FIX THESE 5 Things To Live Longer & Start AGING IN REVERSE! | Sergey Young & Lewis Howes

when you have your annual medical checkup it should be as comprehensive as possible and it should be as expensive as possible to the extent you can afford the most important day every year your life is the day of your annual checkup i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness yeah please welcome us you want to reverse aging you want to live to 200 years why do you want to do that and is that even possible for us to live beyond 120 okay so why do you want to do it it's um i have so many things that i can do on this planet so right from the beginning when i was a kid i had plenty of dreams and my mission is to change at least one billion lives by bringing affordable and accessible version of healthcare and longevity to the world and so you need a lot of time for that right doesn't happen overnight yeah it's not so and human body in mind is like the most complex thing for us to handle to correct the code to extend the resource so that's actually requires a lot of time so if you think about this if it will be one silver bulleted solution for our longevity and health we would then invented this or discovered this either in the process of evolution or through kind of science so it's obviously it's much more complex than that so that's that's a mission thing and and from personal perspective i have four kids as i uh i'm an investor so i'm saying i have diversified portfolios and uh well it's just another reason to leave so is it possible to to leave to 200 yeah okay uh let me be upfront it's completely irresponsible promise today yes and i'm i'm actually communicating and using this 200 years by a number of reasons one if we want to change a lot of lives you need to get an attention so when you come in into conversation saying well how about living hundred years people like okay you know i've i've seen people lots of people yeah yeah so actually i've created this whole three horizons like horizon one today horizon two like in five to 10 to 20 years for us to live 250 and then and it was not enough people were like okay the oldest woman on earth lived 222 so 150 is almost there yeah so i created the third horizon like human avatars human brain ai integration virtual world and saying well this is where we're gonna go if we want to live 200 years but so again i'm i'm really mindful that this is irresponsible promise but it's such a great aspiration sure and as we discuss like every morning i'm 49 so every morning when i wake up i have like 3 4 of my life ahead of me so this is like the biggest source of energy for me there's so many things i can do so just thinking that i'm going to live to 200 it makes you start to change the way you think your actions your habits your routines your plans you're not planning like i'm going to start getting sick in 20 years and then retire and then just sit around you're like i've got 150 years left yeah uh well let's that's changes your identity well well this is this is the term that we use your psychological age identity and obviously by our lifespan and life cycle terms so if i'm 49 out of my 200 i'm still a kid in a way right so the world is full of opportunities for me so that's that's the that's the aspect of that and then your energy change the way you look the way you communicate the way you dream the way you share something with people so that's that's that's a very important aspect of that the other aspect is we almost and this is one of our limiting beliefs we always neglect the connection between our mind and body we kind of you know think it's separate it's not so if you start thinking i'm young and you have your psychological target age like 10 or 15 years below your calendar age your body actually start to react and and develop itself in the in uh in a different way because you're a lot more younger just for the chemistry of your yeah so if you look at biomarkers right uh the studies where we've we managed to reverse aging literally at a very small increment still but it's it's just a lot of progress always had this psychological component like psychological work stream when people just um think that they're younger than than they really is when they think they're younger they physically become younger yeah and we've been able to track that or our research yeah so basically what is happening with um we just done a piece of research uh last year uh it's still pretty small group uh so but then the psychological aspect of aging like thinking young like almost think and grow young yes just uh one of the sub chapters uh in the book is always the part of rejuvenation routine and uh a lot of studies where we actually trying to reverse aging based of biomarkers that you have like 44 and what's the best way to think young what does that look like uh okay what's the practice of thinking yeah yeah okay so i can tell only from my own experience well that's why we're having this conversation right um how do you think young yeah so first of all you just need to almost like ignore your calendar age and allow yourself to be younger in terms of your dreams aspiration behavior just ignore like a social standards for you and social conditions and pressure um for your calendar age and and the best thing is just think about the figure so my figure is 25 years old my figure yeah like a particular age the do you think you're psychologically quite yeah yeah i'm like 25 years old obviously i'm having my conversation with sergey come on you might look like 35 years old you're not that young but then in the end if you if it's part of you for like many days weeks and and months it's just becoming your almost identity so having your target psychological age ridiculously below your calendar age right is uh it's a great way to start a great strategy yeah so that's just saying i'm 20 you're 49 so you'd be saying like yeah i'm i'm 25 years old i feel 25 i feel and look 25 is just saying this to yourself repeating a mantra writing it down what is priming so what i do like in the morning when i do priming so i'm like okay i'm going to live 200 years actually it's it's better to have healthy and happy ears yeah because we'll give you like the figure but the quality is probably more important than quantity so i'm gonna live healthy and happy years uh 200 years in the body of 25 years old man and that's it this is what i'm doing and then in the evening when i have my uh gratefulness moment i'm also i'm just repeating that and that's it and and usually it takes like a week or two for you to accept that or start accepting that and just make it and see the changes you'll be amazing you're gonna behave like a kid your level of energy right gonna be completely different and level of uh aspirations and uh your mission and your kind of life plan sure is different as well so what's the i know you have like two different visions one is like okay for the next five to ten years what are the things that are available to us now to help us age and reverse and then ten years and beyond all the other things that are coming that aren't here yet that we can look forward to so what are something that someone who doesn't have a lot of resources and funds right now they can do to start aging or reverse besides psychological age today yes okay there's there's so many things that we can do they might sound boring but they work just in a brilliant way right okay so just for the interest of time so in the book i have like a bonus chapter it's two times bigger than any other chapter in the book and and it's about 10 longevity choices with your permission i just want to go through five do it yeah five buckets yeah five longevity buckets so and and let's start with the one which is your importance of your annual health checkup annual health checkup yeah when i have 30 seconds on longevity even only passport control when people ask me like you know what brought you to united states i'm like you know i'm on longevity mission i want to change one billion lives and all like what so what do i need to do so when i have 30 seconds i'm saying the most important day every year in your life is the day of your annual checkup so yesterday for me i went to human longevity center in san diego was most important day for me this year when you have your annual annual medical checkup it should be as comprehensive as possible and uh it should be as expensive as possible to the extent you can afford okay uh but then and one of the things you're doing at that checkup what do you do is it drawing yeah so you know a lot of checking your site you're hearing yeah there's yeah there's so many things that you do there like i give what 21 blood samples just to go through all of my markers yeah but remember i'm kind of crazy guy this is my mission passion you could do it for free probably yeah yeah yeah but i i just want to uh to mention that you don't need to go to extreme what healthcare system has to offer to you on whatever level you are in society and in terms of well is enough to detect the biggest risk factors and problems in your body right so don't think well of course sergey can do it his longevity investor he has an access he has a knowledge yes i do but uh a lot of people around me it's just hospital next door and having a dialogue with your doctor or or with healthcare providers saying you know annual checkup and and your risks are heart disease cancer diabetes and not really neurogenerative disease because we really don't know now where it comes from and how to treat that so that's right that's that's the thing so what i do is like full body mri 21 samples of blood uh ct uh ultrasound check of uh your arteries here uh your heart yeah i actually put the heart monitor i'm a big fan of wearables yeah and it's crazy so what is that that sticks in your chest so yeah it's [Music] you have audio audience as well yeah so that's that's like a small piece of wearable right on your chest next to the heart so you can wear it's like a glucose monitor yeah i actually have glucose monitor here so it's internet of body we'll we'll come back to that so you put it on your chest you wear it for probably seven days and it what it does it does its monitor performance of your heart on on you know every minute uh within this um seven days so then you ship it it's it's right here in the chip and it's much more kind of scientific precise uh and data driven that everything what's happening during the day in the morning and yeah it's cracking all of it yeah and uh it's it's shaking and the major focus is is performance of your heart right because heart disease and cancer are uh two biggest reasons for that it's like more than fifty percent of deaths up the age of 50 happening because of these two reasons okay heart disease or cancer and cancer right now how can you prevent those things okay so uh coming back to your annual check right longevity bucket one um think about cancer 20 years ago people thought it's case of that people were differe actually deferring their uh cancer check because if you knew you had cancer there's i mean you're gonna be dead in just a few months well it's not the case anymore we're right in the middle of winning the war against cancer it's still very expensive it's still extremely dangerous disease but if you detect cancer uh and we investors longevity vision fund we invest a lot in early cancer diagnostic early on like stage one cancer your chances to recover is 93 to 100 percent depending on the cancer type imagine if you detect it early early so that's why having the health exactly once a year yeah will allow you to catch that earlier exactly and technologies is really progressing in this field right i'm not sure to what extent you're comfortable speaking about colonoscopy but they that's that's the that's the main kind of tool and intervention for us to check uh like a colon cancer called hospital yeah yeah so then i call how many lives have you done uh so i i was just delaying my i was like i don't want to do it yeah i don't want to do it so you do it under sedation so i've done two in the last five years so i call human longevity up and say guys do i need to do one this year and they said no we have a colon guard like a new product and it's like nineteen dollars one nine colin guard yeah uh it's like a supplement or something yeah no it's um uh it's uh test it's actually difficult i'm not sure i need to go out on this details for the audience but network built by artificial intelligence on the basis of 100 000 samples for the price of nineteen dollars you you you have almost like the same detection results detection rate as like this invasive uh awful uh and scary procedure and if you buy 20 tests i mean you don't need to buy it it's just part of your plan right but like for 20 tests you pay 100 imagine so every technology that we invest in the longevity vision fund don't change the current state and not it's it's not improving improving this by like factor of 10 or 20 percent it's decreasing the cost of health care for people by a factor of 10 20 50 times and we invested in affordable ultrasound diagnostic we invested in different wearables early cancer diagnostic as well like 19 dollars wow that's amazing and like with and it's more than 90 and you'll discover the very early signs of the colon cancer in combination with full body body mri and i can speak forever about the importance of early detection and the same with heart disease uh just in the last 10 years you have you know special surgical robots you know like whatever the problem you have in your heart system it's going to be fixed with enormous degree of reliability by human doctor who's just operating this through computer and there's a beautiful robot who is just doing so you know again i can talk about this forever bucket number one the auto health support health check up and where can someone go wherever they are in the world did they just go to their local doctor did they go and just say i need an annual health my check-up yeah and my focus is uh health disease cancer diabetes so ask them to test you on those things yes and go from there yeah exactly so that's number one annual health checkup that makes sense because knowledge is power exactly and if you're not i think most people are like how do i delay this checkup the longest until they need to do it because they feel like something's off then they check up but preventative care is probably the best thing you can do by number of reasons it's like just do the things to prevent it so you don't have to get sick exactly well it's 10 to 20 times cheaper yes right it's much more successful less painful yeah yeah it's less painful and you don't need to wait until your body will manifest itself with disease because at this stage it's almost like stage four right and your recovery chances like if looking at cancer is what twenty to thirty percent uh and and in terms of the call and even if you survive like my father had a lung cancer back in 2005 he survived but he shrunk in size by one-third his body yeah yeah and his quality of life never recovered to this extent so this is where my passion for longevity is longer and more quality yeah yeah exactly okay so that's number one two um i call it don't die stupid or don't do stupid things or scientifically i call it passive longevity right so if you're smoking statistically you're going to live 10 years well less right and and if you look at the average for your gender and population group okay so smoking minus 10 years from your life uh not using seat belts uh minus two years seat belts in the car seat belt seat belts yeah minus two years uh from your life uh well excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol i don't even have the figures but um that's uh dangerous as well um so this these are the simple things or don't doing you know doing super extreme sports like for for example i i've been blessed and i've had an opportunity to travel to like south pole and north pole because it's it's still pretty safe trips but then i thought okay what if i i want to go to everest like the the highest mountain on earth so probability of death if you try to do it is a little bit around well a little bit above six percent wow so i thought like as a man who want to change one billion lives and father of four kids i don't want to do it so these are the simple choices and and again they all rational uh in regards to smoking or your safety procedures etc so that's that's very important too and people really underestimate that don't die stupid don't do things so extreme that it gives you more chances of dying younger yeah okay number three third is diet so one of our limiting beliefs and this is what has changed for us is we underestimate the power of food and the food uh and the fact that food can be our medicine right so in this regard there's so many disagreement in in in scientific circles around what actually extends our life today but there is almost one agreement even this most skeptical one say that if you decrease the the number of calories your your caloric intake it's almost it's almost you're guaranteed that you're gonna live like two three four years longer and the quality is actually gonna be better crazy yeah it is you'll look younger too yeah yeah exactly but then the question is how you do it right because you don't want it's for me it's a nightmare just to three days a week uh sorry three times a day seven days a week just to control like the number of calories that you do so what i do i i'm i'm doing a lot of plant-based food because the caloric intensity of vegetables is so small even you have if even if we have like the whole table full of vegetables you're still going to be fine so that's one two because of the current production practices for meat and fish the industrial version of this is full of growth hormones antibiotics equally bacteria itself so i'm just trying to avoid this so that's important as well and this is why you switch to vegetables as well i also do fasting but it's not for everyone you know i do like 36 hours of fasting every week monday evening to wednesday morning i've been starting to do that from sunday evening mm-hmm to tuesday morning yeah and i feel great it's amazing i just did this a couple days ago yeah i've done it a few times this year and i'm kind of like okay once a month right now try for 24 to 36 hours yeah and it's like maybe every two weeks or maybe every week eventually i feel like i'm getting leaner i feel like healthier younger all those things so yeah yeah well let's i also like your choice of uh weekdays because i'm i'm kind of trying i'm killing the blue monster in the beginning right so i'm like the most difficult part is like do it on monday and then for the rest of the week yeah enjoy you enjoy yourself yeah i also like wine but uh specifically californian one but um it's really unhealthy specifically from the age of like 45 when your aging processes uh are starting to uh progress so i i'm sticking like probably one or two glasses of wine every week like on my scene days like friday evening or saturday max and that's it yeah i just did a brain scan with dr dave daniel do you know of course yeah i interviewed him for the book amazing guy i just just got my results back really last week and did three brain scans supposed to go back in four months he wants me to give me he's giving me some supplements and some hyperbolic hyperbolic chamber did my first one yesterday i'm doing another one tomorrow i'm supposed to do 40 sessions uh yeah it's at next health here yeah yeah and in the chamber um and he said i asked him i go we just had an interview come out with him but i asked him of smoking marijuana cigarettes or alcohol which one is worse for the brain yeah and he said marijuana based on 80 000 i think scan results those that had marijuana had far worse brains than looking brains than those who didn't he said obviously smoking and alcohol also affected but marijuana is the worst and so if we know these things that smoking alcohol marijuana is bad for the brain bad for long longevity why do we keep doing them why do we keep doing it please look it's a trillion dollar question i i can guess that i do think through evolution we didn't really have access to all these things so our body and our mind has never been prepared to tackle the challenge of this kind of over availability of this of this world things yeah of the world right so much stimulation so much opportunities challenges adversity pain suffering media like it's a much simpler life a hundred years ago exactly exactly there was still adversity but it was like okay we're just hanging out with a few friends and then in the farm yeah that's it yeah i agree and uh we've never been well that's why i uh you talk about discipline and the unique and longevity because otherwise um your body through centuries actually through a million years of evolution has not really been prepared to to handle all this stress and all these choices that's that's probably the shortest way to answer that okay so that's the diet and also the final you know those three right yeah yeah yeah final piece on the diet is the importance of like take out the sugar drinks so like we're drinking water today so that's super important um this we have way too much sugar that we should and we can process in terms of how our body works the fourth is physical activity and we have a funny uh view on on physical activity so i mean as humans everything is like black and white it's everything is binary extremes so it's as group of people just they're sitting and like watching football on tv the other group of people are okay i need to run a marathon yeah but there's so many things in between like the