Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Slowing Down the Aging Process | Dr. David Sinclair

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

This week’s conversation is with Dr. David Sinclair, a professor in the Department of Genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School, where he and his colleagues study longevity, aging and how to slow its effects.More specifically, their focus is on studying sirtuins—protein-modifying enzymes that respond to changing NAD+ levels and to caloric restriction—as well as metabolism, neurodegeneration, cancer, cellular reprogramming, and more.David is the co-creator and co-chief editor of the journal Aging, has co-founded several biotechnology companies, and is an inventor on 35 patents.Among the honors and awards he’s received are his inclusion in Time Magazine’s list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” and Time's “Top 50 in Healthcare”.In addition, David is the author of the new book, Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To.I wanted to speak with David because he’s pushing the boundaries of what we understand to be possible for humans – and if he’s successful it will change the world as we know it._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and by trade and training a sport and performance psychologist as well as the co-founder of compete to create the whole idea behind these conversations behind this podcast is to learn from the extraordinaries, to understand how they organize their inner life, how they execute in consequential environments, and to also dig to understand the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their understanding of what's possible as well as their craft. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms. One thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of

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traveling or in between meals on a demanding day, certainly, I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David Protein Bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put him on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day, one a day.

What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Atiyah, someone who's been on the show, it's a great episode by the way, is also their chief science officer. So I know they've done their due diligence in that category. My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know,

Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. David Sinclair, and he's a professor of the

Department of Genetics and the co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology and Aging at Harvard Medical School, and where he and his colleagues basically are studying longevity, aging, and how to slow its effects. David is also the co-creator and co-chief editor of the journal Aging, and he's also co-founded several biotechnology companies and is an inventor in 35 patents. Okay, so what does all that mean? David is at ground zero. He's a tier one thinker about aging and how to slow it down and the biological effects of it. And he's deep in it. It's not just opining about aging. He's really in the weeds of the research. And I mean, mentioned some of his awards is that he's received and is included in Time Magazine's

list of the 100 most influential people in the world, as well as Time's top 50 in healthcare. And in addition, he's also an author of a new book, Lifespan, the revolutionary science of why we age and why we don't have to. And I wanted to speak with David because he has a deep understanding about the aging process. And we're all getting older in this high performance way of living, like how do we maximize the time that we have and how do we help create this inner vibrance for us to be able to live whatever and however we describe an extraordinary life. So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. David Sinclair. David, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you?

Where's the accent from? It's from Sydney. That's what it sounds like. Yeah, I've lost a little bit. I spent some time in Wales doing my PhD, so I tend to be a little bit too British. But I've been in Boston too, and actually the Boston accent is the same as my accent. Say car. Car. Parky car. Okay, good. So, listen, you know, I can't wait to get into this with you and studied your work. Thank you for what you've done and how you've shaped the understandings of what's possible.

And that that's a loaded statement that I just kind of hinted at. And, you know, I just want to say thank you for your time. Thank you for being here. And I'm really eager to understand how you organize your inner life. I'm also equally as fascinated about what you understand. And so when we talk about mastery, we talk about two things, master yourself and mastery of craft. And I want to hit both with you. I don't say that to everybody. So where do you want to start? Master of craft, master yourself.

What's more interesting to you? Uh, I think mastery of craft because I'm still very interesting to you uh i think mastery of craft because i'm still very much uh not a master of my my own domain so they say so they say yeah so let's start with self oh great i'm joking now we can do whatever you want we're gonna cover both anyway yeah we are okay um all that that being said like let's just do the easy stuff like the kind of the you know the mechanical check the box. Where did you go to school, undergrad, early days? Yeah, sure.

So I grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, fairly standard life in the suburbs. But one thing that I think was a big influence was I was on the edge of the bush, as we call it. So my whole life was spent trying to avoid getting killed by snakes, spiders, and other things. I would go for bushwalks, dreaming about the future, dreaming about discovery, being an explorer. And I would do that every day. Can you imagine this kid who has a million square miles in his backyard to explore? And I'm not kidding. This is, it's a million. It goes North for hundreds of kilometers. And so I was this explorer and I was jumping off rocks and building forts. So there was that. But I also have an insane curiosity. I want to know how things work, not just mechanical things, but living things. Cause

they're much more complicated and interesting to me. So I'd pull apart insects. I'd pull apart spiders nests. And that was my world for the first 18 years. What were your parents doing? Spider nests, pulling apart spider nests. I mean, like... Yeah. So my parents were hands off. Were they hippies? What was the deal there? Yeah. The opposite of helicopter parents. They would say, David, just go outside. As long as you're not watching TV, it's all good. So in Australia, back in the 19, early 70s, it was standard to just kick kids out of the house and hope that they come home for dinner. Sometimes I never made it home. I actually walked too far and it was dark by the time I ended up across many valleys, across many rivers. I have a river system that I actually

explored downstream into Sydney Harbour many miles and had to get picked up. But I always wanted to know what the source of the river looked like. I wondered, what is the beginning of a river look like? Is it a trickle? Is it a dewy patch? So I kept walking upriver as well. And I actually never found the beginning of that river, much like my quest to find the Fountain of Youth here. Okay. So you're more interested in upstream than downstream? Or equally interested in both? downstream or equally absolutely the upstream is far more interesting yeah when i think of upstream from my lenses i'm thinking about psychological stuff right so i think upstream from a cns perspective central nervous system really is

you know how the mind works um which is a mechanism in my mind a model that is the mind is driving the central nervous system when When you think upstream, what do you think? Well, so I'm a trained biochemist and geneticist. And so what we talk about as being downstream, upstream, downstream are all the effects of a process and the upstream are the causes. And I study aging and longevity. So the downstream, we know what happens. We've been, we've been watching this happen to our families and friends and ourselves forever. But we don't know what's upstream. What is driving that process?

And we tend to take it for granted because, you know, you look at a river and you go, that's a nice river, but how often do people think, where's that source? And I'm like the explorers of old where I'm just too curious. I want to know where everything begins. Because when you know where it begins, you can actually understand why it happens, where the river comes from, and you can even damn it up if you want to. Yeah. So early days you were exploring upstream physically, and then you followed that path all the way through your academic studies and now your professional life to explore the upstream of longevity. Right. Why we age and why we your professional life to explore the upstream of longevity.

Right. Why we age and why we don't have to. You know I'm going to pause there. We don't have to. Well, I don't think we have to. I think that we're on a quest. I'm on a quest and many of my colleagues believe that we have a really good handle on why we age. And once we understand why we age, we can slow it down, if not reverse it. We've got some new stuff we'll talk about later about the true resetting of the clock. But we're not there yet, but we're very close to being able to understand all of that in great detail. Similar to when we discovered why cancer occurs, we had some breakthroughs. Every time we understand why something happens, HIV, heart disease disease we can make an impact otherwise we're basically just throwing

herbs and and and wishes and voodoo at a problem i'm laughing because um i see it all the time in sport i see these technologies that come out. I'm not saying good or bad, but like, as if it's the Holy grail, you know, and you're saying herbs and I'm laughing because I see the same thing. Like, it's like, how small of an impact is that going to really have? How far downstream is it? And, you know, it's marketed really well, but then when you really think of the full ecosystem of human performance and flourishing, where are we in the current? And I think the two of us are way more interested in upstream. And then, but before we go to what your origin of your question is, I still want, I want to go back first. So pulling apart spiderwebs, then what was grade school? Like

what was high school? Like What was high school like? How many kids were in the family? Yeah. Paint the picture a little more. I've got one brother and it was just him and me. He's four years younger. And so he would, like most brothers, I was his idol and he was my enemy. So that was the life.

Don't follow me into the bush. I want to be alone. And he was like can i come and he'd be with his fluffy ugg boots walking through the rivers and getting leeches in his in his boots and uh but that was great you know i was fairly standard uh boy we would fight a lot i sent him to hospital a number of times well i mean like people say that we fight a lot but no one goes to hospital well in in Australia, it's very different. You fight with rocks. You fight with sticks.

You fight with tools. I broke his foot. I clipped his eyelid off. It was not fun for him. But it's only because I was a lot bigger. It's not as if I was more skilled. By the time he was 18, he could kick my ass. It's a good thing you're an academician

because I'm a little concerned for psychopathology here. Well, I am competitive, but no, I'm not a mean person. So I have one brother. I have two parents who were biochemists. I was influenced heavily by my grandmother on my dad's side, especially. One grandfather who I didn't know that well was a very successful dentist. But on the other side, my grandparents were Hungarian. My grandmother escaped from Hungary in 1956 to go to Australia. Having lived through the hell of World War II and communist occupation, she saved many lives of Jews. I'm ancestrally Jewish, but we converted to Lutheran. So I only discovered I'm actually Jewish because I did a DNA test, and it was obvious.

