. A great expense. No, the magazine doesn't come with the lure. That's just special for Joe, as a thank you, president. Thank you very much. Most science out there is written by reporters who don't know what they're talking about. So we wrote this for the public and you can believe whatever you read in there. All right. Beautiful. Yeah, thanks. The lure, so you have to trust it. So that's at lifespan.com. You can subscribe. Get that every month just for $10. I like to take at the bottom. Life's too short. Let's fix that. That's how slogan at life span. Yeah, it's an awesome slogan. So it's a community. It's the show. My show is also called lifespan on YouTube. But the magazine is a passion project. I want to put out something that people love. It's beautiful, right? It's like natural geographic. By the way, just today, this is no joke. It seems crazy. But my lab's researchers on the cover of natural geographic. Oh, that's awesome. That just came out today. They heard, by the way, at Nat Geo, they said, you going on Joe Roganow went, you know, they go, all right, we'll put it out early. So you can now read about my lab's research on Nat Geo as well today. That's very cool. That's very cool. So you would just like to do more. Have more funding. Do more. That's the thing that you wish you could be working on now. Just having more different, more different studies and tests running concurrently. Now we could go so fast with AI because it's spitting out new drug candidates all the time that we can't test. It takes years to get through. So with money, we could do a lot more trials and put these through different diseases much faster. If you had no regulations like an island of Dr. Moro type deal, well, you know, well, at the risk of getting kicked out of my university, theoretically, we could very safely do more animal studies and with those best candidates put them into humans quicker. Right now it takes years, it's taking us close to 10 years to go from the first discovery in my lab in Nature Magazine to now. But that's too slow. People dying 150,000 a day on this planet. It's terrible. So I would love to have the resources, you know, like Jeff Bezos and others. Yeah. My company, by the way, even though we lead the pack of all these guys, we're really small. We're pretty small little outfit in Boston. We've raised a lot less money, but we're, because I think we're focused, we have, and we started earlier, we're doing pretty well. That's the big one. You started earlier. You have a lot of momentum on your side. Yeah. But we, I think we could have a big impact on aging in our lifetime with more money directed in general at the field, not just me, but spread it. And so the money that we raise from the magazine is going to support other labs as well and students who can find these medicines quicker. So if you, in a perfect world and you had unlimited resources, you would just run a bunch of different clinical trials and studies concurrently. Yeah, AI is feeding us molecules. We put them into mice. We go to monkeys. We go to humans and it would just be fast. One of my friends, Alex Karonkov, he has a similar company, but not on exactly what we do, not on reprogramming. But he's able, I think he's on his 35th drug, but he's driven by AI and robots. His whole lab is robots, at least he says they are, and then goes into humans. And his company is worth billions. That approach applied to what we do would be incredible. Yeah, that's best case scenario. That would be incredible. Well, I'm hoping through this conversation that people are going to reach out. And I'm hoping through this conversation that people realizing like, oh, well, so much work has been done and so many breakthroughs have been made. If they had more access to resources, more access to different, whatever you need, you know, and that you could run all these different studies. We could, we were, our budget in my lab is only it's almost three, three and a bit million. It's not much, right? Compared to what impact it could have on the planet, which is trillions of dollars saved, just in the US alone. So it's a little bit of donation or getting a magazine. The impact would be life changing for all of us. Who doesn't age, who doesn't get diseases? Right. Who doesn't want to feel better? Yeah, it's also like so much, you can get so much more done if you feel better. Well, we take it for granted until we feel sick and it's like, I forgot what it's like to feel well. Exactly. Exactly. I had a day, a week and a half ago, where I came back from Italy. I was a little jet lagged. I couldn't sleep right and I worked out really hard a bunch of days at a row and I was working constantly. And then I had one day. I was like, I kind of feel like shit. I better not do anything today. After I was on work, I just watched TV and relaxed. And I was like, I can't wait to feel better again. Well, imagine what it's like being old and frail. That's every day is sick. And right now you can't do anything about it. Yes. And while you're healthy, you take it for granted. And that's the real sin. You're like, I'm fine. I'm great. I mean, this is what people do when they go out drinking, right? They take advantage of the fact that it's worth it for a good time, just poison myself for a night. Well, it's not worth it because that also accelerates aging. But big time says what I tell my kids who like alcohol, like most kids. You might feel better in a few days, but the memory of that is going to be in your body. Yeah, you can drink. It's fine to get drunk once in a while, but