2021-06-07 - Interview Dr. David Sinclair - Lex Fridman Podcast - Extending the Human Lifespan Beyond 100 Years

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• Length: 1:41:33
• Interviewee: Dr. David Sinclair

Transcript

Introduction

0:00	the following is a conversation with david sinclair he is a professor in the department of genetics at harvard
0:06	and co-director of the paul f glenn center for the biology of aging at harvard medical school he's the
0:12	author of the book lifespan and co-founder of several biotech companies he works on
0:18	turning age into an engineering problem and solving it driven by a vision of a world where
0:24	billions of people can live much longer and much healthier lives quick mention of our sponsors
0:30	on it clear national instruments and i simply safe and lino'd
0:36	check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that longevity
0:41	research challenges us to think how science and engineering will change society
0:47	imagine if you can live a hundred thousand years even under controlled conditions like in a spaceship say
0:53	then suddenly a trip to alpha centauri that is uh 4.37 light years away
0:58	takes a single human lifespan and on the psychological maybe even philosophical level as the horizons of
1:06	death drifts farther into the distance how will our search for meaning change does meaning require
1:12	death or does it merely require struggle reprogramming our biology will require
1:18	us to delve deeper into understanding the human mind and the robot mind
1:23	both of these efforts are as exciting of a journey as i can imagine this is the lex friedman podcast and
1:30	here is my conversation with david sinclair i usually feel like the

Staying young at heart

1:35	same person when i was 12 like when i right now as i think about myself i feel
1:42	like exactly the same person that i was when i was 12 and yet
1:48	um i am getting older both body and mind and still feel like time hasn't passed
1:53	at all do you um feel this tension in yourself that you're the same person
1:59	and yet you're aging yeah i have this tension that that i'm still a kid but that helps in my career
2:05	scientists need to have a wonder about the world and you don't want to grow up 12 year olds and even younger
2:11	i would say 6 7 year olds i've still got that boy in me and i can look at things it's a gift i
2:17	think that i can see things for the first time if i choose to and then explain them as i would to a 60
2:22	or 6 year old because i i am that mentally but on the other hand i'm getting older right i run a lab of 20 people at harvard i've
2:29	got a book i've got uh you know science to do companies to run and so i have to
2:34	and on most days just pretend to be a grown up and and be mature but i definitely don't feel that way
2:40	there's uh there's something i really appreciated in opening your book you talked about your grandmother
2:46	and on this kind of theme on this kind of topic uh she first of all had a big influence
2:53	on you my grandma mother had a big influence on me he also mentioned this poem by the
3:00	author of winnie the pooh allen alexander milne maybe i can
3:05	read it real quick because i on the topic of being children when i was one i had just begun when i
3:12	was two i was nearly new when i was three i was hardly me when i was four i was not much more when
3:19	i was five i was just alive but now i am six i am as clever as clever so i think i'll
3:26	be six now forever and ever um so this idea of
3:34	being six and staying six forever being youthful being curious being
3:39	childlike this and other things what uh
3:44	influence has your grandmother had in your thinking about life about death about uh love
3:53	yeah i was getting misty-eyed as you read that because that that poem was read to me very often if not every day by my
3:59	grandmother who partially raised me and she was as much a bohemian as an
4:04	artist philosopher and she's one of those people that wouldn't talk about the little things
4:09	she said i hate small talk don't talk to me about politics or the weather yeah talk to me about
4:15	human beings and culture so i was raised on that and this poem was one that she read to me
4:20	often because she knew that the mind of a child is precious
4:26	it's honest uh it's pure and she grew up during the second world war and in
4:32	hungary and budapest witnessed the worst of humanity she was trying to save a whole group of jewish friends in her
4:40	apartment saw what happened after the world war which was um there was the the russians were in
4:47	control and locals weren't necessarily treated well if they were rebellious which she was
4:52	and then there was the revolution in 56 which she was part of and had to escape the country so she saw what can happen
4:58	when humans do their worst and her words to me expressed in part through that poem was
5:05	david always stay young and innocent and have wonder about the world
5:11	and then do your best to make humanity the best it can be and that's who i am that's what i live
5:18	for that's what i get up in the morning to do is to leave the world a better place and show to whoever's watching us
5:23	whether it's aliens or some future human historian that we can do better than we did in the 20th century

Bringing people back to life

5:31	you know we mentioned offline this idea of bringing people back to life through um through artificial
5:36	intelligence sort of i don't know if you've seen videos of basically animating people back to life
5:45	meaning uh whether it's for me personally i've been working on specifically about albert einstein
5:51	but also alan turing isaac newton and richard feynman
5:56	and it's it's an opportunity to bring people that meant a lot to others in the world and uh
6:04	animate them and be able to have a conversation with them at first to try to visually
6:12	visually explore the the full richness of character that they had
6:17	as they struggle with the ideas of the modern age sort of it's less about bringing back their mind and more
6:24	bringing back the the visual quirks that made them who they are and then maybe in the future it's using
6:31	the textual the visual the the the video the audio data to actually
6:37	compress down the person for who they are and be able to generate text there's a few
6:42	companies there's replica which is a chat engine that was born out of the idea of bringing
6:48	the the founder uh lost her friend uh to uh he he got ran over by a car
6:55	and the initial reason she founded the company was trying to just have a conversation with
7:02	her friend she trained a machine learning uh natural language system
7:07	on the text that they exchanged with each other and try she had a conversation with him sort of after he was gone uh and it's
7:14	very the the conversation was very trivial it was obvious that it's uh you know a ai agent but it
7:21	gave her solace it made her actually feel really good and that's the way i wonder if it's
7:27	possible to bring back people that are that means something to us personally not just einstein but
7:34	people that we've lost and in that way achieve a kind of small artificial
7:41	immortality i don't know if you think about this kind of stuff uh well i'd definitely think about a lot of things
7:46	that that one's a really good one there's a great black mirror episode about the the wife who brings back the
7:51	the boyfriend or husband i think one of the challenges with bringing back richard feynman would be to to capture his sense of humor but that
7:58	would be awesome um but yeah bringing back loved ones would be great especially if uh if it's you're they're young and uh they die
8:06	early though it may hold you back from moving on that's another thing that could happen as a negative
8:11	but i think that's great and i also think that it's going to be possible especially when we're recording some of
8:16	us every aspect of our lives whether it's our face or uh things we see right
8:22	eventually one day everything we see can be recorded and then you can you can build somebody's experience and
8:29	and thoughts uh speech and and you will have replicas of everybody
8:34	um at least digitally and physically you could do that too one day but that that's a good idea especially
8:40	because there are people that i'd like to meet and i think it's easier than building a time machine one person i'd love to meet
8:45	is benjamin franklin really well i wouldn't go back in time um i would but i'd prefer to bring him
8:52	into the future and say can you believe we have this thinking machine in our pockets now
8:58	and he just see the look on his face as to where humanity has come because i think of him as a modern guy
9:03	that just was before his time yeah so you're you're thinking benjamin franklin the scientist
9:08	not benjamin flanken the political thing because he'd be very upset with congress right now right so maybe talk to him about science
9:15	and technology not uh not politics or maybe just don't get him on twitter because he'll be very
9:20	upset with human civilization you know i wonder what their personalities are like isaac newton it does seem complicated to
9:28	figure out what their personality is like even friedrich nietzsche who i also thought about feynman is
9:34	we just have enough video where we get the full kind of um i mean it shows you
9:41	how important it is to get not the official kind of book level presentation of a
9:47	human but the authentic the full spectrum of humanity you mentioned collecting data
9:53	about a person collecting the whole thing the whole of life the ups and downs the embarrassing stuff the
9:59	beautiful stuff not just the things that's condensed into a book and then with finding you start to see that a little bit
10:05	through conversations you start to see peaks of like that genius and then through stories about him from
10:12	others and then certainly you uh the sad thing about alan turing for example
10:17	is there's very little if any uh recording of him in fact i haven't
10:22	been able to find recording allegedly there's supposed to be a recording of him doing some kind of radio broadcast but i
10:29	haven't been able to find anything and so that that's that's that's truly sad that it feels like it makes you
10:36	realize how the upside how nice it is to collect
10:41	data about a person uh to capture that person there's that's the upside of the
10:47	modern internet age the digital age that that information uh yeah creates a kind of immortality
10:55	the and then you can choose to highlight the best parts of the person maybe throw away the ugly parts and celebrate them even after
11:02	they're gone so that's a really interesting opportunity you um you've also mentioned to me offline