easiest thing you you can do is just like wear your whoop or fitbit or apple watch and count the steps 10 000 steps a day is enough actually to uh to transform your metabolic state right to support your longevity like a healthy state of your body if you look at at science starting from 6.5 thousand steps or seven thousand step is actually enough then it's a plateau but usually say like ten thousand steps a day because we tend to under deliver yeah in terms of our target and it's it's very easy it's gamified you can have immediate feedback like a batches congratulations prices and uh that's that's the whole thing i had an interview with um adrian gore the founder of um insurance companies they are i don't know who's their partner in u.s in the uk it's vitality uk they started from south africa and like the only option and and tools and resources they had to make people healthy is lifestyle changes because of the way the country was run and how poor they were like it was like the only thing that they and they and and they work a lot with guys like apple with feed beat just to make a change in in your health through giving you different stimulus uh to do physical activity every day in form of steps so like if you do every week if you complete your seven goals you get like a cup of coffee from starbucks every two weeks is i think tickets to the cinema and then but then the funny thing you'd be amazed how many things that we can do for freak uh cup of coffee starbucks like i'm gonna go do this yeah yeah so that's that's the thing so gamified and then obviously on top of that if you can you should add stretching you should add um like a cardio exercise because this is the best training for your heart and vessels and remember it's one of the top uh risks for that so then yeah it's heart disease and cancer so that's that's super important um as well and also heavy lifting what i've what i've heard i've seen the study actually that people who are professional like heavy lifters uh they have zero problems in any stage of their life even during the all stages zero problem with uh joints and bones as well i don't know how it works but it's really amazing so that's that's worth that's your uh health uh yeah everything is i mean there are some heavy lifter body builders who have destroyed their bodies so if you're an extremist oh yeah obviously it's gonna shut your body down but i think the science behind this is like the resistance training the heavy lifting is increasing bone density it's like it's doing all these things for your body yeah and muscle burns fat so it's like helping you keep the fat off which is helping you stay younger and all those things so that's physical activity number five yeah number five uh i call it peace of mind and um as we discuss them every time we we think about how we kind of defer to and we focus on on physical health and i do think we underestimate the importance of the mental aspect of that because if we want to live longer we want to live in healthy and happy state so that's important and that's that's a lot of simple things like uh sleeping yeah my rule is huge eight hours in the bed seven hours of sleep so that's that's what i'm resting for an hour sleep yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's what i do uh you know i might fall asleep early but then it's just i don't want to mix that you know time in the bed it's not always your kind of quality sleep time um then meditation is very important the problem you just mentioned how difficult and uh and um destructing this world is so by this means we have extreme we all probably have very high uh level of cortisol the stress hormone yes and the way mother nature constructed our body it's actually meant to be like a spike so you see a bear or something dangerous in the forest you have a spike of course there's all the straight hormone you run and then in if you like it in uh you know 10 or 20 minutes then you can actually relax and your cortisol level goes down so what we live in with extremely high cortisol level hour by hour day by day week by week and it's it's and it's very dangerous so meditation is is a really simple way to decrease your cortisol level and it's has uh enormous um health effect and also in terms of the happiness i think the sense of purpose and sharing the like social realization sense of purpose is is super important and again um as we discuss pre-show uh if you think about like religious leaders or people who have a big mission in life they tend to shine more have more energy and uh live longer so yeah i mean for purpose yes exactly yeah meaningful purpose going back so those are the five out of the ten buckets um going back to the psychological age and social i guess pressures or social norms something my father did as a child growing up is he would never celebrate my birthday and i remember all the other kids in my class would have birthday parties cakes balloons presents it was like this big celebration my birthday comes around nothing i got no gifts no parties no nothing it was just another day and i remember after like a few years of this you know once i realized at like five i was like oh i'm not even and it was like seven and eight i was like dad why don't you celebrate my birthday what's like do you not love me you know i was like yeah yeah yeah he goes son we celebrate you every day but i don't want to put emphasis on your age on how old you're getting because i've seen so many people focus on their age and be held back mentally and emotionally physically by how young they are or how old they are and so we never celebrated it and i was like dad but we can still get like a cake or something you know and have like presents but he was like i just don't want you to be limited by your age by focusing on time as a factor that's of importance for you that could hold you back and i thought it was you know after of like the sadness of it i was like this makes sense and i grew up feeling just like it doesn't matter how old i'm getting biologically right but psychologically i'm staying young and healthy and fulfilled and fun and joyful yeah i'm expressing myself like a child and therefore i feel young and so and i never feel like limited because i'm like oh i'm now i'm 38 biologically so it's like i can't do this it's like no you can't can still do whatever i want oh yeah that's that's a great story i mean it's obviously a little bit painful for the if i can imagine uh but that's uh that's a great lesson but it's kind of great it's breaking down the social norms of like how to put emphasis on our age yeah and how okay now you're a big milestone 30 now it's 40 like oh you're getting over the hill it's like saying these things words have meaning and start to psychologically affect us like now i'm middle aged okay so you only got half of your life i mean yeah so it's all downhill from here it's like the words we use transform our mindset which affects our physiology exactly exactly you also touch on on very important topic of how society and our life will change if we're all going to live much much longer whether it's 150 years or 200 years as well and then i think the biggest mindset shift that we need to do is that our life will consist of several beautiful mini lives okay so these lives meaningless seasons yeah yeah well that's a great uh metaphor a way to call it so then uh every 10 to 20 years we will have a an opportunity and a pleasure of changing career right or you know start to do things that you always were dreaming of doing so that's that i i do think it's important to recognize and uh we always be on this trajectory of redefining ourselves and and and and i do think it's it's very soon now we'll have an it's going to be a social norm to make a lot of changes in your life in terms of your education career per even purpose even the dream uh every 10 to 20 years well that's that's one of the things to um to grow young but also i think it's a necessity in a world where our lifespan will go beyond or well beyond 100 years yeah that's cool i'm curious about environment and weather how does that play into age and aging or ants are staying up to people that live in cold extreme cold live longer do people believe in extreme hots is it more mild temperature would they live longer do we have any research around this yes so and this is very interesting actually so every time we're talking about extremes right it's not really great yeah either yeah so if you like right yeah you know in the middle of africa right and always under the sun it's not that great because it what it does it's actually uh speeds up uh like the aging processes in your body and everything yeah well the other the other extreme if you are like really up north that then everybody has to work so hard yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's that's one well the other thing is um you are deprived of sun because it's like six months or yes yeah what vitamin d yeah yeah yeah uh of um polar night and six months of polar day you don't have like a vitamin d which process naturally in your body and and also you usually have certain limitations in terms of your access to nutritional food food is in deficit there in terms of variety and like vegetables as well so you're really far away from kind of your organic farm or yes wherever you take your vegetables from so i do think that we all like if you think about us or europe in this sweet spot of um where we can live for to maximize our longevity i also i i talk about then about this in the concept called longevity revolution i do think and i i say there's seven signs of longevity revolution just for communication purposes and first sign for me is that i i want you and all of us to watch out how longevity friendly uh our uh our environment um is becoming uh so like china and india added 10 of their timberlands in the last 10 years or driverless cars they added what uh timberlands like foreign increased right so that's why is that for oxygen is that uh yeah well that's because i mean i think making sure the world is becoming better right and and fighting global warming is um is on everyone's agenda and and uh you know like these countries they they kind of thought okay if we will increase the you know the timber like a forest land uh that's gonna help to solve a problem the other sign is um like driverless cars so if you are i was about to say if you're driving driver's car so is that out there yet i mean there's the tesla that i have has like yeah you're still yeah we get in there it's just a matter of in the next because you know i i want to prepare all of us not only for changes that we just discussed for today but like you need to stay on longevity breach you in the next five to 10 15 years you need to be healthy and happy to make sure you enjoy the benefit of all these technologies which are coming it's not too late so i call it horizon two so we we will discuss that as well but then drive your scars so that's a natural choice you just decrease mortality rate by a factor of 10. wow that isn't that amazing or plant-based meat or lab-grown meat well that's well just another caloric restriction intervention intervention uh if you think so i'm actually very uh hopeful and positive about the fact that right now we have a choice whether you go for like uh usual meat or plant-based meat as well and i'm not religious about being vegan or vegetarian i have plenty of friends who are gonna have this habit but uh you know obviously all these changes in the environment contribute to right you know our ability uh to live longer and enjoy in our life in fact i'm actually i'm doing a lot of pro bono programs called longevity at work with largest corporations on earth i just i don't want to use their names and again everything i do longevity is is me sharing the best of me so i do it for free but what we do we create longevity bubbles like a longevity enabling environment in their offices so people use the stairs there's uh healthy food in canteens and vending machines they all have wearables and then week by week you just compare this department with this department this state with this state uh as well they have and and right now you have so many apps for like meditation for smoking cessation and an annual checkup is is a part of so many health plans so you just need to have like a good focus on that yeah so this is what we do it's just another way for you to uh improve your longevity chances to make sure you have you're surrounded with healthy choices rather than you not just you opening out your fridge and it's like alcohol and chocolate i i love all of this but it's just not really healthy we were not prepared to handle these choices on a regular basis by mother nature yeah what what do you think is the perfect temperature to be at if you're like yeah 75.2 degrees yeah year-round or is it good to have some seasons yeah where there's like some cold months some hotter months some milder months what do you think about temperature so if you look at distribution of uh lifespan uh all around blue zones yeah where are the what are the temperatures yeah so if you are this not on the extreme side of the earth like not not on equator or not in the north pole um the biggest determinants of your lifespan is actually not the climate but um uh your access to healthcare uh that's important uh and your income your genetic predisposition right so if you are unlucky in genetic water you you have like rare disease so that's uh that's bad um as well well that's why my mission is to bring affordable and accessible version of longevity to the world because i'm kind of less interested to create something which will cost like a millions of dollars and give just very few the opportunity to outlive the others um that's it so but then it's just to be practical here i think anyway between like in the room like between 68 and and like 70 degrees is fine people so the way our body develops itself uh and um optimize itself is just reaction to mini shocks so that's why like cryo chambers uh is important hyperbaric chambers that you're doing is also important so let's change the inflow it's usually kind of full of oxygen uh so that's actually pretty important for your brain health um as well so that's why you know people love to you know to take like a cold showers because i mean if you do it like for two or three minutes it's just like uh uh body starts to respond to that like the mini shocks and like and and and and if you look at what nassim taleb uh anti-fragile anti-virtuality uh book so he's basically said that the series of mini shocks prepare prepares us for handling much bigger shocks in our life yes and this is the way body develops itself uh so i do think uh making sure you're not that comfortable yeah and it's volatile right in a way and also temperature wise is uh is important as well that's good what would you say are the five worst habits that actually shorten our lives um one we covered this a little bit so one is um obviously smoking yeah right and i can expand it to like drug addiction uh so that's that's one uh to um yeah i don't want to talk about alcohol i i think it just goes without saying um two is [Music] having your diet wrong bad diet yeah it's bad diet and specifically we're living in a world which is full of temptations and and this we basically delegated and outsourced all our food choices to uh you know big food producers uh other suppliers to advertising as well so i i do think there's it's it's time to take back control and responsibility for your own health through kind of defining your own uh diet uh third is lack of physical activity so that's uh that's really bad um fourth i think it's just this reactive approach to medicine which starts with us so unless my body manifests itself if i have a problem then i'll see a doctor right right and it's and that's usually by that time it's really too late to treat it in a um in an optimal inexpensive and highly successful way and fifth i think it's just priming ourselves to be negative right because and and we have like if you watch tv or you you you go to the news website today you have a feel that the world is falling apart it's not this is like the i know it might sound ridiculous for some of you but this is like the best time to live on this planet statistically you know through the whole history of humanity right but then instead of that we just we got this you know all the pieces of bad news so i do think it's it's just keeping the distance from constantly negative news yes uh and um making sure uh that you have something positive uh in your life and in your mindset and how important is sleep to living longer so i i don't know if you if you um had a chance to talk with uh matthew walker i'm supposed to interview him soon but i've had sean stevenson on him okay yeah so frankly speaking before uh probably age of 45 i i was looking at sleep as obligation so it was almost like endless credit for hours yeah that guy can take let me i can wake up early i'll just do that i'll stay late etc and then after reading why would sleep by matthew walker this basically like changed my life completely so i do think it's super important by by a lot of scientific reasons and i know i obviously know i have a lot of friends who run like longevity and human performance optimization clinics all around the world so this um there's a guy called um dr jack cradle so first time i met him i'm like so what's your advice so he we had a lunch and he was just looking at me and and he said the beautiful he said sergey every night we have an opportunity to visit the best clinic in the world we go to bed and i'm like oh my god this is the best way to put it right so i mean it's like and then it really costs nothing right so you don't need to be rich to improve your quality of your sleep i mean it's obviously just a lot of like techniques around that um but um that's it and so this is the best clinic in the world in terms of your hormonal balance the level of energy uh in fact if you look at science there's a so if if you were sleeping less than six well probably five hours your chances to get alzheimer is 40 percent higher wow yeah and and neurogenerative disease uh uh diseases are such an unknown territory for us so i mean if you can almost guarantee you decrease your chances to hit that by sleeping more and i i think we all should do this right right and what about you mentioned not being negative what does a positive mindset in general do for our longevity so my definition of positive mindset is like um not judging people and it's it's i mean it's always much easier to say that rather than to live with this habit but like your mental discipline is pretty important so every time like i'm i'm going in my judgmental mode i'm i'm always like who am i you know who i am to judge these guys right and this and if someone someone does something this sometimes it's just like a good reason for him or her to behave this way we just don't know that so there was number of reasons so uh like uh if someone is just not responding to your emails well think about what if they have like a huge trouble in the family right and we and we always by default we're just like well what's called you're just not responding to my email so it's like giving people like a benefit of doubt and and always um think that there's all positive interpretation of other people's actions so that's one the other one is um is just giving more than taking from the world i think it's very important because we have this transactional mentality so you know i'll just do something for you and you'll do something for me i don't think it's the way how world and universe uh works and i just realizing that and uh and i've seen so many lives changed with people who just decided one day that they're gonna share the best of themselves with the world and how rewarding it can be and literally like and it's three six months and you just get completely different level of support and positive vibes and good things happening around you right what about money how important is money and longevity how important is thinking about money making money um not having money how do these play in do people with less money live longer do people with more money live longer um so and again it's it's a sensitive topic for me because of my mission again affordability and accessibility aspect is is is um is of the major focus for what i do and and the fund as well so it's a it's a very complicated question obviously and i think that money is a very important resource well this is the way this world has been constructed that this is what we use to exchange for good services and some other things so in a way i and again which is coming back to one theme today like how bad extremes can be so if you're like really obsessed with that it's actually replace your sense of happiness sense of enjoyment in the world you like almost like insecure overachiever which is working on and it's never enough right so that's one extreme the other one is like if you completely ignore the role of money in our life whether it's in longevity or like an in a broader sense then that means that um some of the important things will not be available for you because this is not going to be enough money or res or resources for you to enjoy that and i'm not talking about i don't know big house or yeah or private plane i just i'm not interested in that you know my s is as comfortable in economy class as in private jet so it's the same speed and it's the same point a to point b so i'm i'm really indifferent about this uh this whole thing so in in this you know an extent but obviously i've seen so many people who who um became kind of happier by the moment they realize that