Modern Wisdom - #872 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientist’s Masterclass On Longevity
Episode Date: December 2, 2024Dr Mike Israetel is a Professor of Exercise and Sport Science at Lehman College and the Co-Founder of Renaissance Periodization. As technology advances at an unprecedented pace, the idea of humans liv...ing forever feels within reach. But what’s the truth about extending our lives? What does the latest science reveal about our pursuit of extended lifespan? Expect to learn the biggest determining factors to increase longevity, the role of genetics, whether fasting is the ultimate hack, how steroid usage impacts lifespan, the best exercises for living longer, the biggest predictors outside of your body that determine how long you'll live, the biggest myths for extending your life, the truth about Blue Zones and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get $250 off your CAROL Bike at https://carolbike.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America and bypass Function’s 300,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with any purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
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Hello friends, welcome back to the show.
My guest today is Dr Mike Isretel.
He's a professor of exercise and sports science at Lehman College and the co-founder of Renaissance
periodization.
As technology advances at an unprecedented pace, the idea of humans living forever feels
within reach.
But what's the truth about extending our lives?
What does the latest science reveal about our pursuit of extended lifespan?
Expect to learn the biggest determining factors to increase longevity, the role of genetics,
whether fasting is the ultimate hack, how steroid usage impacts lifespan, the best exercises
for living longer, the biggest predictors outside of your body that determine how long
you live, the biggest myths for extending your life, the truth about blue zones and
much more. My kids are tough.
Welcome to the show.
Press thanks for having me again.
In a barn.
This time.
Yes.
The person who picked me up blindfolded me, put a shot in my arm.
I woke up in a helicopter being rappelled down to a barn.
I have no idea where we are, but interestingly,
I do have some ideas about longevity on the brain.
And an erection.
Always.
Ah.
Just kidding, never.
Talking about longevity, bit of a buzzword,
especially the last sort of five to 10 years on YouTube.
How'd you come to think about longevity,
constituent parts, what is it?
Longevity is kind of the big concept.
And there are two underlying concepts at least that are important to chat about.
One is the duration of your life, how long you're alive.
And the end run of that is mortality.
long you're alive.
And the end run of that is mortality.
Like if you die at 97 versus you die at 57, then you lived 40 years long or whatever, you had more longevity in that sense.
And that used to be kind of sort of the only way longevity was discussed,
a generation ago or so and times before that.
But there's an important sub-component, sort of
part two of longevity that has to be in the discussion for it to be the
most meaningful discussion possible.
And that is a variable, the end run of which isn't mortality, but it's morbidity.
And that is quality of life.
So the two parts of longevity are how long do you live for and what is the
quality of life that you're experiencing during that time?
So mortality is how soon you die.
Morbidity is like, what are the last five, 10, 15, 20, 30 years of your life
like, because it is a very, very different situation to have two people live to 90
and croak summarily at 90 and one day at the same time, holding hands,
very romantic.
But one of them up until two years ago was
living life to the fullest, active, independent,
healthy, generally speaking, could travel,
maybe could drive all the way up to.
Few restrictions on what they could do.
Very few restrictions.
Yep.
The alternative is there are people currently
in their late forties that suffer from morbid
obesity, that if you somehow just kept them
alive and with technological innovation that
is increasingly more possible, that they kick
around for a while.
Let's say magically you got someone like that to
their nineties or something.
Let's use a more realistic example.
After age 70, a person is mostly bedridden,
requires the care and attention of many people,
is bereft of family and friends and lives in a
nursing home, tended to hand and foot.
Very identical mortality, same day of death, very
different degree of morbidity.
One person experienced almost none, one
experienced a significant amount.
So for the rest of the discussion we're going to
have here today, we're attending to variables
that don't just enhance the probability that you
live longer, though they will, but they're also
going to enhance the quality of life you
experience as you age, which is really,
really important.
Cause if someone's like, do you want to live
longer?
And you're like, yeah, they're like in a
nursing home with tubes everywhere.
You're like, Oh, how much longer?
Like years, decades, like cash.
Some people want that sort of thing.
Some people don't.
So very important distinction.
Is it a trade-off between the two? Almost never. decades, you're like, cash me out. Some people want that sort of thing. Some people don't. So very important distinction.
Is it a trade-off between the two?
Almost never, but almost.
Sometimes there is a trade-off between the two.
For example, in very difficult athletic pursuits, there are some data indicate
that if you really grind it as an athlete, especially into your later years, you
could technically be through putting so much
through your metabolism.
Uh, the total human metabolism and the
amount of sort of damage and chemical
alteration your body takes is kind of like, uh,
like a candle.
If you burn it really fast, it burns out a
little quicker and just, just low key that there is a situation like that.
This is at the extreme end though.
Very extreme.
Very extreme.
We'll cover that later as well.
Donald Trump made a comment about, uh, you have a limited number of
heartbeats in your life and life exercising speeds them up.
Yeah.
Not quite right.
Donald.
One of the many ways in which Donald Trump is more wise than us all.
Uh, he does have a little bit of a point there. Not quite right, Donald. One of the many ways in which Donald Trump is more wise than us all, uh,
that he does have a little bit of a point there.
Um, so if you are a hardcore athlete, you may not live quite as long as if you cooled off on the training a little bit.
However, if you're a hardcore athlete, you'll probably just not suffer
nearly as much from mobility restrictions, morbidity things, various health maladies.
You just going to croak a little sooner.
And by a little, I mean, maybe on the order
of months to a few years sooner, but your
quality of life is going to just be completely
different, especially in your later years.
Those distinctions are very rare and they're
almost no cases in which mortality and morbidity
contradict each other.
Usually it's roughly the same stuff.
Like most of the recommendations we'll have talked
about today are going to be like a lot of column A,
column B, both checked off.
When it comes to longevity, quality of life,
what's the biggest movers or the number one,
what's the biggest determining factor?
Do you know?
Is that a question that can be answered?
Technically in the literature, so it's difficult to say what the biggest
factor is by far, because the way you ask that question has to include, what is
the degree of variation you account for?
So if you say that nutrition is the biggest variable, but you're dealing with a hundred
people being examined for their nutrition or trying to correlate lifespan, but most
of them are eating decently well, it probably won't be the biggest variable.
But the kind of raw take, to be completely honest in our current environment is
probably the degree of adiposity that you carry, how much body fat you have and
how heavy you are beyond what you were genetically designed to hold.
So like the Great Dane effect or the, uh, you know, like
big things don't live as long.
Large dogs are designed with similar systems as small dogs, and they almost
always die like half sooner.
Um, humans are all designed on very similar systems and subsystems.
And when you get a human to weigh four or 500 pounds, it
strains everything like crazy.
So it's like a reliable way to shorten your life.
One of the most reliable ways to shorten your life would be.
Probably one of the most short of extreme drug abuse, like just doing crack or
coke every day, stuff like that.
Um, extreme, uh, prolonged stress and sleep deprivation,
absolute Hunter Biden stuff.
So the laptop type of shit, right.
Uh, but, um, yeah, as far as things that we see humans alter in the real modern
world today, it's difficult to reduce both your, uh, longevity, how long
you live, your lifespan and wildly increase your morbidity in a more
dependable way than being severely overweight.
Okay.
You mentioned a word there that I thought would maybe be the biggest one, genetics.
What's the role of genetics when it comes to lifespan, longevity, quality of life?
Central.
And, uh, I, uh, it's interesting that the way you asked genetics is insanely,
insanely pertinent to how long you live. And explains almost all of the variants for those wacky stories you hear,
which are often false and sometimes true.
Well, my grandfather, he lived till 98.
He smoked 10 packs a day and he means son of a bitch barely slept,
drank all the time and somehow he lived to 98.
And usually people trot out these stories to try to reduce the apparent
benefits of improving your lifestyle.
Because there's kind of a fatalism associated with like, dude, if, if my
grandpa lived till 98, just eating raw meat, you know what I'm saying?
And smoking eight cigs in an hour.
Who, why am I going to go eat kale?
That's stupid.
I'm not going to waste my time.
If the thing is grandpa probably had just
the right stuff genetically.
And if you tried at any given age and you tried
any given level of genetics that you may have,
maybe you're closely related to grandpa in
that regard, maybe not so much because you
might only be a quarter related to grandpa.
And if the gene shuffle pretty decently,
maybe only an eighth.
And you might have other people in the family
that like croak at 55, all of a sudden you're like, eh, whatever.
So genetics matter a ton, but they are still altered.
So genetics gives you an average of everything's
average in your life, average nutrition, average
sleep, average everything.
Genetics will say you're going to die probably
about 72, but if you do everything right, you
might die at 82.
If you do everything wrong, you might die at
52, 62, something like that.
Very big differences abound. However, that settling point of longevity If you do everything right, you might die at 82. If you do everything wrong, you might die at 52, 62, something like that.
Very big differences abound.
However, that settling point of longevity,
very genetically informed.
However, the reason I said that adiposity is
probably the most pertinent variable, the biggest
one explanatory wise is because it's a variable
that you can push all the variables to extremity.
You can push your sleep down. You can push your stress sky high, but it's a variable that you can push all the variables to extremity. You can push your sleep down, you can push your stress sky high, but it's
unlikely you're going to do that to yourself for very long in the free modern world.
Like if you work any decent job in the U S or any of the Anglophone countries,
modern Asia, et cetera, Europe, like you're probably not going to like die
because you overworked voluntarily in a coal mine. Unlikely. But boy, are a lot of people voluntarily overeating like crazy.
And being that we're, are we allowed to disclose the filming location?