Wearables and tracking health data

11:07	that you're really excited about all the different wearables and all the different ways we can collect
11:13	information about our bodies about uh well the whole thing is what's most
11:19	exciting to you in terms of collecting the the biological uh data about a human being
11:27	well so i'm a biologist i find animals and humans as machines very interesting it's one of
11:34	the reasons i didn't become an engineer or a surgeon i wanted to understand how we actually are built
11:40	and so i think a lot about machines merging with humans and the first of
11:47	that are the bio wearables and so i talked a lot about this i wrote about it um in life span the book and
11:53	pictured a future where you would be monitored constantly so that you wouldn't suddenly have a
11:58	heart attack you'd know that was coming or you you wouldn't go to the doctor and they don't know if it's
12:04	you need an antibiotic or not um long term how old are you how to fix
12:09	things what should you eat what should you take what should you do these devices i predicted would be
12:15	smarter better educated than you than your physician and would augment them and then there'd be a human that would
12:20	just tick off to see if that it's correct and they approve i also was predicting in the book that
12:27	we would have video conferences with our doctors and that medicines would be delivered initially by courier but eventually by
12:33	drones and get it to you sometimes in an emergency and that we could even have pills that were synthesized or delivered
12:40	um in your kitchen and combined certainly what's amazing about that is that what
12:46	are we now two years since the book came out even less and that future is basically here
12:51	already covered uh 19 accelerates accelerated that incredibly
12:56	so where we're at now in society is if you if you want to pay for it you can have a blood test that will detect cancer 10 20 years earlier than it would
13:03	before it forms a tumor you can of course do your genome very cheaply for less than a hundred dollars now
13:10	there are bio wearables already i wear this ring from aura that i have number of years of data i've
13:17	been doing blood tests for the last 12 years with a company called inside tracker which i consult for and so i have all of that
13:23	data as well and there's 34 different parameters on my testosterone my blood glucose my
13:28	inflammation and i use all that data to of course i wear a watch that that
13:33	measure things as well i use that data to keep my body in optimal shape so i'm
13:39	now 51 and according to those parameters i'm at least as good as someone in their early
13:44	40s and i if i really work at it i can get my biochemistry down to early to mid 30s though i like to you
13:52	know now eat a little dessert once in a while so that's the future we're in right now
13:58	anyone can do what i just said but in the very near future just in the next few years
14:04	you can be wearing wearables so i'm currently wearing a little what's called a bio sticker uh this one
14:12	i just put on last night uh it's about an inch long a few millimeters yeah
14:18	people just listening it's uh san diego's chest yeah it's just the how does it attach it's just kind of
14:24	it sticks on sticks yeah so on one side you have an on button that you press the lights come on flashes four times
14:29	it's good to go it immediately syncs to your phone and this one uh the it's called a bio button
14:36	a nice name and there's a there's another one that i have that i haven't tried yet that does ekg on your heart um this is
14:41	mainly for doctors to monitor patients that go home after a heart attack or surgery but that's medical grade fda approved
14:47	device so there will be a day in fact it's already here that doctors are using these to get patients
14:53	to go home and save a week in hospital two thousand dollars at least for each patient
15:00	that's massive safe um savings for the hospital but ultimately what i'm excited about is
15:06	a future that isn't that far off where everybody certainly in developed
15:11	countries eventually these will cost a few cents and rechargeable the only cost will be the software subscription that can be monitored
15:17	constantly and to give an idea what this is measuring me at a thousand times a second is my vibrations as i speak
15:26	my orientation it can already has told me this morning how i slept where i slept what side i slept on
15:33	uh we've got sneezing coughing body temperature heart rate heart of other parameters of
15:40	the heart that would indicate heart health these these data are being used to now
15:47	to predict sickness so eventually we'll have just in the next
15:52	year or so the ability to predict whether something or diagnose whether something is pneumonia
15:58	or just a rhinovirus that can be treated or not right this is really going to not just
16:05	revolutionize medicine but i think extend lives dramatically because if i have if i'm going to have a
16:10	heart attack next week and that's possible this device should know that and i'll be in hospital before i even have it
16:16	maybe you can talk a little bit about inside tracker because i saw that there's some really cool things in there
16:22	like it actually so maybe you can talk about i guess that you're collecting blood and to give it the data so
16:30	and it has like basic recommendations on how to improve your life so we're not just talking about diseases
16:36	right like anticipating having a particular disease but it's almost like guiding your trajectory to
16:41	life how to whether it's extend your your life or just live a more fulfilling like improve the
16:47	quality of life i suppose this is the right way to say it what how does inside tracker work uh
16:52	what the heck is it because i thought there was also pretty cool yeah what is it is it something other people can use
16:58	you can definitely use it uh you can sign up it's consumer it's like a company consumer facebook
17:03	company it is yes uh and i also want to democratize the
17:08	ability to to just take a mouth swab eventually we don't need to have a blood test necessarily but for now it's a blood test and and
17:15	you'd go to a lab core request in the u.s it's also available overseas you can upload your own data
17:21	for a minimal cost and get the algorithms the ai in the background to take that data plot
17:28	where you are against others in your age group as in terms of health and longevity by your age they call it no
17:34	inner age but also it provides recommendations and this isn't just a bunch of bs it sounds like
17:40	it might be to say i'll go eat this or go to that restaurant and order that but it's actually based on
17:46	they basically this company has entered hundreds now it would be thousands of scientific
17:51	papers into their database and hundreds of thousands of human data points and they have
17:56	tens of thousands of individuals that have been tracked over time and anonymously that data is used to say
18:02	what works and what doesn't if you eat that what works if you take that supplement what works and i was a co-author on a paper that
18:09	showed that the recommendations for food and supplements um
18:15	was better than the leading drug for type 2 diabetes that's so cool the idea that you can
18:20	connect like skipping the human having to do this work you can connect the scientific papers
18:27	almost like meta-analysis of the science connected to the individual data
18:32	and then based on that sort of connect your data to whatever the proper group is within the
18:38	whatever the scientific paper is to make the suggestion of how how like how that work
18:44	applies to your life and then that ultimately maps to like a recommendation what you should do with your life
18:51	like it all like this giant system that ultimately recommends you should drink more coffee or less
18:58	right and and we'll have the genome in there as well you can upload that yeah uh and so so these programs will know us
19:04	way better than we do and and our doctors as well the idea of going to a doctor once a year for an
19:09	annual checkup and having you know males get a finger up their butt and uh you know you cough that that to me is
19:15	a joke that's medieval medicine and that's very soon going to be seen as medieval
19:21	yeah it's um to me as a computer science person it's always upsetting to go to the
19:28	doctor and just look at him and like realize you know nothing about me
19:33	like you you're you're you're making your like opinions based on like it is very valuable
19:40	years of intuition building about basic symptoms but you're just like it is medieval
19:45	they're very good at it in fact doctors in medieval times are probably damn good at working with very little
19:53	but the thing is i'd rather pref for a doctor that doesn't really know
19:59	what they're doing but has a huge amount of data to work with well you're right and many of my good
20:04	friends are doctors i work at hard so i'm not against the profession at all yeah but i think that
20:10	they need just as much help as anyone else does we wouldn't drive a car without a dashboard we wouldn't think of it so why
20:16	would doctors do the same if we could we step back to the big profound philosophical

How to solve aging

20:22	both tragic and beautiful question about age how and why do we age is it uh
20:30	from an engineering perspective he said you like the biological machine is that a feature or a bug of the
20:35	biological machine it is both a bug and a feature uh evolutionary speaking we
20:43	only live as long as we need to to replace ourselves efficiently if you're a mouse you're only going to
20:48	live two and a half years three years you're probably going to die of starvation predation freezing in the winter so they they divert most
20:56	of their resources to reproducing rapidly but they don't put a lot of energy into preserving their soma which
21:02	is their body conversely a baleen type of whale a bowhead whale in particular will live
21:08	hundreds of years because they're at the top of the food chain and they can live as long as they want so they breed slowly and build a body
21:14	that lasts we're somewhere in between because we've you know we've really only just come out of the savannas where we
21:19	could be picked off by a cat we were pretty wimpy going back six million years ago
21:25	uh so we we actually need to evolve quicker than evolution will and that's
21:30	why we can use our oversized brains and intuition to give us what evolution
21:36	not only didn't give us but took away from us you know we're pathetic look at our bodies these arms if any of us even the
21:42	strongest person in the world went in a cage with a chimpanzee the chimp could knock that person's head off no question so we're pathetic so we
21:48	need to engineer ourselves to be healthier and longer lived so getting to aging we we can do better
21:55	right whales do way better we're trying to learn how whales do that and if you ask really anybody in the
22:02	field now professor they'll say there are eight or nine hallmarks of aging which are really it's
22:08	a it's a word for causes of aging so that you probably have heard of some of these your
22:13	listeners will have a loss of telomeres the ends of the chromosomes like their little
22:19	ends of um shoelaces that kind of thing they get too short cells stop dividing becomes senescent
22:24	they they become they put out what are called mitogens that cause cancer and inflamma inflammatory molecules that's
22:31	another aspect of aging cellular senescence another one is loss of the energetic so mitochondria the
22:36	battery packs wind down there's a whole bunch stem cells
22:41	proteostasis well these are our achilles heels that i'm talking about that are common amongst all life forms
22:47	really but if you wanted me to jump to the chase as to where what is the upstream defining factor if
22:54	we boil it down what do we get so most biologists would say you can't boil it down
22:59	it's too complex i would say you can boil it down to an equation which is the preservation of information
23:05	and lost due to entropy i.e noise and that is the basis of my research
23:12	it originally came out of discoveries in yeast cells where i went to mit in the 1990s you studied
23:17	bread i kind of did i studied the uh the makers of bread a little yeast called
23:24	saccharomyces cerevisiae which at the time was one of the hottest excuse the pun uh organisms to work on yes
23:30	but they we we figured out in the lab why yeast cells get old and found genes that control that
23:36	process and made them live longer which was an amazing four years of my life
23:42	one of those genes had a name with an acronym sir2 now the two is irrelevant
23:49	the s-i-r is important and the most important letter out of all of those three is i which stands for information silent
23:57	information regulator number two when you put more copies of that gene in just put in one more copy
24:02	the yeast cells lived 30 longer and suppressed the cause of aging which was the dysregulation of information in the
24:08	cell and then so fast forward to now i've been looking in humans and mice because they live
24:15	shorter and cheaper to study where the loss of information in our bodies is a root cause of aging
24:22	and i think it is your boldness in viewing biology in this way is
24:28	fascinating because that also leads to a kind of
24:34	uh it's almost like allows for a theory of aging like like you could boil it
24:41	down to a single equation and it leads to a perhaps a metric that allows you to optimize
24:47	aging sort of in the fight against entropy to figure out which mechanisms like you
24:53	said the the silent information regulator which mechanisms allow you to preserve information
24:58	now without like without injecting noise without without creating entropy without
25:04	creating degradation of that information for some reason converting biology
25:11	which i thought was mostly impossible into an engineering problem feels like it makes it amenable to
25:18	optimization to solving problems to creating technology that can
25:23	whether that's genetic engineering or ai it makes it uh possible to uh
25:29	create the technology that would improve the the degradation of information and aging
25:36	is there more concrete ways you think about the kind of information we want to preserve and also is there good ideas about
25:45	regulators of that information about ways to prevent the distortion and degradation
25:52	of that information right so that we have some information regulated genes in our bodies we have seven of them
25:58	uh certain one through seven they're called and we found in in mice one way to slow down the loss of
26:03	information is to just give more of these um to up regulate these genes so we we
26:09	made a mouse that has more of this so t1 gene turned it on and that slowed down the aging of the brain
26:15	and preserved their information now what information am i talking about you might ask well again you can simplify biology
26:21	there are two types of information in the cell primarily the one we all read about and know about is the dna the
26:28	genome and that's base four information atcg the four chemicals that make up the various
26:34	sequences of the genome billions of letters and that also degrades over time but
26:40	what's been fascinating is that we find that that information is pretty much intact
26:45	in old animals and people you can clone a dog one of my friends in l.a just cloned his dog three times
26:50	so this is doable right it means that the genome can be intact but what's the other type of information
26:56	it's the epigenome the regulators of the genetic information
27:01	and physically that's really just how the dna is wrapped up or looped out for the cell to access it
27:06	and read it so it's similar to an excuse this analogy but it's a good one um a compact disc or
27:13	a dvd those pits in the foil are the digital information that's the genome
27:19	and the epigenome is the reader of that information and in in a different cell you'd read different
27:24	music different songs different symphonies and that's what gets laid down when we're
27:30	in the womb and that gives makes a skin skin cell forever a skin cell and not a brain cell tomorrow
27:36	thank god otherwise our brains wouldn't work very well but over time what we see is that the brain cells start to look more
27:41	like skin cells and the kidney cells start to look more like liver cells and they what we call x differentiate
27:48	this is a term that we use in my lab but isn't yet widely used but we needed a term to explain this and that those
27:54	that process of x differentiation the loss of the reader of the the cd or the dvd
28:01	we liken that to scratches on the dvd so that the reader cannot
28:07	fully access the information now we can slow down the scratches as i mentioned we can turn on these genes we
28:13	can even put in molecules into the cell or even eat them and turn on those pathways which
28:19	which my father and i have been trying to do for about a decade to slow things down but the question
28:25	that i've had is is there a repository of information still in the body
28:30	because anyone who knows anything about the loss of information or even has tried to copy a cassette tape or
28:36	photocopy or xerox anything knows that over time you you lose that information irreparably
28:41	so i've been looking for a backup copy inspired largely by claude shannon's work at mit as well in the 1940s
28:49	his theory mathematical theory of communication is just brilliant and so i've been looking for what he called the observer
28:55	which is the backup copy we today might call that the tcpi pro tcp ip protocol of the internet that
29:01	stores information in case it doesn't make it to your computer it will fill in the gaps and we've been
29:07	spending about the last five years to try and find if there really is a backup copy in the body to reset the epigenome and polish those
29:14	scratches away that's incredible so finding the backup so whenever there are too many scratches
29:20	pile up you can just write a new version like right that not every new version
29:26	but go to the backup and restore it right that's really all we're talking about it's not that hard
29:32	once you know the trick and for people that actually remember uh like dvds and scratches on them how
29:39	frustrating it is that that's a brilliant metaphor for aging
29:45	and then the the reader is uh is the thing that skips and then it
29:51	could destroy your experience the richness of the experience that is uh listening to your favorite song
29:57	right but in biology it's even worse because you'll lose your memory your kidneys will fail you'll you'll get diabetes your heart will fail
30:03	and we call that aging and age-related diseases so it's it most people forget that
30:09	diseases that we get when we get old are 80 to 90 caused by aging and we've been trying to
30:14	fix things with band-aids after they occur without even generally talking about the root cause of the problem
30:21	is there um the scratches do those come from