life is just not about money just about simple pleasures happiness um helping others kind of things i know it sounds a little bit altruistic but this is like i'm always been criticized for being idealistic so that's that's me yeah i mean you've been around in the venture capital world investing world for a long time yeah 20 years you've met a lot of extremely wealthy people billionaires you've worked with um you know you know a lot of these individuals does having more money make you less judgmental more mentally disciplined more altruistic with the world in general in your mind or does it not matter no i meant more in proportion i meant more uh um happier and healthier people in uh whatever the definition is like i'm if if i can kind of say a middle class than the middle class whatever is between two extremes uh i think it's uh because at certain point of time uh uh in in the equation between you and money money becomes kind of first so if you elegantly kind of ignore or de-prioritize that it actually makes you more balanced then think about so when i started to do priming and i was just thinking about what are the things i'm the most grateful for in this life i i was really shocked actually because i was thinking this whole career like uh raising the next one finding the company who can change the world is like the best but then it's like pictures of my parents my wife and my kids and my dog actually yeah or the dog that's it and i and and it was i know it sounds really obvious but like for 45 years old man it was shocking realization that whatever i i thought is important it's not right right what about the next wave in 10 15 years you've got a wearable on your chest you've got a glucose monitor this is like version 1.0 of like technology connected to the body but what what is available now what is going to be available in 10 years for us to look forward to so that we are disciplined now yeah and we could use these things to accelerate living a longer life okay uh very interesting questions there's glucose monitors now you can track like your your blood sugar your spike and your food you've got this heart monitor that's in your chest right now what else do we have right now okay um so what i'm going to do so i call it horizon 2 of longevity and horizon 2 is about what are the technologies and scientific inventions that we're going to see and enjoy yes uh in like 10 15 years time 5 10 15 years time but what i want to do i'm going to talk you through like the three like three biggest uh areas okay for the change but i'm gonna be using examples from today okay okay so one is um genomic medicine or like gene editing or gene engineering yeah so then um there's so many things which is happening in this field and if you if you want to pick up like one technology and one piece of science which would fundamentally change us as humans is actually genetics right and our ability to influence that reprogram that etc in fact i do believe that in in 10 or 20 years time uh science and technology is going to be there the problem is is going to be like regulation obstacles and barriers and ethics i actually i call it morality of immortality because i do believe that we have created technologies to extend our life but we haven't created life that we want to extend and that's like the biggest problem so if you're interested we can discuss later but then so genetic engineering yeah like genetic engineering because there's so many things that you can do i mean we might not know right but modern and vaccine and there's so many uh covet vaccines are they it's just uh gene therapy uh therapy yeah so that's uh that's actually uh that's how close we are like 10 years ago you can help like tenfold of people like people who suffer from really rare genetic disease with the technologies that we had 10 15 years ago right now it's massive or there's a drug i don't want to use this name which helps you to reduce cholesterol and 40 percent of people a population in developed countries including u.s uh suffer from high cholesterol problems including myself so it's just gene therapy drug uh which can i mean you do it probably once every six months which reduce your cholesterol level and this is how close uh gene therapy and you know overall uh field of genetic engineering right you know come to us so this is examples from today but it's going to be massive in 10 or 20 years time and that can you can even on at the embryonic stage you can peop you can make kids and people are uh prone to oh sorry uh you can like defend them from uh hiv from a lot of many diseases from genetic disease as well um and then and like we already know like 3 000 genes which are responsible for longevity for us living healthier and longer life so that's technically we will be able to reprogram them or uh or switch them on um literally next five to ten fifteen years i'm pretty sure it's happening today in the lab but again the question gonna be is are we ready as a society to accept that and i i again again i'm not advocating this so this is a huge debate that we need to have what is permitted there but usually you start helping people who like and they're really late having really late stage disease where they have no alternative for treatment apart from that similar to what is happening with elon musk and neuralink well if you think this uh if you think about urine as a way to help people who haven't who have alzheimer's or dementia right well that's that's a great invention uh so that's the first is um gene editing gene therapy very promising there's so many science and technology of this developing today including vaccines uh but then it's going to be transformational in terms of the size of uh of application of this technology and and science breakthroughs in our life so that's one okay second is organ regeneration so if you speak to father of gerontology aubry de grey uh he's he's saying that we what we're doing now we're transforming the view of human body from biological perspective to engineering perspective it's almost like an old car metaphor that he used that if you want to extend resource of the old car all you need to do is just kind of swap maintenance and and change the parts so this is what is uh well this is what we're trying to do in case of human body and actually human mind as well so and then there's so many things happening in organ regeneration uh field like we uh two years ago we invested in the company from pittsburgh uh called light genesis all they do is they regrow um organs inside our own body right yeah so then it's crazy it's crazy yeah and they're starting human trials next month that's great they just have fda approval so what is happening so in today's environment if you have a problem with liver and you need to have a liver transplant you wait six nine 12 months some people die they because they couldn't really last that long it's very expensive procedure it's uh probably seven to eight hundred thousand dollars for that and success rate is not that high because your body thinks that this is a foreign organ and it does it's rejected yeah reject it so it's autoimmune rejection reaction oh my gosh so this is what is happening today what geniuses does it it takes a donor liver split it in in 50 or 70 pieces use very non-invasive like laparoscopic operation to put it in your lymph node it's actually here well this is the best place to regrow that and uh in course of three to six months your body regrows like your liver b and then when you remove it and put it in uh no no you just it stays there and and look our bodies just piece of art right so and and it takes as much work from your damaged lever as possible and that's it you just live with that wow so they've done it with mice dogs um monkeys and again they just got with 100 percent success rate 100 and they just got fda approval to start human trials so it's not even like 10 20 years from now this is happening but then imagine how many lives that we can uh change that or or martin roadblock amazing woman the founder of united therapeutics they work with um like 3d printed organs yes they work with uh center transportation just taking organs from um like any other animals human-like animals like peaks etc and helping people who's just gonna die without that right without that help and there's so many technologies that she's working out so it's just brilliant um uh and in the end actually the funny thing that like the most difficult organs for us to uh you know recreate and replace our heart and and brain and probably for the good reason but um now all this will come in the next 10 to 20 years yeah so that's uh we wouldn't supplement this with like computer brain uh integration interface uh anyway so that's that's the second piece like organ regeneration um and then third is um longevity and appeal we're so used to the model of medicine when we're just taking pills and i kind of respect that i actually think it's makes sense um so we already have quite a few drug candidates for us that for us to be able to use them as longevity drug because right now if you go to like you know walgreens or cvs and you ask like a drug against aging they would think you're crazy or they will send you to cosmetics or to supplements and this is counter-intuitive right because your chances to get disease like your heart disease cancer yeah diabetes is is exponentially increased with age usually after age of 50 or 55. so that's why is that so obviously um we're looking at a few trials like tame trial done by my very good friend uh professor near barcelona when we when they take in generic drug called metformin who's been there for what 50 60 years very safe and they start in the trial with 5 000 people to see if there is actually you know any positive effect on their uh lifespan and health span and i think statistically it's i i do believe that metformin uh we will prove that meforming can extend our life by two three kind of even four years uh but you know please don't rush to kind of pharmacy your doctor asking them to to prescribe you metformin you need to stay a longevity breach but then in five years time we'll have more um uh different candidates for longevity drug and in the and i always kind of try to remember this funny things interesting things about different uh uh longevity treatments and interventions uh so they do in the study with like five thousand people with metformin and you know that in every study you this you know certain group you do metformin right and the other one you do placeba so placebo for this study was more expensive than itself wow this is how cheap this this whole thing and this is actually illustration that not everything that uh and it's not a good excuse saying like you know i'm i couldn't really afford this this and this there's so many lifestyle changes or the simple things we will be able to use in in in the very near future to change our uh life and to improve our health that's exciting and there is there's um going to be new you think there'll be new devices as well that we're connecting and with our bodies yeah so my concept called uh internet of body and and uh you know i'm i'm not saying this is my thing right i think it's natural it's just like logically you you expand the internet of uh of things concept uh to internet of body and um but we all gonna be uh connected in in many ways so like well think about this zeo patch right on my chest so what it does right now it puts everything like seven days data and nights as well on cheap and i just ship it to the company uh in the next three to five years uh it will just we're gonna be direct transmission of the data in my electronic health records database yeah and that's it right and the same with glucose monitor watch out apple apple has uh enormous ability to disrupt a lot of things and when people ask me about the future of healthcare industry i i'm actually saying that the the biggest change will come not from all players doing new thing the biggest change will come from new players doing completely new things and and and like if you listen to scott galloway professor jay he's uh he's saying so if apple want to add another trillion or two to its market capitalization there's only three avenues so it's uh healthcare education uh healthcare and automotive like a cars so that's it so and then i just seen a report uh a year and a half ago i think it came from morgan stanley that apple might generate half of its revenue from health care by the end of this decade imagine we don't know if this is happening or not but obviously we tend to think that that our variable is like you know helped us to count the step but it's already personalized healthcare devices there's so many things that you can do with that and all they need to add is like your glucose monitor uh there and uh blood pressure monitor so that's going to be like 90 to 95 percent of data you need to to measure in a regular basis so that's why you know i'm i'm a fan of the different wearables but i switched to apple watch because that's like probably the biggest and most promising platform which also personalized healthcare right as well and then funny enough what was this okay so it was a study i was just looking at from last year that 30 of the world data uh is uh healthcare data imagine that and um well the other funny things i'm full of anecdotes that i think it was in the uk like a natural national healthcare regulator recently prohibits the purchase of fax machines for healthcare providers and hospital imagine it's 2021 when was the last time you've seen fax machine uh yeah i'm not even sure yeah but then it's still like 70 of the data exchange happening in informal stacks so what are we talking about that's why it's important to be digital it's important to embrace the concept of internet of body and it's like as preventive as possible so it's going to be i guarantee it's going to be 10 to 20 times cheaper for you for your health care provider if you do that i'm loving this stuff this is some great information you got a lot more great data in here that people should check out the science and technology of growing young by sergey young make sure you guys check out the book i've got a couple final questions for you um this question is called the three truths i ask everyone at the end so i'd like you to imagine you're 200 years old and it's your last day you finally got to turn the lights off okay right it's you made it but you got to go to the next place okay you got to leave your body whatever happens with your mind but you get let's say it's over uh and for whatever reason you've accomplished every dream the billion lives you're changing you know you're writing books you're doing whatever you want to do you're living those dreams but for whatever reason you've got to take all of your written words with you all of your content your work the information you put into the world videos whatever yeah got to go with you to the next place okay so no one has access to your information anymore this book and everything else is okay hypothetical interesting but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true three lessons you would leave with the world and this is all we would have to remember you by okay what would you say sergey what are your three truths um okay first there's only love if people are mean to you not supportive of you being judgmental with you discouraging you giving you hard time uh you need to love them unconditionally because they are in search of life of love they are this is what they strive for this is what they're missing in their life this is their way to cry for help so whenever you think someone is really being bad for you you just need to transform it into understanding that this person needs help and and it's now your responsibility to give him or her as much love and support as you can and and i've done it so many things in life you couldn't even imagine how people change after you you kind of give them like even a recognition of their heart feeling or the hardship that they went through life in the past or today type of problems they were trying to solve and you were there to support them and help uh so that's that's going to be truth number one okay number one well truth number two is um you need to embrace as much knows in opposite to yes that you receive so we we live in the culture where uh no is like a shame we take it personally we think it's failure uh but then like speaking of martin rothblatt who's just working a lot on organ regeneration so she's saying like if i didn't receive my 99 nose i will not get to my yes so just embracing your failures and um been really happy that someone is uh told you that because as i think it's got galloway again because saying if you're not receiving enough notes that means that you're not going to try and harden and then the third truth is the only guy the only person in this world that you're competing with is is just you okay so no matter how strong or weak you are in in in any areas um your mission and your happiness will come you know uh come from every day trying to be like a better a little even a little bit better version of yourself this is the most fascinating mindset that you can have well it's beautiful i don't think i've heard those three in that order so that's great thank you for those um how can we support you where can we follow you online um i think the easiest way is to go to sergeyang.com and we have a beautiful newsletter there's a lot of newsletters in the field but what we're trying to do we we translating signs of health and longevity in uh very simple words uh so it's kind of engaging but also interesting because this this there's so many confusion in this space so we're trying to be as science-based as possible okay we you can even like download the uh uh free version of uh chapter from the book it's a chapter it's my favorite chapter called morality of her mortality about how our world and we should change by taking responsibility for our own health and the health of the planet uh on our own shoulders so that's probably like the easiest way to follow me or like instagram or you know young on yesterday as well perfect sergeydon.com check out the newsletter instagram as well get the book the science and technology of growing young make sure you guys check this out final question for you before i ask you i want to acknowledge you sergey for your mission i think uh having the audacity to live to 200 is a big mission and a dream that can at least inspire people to live longer maybe they don't want to live that long or maybe they can't think that big but maybe say you know what maybe i get to 100 105 110 whatever it is for them so i acknowledge you for your youthful energy your maniac on a mission uh research and you're investing in these technologies to help it be more affordable for the rest of us to live younger i appreciate and acknowledge you for that uh my final question is what is your definition of greatness um definition of greatness um well my definition of greatness is um you are great when you helping other people to be great that's it there you go that's like the only thing we need to remember so yeah thank you very much man love it thank you let me know some of your biggest takeaways in the comments below and make sure to share this with someone you think needs to hear it and stick around for more inspiring content coming up right now two types of information in our cells one is the genetic information that we get from our parents of course dna but there's another level of information that's just as important but we just don't talk about it it's called the epigenome which is the instructions to tell the cell which of those 25 23 000 genes to read and if you read the right ones at the right time you'll be a nerve cell or a skin cell because you don't want to read all 23 000 at once so sure that doesn't work doesn't work so the epigenome is like the pianist that plays the piano and what we think we figured out is that aging is that the pianist becomes demented demented just can't play the tune right anymore the wrong genes come on what is that what is that called the pianist what's that called the p the demented pianist what's it called the epigenetic epigenome okay so the epigenome becomes demented yes loses function in some way right and we can cause that to happen one of the main reasons that it happens we think is chromosomes break every day a trillion times in our body every day and in the process of having to open up the dna and fix it and put it back together the epigenome gets messed up and we lose the ability to read the right genes so how do we stop it from breaking well you you can't always prevent it start by not smoking start by not getting burnt by the sun really yeah don't be in the sun for too long no no i mean we know that age is your skin any australian will tell you that what about like what's the amount of time we should be in the sun without aging or does it always have sunscreen on at all times it's not chemicals that affect i mean yeah there are some people will tell you that zero is the best zero sun well that's what some people say is in vitamin d supposed to help you live longer too well yeah they would say to take a supplement instead but i'm not human nature right like sun for me it makes you feel good a bit of uv but you don't want to overload the body it's very easy to over do it well 10 20 minutes when your skin is starting to tingle don't get don't get red but in australia we used to pull pieces of skin off blisters right yeah yeah so i've only been burnt maybe once or twice in my adult life um for for good reason don't in this time too long right right uh unfortunately it ends up you know you look white