Being that we're in the Austin, Texas metropolitan area, lots of people are
eating to such high extents that I'll tell you this, if you weigh 400 pounds and
you trot out the genetics bullshit to me of like, why you haven't lost weight, I'm Drake and you like, I don't even want
to do this shit because you know, like you can really do unbelievable damage
and shorten your life substantially.
It kind of doesn't matter where your genetics are at that point.
If you're talking genetics, does that mean all grandparents and both parents seem to have lived for quite a while?
Most people haven't done a full genome
assessment or whatever.
I don't even know if we've done a polymorphic
trait, like here's the long living gene or
here's some of the long living, long living.
I can spare the expense.
It's going to be polygenic, but there are.
I mean, there's not one gene that I can just
take or turn on.
People only live to 55 or 95, no one in between is very bimodal. Right.
Um, if you look at it, you can look at genetics from two different
perspectives in this regard, at least one perspective is there are no doubt
genetic variables about a person that under the hood caused them to live a
long time or live a short time.
You might be able to clear mitochondrial damage faster or something like that.
Your genome, the actual like strands of DNA are kept like less methylated than
otherwise. There are a variety of molecular machines that do that.
Some people have more effective variants or more of them, so on and so forth.
You would never even look at a person and tell that's what they have.
They just have that shit.
That's what grandpa had when the coal mining days, when he smoked a coal
chimney every hour or whatever the fuck he did.
He was, he was literally a cigarette, Chris, a giant walking cigarette,
and he wouldn't die.
So that is factor number one. There's a bunch of those kinds of things, but the other kind of genetics,
and it's just straight up still genetics that affect your lifespan is the genetic
propensity for the secondary effects that affect it.
For example, if you have a fucking appetite for very tasty,
very not good for you foods, and you have, uh, genetically hunger signaling
that's just like kind of, you're always hungry or whatever.
No pleasure from exercise.
A hundred percent, um, propensity to do addictive drugs, a propensity
to take preposterous risks, a propensity for poor sleep.
Um, that's not under the hood stuff. It's going to affect what's under the hood, but it's, it's to do addictive drugs, a propensity to take preposterous risks, a propensity for poor sleep.
That's not under the hood stuff.
It's going to affect what's under the hood, but it's expressed in other measured variables.
So there's two ways to look at that.
Okay.
Environment, how does that impact longevity?
Yeah.
Basically, in the current modern world,
environment impacts longevity a very small amount because all
of our environments are generally kind of really good, good enough that the variance
produced by environment is very small.
However, in the developing world, environment has really big effects on longevity.
Still one of the top killers straight up all around the world is, um, indoor air quality.
Uh, if there are still countries and cultures in which you burn for food
and fuel like sod or some shit like that inside, and then he sure goes out
the chimney, but believe it or not, some of the molecules stray to the sides
and you inhale that shit, you do that for 30, 40 years,
it's going to impact your longevity like crazy. If you've ever been to developing nations like
India, for example, you land the internal circulation of the air stops, external air comes
in and you're like, the fuck happened here? And that does not stop until you leave India or go
way into the jungle because like Mumbai has an air quality that like, if we had
that in Austin, there would be like, um, like
do not travel to Austin, Texas for the next
two months.
Kind of shit.
Like I remember the California wildfires are
really big deal and the air quality was like,
well, it's really bad.
And I remember being there and I was like,
the fuck has I had been to Mumbai a few times.
I'm like, man, I could live the rest of my life
in this.
It wouldn't affect me at all.
I've been to Mumbai.
So outdoor indoor air quality, uh, polluted
water, contaminated food, things that we just
really just don't deal with in the modern
world, you go to Japan, Taiwan, the UK,
Germany, the U S it's all free and clear
pretty much.
And so when the environment doesn't have
huge effects in that sense, um, there are
other things about the environment that can
produce her, uh, uh, increased longevity,
stress and things like that.
I don't like to call that environment.
You could be more specific with those things, but
generally speaking, environmental factors just
aren't a big deal for us living in the modern
world, modern world, how rude, everyone's modern
in the developed world.
It's not a big deal in the developing world.
Yeah, it's a huge deal.
And one of the ways to increase human well-being
and human lifespan is to help
the developing world clean up, like in the literal sense of it.
Just have cheaper, cleaner energy.
Cheaper, cleaner energy, cheaper, cleaner abilities to clean up.
Look, cause like, if you get a lot of energy, you don't exactly
clean up your air doing that.
If you have a five nuclear power plants, you still have to make sure that your
production facilities of all these goods are not spewing toxic shit. You have to have regulatory framework to make sure cars are
increasingly expected to have different standards. Because like in India, there's like diesel,
regular small cars in the road and they put out some smoke that I'm like that our cars at home
do not fucking smell like that. They do not pass that regulatory burden. And obviously, of course,
like good governance, largely free markets, enough ability to generate wealth, all that stuff.
So.
Okay.
Diet touched on body fat, body weight earlier on.
Yes.
Does it matter what you're eating?
Does it matter how it impacts you?
How should we come to think about diet from a
longevity standpoint?
Great.
A diet that can keep your muscle mass at decent levels and does not make
you excessively over fat or overweight probably is something like 80% of what
we mean by diets effect on longevity.
So if you take two people and the two very different diets, but one that
are roughly the same body composition and size, et cetera.
They're going to get longevity differences
from diet alone, but they're not going to be
enormous on the order of probably five years
or less, just on a heuristic basis.
We're not talking about 20 or 30.
If someone weighs 600 pounds, yeah, it's 20
or 30 years, if not more, you know, once.
Stop arguing over vegan versus carnivore
and instead look at how much they weigh.
Oh my God.
By a long shot.
Let's put this in perspective with some
characters that we make up in our heads.
If a vegan or carnivore doesn't matter, uh,
say, you know, they're 350 pounds of five
foot seven and they're like, well, I'm vegan.
So it's not a big deal.
You're going to be like, bro, that ain't it.
Now, if you eat mostly healthy foods, lean
proteins, veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy
fats, and mostly unprocessed foods.
If you do that, whatever body weight you're at,
it absolutely matters for longevity, but it
matters a little bit.
And that means you should do it.
But the biggest thing that you get out of
those foods is the ability to do weight control.
Because if you are grotesquely overweight,
you could be eating fuck all.
It matters, but not by a ton.
How much mitochondrial damage and stuff like
that is coming from junk processed foods?
Or is your concern with avoiding ultra processed
foods that they're
just more palatable than eating the whole of
food version?
It's probably another 80, 20 or 90, 10
situation where mostly they're just a portal
to being really fat.
But, um, yeah, there is some decent research
that says very processed meats, very
processed, various other foods do have
chemical effects, cellular levels that are
absolutely not ideal, especially if the
preponderance of your diet is
composed of those foods.
But if you eat, uh, not so healthy foods
a few times a week and the rest is healthy,
they cannot statistically differentiate
you from someone who eats healthy a hundred
percent of the time in the mortality or morbidity.
Assuming that you maintain a similar sort of weight.
Correct.
Yup.
So yes, exactly.
But again, we're fighting with ultra processed
foods are more palatable, often more calorie dense.
Go back and watch the fat loss episode that
we did before.
If you want to learn more about that.
That's it.
So that's really important stuff, but I think
the big takeaway for me is this.
If you kind of two extremes, one we already
mentioned, if you are following some ultra healthy diet, either
ostensibly healthy or actually healthy, and you
have gotten up to 400 pounds and you're not losing
weight currently, but you're like, I'm good.
I'm eating the new way.
It's great.
You got a bad thing coming your way.
On the other hand, if you happen to be in a position
where you are of a healthy weight, you're
physically active, et cetera, all the other
variables we'll talk about are pretty well in
line and you are looking at a plate of nachos at
a Mexican place with your friends and they're
like, eat some.
And you're like, Ooh, but they're kind of going
to kill me because they're made of chips
and those are bad.
Sorry, crisps.
Does that make your English feel better?
Anglicizing everything.
Yes, yes.
Um, that's also probably the wrong move.
And it's a, it's a wrong move for at least
two reasons.
One, if in moderation and with all the other
factors aligned, you eat some junk every now and
again, it's a very difficult story to tell yourself that
anything very much matters about if you eat a few
chips or zero chips, or even two bags of chips
every now and again.
The other way in which it matters is the, and this
is a little bit more about how you approach food.
If you approach food in a neurotic fashion,
anticipating dangers everywhere, trying to
curate your lifestyle to only get the organic
vegan superfood shit and really worrying a lot
about what goes into your body, you almost
certainly will live less time than if you just
didn't give a shit and ate mostly good shit,
but every now and again, just had 10 burritos.
No, no problem.
I love the idea of the stress of trying to be
perfect will kill you more quickly than
your imperfections.
Depending on the degree of imperfection.
But if you're doing a decent job and you're
worrying more than that, you're just going insane.
I did a Jeffersonian breakfast with Brian
Johnson a couple of months ago.
Okay.
What does, I don't know what that means.
So you, everybody gets, I think a minute to speak
and you kind of go around and you've got a
topic that you're talking on.
And, um, it's a way of, I guess, fostering,
uh, discussion, some kind.
Okay.
Uh, and he was talking about some of the
research that him or his team had done.
I don't know where it'd come from.
Uh, and he said that eating a McDonald's,
uh, kills you 12 minutes earlier.
Uh, that was, uh, some of the, and I do wonder, you know, I like what Brian's
doing in the same way as I like having a scout in a army that goes and sort of
climbs a really dangerous.
I don't want to go up there, but I'm glad he doesn't maybe tell us some interesting
stuff when it comes back down.
Totally.
However, I do wonder, this is one question I haven't got to ask him yet, which is how are
you or any of the people that are really
obsessed with long, I go on the r slash
longevity Reddit or whatever other versions
of that, the NAD discussion forum, the rest
varatrol discussion forum, all of this David
Sinclair stuff from years ago.