But anyway, my grandmother lived through hell, came to Australia to start fresh. She wanted to be as far away from Europe as she could get. And she raised me basically because my mother and father were working as biochemists. And what she taught me was humans can be evil, adults screw up everything, and we need to do better as a species. And she said that, David, it is your job, all of our jobs,

and I want you to carry the flame to save lives, make humanity the best it can be, and never grow up. As you're wearing a shirt that says adult-ish. Yeah, not many Harvard professors wear adult-ish, but it's to remind me that the wonder of life and the ability to do things that no one's done before, you need a child's approach, a vision of the world that you see things for the first time. Because as we get older, it's so easy to take everything around us for granted and not see through that, not just to what we know, but what we don't know. That's the hard question to answer. I ask that question all the time to folks, like,

are you more interested in what you don't know or what you do know? And you know what everyone says? What I don't know. No one says I'm more interested in what I know because it sounds so narcissistic, but to really organize your life around exploring what you don't know. And the fact that there's so much we don't know seems really like a wonderful way to live. What is it that you're exploring? Well, my quest in life, ever since I was four years old and my grandmother told me that everything around us will pass and turn to dust, is to keep that feeling in my brain every day I wake up knowing that everything around me will be gone one day, including myself, including those I love and everybody you see around you. 120 years from

now, unless I do something about it or someone else succeeds, we're all dust. And that keeps me grounded. And so my quest has been since age four is to get a degree in biology, become a doctor, PhD, study genetics, figure out the tools to understand why we age, and then figure out how to slow that down reverse it extend people's health it turns out if you're healthy and you don't have diseases you tend not to die unless you don't look to the right but the the point of it all is that i'd like to leave the world a better place than i found it i want to I'm secretly trying to do, do my grandmother proud doing what she's instructed me to do. I'm sure that's part of it. Uh, but yeah, I think we all, I think many

of us, especially those at the peak of their careers want to be remembered for something good for having done something that, you know, it makes our lives worth something. You know, why else are we here? I't know i don't either is legacy important to you some people have a bad reaction to that word i'm really driven by legacy and it's it's a little selfish i know but um i was very happy to have three offspring because i know that there'll be something even if i don't bend that needle there'll be three people in the world that didn't exist before. But yeah, it's a quest.

I'm not a religious guy, so you could call this my religion. I get up wanting to make every day count, every second count. If you saw me during the day, there's barely a second where I have take a breath. People say, David, take a break, take a vacation. That's a nightmare to me. That's wasted time. Now, I do have to spend more time with my family, and that's an area that I'm still working on. I love my family.

Also, it's 24-7 trying to get this job done because time's running out for all of us. You know, I was going to ask you this question earlier, like how much space does your grandmother take inside of you? And let's just hold that out there for a minute. And then I want to ask, like, how painful is it for you that you're not with your family more? And the reason I ask you that is because it is my struggle, is that I'm mission-minded to explore the reaches of human performance with some of the most extraordinarily gifted and talented and skill-developed, courageous men and women in the world. And at what cost? What am I doing? And so I struggle with it, helping many at the cost of few, the intimate few.

So I ask you that because it's a real deal for me. And I'm like, what is it like for you? Yeah, it's the biggest challenge. Solving aging is actually easier than solving being with my family. Every day I get probably 10 to 20 requests to do something out of town and learning how to say no to things and prioritize is something I'm still trying to master and I'm really not good at it. And one of the problems with being a scientist is these invitations come in often a year in advance and the psychology of my brain is, well, a year, it doesn't matter. I say, figure it the same thing. They're coming a year in advance. It's like, oh yeah, that's great. And then when it gets down to it, it's like, oh my gosh, I'm way over-promised.

And that's a problem for delivery. It is. So one of the secrets to my success, and I'm not just saying it, is that I married the right person. I have a wife who is tough, but does understand what it takes to be successful. She's also a scientist trained at MIT in genetics. She's successful in her own right. She's now the CEO of a nonprofit organization. She's run companies. No, she definitely want me to be home more. And she tells me flat out, we have a lot of fights about it. And even in my bathroom, you'll see under my mirror, it says, living with a German, my wife's German, living with a German is character building. And I have to remember that. But she's got a good point. She's got a good point. But fortunately, she has not

ever left me in the tough times that we've been through. And we stay in touch as much as we can when I'm on the road. I gave her a call just before we sat down here just to check in to see how she was doing. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life.

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longer without digital fatigue creeping in. Plus, they look great. Clean, clear, no funky color distortion. Just good design, great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code Finding Mastery 20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. Okay. So I'm not going to get the answer I wanted from you. Like, you know, like, I don't know what I wanted really, but maybe it's just like, maybe it's just an appreciation because I have regard for the work you've done and for

not to hear another person saying i struggle with family too i love my family like i love my family and i don't know somebody that has organized their life to say oh i spend equal parts time on mission and equal parts time on family i don don't know anyone. But also, like, maybe we're talking, we're in this weird little warp, I don't know, where, I don't know, maybe there's a whole world of people that are not organizing their life in the same way. So I don't know. Well, for sure there are. There are plenty of people who put family first, number one.

But I don't know anybody who's reached, who's gotten tenure, which is a permanent job at Harvard, without sacrificing something. It does require sacrifice. And if we're lucky, we have people who understand that close to us. Yeah, that's spot on. I couldn't do this without my wife, for sure. I mean, she's the backbone for just about every system in my life. So, you know, that's a refreshing answer that you gave me for sure. That being said, how'd you get into, PhD was where? Yeah. So standard training in high, in high school, in Sydney public school, got pretty bored in school. I was one of those very annoying kids who was the disruptor,

the class clown trying to get attention, love biology, realized in high school that I wanted, I didn't want to be, do medicine because I was, I really despised humanity at that point. You can imagine, I was told by my grandmother how bad they can be, had very little empathy. I still, I've learned empathy, but when I was a teenager, I thought humans were the enemy. So I didn't do medicine. I went into genetics in Sydney at a university called the University of New South Wales. And it's close to my family. And in Australia, you actually stay close to your family. You don't head off to a new city typically.

So I finished that, did what's called honors, which is an extra year of research. And I struggled. People I teach are often amazed to know that I had huge doubts about whether I could do this. I was fearful of failure. And failure to me was not getting to come to the US, which was my dream, which is where all the best research is done. And so while I was applying to get money to come to America, which is one in 50, one in 100 chance probably, I was looking at other alternatives. I was pierced with my PhD supervisor who I felt didn't tell me the truth about the lack of opportunities for PhDs in Australia, and he exploited me as a slave in his lab to make himself successful. And all graduate students go through this,

even the ones at Harvard. It's really tough because to get to my level at Harvard, there's probably, I wouldn't know the numbers, but I'm guessing it's probably 5,000 people want the job and one gets it. It's that competitive and it's really hard. And so I got into Harvard, the backdoor, actually, what I did was I managed to get some money to come to the US. There's a story in that. Do you want to hear it? Oh, yeah. David, I came in, I want to hear all the story. I came in non-traditional route as well. So yeah, oh, yeah. Like, there was no clear map that I followed. So I love this part of your story. Yeah. Well, I'd be interested to hear if you're the same as me. I'm not the brightest guy in the room.

What I'm definitely good at is focusing on a goal and not giving up when all odds would say that I'm nuts. And people would tell me, you'll never do this. It's never been done. And that gets me angry and gets me to work even harder to prove them wrong. I'm very competitive. So the best thing people can do if they don't like what I'm doing is to say, David, you're not doing the right thing. It's like, thank you.

I needed that motivation. Now I'm really going to do it. So anyway, getting back to how this all happened, getting money to go to MIT, which is where I did my post-PhD, my postdoc studies, I wrote to Leonard Garenti, who's my PhD supervisor. And he said, well, we're kind of full up MIT, you got to bring your own money to, you know, I'm not going to pay you, he said. So I defined this money. And I didn't have wealthy parents. So I tried to find ways to get money. And the best way to get money is philanthropic money. And no one in Australia would give me the money. I wrote

to the Heart Foundation. They said, you're studying aging. That's not heart disease. And I said, yes, it freaking is. You just don't know it yet. Anyway, they liked me, but they didn't give me the money. So my one chance was to write to American institutions. And I wrote to this one called the Helen Hay Whitney, like Whitney Museum in New York Foundation. And I wrote to this one called the Helen Hay Whitney, like Whitney Museum in New York Foundation. And they were, this is the elite fellowship. If you get this, you're in. It's like winning a Nobel for a student.

And I wrote to them and they wrote back and they said, we don't fund foreign students. And I wrote back, well, why not? And they said, well, it's too expensive to fly them over for a face-to-face interview. So I said, well, what if I cover the costs of the airfare? And I'm thinking, I'm going to have to sell my car to pay for that, but damn it, I'll do it. And guess what? I was the first person that they said, okay, you can come over and do the interview. Yeah. So I'm talking about David. Yeah, that's good. Okay. So you got that tenacious, gritty, passionate, mission-minded approach to life. No fuels you. It does not get in your way. And you didn't come from affluence. You came from

humble beginnings, if you will. Very bohemian, Hungarian background, artistic. And life is more about the friends you keep and the books you read and your education than any wealth you can accumulate my grandmother gave all her money away and i'm kind of the same kind of guy okay all right and then so then you hook and crook and scrapped your way to get in how much money were we talking about oh it was it was a pittance it was fifteen thousand dollars a year in those days okay so if you could come up with 15 grand, that's to live. Is that right? That's to live. But the airfare for the interview was probably only a couple of thousand dollars. Yeah, but still.

Well, for a student who's struggling to pay rent for $50 a week, it was a big sum in those days. Yeah, for sure. Did you sell your car or what did you do? I did. I sold my car. It was a Mazda Miata. It was quite a nice car and I miss it still. Was that the rotary? No, that's a Mazda. No, this is the soft top Mazda sports car of the early 90s. What's a Mazda and a Mazda? Same car? Yeah. Okay. So I had, no, my family had, I didn't have it, but we had that rotary engine.