and pasty but for for caucasians anyway right but that's the price you pay you if you sun tan a lot in your 20s by the time you're 40 or 50 you will look about 5 10 years older okay now it's not all about vanity but skin cancer is also an issue so yeah in australia we learn a lot about that wow so you can be in the sun just put protection on is what i'm hearing that's right it's like or just stay inside all day yeah now put protection on i mean it's like enjoy mother nature you can go to the beach you can go on hikes just wear a hat put sunscreen on your face your arms your hands right right okay just make it okay cool yeah you got to go outside uh for sure i mean otherwise what's what's life yeah okay now i just did this trip to poland with wim hof we're with a group of guys where we did this intensive breathing and ice therapy training where we were in the ice for 10 minutes up to our neck breathing and exposing ourselves to the cold we also hiked four hours in a mountain that was about 50 miles an hour wind at the top minus 22 celsius and with no clothes on just shorts hats gloves and shoes so exposing our legs and our chest and face to the wind and the cold and pelting us with hail essentially at the top how important is heat therapy and cold therapy to aging or anti-aging i want to hear all about this all right this sounds fascinating definitely tell tell us more about that uh but yeah so when i started writing the book uh my editor said you got to talk about this cryotherapy and also sauna that's not science it can't be real uh so i looked into it and we'd also actually i must admit we've done some work on cold already one of these sort of protective genes not number one that i talked about but number three responds to cold and actually turns on healthy production of what's called brown fat so the more i looked into it and the more i can ponder my own research i thought maybe being cold does help your health and so i write about it but i think that the data it's not as strong as as fasting and exercise but it it's believable that what what you're doing when you're cold or actually when you're hot is turning on those protective longevity yeah yeah i mean not not internally you're not going to freeze internally and be cold but on your skin you're going to and just under your skin you're going to have what's called brown fat which is full of energy producing um and heat producing mitochondria the battery packs of cells and those mitochondria are really dense and it's one of the reasons that they that's brown not white fat and the brown fat it's not like normal fat where you're just storing energy it's actually metabolically active so it's burning energy but it's also seen to be healthy because it's secreting these little proteins that tell the body to stay young we don't know what they all are but there's a lot of evidence that stay young well yeah so brown fat is found mainly in babies wow because they can't sure little babies did you know that i understand why can they shiver though i don't know it's weird how old do you become until you can shiver for the first time i don't know uh i'd have to guess but but newborns don't shiver and they have to use this brown fat they're full of it but as we get older we lose it in fact when i was uh you know 20 years ago when i was just starting out people thought there was no such thing as brown fat in adults and then they did pet pet scans and found that this brown fat it was mostly in people who were cold uh and experiencing cold and found across the back mainly so you can recreate brown fat exactly yes or beige fat you can turn your white fat into brownish fat by being cold by by do we know how much cold therapy you need to do is it once a month is it once a week is it daily is it for a certain amount of time well we're still figuring that out but it seems like the more the better unfortunately so what you were doing sounds perfect so like every day doing a cold shower or an ice plunge for a couple minutes a day or just something like that helps generate brown fat which is a layer of mitochondria dense mitochondria under the skin which helps you burn more fat yeah is that what it is that's a good way to put it okay it's designed to keep you warm but it also is telling the body hey times are tough we could we could freeze to death adversity right what doesn't kill you makes you live longer well that's a good one so put your body through pain throughout your life as consistently as possible like controlled pain right going in a sauna for 15 minutes and pushing an extra minute like that feeling of adversity going in cold working out hard doing something where it's a you're not gonna kill yourself or hurt or break a leg but it's like discomfort is that what i'm hearing that's the most important lesson we call it hormesis and it's it's basically your body will be complacent if you don't tell it to work hard and the problem with our society is everything is designed to be comfortable comfortable that's what we strive for you know i was coming here uh flying out and i'm looking at all the roller bags and thinking and i'm carrying my two bags here and i'm thinking should i put it down no i'm going to walk with my bags because that's what people used to do but you know these days everything is all about comfort constant food don't exercise don't be cold ever it's crazy we're killing ourselves we're accelerating our aging process so we've got to get out of that comfort zone we're killing ourselves by being comfortable right so is there too much like if i'm cold therapy and hot and fasting and doing a hit workout is there such thing as too much discomfort in your life that will start to age you i don't think so so i could fast be in the cold and the heat two minutes of sun like do all these things in a day do it consistently carry my bags everywhere and you think it'll make me younger i think your your rate of aging will be slowed down dramatically wow skip a meal or two a day as much as you can yeah i mean there's no question in my mind that this would work give you an extra at least 15 years maybe 25. wow it's not it's not rocket science right if you do that to a rat if you give it cold or you actually give it less food it starts to if you come to my lab you'll see mice we've got mice that are on a regular diet they can eat whenever they want food just laying around just eat as much as you want and those are not fat mice because they're on a lean diet the ones we give the high fat diet they die 30 faster anyway they age rapidly but let's say even if you're lean like you are and eating well but you're eating a lot right constantly yeah if we do that to a mouse uh they will age at the what we call the normal rate so they'll be two years old they're getting frail they get gray hair they're looking old and then they'll die about six months later on average the mice that are on this calorie restricted diet that either get less food in total or only eat for a few hours a day they're running around the cage no gray hair they're super active they stay young so don't eat well you gotta eat it's fasting it's it's what do you like intermittent fasting we do like the 24-hour fast do you like uh three-day fast what do you think is ideal for most people well yeah scientifically i think going for three days is great so scientifically peter atiyah hats off to him that's his profession he can just do the uh what's the prolong or what's the uh diet what's this guy peter yeah i don't know what he's doing do you have a diet does he have like a program for this or no i don't think so he's uh he's a doctor who's experimenting on his body in severe ways and three days it's like well he goes for a week without food he drinks just drinks water wow and uh skin and bones though right yeah it's probably not the best for high performance of life no no if you're an athlete forget it so what if you're an athlete if you want to work out new hit training yeah what what if you think is scientifically right like one day fast and then intermittent fasting and skipping meals well so he i get asked this every day and the simple answer is uh do as much as you can and the more the better uh in general without losing your energy but the other fact is that nobody knows the true answer anyone who says this is the way to do it is bsing you because everyone's different and we all have different needs and different bacteria in the gut different energy levels different genes uh different lifestyles different professions and so for someone like me i'll tell you what works for me is so i'm often sitting probably for half a day i got a standing desk that's a start right you're not working out no yeah i work out once a week for a few hours that's right as much as i can do so for me what i do is i i very rarely eat breakfast i'm not hungry in the morning anyway i try to skip lunch with my cups of tea i would say i'm about 70 successful um i might have a little nibble of something in the afternoon because i can't focus well right but then i have a normal dinner i go out to dinner and i'm right right living normally yeah that works for me and i think for for an athlete that at least skipping one meal would would be good it would be good and then maybe one day a month not eating or something right yeah that sounds reasonable yeah going for a whole week though yeah 24-hour fast could be good once a month yeah one thing though about that three-day fast i've never done it myself but what happens we know is that it kicks in what's called the the super cleansing autophagy pathway which kills the bad cells and gets rid of the the bad proteins that have accumulated three days you need to go for three days to really get the deep cleanse unfortunately you've never done it though huh you'll need it you look like you're 30. you're fine maybe i could be 20 you know [Music] from your perspective as a geneticist why do people have such different physical reactions to viruses like the coronavirus why are some affected and others not is it a genetic thing or do you think it's something else well it seems to be both there are variations in the h2 receptor that seem to be involved but most of it as far as i can tell from my reading is actually people's age that that's tenfold worse than anything else further down the list is diabetes heart disease but you know we're literally talking about aging here aging is your biggest risk if you've been healthy your whole life and done the right things that's going to protect you from dying from covert 19. because a lot of things go wrong as you get older that make you susceptible to the disease um one for sure is that your immune system is a lot less resilient you know when when we ex are exposed to a virus our immune cells will multiply well actually as you get older you have a lot less ability to do that um and there are even a lot less variance of your immune cells so you can have a 100 year old person has a lot fewer types of immune cells available to to fight an infection we generally have clones of clones in our body as we get older whereas when we're young it's a it's like a melange a whole different set so the immune system is screwed up but there's also other issues as you get older you get more and more inflammation in general there's a protein in the body called a complex of proteins called the inflammasome and it controls your inflammation as you get older it's harder and harder to keep that at bay and so older people in general tend to have this hyper immune response that actually often can do them in and it's not because the virus that's due to the body overreacting to it is there anything that people that are more susceptible currently that they could do to help combat the coronavirus or viruses like that without staying at home all day and not being around it is there things they could do to enhance the immune system and support them oh sure there are i mean if anybody is is out of shape uh or is carrying too much weight those are the the easiest things and most likely to work is to lose some of that excess weight and and get moving these things are known to greatly improve your immune system and including lowering inflammation now not everybody can do that right people who are at an advanced stage you can't expect them to go out on a run or even perhaps to to restrict their food but you know people who are middle aged you know like myself i've been working out a lot more exercising a lot more to make sure that my body's ready if i catch it what is what is exercise or shorter moments of bodily stress why does that boost immune system and help us anti-age well there are a lot of answers to that but in general the summary is that these protective pathways that we've discovered dampen inflammation when it's too high and they also allow the immune system to attack a virus when it's needed um one possibility and this hasn't been proven but there's there's some evidence in over the last six months of of published work is that as we get older we lose the ability to make a molecule called nad which we work on in my lab and without nad our bodies are not very well equipped to fight diseases including infections this inflammasome which i'm kind of showing as a whole but it's obviously much smaller it is regulated by the levels of nad what does nad stand for oh nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide it think of nad as a small chemical that we need for life it controls about 500 or so chemical reactions in our body it's needed for those we make less of it and we destroy more of it as we get older but here's the thing that two of these sirtuin proteins that we work on in my lab are controlling inflammation through this inflammasome protein complex and as as we lose nad one possibility in older people is that the inflammasome is now dysregulated and that goes crazy and leads to this cytokine storm that can eventually kill people we have drugs that were that people are trying to dampen that down and one of the things that we're trying now in a clinical trial is a molecule that the body can use to make more nad an nad precursor wow and there are patients being dosed right now in i think four hospitals or at least going to be four hospitals where we'll see if that is one of the ways to give older people resilience so the body stops making nad stops producing it the older we get and it's one of the causes that helps us defend against infections inflammation disease well we think so what we see is when there's an infection um the virus actually chews up a lot of nad so cells even if you're not old the virus will deplete cells of nad and we think that that's a problem cells need nad for life if we don't have nad we're dead in about 30 seconds but also without that energy you could easily imagine that the body is unable to fight the infection but also could be an issue late in the viral infection where the the body starts turning on itself at the moment there's no supplements out there that you could buy that have nad to help you replenish any of these right oh well so you know i'm a professor i don't hawk any molecules or recommend any i have to be very clear um but there there are people uh some companies that are selling nad precursors really interesting okay i don't endorse or recommend any of those sure sure testosterone is also something that men lose that stop producing over time as well which helps you does it just look younger or be younger uh well there was a set of very expensive clinical trials done with testosterone and the results from those studies were that there wasn't a change in long-term health the results were they were negative for slowing down aging that said you know testosterone will help you build muscle uh and having muscle is very important as you get older of course you don't want to be frail and if you fall over you want to be able to be resilient and not break a bone every few minutes somebody falls an elderly person falls over breaks a hip and doesn't recover from that so anything that you can do to be more flexible and resilient and have more strength you know that to me sounds like a good thing for elderly people got it you're in your 50s or 40s i don't know i couldn't say i'm an expert on that i'm gonna ask you another question that might be controversial based on a couple of previous doctors that i've had on i had dr roger patrick on and i asked her i said hey what are some of the the healthy foods that are marketed as healthy that in your opinion aren't as healthy as they claim to be essentially was the question i asked and she said grapes have a lot of sugar in them that spike my blood pressure i think she wears like a glucose monitor so she's monitoring all of her food and constantly testing it she said when i was eating grapes like my glucose levels went way up skyrocketed and i realized that that's not good for the body to have you know grapes a lot of grapes and you can transition into having blueberries or something else that might be better for the nutritional benefits i put that online and people slam me for that and then uh dr gundry said that he doesn't think uh you know modified apples the way they are now how we modify them how they're so big how they're full of so much sugar he's like i don't think that's good to have these big apples that are modified because of the sugar and the fructose in these big apples like a honeydew crisp or something and he was saying we should be having a lot less fruit because of the fructose levels what's your thoughts on fruit in general uh should we be eating fruits every day is it something with you know i've been hurt in the past like we only used to have fruits right before the winter to kind of store up the fat and in a seasonal thing there's a lot of fruit eaters out there that believe in eating fruits only fruit all day i'm just trying to find the answers i don't know the truth of the matter but what's your thoughts based on research so research we don't research fruits of course but we do research the effects of sugar on the body uh and it's not good so try and is that all sugar or is that fruit sugar or refined sugar what's do we know that well there's there's glucose and fructose okay so it doesn't really matter where you get it these are just chemicals that's the same chemical wherever you get it from glucose you need glucose right we again we die without glucose but the foods in in our world are so full of sugars that we're constantly feeding ourselves uh more sugar than we ever would have experienced even just a hundred years ago or fifty even um so where do i come down on this well let me tell you from my own experience it's probably better to give you my example yes and preach to others yes um i definitely like fruit and i eat fruit and i encourage it with my kids for sure but they're it's a it's a balance you want the most nutrition and vitamins uh and and the lower amount of sugar and on a scale of of that ratio i think rhonda patrick's right that grapes have more sugar than nutrition compared to other fruits so the types of fruits that i like to have are ones that have lots of polyphenols colored fruits such as blueberries blackberries those things you don't want to eat too many of them of course because then you you're basically eating tons of sugar in it anyway but yeah blueberries i would have in a yogurt in the morning if i had had some right the other fruit that i think is worth looking at is cantaloupe or rockmelon um that i believe has the most nutrition versus sugar of any fruit so we try to eat those kind of uh melons as well you know what watermelon probably isn't in that category but we still eat it in summer the the point in my family and in my life is uh we're not so strict that that we avoid every type of food i'll even eat a hamburger or whatever if i feel like it but most of the time i try to focus on on plants um and have meat as something like a reward even though i much prefer the taste of meat than than just leafy vegetables but i think that it's born out just looking at people who live a long time and cultures that have a lot of elderly people over 100 the type of foods they typically have a lot more plant than just pure meat i know i'm gonna get hate meal as well from the carnivores but it's important people know i'm not saying don't eat meat i'm just saying the kind of balance if you want to focus on types of foods for longevity that's what the data says gotcha do you know if um the people in the blue zones who are living over a hundred are they are they eating i'm hearing you say they eat more plant-based are they eating lots of meat lots of fruit as well or are they limiting intake on some of those areas well they seem to do all the right things so it's don't eat a lot on the island of okinawa they tend to stop eating when they're only 70 full which is a very good idea cash it's like i i keep eating until i'm 70 percent over full yeah and then you can regret then i regret it yeah but you also you you work out more than i train hard yeah yeah uh they tend to eat the right types of foods which are packed with these polyphenols these little chemicals that are found in plants when particularly when those plants are stressed out they don't eat a lot of processed foods which kills a lot of these vitamins and polyphenols as well they colored foods which which as i mentioned is is a good thing they tend to have good social life they tend to move a lot they do gardening they do walking as they get older these are all things that just make a lot of sense anyway we we know that exercise and eating these healthy fresh foods are are good for us no matter how old we are in terms of chemicals in the diet olive oil for example has a lot of oleic acid and a lab just