I wonder whether those communities have got to
the stage yet where they've tried
to mediate the longevity induced stress reduction.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Yes.
Now there are a few ways you could go about this.
If you are a person who's obsessed with longevity in a glass half full sort of
way, you're looking at the variables in your life and you're like, Ooh,
I want to optimize for longevity.
I love my life.
I love science.
I love being intricate and meticulous.
It's just my nature.
I love organizing all the variables and being very strict.
You're not really stressed when you're doing that.
You're actually involved.
It's part of your orderliness.
Yeah.
And so not only do you get the benefits of being a perfectionist on never
eating any junk, but also you get the benefits of being a perfectionist on never eating any junk, but
also you get the benefits of being super involved,
which is another big variable we'll discuss
later as seems to have some promise for longevity.
But if you're a person who, if they are told,
listen, just eat mostly healthy foods and you're
good to go.
And you're like, Oh my God, thank God.
But if I tell you, look, every fry you put in
your mouth is like 30 seconds, less life.
Like you're telling your wife something just
beautiful about how much you love her on your
deathbed and you're like, and my favorite part of
you is, and she's like, that's stupid fry from
McDonald's, oh my husband's soul.
If you are a person whom that idea and the
pursuit of perfectionism tends to give higher stress levels,
I'm going to tell you right now, it's
probably not worth it.
Just do a good job.
Don't try to aim for perfect.
We'll get back to talking to Dr.
Mike in one minute, but first I need
to tell you about Carol.
I first heard about Carol Bikes from Brian Johnson
of all people who said that this is the best
way that he managed to get his heart health improved.
I think he's got the heart of an 18 year old, maybe an 18 month old, I'm not sure.
But he told me that this was the way he was doing his high intensity training.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick also has been harping on about it.
And Carole Bight gives you the shortest, most effective workouts actually backed by science.
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That's c a r o l bike dot com slash modern wisdom.
What happened to all of the research saying that if you cut a rat calories by 50% or 30% that it lives tons longer.
Whatever happened to the intimate and fasting side of that?
You haven't mentioned once calorie
restriction for longevity extension.
Why?
Um, because it's almost completely
encompassed by the variable of body weight.
And I'm going to tell you something
completely insane, Chris, you might not
believe, but when you feed a rat a little
less food or a lot less food, it gets a
little or a lot lighter in body weight.
And if you factor that variable of body
weight, it already accounts for that.
So it's absolutely true that if you input fewer
calories on average in a certain margin, you
gotta starve, you can starve yourself to death.
And you've like always been starving to death
and you're a skeleton, but like at 110,
you're like, I'm still hanging in fellas.
Can I get a brownie?
They're like, no, no, you would die.
Like, I kind of want to die with a brownie in my mouth.
So the body weight basically absorbs
all of that variance for us.
So let me put it another way.
Does that mean that we should all be fighting
to be as low body weight as possible?
If you want to live.
There's an optimal body weight, but it's not
one number I can give you because it depends
on a bunch of stuff.
Internal genetic variables, I can't possibly
predict because I don't have an AI scan
of your whole genome.
It's coming, I'm sure, but it's not here yet.
Another one is frame size.
Like someone who's six foot two, you're like, yeah, yeah.
Like, and very broad shouldered in the interchromial distance for the bones.
You're like, yeah, you got to weigh like 115 pounds and then you're going
to be super like longevity, like, yeah, until they die of starvation.
So merely one day later.
So a lot of variables play into that.
But as far as body weight is concerned, you're
generally going to take the average
recommendation of what most of the governing
bodies in medicine agree is the statistically
healthiest body weight.
And you're going to err either at that body
weight or a little bit less.
You start going much less than that.
Not so great. So for example, if the insurance tables say that you're probably in your best
health at 150 pounds, given your, they don't usually do frame size already.
This is fucking shit.
The 150 pounds, you're good to go anywhere between like 135 and 150.
That's probably your super golden zone.
You can weigh up to 165, 170, 180 if you're more muscular and it'll
be almost the same result.
But if you get into like the one twenties or the one tens, just to live
longer, it might not work out so well for you.
Is holding muscle mass from a diet perspective, well, actually just what's
the role of muscle mass?
Talk to me about how muscle mass plays a role in, in longevity.
Is it important?
Muscle mass plays, makes sort of two
appearances in longevity.
One appearance that muscle makes in longevity
is that having a decent amount of muscle has
secondary health effects for your rest of your
system.
Muscle is a glucose consumer and it keeps your
blood glucose chronically lower than if you didn't
have plenty of muscle. And excessive chronic high blood glucose is a
surefire way to just croak fucking early.
That's it.
And so there are a few other ways in which muscle
has these great systemic effects and those are
awesome.
And that's actually the primary driver.
The second thing about muscle is when you look at
the statistical literature on people with a certain
level of muscle mass and their mortality
predictions,
you see these massive correlations.
Correlation is not causation.
Most of the variance of muscle mass or most of the
relationship between muscle mass and mortality has
to do with, uh, muscle mass isn't what's keeping
you alive.
It's just a really good indicator of your overall
health.
That's like healthy use of bias signal.
A hundred percent.
So like, if you give me an 88 year old woman who is walking on a cane,
she's super jacked, destroying skyscrapers and shit.
She's like, you ever seen someone who's not overweight, but they
like reach for their luggage and it's like skin and bones and like the muscles
are like her biceps, like the width of my finger.
And you're like, how the fuck is that person moving?
And they're barely moving.
She's going to croak probably in not so long a time, but it's because she's 88.
And because all of the other health factors have precluded her from building
muscle, not as much because if she built a ton of muscle, it would keep her
lifelong if she had a good bench press. Right. She'd be sweet. It's true. She had more muscle, probably as much because if she built a ton of muscle, it would keep her life long. If she had a good bench press, she'd be sweet.
It's true. If she had more muscle, it'd probably be healthier for her. But a lot of times,
people who are bedridden, people who are suffering from chronic illness, people who are suffering
chronic physical inactivity, like your hips are totally fucked. So you lose a ton of muscle in
your legs. And then like people are like, when you die, they measure your muscle mass in a study and
they say, well, it's low muscle mass. It's at the low muscle mass specifically
that killed you.
Although it did have a small effect.
It's the fact that like, oh shit, you
weren't really poor health in order to get
to this muscle mass is downstream from
what you've done.
100%.
And there's a couple of things going
around the internet.
People are talking about jump height, uh,
your ability to jump high related to your
mortality and grip strength.
And like, if you try to train to jump
higher or grip stronger, thinking it's going to keep
you alive, uh, reverse causation, not the
best use of your time.
Yeah.
What about too much muscle?
Lots of people listening who maybe were
worried about that.
They spend all their time in the gym, you
as well, the large guy who's competitively
body belt, body built for quite a while.
Yes.
Body built.
So technically as soon as you get to be considerably
10 or 15 pounds heavier than what the insurance
tables predict will be the body weight that
lets you live the longest, you're probably not
doing yourself any favors with longevity.
However, this is one of those instances where
quality of life and longevity can be a little bit antagonistic to one another.
So that definitely has to be stated that no, you can't be as jacked as you want
and still live as long as you want.
But if you're not using anabolic steroids and growth hormones to get that extra
muscle, the amount of muscle a human can gain naturally, as long as they don't
have a high degree of body
fat is just not going to make a huge
difference in longevity.
And so if the quality of life trade off is
worth it to you, it's going to be a very small
effect, less than five years end of life,
maybe even less than that.
If you use a ton of steroids to get this jacked,
then you're going to be doing some time at the end of your life.
What are you talking about with, uh, I don't
know, take yourself the sort of course you've done,
which I would guess is in the upper range of what
most people, even non-professional bodybuilders
would take, what sort of, uh, life price do you
think people are paying?
As far as my back of the envelope calculation
for myself personally.
So there's a big caveat so that I don't
embarrass myself posthumously when this is released.
When you die tomorrow or die in a hundred
years time.
There's a huge stochastic element about that.
Like I can, anyone can just die fucking tomorrow.
They're like, ah, blood vessel in his brain
just blew up.
Turns out his head was too big.
Uh, that kind of weird shit aside on average,
I would have expected myself to probably take
about 10 years off of the end of my life.
Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's just.
What is it that the drugs are doing?
That's speeding up the dying process.
Yeah.
What aren't they doing that speeds up that, uh,
they're growing your heart muscle in a way that
makes your heart worse at pumping blood.
They are consistently presenting you with
cholesterol levels that do nothing good for your
arteries.
They are elevating your blood pressure.
Now, many of those variables I have kiboshed.
So I could be lucky and be looking at less than
five years, but there's also an element of where
carrying that much excess body weight starts to
be a stand in for the muscle.
When you weigh, I'm five six and I currently
weigh two 35.
You weigh 235 pounds at five six.
You are, I'm like one obesity category away from the highest one.
All the time.
On BMI.
Correct.
Yep.
But like the amount of weight you carry around, the amount more forcefully,
your heart has to pump blood, et cetera.
That's still fucking counts.
Fatiguing.
100%.
And so to quote Donald Trump on the heartbeat
thing, again, he's not a hundred percent wrong.
That definitely is a factor.
So if you happen to have used lots of steroids,
but you kept most of your health values in check
and you just had dog shit genetics for being
jacked and you never got really big, you're
probably looking at less than five years off
your lifespan on average,
but I've been pretty big for my size for a long time.
And my parents are both teeny tiny people with very small frames.
I also have a very small frame.
I just have a lot of muscle on it, relatively speaking, and a lot of
weight that I have had for years.
And that's absolutely a big fucking problem.