Right, RX-7. Yeah, there you go. That's not what family had one. I didn't have it, but it had that rotary engine. Right, RX-7. Yeah, there you go. That's not what you had, though. No, I had the sexier version, the smaller one with a typical engine, but it was a soft top and it was two-seater. How did you afford that? Well, my grandmother, as she was failing in her health, decided to give everything away before she died. And one of the biggest gifts she could give me was my dream. And I wouldn't stop talking about this Mazda car. And she gifted me enough to, with my own savings, afford that secondhand. But it was my dream, dream car. Very cool. Okay. hand but it was my dream uh dream car very cool okay and speaking of dream car i've never told

anybody this my my great-grandfather was a playwright in hungary and you can buy his movies on amazon he was he's really famous in hungary not so much in uh in this work this country but i'm sure my grandmother was thinking of that when she said okay david you buy you this dream car of yours. What was she thinking? I didn't follow that. Well, so in our family, so my grandmother's father wrote and produced a movie that's well known in Hungary called My Dream Car. Oh, got it. Okay.

So she was living out her father's play and movie. Oh, cool. That's really cool. Are you nostalgic? Well, I'm so busy during the day, I have very little time to look back. But I think I am. I have a lot of keepsakes. I have drawers full of things that make me remember the past. I've still got old school books in my closet, that kind of thing. And then, so go back to that question about how much space does your grandmother take up inside you?

Oh, it's massive. It's massive. I'm, I'm every day. I think about what would she want? What would she think? Yeah, this is the driver. You know, there's other people in my life, like my mother who gave everything to her children.

I could never be like that. And I have a father who is the kindest, gentlest guy who would never hurt an aunt. And I try to be like that as well in life. So the combination of those three people I use and think, what would they do in this situation? Very cool. Okay. So backdoor into graduate school. Right. So I'm at MIT and I've just arrived at MIT to solve aging. And the first thing that happens is that someone else discovers what I was hoping to do. It's called scooping in science. And it's the worst thing that can

happen to you. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to go home, actually. How'd you learn about it? I forget. I think somebody said, hey, did you see that so-and-so's lab in Seattle just published cloning the gene for this premature aging disease in humans that I wanted to figure out? That was crushing. That was really bad. I called up my mom and I said, I think I've made a big mistake. Not only have I been scooped, but this lab is not what I thought.

The professor isn't respected. He's working on aging. And I thought he was my hero for doing that. But all the other people in the lab at the time, except for a couple of students, thought that he was nuts to work on aging. And he was working on aging, not in humans so much, but in yeast cells, baker's yeast.

And so it was doubly nuts. You can't solve aging, it's too complicated, and you're working on it in yeast cells? What the heck can yeast cells tell us about aging? They don't get heart disease, they don't get Alzheimer's. So I learned that my professor isn't as smart as I thought. He's working on something crazy and I just lost the project to someone else the week I arrived. It was a nightmare. So this idea about, is it imposter syndrome? No, it's not imposter syndrome because you don't worry about if you have what it takes. What is the thing underneath that is scary or was scary for you? Maybe it's still present.

What drives me is the fear that I wasn't going to get to do the chance to do good research. Here you are at one of the greatest institutions in the world. You just got scooped. Okay. But what is the fear? Like if you expanded that out a little bit or pulled on that thread, what would it be? Well, the first thought that goes through your mind at that point is, oh crap, I don't know what's going to come next. My plan that I'd set out, and I like to have a plan towards the future where I'm going, suddenly needed to take a fork in the road. And I needed to take a deep breath, find where that new fork in the road goes, make sure it's still driving forward, not backwards or sideways. And so that was the confusing part.

I think it was homelessness as well that drove me to that conversation. But very quickly I regrouped. I thought about it. I found the new fork in the road to get where I wanted to go. It was only a couple of days, and I marched back into my professor's office, and I said, I now know what I'm going to do. I'm going to figure out what causes that premature aging disease that had just been found in humans.

I'm going to study it in our yeast cells, in those yeast cells. I'm going to figure out why yeast cells get old, and I'm going to give it. So the disease is called Werner's syndrome. I'm going to give yeast cells Werner's syndrome and see happens do they age prematurely and if they do that means that yeast can tell us about humans so very quickly i figured out the problem um but what was my biggest fear at that point my fear was that uh i'd come so close you know i live come so close. I live life so close. I'll tell you something that I haven't told anybody,

and I've only realized this. What I find comfort in to get over this fear that I'm getting so close but not potentially going to make it is that there are multiverses. I believe strongly in physics. I understand quantum entanglement, and I get all that. And if there are an infinite number of universes, what that means is what I'm doing is pushing our world, our universe closer to where I want it to be. And if it fails right at the last moment, I know that there are universes where it actually happened. And I get comfort in knowing at least I pushed the needle in a different universe than this one. We just don't get to see what happened. Whoa.

Okay, so you just took it out there now. Entanglement, multiversities, you know, really cool. And so then your thought is, okay, if I put a good effort in to this version that I can see, that I'm limited in seeing right now, that there's somewhere else in the universe, I actually crossed the finish line or got through. Right, right. And those worlds are better off. But I still want to see it happen in our world. So then I'll find a new path to succeed. Okay, let's go upstream again, is like, what are you searching for right now? I am searching for the ultimate cause of why we grow old at the molecular level.

Okay, pause there. I'm going to hit all these with you. Why we get old at the molecular level, one. Okay, what's the second? Can we understand it to enough detail to be able to slow it down or reverse it. Okay. If we go back to the beginning of the conversation, there it is again, right? Those are the big things for you. And then what sits underneath that for you? Meaning that I want to know I'm important. I want to, I want to change humanity. I want to like,, where is it? Is it internal? Is it external?

Well, you asked me if I'm nostalgic. I'm hugely nostalgic. I could watch history shows all day. I love the journey of humanity that we've been on for the last few hundred thousand years. If I could go back in time, I'd love to watch the invention of the bow and arrow. I'd love to hang out with inventors, whether they be Benjamin Franklin or Wright Brothers. And these inventors are my idols because they've really done what I'm hoping to do. No, I don't expect that I'm going to be another Benjamin Franklin, but I'd like to be like that.

That's my hope. And if you came to my home, you'd see on the mantelpiece in our living room there are books of all these great scientific folk. I've got books that were printed by Benjamin Franklin and Francis Bacon, who started the Enlightenment. These are my heroes. And I would love to have a place like that. I know it's crazy to think that, but that would be my ultimate goal if I could get there. I'm actually like, like grinning because I've got artifact of this about 14 folks in my, um, that are incredibly inspiring to me. And I've

got artifact across my house reminding me. So as I walk past my house, I've got a book here and I've got a little thing there and you know, of folks that have been disruptive in a way that is aspirational to humanity. And so, yeah, you're smiling now too. Well, I'm smiling too because this is a topic that is very private, but I think it's worth sharing. I've got the ship of the, what is it, the Endeavor ship for Captain Cook who sailed the world and discovered, well, co-discovered Australia. And these explorers, I have huge admiration. I have a signed book from Edmund Hillary. I tried to get one from Magellan, but he passed away.

Yeah, well, these are not direct, although the one from Hillary is signed for me. But that sits right up above the books. It's exploration. It's going where no one's gone before. Of course, I love Star Trek as well. But what I also do is I love innovation. And so I've got a Macintosh collection, an Apple collection. So if you were to come to my home, you'd see stack upon stack on glass shelves of all the major Macintoshes that have come through, actually going back to the original computers from the 18th century, actually. And that reminds me that science progresses one step at a time, but it always marches forward. Okay. So let's leap forward quickly before we get to some of your insights, is that, so we got deep learning, machine learning, deep learning, AI, right? And we've got general artificial

intelligence, specific artificial intelligence, and the progression that science is taking in those directions. There's two basic camps. Uh-oh, watch out. It's not good. You know, it's happening. Be careful. Decode everything in your life so you're not caught in the matrix because they're going to take over one day. then the other one is like hold on it's happening it's great we're still going to be able to govern and manage you know this independent thinking language whatever maybe hint of sentient beings in the future so where are you when we leap way forward on technology yeah so interestingly i was just at a book launch. David Ewing Duncan writes about the future of robots. And I was one of, fortunately, one of the people he interviewed. So I've thought

a little bit about this. So I'm all positive about the future. I think humanity can solve any problem as long as we don't let maniacs run the world. And science will solve any problem. If you put smart people together, which I do, from all walks of life, from computing, we build our own computers, we scan the depths of the cell. When you do that, then you can figure this out. So AI, where do I sit on this? I'm bullish on AI. I want us to go as fast as possible. I think that the Luddites and those since have shown us that you shouldn't fear technology. You can make rules. You can govern how they're used. So I'm not in Elon Musk's camp of worrying about AI.

I've seen the future. I know of a lab that's very stealthy, so I can't reveal who they are. But I've seen the future. I've seen computers that are simulating neural, true neurons, biological neurons, building an entire brain out of digital code. And when you do that, magical stuff happens. You get emergent properties of machines that can think beyond anything we can imagine today. And it's really compact. You can squeeze this into eventually an iPhone and your iPhone will be semi-conscious probably within the next decade, maybe a couple of decades.

