Modern Wisdom - #066 - Professor David Sinclair - Can Humans Live For 1000 Years?

Episode Date: April 22, 2019

David Sinclair is a Professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-Director of the Paul Glenn Centre for the Biological Mechanisms of Ageing. Today we hear from a scientist at the cutting edge of longevity research as Professor Sinclair gives us a fascinating insight into the world of anti-ageing. Expect to learn how and why we age, why stabilising the epigenetic landscape may enable a human to live for 1000 years, exactly what tactics Professor Sinclair is using himself to try and extend his life and how fasting, Sirtuins and NAD can be used to promote health and reduce diseases. Extra Stuff: David’s New Book - http://lifespanbook.com/ Follow David on Twitter - https://twitter.com/davidasinclair Inside Tracker - https://www.insidetracker.com Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howdy friends, I'm coming to you from America as is this podcast but not the same trip podcast land sometimes has a odd sense of serendipity when it comes to the scheduling. So today I am sitting down with Professor David Sinclair from Harvard Medical School. Now first her David on Jururugans podcast and was blown away by his insight. He's an expert in anti-aging and longevity. He has more companies than I think even he can remember and has essentially the same as a knighthood in the UK but the Australian version. Oh yeah, and he's one of Time magazine's

50 Most Influential Health Professionals on the planet. So in short, he knows what he's on about. Today we're learning about what makes us age, how are cells and genes degenerate and get damaged over time, and what techniques are available to actually slow, stop and reverse this process. That's right, making animals younger than they are. Sounds like science fiction, but it's just another day in the life of David's laboratory. So, yes, strap in and get a note pad and pen out

for this one. Also, I'm going to predict a number of inquiries about who Inside Tracker are, after me and David both extoll their virtues on this particular episode. So if you're interested, head to www.insidetracker.com to find out more about their service. David uses it and if it's good enough for him, pretty certainly it's good enough for the rest of us. But for now, please welcome, Professor David Sinclair. Oh yeah, PS, there's some special behind the scenes footage of David's laboratory and Harvard Medical School, along with me taking far too much caffeine on the YouTube channel. So go and watch the episode on there if you fancy it. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by Professor David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School. How are you today? I'm doing really well, of course. I'm very, very glad to be here. I'm off to see your friends at Inside Tracker later on. I'm going to go straight over there and have a sit down with them and go through my results. See what they've got to say.

Oh really? You've had your blood drawn? I haven't got any. That'll be exciting. I went to Quest Diagnostics, a week and a bit of going to California and I went through my results with Stacy, if it's not, if she's not called Stacy, I'm gonna be in so much bother, with one of the unlists inside tracker, and they took me through all of my stuff earlier,

and actually, which is super interesting. So are you older or younger than your actual age? I am 31 in real years, and the inside of my body's 36. Oh, wow. That is because glucose being out of range waits very heavily and the only thing I've got is slightly out of range glucose and my lipids are a tiny little bit out as well so I need to eat soluble fiber. Yeah you'll enjoy that. Solu fiber, when I was looking at the list of potential groups of foods, it was just

20 different types of beans. I was like, I have no types of beans in my diet. Like a baked beans, like does that count as a bean? I'm sure it does. It has the desired effect, I bet. It does indeed. So the first question I've got for you, what do you do here? I know we're in Harvard Medical School. I haven't got the first idea about what it is that you do. Well, so I come in every day to my lab, there's about 35 people in my lab, there's about 35 people in my lab and I instruct them to discover really cool stuff.

And that's basically my job and they'll come to me and I'll say, I've got an idea to discover something and I'll say, that sounds good, go do it or that sounds really boring, don't bother doing it. And by the way, how much is that going to cost? And I'll tell me it's going to cost about $2 million. So it's my job to bring in the money and let them figure it out. But the theme of my lab is focused on aging. And has been since I started the lab about 20 years ago here at Harvard. And so I run a center for aging research here. And we are really working not just on trying to understand why we age but

also how do we slow down and reverse that process as well. And that's all being conducted here but also offsite at one of your multiple companies or is it mostly here or is it how does it work? Well there's a giant ecosystem. This is the Menlo Park version of the ecosystem where we do the very basic discovery. We can ask fundamental questions about what is the clock of aging? Can we reprogram the body? Is it safe? And can we extend lifespan? Mostly of animals we work with here.

These are laboratory animals. Outside of the university is a network of companies, institutes, colleagues, collaborators, literally thousands of people around the globe, Europe, Asia, Australia, and others, all working with us on trying to understand these questions, answers to these questions. But also, what makes my lab rare and unusual is we're very innovative so that we file patents once every few months. We spin out a company at least a couple of times a year. And the reason for doing that is not because, well, I do like starting companies, but that's not why I do it.

I do it because I'm not satisfied with just publishing work. I feel that my role on this planet, if I have one, is to try and help people with their lives to live longer and healthier and more productively, and just making a discovery in a yeast cell or a mouse isn't doing it for me. That's just part of what I'm here for. You need to apply that as well. Exactly. So most of the companies that come out of this lab are biotech companies working on medicines, but we also do a whole range of other things.

We have biosecurity, so protecting the world from pathogens and other nasty things that can go on. We also work on bioinformatics, so trying to understand, like inside tracker, how do you estimate somebody's age and help them with their living and what they're eating. But mostly it's molecules that we hope will be drugs one day to not just treat one particular disease of aging, say diabetes or heart disease or cancer, but to have a radical type of medicine that would actually slow

down all diseases at once with a single pill. Is it likely that there is a, I don't know where the panacea is the right word, but out there a particular way to manipulate molecules which will be the equivalent of an aging panacea? Well, there certainly will be. A lot of people who hear that we're close to finding something that will slow down aging. They're right to be skeptical because... Sounds like turning back time, right?

Like, literally feels like, oh, you slowed down aging, yeah, cool, and can I go and get in a delorean at the same time, please? Is that all right? Right, but actually figuring out how to slow down aging or reverse time is a lot easier than building a time machine. And I think it's going to be easier than curing cancer. It's not that hard. We actually understand as a field over the last 20 years,

what controls aging? We have genes in our body called longevity genes that slow the process down. And in recent breakthroughs, just in the last couple of years, the field and my lab have discovered that you can reprogram the body and reset the body's clock to be young again. And when I say body, I mean, it's still in the lab.

But we hope that within a couple of years we'll be actually be doing human clinical trials to literally reverse aging in cells. What's the mechanism that this works on? Can you take us through it? Yeah. Well, there are three main approaches that we're taking, and I'll just summarize them. The first that we've been doing for a long time is activating the body's defenses against

aging. So normally you have to be hungry or exercise to do that. We've found genes and molecules that you can give to animals and end to people actually that slow down the effects of aging. So that's one. So that, think of that as activating the body's natural defenses against deterioration and disease. That we've been doing for 20 years at least. The second is to delete cells that are actually causing the problem.

So there are cells called senescent cells that you might think of as zombie cells. And those zombie cells are causing havoc. And you can actually get rid of them. And when you do that in a mouse, it'll live longer and be healthier. Then the third approach, which is much more recent, but much more powerful than any of those, is called partial cellular reprogramming.