Why do we age?

30:28	are those programmed or are they failures meaning is it so if it's
30:35	by design then there's like a encoded timeline schedule that the body's just
30:42	on purpose degrading the whole thing and then there's the just the wear and tear of like the scratches
30:48	and a disc that happen uh through time which which one is it that's the source of aging
30:53	uh it's more akin to wear and tear there isn't a program um getting back to evolution there's no selection for aging we're not
31:01	designed to age we just live as long as we need to and then we're at the whim of entropy basically second law of
31:06	thermodynamics stuff falls apart we live a bit longer than age 40 only because there are robust resilient
31:12	systems but eventually they fail as well current limit to the human lifespan where they completely fail is 122.
31:19	uh but so it's and i but i don't like to think of it as wear and tear because there's there's two aspects to it there's a
31:26	system that's built to keep us alive when we're young but actually ghost comes back to bite us
31:32	as we get older and we call this this issue antagonistic pleiotropy what's good for
31:38	you when you're young can cause problems when you're older so we've been looking what what is the
31:44	cause of the main causes of the noise and we've come we found two of them definitively
31:49	the first one is broken chromosomes when a chromosome breaks the cell has to panic because that's
31:55	either going to cause a cancer or kill the cell there's only two outcomes it's pretty much a problem uh and so what the cell
32:02	does is it reorganizes the epigenome in a massive way
32:07	what that leads to is think of it as a tennis match or a ping pong game the proteins are the bowls and they
32:14	now leave where they should be which is regulating the genes that make the cell type whatever it is
32:19	and they have to they have a dual function they actually go to the break the chromosome will break and fix that
32:25	and then they come back you might ask well why is it set up that way well it's a beautiful system it coordinates gene
32:31	expression the control systems with the repair you want them coordinated problem is as we get older this ping
32:37	pong game some of the balls get lost they don't come back to where they originally started uh and that's what we think is the main
32:44	noise for aging and we've also the other cause of aging that we found is is cell stress
32:50	we damage nerves and they age rapidly so you that's the other issue there's probably others
32:56	smoking chemicals for example we know accelerates biological age pretty dramatically
33:02	but the question is can you slow that down or can you reset them to get those ping-pong balls to go back to where they
33:07	originally started in the game and we think we've found a way to do that what can you give me hints
33:13	uh whose fault is it and the ball's not coming back is it the proteins themselves like are they are they starting again
33:20	i've been obsessed with the protein folding problem from the ai perspective so is it the proteins or is it something else well we know who hits the balls
33:27	um and recruits them so that the brake uh is recognized by proteins who send
33:33	out a signal uh through phosphorylation is typical way cells talk
33:38	to other proteins and that recruits those repair factors those ping-pong balls to
33:44	the brake so the cell's actively doing this to try and help itself but we don't know
33:50	who's to blame for them not coming back um that could just be a flaw in the
33:56	quote-unquote design i don't think that there's something saying well one percent of you you bowls
34:02	proteins never go back i just think it's hard to reset a system that's constantly changing
34:07	we have in our bodies close to a trillion dna breaks every day
34:12	and imagine that over 80 years what damage that does to our epigenomic information now we know that this is well i should
34:20	we never know anything in biology but we have strong evidence that this is true because we can
34:25	mess with animals we can create dna breaks and tickle them with a few breaks maybe
34:31	raise it by threefold over background levels of normal breakage and if we're right those mice
34:37	should get old and they do we can actually we've we've created these breaks in a way that's
34:43	titratable we can it's like a rheostat we can send it to 11. you know i drove my tesla here i'm a big
34:49	fan of of spinal tap two going to 11. if we go to 11 we can make a mouse old in a matter
34:54	of months we prefer to go to a level of about four and it gets old in 10 months
35:00	but it's definitely old it's got all of the hallmarks of aging it's got diseases it looks old its skin
35:06	is old it's got gray hair but importantly we can now measure age by looking at the scratches we can look at the epigenome we can
35:12	measure it and use machine learning to give us a number and those mice are 50 older than normal
35:19	so you can replicate the aging process in a controlled way you can all i mean in a way that you i mean you
35:24	could accelerate it in a controlled way and measure how much
35:29	exactly it's aging and that gives you step one of a two-step process to when you can
35:35	then figure out what how can we reverse this and now we're reversing those mice is there a good
35:41	i love what you said i mean in biology you really don't know it's it's such a beautiful mess uh
35:48	is is there is there ideas how to do that is that on the genetic engineering level is that uh

Genetic reset switch that reverses aging

35:55	like what can you mess with is it going to the trying to discover the backup copies
36:02	and restoring from them like what's if it's it's possible to convert it into natural language words
36:08	what are the ideas here what is the observer and how do we contact it exactly what's the observer and how do
36:13	you contact or if there's other ideas how to reverse the the the boss getting
36:19	lost process yeah well you you can slow it down slow it but we found a reset switch recently we
36:26	just published this in the december 2020 issue of nature
36:32	and what we found is that there are three embryonic genes that we could put into the adult
36:38	animal to reset the age of the tissues and it only takes four to eight weeks to work
36:43	well and we can take a blind mouse that's lost its vision due to aging neurons aren't working well towards the
36:49	brain reset those neurons back to a younger age and now the mice can see again these
36:55	three genes are famous actually because they're a set of four genes discovered by shinya yamanaka who won
37:01	the nobel prize in 2016 for discovering that those four genes when turned on
37:07	at high levels in adult cells can generate stem cells and this is i think well
37:13	known now that we can create stem cells from adult tissue but what wasn't known is can you partially take age back without becoming
37:20	a tumor or generating a stem cell in the eye which would be a disaster and the answer is yes there is a system
37:25	in the body that can take the age of a cell back to a certain point but no further safely and reset the age
37:33	and uh we're now using that to reset the age of the brain of those mice that we age prematurely
37:39	and they're getting their ability to learn back this is really exciting right like
37:44	what's uh what's the downside of this well the downside is if you overdo it and you don't get it right
37:50	uh you might cause tumors but we do we do it very carefully and we also know
37:55	that in the eye it's very safe yeah we also injected these we deliver them by viruses so
38:02	we can control where and when they get turned on and in this paper we've published that
38:08	if we put high levels in the mouse into their veins throughout the body they don't get cancer for over a year
38:14	so i'm so optimistic that we're going into human studies in less than two years from now is there

