The 8 SECRETS To Age In Reverse & LIVE LONGER Today! | David Sinclair & Lewis Howes

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 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 truly reverse aging like a reset switch then who knows you know we we could live 220. did you know that it's possible to reverse your age in this video harvard scientist dr david sinclair breaks down the secrets to becoming young again [Music] was there anything new that you discovered in the last year that hasn't been out yet that hasn't been talked about uh yeah well it's in my book but other than that yeah that might be why the journal's angry that some of it ended up in the book but uh maybe i jumped the gun so what we what we think we've discovered here is that uh cells lose their ability to stay young because they lose information because they lose information yeah so there are two types of information in our cells one is the genetic information that we get from our parents of course dna but there's another level of information that's just as important but we just don't talk about it it's called the epigenome which is the instructions to tell the cell which of those 25 23 000 genes to read and if you read the right ones at the right time you'll be a nerve cell or a skin cell because you don't want to read all 23 000 at once so that doesn't work doesn't work so the epigenome is like the pianist that plays the piano ha and what we think we've 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 this over 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 is that 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 isn't 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 blisters right yeah yeah so i've only been burnt maybe once or twice in my adult life um for good reason don't stain this time too long right right 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 uh so you can be in the sun just put projection on is what i'm hearing that's right it's like or just stay inside all day yeah no 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 me okay cool yeah 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 there was about 50 miles an hour wind at the top minus 22 celsius and with no clothes on just shorts hats gloves and shoes so exposing our legs and our chest and 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 um 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 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 juice 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 seemed to be healthy because it's secreting these little proteins that tell the body to stay young we don't know what they all are but there's a lot of evidence that having it stay on well yeah so brown fat is found mainly in babies wow because they can't sure little babies did you know they don't 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 well i don't know uh i'd have to guess but newborns don't shiver and they have to use this brown fat they're full of it but as we get older we lose it in fact when i was 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 pe t 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 the way 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 going to 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 gonna walk with my bags that's what people used to do but you know these days everything is all about comfort constant food don't exercise don't be cold ever it's crazy we're 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 aid 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 ate 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 it's fasting it's it's what are you like intermittent fasting gonna 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 what's the prolong or what's the uh diet what's this guy peter ortiz yeah i don't know what he's doing you have a diet does he have like a program for this or no 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 is you think is scientifically right like one day fast and then intermittent fasting and skipping meals well so i get asked this every day um and the simple answer is 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 yeah 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 i'm often sitting probably for half a day i've 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 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 but at least skipping one meal would would be good that'd 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 funds 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 who knows [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 uh 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 bodies 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 it'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's 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 uh 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 uh ready uh 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 is all but it's obviously much smaller it is regulated by the levels of nad i mean what does nad stand for oh nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide um 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 um but here's the thing that two of these sertuan um 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 uh 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 uh is a molecule that the body can use to make more nad an nad precursor we call it wow and there are patients being dosed right now in i think four hospitals or at least going to be four hospitals where uh 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 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 have to be very clear but there there are people uh some companies that are selling nad precursors 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 and having muscle is very important as you get older of course you don't want to be frail uh 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 oh yeah 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 um doctors that i've had on i had dr roger patrick on and i asked her i said hey what are some of the healthy foods that are marketed as healthy that in your opinion aren't as healthy as they claim to be essentially 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 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 honey 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 should we be eating fruits every day is it something what 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 were constantly feeding ourselves more sugar than we ever would have experienced even just 100 years ago or 50 even 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 examples and preach to others yes um i 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 um the other fruit that i think is worth looking at is cantaloupe or rockmelon that i believe has the most nutrition versus sugar of any fruit so we try to eat those kind of 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 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 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 borne 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 going to get hate mail 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 the blue zones who are living over 100 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 it's like i i keep eating until i'm 70 percent over full yeah then you can regret then i regret it but you're like oh 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 the 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 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 sort of 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 uh david is 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 uh aging is a disease is that right well that's what i think yeah that's what you think it is is does that mean death is a disease as well uh well death is the the end product of aging okay 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 or 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 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 the sortuans 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 study the others are they 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 questions 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 skin 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 digestive really yeah yeah yeah what 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 uh 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 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 he'll fire yeah and then you can make it older like benjamin button and then reverse its 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 like there's a brain it's getting older it's getting younger yeah yeah yeah but now that i'm talking about it with you which is 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 gotta 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 or 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've got to pull together teams of people molecular biologists biochemists mathematicians computer software people and we get in a room 