And my lab and some others have actually shown just a few others around the world that currently if you put a combination of resetting genes into cells in the dish and actually in an animal, you can quite literally reverse the age of those cells so that they become young again. And in my swat we're discovering we're writing these papers up now, is that you can drive aging forward and accelerate it with this technology, and you can reverse it just as easily, and make cells, behaviors though they're almost embryonic. I'll give you an example. Yes. When we're, when we're born, one of the first things that ages in our body is our spinal cord and our central nervous system.

And you might say, Dave, why do you say it's aging? Well, a young neuron will be able to repair itself and regrow. But we know that if we damage our eye, our optic nerve, or our spine, we're never going to walk again. We'll see again. But if you're young or if you're a salamander, you can actually regrow the central nervous system. So we've got ways now of reprogramming those cells or an entire mouse to make it ostensibly younger again and they regrow the optic nerves so that they can see again.

That sounds like science fiction. I thought so too, but in May this past year, 2018, one of my students who was working on this one-chain, he thought it was never going to work, but he thought he tried anyway. So he injected this gene combination into the eye of a mouse and he damaged the optic nerve so that it was all dying, turned on the system and it grew back. And he texted me the picture and said, I cannot believe this is working. And I said, you know what, I can see the future right now. And he since tested it on glaucoma, which is damaged due to eye pressure. He's tested on just on regular old mice that don't have good vision. I'm almost

50 and I can already tell my retinas and I was good as it used to be. We can actually treat old mice and get them to see like a young mouse within just a few weeks. To me, aging feels a little bit like the passage of time. So it feels like something that you are along for the ride with. And it would appear that that's not quite the case. And I think I'm a good avatar for the layperson. I understand that cells regenerate. And I think that your entire body, every cell is redone within a particularly,

not a hugely long window of time. But for some reason, the concept of them actually growing or getting younger just seems odd. It feels like we would be going back in time. Well, we're going back in age. And you can disconnect biological age from chronological age. One of the main reasons I believe we age is that we have what's called an epigenetic clock

that ticks over as we get older due to time, but also how we treat our bodies. If we smoke, we don't exercise. Or we're obese. The clock will tick faster. But now that we understand what the clock is, we're finding that we can actually revert that age and get the biological clock to go backward, not just slow it down.

And so those nerve cells that I was talking about regenerating, we do literally make them biologically young again. And how that actually happens is on the cutting edge of science right now. But we have some clues as to how the cell is accessing the youthful information that is locked away inside it. Can you explain how that works? I can, to the very extent of what is known to science right now. Yes. Are your best, your best idea? Is it what's on this whiteboard?

Is that it? Some of it. That's a messy diagram that I drew trying to explain it. It looks like bunches of grapes. Those are some mice running towards other mice. That's a little bolt at C. That is, that's a cloud. That's a cloud that birds coming out of it. It's exactly right. You solved it. Cricket balls there at the top. Yeah, actually, that's a tennis game within ourselves, literally. Well, and maybe not literally. You don't have tennis balls, but what we do have

are proteins that act like tennis balls that bounce around inside the cells, going from one thing to another, and that's a tennis game. And what we've discovered is that normally those tennis balls, those proteins, will sit on parts of the genome to tell a cell, it's a liver cell or it's a brain cell, muscle cell. So it doesn't regenerate the wrong thing? Right. Okay.

Right. And those are laid down, those structures in the cells are laid down when we're born. So a muscle cell is not going to give rise to two liver cells, it's going to give rise to more muscle cells. Yes. And we understand pretty much how that works. These proteins sit on the DNA. They control which genes are on and which are off at

any one time. But those balls actually get distracted. So here's where the tenis analogy comes in. We can distract those proteins by doing things to the cell. One really great way of distracting them is to break a chromosome. And then those proteins, they panic and the cell pulls them to the break to help repair the broken chromosome leaving those genes to Rick havoc for a short period But then once the repair is complete They'll go back and reestablish that program again so that deliver cell stays a liver cell the problem is With the tenison allergy if you keep whacking balls back and forth

Over a 70 or 80 years, you're going to lose balls, you're going to not hit them back to where they came from, and it ends up being a huge mess. And so this ball scattered all over the court, or in this case, those proteins that were once laid down in the right place to turn the cell, the genes on it the right time, and scattered it all over the cell, the nucleus, and the cell loses its identity. So a liver cell is, an old liver cell is more like other cells in the body and actually they forget to be liver cells. Okay, so can you explain the difference between what would look like a young cell and what would look like an old cell or what is,

what categorizes that, that's someone who needs to know what a young liver like an old cell or what categorizes that that's someone who needs to know what a young liver and an old liver cell look like that's what that person Well I can pretty much guarantee you that it's someone calling me to find out how much of a certain molecule they should ingest. Is that really what you're getting at the moment? Hundreds of emails a day. Really it's a lot. I mean this is the Joe Rogan effect isn't it?

Well it's always been a lot, but yeah, Joe did increase the load. What is it, Magnus? Of interest. For sure. Also, I'm fairly rare as a scientist. I talk about research as it's happening, and it's spark people's imagination. To Segway briefly here, one of my friends who spans a fair bit of time on Reddit mentioned that him and some of his buddies love the episode that you've done with Job and that they were part of the R-slash-long-gevity thread on Reddit and I just decided that he would post one of my buddies who's currently going to a podcast with Professor David Sinclair.

Does anyone have any questions? And I thought it would be like, I don't know, how many pieces of fruit and veg should I eat today or how long is the optimal window of a fast, like, you know, 16-8, or should I be doing like a, like, a 18-6, or whatever it might be? And the list of questions that I had to try and translate, I've not even, they're in ever-note, but they're just saying there because I can't pronounce half of the words that are in there. But I think one of the things that it definitely did identify to me is that longevity at the moment appears to be a very emerging field within kind of the general public or becoming more of a general public concern. I mean, everyone's aging,

right? Right. Well, we've always been aging as a species for concern. I mean, everyone's aging, right? Right. Well, we've always been aging as a species for ever since we were, you know, primordial cells in the soup, before Billion Newsego, and we've always been conscious of our mortality. But I think there are two things happening, because one is that the science is mature, and it's no longer an effort, just a win. We have the technology, we understand how to slow down aging, maybe even reverse it. And the other is that the world, I see, is bifurcating into two types of people.

Those that want to understand a topic in detail, so your listeners are those type of people. And God bless them. This is the level of detail that typically members of the public would never know about. And then the rest of the world typically members of the public would never know about. And then the rest of the world watches cats playing pianos and stuff. But thank goodness there are people who really care about the world and what's happening

and want to learn in detail beyond what typically a newspaper used to tell people. I agree. I think that we've emancipated the ability for people to learn in as much detail as they want, and there is a horse for every course with regards to what people want to learn. You're totally right, that for myself, we get comments all the time on the YouTube videos and stuff, like a too long didn't read, like can someone do a TLDR of this particular podcast? And I'm like, if you want a shortened version of this,

there's someone, or if you want to watch something which is short, YouTube is a wash with three and four minute videos, like feel free to go and watch that. I particularly, and I know that the listeners do as well, they enjoyed the new ones and the subtlety and the detail and deconstructing things down with component parts over the course of one, two hours. That's what I think is important, and it definitely sounds like that's helping people to buy into more difficult topics potentially like this. Of course, because when a newspaper reporter, not all of them, but many of them, over the my career, which now spends 25-30 years, they latch on to this, and it's always hyped. Oh, we're going to live forever.