Scary and wonderful, isn't it? I mean, it changes the entire framework about how we'll interface with ourself, nature, technology, you know, products and other humans. Like, it's incredible. Well, yeah, we need to do what evolution didn't didn't give us you know we we've struggled out of the forests and the plains of africa but everything we do we're sitting here in a room that i wish it had air conditioning and uh and and then we've got clothes here we've got we've got computers everything we do is to make us better but everything around us is. What about this room that we're in? I

would ask your listeners to look around the rooms that they're in, or maybe they're on a plane listening to this or in a car. What is natural? Nothing is natural anymore. Same with aging, same with AI. We want to be better animals that we are. And technology solves a lot of that. Now, often I'm criticized, actually, that people, not often, but a lot of that. Now, often I'm criticized, actually, people, not often, but a lot of people worry that if we solve aging, that's the end of the world. But what I say in my book, my point in Meaning, hold on, meaning what? Well, overcrowding, we've got consumption, we've got the environment, we've got global warming to tackle. And with more humans, it's just going to be worse. But to that point, if you go back to

London of 1830, and you told them that, oh, we're going to have another 5 million people in this city, they would have said, okay, I'm going to shoot myself now. But the London of today is great. I mean, it's expensive, but other than that, with restaurants and no cholera, and it's not horseshit on the ground and cigarette butts and, cigar butts that london despite its increased population has overcome those difficulties why because scientists and engineers figured it out they figured out that you shouldn't be shitting near the well and you should be dumping sewage into the thames all you have to do is turn off the freaking pump and you end up with great, you know, you can solve that. What else with surgery and childbirth? How easy is it to use soap? Once you figure that out, you can save millions of lives.

It's going to be the same with what I'm doing. Once we figure this out, slowing down aging and even reversing large parts of it, it's not going to be that hard. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night, and these sheets have helped me sleep cooler and more consistently,

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Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. One of the reasons I was so geeked to have you, your mind in this conversation and your life efforts to be able to demonstrate a body of work in a position that you've taken is because for me, I've spent my whole life working out how the best in the world do what they do. And it is about tip of the arrow performance, world leading consequential environments. And it is organizing life around high performance. But what's after

that? We know that there's so much more, but what is that after that? So what's after that is longevity. The new wealth is not a big car, big watch, big car, you know, big money in the bank account, big house. It's not that. The new wealth is flourishing. It's being rested. It's being vibrant. It's being switched on. And that is going to have consequences in how that we organize our life because stuff's got to change.

People are fatigued and anxious more than I would hope for. And so I'm geeked to have this conversation with you about longevity. So where do you take us now? So humanity is on a course that is unstoppable right now. The last 50 years we've gone from having no idea why we age other than theory to having a pretty good handle on what the symptoms are of aging and why they happen. And this new science of the clock of aging and how to reset it, that's put us on a course that we couldn't have dreamed of. Is that new science you? Well, it's me and a band of four people

around the world that we think we've cracked it. What do your peers think at Harvard? I'm not well liked at Harvard. I've got some close colleagues within the department. They're all brilliant. We've got Nobel Prize winners winners this is the the top you'd say arguably but arguably but probably in terms of biology and genetics i'm at the top top place on the planet and that's full of smart people driven people egotistical people independent people and i'm also at a medical school and they don't like rebels like me saying we need to do medicine differently yeah it's super disruptive and they don't like you like me saying we need to do medicine differently. Yeah, it's super disruptive. And they don't like you because you're talking about it, because you're studying something different.

You're being contrarian to, you know, the steeped research and position that people have taken for hundreds of years. Well, yeah, and also I don't like to just publish papers. Publishing papers is just a means to the goal of the mission. Now, publishing papers is hard. That's what I do as a day job, and I'm paid, and I'm certainly punished if I don't. I'm paid to discover the impossible. Now, at Harvard and places like that,

you can't just make a small discovery a little step forward. You have to try to make leaps and be published in the world's top journals. And most scientists, they're lucky if they get once in their lifetime to publish in these top journals. At Harvard, we're expected to do this at least once or twice a year. That's how hard it is. So I have to do that.

That's hard enough. But yeah, it's the elite of the elite. And we're all competing with each other to be recognized. The other thing that I do that's different is not just publish, but I try to make practical use of my discoveries. But this all sounds sane. You sound totally normal and sane when you say this. So where does it go sideways?

Well, so the science has come out of the last 200 years more like a monastery with monks. Until very recently, to talk to the public directly or to go out there and be on TV was considered breaking the code of ethics of science. And also, if you want to start companies, that was a no-no because that's contaminating your research with money and conflicts of interest. So you've done both?

I do more than most scientists are comfortable. On the entrepreneur side or on the talking side? Yeah, both. Both. I mean, increasingly I'm speaking to the public because I'm finally relieved that I can speak to them directly rather than through newspapers and that where I'm distorted tremendously and my words come out completely garbled. So I'm now talking directly thanks to

guys like you, folks like you who understand that the public is really eager to hear the exact words of what the scientists say, not this headline. Headlines for me are typically, Sinclair says we're all going to live beyond 150 and he solved aging. You know, there's a lot of nuance to that, right? There's caveats. This could take a while. So I'm doing that. And on the business side, I've been working on companies since I was in my early 30s. I just turned 50. So I've had a lot of really good mentors, a lot of experience building companies from the ground up. They're typically co-found companies. Or if I find technology, I will support co-founders, support founders.

I'm now in a lucky position where I have the experience to know how to start a company. I have a network of people who can help me with that from lawyers through to fundraising. And I have enough money of my own to help start companies hey yeah this is so good yeah my wife will kill me though yeah we don't hang on to money much in my family we reinvested into labs and startups okay and you know one of the places that i want to ask you about before we get into the the juicy stuff of your understandings is that how did you deal with arrows in your back? And I ask you that because I don't know if it's for a long time, I thought it was my industry being trained as a scientist and then an applied scientist. In fairness, I don't work in a lab. And we're not supposed to

be talking about things. And I'll never forget the first time I was in a lab and but we're not supposed to be talking about things and I'll never forget the first time I was in I cornered a fight in the UFC which I don't know of another psychologist that was cornering a fight it was the athlete the head coach myself and a cut man and it was on pay-per-view pay-per-view or whatever it was. And my mentor at the time saw it, was watching the fight. And I'm walking in with the athlete like, what am I supposed to do? Like I'm walking behind him. I'm like, there's nowhere else for me to be at that moment. I'm supposed to be in the corner.

And you know what he said to me? He said, Jervais, what are you doing getting in the picture? I was like, well, wait a minute. I'm not trying to get in any picture. What picture? He goes, you were all over the screen. I was like, well, wait a minute. I'm not trying to get any picture. What picture? He goes, you were all over the screen. I said, oh my God. Like, I don't know what to, I don't know what else to do. Like I'm supposed to walk in with them. So I'm saying that because it's a little bit of a story I think that you've experienced and I'd love to know how you've managed that. Right. So anyone who's followed my career will know that I've had

some pretty dark days. I've had some giant pharmaceutical companies come after me, try to invalidate my patents, invalidate my science. It is rough. I had friends call me and say, well, supposed friends say, you know, sorry, what has happened to you? All scientists, you know, have the potential to go down. I'm sorry, you've gone down, basically. It was nice knowing you kind of phone call. But you do find out who your true friends are when it hits the fan. One of the worst times of my life, my career was when we had published and been pretty well known for discovering the red wine molecule resveratrol is good for health. And we showed, and it's very clear that it's healthy for animals and probably healthy for humans. But we said it works by this

particular mechanism that boosts survival and longevity. So what we had been telling the world was that this resveratrol molecule from red wine could extend the lifespan of every animal and every species. Yeast as well, they could live longer. So the reason that was a game-changing idea was until then, the only thing you could do for aging was calorie restriction. But no one had a safe molecule that you could give to an animal,

a mouse, or anything that would make them live longer. But here we had this molecule that we thought ostensibly worked through this genetic mechanism through a particular enzyme in the body that is normally activated by caloric restriction or by exercise in animals. And that was a big deal, right? Because here was the proof of concept that we could design or find molecules that could slow down aging and make at least animals healthier for longer. I remember when I first came across your work there and I was like, whoa, this is a game changer. And then the easy kind of thought was, well, I'm just going to drink a lot of red wine,

which is not, you know, I mean, that's not the answer that you're purporting by any means. And then I remember thinking, well, you know, the thought is when you, you know, when you change something like a plant and you're just going to strip out some molecules and leave others, like you change the actual fabric of the delivery mechanism and the properties. And so is it really going to work, you know, just by itself, resveratrol? And so can you answer that? Sure. Well, so resveratrol you can get as a pure substance.

And we were testing this in humans, and it looked really good for diabetes. And then derivatives of it are actually more synthetic molecules worked in inflammation and psoriasis in patients so it was never about drink a lot of red wine although i drink i drink it now that's what it turned into for pop pop culture right right well red wine cells went up 30 because of that we were in on 60 minutes and others barbara walters was interested so i i was out there but i had so many arrows in my back getting back to to what we're saying, that it was not funny. People really wanted me to fail.

And the moment someone found a chink in my science, people just piled on and said, we knew it was wrong. And that was in 2010. We first showed it in 2003 to 2006. So I went into a tailspin psychologically psychologically and I could barely get out of bed. It was, it was depression for sure. Not because I thought I was proven wrong because we had really convincing data in my lab that we hadn't published yet, but I knew we had. But, but I felt that the world was ungrateful. I felt here I am sacrificing my life, my family, my money,

working as hard as I can, and the world says, F you, David. So in response for a few days, maybe a week, my response was, well, F you, world. I'm just going to give up. I'm going to go live a good life. I've got enough money to never work again. Why don't I just quit now? But that, I dug deep. And what I realized is I could not die without knowing the truth

and without the world knowing the truth. Wow, very cool. Like, so your first response was to go into a cave yeah i was bedridden i could not get out of bed okay and to me that's evidence of how much you care and how much you feel when the results or the public storyline sometimes it's private storylines for some people, but yours was the public storyline, is that you're no good. You don't have what it takes. You're a fill in the blank. And so because you cared and because you feel,

you went into a cave. How'd you get out? Well, so I, first of all, I wrote down on a piece of paper, never forget this. Never forget this moment. Is it the feeling or some sort of insight that you had around it um never forget how hard this is um and that it can be really really hard because i'm

usually the most optimistic person and i get into trouble because I trust people and I'm jovial and I'll do things that are considered crazy. But I had discovered a new aspect to being treated by humanity. And I need to remember in the back of my mind every day that that kind of stuff can happen. So, you know, don't just say stuff that's on your mind. Be careful, be thoughtful. When we publish something, work on it for up to a decade before we tell the world about it. So there's absolutely no way anyone can find fault in what we do. Did you make a mistake? No.