not a lot, not constantly. I used to drink once a day. And I do not do that anymore because the date is incontrovertible that it affects the brain, even the size of the brain if you drink constantly. I took eight months off of no alcohol at all. And I felt a lot better. Exactly. I started drinking again one night. I went to dinner with my wife and had a margarita. I was like, I think I'm back. Oh, really? Well, so I drink now, but now I do not get drunk. I haven't gotten drunk. This was over a year ago, it was when I had a drink again, I think. I think it was a year. I'm not sure. But point is, I have not been drunk since then. I will have a glass of wine with dinner, or I will have a shot of whiskey before I go on stage, like a little bit, but I do not get drunk anymore. It's just not worth it for me. The feeling afterwards is so terrible the morning. And especially for me because I work out so much when I wake up. It's like that workout is going to get done. Okay, whether I feel like shit or not, that workout is going to get done. And this is going to be rough. I mean, you got the sweats. It's incredible. Versus when I feel great, I love the workout. I'm excited. Like I look forward to it. Even when it's hard, when it's over, I'm like, whew, all right, let's eat it. I don't feel bad. I feel good. And it's like, why am I giving up that for a few hours of, you know, it's just not worth it. It's not worth it. Yeah, well, you're funny, even without alcohol, but I'm not. So I've lost a lot of my humor. But there's nothing better than feeling great, right? Yes. And you can make it your hobby of working on your health and your longevity. Yeah. You'll enjoy it. Yes. It shouldn't be a chore. It'll also directly affect the other things that you love because you will have more energy. Your life energy, Our vitality is. so important for anything you're doing, whether it's a creative thing or an intellectual thing like anything that you're doing. If you have more energy, you'll be able to apply more energy to that thing. It's that simple. You're building a bigger gas tank for yourself. You're building a larger engine. That's what you're doing. Exactly. Mentally, physically, you can do so much when you feel good. You jump out of it. If you wake up and you're tired, woozy, your eyes are puffy, that's not how it should be when you wake up. If you're getting, and sleep is important for longevity, of course, if you're getting good deep sleep, then you should wake up and you feel great. Yes. Yes. You don't even necessarily need a cup of coffee, but it's not bad if you have one. I like coffee. I'm not going to stop drinking it. I don't give a fuck what anybody says. Right. It's good. And I also like conflicting information. Some people say it's good for you. There's benefits. It's good for you. Come on. That's what I say. Oh, it really is. Anyone that says it doesn't read the-- Well, I would imagine an overabundance of caffeine is not good. Too much is not good, but that's true for everything. Too much salt will kill you. Yeah. It's not a pound of salt. You'll be dead in an hour. Right. And you can get away with very little sleep, actually, as long as it's deep sleep, because what it's doing is clearing out the misfolded proteins in your brain and the toxins. We know this, the glymphatic system. And if you get deep sleep for an hour, you're actually going to wake up much cleaner or healthier. And what I've been able to do with some work is figure out how to get deep sleep every night. Efficiency on these rings that say above 90 sometimes. How long do you say rings? Because you're wearing two-or-a-rings. Oh, or one-and-a-one. One-and-a-one. One-and-a-one. Okay. Why do you wear two different rings? Because when I've got two, neither of them is correct. No. The truth is, some of them are really good for sleep. The others are good for heart. And so I've got this one's my heart, and this is my sleep. What is the difference in the companies? Which ones? Which? You don't mind me saying who they are? No, I don't care. This is an aura that I want. Right. And then the thinner one is called ultra-human. Ultra-human. Yeah. And which one is good for what? Well, I find aura really good for sleep. That's their specialty. And then the heart for ultra-human. Like cardiac age. Oh, okay. So it's just like giving you data all the time. Yeah. And they're getting even better because they, I don't get paid by these companies. But I do like that they pop up with AI information now. Have you noticed that Dada Dada, or I noticed that you ate a meal last night that spiked your glucose? You know, and this one, I'm monitor on right now so I can see what's going on anyway. But yeah, they're becoming like a fucking monitored, bro. I am. Two rings and a patch. It's a. It's a hobby. It's a hobby. But you learn a lot. And I put one of these on my son and he stopped eating bad food for a long while. Really? Because he was just recognizing the impact of the health spot. It's good for kids. Now I wouldn't say slap it on a kid without pediatrician recommendation. But it was amazing what happened when he could see the crap that was going in his mouth was doing to his blood sugar. Really? It was amazing. I think it's a great learning tool if nothing else. Right, just to have actual data. I know a lot of people, it's changed their opinion on alcohol, particularly the oral ring when they look at their sleep. Because even just a couple of drinks before you go to bed, like a couple of drinks at dinner, and then you realize like, "Oh God, my sleep was all