You should drink more red wine, blah, blah, blah. And I can tell you as a scientist who's spent his career working on the cutting edge of research at Harvard Medical School, publishing in the world's best scientific journals, it's really frustrating. And it's actually taken a lot of willpower to make it through those times because almost every time what I say comes out changed, you get the bus to that is version of whatever it is that you've said. No wonder the public says, yeah, this is another stupid story, it can't be true.

But if you listen to two hours of someone like me talking, you really do realize that the science is way more advanced than people ever knew about. And as a scientist, I just think, heaven, think people like you who can actually allow people like me to reach many people at a level that never was possible before. I totally agree. How much this is a question that's been percolating around in my head? How much do you think the increasing interest in longevity with the general public is due to a fear of death? Probably most of it, most of it deep down. I think we're all afraid of dying.

And maybe not actually the day we die, we're not afraid of, I'm not afraid of dying of look to death in the face a few times in my life it's not that scary but I think we're all fearful of not being around. It's going to be pretty boring. We're never probably going to see our loved ones again or our friends. That's pretty sad. If you really think about it and it actually takes a lot of courage to think about our own mortality, mostly by the time rate of six, we forget about it and don't think about it again till we're about 50 years old. And that, in sort of an period, we assume we're immortal, of course, we're not.

And I don't think we ever will be. But I think what's going on is that once you realize that something can be treated, potentially, then it gets exciting. A hundred years ago, people used to say, you know, cancer and gangrene dying from a splinter, childbirth, these were things that were just the way life is or was, just the way it goes. And so people didn't really care that much about it. One Santa Barthics would develop another medical treatments, people actually were okay. Talking about it, and the same is happening with aging right now.

The best analogy I could give in terms of human history, it's like the Wright brothers were in 1902, they built their right flyers and we're strapping on engines and seeing where we can fly. Yeah, you are right that the frame is moving with regards to the fidelity and the resolution with which we see life that a splinter could have killed you a hundred years ago or that I've read an article

not too long ago about the fact that so many prehistoric people died from issues with their teeth that they had mouth infections that was one of the one of the the main things because they had no way to be able to comprehensively clean their mouths. And you are right, as time begins to move forward and as the public perception hasn't yet caught up with the technology that's available, the status quo as it is at the moment, well, aging is always going to be there. We've always got older and now we will forever more, was the same as a hundred years ago. People have always died in childbirth or people have always died from gangrene or a splinter or scurvy or whatever it might be. Exactly. That's exactly right. And that's why I think that, especially

younger people who tend to listen to this kind of show more than older people, really get it. They get that we're going through a scientific transformation and that the future that most people think is coming, that's not going to happen. The future is something quite different and people who are born today or people in their 20s and 30s are going to see radical changes that are far bigger and far more important than the iPhone. Does anyone really care about the next additional memory in an iPhone? I think we reached a point where a lot of that technology, frankly, is being quite disappointing with the new releases. So what's the next big thing for

humanity? Well, some of its artificial intelligence, they just had one of the world's leading AI people visit the lab this morning. That was one of the reasons. Wow. So that was the reason that we were running half an hour left. If Elon Musk's in here, then it's fine. Elon, mate, I'll forgive you. I would like to test the roadster, please, if it's available. But yeah, it's okay.

Well, yeah, I agree with Elon about a lot of things but on AI I think he's wrong. I think that we can build AI systems and enough checks that we will not be overrun by evil. Have you read Super Intelligence by Nick Bossram? Not yet. It's good. Highly highly recommended. You know who Nick is? Prefer the head of the future of Humanities Institute. Where is that over in London? It's Greg. I think it's Oxford University. He's recently built a podcast with Sam Harris, which is absolutely fantastic. I would recommend checking out. It will be in the show not below for anyone who wants to find out what I'm talking about. I don't want to segue on AI, but we've touched on it, so I'm going to do it anyway.

The control problem for AI is something that's difficult, I think, not allowing our creations to get out of hand. Is there a similar concern with regards to developing these tools for longevity that you could, a nefarious group could get a hold of the technology and then weaponize it or do something really, really sort of untoward. Well, yeah, always, you can turn technology against humanity. I'm not worried about that so much with what I do because even though we have the technology

to make mice and probably people age rapidly, it'll be about the slowest way to damage your enemies. There are much more efficient ways. If you're eating someone in the head has been created in a pretty efficient way to... There's that, and somewhere in between, we could pretty easily unleash a deadly virus that wouldn't be too far beyond what we could even do in this lab, not that we would, but in terms of making people age prematurely, we can certainly do it. And I could take you downstairs, or maybe somewhere I shouldn't say, and there are mice that we can

control their aging process forward and backward. So that's doable. Where I think people get uncomfortable with this technology is. So we now understand. Where I think people get uncomfortable with this technology is. So we now understand that there are genes that control how long we live. There's one, for example, called Foxo, which is turned on in whales and longer lived animals than us. There are even human variants. My children were lucky enough, two of them out of three, turn her at two really good copies of this longevity gene. And so they're probably going to live a lot longer than my wife and I will. So we know a lot about that.

So why does this get weird? Well, now that we can crisper engineer babies, what's going to happen when the world's most in telecopter parent wants a kid that can live 220? That's probably doable right now. Whether or not we should is another question. Whose job is it to work out whether or not we should? Well right now there's a worldwide debate among scientists about whether we should come out against it. Interestingly, when

human stem cells were first discovered and that you could reprogram cells and clone animals. There was a much greater backlash. You probably remember the Blair Bush days where all these committees set up and it was banned here in the US. We had something just as big happened last year, was that the Chinese researcher, Professor, he had a couple of, well, engineer, a couple of twins, twin girls who were a resistant, going to be resistant to HIV infection, and he engineered those genetically. Now, there was a little bit of upset, a lot of scientists got upset because this was announced

without any warning at a scientific conference. There was no oversight, there was no consultation with governments or other scientists. So the shock really took us all by surprise. But there was no major backlash. There hasn't been yet. There hasn't been any outlawing. You certainly don't hear a lot of backlash at the high levels of government over here in the US at least. I think that's healthy. I think that what we've got is a very rational debate and that we shouldn't just overreact just because something feels weird or hasn't ever been done before. Now we need to discuss not just the ethics but is it safe and I think safety is more important than ethics actually. And what I mean by that is someone's ethics might be different than yours.