last year showed that oleic acid works just like resveratrol to activate the two in one enzyme this protective defense enzyme that so normally you would have to be hungry to turn this on this enzyme on that we work on but now we know that you can probably take some resveratrol or some olive oil to activate it artificially well gundry would say the whole purpose of food is to get as much olive oil in your body as possible he's a big believer in olive oil and how it's like helps you anti-age so this is fascinating stuff again i hope want to make a note that i hope all the fruity eaters out there don't hate on us i'm just trying to find the answers and david is uh giving some of the research that he's seen from his experience as well [Music] something you said before we got on here and that i read in your book is that aging is a disease is that right well that's what i think yeah that's what you think it is is would that mean death is a disease as well uh well death is the the end product of aging okay right so we've cured just about every other major disease so you don't die from an infection you typically don't die in childbirth if you're a woman so now what's left is aging and while we're whacking each of these diseases cancer heart disease alzheimer's trying to whack them on the head like a whack-a-mole game right we forget that the main reason all these diseases occur is that our bodies are aging if you don't get old you don't get those diseases is that because your immune system is strong and so that your fights against disease essentially well yes it's similar but it's not the immune system that you're thinking of we actually have inbuilt defenses we call them longevity genes that we can activate in our daily lives by doing certain things longevity genes yes that's what we call them how many genes do we have oh we've got about 23 24 000 of them 23 or 24 000 genes right but there's only about 50 really important ones for longevity okay and what are the one is the longevity gene well the the ones we study are codes called sertuans and there are seven of those and they're in all parts of the body and they do all really crazy good stuff for us okay and where do telomeres come into play well they're part of it okay yeah there are seven hallmarks or eight depending uh these are causes of aging so telomeres are one of those hallmarks other things are like the battery packs winding down those mitochondria in our cells we lose stem cells all this other stuff but here's the the important point we think a that there's a unified cause a whole uh upstream cause of all of those things we can talk about that but also these sort of they defend against all of those so while we used to think we'd have to develop eight different drugs to slow down aging if you just tap into these longevity genes they they take care of everything really they continue to regenerate good cells they continue to fight against disease or stress or whatever it may be or they do that they're really smart they they're they make proteins that act like traffic cops telling the body how to fend against adversity okay and they've been with us on the planet since life first arose and it's seven of them well the ones i studied there are seven there are others there are seven sirtuins and there are three classes of longevity gene the ones i study those seven and there's a couple of others that you can turn on why don't you start with the others they're not they're not credible enough we do not we do but we scientists we like to uh specialize gotcha gotcha but in truth even though 10 years ago we used to fight with each other my longevity gene is more important than your longevity gene it was it was ridiculous my worms living longer than your worm it was really silly but now we've realized most of us admit that all these genes are talking to each other and if you tweak one set the others will be tweaked too right okay so these genes when you say you study them what does that actually mean you're pulling like blood out of different humans and you're putting them in a tube and you're researching and you're like what's actually happening to study these yeah because i'm a non-scientist i have no clue what that actually means right is it like rats is it humans is it you know you've got to come to the lab you've got to see what's going on because it's crazy stuff we do anything we can to answer a question you're cloning humans in there you're doing all sorts of stuff right it's crazy stuff okay so we're driven by the question not by the technology so most labs will say okay i'm an expert in rats i don't give a rats about a rat i care about answering a question and our question is why do we age and what can we do about it and we'll will that transform medicine wow and so what we do if you came to lab you'd see we've got we've got jellyfish growing we've got mice that are living longer and running on little treadmills wow up in the lab we have stem cells that we're growing and uh actually turning them back in time we can reverse the aging of these skeleton cells yeah so what does that mean you take a cell from a human like yeah like a sample like a skin sample like a blood brain cells growing in the body really yeah yeah yeah wait brain cells growing in the dish yeah so like you take it from like a a living human yes you take a little piece of brain yes you put it in a dish and you reverse the age of the brain correct wow yeah that's what we do now we can actually grow little little brains in the dish too from scratch well you start with a network of cells and then you coax them into forming these networks and it's like a mini brain yeah okay so and we can age them forwards make them older no we think we understand what's driving the aging process really and then we reverse it right so you can create a brain from nothing a bunch of little cells that come together and create a thinking brain well i don't know how much it thinks but it'll respond to stimuli it'll wow it'll fire yeah and then you can make it older like benjamin button and then reverse it's aging right wow i'm telling you it's it's crazy but when i'm in the lab and and with my students for us it's just every day it's like work there's the brain it's getting older it's getting younger yeah yeah yeah but now that i'm talking about it with you it's fascinating some bizarre non-scientists yeah the other thing that's weird about this profession or anyone who wants to go into it is that essentially you're an apprentice under me and you you work in the lab and you spend a few years learning how to do all this stuff it's not easy the first two years basically you screw up yeah but it's weird that to think about it you get a bench in a lab and some chemicals and you have to make the chemicals yourself usually and then your job is to discover something nobody else has discovered it's got to be not not just slightly new radically new because i'm at harvard they don't give prizes for discovering something obvious wow it's got to be shocking and if it's not shocking it's not worth studying and haven't you discovered like tens or you've like malt 30 something 35 awards for new discoveries or something are 35 patents what do you have something some numbers like that we've discovered a lot of new things well yeah yeah if i didn't i wouldn't have a job there's motivation to always be doing cutting-edge stuff but what drives us and the reason i think we've been successful uh is that we're driven by the question not by the technology yeah and the technology comes second so what i'll do is i'll say okay here's a question we want to figure out why does cold improve health or why does fasting not eating improve health how do you figure that out well then you got to pull together teams of people uh molecular biologists biochemists mathematicians computer software people and we get in a room and we figure it out really so what would you say and your questions are why do we age and how do we reverse it is that the two questions you're focused on the most right now uh yeah that's that's pretty good yeah why do we age and how to reverse aging right do you think and so you say aging is a disease is is death of disease as well then in your mind is it like that just leads into and can we reverse death is that a possibility uh no not yet okay not yet so anyone who's had their head frozen there's nothing i can do for you right now but we can uh turn back the clock radically just in the last couple of years we've figured out that there's a backup hard drive of youthfulness in the cell that we can access to reset it so usually the earlier you start in turning on your longevity genes the better we've learned from studying mice and now humans for many years that if you're in your 20s 30s 40s you want to start turn it on now do it now because don't wait till you're 80 and then say how do i go be 60 again but most people do they wait too long why well because they're in denial that they're mortal and and we used to think that aging was was a one-way street you couldn't do anything about it we now know from studying twins that 80 of your health in old age is up to you how you live your life right your community your positivity your thinking your food the sleep you have like all those things right yeah and the reason that they work we've discovered is because they turn on the longevity genes that's the breakthrough okay so now we're artificially tweaking these longevity genes genetically or with supplements or hopefully medicine soon gotcha but you could do it in more natural organic ways is what i'm hearing well right now that's what we've got and even if you just do the five obvious things things like skip meals and don't smoke and exercise that'll get you an extra 14 years on average really it's that big that's not even using high tech that's just there's no technology just like living a good life right so what are the main things to turning on the longevity that anyone can do without technology without money you know science yeah well okay so we we've first of all don't smoke yeah that'll damage your dna that'll accelerate the aging process does that include like e-cigarettes and all these other vaping does that also well i'm a big uh advocate for uh for putting nothing artificial in your body including vaping yeah my mother died from lung cancer so i'm pretty militant about it wow um i don't think vaping is as bad in terms of the number of chemicals getting into your body yeah but we've seen recently it's probably not healthy anyway yeah yeah okay so no smoking that's one that's one next one is don't eat so much eat less often so not malnutrition of course you don't want to get too thin but this three meals a day plus snacks is ridiculous in the future i need to get rid of that yeah well you're also working it out but someone like me who's not an athlete yeah the most exercise i do during the day typically is typing three meals a day is too much actually one meal is enough for someone like me wow yeah i'm now 50. so my metabolism is way down you look like you're 37. oh thanks that's great you might need me you're like a hundred and you're like look at 37 you've already reversed the aging uh well i'm glad i don't look uh 80 because that would really be bad for your guy for here okay so we got no smoking uh eating less yeah next one would be the obvious high intensity interval training lose your breath once in a while lose your breath what do you mean just by like working out like yeah become hypoxic tell your body that you're being chased by a saber-tooth tiger or something like that the reason all of this stuff works in terms of the diet and exercise uh it's not that your blood flows more or that being hungry is is just healthy for the body it's actually that your longevity genes get turned on by these things and why does that happen why does it happen in humans in mice even in yeast cells for bread and beer the reason is that the body senses adversity and says crap we gotta fight back we might die next week without food and we you know we're running away from tigers and lions that's what this survival network this longevity gene so it turns it on when it feels like it's in survival mode that's it we want to be in survival mode and we spend our whole lives trying to reduce our adversity right being comfortable right now don't be hungry don't be puffed don't walk you know valley your car right roll your suitcase don't carry it for goodness sakes we've done the worst no wonder we're we're getting sicker and sicker we're in a world of convenience right and it's the worst thing we could do really for our bodies in terms of longevity so those three things okay uh the other two um uh let's see what else is there oh the type of food you eat is important uh yeah there's a big debate of course let's say like plant-based is gonna extend the telomeres right if you're eating leafy greens that's what i've heard but right well among other things it's also going to have a couple of really important types of molecules one are the monounsaturated fats fatty acids you get that from olive oil and avocados those are great and uh we've just learned that that's a really important trigger for a certain longevity olive oil yeah i think when i had gundry on he was like i drink a cup of olive oil a day or something like teaspoons of olive oil he's just eating it like i'm trying to get as much in as i can putting it on everything yeah well let's get back to that because there's a there's a new discovery as of a week ago that says we think we understand how that works but in olive oil there's also what are called the other the other important component of a plant-based diet are polyphenols which are the molecules that plants make when they're under adversity when they're stressed and i believe that we've evolved to sense when our food is running out so we get that signal when our plants are stressed so you don't want to eat plants that are like there's watered white liquid lettuce you can buy californian lettuce right right you want these colored vegetables that have been a little bit stressed a little bit dried out wine is a perfect example it's full of polyphenols one called resveratrol that we've worked on for 20 years and it activates these longevity pathways really well wow so stress your food organic yeah um i am for a plant-based diet but i do eat meat occasionally it tastes pretty good but um but you know it's very clear dan button is right where you go to the longest lived places in the world the blue zones sardinia right the okinawa island in japan they're not eating all meat um and actually we know that if you eat a lot of meat you shut down some of these longevity pathways really yeah so you actually you might look good and grow muscle and that's great when you're young you want to find a mate you want to look good you want to feel good but in the long run i don't think that's healthy healthy really so cutting down less and less meat at least having more plants is the way to go yeah that's that's what i've done i was on an okinawa diet in my 20s and 30s which is why there's rice and leaves and it's a bit of rice you've got to watch out for white rice because there's a lot spike your sugar yeah it's a lot but it's uh it's a lot of tofu miso soup green leafy vegetables dark greens for these uh phytochemicals and then what else was it there was a bit of fish okay yeah but but also what's important is not a lot of food i mean these days i'm stopping eating when i'm about 60 70 full and i'm trying i just never feel small until i've like eaten so much then i'm like okay i'm full well you're a young so i probably agree well here's one of the things i think one when you eat slower you start to get fuller you start to feel it and i've i'm the youngest of four and so as a kid we didn't have a lot of money growing up in a small town in ohio and there wasn't that much food so i learned to like grab and just shove it in my mouth and that became a habit that i've kind of stuck with and i'm not starving anymore like the food's available at any time i can afford it and i have it all the time but i think it's reconditioning my mind or a habit or routine of like you know i'm not scarfing my face down right now but you know it's that mindset of uh what if i'm gonna go hungry for sure uh we all suffer from that well not all of us but those of us who grew up in regular families we were told to finish our meals right don't leave anything on the plate sisters right they're stealing your food uh my wife grew up in a very poor family and even when she was a student she could barely afford food she would scrounge and buy potatoes and at the dinner table she'll call me kill me for this but uh she will eat like it's gonna all go away tomorrow but i have to have to remind her and everybody everyone should know this there's always gonna be another meal yeah there will be another meal don't worry but we're conditioned to eat food when it's in front of us i think it's a mental conditioning and it's also like either your body's tricking you or it's your brain or it's your gut or something is treating you like i'm still hungry even though you've had 2 000 calories in 10 minutes you're still like oh there's food it's like turning something on we're like i want to eat that i don't know why that is well yeah i mean it's the reason that we're here our ancestors uh put on fat and they survived the famine we don't have famines anymore thank goodness yeah but we we've descended from those people so we've got the the genes in our brain that say eat eat eat um how do you turn it off well well you can you can take certain types of food i drink a lot of tea and coffee hot water even just to fill up my stomach that works really well okay hot water not cold water i just like the feeling of hot water cold water isn't as i actually it might be something about the heat i've never thought about it but for me that's what works so when i get a little bit hungry at lunchtime i'll just i'm basically drinking tea warm water tea yeah you probably like some interesting but but it's a fight all the time yeah you know i fly a lot and people are bringing nuts and cookies and ice cream and you gotta fight it and it's really hard to fight how do you say no well i do i die but how do i do that so i've trained myself to fight it and the best thing that i do besides saying can have a cup of tea is what do i want to look like next week what do i look like a year from now what do i want to look like when i'm 80 so you you tell yourself that you ask yourself the question i think it's also how do you want to feel tonight tomorrow next week when you're 80. it's like look like and feel combination is powerful right because your mind is saying now is important and you got to train yourself to say tomorrow and the next year is just in my life yeah right and that's more important okay so is that the fourth thing or the fifth thing the fifth thing uh i didn't mention uh there are a couple of things i'll let's divide it up one is get good night's sleep sleep with everything yeah and then surround yourself by friends and people who'll take care of you yeah that's like the blue zone way too right it's like be around a good community get lots of rest and naps move a little bit eat healthy right well these are things that most people should know but they don't do so you and i are here to motivate people to do exactly but the research that i discuss in the book is how to take that to a new level how to optimize those things and add some science in there to reverse it or get getting there i like this okay before you share that stuff how did you get into this fascination or curiosity of reversing aging in the first place was there someone that inspired you was there a moment was there an event did something happen uh yeah it was an event that i think we've all gone through we just forgot about we learned that there's such thing as death we don't live in a disney movie right and all happily ever after it's not it's shocking when we're four or five we're told this and we realize it and we're in denial you know uh no that's not going to happen but uh for me i haven't been able to get that out of my mind really uh it's cruel don't you think that we're sentient beings that that know that this is all going to end [Music] we love people they take care of us and then they're gone yeah and i don't want to live forever um i would just like to leave the world a better place yeah and i think one of the big things that we're missing in medicine is that aging is driving a lot of our sickness and when we treat diseases we're treating them far too late once you've got well i won't say which disease but you know take my mother for example um let's use her lung cancer as an example she could have not smoked she could have done all the things we've talked about she could have perhaps taken some molecules that we work on uh and not had lung cancer by the time she had a tumor that was the size of a grapefruit in her lung it's game over she couldn't do anything right but we but we've put billions of dollars trying to cure lung cancer not prevent it if we just prevented it we wouldn't have to worry about it because it's easier prevention is very easy yeah right so how old were you when your mom passed away from lung cancer i was okay and uh uh i know let me take that back she was diagnosed when she was 25. when i was 25 when you were 25 and uh she went on another 20 years really yeah but it wasn't it wasn't really an enjoyable life it was a they took out her left lung so what she bring from a tube or was it like ah she could breathe but she wasn't she was always short of breath there were times when she thought she was just gonna suffocate in