Do you, I think about Chris Bumstead,
when you talk about that, someone who's just retired,
age 30, six, two, six, three,
I think he steps on stage at like 220, 230,
something like that, I'm not too sure.
It's very mysterious what the classic guys actually weigh,
but yeah, 220 to 240 or something.
Yeah, I think about him, you know,
trying to get in and get out.
He's like, you know, Navy seal team six, like kicking a door down,
shot someone in the face six times and then, like, you can't get me anymore.
I don't have any more Olympia trophies.
Yeah.
All right.
Uh, I wonder, wonder how much he's been able, obviously genetically elite.
Uh, I wonder how much he's been able to get in and get out, so to speak. The more you can get in and get out, the better.
Um, I never used preposterously high doses, mostly because I was like, I don't
exactly want to die like tomorrow, tomorrow, but also because for me, high
doses were just not so great for psychology and stuff.
Yeah.
But, uh, for someone like Chris Bumstead, I mean,
his degree of muscle mass and body weight that
he carries for his height and frame were never
like insane.
Do you know who big Rami was?
Yes.
Like is, um, that's going to put you in the grave
a lot sooner because you are carrying.
Can you do that?
In your ordinary amounts of time.
One, isn't he like three 40 off season?
Correct.
So he literally is 100 pounds more than
Sebum at probably a slightly shorter height.
Like that's the kind of thing that's going to affect you.
So just to review that.
That's real tail end.
100%.
Yeah.
So to review the muscularity part, if you
were very under muscled, it's probably not a
huge deal for longevity, but being of at least
normal musculature for the average person of your sort of height and
frame and age is probably your best bet at
longevity, having a little extra muscle can
help, can hurt, probably cancels out on
average.
So if you're jacked as a natty, unless you
got super fat to do it, like I did when I
was natural, no big deal.
Hey.
Yep.
And then as you use drugs, if you use drugs
to get jacked, but you're really good
at controlling your health variables.
You never had excessive cholesterol.
You never had a chronic high blood sugar
from mismanagement of insulin and growth
hormones, shit like that.
If you did a good job managing that and you
never got enormous, enormous.
Yeah.
Like the drugs definitely kill you faster,
but not psychotically faster.
I mean, there are dozens and dozens of
golden era pro bodybuilders that are still alive today.
They're in their seventies and eighties.
Arnold's still kicking it.
Like if this shit was, remember one of my mentors,
Dr.
Mike Stone, uh, told us something about the
steroids when we were in PhD program.
He's like, you know, we in the eighties knew
that the media was lying because you just went
into locker rooms and gyms and just didn't see any
dead bodies. Cause you know, like eighties anti-drug was lying because you just went into locker rooms and gyms and just didn't see any dead bodies.
Cause you know, like eighties anti-drug hysteria was a totally different level.
I want steroid injection.
You're a criminal, you're in jail, you're addicted to heroin somehow also.
And you're for sure dead.
Like tomorrow, that absolutely doesn't happen.
However, last category is if you get very, very large, stay large for a long
time, stay on tons of gear for a long time, and don't attend
to the various health consequences.
At that point, you're rolling the dice.
And the only way in which the dice are loaded
is with your genetics, because there are juiced
up people that have been jacked for forever.
They're beat red and they just like don't die.
And they live into their eighties.
Not the great model for most people because
they just have baller genetics.
One of my friends met a mentor of mine,
Broderick Chavez, he had to believe like a
grandfather or an uncle who like worked
literally in the coal mines.
And he had like a, some kind of chest condition.
This is an amazing story.
It was the 1960s and he like went to the
doctor and he's like, Oh, something in my,
like some lungs or shit.
And they're like, Oh yeah, here are Diana ball tablets, a D ball taps, oral steroids.
Right.
He just got a script for oral steroids and he was on them
for like a generation straight.
This is an oral drug.
You're not supposed to take for longer than like six to eight weeks.
He was just on it all the time.
And I was like, all right.
So what was he like?
He was like jacked and mean.
And he lived like well into his like late
sixties or seventies and fucking coal mining.
Right.
And Brod said once, he was like, I think he just
died because he was just like, God, fuck this.
Like, you just don't want to be alive anymore.
The thing is most of us do not have genetics like that.
So really important to say, like, if you know
someone that's lived a long time in spite of everything.
Do you want to take that chance on yourself?
I wouldn't.
Anything else to say on muscle mass?
Actually, that's a question.
There is something else to say.
If I want to take a non bodybuilder, but
longevity approach for training for this.
Yes.
Very rough hewn.
What do I need to do?
Yes.
Training two to four times per week for 30 to 45 minutes at a time.
Mostly compound movements, large muscle mass movements, underhand
pull downs and pull ups, rows, close grip bench presses, dips, overhead presses,
squats, deadlifts, et cetera, stuff like that.
Obviously vanity shit you can do.
Usually with relatively short rest breaks for sets of 10 to 30
repetitions per set, alternating muscles that
aren't involved in one movement with those that
are involved in the other.
So do some close grip benches, take a quick 10
second breather, do some underhand pull downs,
quick 10 second breather and back and forth and
back and forth.
That should constrain your workouts to a small
amount of time.
Interestingly enough, if you're working out
exclusively to get more life at the end of your life,
you're also consuming a lot of life being in the
gym around sweaty, nasty people.
So you have to integrate that in.
Yes.
But there is a cost.
The duration of you spending time in the gym
lower, but also because of the short rest intervals
and the higher repetitions, it allows you to have some of the benefits
of cardiovascular exercise that are sort of enhancing to both quality of life and
how long you live.
And so that's probably the best way to do it.
It's very minimal effect on your schedule and it has probably as much as
you'll ever need to extend your lifespan
or make it higher quality.
If you're training in the gym, like two hours a day, six days a week, and you're
like for longevity, like it's not, it's not bad for you necessarily, but it's overkill.
You're overshooting.
Yeah, definitely.
Sleep.
What about sleep?
Sleep's a big deal.
Sleep is the ultimate stress reducer in everyone's life.
Like that's pretty much the, one of the main
purposes of sleep is to kind of reset the whole
system and sleep is a thing where again, that
90, 10, 80, 20 rule comes in handy.
If you're mostly sleeping enough to feel well
rested, which means if you need like
fuck new tonic, I need eight cans of Monster to keep me awake after 2pm.
You're not getting enough sleep, but if a can or two of new tonic throughout the day is all you need to be your sharpest, then you're good to go.
And you're probably getting enough sleep, seven to nine hours for most people.
As good of quality of sleep as you can manage,
keep the room dark, keep the room cool, few
distractions, no blue light a few hours before
bed, all the general sleep recommendations
that are really awesome.
If you just checklist that and you usually get
really good sleep a night or two every few weeks,
you stay up all night or you get, you know,
really busy with work, you don't sleep few
hours, no big deal.
Generally that's the recommendation.
Chronic low amounts of sleep in a way that
has you feeling it is a big deal.
Some people just don't need as much sleep as others.
Jocko.
Uh, is that true?
Supposedly.
So the 4.30 AM thing, which I'm reliably told by
some of my friends that are fathers that
they beat on an almost nightly basis.
Easy.
I'm never asleep.
They've got dad shit to do.
Yeah, exactly.
Um, but yet, I mean, there's that genetic
mutation that I think the same likelihood of
you having that, that requires you to only
sleep maybe four hours a night and feel okay
is the same likelihood as you being hit by
lightning twice.
Holy shit.
It's like super, super unlikely.
So a few very, very rare.
Anyway, um, Jocko is one of those people
that I've heard, I think basically what
most special forces select for are people
that can deal with sleep depth very well.
Very big deal because if you, if you need
lots of sleep consistently and you also
degrade very heavily in your
cognitive and physical function, you just
won't make it through selection.
Even if you're a straight up killer, that's
the kind of guy you want to be like an elite
bodyguard for someone like the president who
sleeps normal hours, even a decent rotation for
your body guarding shifts.
You can be like a Delta Force level shooter.
You're just like, look, if I don't get my sleep, I'm, I'm good to know.
When after a few days, Tim Kennedy told me this story.
Maybe you ask him about it tomorrow.
If you're chatting to him, ask him about the time he ran out of ammo
and he'll know the story.
And, uh, I think he said he was awake for, but the only time he slept was only
was concussed by an IED going off in like 48, maybe more hours.
He's asleep for awake for two full days, runs out of every different platform,
every different magazine, every different piece of ammunition that he had.
And, uh, you just realized that, okay, that's, that's what the job demands of you.
Ross Edgeley, who I think, uh, wanted an intro to you to have a chat at some point.
Um, I asked him, you know, he's done all of these crazies swam or did a triathlon
holding a tree, uh, triathlon, uh, he's the first person in history to have a
swim around Great Britain, he did six hours on six hours off for basically seven months.
Uh, he's just done the longest single distance river swim in history.
Uh, it was 300 miles, 55 hours without touching land, without
sleeping, without anything, 55 hours
straight through.
And, um, I asked him what his super power
is and it completely makes sense.
All of those things together are him allowing
to deal with sleep deprivation and to digest
food in very strange situations.
Yeah.
So he's.
Some people's digestion will shut down
and ultras and stuff. So he's digestion will shut down and ultras and stuff.
So he's able to have piping hot porridge to
keep him warm.
When he was in the Yukon swimming in Canada,
piping hot porridge, like a internal hot water
bottle, heating him from the stomach out.
Um, but then get back to moving and being
horizontal.
If you feed me food, I need to be vertical
for at least 45 minutes afterward, just the
way my digestive tract is put together.
Sure.
I don't like being horizontal.
Sure.
Um, so what I'm saying is certain people
deal with digestion, sleep in very, very,
very different ways.
Yes.