And usually I come down on the side of freedom to do things as long as they're safe and that they're beneficial and there's some consent. But in this case, what's tricky is that your children don't have consent. So that's why I think it's a hard one. But what if your child was definitely going to get say a dominant genetic disease and there was no way to get around it except

either have new parents or don't breed or to Have an abortion. What would be an example of a dominant genetic disease? So Huntington's for example if both parents have Huntington's you can or even one you can have a child with Huntington's I mean you can always select the embryo but maybe you don't want to kill embryos so maybe you could create An embryo that you go in with this CRISPR editing system and chop out the bad Huntington's gene and create a healthy child That should be doable. It's a big ethical question there isn't though.

Well there is though, if you're making people healthier and not suffer, I always say that that's what we humans have always done. That's why we invented aspirin and antibiotics. We're just going into a new era where we can really have a big effect Because it's not just on one person's life. It's Generations forever beyond that person. What's the second or the third or the fourth order effect of this particular decision? Yeah, I guess the The most subtle question is between Huntington's disease and a healthy human baby, the line appears to be quite clear as what is preferable. But as the fidelity of that becomes, well, I've

got two ginger parents and I've got bullied at school for being ginger like, I don't want to have a ginger child. Where do we begin to draw the line here? Because in essence, all we're talking about at the lowest or the highest resolution is preference. It is. And then it gets really crazy when parents say, I want the smartest kid I can have, or the best looking kid. Can we identify the contributing factors to that? Well, there was a gene published last year that is thought to contribute to human intelligence

and speech. The differentiates us from the chimps. And perhaps having more copies of that gene could make us smarter. We don't know that yet. So I think that that's still in the realm of science fiction. But looking ahead 30 years from now, you could probably engineer your child to have these traits of certainly high disease resistance.

We can protect against cardiovascular disease. And what about intelligence and longevity? And then we also, it gets into a crazy zone where imagine 100 years from now that you can have an army of clones or of people who are robust who heal better. Don't bleed out. Yeah, I mean this is not beyond possibility in terms of technology today here in the the second decade of the 21st century

22nd century it's going to be quite something to see. And biology, getting back to the iPhone, I think biology is going to really make a much bigger difference to our lives than any electronic technology. Wikipedia. Yeah. I do live Wikipedia. Did you listen to Alex Jones on Joe Rogan, the most recent one? I did. Yeah.

I mean, I don't really even know where to start with that, but the the transhuman animal hybrids and the flesh farms wherever it is like is is that the sort of thing that's Doable at the moment with current technology? Oh Yeah, we do create Come out chimeric animals in the lab. Yeah And so that what island of Dr. Mung. Chimeric. Well, it's a organism that's comprised of cells with different genomes.

And so it's a mixed organism. And yeah, we could do that, but I mean that to me seems highly unethical and even unnecessary. Well, I think everyone would agree that that's the case, but it doesn't necessarily stop the technology from occurring. And I suppose the line between, how do you, what if you had to do a lot of iterations of chimera proliferation and X number of years from then you would develop this unbelievable new Solution to something you've been looking to work on does the cost that way the the benefit? Right, well, I think we all we all have personal views on that

One area that I think is really interesting in this building right here at Harvard Medical School is whether or not you think it's okay to use animal organs for humans. And so one of the reasons we don't use pig, livers for transplants is they're full of pig viruses. But George Church and his spin out company are actually removing those viruses, cutting them out of the pig genomes so that these livers might be useful. And you might say, well, we shouldn't be breeding pigs to have transplants, but if we're eating the rest of the animal and throwing away the livers, why not? That's a very good question. I'll be interested to hear what the listeners think about

that particular ethical dilemma about, I suppose the vegans and the vegetarians might be firmly on one side of that already. They don't need, it doesn't matter whether or not the liver is going into someone's body, I think, that they've already made their stance on that. Yeah, I would charge the listeners with the following thought, what if it was your mother or your child who needed a liver transplant and they were non-available, would you sacrifice a pig? That is a difficult question to answer, isn't it? So moving back onto the questions that you get all of the time reing through the phone,

what would you say are the foundational strategies that people right now should be looking to incorporate into their lives to improve longevity? One of the reasons that this field is taking off also is because there are things that people can do right now that we've learned are actually helpful for turning on these longevity genetic pathways. If I could give one piece of advice, only one, and I will give more, but if I could only give one, the most important thing would be eat less. Eating less has been shown for centuries, but also in labs of the last 70, 80 years to be extremely effective in extending lifespan of everything from yeast cells to worms to flies to mice to monkeys. And if humans don't live longer for fasting and calorie restriction, then we'd be the exception on the planet.

And I don't believe that we're an exceptional species, biologically speaking. So eat less. What does that mean? Well, nobody knows what the perfect diet is. I get a lot of those questions. What should I eat? What should I eat? What should I eat? Well, what you eat is important, but when you eat and how much you eat are just as important as well. So what I do is I do a fair bit of research and I've come up with

my own best practices. So I do intermittent fasting. Now there are a variety of those, and I think many of you will know this is probably know them by name. But there's fast, every other day, there's fast, two days out of five, there's skip breakfast and perhaps have a late lunch and don't have a late dinner as well. That's the one that I prefer. I find it easier to skip breakfast and have a late lunch than to really go through days of being hungry. I can't tolerate it for too long, but I don't mind hunger pains for a few hours. On top of that, I take a drug called Metformin, which is prescribed for diabetics, type 2 diabetics, age associated diabetes, which has two main effects.

First of all, obviously it blows blood glucose, that's what it's prescribed for patients. But it also is quite rough on people's stomach, and I find that it actually stopped me from being hungry. It curved the hunger pains. Yeah, it really is effective. And so I have the kind of biology, and so does my son, that we like to eat, we feel hunger more strongly apparently than other people, we're kind of like Labrador's of the human world. But we also gain weight rapidly. We put on muscle, we also gain weight pretty

quickly. And so I would, if I was allowed to eat what I wanted to without a lot of mental power and a little bit of help from it forming, I would be quite a no-beast person. And my son, God bless him, he hopefully is not listening to his podcast. He's put on a lot of weight. He's 11 years old and we're going to the gym. But you can see that it's pretty hard for people with our genotype to keep the weight off. So bodies are airing at the jumping at the bit to get bigger. Well, it is. It is. And so he's getting strong, but he's also covered in a layer of fat. And so my point is that if I can do it, and I've got to be am I about 21, 22, if I can do it, anyone can.

Because you are genetically predisposed to have a poor, thin person body type. Yeah, well, you know, my father, it was pro-indoyed, B-Cities, his diabetes and his grandmother, well, my grandmother, his mother, had a stroke in her 30s and had type 2 diabetes. So I have half Ashkenazi Jew genetics coming out of Hungary. Sinclair is not my real family name at Sigurd. Those genes are pretty crap when it comes to longevity, and so we're fighting it. My father, my son, myself, trying to live, at least in normal life, man. I understand. So you mentioned that fasting is effective due to calorie restriction. What's the mechanism of that work? Right, so we didn't know how calorie

restriction worked until recently, and it's exciting, we understand it. So how does it work? Well, this is partly what we've discovered in my lab. There's many others in the world as well, but we can put a little brick in the wall for that. We showed that there are longevity genes, they got the name Sir Tuan, actually named after a yeast gene called Sir Tuan.