Actually, the jury is now not only in session, but the jury is out. And the verdict is that it was right. And I'll tell you in the world why. We went back to the lab. I went back to the lab, and I had a brilliant graduate student who believed in this story. Most people in my lab said, we're done for. David's career is in the toilet. We probably should get out of here.

So it was Armageddon. I went from having 20-odd people in my lab down to about four of us. And I couldn't get grant money. It was really hard. And you get tainted as a scientist, somebody who, not a fraud, but somebody who misinterprets data and overpromises. That was me for a little while. But the only way out is to go back to the lab and do even better science. And we had this data, this observation that

if we change the enzyme that we think resveratrol is working on, we could block its activity. So a little tweak in the enzyme and all that was was we switched out one amino acid. Now resveratrol didn't work again on this enzyme. And so we said, well, if we put that change into a cell, will it block resveratrol? And it did. And then we went one step further, which was there were drugs in development, like the one that worked in psoriasis. We tested those drugs. And they're very different

molecules. Those are a thousand times more potent. And they were also blocked by this change in the one amino acid. And that told me, most likely, that we were right and that the drugs that were developed through completely separate people, through different assays, different mechanisms, are all working through the same mechanism. So I'll give you an update. So we published that part in Science magazine in 2013, and that allowed me to breathe again. It allowed me to get money again, and so my lab is now thriving. We have about 30-plus people.

So I've dug myself out. We're on to really cool new things, but we still have one experiment that's unfinished, but I know the result already. and i haven't published it yet but i will tell your listeners what it is because it's really cool we made a mouse we can engineer mice that just have one change in one amino acid in one of the enzymes we you know we've got technology to do that and so we made a mouse and the prediction is if you change that one amino acid if i'm right right and Pfizer is wrong, then the mouse should not live longer when we give it resveratrol. And if Pfizer is right and I'm wrong, then resveratrol, it'll still extend lifespan.

And you can guess what the result was. Clear as day. There was no way that you can squint and see the difference. The mice that run resveratrol on this Western diet are still all alive, maybe one or two out of 50 have died. And the ones with the mutation, resveratrol has no effect, zero. It's all through this one enzyme that Pfizer said was bullshit. So in other words, plain English,

is if you don't have resveratrol on board, die early. Well, no. No, there's plenty of ways to mimic the effects of resveratrol. And conversely, resveratrol can mimic the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. But together, they're even better. Wow. Okay. But we've come a long way since resveratrol.

That's now ancient history. So there's a lot to update you. Well, it's still actually one of the important agents to the important agents you know well i'm still taking it every day um doesn't seem to do my family any harm um i'm still going strong at 50. okay good let's get into the good stuff then let's go deeper into what some of your insights are and maybe dispel some of the myths that people have believed about aging for a long time? And if that's an interesting way for you to get into the genius that you're opening up here. Sure. Well, the theory of aging from the 1970s and 80s, that we are aging because of the genome getting mutated, mutations cause aging,

free radicals damage. That's largely out the window. It's a little bit of the story, but it's not the main story. Antioxidants haven't extended the lifespan of organisms the way we were hoping back then. So what have we discovered? We have discovered that there are protective genes in the body that make animals and we live longer. We have many of these we share with yeast and worms and flies. There are broad classes. There are three main ones. We work on one class in my lab, and other labs around the world work on others.

And they form a surveillance network of our body. And when we're hungry and when we're exercising, they get activated even more. The opposite, if you sit on a couch and eat a lot of food, they will become complacent and they won't protect the body from diseases and aging. And so the best ways to activate those pathways is to exercise, to be hungry occasionally, intermittent fasting is a good way. And then we have some molecules in our toolkit that we think can artificially activate them and enhance those effects as well.

Big time. There it is, right? So there's genetic things that we can pay attention to. Switching on, switching off. Right. So is this epigenetics? Well, so what sits above all of that? What are these protective genes doing that's so important? Well, they do a lot of good things. They protect the ends of chromosomes, the telomeres, they give us more energy, the mitochondria they're called. They stop the formation of zombie cells that accumulate in our bodies as we get older. But that's all descriptive. That's what happens when we age. That doesn't answer the question, why do we age? So if I decode that, telomeres reduce.

Yeah. Right? And then mitochondria becomes less potent. Do they die away? Yeah, they lose their energy. We don't have a lot of chemical energy left. Yeah. And then I've never heard of zombie cells.

So senescent cells. Yeah. What are they called? Oh, senescent. Okay, sure. Okay. So those are the three main kind of thrust that you're saying there there are about eight to nine recognized hallmarks of aging um but they're

not connected they're they're this is this is uh like i said physics from the 1800s where they knew that there were some particles there's a neutron and there's a proton and there's an electron but it took the 20th century to figure out that they're all manifestations of the same particles as you go deeper and that's what i think we were figuring out for aging as well that these are partial effects of aging but the main driver we think there's one unified underlying problem in the cell that we talk about string theory we talk about theory what are we talking about string theory? We're talking about M-theory. What are we doing? Well, string theory, that's still controversial. This is the unified theory of why we age. And I call it the information theory of aging. And it does have to do with epigenetics. Keep going. All right. So epigenetics, let me describe that. So there are two types of

information. Information is going to be a big theme in what I'm going to say, because I believe that aging is to do with the loss of information over time. Now, the genes that we discovered control aging are called the sirtuins, and these are the protective enzymes that resveratrol activates. So it's all coming together that way. So sirtuins, the sir part of that name, stands for the acronym for silent information regulator. That's an old-fashioned way of saying there's an enzyme that turns genes off. It's a gene regulator. But information is important because I believe what happens during aging

is that in the same way that a DVD can get scratched over time, our bodies lose the ability to read the movie or the songs beneath that. And so the two types of information, one is digital. That's our genetic code, A-T-C-G. We know about that. But the epigenetic code is these enzymes that control how the DNA is read, silenced or switched on, and that is called the epigenome. It's the control system for the genome. But what sucks about the

epigenome is that it's encoded in analog format. Information in analog is extremely unstable. It's subject to noise, and it's the reason we threw out cassette tapes in the 1980s. And that's our problem. That's what I believe happens, is that the epigenome, which is essential for keeping cells identity, so when you're born, you're full of 26 billion cells that each know what they should be and what they should be 80 years from now, from birth, that's the epigenetic code. Because every cell has the same code, right, at the DNA level, at the digital level. But the epigenome is what tells which gene to turn on and off. The problem, I think, for our bodies is that that epigenetic code that tells

a nerve cell to stay a nerve cell and a liver cell to stay a nerve cell gets noisy. And there are things that introduce the noise. Broken DNA and wild swings in blood sugar will disrupt the packaging of the genes. These sirtuins that we work on, they lose their ability to package up and silence the right genes. And nerve cells start to look more like liver cells, and liver cells look like skin cells, and all hell breaks loose. And I think that's what causes us to age. It's what causes us to get these diseases, and that's what causes us to age it's what causes us to get these diseases and what causes us to die and if we could reset that restore that backup backup information of that of that off a hard drive if we can find a reset switch then we wouldn't get these diseases in fact even if you were close to getting cancer if i could make you

young again you probably wouldn't get cancer. Okay, so that's a super disruptive thought because the main thought for most humans is that you're decaying. And in that decay, just do the best you can to delay the decay, which is sleep well, eat well, move well, think well. You know, like do a good job in taking care of yourself. It's coming. Right. The K is coming. In other words, the certain genes are going to start turning off.

The information is lost. But you're saying, whoa, whoa, whoa. What if we can go back up and not a reset button, but recapture some of the early programming? Right. So it's like a soft reboot. Now, is that what it is? That's what I would have said. Right. Right. So it's like a soft reboot. Now, is that what it is? That's what I would have said. Exactly. Okay. So we go back upstream to open up the coding and say, Hey, get a second try. Right. Right. You're, you're a nerve cell. Damn it. Go back and be a nerve cell. Right. But we didn't know until recently that you could do that reset

switch. We didn't know that there was a backup of being young, but we figured, we think we figured that out at the molecular level, how to not just how it's encoded and where the backup drive is, but how to access it and reset the software. Amazing. Super disruptive. Your eyes are lighting up right now because you know that it's a game changer. So I have a manuscript that's going to be revealed. It's got to be peer-reviewed, of course. We all have to go through that as scientists. But yeah, that's one of the fun things about being a scientist is the gleam in our eyes is that when we discover something that no one else has thought of in the last few thousand

years or if ever. Okay. I don't know where to take that because like I, one of the things I've learned in the performance world is it's not the trophy or fill in the blank. It's the knowing of what it takes to be able to deliver in that set environment. It's the knowing it's the, to your point, it's the information. It's the nodding your head. It's the feeling behind the eyes.