AI in biology

38:20	a place where ai can help sorry to inject one of the things i'm
38:27	very excited about i'm passionate about so uh deep uh google deep mind
38:33	recently had a big breakthrough with alpha fold two but also half a fold two years ago with um
38:41	achieving sort of uh state-of-the-art performance on the protein folding
38:47	problem single protein folding but it also paints a hopeful picture of
38:52	what's possible to do in terms of simulating the folding of proteins but also simulating biological systems
38:59	through ai is there something to you combined with this brilliant work on
39:05	the biology side that you're hopeful about where ai can be a tool to help where isn't that a
39:11	tool and if you're not using ai right now in biology you're getting left behind we use it all the time we're using it to generate these
39:16	biological clocks to be able to read those scratches we're using it to predict the folding of
39:23	proteins so we can target molecules and modulate their activity we're using it to assemble
39:28	genomes of different species what else we use it to predict the longevity of a
39:35	mouse based on how it reacts to certain things hearing eyesight generally frailty so we
39:41	have we just put out a paper last year on that um the other thing we can use it for which
39:46	is a little off the track here but we use it for predicting which microorganisms are in your body
39:53	actually not predicting telling you so our daughter natalie was infected with
39:59	lyme disease a few years ago almost went blind from it and the test took four days and i thought
40:05	just give me the dna for my spinal fluid i'll go tell you what's in it if it's lyme disease or not they refused and so at that point i said
40:11	this has to be done better so i've started a company that now can take a sample of any
40:16	part of your body it's typically done now with transplant liver transplant patients to detect
40:22	viruses that come out of their organs but that's that's another area that ai is extremely
40:27	important for um i i think if you're not in five years if you're not using
40:33	you know deep learning you've got a problem because the amount of data that we generate now as biologists
40:38	is just terabytes can be terabytes per week it'll eventually be terabytes per day and then we just go from there and i
40:44	actually have trouble recruiting enough bioinformaticians a lot of our work is
40:49	now just number crunching a part of that is collecting the data

Health data

40:55	which is kind of something we've talked a little bit about but is there something you can say
41:00	about how we can like can collect more and more data not just on the one person level
41:07	like for you to understand your like various markers but to create
41:14	huge data sets to understand how we can detect certain pathogens detect certain
41:21	properties characteristics of whether it's aging or all the other ways the human body can fail
41:27	it seems like with the with biology there's a kind of privacy concerns that well actually not
41:34	privacy concerns it's almost like regulation that kind of prevents like hospitals and
41:39	sharing data um you know i'm not sure exactly how to say it but it
41:45	seems like when you look at autonomous vehicles people are much more willing to share data
41:50	when you look at human biology system people are much less willing to share data is there a hopeful path forward where we can
41:57	share more and more data at a large scale that ultimately ends up helping us
42:02	understand the human body and then treat problems with the human body so we are right in the middle
42:08	we're living through what's going to be seen as one of the biggest revolutions in human health through the gathering of data about our
42:15	bodies and 20 years ago people didn't want to go on social media they're worried about it now
42:20	you have to if you're a kid that's for sure same with medical records these are
42:25	becoming all digitized and and expanded ultimately we're going to
42:31	even if we don't want to have to be monitored there's going to be a court case that i
42:37	bet two three years from now someone's going to say how come my father died from a heart attack you had these biosensors 20 bucks
42:44	and you didn't use it lawsuit right there and suddenly all hospitals have to give you one of these there will be a
42:49	reversal like to where it's your fault if you don't collect the data that's brilliant
42:55	that's and that's absolutely right i mean that's absolutely right that's the frustration
43:01	i feel when going to the doctor is like you're it's almost negligent
43:08	to not collect the data because you're making if there's something really wrong with me
43:13	and you're making decisions based on very few tests that's almost negligent when you have
43:19	the opportunity to collect a huge amount more data well like let me tell you something yeah like the
43:25	i've got this inside tracker data for for myself over a decade and you'd think my doctor would roll his
43:31	eyes at this oh he's gone to a consumer company blah blah blah i had my first checkup in a year with
43:36	him through video conference and he was running
43:42	blind he really didn't know what was going on with me he asked the usual things how am i sleeping how am i eating these
43:48	kind of usual things and i said well i've got new tests back from inside tracker and he said
43:54	great i'd love to see them so i share screen and we look at the graphs look at the data
43:59	and he's loving it because he cannot order these tests willy-nilly so i said well let's order a
44:06	hba1c blood glucose levels because i'm very interested in that that tracks with longevity and he says well
44:12	i have no reason to order that do you have a family history no uh are you have any symptoms of
44:18	diabetes no well i can't order the test i almost wanted to reach through the computer and strangle him um
44:23	but instead you know i i pay a little bit to get these tests done and then he looks at them so that's now the way consumer health is
44:30	going is that you can get better data than your doctor can and but they like you to do that quick human question maybe you can
44:36	educate me i've i think doctors sometimes have a little bit of an ego
44:42	i understand that the doctor is super experienced a lot of things but this is a fundamental question of human
44:48	variability like i know a lot of specific details about like um i mean depending of course what we're
44:54	talking about but there's a i bring a lot of knowledge and if i have data with me then i have
44:59	like several orders of magnitude more knowledge and i think there's an aspect to where the doctor has to
45:06	put their expert hat like take it off and actually be a curious
45:13	open-minded person and study and look at that data do you think it's possible to sort of
45:18	change the culture of the medical system to where the doctors are almost as you said are excited to see the data
45:25	or that's already happening it's really happening now we've probably lost the last generation um that they're no hopers but
45:32	so i teach at harvard medical school and they're excited about this they're excited about aging which is a
45:37	new aspect to medicine oh wow we can do something about that and then yeah all this data what do we
45:43	do with it there's still the traditional pathology and all that stuff which they need to know but time will change their
45:50	their uh mindset i'm not worried about that and like we were discussing this isn't a
45:56	question of if it's just a matter of when and it's you know i have a front row seat on all of this
46:02	i had breakfast with with the ceo who uh is making this happen uh just
46:07	yesterday i can tell you for sure that most people have no idea that this revolution
46:13	is occurring and is happening so quickly uh if you're running a hospital and you can save two thousand dollars per
46:20	cardiac patient what are you gonna do you have to use it otherwise you know the hospital down the road's
46:25	gonna be beating you um and there are large hospital aggregations so there's ascension and
46:31	others that just have to go this way for budgetary reasons and right now the
46:38	u.s spends what is 17 of their gdp on healthcare for let's say one of these
46:44	buttons on my chest cost 20 bucks it's rechargeable and it can predict people's health and save on antibiotics
46:50	prevent heart attacks how many billions if not trillions of dollars will that save over the next decade
46:58	yeah so when the public wakes up to this they'll almost demand it like this this should be this should be accepted everywhere this is obvious
47:04	it's gonna save a lot of money it's gonna improve the quality of life well and the cfos of hospital yeah groups will have to and insurance
47:12	companies are going to want to get in on this so now that gets to privacy right if
47:17	should an insurance company have access to your data i would say no but you could voluntarily show them
47:23	some of it if they give you a discount and that's also being worked on right now
47:28	i hope we do create kind of systems where i can volunteer to share my data and i can also
47:34	take the data back meaning like delete the data request the deletion of data and then maybe policy creates rules to
47:41	where you can share data you could delete the data and i think if i have the option to
47:48	delete all my data that that a particular company has then i'll share my data with everyone
47:55	like i feel like uh if the if uh because that gives me the tools to be a
48:02	consumer an intelligent consumer of giving of awarding my data to a company that
48:07	deserves it and taking it back when the company is misbehaving and in that way encourage as a consumer
48:14	in the capitalist system encourage the companies that are doing great work with that data
48:20	well yeah health care data security is is number one on on my mind uh inside tracker
48:26	made sure that that was true but you know these buttons on your chest there's very private stuff they can probably tell
48:33	if you're having sex one night right so this is not the kind of stuff you want leaked yeah so i don't know whether it's
48:38	blockchain or just for yourself i don't want this public life i guess it depends on how you how
48:44	how you go but yeah uh you know there there's a lot of stuff you don't want out there and this definitely has to be number one
48:51	because it you know it's one thing to have your credit card information stolen it's another thing health records are permanently out there
48:57	yeah so there's on the biology side super exciting ways to um to slow aging but there's also on the