And that gene controls which genes are switched on and which genes are switched off. It's called a silent information regulator. That's what Sir II stands for. And this gene really gets back to that clock of aging that I started talking about earlier. It controls which genes should be off to maintain youth. But over time, it actually gets distracted and goes to other places to repair broken chromosomes, for example, and ends up causing a yeast cell to lose its identity.

It actually loses its sexual identity, becomes sterile, and that's a whole mark of yeast aging. So what that tells us is that there are genes in a yeast cell that control its longevity. It turns out if you give a yeast cell more sur two genes or more copies of sur two, it'll live longer. Take it away, it'll live shorter. Okay, so that's the fundamental knowledge that you need to understand what I'm about to

tell you. Sur two makes a protein that controls the epigenome, these genes, but it doesn't work well unless it has a molecule in the cell called NAD. The long term, the long word for that is nicotinamide adenine danucleotide, but let's call it NAD. NAD is much better, yeah.

Yeah, NAD, or NAD, some people call it, but should be called NAD. It's not called NAD, I don't call it NAD. I'm British and NADs are not what yeah. Yeah, NAD or NAD, some people call it, but should be called NAD. It's not called NAD. Don't call it NAD. I'm British and NADs are not what I want to be taking. No, some people won't lodge a NADs. That's true. We have NAD boosters in the lab.

That's what my dad takes. So these NAD, NAD boosters, the relevance of that is that these Sir 2 proteins, there's Sir 2s in our body. They don't work well unless they have a lot of NAD in the cell. As we get older, and even as yeast cells get older, they lose their NAD.

So that by the time you're 50 years old, like me, you have about half the levels of NAD that you had when you were 20. Without the NAD, the serotones are lazy. They don't control the genes of youth well, and they don't repair broken DNA well, and that leads to aging in organisms, we believe, among other things. But that's one of the main causes. So what does calorie restriction and fasting have to do with it?

By fasting and calorie restricting, we actually boost the levels of NAD in the cell, so that those repair genes and those protectors of the genome are too and are more active. That's one of the explanations for calorie restriction. There are other genes that control aging. There's one called MTOR, there's one called AMP kinase, and all of these longevity pathways that I'm telling you about are boosted by fasting. And so we think that by being hungry, what you're really doing in a general sense is telling the body, I'm under threat. I might be dead in a month from now. My food supplies running out.

I'm going to hunker down. I'm going to build a stronger body. I'm going to survive. I'm going to breed less. Remember the yeast cells become sterile. We become less fertile if we're starving as well, by the way, especially women. And that's a survival response that we kick into action just by being hungry or by exercising for that matter. Is that one of the reasons why bodybuilders, when they die at downfall show and they're at super low body fat, will have trouble with maintaining erections and sex-ribe and things like that is likely to be the same pathway. Well, so I didn't know that for a fact, but it perfectly makes sense that it's a balance

between growth and reproduction and hunkering down and surviving. And we call this the disposable somatherie. So this is actually a Brit Tom Kirkwood just proposed this back in the 1970s. And the idea is that species as a whole and individuals also are exercising a trade-off between growing fast and reproducing and hunkering down and building a body that lasts a long time. So by stimulating growth and reproduction, so if you take a lot of testosterone, that triggers a lot of growth, take a lot of protein, amino acids, it's great, bodybuilding, you'll repair things better. But it's

probably at the expense of building a long-lasting body eventually that may run out. So you might want to pulse between growth and reproduction and then shut it down a little bit by fasting. So testosterone is one of those molecules that tells the body grow muscle, which is shut down by being hungry, so you'd survive. So the actual hunger itself, is it the sensation of being hungry that causes this beneficial effect, or is it the fact that the blood glucose is lower, or is it what the actual mechanism that it's working on? Well, it's actually thought to be both based on mouse experiments.

If you cut back on calories, but still fill the stomach with cellos, that is sufficient to extend lifespan. So part of it is the biochemical response to low calories and low amino acid. But it's not everything. So that you can be full and you can still get the benefits of low calories. That's interesting. But on the other hand, some people have done the opposite, which is, give a lot of calories, but simulate hunger. And you can do that by tweaking the brain in ways that are increasing, growing, releasing stuff like that.

Exactly. And people can also tweak the hypothalamus, which in itself can extend the lifespan of an animal. I mean tweaking the hypothalamus sounds like a terrifying thing to do. It's not taking your car in to get the MRT done or have a service. It's like poking your brain. Right. It's changing glucocorticoids which signal to the body that it's hungry or it needs to grow. And that also extends lifespan. Does anything not extend lifespan?

I feel like everything that we've talked about today, I should just live to 120 just by pretending to just test insta. I'll open that drawer, I'll see if that drawer extends lifespan. I'll use my left hand to put that code on and that extend lifespan. Well, obviously we don't read about those studies that failed. Yes. So there's a lot of things in my lab, for example, that never extended lifespan. Are there any notable examples of that that you thought, or was there anything that you thought would really was a real winner? And then it turned out to not be a winner?

Well, let's see. So usually we don't embark on a mouse experiment that'll take three or four years without some pretty good science behind it. We tried some plant molecules that didn't extend the lifespan of some species. Gee, let me think. We tried some versions of rapamycin, which are turned down this mTOR pathway, one of those longevity pathways, and that didn't extend yeast cells very much because we think there was some side effects of toxicity. Let's see, oh, we overexpressed the CERT1 gene, one of

these mammalian sirtoins, and that didn't work. And we figured out why. Turns out that in the brain, CERT1 actually has a negative impact in the pituitary. We haven't published this yet, but even though C one made a robust mouse and it was protected against pretty much all diseases, we could give it diabetes and heart disease. It didn't live longer, and we found out because in the pituitary, it needs to be off rather than on. So you've got this physically incredibly robust mouse, but it's actually suffering with dementia and it's like super old and super wise.

What happens with the pituitary is it controls growth hormone. And so by turning it down in the pituitary rather than up, we actually created a small mice that lived a long time if we just tweaked it in that part of the body. But by turning it on in the whole animal, that turning it on and gave the mouse a lot of growth hormones, we got a bigger, more robust mouse, but it didn't live longer unfortunately. You touched on growth hormone there. I remember watching a bigger, stronger faster Chris Bell's documentary a long time ago, where he was talking about recreational steroids in America and said that amongst that one of the commonly used compounds is human growth hormone.

The UK is very different to the way that it is out here in terms of getting a prescription from your doctor and all that sort of stuff. One of the places that he went to was an anti-aging convention and he made a joke about there being a lot of old people there walking around and pretty much every single stall was offering human growth hormone I think exogenous human growth hormone as a solution. What's the truth in that if there is any? Well, I don't think there's any evidence in humans that it extends lifespan growth hormone. And the short?