Like I actually know what it takes to be able to express myself at the highest level in consequential environments. And so that same kind of gleam, like, yeah, that happened. That's where you're at with this right now, it sounds like. Well, I am. And what's been rewarding, if you'll allow me to just reminisce and maybe gloat a little. Let's just talk about how lucky I am. Seriously, if we go back to my early days at MIT, we're trying to figure out why yeast cells age.

And we came up with this same idea that the loss of these silencing proteins, the epigenome, was the cause of aging in yeast cells. Fast forward now 20 years, 25 years, and the same thing is happening in our bodies. And we've only just finally figured it out, but we've been really lucky. I've got a student who dreamt big and said, why don't we test these genes to see if we can reset, reboot the cells and find the backup drive. And that's what we found recently. Where does it live? Well, it lives in every cell. Every cell has a reboot. So I can take one of your skin cells, clone you, turn you into a stem cell

and make a sperm and an egg and fertilize that and grow a new you. So that, not that I'd go do that without permission, but I could do that. But what that tells you is, and by the way, i could do that but what that tells you is and by the way we can do that for mice and monkeys and sheep that's done all the time and those animals live a normal lifespan they don't die early yeah first time i heard a crisper i like i was like freaked out i was like what is this was i don't know i don't know how many years ago but i was like what is happening on a pace let's later talk about the pace of scientific change because it's head spinning but to get back to the cloning of animals, that tells you that the information to be young is still in every cell.

Yeah. Yeah. You just have to access it. Okay. And you figure out where the switch or how to access the switch. Exactly. We don't actually know where the hard drive is, but we know. So let's talk about a clock.

I like the analogy of a clock. What we're figuring out is that we have a clock in our bodies. I could take your blood and measure exactly how old you are within a few percent and even predict when you're going to die with quite high accuracy. And that's called the DNA methylation clock or the epigenetic clock, sometimes known as the Horvath clock, named after my friend Steve Horvath at UCLA. And that clock ticks away. Ever since you were born, it's ticking. Even a teenager, you're aging, sorry to say. And it's very predictable. It's linear. You need

machine learning to do it. It's not that easy. But once you've got the clock, it's good. We've got a clock for mice. We've got a clock for whatever. All right. So why is that important? Because that's the clock that's on the wall. But what we've asked the question is, can you accelerate the clock? And the answer is, yeah, we can actually perturb the epigenome of an animal and make it age faster. We've done that in the lab. It's not sleep restriction, high stress, chronic stress, stuff like that. Better than that.

We go deep into the molecular. We actually break the chromosome and cause disruption of the epigenome when we do that. That's like a short circuit haywire. Right, right. That was the test of the hypothesis. So that worked out. But the reset switch, if that works, the analogy

is that you're taking the hands of the clock and if we're right, moving the hands of the clock backwards will not just change the appearance of time, it will truly turn time backwards. And that's what I think we've figured out. My goodness. So folks listening,

and me included, where should I begin to think, like, how can I make an influence in my own life for the, I don't want to live necessarily longer right now. That's not my game. My game is definitely live more vibrantly. Oh, for sure sure so there are plenty of things that that you can do now i i do things that i i think are helping and my my father who's 80 is is thriving at that age so that's not a clinical trial but it certainly gives me hope that we're not doing any harm at least as as physicians and i'm a phd um so would you like me to go through what i do come on all right so first the disclaimer i have to say I'm not a doctor. I knew it was coming.

I have to. And it's fair. People should know what the risks are. It's not proven yet. It's based on a lot of animal data and some early clinical trials in humans. Everybody's different. And you've got different microbiomes in your guts. You've got different genetics.

When you said you're not a doctor, you're not a PhD. I am a PhD. I'm sorry, MD. Right. Yeah. So when you say you're not a doctor, you not a phd i am a phd i'm sorry md right yeah so when you say you're not a doctor you're a doctor but not what people think maybe as a medical doctor right i'm a fake doctor come on yeah you're a researcher i train doctors at harvard does that count anyway so it's a that's another thing that my critics say. I shouldn't be talking about what I do. But I'm of the opinion that nobody should ever lie. And unless it's highly confidential, you should be transparent and honest in the world.

And I'm not boasting. I'm just saying, here it is. Judge it as it is. I want more information so I can make an informed decision. So please, keep going. Exactly. I teach my kids, by the way, that lying is the worst crime. And so it's forbidden in my family. And anyone who's worked with me or knows me, I've never told a lie. And so my wife, when she says, and the other night I was out,

and she said, were you drinking and driving? And I said, no, actually, I had half a beer. And she goes, oh, fine. I know you're telling the truth because you never lied, damn it. So everyone who's listening, especially young people, I think it's a good thing to live by. Anyway, so what do I do? So I take a gram of resveratrol roughly, I spoon it, I have a powder in my basement and I spoon pure resveratrol into a tiny amount of yogurt. That yogurt is made by myself. It's one of my hobbies is to make yogurt. And it's made from bacteria that are healthy. You are such a nerd.

It tastes good. It tastes good. Yeah. So you don't want to just go get one of the brands. You want to make your own. You know, now that I've been having this homemade yogurt, and it tastes more like Greek yogurt, if I taste some of those commercial brands,

it's like eating sugar, and my taste just can't cope. So I spoon in my resveratrol. The reason I do that is that resveratrol, one of the problems with it, and why it's not a drug in part, is because it's highly insoluble. You can think of it as brick dust. If you put it in your mouth, it'll go crunchy. It's that bad. But in yogurt, it dissolves. So that'll help with absorption. We it's got goes about five up about five fold if you have it with food so do that if you're interested and resveratrol is available we also have in my daily routine nmn which is an nad booster now what's an nad booster i hear you ask yeah i had to take it for i think it was like a chelation diet. NAD-2? Yeah, so NAD-plus is a molecule that these sirtuin enzymes need.

Resveratrol is the accelerator pedal, and NAD-plus is the gas for the same enzyme. And that's why when we lose NAD over time in certain organs, then we want to replenish that. And so that's the idea behind this. And when we give our animals in our lab the NAD or a precursor, like a vitamin that is turned into NAD, we end up with mice that can run further, they have better memory, they have all sorts of protective effects. And it mimics exercise and hunger. What type of dosage are you talking about for you? For me, it's a gram.

I take two capsules of 250 milligrams in the morning and then another two at lunch with food uh preferably with food but that i'm not so worried about it's highly soluble doesn't need food do you have some brands that you like or do you want to stay agnostic uh well i i don't buy it i have stashes in my basement. That's what I figured. But if someone wanted to go get some, are there brands that you like? Well, I can't jump into the fray because it's highly litigious. But I can say that what listeners should do is look for GMP grade, which is called good manufacturing processes. That is a good sign. High quality, trusted brand, look for

good science. Often these companies are doing clinical trials. So those that are doing the clinical trials, trust those over those that are not. And definitely don't trust a company that claims that they work with me because they're shysters. I don't work with any of these supplement companies. There's even a Sinclair Labs that sells NMN. How bad is that? Really? Yeah, they ripped my name off too. So I could spend a large amount of my time and money on shutting these folks down.

And occasionally I get upset enough to do that. But I'm too busy and it's a serious amount of money to be doing this all the time. They just pop up again anyway. Okay, good to know. Keep rolling. What else we got? So the big one of those three is metformin. Metformin is a drug that's given to diabetics to control their blood sugar. It's been used since the 1970s. It's relatively safe. It still needs a prescription from a doctor. But increasingly, doctors who are at least familiar with the literature are, in general, realizing that the risk-reward is very low. And so the risk is maybe upset stomach in extremely rare cases, what's called lactic acidosis.

But under doctor supervision, it should be fine. It's all reversible if there's a problem. I eat it with food, typically. So my metformin is either at lunch or at night. I take two pills, two tablets. One is 500 at lunch and one is 500 at night. Now I'm not diabetic, but I have diabetes in my family. My dad's a diabetic, borderline diabetic. Really it's just taking the same drug as a preventative measure for diabetes. But what's great about metformin, first of all, it activates the sirtuin pathway, just like resveratrol and NAD, but it also boosts mitochondrial activity over time.

It activates a pathway called AMP kinase, AMPK, and that's one of these three pillars of longevity. Sirtuins, AMPK, and there's a third one we can get to. Anyway, metformin seems to be great. My blood sugar is in control. I'm not going up and up and up as I was getting older. And I truly believe that that will forestall not just diabetes, but based on large studies of others have done, cancer, heart disease, frailty, and Alzheimer's. Studies of tens of thousands of veterans show that people on metformin, even though they have diabetes, are protected against these other diseases. With sugar in all of its forms, in the impacts that it has on the body,

there's real challenges there. Well, sugar is a nightmare. There was just a study that came out a few days ago that showed that people who eat sugary drinks, drink sugary drinks I should say, have a much higher predisposition or association with getting cancer as opposed to artificial sweetened drinks and water. So it's a scary thing. So sugar levels in your blood, if they're spiking, that's even worse. So try to keep blood sugar levels constant, relatively low, because once you're on a path towards diabetes, it's a positive feedback.

It means that you're on a path to pain, suffering, and death. Diabetes, one of the hidden things from society is that diabetes leads to most other diseases. It rapidly ages you. You'll get cardiovascular disease, you'll get low circulation, many diabetics get foot wounds from stabbing their toe or stepping on something. And every 10 minutes, an American loses a limb. And from then, the chances of five-year survival is less than having terminal cancer, basically. And it's completely type 1 and type 2. Type 2 is completely preventable. Right. That's what we're talking about. Type 2, age-associated. So metformin is maybe a dollar a day less.