Fasting

49:04	lifestyle side i've recently did a 72 hour fast it's just an opportunity to take a pause and
49:09	be you know appreciate life think about like there's something about fasting that um
49:16	encourages you to reflect deeper than you otherwise might the time kind of
49:22	slows and you also realize that you're human because your body needs food and you start to see your
49:29	is almost as a machine that that takes food and produces thoughts and then
49:35	and then ends briefly i mean there you start to depending who you are if you're like engineering minded you
49:41	start to think of this whole thing as a kind of yeah as a machine and then also feelings fill this machine
49:50	uh feelings of gratitude of love but also the uglier things of jealousy and greed
49:57	and hate and all those kinds of things you start to think okay how
50:03	how do i manage this body to create a rich experience all that comes from fasting for me anyway but there's also health benefits
50:10	to fasting i intermittent fast a lot i eat just one meal a day
50:15	most of the time is there something you can say about the benefits of fasting in your own life
50:20	and in general the anti-aging process well you're a philosopher too sorry i
50:26	apologize no i'm impressed uh through renaissance man uh it's it's a joy to be here
50:31	uh so when it comes to fasting this is you know being abstinence is one of the the oldest ways to improve health right
50:38	probably they knew this 5000 plus years ago so that's not new but what we're
50:43	figuring out is what is optimal and how does it work and one of the things we helped contribute to
50:49	which i can speak to with some authority is that these longevity genes we work on we showed back in the early 2000s are
50:56	turned on by fasting and at least in yeast we were the first to show that how calorie restriction
51:02	fasting works to extend lifespan that was the first for any species something similar happens in our bodies
51:08	when we're hungry or put our bodies under any other perceived adversity such as running
51:14	our bodies think wow we're getting run chased by a cyber save tooth cat or something if we're
51:19	really hot or cold these probably also work to put our bodies in this defensive state to activate these genes in the way
51:26	that whales do and mice don't and so hunger is the best way to do that
51:31	in fact i don't think you have to feel hungry you can get used to it but if there was one thing i would
51:36	recommend to anybody to slow down aging would be to skip a meal or two
51:41	a day now it doesn't mean you don't have to live well you can go out i go to restaurants i eat regular food i try to be as healthy as
51:48	possible but i've gone from skipping breakfast most of my life now to skipping lunch as well and i have
51:56	my physique back that i had when i was 20. i feel 20 mentally i'm much sharper i don't
52:02	feel tired anymore i sleep well so i'm a huge fan of the one meal a day thing uh where i'm not good at is going
52:08	beyond one day but have you ever fasted longer than uh than them 24 hours i tried doing two
52:16	days i might have made it to the third and given up i'm i just find that i'm i'm not ver i don't
52:22	have a lot of willpower i also hate exercise so i'm not sure how long i'm going to live but i've managed to do one meal a day so
52:29	if i can do that seriously anybody can do that um to your listeners and viewers i would say
52:35	don't try to do it all at once you can't go from snacking and eating three meals a day to what i
52:41	do easily work your way up to it but also compensate with drinking if you like tea if you like coffee put some milk in it
52:48	um that's fine you can fill your stomach up with with liquids uh diet sodas i get criticized for
52:53	drinking but i'm going to continue to have those but then you know i power through the day i definitely don't feel tired i
52:59	don't have a lag anymore but give also give it at least two weeks because you there's a habit as well having something
53:05	in your mouth chewing feeling that fullness you can break that habit and within two three weeks you'll have done it
53:12	absolutely so i'm not actually even that strict about it you said that soda uh yeah people are very kind of weirdly
53:18	strict about fasting the rules and the fasting like for example i i drank
53:23	uh element electrolytes when i was fasting and that has like five calories and so technically it's uh
53:30	not fasting or people will say like if you drink coffee there's caffeine and they'll say that's technically not
53:36	fasting because there's some kind of biological effects of caffeine whatever of course there's like biological benefits that you can argue
53:43	about but there's also just experiential benefits just calorie restriction broadly has a
53:48	certain experience to it that like for me personally just as you said has made me feel really good
53:55	that said like especially uh i've gained quite a bit of weight uh like maybe even
54:01	like 15 pounds something like that since i moved to austin texas and i i still keep the same diet but
54:09	i eat a lot of meat in that one just because it's delicious because it's
54:14	also the the the amazing people i met in texas it's just there's like a camaraderie a
54:21	friendship of love to the people that like makes you really enjoy the uh the atmosphere of eating the
54:28	brisket and the meat is this joe rogan insisting joe is i mean he's very different
54:33	uh joe loves bread and pasta like he knows that his body
54:40	feels best doing keto or carnivore so that's what he usually tries to stick
54:46	to but he also does not hold back and he'll just eat pasta when he does
54:52	pasta and he sort of enjoys life in that way i can't i don't know how to enjoy life
54:57	in that way i also love pasta but i'm just not going to enjoy it because i know
55:03	i i know my body ultimately does not feel good with pasta so it's a funny kind of dichotomies i i
55:09	would like to uh cheat i guess by eating more meat than i you know like
55:17	overeating uh on the things that i know my body feels good on as opposed
55:22	to eating stuff i shouldn't like cake and all those kinds of things i tend to um i tend to find happiness in
55:30	overeating the good stuff versus eating the bad stuff and the that's the
55:36	kind of balance him he's like [ __ ] it every once in a while you got to enjoy
55:42	it and and then also coupled with that for him uh is just exercise like then faces
55:49	demons the next day and just like burn a huge amount of calories which is i mean
55:55	whatever whatever is up with that guy's mind there's an there's a ability to fully
56:02	experience life which is represented by the pasta and the ability to just like fight the
56:08	demons which is represented by all the crazy kettlebells and and running the hills and all this kind of stuff that he does that takes a lot
56:15	out of you doing that kind of insane exercise and i think i'm more like you at least
56:20	towards your direction is like i really hate exercise so i do it but i
56:25	really hate it and so it's a balance that you have to strike is there something you could say about

Diet

56:31	the diet side of that for you personally but in general in order to achieve
56:37	calorie restriction like for me eating i know it may not
56:43	sound healthy but eating carnivore eating mostly meat has been has made me feel really good
56:50	both mentally and physically is there something you could say about the kinds of diets
56:56	that may improve longevity but also enable calorie restriction well sure i mean the first thing that's
57:03	important to know is that while many people are interested slash obsessed with
57:09	what they eat the data that's come out of animal studies at least is it's far more important when you eat
57:16	than what you eat and this was a fantastic study a few years ago by my friend rafael de cabo at the national
57:22	institutes of health in bethesda and he had 10 000 mice on different diets hoping to find the perfect mix of
57:28	carbs protein and fat and it turns out that the only ones that lived longer were the ones that only ate
57:34	once a day and so that if we're we're not mice but i think that we're close enough to mice
57:40	that this tells us a lot but okay but i still think the best bang for the longevity buck is to do both well eat
57:48	less often and eat the right things now i'll preface this to say i'm not a nut about this i will eat
57:55	occasional very occasionally a dessert usually i steal from others which doesn't count right
58:00	exactly but you've got to live life right what's what's a long life if it's not enjoyable anyway but what i've i also found and this is
58:07	i'll get to your question a second but my microbiome right now and stomach is at a point where if i try to overeat
58:14	on a steak which i did a couple of days ago i actually had a chicken uh a fried chicken specifically
58:22	for two days i felt terrible i couldn't sleep it wouldn't go down so i'm now at a point where even if i
58:27	want to binge on meat and fried foods i just can't it just feels bad
58:32	but what what do i recommend well what the data says which i try to follow is that
58:38	plant-based foods will will be better than meat-based foods and i know that there are a lot of people disagree
58:43	but one of the facts is there's a few facts one is that people who live a long time tend to eat those type of diets mediterranean okinawa
58:50	diet they're eating mostly plants with a little bit of meat and not a lot of red meat and the other
58:56	fact is that in animals we know that there's a there's a mechanism that's called mtor little m capital tr that responds
59:03	to certain amino acids that are found in more abundance in meat and when it responds it actually
59:08	shortens lifespan and the converse if you starve it of those three amino acids uh in mostly in meat
59:15	then it extends lifespan and there there's a drug called rapamycin which some people are experimenting with
59:21	that does that so you might be able to you know i'm just saying this here from my colleagues we don't know the results
59:27	here but you could potentially take a rapamycin-like drug and counteract the effects of meat on in
59:32	the long run don't know we should try that actually we could do that in the lab but uh getting to the bottom of this
59:39	what i think is going on is that just like testosterone and growth hormone you will get temporary
59:45	maybe not temporary um immediate health benefits you'll feel great you'll get more muscle
59:50	energy but the problem is i think it's at the expense of long-term health and longevity
59:57	well this is actually something i worry about in terms of long-term effects or
1:00:04	the the cost in terms of longevity it's very difficult to know how your choices affect your longevity
1:00:09	because the impact is down the line like just because something makes me feel
1:00:16	good now like eating only meat makes me feel good now i wonder what are the costs down the
1:00:21	line well think about what i i was saying about the trade-offs between growth and reproduction which is what a
1:00:27	mouse does and a whale that grows slowly reproduces slowly lives a long time
1:00:32	it's called the disposable soma theory um kirk would just uh propose that in the 70s what meat
1:00:39	probably does is put you in the mouse category super fertile grow fast heal fast
1:00:44	and then if you want to be a whale you should restrict meat uh and do things that promote the
1:00:51	preservation of your body is it uh difficult to eat a plant-based
1:00:56	diet that uh you perform well under so uh mentally and physically just
1:01:02	almost i'm asking uh almost like a anecdotal question unless you know the science
1:01:09	uh well the science is still being worked out but from the synthesis of everything i've read i try to
1:01:16	eat a diet that's definitely full of leafy greens uh particularly spinach is great because
1:01:22	it's got the iron that we need plenty of vitamins i also
1:01:27	try to avoid too much fruit and berries particularly fruit juice
1:01:33	definitely avoid that sugar high spiking your sugar is not healthy in the long run
1:01:39	the other thing that's interesting is we discovered what are called what we call xeno hormetic molecules let me unpack
1:01:46	that because it's terrible name and i take full responsibility with my friend conrad howitz the xeno means cross
1:01:52	species and hormesis is the term that what doesn't kill you makes you live longer
1:01:59	and and and be healthier and so we're getting cross species health improvements by molecules
1:02:05	that plants make and plants make these molecules when they're also under adversity or perceived adversity for instance uh
1:02:13	i understand if you want really healthy or good oranges you can drive nails into the the bark of
1:02:18	the tree before you harvest same with wine you typically want them to be dry before you harvest
1:02:24	or covered in fungus and that's because these plants make these colorful and xenohemetic molecules that make
1:02:31	themselves stress resistant turn on their sirtuin defenses the sir genes remember
1:02:37	and when we eat them we get those same benefits that's the idea and we've evolved to do so this isn't a
1:02:42	coincidence it's my theory our theory that we want to know when our food supplies
1:02:48	is under adversity because we need to get ready for a famine and so we hunker down and preserve our
1:02:53	body and by eating these colored foods so practically speaking if it's full of color or if there's been some chewing by
1:03:00	a caterpillar caterpillar organic grown locally in local farms i'll eat that
1:03:05	versus a watery insipid uh light-colored um lettuce that's been grown in
1:03:12	california so you want vegetables that have suffered you want the david goggins as the vegetables that's the xenochromatic molecules i
1:03:19	love that tone i'm gonna take that one with me thank you yeah
1:03:24	oh i follow him on instagram is always screaming so you want the that he's basically uh the the
1:03:31	the xeno-harmonic version of a human um i like it so these are the molecules
1:03:37	that are representative of the stress that's been um that a plant has been under yeah the
1:03:44	best example of that is resveratrol which many people including myself take as a supplement grapes or grape
1:03:51	vines produce that in abundance when they're dried out or they have too much light or fungus
1:03:56	and that we've shown activates the so2 enzyme in our bodies which remember is
1:04:02	what extends lifespan in yeast and slows down aging in the brain that's beautiful yeah i tend to avoid fruit
1:04:08	as well so green veggies anything that's not very sweet so i would just say you're relatively
1:04:14	low like you try to avoid sugary things as well yeah i'm fairly militant about
1:04:20	that um i rarely would add sugar to anything occasionally i would um
1:04:26	eat a slice of cheesecake but that would be you know maybe once or twice a year you have to give in occasionally but
1:04:33	yeah anything that's sweet i would rather substitute something like stevia if i need a sugar hit