Well, that's the debate. It's really not known. Anyone who says they know the answer really doesn't know what they're talking about. But theoretically, it could shorten lifespan for a couple of reasons. One is testosterone and growth hormone could make preexisting tumors grow faster potentially. But there have been a lot of studies where it's seemingly safe, at least, over the course of a year or two. And so I think that I hate to say this because we all want perfect answers, but the jury's still out about the long term safety. I think replenishing

testosterone and growth hormone to levels that are natural in young people I think should be okay. That's my personal view. Testosterone has been studied quite a lot in the elderly and even though there were some benefits in terms of strength and muscle maintenance, there was apparently no change in mortality so we need to do more than just raise testosterone I believe. Interesting. I guess there's a balance as well between quality and length of life as well, that you could potentially take something which may shorten your life, but if it only reduces your life by 5%, but doubles your mobility or quality of life, however it may be, I suppose that there's a

very big balancing act that you guys constantly need to play when you're looking at these. Well, it's not as hard as you might think. By turning on these sort of two engines and changing mTOR and the same picanase, this meant form and pathway, we actually find that we lengthen the health span of the animals. And so what that means is they don't get cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes until much later in their life. That's why we call it the health span. And you know what happens when animals don't get sick, they live longer. That's a nice side of fact, right? Animals don't die if they're healthy, same with humans. And so it hasn't been

a hard thing to balance. In fact, if you focus on health span, life span is a nice byproduct of that. That's a very good way to look at it. So you've mentioned fasting would appear to be the the parrhoid or the 80-20 of what we're looking at here for the vast majority of people. It's free. I mean, it's actually better than free. It's cheaper than what you're doing at the moment. It's cheaper than what you're doing at the moment. What else would you, as a disclaimer, we are not your doctor. This is not medical advice. Please seek a physician, etc., etc. Disclaimer.

What else do you think is an optimal strategy that some people, if they chose to, would be able to undertake? Sure. Well, what I do is I, besides intermittent fasting, I also exercise. I exercise as the other thing that raises NAD and boosts these longevity pathways. And we've also known for centuries that this is healthy, right? So we're not discovering anything that new, other than what types of exercise seem to activate these longevity pathways the best.

And what seems to work best is the height intensity interval training is to get the body stressed. So just as intermittent fasting tricks the body into thinking, you food running out, exercises tricking the body into thinking, I might have to run a marathon or the other, yeah, that exactly there's a saber tooth tiger in town. Okay. So that's exactly right. The high intensity seems to really stimulate the body's defense networks even more than just a long walk or a steady long run.

It's all about varying it, right? The high, the low, intimate and fastening. It's food, no food. Intensity training is running, stop, running, stop, hypoxia, oxygen hypoxia, and it's that up and down that seems to work really well that's why whatever you're doing do something different and get your body into shock. So the thing to think about is the concept is called hormesis but really the concept of hormesis is just whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger

and longer lived, by the way. So keep your body on edge. It sounds like all of the things that are good for you are really uncomfortable or a lot of the things that have to be. Yeah, well that's the sad thing people say, oh, why is cake, why does it taste so good and why doesn't sitting on the couch feel good? No, other way around, why doesn't exercise feel good? Why is sitting on the couch bad for you? I mean, that's exactly the reason is that you've got to put your body in this slight painful experience to get

it to react. Otherwise, it becomes complacent. Anybody just falls apart. It would be nice if cake extended your life, wouldn't it? It would be fantastic if that was the case. So what else is that you're doing? What else? I mentioned Metform and that's been a recent change. Is that some of this is available without prescription but I think Metform and it's something which you do need a prescription for, is that right? In Western countries, yeah, in Eastern countries less.

Over the county. Well, yes. Everything in Thailand over the country. You can. And actually, it's smart of them, I think, because they have rampant diabetes like we do. And Metformin is one of the safest drugs in the world. You get an upset stomach. It's extremely rare that there's anything more serious than that. It's not perfectly safe.

No drug is. But in terms of drugs, this one's pretty safe. It's a derivative of molecule from the French lilac. It's basically a version of a plant molecule. So anyway, so I take my form and every morning, sometimes I vary it. I'm not strict with everything, but sometimes it's half a gram, sometimes it's a gram. A typical diabetic will take somewhere between a gram and two grams, so it's a bit below

that. What else do I do? Let's get this all on the table. Throw it out there, come on. All right. Again disclaimer, I'm not recommending. The internet is waiting to find out what you do to make yourself live so long. Oh, well, no, I don't know if I'm going to live longer. I'm 50-foot-can-judge. How am I doing? You look fantastic. Don't doing this in general public. Well, let me know if I have a gray hair. That's been one thing that's going all right. Anyway, so let's lay it out. So an NAD booster. Yep, how much?

I take a gram of an NAD booster every morning, and it's water soluble, so just take it with a drink, with a coffee, along with the metformin. I also take a gram of resveratrol, which isn't a strict amount, I actually just shake some powder into a yogurt, and mix it up a few spoons of yogurt. I've also been asked over the internet on Twitter that asked, don't you think that

that's breaking the fast? It's no longer fasting. I thought you said, it's incline that you'd get. Because you haven't a yogurt on a morning. Yeah, well, it's not actually. Actually, if the blue has ruined the food. Well, I don't regard that as a lot of calories. I actually make my own yogurt. It's one made out of special bacteria. Are you considering marketing it? I bet people buy it. If you release silkyogeats. It's not mine. It's actually commercially available. Okay. Where? Where? Well, I don't know the people who make it, so this is not an endorsement, but it's

called bravo. And I know it's in America and Europe. Okay. But it works out great. I don't follow the instructions. I just get full cream milk. I get a jar about that big. And I just pour it all in, shake it up, put it in the oven on on defrost or whatever it is. I think it's it's body temperature. Leave it for about 24 hours and it's beautiful, thick, yogurt. And for breakfast, I take a couple of spoonfuls. I'm going guess it's probably not super calorie done, anyway. Probably is, high full fat yogurt.

Full fat milk though? Yeah. How much are you having? Like a big bowl? Well, I make it in a video. Yeah, that one. How much are you eating? Two spoonfuls, two or three.

There's enough not breaking the fast. I don't think it says you're breaking the fast. Chris, thank you. They need to leave the room. They need to leave the room, don't worry. So what else you do? What else do you do? You're exercising, you're fasting, thank you. Now, we'll keep the room. Please don't leave the room. Don't worry. So what else you do? What else do you do? You're exercising, you're fasting, you're putting your NAD,

you've got your resveratrol, you've got your metform. Right. That's the main thing. I mean, my doctor gives me a statin, because I've had high cholesterol since I was in my 20s. So that's another thanks to his genes. I'm kind of screwed there. I take a, still take a baby aspirin a day, even though the baby aspirin,

well, it's, it's 81 milligrams of aspirin. Okay. What's that for blood thinning? Right. Right. And the, the current recommendation in general from the medical association, just so we're clear, I'm not a doctor, but I read the literature is that if you haven't had a heart attack, maybe, literature, is that if you haven't had a heart attack,

maybe, maybe not take it. I haven't had a heart attack yet, but I'm convinced that it will help with my blood flow. But you can say I'm convinced I'm going to have one soon. Gosh, I hope not. That would be a bad look. That would be a really bad look, wouldn't it? Yeah. One question that did come out of the Reddit

Furore, which I think was actually pretty pertinent, was when do you think that people should begin thinking about longevity? Obviously we think about health our whole lives. Like we don't just let the kids go loose on a bag of sugar. But is there, you know, should people be taking an AD at 18 years old? I love that question because I have new answers to that based on new research partly in this lab. Unleash it. Unleash it on the world.