So for those people that don't need as much
sleep, don't feel like you have to get it.
But if you're genuinely not well rested,
chronically, you're doing some reduction of lifespan
and life quality, 100%.
What about regularity of sleep?
I've heard that the regularity can impact
longevity as much as the duration.
Yeah.
That's probably a little bit of an exaggeration,
though maybe not by much, especially in extreme
cases, it can be pretty nasty.
Shipped workers, firefighters, nurses.
Correct.
Um, sleeping roughly with the day and night
cycle, uh, and getting to bed and waking up at
roughly the same time on most days is probably
a good idea for some people that like that.
Brian Johnson, robotic lifestyle.
Every morning you wake up at the same time,
every night you go to bed at the same time, dope.
But for most people, they're going to take a
hit on social quality of life factors.
And yeah, if you stay up a night or two, a week,
a little later and wake up a little later, it's
just not going to be a big deal.
But regularity is a really, really good thing.
It's a thing that should be built into your life
anyway, and violating every now and again is okay.
Always being in the mix of God knows when I go to sleep and wake, probably not ideal for longevity.
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Going back to the exercise portion, I realize
we touched on muscle mass, like the
bro side of exercising, but what about more
general activity outside of that?
Yes.
Walking and stretching and cardio and all that stuff.
So stretching, no reliable mechanism by
which it'll let you live longer, but generally
a moderate to high amount of physical activity
has a good combination of promoting the longest
lifespan and the longest health span.
I think that's a computer at a book title. I just said by accident, um, that, you know, the
keeping the morbidity low, having the higher
quality of life because so something like just
for people's reference frame, six to 12,000
steps per day for most people is totally cool.
But a better way to put that is probably if
you're doing a lot fewer than five or 6,000
steps per day all the time, and you don't get a
lot of physical activity.
Otherwise you could be living longer if you did
more physical activity in most cases.
Just to touch on that.
Uh, I think I'm a good avatar for the gym bro,
who goes quite hard for an hour and then is
sedentary for a lot of the day.
I'm doing some exercise.
I'm doing probably significant 90, fifth percentile intense exercise.
And I'm also not moving quite so much.
What would you say?
I imagine a lot of the audience fits into this particular bracket.
I think you're doing really well for yourself.
If you wanted a small, but meaningful enhancer
to quality of life and longevity later down the
road, you would break up your periods of physical
inactivity at least another one time in the day
for a serious bout of some kind of aerobic output,
be it walking, as easily as that, all the way up
to pretty difficult aerobic activity.
And so if you lift weights and you do all that.
And if you get, you know, roughly 10,000 ish
steps a day, very roughly huge variation for
individuals, you're pretty good to go, but
there's probably almost certainly a morbidity
reduction way of doing it and probably
increases your lifespan by a little bit.
If you have several sessions a week, two to
four sessions of 30 to 60 minutes of intense
cardiovascular activity.
And for most people, a really easy way to
measure that is can you have a conversation
with someone while you exercise?
I don't mean a few words here and there like,
Oh, I'm doing good.
See you tomorrow.
Like not that I'm talking about like consistent
conversation like you and I are having now.
You and I can have this conversation on a walk.
No problem.
If we were in really good shape, we could have
it on a jog, but we're not pushing the pace with
aerobic exercise if we can talk.
So if you can't talk and you're huffing and
puffing doing that at least twice a week for 30
minutes on end and all the way up to four times a week for
60 minutes on end or any combination therein is
probably that extra cherry on top for longevity
and quality of life enhancement.
So if you really want to live as long as
possible, I would say some pretty intense,
regular aerobic activity is probably a good
thing and unlikely to be a bad thing.
Is that something that you're thinking about
now that you're out of, I just want to be as
big and lean as possible world?
Are you, or do you see your Brazilian jujitsu
as, is that contributing in that sort of manner?
My Brazilian jujitsu definitely counts as
that, and I do BJJ now roughly five times a week.
And at least a few of those sessions have me huffing and puffing. So I'm probably taking good care as that. And I do BJJ now roughly five times a week. And at least a few of those sessions have
me huffing and puffing.
So I'm probably taking good care of that.
Um, I am absolutely not the model for longevity
and quality of life.
I'm in a very perverse, very strange path,
very understood, very chosen path.
I think you've, uh, at least partly
ejected yourself out of that or sort of
gently come into land.
Yeah, I stopped abuse level steroids.
But yeah, it just makes me think again, I have this idea called the manual
pause guys at some point between 28 and 45 that have just wanted to get as
jacked and lean as possible.
Maybe they have or haven't abused BDS.
Maybe they have or haven't ever tried to do different training modalities,
realize that they become chronically aware of their own mortality.
And they think, Hey, I shouldn't be out of breath going up those stairs or whatever.
I can't touch my toes or my shoulder hurts always.
Yes.
Um, just again, thinking about people pivoting out of that.
And it seems to me that if cardio,
which for some people is fun apparently,
but for other people you need to game it,
like you have, which is choke the guy,
oh, my heart rate's high.
I was trying to choke the guy, my heart rate got high.
For me, pickleball is a good example.
I'm chasing a ball around a thing.
Very British, very British way of engaging.
That would be, yeah, maybe not bulls, bulls or polo. Um, but yeah, just trying to think about
some of the easiest ways for the non-cardio
lovers to get themselves to that place.
For sure.
That's a great, great question, Chris,
a great statement, because we know from the
exercise participation literature in the
physical activity participation
literature, I actually used to teach a class
dedicated pretty much to this.
That is encouraging people to participate.
And behavior.
Right.
Okay.
Health behavior is a trip.
Like we know pretty well what to tell people to
do, but then they're like, and you're like,
okay, they won't do it.
How do we get them to do it?
A big part of that is a two factor thing.
One is your physical activity should be pretty fun.
And it should also hopefully be something that involves you with other people so
that the community reinforcement part is in play and that you have the situation
where if you just don't feel like it someday, your airsoft team is still meeting up to shoot airsoft
pellets at each other.
You better be there.
And so you just end up falling in.
And if you fall out of activity that nobody
gives a shit, cause you're just on a treadmill
at home and you have no friends and no one to
talk to, you're maybe kind of done.
But if people are like, dude, are you
going to make it to jujitsu again?
I heard you healed up.
You're like, dad, I do, I should go back.
I love jujitsu.
Okay, I'm going back.
The fucking social pressure usefulness.
That was the thing that I realized when I
started doing a CrossFit and, uh, any fighting
that, you know, your most training for most
people, unless you have a really cool gym
training buddy, is you steeping in your own
neuroses as you stare in the mirror, listening
to metal or dark
thoughts, if it's you.
And, uh.
Or nothing.
Yeah.
Um, and I realized, oh, this is awesome.
I'm like outsourcing all of my exercise motivation
to this group of people around me.
Sure.
It lightens the burden of me having to do this
thing that I kind of probably didn't want to do.
Yes.
And I don't want people to misinterpret that
as being like, you got to bully your
friends into
exercise.
See that?
That was good.
And you consider playing American football.
I played cricket for a long time.
Excellent.
That's it.
I don't want people to misconstrue this as us
saying you need to bully your friends into
exercise.
There's a latent assumed expectation that people
have that you're going to come back to aerobics class, that you're going to come back to the pickleball situation, jujitsu, whatever it is.
And that internally to people without anyone ever saying anything, you have this thought of like, well, all the guys are at jujitsu.
I'm going to go.
Social pressure is a hell of a drug.
It's a big deal.
And also what to the early point, like it should be
something that you ideally look forward to.
And then it's fun.
You don't want physical activity and nutrition,
everything in longevity pursuit to start feeling
like medicine, to start feeling you just swallow
the horse tablet and then you're good to go.
People generally don't tend to stick to that
sort of thing and the discomfort of it.
The, um, less enjoyment
that you have, the less involvement that you have already actually Xs off another
longevity variable we'll discuss later, which is like life involvement.
So if you like what you're doing, you're doing it with friends and it's healthy
for you, fuck man, you got a real good thing going.
Yeah.
I suppose there's a few times where a more nuclear option is required.
If you're Ethan Supplee that you got to meet the other day and you have 530
pounds and you're going to get down to 250 or something.
You got to do the thing.
Yeah.
You eat the horse tablet all day, but yeah, for most people, there are easier
ways to kind of increase compliance.
I love that.
I didn't even know that, uh, exercise behavior was it?
Yes.
Health behavior, health behavior.
I didn't even know, but it makes complete sense.
Yeah.
Uh, what we spoke about last time on the last episode, which I really loved was Exercise behavior. Was it? Yes. Health behavior. Health, health behavior. I didn't even know, but it makes complete sense. Yeah.
Uh, what we spoke about last time on the last episode, which I really loved was my
favorite of the ones that we've done so far about stress management, uh, recovery.
What is the role of stress in all its forms on longevity, lifespan, morbidity?
Yeah.
Stress has what has been described, I I say pretty accurately as a hermetic response or
association, too little is not great, too much
definitely not great.
So if you never have challenging times in your
life, times where the best of you is required,
times when you have to focus, times in which you
struggle both mentally and physically,
you're unlikely to have as high of a quality of
life and by a little bit as high of a duration
of life as if you have times of life that require
you to get tired and beat up and stressed and
overwhelmed.
However, because there's a lot of really cool shit
that happens when your body's overwhelmed and a
lot of the crap it secretes when it's
overwhelmed or actually like molecules they're
studying now that have like longevity
enhancing effects.
However, if you're so stressed all the time or
much of the time that you're like lips just
above water kind of stressed, you know, like
the gasping for air in a pool that's almost
your height, then that's almost your height.
Then that is overwhelming your body systems
and chronic high psychological stress will
put you into the grave early almost every single time.