Exercise

1:04:40	what about exercise your favorite topic is there uh is there anybody talking
1:04:47	about it yeah okay great is there benefits to longevity from exercise well no doubt that's
1:04:54	that's proven um just like fasting it's pretty clear that that works uh for example there are studies of
1:05:00	cyclists it was something like people that cycle over 80 miles a week
1:05:06	have a 40 reduction in a variety of diseases certainly heart disease so that that's not even a question but
1:05:11	what's interesting is that we're learning that you don't need much to have a big benefit it's an asymptotic curve
1:05:17	and in fact if you overdo it you probably have reduced benefits particularly if you start to wear out joints that kind of thing
1:05:23	but just 10 minutes on a treadmill a few times a week getting your lose your breath get hypoxia because it's cold
1:05:28	seems to be very beneficial for long-term health um and that's the kind of exercise that
1:05:34	i like to do aerobic though i do enjoy uh lifting weights so that is what i call my exercise which
1:05:40	has other benefits including maintaining hormone levels male hormone levels
1:05:46	but also really why i do it is i want to be able to counteract the effects of sitting for
1:05:52	most of the day yeah and as you get older you lose muscle mass it's a percent or so a year
1:05:57	and i don't want to be frail when i'm older and fall over and break my hip which is which happens every 20 seconds
1:06:02	in this country so maintaining that strength but also doing the cardio for the longevity for
1:06:08	the avoiding the heart disease yeah i definitely just like with fasting
1:06:13	have the philosophical benefit of running long and running slow i enjoy because it kind of clears the mind and
1:06:19	allows you to think and actually listen to brown noise as i run it really helps
1:06:24	remove myself from the world and just like zoom in on particular thoughts what is brown noise it's like white
1:06:30	noise but deeper so like the white noise is like shh and then brown noise is more like
1:06:38	like ocean that sounds great i might try that yeah yeah it's a small sweet thing probably
1:06:44	i'm not sure there could be signs to this i need to look this up i've been meaning to but i've when i started uh
1:06:52	this is maybe like five years ago i started listening brown noise when i work and uh the first time i listened to it
1:06:58	something happened to my mind where it just went like zoomed in
1:07:03	to like in a way that it felt like really weird like how how precisely was able to sort
1:07:11	of remove the distractions of the world and really help my mind obviously like the
1:07:17	mind is trying to focus and then it just enabled that process of trying to focus on a particular problem i don't know if
1:07:24	this is generalizable to others people should definitely try it if you're listening to this maybe it's just my own mind but
1:07:31	it's funny like it made me brown noise made me realize that there's probably
1:07:36	hacks out there that work for me that i should be constantly looking for it's almost like
1:07:42	um an encouraging and motivating of event that maybe there's other stuff
1:07:49	out there maybe there's other brown noise like things out there that truly like almost immediately make me
1:07:55	feel better i don't know if it's generalizable to others but it does seem that it's the case that there's probably for
1:08:02	many others things like that that could be discovered and so it's always disappointing when i find
1:08:09	things in life that i wish i had found earlier like i got lasik
1:08:14	eye surgery a few years ago and the first thought i had like the next day when i woke up is like
1:08:21	damn it why didn't i do this way earlier there's other stuff of that nature that um they're yet to be
1:08:29	discovered so it pays to explore yeah though you have a different mind you have quite a beautiful mind so i
1:08:34	suspect brown noise helps you focus and because you're probably all over the place if you don't control it
1:08:40	yeah exactly i mean it's something about it it's a programmer thing i don't the programming is a really difficult
1:08:47	um mental journey because you have to keep a lot of things in mind
1:08:52	you have to uh so you're constantly designing things and you have to be extremely precise by
1:08:58	making those things concrete in code you also have to look stuff up on the
1:09:04	internet to sort of feed like information and looking up stuff on the internet
1:09:10	internet is full of like distracting things so you have to be really focused in the way you look stuff up in pulling that information in so it
1:09:17	requires a certain discipline and a certain focus that uh i've been very much exploring
1:09:23	how to do like i do it really well in the morning coffee is involved all those kinds of things you're trying to optimize
1:09:30	uh keeping very positive inspired no social media all those kinds of things and trying to optimize for and everybody
1:09:36	has their own kind of little journey that they try to understand you get this from like writers
1:09:41	when you read about the habits of writers like the habits they do in the morning
1:09:47	they usually write like two three four hours a day and that's it it's like they optimize that ritual and
1:09:53	then there's always hunters thompson so uh
1:09:59	sometimes it pays off to be wild what about the sleep how important is sleep for

Sleep

1:10:05	longevity i would guess based on the evidence that
1:10:10	it's really important and because we don't know for sure but what we know from animal studies
1:10:16	is the following if you restrict sleep from a rat for just two weeks it'll develop type 2 diabetes it's that important
1:10:24	so that's the main thing what we also know is at the molecular level that if you disrupt your
1:10:31	sleep wake cycle so we actually have proteins that go up and down that control our sleep wake all of us most of our cells do that if
1:10:39	you disrupt that you'll get premature aging and guess what the opposite is true that as you get older
1:10:45	that cycle the the amplitude becomes diminished and this is why it's harder to get to
1:10:50	sleep as you get older and then you've got all sorts of problems and i think what's going on is this positive
1:10:56	feedback loop which is is a disaster in your old age which is um
1:11:01	right you're aging you can't at this moment totally prevent that and then it's disrupting your sleep then you get not
1:11:07	enough sleep and then that's going to accelerate your aging process um and so it's known that that people
1:11:12	who are shift workers are more susceptible to certain age-related diseases so your
1:11:17	bottom line you definitely want to work on that it's one of the reasons i have this ring on my finger which helps me optimize my sleep and learn
1:11:24	what i do the day before if it was a bad idea and i'll stop doing that like eating a fried chicken
1:11:31	i see you're still carrying the burdens of that decision but is yeah you know sleep is one of
1:11:37	those things that's making me wonder about the variability between humans a little bit and how
1:11:43	science is often focused on like it's not often focused on high
1:11:50	performers in a particular way and it's looking at the aggregate versus the individual cases
1:11:57	for example like for me i don't know what the exact hours are but like power naps are incredible
1:12:06	i tend to look at the metric of stress and happiness and joy and try to optimize those so
1:12:13	decreasing stress increasing happiness and using sleep as just one of the tools
1:12:18	to do that because like hitting the five six seven eight nine hour mark or whatever the
1:12:25	correct mark is i find that to be stress inducing for me versus
1:12:30	stress relieving like thinking about that i i feel best if i sleep sometimes for
1:12:36	eight hours sometimes for four hours and then power nap and as long as i have a stupid private
1:12:42	usually smile on my face that's when i'm doing good as opposed to getting
1:12:47	a perfect amount of sleep according to whatever the latest blog post is and i also pull
1:12:54	all-nighters still i also think there's something about the body like as long as you do it
1:13:01	regularly it's not as stress-inducing like you know what you know what it is the reason i pull
1:13:07	all-nighters isn't for like i'm playing diablo 3 or something is because i'm doing something i'm truly
1:13:13	passionate about well i can also love video games but i'm doing something i'm truly passionate about
1:13:18	and it's almost like there's the jocko willing feeling of when i'm up at seven a.m and i haven't slept all
1:13:24	night and still i'm working on it there's a kind of a celebration of the human spirit that i really enjoy it
1:13:30	like uh and that's happiness and to sort of then and i usually don't tell that kind
1:13:37	of stuff to people because their first statement will be like you should get more sleep
1:13:42	it's like no i'm doing stuff i love you should get more love in your life
1:13:47	bro that's right so but that said in aggregate when you look at the full span of life
1:13:55	it's probably you should be getting a consistent amount of sleep and it
1:14:01	seems like it's in that seven eight hour range yeah but it's similar to food
1:14:06	it it's the quality not the quantity right and and when you get it so i i look at my my data pretty often
1:14:14	and what makes a difference to me is not the amount of hours but the quality the depth and the deep sleep
1:14:20	is what what'll do it so if i have a lot of alcohol before going to sleep and i can see my heart rate being
1:14:26	different but what really kills me is that i don't get a lot of that deep sleep and i wake up you know barely remembering stuff
1:14:32	so that like you say if you're happy and contented and you're not don't have these cortisol chemicals going through your
1:14:37	body you will more naturally get into that deep state and even if you just get four hours way better than eight hours of none of that
1:14:45	yeah yeah that's beautiful and some of that could be genetic for me i just i just fall asleep like this if you want
1:14:52	me to fall asleep right now i can do it it's it's no um i have no problem with the combined with coffee i just had two
1:14:58	energy drinks i could probably uh sleep so that i don't know if that's genetics or
1:15:04	it's kind of um i don't know what it is or maybe that i don't have kids that i'm single so i don't have uh
1:15:10	i'm almost listening to some kind of biological signal versus societal signal on when i'm supposed to
1:15:16	go to sleep so i just go to sleep whenever i feel like going to sleep well that's because you're
1:15:21	self-employed so most people don't have that luxury but we're lucky the two of us that we can make our own hours yeah
1:15:27	um but yeah it's super important and those people who have the shift work i mean they they really
1:15:33	need to to change the way that works because they're literally killing those people
1:15:38	is there something you can say about the the mind and stress
1:15:45	uh in terms of effect on longevity sort of um because i don't know if you
1:15:51	think about it this way but when you talk about the biological machine it's always these mechanisms
1:15:56	that don't are not necessarily directly connected to the brain or the operation of the brain like
1:16:02	what's the role about stress and happiness and uh
1:16:08	yeah the sort of higher cognitive things going on in the brain on longevity right well that's a great
1:16:15	point that the brain is is the center for longevity actually we we do know that first start when when
1:16:21	i'm stressed i can see mentally stressed then i can see it in my body
1:16:27	heart rate hormones it's clear you know that's no true surprise so you've got to work on
1:16:32	your brain first and foremost if you are totally freaked out agitated uh
1:16:38	all the time you will live shorter i'm certain of it you know i keep fish i'm a big
1:16:46	aquarium guy and you can see the difference between the the fish that's having a good time and dominant
1:16:51	and one that gets picked on yeah it just looks like crap you don't want to be that the little fish getting picked on if you can help
1:16:58	it so i used to be extremely stressed as a kid i was a perfectionist very shy always worried about being a
1:17:04	failure if i didn't get an a plus you know i was crying in my bedroom that kind of sad existence i got into my 20s then in my
1:17:12	30s and realized that's not the way to live so i've worked very hard to get to this point
1:17:17	where i almost never get stressed never there's nothing that i've never gotten angry in my lab i've
1:17:23	got 20 kids sometimes it's like a most of the time it's like a kindergarten um i
1:17:29	haven't lost my temper i very calm but that's intentional um and i don't worry about stuff
1:17:34	millions of dollars billions of dollars at stake sometimes keep it cool it's only life we're all
1:17:40	headed to the same place anyway don't worry about it um but the the to answer your question i think
1:17:46	in a better way if you manipulate the brain of an animal i'll give you an example if we turn on
1:17:51	this cert gene that i mentioned sir one we a good friend of mine that wash you shiny my did this
1:17:58	they upregulate the operate of that gene just in the neurons of the animal
1:18:03	it lived longer so that's sufficient to extend lifespan we also know that you can manipulate the
1:18:08	part of the brain called the hypothalamus which leaches a lot of chemicals into the body
1:18:13	and proteins most of which we don't know yet but just changing the inflammation of that little organ
1:18:20	or part of the brain is sufficient to make animals live longer as well so get your brain in order first before
1:18:26	you tackle anything else i would say so you kind of mention this with the