front of us eventually she did by the way that was not pleasing gosh that's not something anybody wants yeah and no one tells you what it's like to see your mother die or your parents die it's it's horrific wow i've never experienced another death just this one but it was not pleasant and we don't talk about it we deny it you know oh they're going to drift off into sleep that's not what happens i'm suffering it's pain it's agony it's suffering right yeah my mother was turned into a writhing lizard in front of me and all i could do was whisper into her her ear thanks for being the best mum i could ever hope for no that was it couple of minutes later she's turned blue and choking and no way you can't do anything for right that's it you're helpless you're helpless it's um anyone who smokes please please work to give it up it's just not not a good ending wow were you were you with her alone were you with family was friends was it yeah my father and my brother and i i was also in denial because i flew from america to australia to be with her you're like gosh she's going to get through this yeah you tell yourself she's always recovered last 20 years she'll pull through and the doctor pulled us aside and said we've x-rayed her lung there's barely any lung left that's working oh my gosh you better say goodbye and i said what are you talking about oh my god she's laughing in the bed she's fine and 10 minutes later she starts choking and fluids building up in her lungs and it you know if you've ever seen somebody have something stuck in their throat that's what it was like oh my god you can't get it out can't get it out you can't she's drowning maneuver you can't cpr you can't try to well i'm running around saying help me help me and all the nurses like it's nothing we can do wow so that's traumatic so please uh you know let's try to prevent these diseases as long as possible how old was your mom when she passed uh so she was my age when she was diagnosed with lung cancer and then she lived till 70. wow but she could have hypothetically you know if she didn't get hit by a bus or something she could have lived a long much longer life she didn't have the cancer oh absolutely and through my teenage years i would shout at her stop smoking you're going to die when you when you're in hospital i'm not going to come visit you oh my god you're only given one life because i'm pro life everything about me is we are so lucky to be alive yeah you know one in a trillion sperm from your parent from your dad and it's you what's the chance gift it is don't throw it away and she was the opposite she's like uh you know drinking and smoking and i've lived a good life don't don't bother me and she paid the consequence [Music] what's your thoughts on uh the difference between humans and artificial beings or some other species that uh the more we alter our bodies in non-natural ways like what's the difference between natural humans and kind of altered bodies with artificial beings yeah well we're already there i mean what about our surroundings right now is natural or maybe even even the air is different thanks to humans so you know we're i'm wearing a computer on my wrist right cyborg yeah where we have a cell phone that has access to all the information in the world at our fingertips it's almost it's probably eventually going to be embedded in our brain in some way in hundreds of years sure for sure that's coming but even things that we don't think about the vaccines that hopefully we'll have soon that's artificial that's partly biologically cyborg but these are early steps you know eventually our grandkids will have things integrated more into their bodies i don't see anything wrong with that it's just an extension of what we've been doing for the last probably few hundred thousand years as humans yeah you mentioned vaccines i did i had a doctor on a few months ago and i asked him what's the misconception about the the medical world that you feel like people have that they that they should believe in more and he said it's really sad when people don't i'm paraphrasing this but he said something like it's really sad when people don't believe in vaccines because especially with kids because they don't have the choice and a lot of kids get sick and die without and they can just take a vaccine that way that could save their life and i got a lot of heat for even allowing that to be said on my show from parents and mothers who are completely against vaccines because of the side effects that they believe it had or whether it's true or not i don't know because i'm not the researcher what are your thoughts on vaccines in general i mean should we be taking vaccines is this you know there's there's a lot of angry people that say don't listen to the vaccine people but what is science saying you want some more hate mail i don't know if i want more hate mail i'm always trying to find the truth i'm trying to find answers and i i don't want people to hate on you or me or anything i just like okay what's the information and i always want everyone to do their own research and figure out what works for them and make their own choices but i'm just curious based on your research well my my research is really just reading the scientific literature when it comes to vaccines there have been a number of scientific papers that have been retracted that showed that vaccines were for example causing autism so in the scientific literature you know this isn't me saying it this is published work uh in journals and other scientists have done other work and looked at that work and tried to repeat it and it's come to the point within the scientific community that some of the original work that gave rise to these fears was unfounded and was not scientifically valid so in normal layman's terms there were some research that said vaccines are bad or can cause side effects like autism there was research that said that and now what i mean you say is there's other research out there that says that was not true right and when a paper turns out not to be correct the journal or the author or both decide to retract the paper so it's no longer in the literature oh that has happened to those original papers now you said scientists are always trying to prove themselves wrong every couple of years so all this all the signs could be wrong still we just don't know but what we found so far is that it's doesn't cause autism based on these scientific studies well yeah i think if you if you ask a thousand scientists 998 roughly would say what i'm saying which is based on scientific literature now please don't you know everyone listening don't attack me i'm not right you're not saying this but i can read scientific papers uh and uh that's just i'm stating in fact makes sense i'm always trying to find the answers and the truth and i feel like it's always evolving and you know we're always trying to learn more stuff i'm curious with all this artificialness in us right now it sounds like none of us are real like whole complete human beings anymore if you take a vaccine if you're wearing a digital watch you know using cell phones the air is different the environment is different it's almost like there's not a real human being anymore what makes a human human and as medicine improves how will we know if we're no longer human uh well i found out last night i took one of those little tests online and uh it said i'm not a robot which was good news right didn't it came as a surprise um beyond those little robo i'm not a robot test we will we'll always be human um unless it's life synthesized from scratch or it's it's some other life form or computer intelligence i don't think we'll lose our humanity you know augmenting the brain i think is still we're going to retain our humanity so i'm not so worried about that i think more interesting is the debate about will artificial intelligence ever be close enough to be called human thought and i think one day we may actually get there yeah as soon as computers develop their own type of consciousness and model it based on the way we think it's quite possible you think it's possible that computers could have human thought yeah sure they could um it's it probably is going to be different than human because they we're not mimicking the human brain currently right but you know let's say in a thousand years there are some researchers even now that are modeling the human brain in a way that's different than your typical neural net that say google is working on the idea is to mimic nerve cells rather than mimic just computer connections and these nerve cells as i mentioned are very complex they they have inner workings and they're actually analog devices meaning they're not just ones and zeros they have these waves that pass through chemical waves that pass through by mimicking an actual human neuron and then putting you know he's got millions of them he can actually mimic what happens in thought and in a in a mouse brain and now he's building a human brain so that's a new approach and i think [Music] how old do you think you can get to live like personally with all the research you've done now and with potential in the next 20 30 years of science that you're going to discover like if nothing happens physically with like a bus or something how long do you think you personally can live if you optimized everything yeah what's possible not what's going to happen what's possible right right well before i tell you that um i'm not doing this to live longer right you don't want to live forever i wouldn't mind uh i'm not looking forward to a horrible death yeah but you know that's not my goal here it's not that i'm worried about myself i do want to leave this planet having done something meaningful that's what drives me mainly but i'm also a scientist i'm experimenting i want to know stuff remember you know i told my friends with the last generation so i'm trying to accelerate knowledge at harvard and at home yeah so i i do these things to myself i measure myself glucose levels whole bunch of parameters to see what's going on not as proof but as indicators of what other people may test and uh so i know from my own body that i'm still pretty young i still need to do the definitive age test we can now look at exactly how old really we are like a ring of a tree it is we've just it's called the horvath clock it's the pianist you can measure how old the pianist is within a few percent so you can actually predict when you're gonna die shut up really have you have you predicted i've got to do it i got to do it i've done done a primitive form of that which is um um in full disclosure it's a company that that um i own a little bit of yeah but it so this company takes blood tests um can i say the name sure it's called inside tracker i mention it because people are gonna write to you about it sure sure so inside tracker does blood test and they measure a bunch of things and i've been doing that for about 12 years so i know i'm tracking myself and everything's staying young okay and they can estimate your age it's a it's a rough estimate so you can estimate your age by taking a blood sample right and measuring things in there that go up and down with it's probably like a three-year swing either side or something or pretty close yeah it's an indicator of how well you're doing with your body and uh wow i actually took a test a few years ago many years ago and i was uh they came out as 58. i freaked out because it made you older than what you are i was older than i was i was 48 at the time oh so what did you change well i i upped some doses of molecules took a couple more um and stopped eating badly uh and uh the next test came out at 31. what shut up what do you mean stop eating badly like sugars and candies and cakes or is this like well i wasn't strictly intermittent fasting i'd eat lunches i had more fat than i do now i'd eat pizza and things like that i love pizza yes but i've turned it around i've never been yeah but this was a real that was a wake-up call i have terrible genes my father's side we all died in our 70s usually as males so what does it say that you could live to you don't know yet well i haven't answered your question um so that that doesn't that says that i probably got another 20 years extra right extra than the average lifespan well based on that blood test we'll see but what could we live to so here's the good news is that if we just continue on the trend that we've been on for 200 years and it's been perfectly linear so you can keep stretching it out a child born today in the u.s can expect not hope but expect 50 of them to leave 204 so and in japan 107 oh my gosh if we keep going up now that's not going to happen by accident that's going to take researchers like me to figure it out and a lot of them are doing the work and people actually not eating horrible and smoking and doing the things that help hopefully that'll help too that's why i'm wow i wrote the book is to help people live longer it's just a hundred years is their lifespan now well yeah that's the predicted trajectory that's without um any radical breakthrough wow without you know fixing the pianist now if we can fix the pianist and truly reverse aging like a reset switch then who knows you know we we could live 220 maybe longer it's higher or well yeah you know well i'm going as fast as i can and we've got we've had a big breakthrough in the last year uh that we found the reset switch we think in the cells just to reset the age so what's the next step it's like you guys are researching this for the next five ten years figuring out how to do that reset it well we know how to do it in a mouse pretty easily that worked first time that was easy okay and one of my students another brilliant student he decided to reverse the eye the age of the eye so he took old mice that were basically blind and made their eyes young again so they could see just like they were young again yeah so you could do that with people too well that's the next step that's a few years away but we're working i'm an entrepreneur as you know yeah so i'm trying to push this out of the lab as fast as possible wow but if it works on the eye what else could it work on probably everything i think now is it safe we think it is we've given it to mice for a year and no problem no cancer showing up or anything wow but you don't want to push it too far you don't want to go back to being an embryo you'll be the world's biggest tumor right right wow wow so what do you think you could live to personally yeah you know i'm trying to avoid the question because my my peers my colleagues sure hate it because it's it's unproven it's actually got you but just like you know obviously it's not proven but just and if all goes well you know all right we get sick and all these things don't happen all right so so no traumatic events people are gonna rewind this video when i die aren't they so i'm on a trajectory uh to live well beyond 80 because i'm healthy yeah my father's an example he's 80. he's 80 and a year you should live at least 10 years beyond that right so at least that minimum i should be healthy into my 90s be nice to break a hundred uh with the technologies and some of the medicines that i'm working on and one of them that i'm actually taking maybe beyond 100 that would be nice wow in a healthy way playing tennis wow in a healthy way beyond 100. a lot of people do that yeah um it's not for everybody but but you do see people in their hundreds that are still working and happy how much does inflammation uh play into your the longevity of your life oh it's huge it's huge it's one of these hallmarks that if inflammation is going up too fast that's basically your clock your aging accelerated yeah so how do we get rid of information well there are a number of ways one is do these things and turn on your longevity genes which are anti-inflammatory uh other ways i'm still taking a little aspirin every day um the data still looks pretty good for that taking an aspirin yeah 81 milligrams a day that just takes away inflammation yeah mostly in in your blood vessels wow but you need to take it for a long time of course i think to stop that resveratrol is anti-inflammatory and remember how i said those mice have beautiful arteries no fat on them really so that's good huh yeah but basically it's that and but overeating and being obese is gonna massively turn up inflammation wow yeah within a few weeks you'll you'll do it just eating bad food for a few weeks we'll turn it up and fasting will kill information exactly wow but you might say well if your immune system isn't overactive what about getting sick turns out your immune system gets heightened but inflammation chronic inflammation gets dampened so when you talk to a centenarian and say did you used to get sick they say can't remember last time i got sick in my centenarium centenarian people who live over a hundred okay uh so that's a hormone i don't remember when they got sick they don't get sick they really get even a sniffle or a cold how is it possible well they have massive immune systems so even if someone sneezes on them that viruses is attacked and killed but here's the thing since i've been eating and living the right way over the last few years since that terrible scary test uh i haven't gotten sick no sickness no cold and i'm on planes people are sneezing on me i've got we've got three kids they're always sick what if you got like what if you ate something that had like food poisoning that would fight against that too or is that kind of hard i don't know i don't know but i have a chicken or something you know it's like i haven't had food poisoning recently but it might just be that i can afford better food that's good i like that wow um this is all fascinating stuff and i know you've got more in your book lifespan why we age and why we don't have to um make sure you guys get this book really powerful research and science i got a couple questions left for you this is called the three truths i ask everyone at the end my interviews so i want you to imagine your it's your last day on earth and you're 150 200 or how old you want to be um and you've done tons of research you've written every book you want to write you've answered every question that you can think of while you're live you publish all this information but for whatever reason you've got to take your work with you so no one has access to your work anymore in your research all your content is gone it's going with you to another world that sounds like hell okay just imagine yeah um but you get to leave behind three lessons or three things you know to be true from everything that you've learned in your life you can write it down on a piece of paper everyone have that would have access to these three truths and this is the only three things you could share that they would have access to what would you say are your three truths all right right the first one that i live by is all about maximizing human potential that believe that we're way under utilized but for the individual what you have to think every day is do something that's worth writing uh writing about or write something that's worth reading so have an impact that's that's my lesson is don't settle for mediocrity do something spectacular and don't listen to the naysayers okay is that one that's one yeah uh the next one would be uh do something that scares you every day uh send off an email that you wouldn't be you'd be afraid to do um and along with that when you're young take risks like like we did you can fail that's okay you will fail but it'll make you it'll open you up to more opportunities um but also you'll be a stronger adult stronger 40 50 year old yeah okay that's two ah gee the third one i haven't pre-prepared this uh but this one's from the heart i've described to you what it was like to see my mother pass away and i spent my life arguing with my mother right i regret that [Music] so as a parent now myself let me tell the younger people tell your parents how much you appreciate what they've done for you tell them that you love them assuming that you do if they're good people because there will be a day most likely when they'll be gone and you won't have a chance to hug them anymore or see them anymore because they're gone and when they're gone you think how is that possible that somebody can be there and not there within a matter of two minutes that happens and uh yeah i just wish that i'd uh told my mum more about how much i appreciate it yeah so i've dedicated the book to her because she cared more about herself than her kids wow that's special those are good three truths i love those [Music] two months ago maybe three months ago i decided to give myself an experiment and i wasn't happy with the results i was getting with my health i was training hard i was eating well i was intermittent fasting for 16 hours a day i was sleeping well i was taking supplements like i was trying a lot of stuff and i wanted to try to like lose some extra weight but also just kind of feel like there's some little inflammation here from past injuries and sports i was like i just want to get rid of it and i said i've never tried a you know multiple day fast and i remember you mentioning about just hey eating less will help you live longer and help you get less disease which will help you live longer and i said okay i'm gonna try a i did a four days no food essentially four days no food water i had a little bit of juice on some days and i had black coffee and i just drink a lot of water it wasn't until a week after the four day fast when i started to feel the effects sure i like lost some weight because i wasn't eating for four days and i felt like healthier in jenner i felt super focused