There's another consideration here of how
you perceive stress, because you can look at
some successful business people, athletes,
uh, whoever, whatever realm they're in, mothers,
five children to raise.
If it looks like they're in high stress and to
the outside observer, but they're engaged in
loving every minute of it, they don't really pay
the cost longevity wise.
And it's actually a bit of an enhancer.
But if you, no matter your stress
level, feel totally overwhelmed and like, when
will this end type of situation and you hate it,
just get me out.
You know, like you see a celebrity getting asked
for the 50th time when you're new movie, are you
excited about it?
And they got these ghosts over eyes.
It's not just the hero in that time.
This gloss them over that kind of constant
overwhelm. That's not really the heroin that time that's glossed them over. That kind of constant overwhelm, that's not
really great for longevity or quality of life.
So what you want to do is sufficiently
challenge yourself in life and also get the recovery.
That balance is tough.
I myself have had a real hard time striking
that balance in my life.
I blame my wife for this entirely.
Because she's Asian?
Oh yeah.
Well, we'll get to that in a second. I'll get, so I blame her wife for this entirely. Because she's Asian? Oh yeah. Well, we'll get to that in a second.
I'll get, so I blame her just for many
things in my life, most really, even stuff
that happened to me when I was a child.
She wasn't even around because why not at
this point, but she is a person who is, her
industriousness is like off the charts and she
needs to, in many cases, be doing something
or else she goes insane.
The problem is I'm also like that.
So when we're together, we just work a lot and we get guilt trips in our
own heads about not working enough.
And so we're really, really bad about taking time off and time to rest.
Nowadays we're a little better at it because
per the recovery podcast we did, it's a
priority for us as professional work athletes,
like athletes rest.
The funny, uh, that I can say this in a space
where millions of people will see it.
My wife sent me, so, uh, sorry, our, uh, the
joke is super old, our adopted son, Jared Feather, IFBB Pro.
Um, he is like on exactly that level of
crystallinized psychosis about work, but
probably worse, which he considers a great honor.
Uh, and it is, but also it comes with a tradeoff.
He's a very amazing pro classic physique competitor.
And you've seen Jared in real life. Like you're going to see Jared and you're like, why
do we even train?
Like there's people that this exists.
I don't even belong to the gym, but C Bum, who's
in the same division, but has won six Olympias and
Jared's placed like top five type six in some shows,
but has never cracked that.
I think he will in the future, but, um, it was your
podcast and you had C Bum on that.
My wife sent me that clip just like yesterday.
And she was like, this is funny.
And the clip was what does Sebum do in the average day?
And he was like, I wake up, I do some cardio.
I go back to sleep after breakfast.
I wake up, I chill, I eat again.
I take some pre-workout.
I train, I come back, I eat.
I might take another nap.
I chill, do family stuff, eat, chill, do family
stuff, eat, go to sleep.
And it was like, if Crystal was like, LOL, and I was like,
LOL, I sent it to Jerry because, and he responded with LOL, like,
cause we guilt trip Jared for wanting to be as good of a bodybuilder as he can be.
But Jared does all our RP social media bullshit, all the help with like app stuff and
software.
In addition to that has a full roster of coaching
clients for whom he travels all the time across
America and the world to help compete.
And so like I recently, he had to take a little
time away from training to recover.
And he was like, I don't know what to do with
myself.
And I was like, what do you do for fun?
He's like, uh, uh, work typically or plan to work.
I'm like, anything else.
He's like, I've got nothing.
And so it's like, Jared, if you don't pull back on all the work, how are you
going to be stepping onto the Olympia stage?
You don't have the recovery timeline in your plan to do so.
And so for all of us folks that are super grind kind of thing, and none of us are
like, man, grindset mentality, whatever, say say that because we're just like, isn't that just
what everyone does?
Isn't that normal for those of us in that position, pulling
back as a good idea.
But if you're sitting on the couch, if you're bored, if
you're on your fifth doobie and it's kind of life for you all
the time, you're never challenged, never stressed.
You will live longer if you stress yourself, especially
with things that you're passionate about, involved in
and can progress at that kind
of stress in combination with an equal
amount of rest and recovery is the
joie de vivre as the French are inclined
to say, I don't even know if that's a term.
Middle of the bell code stuff.
Yes.
Which is tough because so many of us that
are prominent for whatever the fuck in
your case, massive success and intellect
in my case, my curious head shape.
Um, you know, we just kind of work a lot
and we're like, this is great.
And here's the thing.
If you love it and you're not overwhelmed
all the time, pretty good.
If you're compulsed to do it.
If you're compulsed to do it and you feel
both overwhelmed and this sneaking suspicion
that you're a little bitch and you just
need to go harder, you're not going to live
as long as other people.
So funny.
So I had a call this morning.
I had my first full genomic test done.
Whoa.
Everything.
Uh, I can, I can show you it at some point
unless you clone me.
So you're out of the closet now.
Uh, yeah, exactly.
It turns out it is genetic.
Who knew?
Um, that, uh, we went through and you talk
about snips, different snips.
We've got this snippet, we've got this snip,
we've got this snippet, et cetera.
And this is correlated with dot, dot, dot.
This allows you to methylate better,
this allows you to do-
Sections of DNA, right?
Yeah, yeah, C677T and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then next to it, there's a percentage number,
how rare it is.
Oh, cool.
And presumably this is across population data
or whatever they've got to compare it to.
They have a lot of data now. Dude, I was sat listening to my doctor go through this stuff this morning and it
was, okay, so you've got two copies of this gene, 6% of the population.
You've got two copies of this gene, 4%.
You've got one copy of this gene, 18%, two copies of this, every single one of them.
Dopamine drive, ruminative thoughts, epinephrine, norepinephrine,
don't clear adrenaline well, like all of the things that will just make you very compulsive,
very motivated, very industrious.
And it's the first time that I've ever looked at the genetic side of behavioral genetics.
So you think, my parents have these traits, we know that heritability is a thing you think my parents have these traits.
We know that heritability is a thing.
Therefore you will have these traits too.
But at no point did I ever actually think,
okay, and what is the mechanism by which this
is passed down?
Well, it's the genes.
It's the actual genes.
And given the fact that we've now got genomics
to the point where we can start to see a little
bit of the code in the matrix or matrix in the
code, uh, we can actually look at it.
So I was like reading the language of me, the
building blocks that I was made for, dude, it
was so fucking interesting.
I need to get that done, man.
I can send you the link.
It was like not that expensive.
It happened in a week.
You just swab the inside of your cheek from
your home, send it off.
And I was like, this is, but also the other
thing that I realized I was like, yep, see that.
Yep.
See that. And what's really funny is where you like, yep, see that. Yep. See that.
And what's really funny is where you go, uh,
you've got two copies of this.
I'm like, yep.
And mom and dad, you got one copy of this and
you can determine which parent.
Holy shit.
Because you go, ah, yeah, that's, that's dad.
That's not mom or whatever the other way.
I bro, I was blown away.
I just can't stop thinking about it all day
today.
So, um, yes.
You get to the genes that predict what you're
going to be like when you're older.
They'll be in there or at least they will have
captured them, but.
Yeah.
You keep reading that genome, you'll see some
really crazy shit.
Wow.
Yeah.
It was cool.
Um, so stress don't have overwhelming periods.
Uh.
Have overwhelming periods, but make sure they're
periods, not years at a time or decades at a
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You mentioned about engagement, some sort of
passionate engagement thing.
Yes.
A thing you like to do.
Yes.
What's that?
Let me say something super, super
quick about the stress thing.
You can have days and even weeks of extreme
stress and it probably won't reduce your lifespan. long as you can comment on the afterwards take days or
even weeks of much lower stress until you feel like, yeah, I could do.
I'm ready to get back out of stress.
Whereas like, you know, day three of a vacation after a really crazy period of
work, you're not even relaxed yet.
Something that, uh, folks might want to know is
that seemingly, and this is just based on my
inference, as you get older, the amount of time
it takes you to unplug during a vacation or as
you say in the, the kingdom.
Holiday.
Tell us holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving,
et cetera.
Um, it goes up, that amount tends to go up.
And takes longer time to slow down.
And so I remember I had met a gentleman,
he was a very nice man who was a doorman in
New York when I was on a vacation with my
parents, I was like my early twenties went
to the Dominican Republic and we were there
for like a 10 days, which we thought was a
really long time.
He was on vacation for three weeks and
at all inclusive in the DR.
And I was like, dude, are you serious?
He's like, when you get older, as you get older,
it takes you longer to unplug.
He's like, so the first week I'm unplugging the
second and third week I'm relaxing.
And I was like, that's weird.
I need a one week warmup to my holiday.
Dude, seriously.
Cause like, it's just not true to say that
you're relaxed immediately after any stressful
activity, like it takes some time.
Like imagine someone finishing a 15 RM on the
squat and as soon as they rack it, you're like,
all right, good to go.
Let's get in the car and drive off.
You're like, hold on a second.
That my sweat hasn't even started coming out
of me yet.
Like there's a process.
And so if you're, as you're getting older,
it's important to note that what used to be
enough duration at a time of relaxation for
you may not be, and that it's good to take a
little bit more time to be a little bit extra
recovered.
The best way to know if it's time to start
grinding again, you start getting itchy for the
shit again, not compulsively like you want it
again.
You want some stress, you feel like a lazy the shit again, not compulsively. Like you want it again. You want some stress.
You feel like a lazy asshole and you're way beyond relaxed.
If you haven't even gotten relaxed yet, you need more vacation.
Well, this is why it's so important to work out whether you're a, like a type
A person with a type B problem or a type B person with a type A problem.
Sure.
Right.
Then again, the patient determines the dose of what is required.