So, so he's waiting. Here is something that almost no scientist let alone in the public understands. The clock of aging, the epigenetic clock that we measure and other scientists have published now just a few months ago, begins even before birth. We are aging constantly. Oh, shit. Yep. And it actually tracks with development, girls who go through puberty early have a faster aging clock. So that's older.

They're older. They're literally older. So even though you think you look old, you're actually getting older. And you might age faster than others. It'll show up later in your life, but it's pretty scary, right? So the other thing that we know is that if your mother, while you're in her uterus, ate certain foods, you can be predisposed either to obesity and diabetes or to health and longer life, which is crazy. So you might want to answer could be the earlier, the better, even before you're born, you should be working on this. This is NAD as an embryo. Yeah, right.

If you've got, you know, helicopter parents, you'll genetically engineer you and feed you the right food in any way. But the other answer is, this is a really important one, is that in animal studies, in mouse studies, particularly, the earlier we start after development, of course, we're not going to calorie or streaked or interfere with these pathways before an animal reaches adulthood, let alone a person. But after adulthood, say 24, 25 equivalent of a mouse, we put them on these regimes of molecules or genes, and that's where you get the biggest bang for your buck starter early. If we start mid-life, let's say on a 50-year-old equivalent of a mouse, you get about half the effect of when you start early, and that's why actually, I started way early compared to my peers, my scientific peers.

I started Resveratrol when I was in my early 30s. And I probably would have started early and knowing now, if I knew then what I know now. I guess when you were talking maybe 10-20 years ago, it's this experimental drug. No one really knows what the effects are. And you're just like, fuck it. Might make me live longer, I better just take it. Like something big risk to take. Well, it wasn't that risky.

We had fed it to mice. I knew that it didn't kill them. And it was in red wine, so I was just taking an overdose of the red wine molecule. But I'm prepared to die for my science. I've never said that publicly. But I believe so strongly in what I do, and the benefits for humanity, if I had died, I would have been pissed off, but I would have...

You would have sucked. Yeah, but I did it knowing that there were risks, and everybody who's listening should know that what I'm saying I do comes with risks, right? I don't know if this gene of this molecule combination with excisional is shortening my lifespan. So far, it's okay. I'm not dead yet. My cardiovascular system and everything else that's been measured comes out pretty healthy, but there are risks. And especially when I was in my 30s, it could have been toxic over 20 years or even toxic for a few months, but I didn't, I wasn't scared of the consequences. I was more scared of not knowing than actually finding out the truth.

Well, that's the true inquisitiveness and I guess the exploratory nature of someone who is a scientist at the kind of the cutting edge of this sort of stuff. One of my favourite podcasts that's ever been done is Matthew Walker, the guy who wrote Why We Sleep on Joe Rogan. And I think that the topics that particularly resonate with people are the ones that the broadest cross-section of people can relate to everybody sleeps, everybody's aging. And I think that that's one of the reasons why there is such an interest in this particular subject. I was totally unexposed to the whole topic area before your podcast with Joe. And I'm super excited now knowing about this whole new subdivision of science that I didn't really even know was this big. I'm super

excited to see what happens. The same way as I read Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom, and now I want to know, I'm super excited to see what happens, I'm terrified, but what might happen with AI? And it's the same for that. Do you feel like a very, in a very fortunate position to be, have your finger in so many different longevity pies? Yes, there's no question that I wake up every day and most days I pinch myself that I'm in this position. It hasn't been easy and it's been not just hard work, I don't mind working hard, I love what I do, but it's been, it's been criticism, there's been ups and downs getting... There was a new year bankrupt company at one point, wasn't there any big risk at some point? I think there was a...

Ah, sure, I mean, there's been so many things, so I've helped build about 15 companies and they all go through strife and running out of money and most of the money that I make I pour back into companies. You know, I've made more money than I would ever I pour back into companies, you know, made more money than I would ever know what to do with, but what I want to do with that is, is pour it back in. And so my, my wife choose her fingernails because, you know, we're, we're multi, multi millionaires for about a month until I find a way to get rid of it. I don't want the money. I want to see that humanity progresses.

I want to see what the future holds. I want us to get to the future faster. And that's my way of doing that. But anyway, the adversity, all scientists get criticized if they stick their neck out to do something that's different, whether it's discovering a longevity gene or saying that we could live longer

or saying that aging is a disease, which I truly believe it is. All of those things have been tough. But fortunately, I'm very stubborn and I'm not taking my eye off of the prize in the end, which is that we all get to live, hopefully all of us get to live longer, more productive lives. And when we do that, we'll look back at today and think, what will we thinking? Why won't we doing a Manhattan project or maybe I should call it the moon shot on this because it's so important. One of the things I truly believe is that we look at all the problems on the planet. It's global warming, there's poverty, there's bankruptcy for countries or at least

economic burden of people being sick. All of these are real problem social security welfare in around the world. I think the biggest solution to that, and admittedly, I'm somewhat biased, but I do crunch the numbers on this, is if we can solve people's health and make them more productive for another 10 years, maybe even longer, but 10 years would be enough to save trillions of dollars every year across the planet, even in the US, it would be a saving in the tens of trillions of dollars. This is money that can be put to work saving the economy and working on other big problems that we need to solve, like saving the environment, saving species, preventing global warming. Would there be an issue of overpopulation with that? Yeah, good question.

There's no question that if people aren't dying as fast as they would, there will be more people. But it's not as many as you might think if we stopped everybody dying today, and which we can't do that, but if nobody died again, the rate of population growth would be less than the rate of immigration here in the US, which the government is trying to limit that as well. Yeah. But it's not as though suddenly there's five times as many people.

And the good news is that we're not going to stop aging anytime soon. We're just going to hopefully live another five to ten years. What that means is though that we'll probably plateau around ten billion, maybe up to 13 billion. But most of that problem is not driven by people living longer. It's driven by the birth rate. And over the last decade, we've seen an ordinary change in our birth rate as a species. And it's going down all the time and going to plateau the World Health Organization and the UN have agreed and Bill Gates has given a wonderful podcast on this. They're going to plateau out over the next 30 years. And we're not going to be overrun

with humans. In fact, places like Europe and Asia are especially Japan are struggling with not enough babies, exactly more humans. But what you want to do is also preserve the productivity of the older people. So when we look at a 70 year old now, we think that's an old person. 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 70 will be middle-aged. Well, we certainly see that happening already. Look at Tom Cruise, what's he now in his mid 50s?