and clear but it wasn't until like a week two weeks later when i was like huh i just feel better i feel lighter i felt like more flexible less inflammation what is the power of doing a one day fast a two three day pass how often should we be doing these types of fasting and i want to make sure that i don't tell people go not eat for three or four days without talking to a doctor a nutritionist or something but what is the the benefit of not eating for a day or two days what does that do for our body long term well we're still learning right um we've only just finished doing we as a field of scientists have only just finished doing a lot of animal experiments but we're now you know a period where we're actually finally doing these in humans so what do we know uh we know that if you fast for one day you're going to turn on these these three main mechanisms that protect the cell um their names by the way that there's one called mtor which senses the amino acids that we eat uh there's one called ampk which it controls and registers how much energy the cell has so if you eat sugar you'll switch it off if you're not eating sugar it'll switch on and then the ones that we work on they're called sotuns and there are seven of these sirtuin proteins that protect the cell in very different ways but all seemingly good the question is how much should you be doing well we know from fasting for one day that you you activate these defenses and that's three defenses we want to activate these three things as much as possible or once in a while good question i i think it's better to do it once in a while you don't want to always have them on and the reason i can say that is based on animal studies the best effects we've had and my colleagues have had is when you do things and let the body rest afterwards for example we did a study with resveratrol this molecule from red wine that activates one of these sirtuins that i was telling you about we gave it every day to mice or we gave him his calorie restricted fasting diet but it was when we actually gave them a resveratrol every second day that we got the longest lived mice in combination with caloric restriction so that's just an example of many that we're finding that it's helpful to to pulse the body and let it let it rest and it it does make sense that you want to have a hunker down period where your body is fixing itself and removing bad stuff but then also a repair phase so when you go back to eating regularly or you're not running marathons every other day which some people tend to do then your body can recover and grow and heal so yeah long answer to your question but i think pulsing it is the right way to go is there a calculated approach to say okay if you're i'm 225 pounds male 37 years old how many calories should i be eating a day like is there a you know perfect system to this of like okay if you eat 1 000 calories a day for three days in a row then you have 2 000 for a day then you fast today have you figured out this process yet with rats no no it's not it's never like that yet that could be interesting yeah the problem that we face in the field is uh we were talking earlier you and i uh before we went on air about funding for science we don't have tens of millions of dollars to run these clinical trials we're always scrounging for money and always worried about what's going to happen when it runs out so we can do some experiments but consider some of these longevity experiments in even in rats and mice they take about three years and if you do it in monkeys then your whole career is used up by one experiment and so what what we're trying to now figure out is what's the right combination of what you eat when you eat and what supplements to take and that combination is hundreds of thousands and you can't run hundreds of thousands of these experiments wow so it's it's hard to find the optimum but in general what i would say is that if you fast for one day you get some benefits if you fast for three days something interesting happens you turn on another level of cell cleansing and uh i'll tell you a bit about that so there's this process called autophagy or some people call it autophagy it is what it sounds like auto which itself and phagy is eating so you're self-eating and what that means is that proteins that are it's not reasonable you're eating yourself you're killing it well eating the getting rid of the bad stuff recycling the bad proteins as we get older and also if we have damaged proteins say if we eat a lot of burnt food we will accumulate proteins that have uh oxidation is one for example and these proteins also are very hard to get rid of they tend to clump sticky they're sticky um and and alzheimer's is disease is a good example of that of uh proteins that stick together and just accumulate and you can't get rid of them easily but autophagy is this process where the cells can chew these up and recycle the amino acids in those proteins but we our bodies especially as we get older do a pretty crappy job at doing that and it leads to things like macular degeneration your generation and others now what what one day fasting does is it turns on autophagy and we'll clear out some of the proteins but from my reading if you do three days of fasting something else kicks in it's a different type of autophagy uh it's called chaperone mediated autophagy or um cma and it was discovered by a good friend of mine in new york anna maria cuervo and uh she has shown that this cma process is really important for extending the health and the lifespan of mice and i'm helping her a little bit with a one of her companies to bring this to humans and hopefully treat diseases uh for example like macular degeneration but anyway uh so three days really starts to kick in the benefits is there a time when fasting too long hurts the body well sure you need nutrition right your body needs to need amino acids to repair itself i can't stress enough that we don't want anybody to lose so much weight that it's bad for them yeah they're a lot especially young people who you can overdo it yeah you you always want to have some add a possible fat on your body you need for for lean times and your body needs it for you know energy when you're sleeping for example but so i i think that going for a week is okay i haven't done it myself it's too difficult but what's the longest you've gone personally i'm not that good at it that's about it i tell you what four days was tough but it was also like once i set my mind to it i was just like i'm gonna commit to this i also wasn't that hungry i was just like okay i can go a little farther it was just weird because i'm so used to eating every i don't know four or five hours i was just like is everything okay like but i felt the effects it felt like it was getting better like my body was healing i felt like the pain was starting to go away and i just felt clear and focused that's a common um thing that people report is you'd think that you'd be distracted by hunger but what actually happens once you do it for a longer time or you've done every other day eating for a while or even in my case where i like to skip breakfast and have a late lunch or maybe even go straight to dinner your body gets used to it you don't feel those hunger pains if you drink a cup of tea or even a glass of water it it not numbs any desire that's when you know you're doing it right but also what people report and i i can tell you from my experience it also focuses the mind and you're not distracted at all in fact it's it's it's like a high that you get and i can get a lot of work done when i'm i'm in that phase [Music] is do you think human beings will ever be able to become immortal oh yeah that that's a tough question here's the honest answer uh no i don't think so never in a thousand years ten thousand years never well never is is pretty hard statement i would say that with the technology that that i can envisage even the best technology give it a thousand years of development i think we can live many hundreds of years really well well let's get into that later i i think we've got some new technology coming out of the aging field that that makes the old stuff even things just two years ago look primitive but immortality is so hard i mean we're fighting entropy we're fighting the second law of thermodynamics which is a very powerful law of nature and really what what we've discovered in my lab and some others around the world is that it's hard to preserve adult living things for a long long time you can keep them together and functioning for longer we've got some species on the planet particularly plants that can live thousands of years and many hundreds of years for some mammals bowhead whale for example but going you know immortality you're fighting what turns out to be a loss of information um you know we all understand the importance of information our computers get corrupted our uh we you know used to have things like compact discs and dvds that got scratched these are examples of of the problems with trying to store information forever you know how how long would an iphone last it's not going to last for a thousand years that's for sure but if the information's in the cloud then it can't be scratched maybe digitally scratched but well that that's the saving grace maybe if we are able to upload ourselves somehow or rebuild ourselves from scratch that's immortality that's beyond anything that i'm seeing right now i think a lot of people who say oh let's just download our brains into the internet are underestimating the complexity of the human brain it's not like just wires contacting each other every one of those wires is extremely complex more complex than anything in the known universe and so you put a few trillion of those together into one thing and it's very hard to map it without damaging it um and let alone rebuild it so the brain wiring is more complex than anything in the universe our brains are the most complex uh thing in the universe do you think it's more complex than than the understanding of god or source or the creator i i think that's pretty simple you believe it or you don't we've inherited brains from our ancestors that have consciousness and then we're able to ask these questions where do we come from is there a force beyond what we understand that gave rise to everything around us or are we just an accident of nature in your opinion what do you think is an ideal lifespan for humans then with the technology we have today and the technology we're going to have over the next two decades what do you think is the ideal lifespan where we'll be functioning healthy human beings that have memory and not just blobs that just last longer yeah you that's a really good question and i i don't recall ever having been asked that one right now the maximum human lifespan uh that's recorded at least and even that is debatable is 122 years old like the french woman john coleman the thing about living that long uh is that and we often forget is that that means she was still very active i'm sure she was riding her bicycle around her village when she was 105. so if you live that long you have this period of health where you don't have diseases aging brings on those diseases and so when you think about extending lifespan the important thing is to realize that you don't live longer in old age you live longer in a youthful state what do you mean by that well we do have technology in in animals let's say nice to make them live 20 longer they don't live 20 longer at the end of life they actually live 20 longer uh in midlife so that they don't get diseases they stay younger longer earlier right so that you can compare these animals you can actually do this pretty easily actually anybody could do it you take a a mouse and and another mouse and you give a lot less food to one of them or feed them every other day and yeah they'll be hungry i think they eventually can get used to it but what happens is you can compare those two mice or you know 50 mice in one group and 50 in the other this is what has been done for now 80 years and the ones that have spent some time in hunger uh or not always satisfied they are remarkably different their coats look all shiny they have very little cancer or evidence of cancer they're running around the cage and the mice that have been eating as much as they ever wanted which is kind of how we live now most people uh they are decrepit they are you know not moving they've lost a lot of their ability to remember things they don't bother making a nest it's dramatic and this has been done for monkeys as well it's been done for labrador dogs it's a really universal thing in life so to get to your question lewis actually what's the optimal life if you had the chance to stay young why would you want to die i don't think anybody who's healthy and has friends and is enjoying their life says i want to die tomorrow i haven't ever met anybody like that you know that there's there's pain there's suffering there's depression but if you don't have those why would you want to die i mean maybe boredom but you know there are ways right you always want to live you'd always if you had a purpose if you had community if you were pain-free you'd want to keep living i would assume if you were enjoying your life and you had love and connection and mission then you'd want to live as long as you could so what i'm hearing you say is that it's almost like food becomes the disease if you don't manage it properly it's what is a big cause of death the more you eat well yeah well the food isn't the cause of death we need food and we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation by any means you know that i want that to be clear right about eating disorders here but we are talking about not having three large meals a day and the way to think about it is not that the food is killing you what it's doing is it's turning off your body's protective mechanisms against disease so creating some smaller stresses in the body turns on the immune system to fight against disease yeah well not just the immune system but that is a big part of it it also turns on repair of dna it clears the body of old proteins that are just accumulating and causing issues rejuvenates the mitochondria which are those battery packs the energy parts of the cell a lot of things happen we don't understand everything that's going on when animals or we are hungry but we know that there are at least we know of three main pathways that and by pathways i mean biochemical workhorses in our cells proteins that do good things three main pathways that are activated when we're hungry and go to work and tell other parts of the cell to repair the body and clear out the old stuff so in your opinion what's the ideal lifespan well it it's personal but i would say i wouldn't mind living for 200 years there's a lot i'd like to see in the future right but i think if i if i reach 200 years i'll still feel young i might feel young and then why would i want to die it's all about being healthy now what's the optimal lifespan for seven billion humans that's a different question you know we can't all live for a thousand years and expect the planet to do well but what i talk about um in my book is that when you do the numbers allowing people to be live longer and healthier as huge amounts of percentage to the gdp right we're spending at least 17 of our gdp in the us on taking care of of people who are sick and most of that is spent in the last few years of life and it turns out the longer that somebody lives they actually are less costly to the healthcare system because they die quicker and so if you draw a graph and you know like i tend not to draw grass but this this is what i have to so we used to die off as a population like this and people would often get sick and stay alive for a lot longer in a sick state i mean now it's still possible to get cancer and suffer for for 10 years trying to fight that disease heart disease the same but in a world where we can push that out and people tend to live to 100 years we know that's possible there are people that do this all the time then there's the very quick die-off um and a lot of people get to that point would get to that point uh and then quickly died die off and and that's a that's a world that i think would be far better than this one where uh from a from an economic standpoint and from an individual and family standpoint um anyone who's had a grandparent or a parent who became chronically ill you know this is just nothing you would wish even on your enemy when it's like five years ten years and it keeps extending where it's just uncomfortable suffering pain as opposed to what i'm hearing you say is live a great life and then once you start to feel a little sick die quicker as opposed to die over 10 years of suffering that that's the ultimate goal with this research and it looks feasible based on the work that's been done over the last 20 30 years because essentially what i'm hearing you say is we're not dying effectively we should be dying in a better way that's better for us as individuals it's better for our families it's better for the economy the planet is what i'm hearing you say right now we see that today as well people who don't take care of themselves who never exercise and eat the wrong foods and too much of it you can see that those are the people that develop diseases in their 60s and 70s that are often horrific your diabetes and having limbs cut off from lack of blood yeah this in large part is preventable already we know how to do that it's really sad i know some people at that stage of life where it's just you can't really come back from it once you've gotten to that point you can't really reverse back to a healthy state is that correct maybe you can manage it a little bit but it's not a reversible thing at that point if you asked me that last year i probably would have said it's not possible to come back from that but this new work that i'm hinting at uh really does look like an age reset is possible in complex tissues and maybe one day an entire body really so someone who's 60s 70s who's got diabetes and it's really slowing them down and they're losing you know function in their their body you're saying that in the future potentially we could reverse that right theoretically now we haven't tested it in the context of diabetes we tested it in the context of a vision loss due to aging or due to damage to the optic nerve but there it was very easy in three weeks we're able to recover a lot of eyesight from in a blunt a blind old mouse by resetting the age of the eye we haven't tested this on humans yet no i'm trying to do that um wow in in uh hopefully clinical trials will be two three years from now that's amazing so i remember you saying in our last interview that you wouldn't want to live forever but as you say in with research things change and last year you would have said something and this year is different now uh and you might want to get to 200 but if you were still healthy at 200 would you want to say hey let's keep doing this another century or would you say i'm healthy uh i have love in my life ah but i want to call it quits is there ever a time if you were healthy still you'd want to call it quits i don't think so yeah i really don't i haven't met a happy healthy person who wants to die have you no so it only becomes when it's a time of like suffering pain immobility to to function at life at a normal level yeah or depression or let's face it there are a lot of people on the planet that are not living great lives you know countries that are not as well off as as these ones are that we right so i can understand there may be situations where you wouldn't want to live longer if if you're doing a profession that every day is painful or you know just way too much work um you know you and i have the privilege that we can we can do jobs from an armchair but not everybody so i just want to you know realize maybe that um not everybody's in our situation but hopefully if you have an extended life span you'll be able to change professions you don't like and have the possibility of three four five different careers right is it in your opinion more important to extend life or reverse aging or live better with the years that we currently have huh well yeah obviously you want to do both and actually it turns out if you if you live better during the years that quote-unquote you have you will live longer if you're making the most of life you're enjoying your life your have a career that you you love getting out in the outdoors you know that will lead to longer life we know that so a good life actually leads to a longer life [Music] when did you become kind of obsessed with being the master of anti-aging well i've got an obsessive personality i think anyone who's you know become at the top of their profession or has to be obsessed with something they're not normal people who are not normal um at age four i became obsessed with it actually four yeah well my first memory is four i don't even know what's my first memory really what was it see your mom smoke and be like i don't know what was that yeah you know in the 70s early 70s when i was a kid the smoke was everywhere i couldn't stand it but that that was not really my motivation it was that my grandmother who helped raise me told me everybody's gonna die and so are you and so is your cat and my grandmother was brutal she didn't lie she told it as it was but she said now that i've told you that you know here am i crying my cat's gonna die santa claus isn't real my cat's gonna die it was my cat that was the problem oh my god you love this cat yeah cause it she said oh your cat's gonna die before you're 20 or whatever