It's like, yeah, I've been thinking about this all the time.
The just work harder, bro advice thing.
It's been in my head pretty much since our last podcast, white
knuckling, creativity, and how you can't do that.
The fact that you don't just get to switch on or switch off the
industriousness, like drive, yeah, yeah.
Motivation.
And it's a super interesting. I think it's a really important thing. the industriousness, like. Drive. Yeah, yeah, motivation.
It's super interesting.
I think it's a really important thing.
Also, do you really want to look back
and just see that all you did was work
like an absolute motherfucker the whole time?
It would be the honor of my life to die at my job.
Yes.
But that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Some people they look back, you're totally right.
All facetiousness aside, for me,
it would be an honor to die at work and having been known as a very hard
worker, but for most people, they're like, man,
there's all this life to live.
I remember, uh, I was in an English class at, in
college, uh, sorry, in uni.
Yes.
And, uh, I, um, there was like a short story we
read about a guy who was like always super smart
and got super straight A's and he like, uh, had an opportunity to go.
It was in the late sixties.
He had an opportunity to get on a bus and go to like Washington,
DC to protest something, but he didn't cause he had exams coming up.
And he gave like a speech to a college graduating class when he was like 60 or
something super successful career.
And he was like, Oh, you know, Mike, my one regret was that I didn't get on that
bus.
And the only thing I thought at the time was like, yeah, but you got these
millions from being a career man, didn't you motherfucker.
And you did that pass on some exams, didn't you?
Yeah.
So, but for whatever it is, as far as how you want to live your life, which
transitions into that next topic of enjoyment. Make sure you're taking breaks.
Don't be stingy with the breaks, but if it's all breaks all the time, put
yourself through some difficult shit.
It's going to help you.
Okay.
Passionate engagement.
Passionate engagement.
I'm not an expert in this subfield of longevity by a long shot.
So you can probably have someone on the podcast at some point, which I would
consider fascinating.
I would at least watch the episode.
You get one view from me.
Hey, I do run a robot farm in China that will
give you a hundred million more views, but you
have to pay for that sort of thing.
Yes.
So at least we have this robust correlational
data that shows that people who are passionately
engaged in one or multiple sequential or overlapping
lifetime pursuits seem to outlive most other people.
We know it's correlated.
I'm aware of no causative mechanism through which this occurs.
It strains my brain to imagine one and maybe the causation data is already around,
not just not up to date on the stuff.
So please ask chat GPT about this.
Ask chat GPT or Claude or whoever about is there mechanistic presupposition or good
evidence of how passionately engaging with anything in your life can increase
your longevity and quality of life.
That data may exist, but at the very least, we know the correlations are pretty passionately engaging with anything in your life can increase your longevity and quality of life.
That data may exist, but at the very least, we know the correlations
are pretty fucking airtight.
And there's just so many people that have lived much longer than you would expect because they were passionately engaged and so many examples of people
that were like, eh, and they don't live a long time.
that were like, eh, and they don't live a long time.
So at least as a check the box, just in case sort of thing,
it's probably worthwhile to have in your mind, if you want to live the longest, not to have this perspective.
And this goes back a little bit to the stress discussion of like,
if I'm going to make it really far, I got to chill all the time and never involve myself too
passionately in anything because passion gets the
heart rate going and that's bad.
On the other hand, you want to consider it as a
balance, but also it's at least worth a shot to get
into that passionately engaging with something.
What do I mean by that?
Let's say you are just huge on world of Warcraft.
Think about it day and night.
You play it all the time.
You have friends that play it.
The game evolves all the time.
Even something like that is statistically as a correlation likely to keep you alive
for longer than if you have nothing about your life that really gets you going in
the morning, nothing you're building.
Another thing is creating something, but people
who create inventors statistically outlive like
almost everyone.
It's really kind of strange composers outlive
almost everyone because it, they have a mission
and it keeps them seemingly so engaged that it
may have some benefits for longevity.
Bit of an intro game in some ways.
Some, maybe this is a maybe, but here's the thing.
On the longevity side, it's a maybe.
On the quality of life side, it's 100% certainty,
which is why it also categorically belongs in this discussion.
Cause even though the longevity stuff, the lifespan is correlated,
maybe it's causative, the causation element of quality of life is 100% a thing.
Your quality of life is measured in a bunch of different ways, but one of them is like,
do you, are you really involved in what you're doing?
Do you really like what you're doing?
Like, imagine you had to describe, you know, you
meet someone on a plane sitting next to them and
someone's like, what do you do?
And you're like, uh, oh, like I do podcasts and stuff.
And they're like, do you love it?
And you're like, that's all right.
It's a, it's a living.
Like you were clearly being facetious
because if I may guess Chris, this is a
deep involvement for you having conversations
with mostly intelligent people, occasionally
sprinkling me in this is a thing you do and a
thing you really give a shit about that is
probably going to be good for your quality of life simply because
it's even just a sub definition of the quality
of your life.
You're in 100% on something for hours a day.
It's a really huge benefit in the
statistical literature that we see.
And so at least worth a mention on two grounds
of might causatively enhance your lifespan,
but almost certainly will make your quality of life much higher.
Is this the effect where we see people who retire from their job at a particular
age, and then there seems to be this sort of drop off towards death, people that
retire earlier, people that retire later.
It might be part of that.
The other part as a big proponent of science, physically big, not smart, just big.
Um, I want to say that there's almost certainly
a big feature of that dynamic.
It's a true dynamic is reverse causation or
causation of an underlying variable.
If you just don't have it anymore at work,
cause you're fucking dying, you quit work and
then you die.
Understood.
Uh, but, but there may very well be this situation
where even if you still got it, if you quit work,
your life drains of meaning and then.
Yeah.
It's probably multifactorial as well, providing
you with a community, providing you with structure
every single day, you're maybe moving, maybe
you're on your feet with some sort of job, you're getting your steps in,
it's a, like it's, you know, all of these things.
Work will set you free.
Ah, shouldn't say that to you.
Huge.
You know, I quoted my dad once on the internet
who said, work will set you free.
And I had a friend reach out and be like,
you do know that was like a sign above like Auschwitz
or Birkenau or something.
And I was like, it's still right though.
And like, you know, my dad is as Ashkenazi
as it gets, so tell him that shit.
Hey.
Hey.
Uh, okay.
Other people.
I've heard that all of the people.
I just don't like them, Chris.
I'm sorry.
They smell, they look at me funny.
I think they look funny.
What else is there to say?
That's true.
But apparently you need them to live longer.
Yes.
Through vampiric consumption of their body fluids. Ideally you get them in infancy, but infants are so hard to live longer. Yes. Through vampiric consumption of their body fluids.
Ideally you get them in infancy, but
infants are so hard to find nowadays.
Birthrate decline will do that to you.
That's right.
That's the real tragedy of birthrate decline.
No more adrenochrome.
No more things to suck the spinal fluid out of.
What is Hollywood even doing to stay young and healthy?
Um, very, very similar statistical picture here
as to the involvement stuff, passion involvement
with something you like is seen in this situation
with community and social relations, family,
friends, community involvement are very tightly
correlated with your longevity.
And because most people like a certain amount
of them, they are in that sub definition of
quality of life.
So we could just say that is really great.
Um, it's a big deal.
And in many cases, people will get all of the
socialization they want and no more.
Like I'm in Austin right now doing a bunch of podcasts.
If you text me to hang out and I'm interested in
hanging out, I'll be like, where, when, if I'm not
interested, I'll make up some bullshit excuse like,
Hey, I'm super busy catching up on something.
Anyway, see ya.
I'm good to manage my own shit.
So that's totally cool.
Most people are doing a fine job at that.
However, there are many people that have
two things going for them.
One is they're not extroverted in a way that
outreaches to get other people to hang out with them.
And two, they simply are not aware of at least
the correlational relationship between that and quality
of life and longevity.
And so some people are totally fine being hermits,
but simpler.
Some people are also totally fine being hermits,
but when they actually engage in a social interaction
where it's foisted upon them, they have like a breath
of fresh air go through them.
And those people specifically need to be keen on making
sure that they do at least the bare minimum to continue to involve
themselves with other people. Now, typically in many cases, it's just not a
problem. Middle school, too many fucking people. High school, same people.
College, uni, a lot of people. You can be ostracized in those situations. You can
be a loner, but a lot of times that's either by choice or by, you just don't like those people.
As you get older, many people report that their ability to form new friendships or sustain older ones, it falls off.
And this is some kind of like doom and gloom scenario or like, you know, everyone leaves you and dies.
That can happen, but there are many, many, many ways in which you can get yourself involved.
There are community centers. There are various games and sports and
involvements and everything. At any age, it's possible for you to reach out,
connect with people and regularly schedule a hangouts. Be it with family
and friends, be it with other people, be it in a volunteering capacity.
You don't have to have like deep, close ties.
Even if you just interact with other humans,
like at a soup kitchen for
the love of God several times a week, that seems
statistically better than just completely
walling yourself off if you're the kind of
person that's inclined for some sociality.
So make the effort is what I'm saying.
We'll get back to talking to Dr.
Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell
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What do you make of Dr.
Robert Waldinger's stuff?
Is that Harvard's longitudinal life study, he came on the show, uh, and he had
found that the single biggest variable in how
long people lived was the number of close
connections that they have.
Uh, it was more than smoking.
It was more than going to the gym.
It was the single biggest determinant.
Why would you posit that that might be?
I wonder if that factors out age.
I haven't seen the actual data.
If it doesn't factor out age, it's probably partially
correct as causative mechanism, but probably
only partially because when you're 88, most of your
friends are dead and you outlived all of them.
And the reason you die soon isn't because they
died, it's partially that, but also.