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 can 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 could 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 warm 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 it's 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 i've got you 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 okay so we got no smoking 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-toothed tiger or something like that the reason all of this stuff works in terms of the diet and exercise it's not that your blood flows more or that being hungry is just healthy for the body it's actually that your longevity genes get turned on by these things and why does that happen why does it happen in humans in mice even in yeast cells for bread and beer the reason is that the body senses adversity and says crap we've got to 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 they 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 uh when i had gundry on he was like i drink a cup of olive oil a day or something like teaspoons of olive oil he's just eating it he's like i'm trying to get as much in as i can putting it on everything 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 this 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 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 uh 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 percent full and i'm trying i just never practice until i'm like eating 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 hungry kids everywhere sisters right they're stealing your food uh my wife grew up um in a very poor family and uh even when she was a student she could barely afford food she would scrounge and buy potatoes and at the dinner table she'll 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 uh 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 tricking you like i'm still hungry even though you've had 2 000 calories in 10 minutes you're still like oh there's food it's like turning something on 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 um how do you turn that 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 uh 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 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 want to look 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've got to train yourself to say tomorrow and the next year it's just 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 let's divide it up one is get good nice sleep sleep is everything yeah and then surround yourself by friends and people who 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 that 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 don't know 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 gonna end 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 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 and not had lung cancer by the time she had a tumor that was the size of a grapefruit and a 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 25 okay and 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 that's 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 pleasant that's not something anybody wants yeah and no one tells you what it's like to see your mother die oh your parents die it's it's horrific wow i 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 ear thanks for being the best mom i could ever hope for anyway that was it a 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 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 uh 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's 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'd 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 opposition like you know drinking and smoking and i've lived a good life don't don't bother me and she paid the consequence 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 the air is different thanks to humans so you know we're 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 uh but even things that we don't think about the vaccines that hopefully will 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 um 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 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 science could be wrong still we just don't know but what we found so far is that it 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 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 i found out last night uh 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 that 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 uh you know he's got millions of them he can actually mimic what happens in thought and in 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 but what's possible right right well before i tell you that 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 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 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 we're 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 um 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 going to die shut up really have you ever have you predicted i've got to do it i got to do it i've done a primitive form of that which is 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 going to 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 that 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 and uh stopped eating badly 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 just 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 gosh uh but i've turned it around um i've never been unhealthy 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 can 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 and i'm 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 just 100 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 well i'm going as fast as i can and uh 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 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 uh you know i'm trying to avoid the question because my my peers my colleagues sure sure i hate it because it's it's unproven it's actually 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 is an example he's 80. he's 80 and so 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 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 inflammation well there are a number of ways one is do these things and turn on your longevity genes which are anti-inflammatory 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 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 um 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 will 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 temeria centenarian people who live over 100 okay so that's a hallmark 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 virus is 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 flu no and i'm on planes people are sneezing on me i've 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 to the question 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 this is all fascinating stuff and i know you've got more in your book lifespan why we age and why we don't have to make sure you guys get this book really powerful research in 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 you're 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 i believe that we're way under 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 do something that scares you every day send off an email that you wouldn't be you'd be afraid to do 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 appreciated 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 amino acids that we eat uh there's one called ampk which is 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 sirtuins and there are seven of these sirtuin proteins that protect the cell in very different ways um 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 three defenses we want to 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 them this calorie restricted fasting diet but it was when we actually gave them resveratrol every second day that we got the longest lived mice uh 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 a 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 number one like that yet that can be interesting yeah the problem that we face in the field is 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 um 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 gonna be sold 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 degeneration 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 it's called chaperone-mediated autophagy or cma and it was discovered by a good friend of mine in new york anna maria cuervo and 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 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 needs 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 there are a lot especially young people who you can overdo it yeah you always want to have some at a positive 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 and 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 it's like a high that you get and i can get a lot of work done when i 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 10 000 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 