Data

1:18:32	inside tracker there's a ability to take blood measurement and then infer from that
1:18:39	a bunch of different things about your body how you can improve how you can improve the longevity and
1:18:44	you've also mentioned saliva and more efficient ways
1:18:49	to uh to get data uh what does that involve what's the future
1:18:56	of data collection look like yeah for the human biological system right well yeah the the issue with with
1:19:01	blood is you need someone to take it it's it i mean or you prick your finger which hurts yes so you gotta have something
1:19:06	better so i think what the future looks like is that you'll spit onto a little piece of paper and stick it in a
1:19:12	machine and it'll it'll do that for you but we're not there yet so the intermediate um
1:19:18	future that that i'm building right now is that you would take a swab of the inside of your mouth which
1:19:24	is the easiest way to take cells out of your body and just ship them off okay so called a buckle swab
1:19:30	um i think we we became very used to that right right now because of covert people don't like going to the doctor as much they don't
1:19:36	like going out they just want to have home tests and so that i think is the next 10 years where you'll get a kit in the mail
1:19:43	you'll swab your cheek stick it back in an envelope send it off and you know a week later you have either a
1:19:48	doctor's report or a health recommendation and what can you get off a cheek swab well you can get
1:19:55	anything you can get hormones stress levels stress hormones blood glucose levels you
1:20:00	can also tell your age reasonably accurately doing that actually quite accurately and those
1:20:06	clocks cannot just tell you how you're doing over time but can be used to give you
1:20:11	recommendations to slow that process down because some people sometimes are 10 years older biologically than their
1:20:16	actual chronic chronological age i mean why does it matter how many times the
1:20:21	earth's gone around the sun seriously who cares about birthdays it's how long your body's clock has been ticking and how fast
1:20:28	so i could take a cheek swab from you today lex take it back to my lab and we then by tomorrow tell you how old
1:20:35	you are biologically based on what we call the epigenetic clock
1:20:41	and you might be freaked out you might be happy but either way we can advise you on how to improve the
1:20:47	trajectory because we know that smoking increases the speed of that clock we also know that fasting and people who
1:20:53	eat the right foods have a slower clock without that knowledge you're flying blind
1:20:58	but i like the idea of a swab because it's it's just so easy we've a lot of us have done something like that for covert tests it's not even i've been doing a
1:21:04	non-stop a rapid antigen test so let me say that particular one
1:21:09	rapid antigen test they've been a source of frustration for me because like everybody should be doing it
1:21:14	it's so easy we've also been working in my lab on democratizing these tests to bring them down from a few hundred bucks
1:21:20	to a dollar so just to clarify you're talking about not research you talk about like company stuff
1:21:25	like actual facing things i i well right the research on bringing the price
1:21:30	down has occurred in my lab at harvard and then that intellectual property is being licensed and has been licensed out
1:21:36	to a company yeah that that will be uh consumer-facing so anybody
1:21:41	for a small amount of money can do this well you got subscriber number one obsessed i think that's a beautiful
1:21:47	beautiful idea so somebody who maybe i would have been more hesitant about it until a covid
1:21:54	uh but home tests are super easy i almost wanted to share that data with the world
1:21:59	like in some way not not the entirety of the data but like some visualization of like how i'm doing
1:22:05	like it's almost like uh like you know when you share if you had like a long run or something like that i wish
1:22:11	i could share because it inspires others and then you can have a conversation about like
1:22:16	well what are the hacks that you've tried and have a conversation about like how to improve lifestyle and those kinds
1:22:21	of things that's grounded in data that's exactly that's what's that's what's going to happen now everything's anonymous of course we
1:22:27	talked about security there but once it's anonymized you can then plot these numbers and i've plotted my
1:22:34	epigenetic age versus hundreds of other people who have taken this test now and i can tell you where i fit
1:22:40	relative to others in terms of my biological age and i'm happy to share that with you all because it's pretty low
1:22:47	you can choose to share it of course not everyone wants to share that but when you go to the doctor first of
1:22:52	all your doctor doesn't does treat you as though you're an average person and none of us are average there's no such thing
1:22:58	but second of all we never know how we're doing relative to others because we all
1:23:03	most of us we we don't share our information so we might have this number and that number but do you know that your numbers are
1:23:09	good for your age or not you have no idea no even your doctor probably doesn't even know so this this graph that i'm talking
1:23:16	about is the beginning of a world where you can say how am i doing i'm a you know for the two of us we're
1:23:21	white and we're male and we're this age and we do this are we good are we doing the right
1:23:27	things or the wrong things do we need to fix certain things and this is what the future is it's
1:23:32	forget about just experimenting and not knowing the result i mean who doesn't experiment and doesn't look at the data
1:23:38	no one it makes no sense so we're going to enter a world where we have a dashboard in our body the swabs the blood tests the biosensors
1:23:46	where our doctors can look at that but we can also look at it and they can recommend you know go to
1:23:51	this restaurant down the road they've got this great meal it's high in whatever you need today because you're lacking vitamin d and
1:23:57	vitamin k2 go for it ridiculous question or perhaps not if

Extending lifespan

1:24:03	you look maybe 50 years from now or 100 years from now a person born then what do you think is a good goal in
1:24:09	terms of how long a person would live like what is the maximum longevity that
1:24:14	we can achieve through the methods that we have today of uh or are
1:24:20	developing some of the things we've been talking about and in terms of genetics in terms of
1:24:25	biology what's is there a number right uh well so it changes all the time
1:24:31	because technology's changing so quickly i keep revising the number upward uh but i would say that if you do
1:24:38	the right things during your life and start at an early age let's say 25 we don't want malnutrition starvation
1:24:43	that's not what i'm talking about but in your 20s start eating the kind of
1:24:48	diets that i talked about skipping meals in animals that gives you an extra 20
1:24:54	to 30 percent we don't know if that's true for humans and that would you know even five percent more would be
1:24:59	a good a big deal for the planet i think that we should all aim to at
1:25:05	least reach a century um i i'm i'm a little bit behind i was born too early to benefit
1:25:11	the most from all of this discovery those of you who are in your twenties you should definitely aim to reach a
1:25:17	hundred i don't see why not consider this is really important the
1:25:23	average life span of a human that looks after themselves and but doesn't pay attention
1:25:29	is about 80 okay japan that's the average age for a male bit higher if you do the right things
1:25:36	in your life which is eat healthy food don't overeat don't become obese do a bit of exercise get good
1:25:43	sleep and don't stress that gives you on average 14 extra years that gets you to 94.
1:25:48	so getting to 100 if you just focus on what i'm talking about it's not a big deal so what's the
1:25:54	maximum well we know that one human made it to 122 and a number of them make it into their teens i think that's also the next level
1:26:02	of of uh of where we can get to with the types of technologies that i'm talking about
1:26:07	medicines like i mentioned rapamycin there's one called metformin which is the diabetes drug
1:26:12	which i take that in combination with these lifestyle changes should get us beyond a hundred
1:26:18	how long can we ultimately live well there's no maximum limit to human lifespan why can a whale live 300 years
1:26:23	but we cannot we're basically the same structure we just need to learn from them so anyone who says oh you max max out at
1:26:30	x i think is is full of it there's nothing that i've seen that says biological
1:26:35	organisms have to die there are trees that live for thousands of years and their biochemistry is pretty close to ours