It's used throughout the world. The risk is low. And what are you asking for if you go to your doc who is, I don't know, maybe an internal medicine doc, and you say, hey, I want some metfor. Like, for what? Like, that's not how medicine is supposed to work. You know, you're supposed to go in with a condition, and they say, oh, I've got a solution. Right. Well, this is the reason why I think aging should be defined as a medical condition. So doctors don't have to feel like they're using it off label.

Well, there are more and more doctors. So this is apocryphal, but I've heard that sales of metformin have gone up dramatically. So there are a lot of doctors who are agreeing with this and more and more are approaching me for information. What do you do? Now, I found it difficult actually to find a doctor that would prescribe metformin. It's not easy. What I would recommend is come armed with these studies. If you go to a website called PubMed, one word, PubMed.org, and you Google longevity, aging, and metformin, you will find studies that are available. Download them. And these are studies that will show you and your doctor

that there is a lot of legitimacy to metformin being a pro-longevity slash anti-aging molecule. Cool. Okay. Good stuff. So we're at like four, four things to do right now. Or is that three? I think we covered resveratrol, NMN, and metformin. Okay. Good stuff. So we're at like four, four things to do right now. Where's that three? I think we covered resveratrol, NMN, and metformin. Okay. Anything else? Well, I'll tell you there's one thing I'm not doing, but others are. There's one that,

so this third pillar is called mTOR. It senses how much, how many amino acids are in the body. And when you're starved for amino acids, it heals the body. And there's a drug that's used to suppress the immune system when transplants are given. That's a highly potent drug. And if you overdose, you could really have an infection that wouldn't be good. So I'm not yet game for that, at least not consistently. Cool. And then if folks are not, like, what are some of the more behavioral approaches that people can take that are not involved with supplementation or medicine?

Yeah. So there's a lot. And the reason we know a lot more about lifestyle is that it's much easier to deliver than develop a medicine. And so we've known since Hippocrates that being hungry, a fast is good. Many religions have that. And it's not stupid. It really would work. We've been fasting and colloquially restricting animals for the better part of a century. And it almost always works. There are some caveats that it depends on when in the day you restrict your food and

depends partly on what you eat. But generally, it works really well. And I think if there was one thing I could tell listeners what they should do, it would be eat less, eat less often. Not malnutrition, certainly not starvation. Anyone who has an eating disorder we know is not going to benefit. But if you're one person that, a type of person that always snacks and doesn't let your body go into a state of want, then try to skip a meal once a day. If you can't do that, then I'm not sure what you can

do. Try not to eat as much, put it that way. The Okinawans eat 70% of a meal and then finish, don't finish the rest. There's an extreme version. There's a variety. One step above what I just described is skipping meals for two days a week. That's the 5 plus 2 diet. Then you can go even more extreme. So Dr. Peter Atiyah, our friend Peter Atiyah, is very brave and very determined. And he, I think it's every quarter of the year, he doesn't eat for an entire week. He just drinks water and maybe some solutes, some sugars, not sugars, some salts. He just got off a fast and he says the first two days are hell. The third day you go into a strange zen-like condition. And then after that, you feel great great and actually i fasted when i met him last

time just to see if i could do it but i didn't make it past three days it's really hard so what i do is i actually i skip breakfast besides that little spoonful of yogurt and then often i forget to eat lunch because i'm so busy and i'm not that hungry anyway metformin will suppress my appetite because it's a bit rough on my stomach. And then at dinner, I eat normally. You know, your research has changed the narrative and it sounds like it's going to continue to change it. And so that being said, what would you add to the texture for people that are really wanting to invest in longevity and health? What, what add to when i say texture i mean like what are the nuances besides take a one two three you know do this this and this intermittent fasting what else can you add to like the spirit of it in terms of daily activity well just like the what

you've come to learn over the last you know of studying. That's a really good question. Just before I get to that, there's a variety of things that I discuss in my book, Lifespan, about not just what I do, but why I do it, what's the science behind it and why it works. So there's an overarching theme, and that is that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. What doesn't kill you makes you live longer. And it all goes back, I believe, to the primordial soup of the planet 4 billion years ago, where cells that we are descended from undoubtedly were able to survive during harsh conditions because they hungered down and they didn't reproduce and they repaired their DNA through these longevity pathways that are now in our bodies that we can now tweak by exercising, by dieting and eating these substances. But how do you get them to work optimally? Well, you want to challenge them. You

want to trick your body into thinking that it's going to be running out of food, that you have to run away from the next village or from animals that are going to eat you. And when that happens, your body fights harder and uses its energy instead of building fat and being complacent and just growing and reproducing. It diverts some of that energy to body maintenance. And over the long run, body maintenance means less disease and longer life. Love that. I've spent my whole life working on running to the edge of capacity, which is a very difficult thing to do on a daily basis, and then recover in a world-class way, and then rinse

and repeat and do it again and again, physiologically, technically, and mentally, emotionally. You should live a long time. Actually, one of the things, we're all born with genes, of course, but a different mixture. And we now know enough to be able to say whether you have longevity genes. Have you done your genome? I haven't. And I knew that this was going to come up. And I almost thought about doing it right before so I could say yes. But I haven't.

And this is going to sound super surprising maybe to you and to others is that I haven't done it because I'm not sure. I love the science i've been following it as best as i possibly can but i'm not sure about the what's called the metadata and i i'm i'm not a conspiracy person like but i'm just i'm a little concerned about like the metadata and how it's going to be used and which i don't know if that's wrong to you know like will you tell me if I'm being silly? No, you're not being silly. Yeah.

I think Anne will kill me for saying this, but 23andMe. The data that you give up is being used. That's right. You sign it away. Now, there are some companies, I don't think Illumina, one of the other competitors, you can actually say that you don't want your data to be used,

and that's the box I ticked. I have a reason for doing that. It's not that I'm selfish. It's that I do work around the world that I don't want to be identified doing. And so if my genome is too far out there, I could be discovered with leaving my DNA on a bottle of water. So that was one thing I didn't want. But I think for the average person, the benefits outweigh the risks. But you can choose your vendor and find one that hopefully won't sell your data too badly. But on the other hand, I think that companies that I've mentioned, they're really trying to do good. They're companies. They need to pay employees. So business model, anyone who thinks that companies can exist on goodwill is kidding themselves. So I understand the business model. But you have to play the game if you're going to get your genome done.

Now, you could always go to a professor like my lab or George Church and say, please, I'll pay you to do my genome. But everyone cannot do that, of course. Of course. But now there's another level. We can do your epigenome and estimate not just your genes but how they've been modified chemically during your lifespan and what that means for your health. And so I would predict, Michael, that your epigenome is extraordinarily young

because you've been living a good lifestyle. The kind of things that accelerate that genetic epigenetic clock are obesity, certainly diabetes. Smoking is a really bad one. The damage that you do to your DNA and having to unpack and repack those genes in their packaging through the sirtuins in part will accelerate that clock. There's no doubt. In fact, if I took your blood and I measured your clock, I would be able to tell that you were a smoker. No doubt. I don't smoke, never have. I can even estimate how many packs per day. It's that accurate.

Is that for with the laws changing about marijuana, is the same for marijuana as it is cigarettes, or is that specific to tobacco? So I don't know the answer to that. I think that any particles that you put into your lungs that are burnt, that are carcinogenic is not good. So I avoid smoke at all costs. There are of course plenty of ways to get, you know, THC and CBD. Certainly not smoking. Yeah, for sure. Okay. And then if folks wanted to take that test, I've never taken that test. If folks wanted to take that test, I'm intrigued by it right now.

Where would somebody go? So there are, there's at least one, possibly two companies that are new startups that are offering that service. Off the top of my head, I don't remember, but we could yeah i'll just tweet that out or whatever yeah i'll do i'll do some work and we'll figure out together okay cool i'll tell you what i i love it i love the work i love your approach i love the fact that you're out there that um you are pushing against the fray and i love every piece of it So I don't want to wrap up yet. I want people to know where to find you, where they can get your book, where they can follow along.

And also I want to make sure that we understand your point of view or position on the concept of mastery. Like, what is it to you, in your own words? How do you think about mastery? Right. Well, I'll get to mastery at the end. Um, so people can find me on the internet. I'm on Twitter. I'm enjoying that. I have my own small newspaper now, uh, try to avoid newspapers for a while. So I'm on, uh, I'm at David A. Sinclair on Twitter, um, Instagram, uh, David Sinclair, PhD. And those are my main platforms

right now. I also have a website where I have a newsletter. People can sign up for a newsletter where I talk about things like which NAD precursor is better and what do we know about the future of aging that you can find at lifespanbook.com. Very cool. I love it. And that's the name of the book as well. Lifespanbook.com. Well, it's the, the book is called lifespan and the subtitle is why we age and why we don't have to. And it's a, it's a, it's been a passion again. It's another 10 year journey, but it's my view on where we've come from since 4 billion years, why we've evolved to age, why we age at the fundamental level, and the results that we've had in my lab and recently around the world, how to reset that clock to truly not just delay aging, but truly make tissues like the eye young

again. Where are you with sleep? What is your position on sleep? I'm a big fan of sleep. I've had sleep problems my whole life, but I've learned how to sleep. It's very important. I think everybody should figure out for themselves how to relax. Are there substances that you can take to help with that? Not alcohol, not drugs as much. Which ones are we talking about? The drugs. No, you said there's other substances? not drugs as much. Which ones are we talking about? The drugs?