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 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 uh 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 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 uh 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 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 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 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'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 uh 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 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 adds huge amounts of percentage to the gdp right we're spending at least 17 percent 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 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 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 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 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 we're 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 bloods 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 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 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's different now uh and you might want to live 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 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 lifespan you'll be able to change professions 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 turns out if you if you live better during the years that quote-unquote you have uh 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 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 my first memory is four i don't even know what this is my first memory really what was it see your mom smoke and be like i don't want to know what was that yeah you know in the 70s early 70s when i was a kid uh the smoke was everywhere i couldn't stand it but that that was not really my motivation it was that my grandmother who helped raise me 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're not 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 because 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 what 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 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 we were in school i was in sydney in sydney so i went to there there aren't that many choices in sydney uh called it's called the university of new south wales like the mit yeah 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 i do so i was a 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 gonna be i was like i'm gonna do the opposite so we have that in common yeah probably your parents learned they had to tell you the opposite of what they wanted to do exactly uh 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 survival survival mode 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 um was talking about um 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 where 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 five ten years is easy look at my dad he's doing all the right things also taking some molecules that we've worked on in my lab wow they're not doing any harm i hope that he makes it past 100. 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 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 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 button 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 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 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 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 so too in 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 we make mice from scratch well from stem cells from a cell you can turn it into a moving mouse yeah that that banks and breathes in 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 what 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 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 [Music] how many mice are in the lab thousands well i don't want i don't know anyone to be upset because we do have a large number of mice but where our goal is to make them healthy gotcha unlike other a lot of other lives you're not trying to kill them like most labs you know i know how to say how can we keep them as healthy and now my sleep our mice live longer so that we're one of the few labs where we do that but yeah so we this this sort of two-on-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 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 lose 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 that my father started taking about a decade ago same as me uh but he 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 their 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 gonna make this medicine bam most people left no money four people tiny little lab uh even people in my lab said i'm out of here this is crazy you're full of it and there was one student who i had his name's basil hubbard and he said you know what there's something to this i'm not going to 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 the internet uh he was a phd student okay gotcha 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 figures 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 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 resveratrol 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 are you testing this on your father no he's a scientist he can read this stuff for himself and he's the one that made the decision that he believed in it and uh yeah i'm glad that he did because so far so good 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 a can we make a medicine which we're still trying but b what we call it the endogenous activator what's in our own bodies that resveratrol is mimicking and it's these monounsaturated fatty acids that come from when we're hungry or if we eat these healthy plants wow okay that's pretty exciting it's 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 how 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 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 in 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 uh 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 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 our best we've made some breakthroughs we know some of the machinery that allows this to works 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 going to 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 companies selling these clock tests you can have 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 of 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 how bad is vaping on the body in the body's lifespan yeah we don't know like somebody needs to test that i think that's going to be a big issue in the next five ten years yeah yeah well so my 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 uh to work well they're very fragile and 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 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 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 uh 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 being altruistic and kind or evil and a liar or someone who uh commits adultery these are all traits that have in at one point in our history being 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 uh um and enjoy you know the freedoms and the luxuries of not having to worry about food david you're one of the the smartest and nicest uh scientists out there my man i really appreciate you and acknowledge you for constantly doing the research and constantly putting yourself on the line based on things you discovered 10 years ago two years ago where you're constantly learning new things and sharing that wisdom with us you're doing great work and i really acknowledge you for that you've got a you got a great book out there called lifespan if people want to learn more about how they can really live longer live healthier you're on social media david sinclair on twitter david sinclair phd on instagram we gotta have you come back every you know six to 12 months for sure because i have so many questions that i want answered and i know your information is really helpful if you want to learn more about how to master your mind check out this next video right here we're all faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations and we are at that point at that nexus point in our evolution as a species so then you don't try to fix that that's never going to work what you do

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 254,064

Rating: 4.8719335 out of 5

Keywords: dr. david sinclair, david sinclair interview, david sinclair joe rogan, david sinclair anti aging, david sinclair aging, david sinclair lifespan, lewis howes, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvment, self development, personal development, health theory, how to live longer, age in reverse, healthy foods, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, how to lose weight, how to reverse cancer, health tips, brain foods, food

Id: TGPJJ3ECL40

Length: 119min 46sec (7186 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020