fucked up because of those drinks." Yeah. Lay off the metafinal, too, for me anyway. But yeah, some metafinal fucks with your sleep as well? Yeah. I have to work really hard to sleep well, there's quiet time, there's relaxation, the lights are dimmed, I think about a happy place, rather than work. I had to do that because for 50 years I was burning the candle at Olens and I was really burnt out and so I fixed that now. I don't worry. So are you one of those guys that like dims the lights in your house a couple hours before you go to bed? It's fine. You can stay off your phone. Yeah. All those stuff. I don't stay off my phone as much as I want to. You wear red light glasses or anything like blockers? I used to, I haven't found a big difference for myself, but interesting fact that isn't well known. If you block blue light during the day or just stay indoors, there's a guy in Japan who says that what happens is you get short-sightedness because the mice that lack the ability to sense violet light get myopia, short-sighted, and he's got a device that indoors you can shine this, but our modern world, the LEDs and being indoors means we barely get violet light and that would be, that would be so interesting if that's what's causing last half-to-work glasses. Wow. And he claims that people that live out in the countryside that see blue light all the time because they go out don't have as much need for glasses. That actually makes sense. Well, particularly like artificial light and then also light that's from a close source. Like one of the things that if I'm tired and I lay in bed and I try to read something online on my phone, it hurts my eyes. The room's dark and it irritates my eyes. Where it never irritates my eyes normally, but it's like at the end of the day, I guess I'm more fatigued. And you're trying to focus on screen? Yeah. So now think about that when people are doing it all day long, maybe doing it at work where you have to stand or stare at a computer monitor from three feet away or closer and then you're looking at your phone all the time or you're working from a tablet or you're watching television. It's like you're constantly staring at these light sources that are artificial. Yeah. And also keep in mind that the muscles have to focus, it's not naturally, you don't actually look as far. You actually, you relax, you see out there. Right. To look here, your muscles here have to be straining for hours and they get very tired and I guess eventually they age to a point where you cannot keep it up and sometimes I do this to see better though. It all makes sense if you think about it, particularly like if your eyes are accustomed to only focusing on things that are close. I mean, they would say about reading when people would have glasses, oh, you fucked up your vision reading, which I used to think it was nonsense, but I'm like, well, it kind of makes sense if you spend all day long focusing even though it's on a screen, you're spending all day long focusing on a book that's only a foot from your face. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. It's really inflexible, and I'm seeing this with my father. He's otherwise in perfect health at 87, which is amazing, but it's his eyes that are failing him. Maybe you should get him a red light bed. That's a great idea. Yeah. I'm going to do that. He's arriving tonight actually from Sydney. He's a kid. Yeah, I'm a red light bed, man, because I'm telling you there's not a thing that I've done that's impacted me in a more obvious way than that in terms of like something that's hugely important. Yeah, I'm going to do it. But I mean, he's into science. He's been taking NMN Resveratrol, metformin, exercising, he goes to the gym two or three times a week. Well, that's great. He's a role model at 87 with no diseases, no aches or pains, and he's traveling the world he was in Japan two weeks ago. Wow. Coming to Boston. That's so cool. I love hearing about people that are older that just keep on top of it and stay active and stay alive and enjoy life. Yeah. He's a great role model and what it shows is he was an average guy until he was in his sixties and he figured he was going to die in his seventies probably because everyone in my family dies young because we've got pretty bad genes, but he's just taken life by the horns and just is running with it and has not physically aged except for his eyes in the last 20 years. That's an exaggeration. That's not an exaggeration. Anyone who's seen him knows he walks, he moves, he travels, he does everything like he was when he was 40. That's where things like resistance exercises are so important because it maintains bone density, maintains muscle mass, maintains your ability to just get around and do things. That's the other reason to do that. I mean, you're going to be really strong when you're older and you won't fall and if you do fall, you'll bounce. You won't break a bone. And he's like that. He's been working out at the gym, mostly strength training, but balance as well. It's very important to maintain balance. He's better at the gym than me at 87. That's incredible. He knows how weak I am. Yeah, I got to go to the gym. How about next time, if you have me on, you're going to be buff. David, you're a trainer, you're in Massachusetts, there's a ton of trainers out there. Great. All right. It's a deal. We'll find you someone. Three days a week. That's all you need. The other days, you could do stuff elective, do stuff that you want. But three days a week, get a personal trainer and then have work out with