He's riding motorcycles. 50, 105, and he looks great. Fantastic, straight out of a cocktail, top gun. And I couldn't agree more. The question that I wanted to finish on was, well, two parts, firstly, would it be possible to make someone live for a really inordinate amount of time like a thousand years?

Is that possible, presuming they don't get shot or one of the easier ways of killing someone that we identified earlier on? Is there a realistic upper limit on the amount of time that a organism could live? Well, we know that there isn't. There are immortal organisms on the planet. There are trees that live for thousands of years.

There are jellyfish that go on, hydra, these little jellyfish-like things that live for seemingly a lot of, I'll go for immortality. The mistake that most people have is that they think that there is a biological limit to humans. And they look at human history and they say, looking back in time, there's never been anyone who, as far as we know, has lived beyond 122,

and even that's doubtful, that's been challenged. I was in the Guinness Book of World Records store on Hollywood Boulevard a couple of days ago and they had the photo of the guy that was 120 that was the oldest certified I think. But I mean, I'm going to guess that the standards to which you hold your research may be a little bit higher than that, that the Guinness Book of Records does. Well, whether or not, Jean-Colmein, France lived 120 or not, or not, doesn't matter. There are still plenty of people who make it 115, 117. So let's say that's the current limit, but looking backwards doesn't tell you the future when it comes to technology. When you looked at the right brothers looking backwards

from 1902 doesn't really tell you that we're going to go to the moon within 60 years. So that actually happened. So what I think is that there is no biological limit to human lifespan. We are living things, we fix ourselves, we repair ourselves. We succumb to entropy, no question. We lose information over time. But what we've discovered with this reprogramming stuff is that we can regain information that is still there as we get older. We just need to access it. Those genes are still there to make us young.

We just need to tell the cell to read the right genes at the right time and we can reverse aging. We don't know how time and we can reverse aging. And we don't know how many times you can reverse aging, but it's possible you could. So let me tell you a bit of a story, but it's based on results in the lab. You know how I was telling you we can reprogram your own to grow again. We can actually use that same virus to infect an entire mouse and turn on these reprogramming genes and get the mouse. We think to be younger.

That's what we're working on. So imagine a future where you could have your genome changed so that you have these reprogramming factors injected. So I'll come along Chris today. We can go to my lab. If we want to do literally, I could take a vial of the virus. I could give you an injection and it would, like, get, give you an injection, and it would be compatible with your body, and you would be genetically modified to be able to

be reprogrammed. Now, we've engineered that virus, literally. We have done this to be turned on by an antibiotic called Dr. Ciclin, which you can go get from your doctor. I've been on it for a while. I've been on and off it for the last few years. It's used as a doxy tetracycline, is used as an acne drug. Yes, or anti-malarial, or if you have Lyme disease here in the US, it's pretty safe. I mean, you would want to accidentally take that when you've got this supergene that's potentially active inside.

Well, so here's the thing. We imagine a future where you now have this virus in your body, and it switched off. You've nothing's happening to you, but you start to experience aging. Let's say you're starting to build up cardiovascular disease in your veins or you're losing your memory. How about you just take antibiotic for a few weeks. Your reprogramming factors come on, your body gets rejuvenated, it finds the youthful information, your nerve cells, remember how to be nerve cells again, and you get rejuvenated, you go back another decade, you don't go too far, you stop taking the antibiotic before

it causes a tumor or something really bad, and you get reset. And then you wait another 20 years and you turn it back on and you get rejuvenated time and time again. And maybe that's the path to living for a thousand years. But for the first time in my career, I can actually see how it would be possible to do that. It was just conjecture before where it's now.

There's an actual mechanism. There's a pathway. It wasn't even conjecture. It was insanity to think that it was possible. And anyone who would say that we could live a thousand years was considered crazy. I'm on record saying that the first person who's born today could live to 150. And I get criticized by a lot of people for saying that because it sounds outrageous and I don't know if that's true but I do know that someone who's born today is most likely going to make it to the year like 22 20 at least what kind of technologies will they have then?

You are totally right and I suppose as well, if, as you've suggested today, aging is a not only something which can be paused at its current point and kind of held where it is, but can also be reversed. It means that as soon as sufficiently sophisticated technology becomes available, everyone who is alive at that time is potentially brought back to wherever they need to be. Right, and actually the longer you live, the longer you get to live. Yeah, which is very bizarre.

So everybody should be working on not getting shot and not stepping out into open traffic and not eating cake, not sitting on a couch, because the longer that you live is the potential that you'll get towards being around when we do have this particular solution. Yeah, I think the number is every year you live, you get another three months extra of life. It gets kind of weird when you get to technology where every year you live, you get another year to live. Wow. That's like the, um, uh, it's not done buzz number. What's the one that talks about processing power doubling every three years for computers.

It's the equivalent but for likes. It's more as low based for life. What was the law for human beings? Yeah. That's fascinating. Well, I mean, I really appreciate your time. I appreciate you kicking Elon out so that I could come and sit down in your office. Hopefully I'll be back in five years time looking at the same age that I am now and you will be as well.

And we can discuss about how far the research has moved from that. If any of the listeners, and I'm sure that there will be, as you've been inundated with the requests over the last few years, if they want to do some further reading or look at some things online, have you got any resources or blogs or books that you would recommend? I do, so I tweet out new discoveries and new things that I'm thinking about and things that other people have discovered. So my Twitter handle is David A. Sinclair, no, he at the end. And so that's the main way I get daily information out. But I've also poured everything that's in my brain into a book that's coming out later this year in the US.

It's coming out in September, early September. It'll be out in the UK and then globally. It's called lifespan, the revolutionary science of why we age and why we don't have to. I'm pretty excited about it because it's going to answer pretty much all of the questions that people have been asking me over the last couple of decades. That's so fascinating. It must feel, I once said this, I did a podcast that was essentially me answering a bunch of questions. I get asked all the time. Will you look forward to receiving all of the emails about how much NAD should I be taking? When should I start doing it? Is my testosterone out of optimal? And all that you ever need to do is just send

them one Amazon link. That's the panacea answer, right? Just, there you go. Read the book, read the book. Well, that, yeah, it's all in the book, plus more. What I wanna do with the book is to give readers a front row seat on this world that I'm experiencing every day, which is blowing my mind and making my head spin off. In terms of the input, I try to answer most emails. It gets pretty hard sometimes. I do also do a LinkedIn blog, so that's a longer format of things that I think about and answers to questions like this.

I want to do more, ask me anything, AMAs on Reddit too, but so look for that. The number of requests, I'm sure that the people on Reddit who are currently writing nasty comments about the fact that I can't pronounce the words that they sent me to give to you will be very happy to hear that you will go and do and ask me anything. Guys, if you do want that, don't forget to make sure that you comment below on YouTube or Hassel David, I'm sure that you'll have some some form of hassle to eat him, to eat him and then annoy him and then he'll go back on and he'll do, he'll do another ask me anything. David, it's been it's been absolutely fantastic. I really appreciate you, you're coming on today and having me in your beautiful office. And I'm looking forward to the book coming out,

really excited. Well, thanks Chris, it's been great to be on you. you