but she said now that you've realized that oh my gosh here's the lesson make the most of life do your best to make humanity the best it can be and don't waste a second and that that was it for me okay i'm gonna go for it but when did you actually start researching like okay now maybe you had this positive mindset i'm gonna make the most different moment i'm gonna enjoy my life i'm gonna learn quickly and not be stuck in these painful moments what was it like middle school high school you're like oh mitochondria and telomeres and you know so i was a pretty average kid um i like to have a lot of fun and i didn't really take care of myself um actually you'd be surprised i was i was pretty chubby as a kid really yeah but i got to college and two things happened one was where we decided where were we in school i was in sydney in sydney so i went to there there aren't that many choices in sydney i went to uh called it's called the university of new south wales like the mit of uh boston so i was there and i wanted to get a degree in what we used to call genetic engineering and i thought that's a cool thing everyone's going into computing i'll do something because i've got also the personality that i don't like to be told what to do and i like to be different you'll be unique one of a kind yeah yeah so uh i was the big dumb jock who never drank a sip of alcohol in college who learned salsa dancing in guitar who was in choir in the musical like i was whatever you thought i was going to be i was like i'm going to do the opposite so we have that in common yeah probably your parents learnt they had to tell you the opposite of what they wanted to do exactly so i went and went to college and i realized two things one was if i'm uh chubby i'm not going to get a girlfriend right so i started working on my survival bug i ate carrots for a month and shed um 15 kilos whatever that is uh got a best body i would have dreamed of it's long gone that was one thing so i became healthy yeah and i've been this weight ever since basically haven't changed it it takes effort yeah and the second thing i realized was that i think i could make a difference in the world and i was playing cards with friends we did a lot of drinking they did a lot of smoking um typical college life and there was a moment where somebody was talking about old age and laughing at old age and making fun of old people which we we do sometimes as kids we're young yeah how old they are and and i had an epiphany i think i was 18 years old and i said do you realize everybody hold it no cards shut the up i've got a i've got something to tell you i've just realized that we are probably the last generation of humans to live a normal lifespan because there's going to be a breakthrough and we're going to miss out by one generation oh my god out of the how many hundred thousand generations leading up to us of primates we're it we're the last ones we're gonna die at 100 or 80 or whatever right and our kids are going to live to 130 who knows what and their kids are going to be 160 yeah so then i thought hey that's what i want to do i want to make that future be a reality in my lifetime wow isn't it sad if just give us another 50 years to be born how much farther you could extend life right yeah i didn't realize how quickly the science would go i thought that i'd probably be lucky to see a little bit of change in my lifetime like 5 10 20 years maybe more well we already got 14 just on what we talked about right but the kind of breakthroughs that we've made now um you know i get criticized for looking too far into the future because i'm supposed to be a harvard scientist but i think another 5 10 years is easy look at my dad he's doing all the right things also taking some molecules that we've worked on in my lab wow they're not doing any harm i hope that he makes it past a hundred it's a it's not a clinical trial clearly right with one subject um but he's a role model for what life can be and should be like right so now is this molecule the same molecule that you worked on 10 years ago that got a lot of credibility and then was debunked i guess by some researchers and then now the last week has come back to be verified as true uh one of them yeah so resveratrol is the red wine molecule it's one of these polyphenols that plants make when they're stressed out and that we found at least we thought that when you take this molecule over many decades uh or as a supplement you'll be protected against a whole variety of diseases including obesity really yeah is that why everyone says like drink a glass of wine every night or something it's going to make you live longer well that that's basically because of me but there's other research of course other people have studied red wine and found that people who drink red wine tend to live longer you know okay then butte and we'll tell you all about the blue zones right so this molecule is something you discovered 10 years ago or you started researching 10 years ago well so remember these longevity genes they make proteins that tell the cell how to survive and we can turn on the production of these proteins by being hungry and exercising and being out of breath um but we wanted to do it artificially because if you're an older person in a wheelchair or you're like my mom and you're not doing hit workouts at 90. yeah you need a drug you can't just expect them to run marathons or go hungry so we we wanted to figure out how does fasting how does exercise work that's another important question a couple of questions and we found that this is sort of number one there were seven number one was very important in mice if we turned it on we can make mice with extra genes by the way in the lab we make them we make mice from scratch well from stem cells from a cell you can turn it into a moving mouse yeah that's that banks and breathes and come to my lab you can make a mouse what we can make them glow green if we want it's not that hard you can take cells and they just kind of like form together and turn into a mouse well we need another mouse to gestate it but it's yeah it's pretty pretty easy these days okay this is crazy you can comment i want to check it out you can take a skin cell of a mouse turn it into a stem cell make a sperm make an egg fertilize itself and make a mouse it's nuts anything's possible wow so we we engineered a mouse to have more of this sort of one gene yeah and it was protected against a whole variety of diseases really were you were you injecting with disease to like test that or just natural environment diseases uh so we we have a lab where we it's like other models have the disease we like them age yeah and that's the main thing we have a lot of old mice and we test them if they're frail uh we look at their strength put them on treadmills test their memory you've got this whole floor in the building of mouse testing machines how many mice are in the lab thousands well i don't want you don't know anyone to be upset because we do have a large number of mice okay where our goal is to make them healthy gotcha unlike a lot of other lives you're not trying to kill them like most labs no i'm not going to say how can we keep them as healthy and now almost live longer so that we're one of the few labs where we do that but yeah so we this this sort of two-in-one gene it makes a protein that helps the cell so we found this red wine molecule just coincidentally turns it on so if you put the enzyme we can put in the little test you wear these little test tubes and we put in the the protein and we can test whether it's more active or not by how much it glows or fluoresces okay and then we tested thousands of molecules and the one that worked the best was this one from red wine it it made it glow really brightly fluoresce and uh that was the beginning of this story where we found a molecule from red wine that turned on our bodies defensive enzyme and that that was great we put it onto yeast cells they lived longer i did that experiment in my dining room actually you can make these cells live longer imagine that crazy uh we fed it to mice and they were much healthier they were resistant to obesity and diabetes and cardiovascular problems it basically made mice immune to a high fat western diet wow they could eat whatever and it wouldn't affect them and they lived just as long as those that would burn the fat quicker well they were actually still fat that was the crazy thing but fat didn't didn't hurt them they were immune to the effects of being fat wow that's amazing yeah okay but but then and this is the one one that my father started taking about a decade ago same as me uh but he was what happened in that was 2003 to 2006 things were great we started making better molecules we made thousands of them they went into human clinical trials put it on the skin of patients with psoriasis they were actually was a pill and the psoriasis got better no way yeah we're on track to having a medicine for aging and diseases that are related to aging and inflammation wow but then everything fell apart why so in 2010 a couple of companies published scientific papers that said it's all wrong that this molecule resveratrol does not activate this enzyme this fluorescence that we're looking at in this test tube was just an artifact it was fluorescing for other reasons it wasn't real and uh yeah my world fell apart the company stopped working on it and it was hell you stopped working on it well we didn't well for about two weeks i sat in bed it was horrific i went into mild depression my lab didn't know what to do uh i had friends calling me well ex-friends who called me and said you know i'm really sorry and didn't hear from them again it was a tough time and when you're you know and this is what i built my career on i was known in the world for this and then it went away wow and if you're a scientist and you lose your reputation you're screwed because you're relying on grants and your colleagues opinion of you to give you the money to give you their endorsements their recommendations right right so so if no one's recommending you anymore no one's giving you money yeah grants dried up i had 20 people vibrant lab world leading science top of the world going to make this medicine bam most people left no money four people tiny little lab even people in my lab said i'm out of here this is crazy you're full of it and there was one student who i had his name is basil hubbard and he said you know what there's something to this i'm not gonna give up wow and uh but the other people in the lab one guy in particular was really mean he just said you're working on this bs stuff wow this resveratrol stuff but he figured it out it took him three years to figure out that uh he was a phd student okay i got you basil and uh just through grit and uh stubbornness and genius he figured out that it was real and we published in 2013 three years later that there was good evidence that we were not wrong so okay take a deep breath i'm swimming i'm not drowning anymore this is three years of like depression or just figuring out how am i going to get to my life my career everything back on track right right i was so mad with the world i'm sure i said it you know everyone i can't trust anyone anymore well it was that because i devoted my whole life to this i'd barely taken a weekend off in my life yeah and uh to have that happen it was like oh you know i i could have retired at that point how did you recover uh well so the problem was that i didn't want to die not knowing the answer wow needed to figure this out yeah and knowing that i was wrong was still better than not knowing it all so we tried to figure it out because it's better to be like okay i'm actually wrong here's the proof here's the science you can live with that is what you're saying right knowing the truth and then okay how do we solve it what's the new solution right where do i go next yeah and we actually had evidence that we weren't we weren't wrong so that's why i got out of bed went back to the lab and uh said let's figure this out let's do some key tests that'll tell us either way if we're right or we're wrong and it turns out we weren't wrong and there was this study you referred to that came out a week ago that said you know what that mechanism that you discovered actually is really important for being activated when you're fasting when you're hungry what happens is when you when you deplete fat let's say you're hungry you haven't eaten breakfast you'll melt away some of the fat and you'll generate what are called free fatty acids and some of them we can get from plants from olive oil monounsaturated fatty acids the good ones a lab discovered that the way res virtual works is actually just mimicking those unsaturated fatty acids that we already know are good for you and dan butter and the blue zones would tell you from the blue zones would tell you that these are what leads to long life wow and so it turns out resveratrol if this is true is basically mimicking gobs of olive oil but without all the calories so my father and i you know maybe we've been doing the right thing so he's been doing your father's been doing this for 10 years right even though people try to say this isn't true this is stupid it's not actually doing anything but he's been taking it consistently right well he's a scientist too everyone in my family is a scientist including my wife and people say oh you're testing this on your father no he's a scientist he can read this stuff for himself and he's the one that made the decision that he believed in it and uh yeah i'm glad that he did because so far so good wow okay so that just happened last week so ten years you've been waiting for this to be like proven again right and we've always predicted i've always said resveratrol isn't the big big story the big story is hey can we make a medicine which we're still trying but b what we call it the endogenous activator what's in our own bodies that resvertrol is mimicking and it's these monounsaturated fatty acids that come from when we're hungry or if we eat these healthy plants wow okay yeah pretty exciting it's damn exciting but it it's not as exciting as i thought it would be because you know in life it's always an antique climax right you think i can't wait until this in my life happens and then it happens you think yeah but tomorrow i've got something else to figure out right really that's just my personality before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day [Music] you said that science is driven by the question not the technology what are the biggest questions you have out there right now or science has out there right now well there's a big one that we're chasing right now as i mentioned earlier we found that we can reset the age of a cell and and literally turn its age back um there's a clock in the body that we can measure it's uh little chemicals that bind to our dna as we get older and by measuring the rate of those changes think of it like plaque on your teeth accumulating the older you get you know as long as you don't scrape it off the more you'll have similar to our dna accumulates these chemicals we can measure the clock we can predict how long you're going to live based on that clock and what we found is we have a new currently it's a gene therapy but hopefully one day it could be a pill that resets the clock and cells go back to acting and being young again no way yeah that's how we we restore the vision of those old mice we put therapy into their retina we can reverse reset the clock of time on our cells and our body well in mice yes uh and in human cultured cells in the dish yes we will know in a few years if it's true for humans what would that mean if we could do that well this is why i'm more optimistic than i was even a couple of years ago we know that we can reset the age of cells in complex tissues like the eye at least once and it looks like it's it's going to be a long lasting change but we don't know but i'm optimistic that we can reset multiple times imagine that amazing and so the big question that we're trying to understand is similar to how a dvd gets scratched how do you polish that dvd and allow the cell to read the young information again wow and it's quite a big idea that our cells have a backup copy of youthful information how do they know which of these chemicals to get rid of to make the cell young again and not go too young that you become a tumor or or basically an egg cell again we don't understand that yet so we're trying wow our best we've made some breakthroughs we know some of the machinery that allows this to work but ultimately we still don't know what form this information of youth is in for instance it could be a new type of chemical that is added to the dna when we're an embryo or when we're very young and we still have it in our bodies that our cells can recognize and use that as the reset switch it could be another type of molecule could be a protein that binds to our dna so we're looking very hard for where that information is stored and when we figure that out then i think we can really have a good handle on age reversal science is fascinating now i know i love being a scientist is there a way right now to predict like when someone would die based on their current life uh their cells and say okay you're gonna live from 84 to 87 range based on what you keep doing at this stage if you don't change anything yeah yeah really some company selling these clock tests you can have a either a swab in your mouth or a blood test no way it'll tell you to predict the age you're gonna die uh i don't know about specific companies what they're offering but in the lab we we can do that a good friend of mine steve horvath at ucla does this routinely and he's published work that can predict within a few years when you're going to die if you don't change your your habits and people who smoke people who are overweight have a faster clock there's no there's no doubt that you can control the rate of your aging with how you live your life what are the effects on a lot of people moving from smoking cigarettes to vaping i feel like vaping is taking over the world right now and a lot of teens and smokers who are saying okay well this is better for me i'm going to vape now and it's not going to be as bad for me how bad is vaping on the body and the body's lifespan yeah we don't know like somebody needs to test that i think that's gonna be a big issue in the next five ten years yeah yeah well so my personal view having a mother who died of lung cancer from from smoking is that um our lungs are pristine organs they need to be free of of particles free of foreign material to work well they're very fragile and putting anything foreign into your lungs to me doesn't make any sense vaping smoking any type of inhalation of a toxin right right i mean there are fewer toxins i understand it with vaping and um but still we're learning that it's not risk-free okay i got one final question for you from your study of biology do you think aliens exist uh yes there is a calculation a formula that you you plug the variables in and the the one thing that we tend to underestimate are the number of stars in the universe and they're actually it's not infinite but it but it's it's close to it there are so many possibilities that there has to be life out there it's a certainty with certainty yeah wow why is it a certainty we'll ever get to know them is another thing you know some some of these life forms are going to be so far away that we can never communicate with them unfortunately but yeah the science says they're out there they've just got to be the the odds of them not being there is infinitesimal now the problem that comes up is that just like we're learning as uh as human beings uh we tend to evolve destructive capabilities right the reason that we are survivors is that our ancestors wiped out the neighboring village uh plundered and raped uh you know pretty routinely we are not necessarily good animals at this point we've got laws which prevent people from going uh you know too rebellious but you know deep down we do have an evil side as a species not everybody individually and it's probably true for aliens as well that they've come up the same way we have and have a bad side as well and that leads to destruction and it could be that every civilization eventually wipes itself out after uh 20 000 years yeah i mean because if a foreign thing came here we probably wouldn't be welcoming something new foreign with welcome arms we would be worried living in fear stress anxiety and to want to protect ourselves kind of like whatever anytime someone settled into a new place there's probably already there was some type of worry fear or stress right exactly whenever i see a human trait my mind goes to why does it exist um and whether or not it's it's being altruistic and kind or evil and a liar or someone who commits adultery these are all traits that have in at one point in our history been advantageous and we are descended from those people but you know we shouldn't we shouldn't be slaves to our dna this is why we have a big brain we should be able to choose a path of survival and kindness where we can all live on this world and enjoy you know the freedoms and the luxuries of not having to worry about food a bunch of them that are really important serotonin and oxytocin and endorphins cortisol dopamine works on the area called the nucleus accumbens which is the pleasure center and the brain push on that and you feel whoa i like that which is why my book feel better fast there's a whole

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Length: 190min 56sec (11456 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021