them. You're on. All right. We'll let you know when it's going or you help me. I can hear though that there's probably a few million people right now screaming. David, just go to the lab. Forget about the gym. You need to help your lab work. It'll help everything. It'll help the amount of research you're able to do. You'll have more energy. You'll be more excited about things. I'm sure you've seen those MRI cross-sections of people's tissue where they take like a seven-year-old man who's sedentary versus a seven-year-old man who's a marathon runner. It's fucking extraordinary. I've seen my own. There's too much fat in the muscle. Gotta get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's really extraordinary when you see those images like those really bring it home. And the bone changes. Bone turns to fat too. Parts of the bone. Yeah. So you've got to have the strength training for sure. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah. A hundred percent. Strength training is, that's mandatory. Yeah. And then do you do a lot of aerobic exercises? Yes. Good. Yeah. I saw the training bike. the hypoxium machine that I just got.
all today. Yeah. The hypoxia thing, what it does is it replicates 14,000 feet above sea level. And you train in it. And it also has a heat element so you could ramp the heat up to 115 degrees. So 115 degrees and 14,000 feet above sea level. What's the matchy picture kind of stuff? Yeah, you're going to hell. That's what it is. It's straight to hell. It feels like it. But it should work, right? Yeah. The hypoxia is great for muscle. Yes. And for adaptation, that's the big thing. And my friend Roman who installed it, who owns one of the guys from the company, it's a very specific with this protocol, in terms of monitoring your heart rate, when to do it, when to push, how much time to spend and how you do it. And it's very scientific in terms of the application on athletes. Yeah. And that's my friend, Adam Greentree, turned me on to it, fell Australian. And he, he's a big hunter. It does a lot of mountain hunting. And he said, there's nothing he's ever done that's had more of an impact on his cardio. So it's been phenomenal. Sounds wonderful. Actually, there's a lot of science behind that. You probably know it. The best results are when people are either having too much oxygen or not enough. And you might say, well, that's weird. Why does it matter? Well, you, you got to get out of the comfort zone, or me, as we keep talking about. And there's a big study in Israel where they put people in these hyperbaric chambers. I've done that protocol. Yeah. Yeah. Sixteen. Sixty sessions of 90 minutes over 90 days. Yeah. Yeah. I have what you do. Yeah. Because the, the data's introvertible, better wound healing, better memory, increase in telomere length. Yeah. I saw that one. That's the Israel study. Yes. What I thought was interesting was when I went over there myself and sat in that thing, they made a joke over there in Israel, by the way. They said, this gas chamber here that were you going into made by Germans? I thought that's not a funny joke. Don't say that again. Anyway, I probably shouldn't have shared that. I did go into the chamber. And what I found out and was that they believe what I believe, which is it's not so much the high pressure that's good for you. It's the coming down that mimics hypoxia, which your room will mimic. So the lack of oxygen, or the perceived lack of oxygen from a high state is the benefit. Interesting. And that makes a lot of sense. You're going to grow new blood vessels just like Viagra is going to open things up. We actually had a paper 2012 that found that one of the supplements that I take, which everyone knows about NMN, could allow animals to grow new blood vessels by getting rid of a protein that accumulates with aging. The bottom line is we could mimic this lack of blood vessels with this pill, but by exercising it's the same. What I really believe, which is barely talked about in the medical establishment is that a major reason we get sick when we get older is lack of blood flow. It's really talked about right. Vascular dementia, second largest cause of dementia in the world, blood flow. And it's the easiest to reverse. You just do exercise or take one of these PD5 inhibitors Viagra. Or you take my stuff, which is NMN, which we think also works. Or all the above, which is probably the best approach. I'm two out of three. Hopefully soon three out of three. But yeah, you know, to protect your brain, which is the most important cause you don't want to be old and dementia, that's worse than anything. Keep the blood flowing in your body. Remember that blood flowing is important. Yes. Couldn't agree more. David, you're a treasure. I really appreciate you. Thank you for being here. You've been so kind. And thank you for getting the word out here about the great science that's going on. Oh, my pleasure, dude. I'm so happy that someone like you out there doing this. I mean, it's such an enormous benefit to people that are listening to the world and you're doing, you're literally doing God's work. We'll try to do more. Thank you very much. Lifespan.com is the website. Please, folks, if you're, you're so inclined, go donate. It'll really help. We'll change the world. David. Love you. Love you too. Thank you. Bye, everybody. [Music]
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
David Sinclair discusses his work on aging reversal, including the first human clinical trial using OSK genes to treat glaucoma, delivered via a virus-like capsule.