Immortality

1:26:42	what do you think it means to live for a very long time let's say if it's 200 years we're talking about or a thousand
1:26:48	years there's some some sense you could argue
1:26:54	that there is immortal organisms already living on earth like there's bacteria so
1:26:59	there's certain there's certain living organisms that in some fundamental way do not
1:27:06	die because they keep replicating their genetic information they keep like cloning themselves
1:27:13	is is it the same human if we can somehow persist the human mind
1:27:21	like copy clone certain aspects and just keep replacing body parts um do you think that's
1:27:28	another way to achieve immortality to achieve of a prolonged sort of increased longevity is
1:27:34	to replace the parts that break easily and keep because actually from your theory of um
1:27:41	aging as a degradation of information it's an information theory view of aging like what is what is the key
1:27:49	information that makes a human can we persist that information and just replace
1:27:54	the the trivial parts uh yeah i mean the short answer is yes we're already
1:28:00	replacing body parts but what makes us human is our brain everything else is is sub-optimal
1:28:06	except our brain the ability to replace actual neurons is
1:28:12	really hard right i think it might be easy to upload rather than replace neurons because they're so tight
1:28:19	it's such a network and just perturbing the system you know it's it's uh it's stretching this cat you
1:28:26	you change everything once you get in there the problem is um well i guess the solution let me go to
1:28:32	the solution that's more interesting what we're learning is that if you reverse the age of nerve cells
1:28:37	they look it looks like they get their memories back right so the memories are not lost they're just that the cells don't know
1:28:43	how to interpret them and function correctly and this is one of the things we're starting in my lab if
1:28:48	you take an old mouse that has learned something when it was young but forgotten does it get that back and
1:28:54	all evidence points to that being true so i'd rather go in and rejuvenate the brain as it sits rather than replace
1:29:00	individual cells which would be really hard what do you think about like efforts like neurolink
1:29:06	which basically you mentioned uploading are trying to figure out so creating
1:29:12	brain computer interfaces they're trying to figure out how to communicate with the brain but one of the features that is trying
1:29:18	to record the human brain more and more accurately do you have hope for that
1:29:25	to um of course there's uh it will lead to us better understanding
1:29:30	from a neuroscience perspective the human mind but do you have hope for it increasing longevity in
1:29:36	terms of how it's used i think that it can help with certain diseases uh but i see at least within our
1:29:42	lifetime that's the best use of it is to be able to replace parts of the body that are not functioning such as the the
1:29:48	retina and other parts the visual cortex back here that that's going to be doable in terms
1:29:54	of longevity maybe we could put something on the hypothalamus and start secreting those hormones and get
1:29:59	that back ultimately i think it the best way to
1:30:04	preserve the brain uh is going to be to uh record it but also i think it's going to
1:30:11	require death unfortunately to then do very detailed scans even
1:30:17	if you have enough time and money atomic microscopy and rebuild the brain from scratch rebuild from scratch yeah we are
1:30:25	living more and more in the digital world i wonder if if the scanning is good
1:30:31	enough for the critical things in terms of memories in terms of the particular quirks of your cognitive processes
1:30:38	they're not they're not yeah we're not we're not close yes but we've made quite a bit of progress so
1:30:44	it's uh if you're um if you're an exponential type of person
1:30:50	yeah well let's dream a little here yes the way it would work that i could see it working is so you
1:30:56	take a single cell slice through your your dead brain and we can now the
1:31:01	problem the problem with the engineering aspect is that the engineering is the physical aspect of the brain is is
1:31:07	not even half the problem the problem is which genes are switched on and off this experience that
1:31:13	we're having here is is altering certain genes in neurons that will be preserved hopefully for for
1:31:20	a number of decades but you cannot see that with a microscope easily but there are technologies invented
1:31:27	actually just down the hall in the building i'm at george church invented away his lab invented a way
1:31:33	to look at which genes are switched on and off not only in a single cell which any lab
1:31:38	can do these days but in situ where it's situated in the brain so you can say okay
1:31:44	this nerve cell had these genes switched on and they switched off we can recreate that but just scanning
1:31:50	the brain and looking how the nerves are touching each other is not going to do it wow okay so you have to scan the full
1:31:56	biology the full details and look at the epigenome and the apogenome too yeah which genes are on and off
1:32:03	it's just easier to reset the epigenome and get them to work like they just use we're doing that now use the
1:32:08	hardware already have just figure out how to uh make that hardware last longer right
1:32:14	ultimately information will be lost even genetic information degrades slowly through mutations so we
1:32:20	immortality is not achievable through that means though i think we could potentially reset the body hundreds of
1:32:25	times and live for thousands of years okay so we talked about biology

Denial of death

1:32:31	let's forgive me but let's talk about philosophy for just a brief moment
1:32:36	so somebody i've enjoyed reading ernest becker wrote the denial of death there's also
1:32:41	martin heidegger there's a bunch of philosophers who
1:32:47	claim that most people live life in denial of death sort of we
1:32:55	don't fully internalize the idea that we're going to die
1:33:00	the because if we did as as they say there
1:33:07	will be a kind of terror of um i mean
1:33:12	a deep fear of death the fact that we don't know what's like we almost don't know what to do
1:33:21	with non-existence with disappearing like our the way we draw meaning from life seems
1:33:28	to be grounded in the fact that we exist and that we some point will not exist is
1:33:33	terrifying and so we live in an illusion that we're not going to die and we run from that terror
1:33:39	that's what ernest beckham would say do you think there's any truth to that oh i know there's truth to that i
1:33:45	experience it every day when i talk to people we have to live that way although unfortunately
1:33:50	i can't but for most people it's extremely stressing distressing to think
1:33:56	about their own mortality we think about it occasionally and if we really thought about it every day
1:34:02	we'd probably be brought to tears how much we not just miss ourselves but miss our family our friends we are
1:34:10	all living life forms have evolved to to not want to die and when i mean one biochemically
1:34:16	genetically physically that yeast cell the cells that i studied at mit
1:34:21	they were fighting for their lives they didn't think but our brain has evolved the same
1:34:26	survival aspect of course we don't want to die but the problem for us unfortunately
1:34:32	it's a curse and a blessing is that we're now conscious we know that we're going to die most species
1:34:38	that have ever existed don't that's a burden that's a curse and so what i think's happened is
1:34:43	we've evolved certainly to want to live for a long time perhaps never want to die but the thought about
1:34:50	dying is so traumatic that there is an innate part of our brains and it's probably
1:34:56	genetically wired to not think about it i really think that's part of being
1:35:02	human and it because you know think about tribes that obsessed with longevity every day and
1:35:08	that were going to die they probably didn't make much technological progress because they were just crying
1:35:13	in their hearts every day or you know on the savannah so i really think that we've evolved to
1:35:18	naturally deny aging and it's one of the problems that i face in my career and you know when i speak publicly and
1:35:25	on social media is that it's shocking people don't want to think about their age but i think it's getting better
1:35:31	i think my book has helped these tests that we're developing should help people understand it's not a problem to think
1:35:38	about your long-term health in fact if you don't you're going to reach 80 and really regret it

Meaning of life without death

1:35:45	and the other side of it so again ernest becker but also victor franklin recommended highly man
1:35:50	search for meeting uh bernard williams he's a moral philosopher they kind of argue that this knowledge
1:35:58	of death even if we often don't contemplate it we do at times
1:36:03	and the very the what you call the curse which i agree with you it's a it's a curse and a blessing that we're
1:36:11	able to contemplate our own mortality that gives meaning to life so death
1:36:17	gives meaning to life is what viktor frankl's argues i would probably argue the same there's
1:36:22	something about the scarcity of life and contemplating that that makes each moment
1:36:28	that much sweeter is there something to that i think it's individual in my case it's
1:36:34	completely wrong i appreciate you saying that i don't get
1:36:40	joy out of every day because i think i'm going to die yeah i get joy out of every day because every day is joyous and i make
1:36:46	it that way and even if i would if i thought i was going to live forever i would still be enjoying this moment
1:36:52	just as much and i bet you would too well that's uh
1:36:58	i think about that a lot i i think it's very difficult to know i'm almost
1:37:04	afraid that i wouldn't enjoy it as much if i was immortal i'm almost afraid to want
1:37:09	to be immortal or to live longer because
1:37:16	it perhaps is a kind of justification for me to accept that i'm going to die is saying
1:37:22	like oh if i was immortal i wouldn't be able to enjoy life as much as i do but it's very possible that i wouldn't
1:37:27	enjoy just as much of course enjoying life whether you're
1:37:33	mortal or not takes work like it it requires you to have the right kind of freedom of mind you
1:37:39	can discover you can focus your mind on the ugliness of life there's plenty of ugly things in this
1:37:46	world and you can focus on them you can complain whenever like you know if it's raining
1:37:51	outside you can you can focus on the fact that you have shelter and you enjoy the the
1:37:57	hell out of it or you can enjoy running in the rain when it's warm and like
1:38:02	the the beauty of nature just being one with nature or you can just complain this [ __ ] weather again in boston
1:38:08	and there you see they're always raining or freezing damn it and like uh the the same the same thing with like
1:38:15	wi-fi going out on airplanes like you can either complain about like
1:38:21	stupid wi-fi and on jetblue or something or you could say like how incredible it
1:38:27	is that i can fly through the sky and in a matter of hours be anywhere else in the world and then it could also on occasion watch
1:38:34	uh like check email and even watch movies through this while connecting through satellites that
1:38:39	are flying to space so it's a matter of perspective and perhaps there's an extra level of work required
1:38:44	when you're immortal because it's easier when you're immortal or live longer to
1:38:50	uh to be lazy to delay stuff but if you're not you can still derive the same amount of
1:38:55	joy it's possible it's possible it's definitely possible in my life
1:39:00	i i went from being the nothing's working to every day is great to wake up to and i i
1:39:06	think even if you live i think you're gonna live forever you can you can enjoy every day
1:39:12	what i do is everything's relative we can compare ourselves to our neighbor who has more money
1:39:17	or to the flight that should have had wi-fi or which is what i do i'm still six years old remember what a six-year-old does
1:39:24	says look i can when i tell my fingers to form a fist they actually do that
1:39:31	that's really cool that's how i live my life you know i'm i can pick up on your desk here this metal
1:39:36	object it's a metal cube about an inch by an inch by an inch and i i tell myself not
1:39:41	not about cubes but about inanimate objects probably once a day i'll say i'm a
1:39:47	living thing i can think i can move i can eat i am full of energy and there's that leaf or
1:39:52	this cube here that will never be alive that's what i look at and compare myself
1:39:58	to and for as long as i live if it's forever of course it won't be but even if it was forever the relative to
1:40:05	this lump of metal on this table here we are wondrous things in the universe
1:40:10	and probably the most wondrous things in the universe yeah we're able to deeply appreciate the leaf or the cube
1:40:18	and deeply appreciate ourselves which is uh it can be a curse but it's mostly a gift
1:40:25	especially when you're such a beautiful poem now i'm six i'm as clever as clever so i
1:40:32	think i'll be six now forever and ever that's a good thing to aspire to
1:40:37	your uh your grandmother was on to something david this is uh incredible conversation i'm a huge fan
1:40:43	of your work so thank you for wasting your valuable time with me today i really really appreciate
1:40:50	it this was awesome thank you for having me on lex appreciate it thanks for listening to this conversation with david sinclair and
1:40:56	thank you to on it clear national instruments simply safe and linode check them out in
1:41:04	the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you some words from arthur shorpenhauer
1:41:10	all truth passes through three stages first it is ridiculed second it is
1:41:16	violently opposed third it is accepted as being self-evident
1:41:22	thank you for listening and hope to see you next time
1:41:33	you