No, you said there's other substances? Well, so there's CBD oil. I've been taking CBD. I've been reading the research. It's super promising. We partnered up with a company to help sponsor. It feels really far downstream. Do you agree with that, or is it further upstream that I'm missing?

Well, I'm working just empirically at what works for people. Got it. And for me, it helps. It helps me too. Yeah. That's all I care about really. Yeah. Got it. I do melatonin and I avoid computer screens. Blue light really affects me. CBD and melatonin?

Right. You'reatonin? Right. You're using both? Right. Okay. Right. On a really bad day, I'll confess that I will nibble on an Ambien, but the dose that doctors prescribe is typically 10 milligrams. For me, that's at least a tenfold overdose for me.

I just need to nod off as I nibble on it. I'm flying probably half of the time getting exposed to cosmic rays accelerating my own aging but uh when i land in australia for example my my uh my go-to kit is to go to sleep is to have melatonin maybe if i need to nibble on on an ambien not much at all just to get me to not off and when i wake up the nad booster the nmn will reset my clock so there's a lot of evidence from animal studies that our clock biological clock circadian clock actually is cycling through the day and nad the levels of nad in your body go up and down throughout the day and by boosting the levels it says to your body oh okay it's the morning

and i feel really great when I do that. I don't get jet lag anymore. Really cool. I'm not using it for jet lag, but one of the things I'm making sure I do is get sunlight. So sunlight is a trigger to the hypothalamus through our eyes to say, hey. So as much as the skin and eyeballs taking sunglasses off as I can. Oh, 100%. But I also wear a ring that tells me my sleep patterns.

And I think biofeedback, I wear a watch and a ring that tells me how I'm doing. And also to have occasional blood tests that tell me how I'm doing. So it's that feedback. So I don't know if stuff's working unless I can measure it. It's all about data. And I've got a decade or more worth of data on my body that what works and what doesn't. How about alcohol? Well, yeah, this is one of my vices besides the sleeping. I do imbibe on red wine. And very occasionally, maybe a couple of times a week, if that's occasional, would be a little nip of whiskey.

Mm-hmm. You know, you got to live as well. Maybe a couple of times a week, if that's occasional, would be a little nip of whiskey. You know, you've got to live as well. Yeah, no one's saying it. You're like thinking I'm judging. I'm not judging anything. I'm asking like you. Well, I have friends who judge me. Yeah, but, you know, my wife is an aficionado of whiskey and we like to try a little bit.

But it's all about moderation. I don't drink a lot. It's a taste and it's enough to get what I want out of it. Don't overdo it. Same with meals. I always try to leave a bit left. And actually, I find that I enjoy meal much more if I don't eat at all. Yeah, that's a practice in our home is the 70% rule that you talked about. It's like, as soon as you start feeling full, shut her down. Yeah. So we talk a lot at meals in my family. How was your day? Good things, bad things, three kids. And, uh, and part of the trick is if you're talking, you don't eat and you feel fuller other than gorging, which is what I used to do when I was a kid. Anyway, so mastery. So let's do it. All right. All right.

So I just turned 50 and I, I finally feel like I'm getting okay at what I do. I still make a lot of mistakes. So I'm certainly not the master that I want to be. And I know it's going to be a lifelong endeavor, but I'm at a point for me where mastery is that my gut is making far better decisions than my conscious mind. And part of that is innate. I just have this ability to understand how cells work and predict what's going to possibly, you know, how things work. But having now read thousands, tens of thousands of scientific papers, and I've looked at cells, I've studied them myself, I know them like they are my brothers and sisters. Now when somebody comes to me and says,

hey, what about this idea? What about this experiment? If my gut says that's not going to work, or even what I'm also prone to saying is that's not as important as it needs to be, go back and think of something that's really going to change the world. I'll tell them. to be, go back and think of something that's really going to change the world. I'll tell them.

And 99 out of 100, we kill ideas early. We kill experiments early. Because finding experiments, world-class experiments, finding those, it's really easy. I can come up with 100 experiments in the next 20 minutes to do. That's not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out what are you going to spend your life on? What are you going to do with the next year of your life? And that's what we do in our lab. We explore the universe of possibilities and narrow that down to the one or two things that if they work, they'll change the world. My lab makes fun of me because I have two questions I ask my students and postdocs.

One is, if it works, what's the title of the manuscript? Distill that down to me in 50 words or less. And if they can't do it, go back and think of something else. It's a shock to them, but actually it works. And all of my mentees, my trainees use that in their own labs. Now I found out now that I'm 50, they all sent me videos of what they remember of working with me. And that was one. The other thing that I do is, uh, that's not Nobel worthy. Go back, go back, start over, right? It's tough, but I help them. You know, we brainstorming is the hard part.

Doing the experiment is the easy part. How do you know what's Nobel Prize worthy? Well, so I go around the world talking to a lot of scientists. I'm in touch with world leaders in science and in nutrition. And I know what's not known. I know what will surprise them. So my job and my team's job is to not to come up with something that's obvious or just some little brick in the wall. It's to publish something that people say, are you kidding me? How is that possible? But have studied it rigorously enough that we know that it's possible, that it's real,

sometimes for a decade. But when it comes out in the the world we want two reactions because I do this with other scientists one reaction is holy cow but they don't say cow the other is if you're lucky damn why didn't I think of that and that's what we scientists do we want to really be impressing our colleagues with how smart we are but to summarize mastery I think mastery for me is knowing a subject well enough that my subconscious is smarter than my conscious and then figuring out how to tap that energy and insight. No one's ever said it that way before. That's really cool. No one's ever said it that way.

I love it. Okay. Nice work. Yeah. You're welcome. That's from the real gut and I've never said it that way either. Yeah. I love that. Okay. So on that note, and're welcome. That's from the real gut, and I've never said it that way either. Yeah. I love that.

Okay. So on that note, and then we're going to wrap this thing up for you. Thank you for your time and intellect and curiosity in this conversation. But psychobiotics, probiotics, do you have a position about the gut-brain access and how that's working? Yeah. So I'm pretty positive about the microbiome. It's a large part of our body. And having read many papers about this and explored it in my own work, it is really important. It's big differences between cultures and how they respond to food, between individuals,

and why some drugs work and some don't, and even why calorie restriction can work on an animal in one lab and not in another. And we've been wondering as scientists, why the heck can't we reproduce that study? And most of the answer so far is, well, the microbiomes are different in their lab versus ours. And so that just tells me that we have a lot to learn about how drugs, how food is processed. They're trying to survive just like we are. They're signaling to our body. They're secreting molecules, perhaps even longevity molecules into our bloodstream that tells our brain to do certain things. And we're just at the tip. But once we understand that, we will be able

to modify our microbiome in very advanced ways, not just eating yogurt, and actually allow our microbiome to produce these molecules that currently we're talking about that will give us longevity and health much longer so that we don't just live longer, but our guts live longer too. Well, they're so, so smart and so pervasive across our body in and outside of it that it's outrageous that we're not really investigating deeply there and to me when i read the research it's it's so promising it feels like how has this not cracked open yet that here's the thing to take you know okay yes eat yogurt right and that's obviously why you're eating your own grown cultured yogurt probably

but not everybody has access to that um or wants to take the time to do that and so it just seems like it's super sloppy right now and you could when you go look at psychobiotics or probiotics on the shelf they are all over the shop of what's actually in it and then it's suspect if it says it's in it is actually in it you know the wild west with actual product development so it feels really sloppy right now. And at the same time, I can't wait for someone to show me exactly what to take. Well, yeah, me too. It is the Wild West.

And a lot of the bacteria that you figure out which bacteria to look for on the label and go for a brand that that is well known not not the fly-by-night yeah that's right yeah but it'll it'll change there will be evidence and clinical evidence that this is right the other thing that we have to think about with the microbiome how important it is is that they are basically us right we think, oh, our skin cells, our hair cells, our eyes, that's us, our brain. But our microbiome are our cells too. Maybe think of them as our tiny pets, but they really are part of us. And what we need to watch out for is that they end up being our enemy in the end. Because what happens is that as our gut

degrades, what's called the barrier, the gut barrier, the blood-gut barrier is breaking down. And so if you lose the barrier between the microbiome and the bloodstream, what happens is that you get infections and you get not just bad chemicals, but living organisms impenetrating your body. And now we're finding, to our great surprise, scientists, not just me, that bacteria are found in the brain associated with Alzheimer's and in cancers. They're living in the tumors. It's scary stuff. So we want to be able to keep that gut layer, our epithelial layer in our guts perfect and communicating well with the microbiome and not degrading. And that's totally

underappreciated how important that barrier is. Yeah, it's beautifully said. And that's why it feels, I'll use the word sloppy again, just feels like there's, it's the wild west in both product development, but recommendation and efficacy for what's working, what's not working. And I don't know, the readings that I have on it it's like i'm compelled to want to start my own line like and that that's not exactly where i want to take my efforts but it's like i want something that i know is going to work for somebody like me and so please do yeah i mean that's not really where i want to spend my efforts but my goodness like it's i'm craving it yeah well i'd be happy to to give you advice on

what i know a little i know but please do it because like like you say to me it's tough and we got a lot of things to be doing but when when enough people need this then we've got to do it yeah right thank you yeah i i this conversation. And folks that are listening, like I want to encourage you to check out his book and his website and Lifespan.com, Lifespanbook.com. And follow him on Twitter and social and figure all that out because the information, the wealth of information is on point and accurate and swift. And, you know, so I just want to say thank you for what you've been able to provide and thank you for the conversation. Well, thank you, Michael. It's been great to talk in depth about this topic more than I've ever done before. There we go. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button

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