The OSK genes (three of four Yamanaka factors) can safely reboot cells to a younger state, restoring function without turning them into stem cells, and have shown success in mice for vision, liver, and joint repair.
A drink and pill cocktail, tested in mice, shows rejuvenation effects within four weeks, working through epigenetic reset (TET enzymes), and is being refined using AI to screen trillions of molecules.
Sinclair highlights lifestyle factors for longevity
He discusses potential future applications like regrowing hair, healing injuries, and even regrowing limbs, while acknowledging risks like bio-weapons and ethical concerns.
The conversation touches on GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) for weight loss and fasting, with Sinclair noting benefits but also rare risks like sudden blindness.
Sinclair and Rogan explore ancient civilizations and possible life extension, speculating on how longer lifespans could reshape society.
Sinclair encourages fasting and ketosis for mental clarity and cellular cleanup, and shares personal habits like taking low-dose tadalafil for health benefits.
Summary:
In this podcast episode, David Sinclair returns to discuss groundbreaking advances in longevity science. He reveals that his lab has moved from speculation to human trials, with the first patient receiving OSK gene therapy to treat glaucoma, delivered via a virus-like capsule injected into the eye. These genes, a subset of Yamanaka factors, can reset cells to a younger state, restoring function without causing cancer or loss of identity.
Sinclair reports that the trial is on target, with no adverse effects so far. He also describes a drink and pill cocktail that rejuvenates mice in four weeks, working by resetting epigenetic markers, and uses AI to screen a trillion molecules for a single drug candidate, completing in months what would take centuries. Beyond interventions, he emphasizes simple lifestyle changes—avoiding smoking, drinking, getting sleep, exercising, and fostering loving relationships—can extend life by 15 years, as stress and isolation accelerate aging.
He discusses the risks and benefits of GLP-1 drugs, noting their potential for weight loss but rare side effects like sudden blindness. Sinclair also touches on future possibilities like regrowing hair, healing injuries, and even limbs, while acknowledging ethical and security concerns, including bio-weapon risks. The conversation ends with a playful agreement for Rogan to train Sinclair, blending personal health advice with cutting-edge science.
FAQs
OSK is a set of three genes that can safely reprogram cells to a younger state without turning them into stem cells. It reboots the cell's backup copy of youth, restoring function.
The first human trial is for glaucoma, injecting trillions of virus-like capsules containing OSK genes into the eye. It is FDA-approved and designed to restore vision in patients.
In lab mice, a drinkable cocktail with three components rejuvenates them within four weeks, improving physical and mental function. Human trials are not yet underway.
AI analyzes vast datasets and helps screen trillions of molecules for potential drugs, reducing years of work to months. It also aids in identifying biological mechanisms of aging.
The five basics are: don't smoke, don't drink, get enough rest, exercise, and maintain a reliable, loving relationship. These can extend life by about 15 years.
Research suggests that OSK genes can regrow nerves and heal joints. Recent studies show potential for regrowing fingertips, indicating the body retains instructions for regeneration.
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