Mostly because you're 88.
Yeah.
It's just clocks ticking.
So, um, it, like I said, the, the
correlational stuff is a big deal.
There are other ways in which it might
not be causation driven.
If you are a crumudgy piece of shit and
you're bad to yourself and your own head
and you're bad to other people, you just won't have a lot of people around you.
Um, if you are very isolated, you're not
economically very productive.
You're not very involved in things.
Most of those things give you more friends,
having more money, having more social
connections, having hobbies in common with
people, they all independently likely correlate
or drive longevity.
Cause like when you have more money, you can just
before better healthcare in many cases.
And also if you have a lot of money, um, you're
probably high in trait conscientiousness.
And so you probably care about your health and
also eat well and exercise and all that shit.
Those people just tend to have more social
connections than otherwise, but there's, there
may very well be an independent
causative part of community.
I'll say another thing.
One of the hypotheses that I like, not saying it's true.
I just, it feels like a nice thing that makes sense to me is that a certain
given level of social interaction is something that the human individual organism has been primed to see as a base level.
Because if you look at our ancestral history, like lone humans,
just die real soon.
I'm a fucking lone wolf, bro.
All right.
Here's a spear.
Oh, just kidding.
You're the females of the tribe actually picked the plant that wraps the head of
the spear.
You don't have a spear anymore.
You have a stick and there's a Buffalo.
You should one of you and that thing weighs 1600 pounds and it's interested
in getting upset at you.
If you try to kill it, you're not doing shit by yourself in all of our
ancestral history, the loner shit.
It's just like, I love that fucking lone samurai bullshit.
Like vibes wise, it's awesome.
Like I hate when the psychotic leftists are like, you know, whenever it does anything by themselves, like
shut up, you just want socialism, get out of my face.
But in the real world, you're just drawing your own
samurai sword by yourself.
This is not how it works.
And so humans are pre-built, primed for living in groups.
And you're just unlikely to, as a human, have an evolutionary
history behind you, which makes the act of being alone for a long time,
beneficial, normal.
Like fuck beneficial.
Totally.
Right.
But it's just so abnormal that if you expose humans to one closet, no sound, no
light, a little bit of food and water just to keep going in a hole in
the floor to poop and pee.
They're also going to die real soon because
people need all those variables just
because they're normal.
And so social interaction at a pretty high level
is normal.
Remember all of us evolved in very communal
circumstances where you walk outside of your
hut, which might have your wife and your three
children in it, but the rest of the village is always every night, every day together.
Everything's together.
We're seeing increasingly more as societies get wealthier and older, a,
an atomization of individuals, like the average Japanese 60 year old has nobody.
But here's the thing.
How the hell are they alive?
They don't need to kill bison with spears anymore.
They have supermarkets, they have food delivery,
they have online work.
So you can generate value at home, consume
media at home, you just never need to leave.
Now watching television shows and listening to
music almost certainly will increase your
longevity and quality of life.
You just have no choice of anything else, but
being around real people, I don't think we have
to suspect that it's some kind of magic fairy
dust effect where like it's the socialization that's good for you.
It's the fact that when you don't have lots of
socialization, it's such an unusual thing to
your human systems, your brain that you're like
this low key subconsciously, something is off.
And then your ability to generate passion, to
have meaning, to have purpose is largely gone
because you just weren't built for the shit.
Yeah.
Passionate engagement will go up. Maybe you've got people around you. So if you get too fat, they're going to say, Hey, to have purpose is largely gone because you just weren't built for the shit. Yeah. Passionate engagement will go up.
Maybe you've got people around you.
So if you get too fat, they're going to say,
Hey, Mike, you're getting a little bit fat.
Totally.
You aren't waking up at the right time.
So they're this sort of correction mechanism
for a lot of other shit.
Having grandchildren and children around for
whom you maybe take care of, maybe you
imbue them with wisdom.
That's a lot of meaning and a lot of purpose.
You're living for more than just yourself.
Do parents live longer?
Do you know?
I have no idea.
Almost certainly they do, but I wouldn't, I
don't have the data in front of me to say that.
Okay.
That's the things that do impact longevity.
What are the biggest myths in the world of
longevity in your opinion?
Again, as in all of our myths discussions, this
has to be highly curtailed for the purposes of
time.
There are a few things that come to mind and maybe you
can remind me of a few.
One is that in 2024, October, am I allowed to say when this
was filmed?
Sure.
Yeah.
Fuck.
We don't have any supplements that you can take that are like
strong main effect for enhancing longevity and
have been approved or that main effect has been
illustrated in a wide variety of studies done by
different laboratories around the world.
And we have a deep understanding of the
causal mechanism behind that.
I take NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide, and I
was, my clip appeared in some other longevity podcast where I went on a longevity rant on one of my other videos and this longevity
expert dude who seemed like sharp guy knew what
he's talking about.
He kind of clowned me on the NMN thing.
So I took another look through the literature
and turns out actually there is some very decent
data for NMN having some longevity effects and
actual mechanistic effects as well.
But the total number of studies on the breadth of population of the world is very, very high. some very decent data for NMN having some longevity effects and actual mechanistic effects as well.
But the total number of studies on the breadth
of populations it's been studied on, it's just
not enough for me to go singing its praises
all the fucking time, which is why I mentioned
it now twice ever in public.
Pulled up for both times.
Right.
Yes.
And, and so, um, it's just something I take as
a hedging mechanism of like, maybe it was
something, uh, I, maybe it was something.
Uh, I just swallow it.
Right.
But I swallow a lot of other things.
Most, in any case, I won't get into it.
So, uh, shut up again.
So if there were these pills I could take that
reliably increased longevity, I would love that.
I would love if there were supplements like that.
There's Rosveratrol, there's a few other
candidates, but none of them have that like duty.
Is this really worth my money for sure?
Like if someone's eating only 80 grams of
protein per day and they're like, I can't
eat any more real food.
Should I take supplements?
You're like, yes.
Like, will it help with muscle mass?
Yes.
Like how many studies?
Hundreds on everyone.
There's nothing like that for longevity supplements.
So in 2024, if someone's selling you longevity supplements, they
could be onto something and there could be some valuable stuff people
have in the formulations that actually works, but nothing that
we can be ultra super sure about.
And really quick, no small number of shady fucking supplement companies
will tell you, you gotta take this.
It's going to make you live longer.
And to every single one of them are if their claims are extreme,
they're bullshitting you.
What about metformin?
Metformin is not a supplement.
It's a drug you have to have a prescription for.
However, metformin is a life extension drug.
Here's the thing.
It's a very small effect.
The only way we really know metformin extends
lifespan is because so many people take it for
diabetic outcomes that from that mechanism alone,
we have just like ungodly numbers of the end size
is huge.
So with a huge sample size and a study, you can
zone into real tiny effects and see them.
So if you take metformin versus not, you're
going to probably live a little longer with
metformin than not, but it's not this thing that's going to take like five
or 10 years and slap it onto your life.
That's what I'm really excited about for the future of medicine.
What I'm here to say is in, is in mid to late 2024, it's just not here yet.
And metformin is not something you just should go out and take.
It should be a conversation with your health provider.
Um, not everyone reacts very well to metformin.
And again, the longevity benefits are quite small.
There's other tons of side effects you can have with it.
There's some really good main effects.
Tons of people are on it for diabetic control, but it's not
some kind of anti-aging wonder drug.
I will say, uh, there's literature coming up a little bit now that some of the
mechanistic effects that you see with metformin are even higher with some
aglutide, uh, and a lot of the new anorectic drugs, the fat loss drugs.
So when people say like, well, I'm going to
take this drug, but when I get off of it,
want to regain the weight and like, yeah,
probably.
And they're like, well, so I just got to
be on it forever.
Like, uh-huh.
And they're like, but isn't that bad for me?
Like, no, it actually might be better for
you to be on these drugs than not on these
drugs in like seven out of 10 cases.
Is that a direct mechanism from the
semaglutide or is it that it's stopping you
from your weed addiction and your food
addiction and your food addiction and
your fucking porn addiction?
Low, there's at least one mechanism off hand
I can, I talk about it lowers your blood
sugar, your chronic area under the curve of
blood sugar substantially.
And that itself has like five different ways
in which it doesn't toxify your organs over time.
It was definitely a thing.
So there are some things like metformin,
some agglutide that are in the conversation
for like, oh, neat, they have little, little
longevity boosting effects, but there's just,
unfortunately, no drug or supplement
currently yet made that's like, this is the
thing you need to take for longevity.
And here's the thing, like there are people
that are, dare I say, anti-capitalist, um,
anti-fitness industry, anti-supplement industry
that will say the same things as I'm saying.
And it'll be true.
Uh, I'm the opposite of all of those things, same things as I'm saying. And it'll be true.
Uh, I'm the opposite of all of those things,
insanely pro-capitalist, supplement optimist, et cetera.
I just happen to think like, I don't, first of
all, I want to lie to people.
I also don't sell supplements.
I wouldn't make any money off that.
Now, if I have to lie to people to make money,
holy shit, welcome.
But it, it's just one of those things that I
really wish was true, but it's just not true yet.
Yet.
And that doesn't mean we're not several years
away from massive, massive changes in how drugs
and other things can affect longevity.
One of the other most common pathways,
intermittent fasting, we spoke about calorie
restriction earlier on, but intermittent fasting
is a very specific type of that with.
What's that thing that it does?
Autophagy.
Autophagy.
Autophagy. Autophagy.
There's another way to say that that's
slightly a slur.
So I would.
Ah, which we both are.
Yes.
I wake up in the morning and the
switch has been flipped.
Always.
My switch broke off through violent
homosexual intercourse.
Always. My switch broke off through violent homosexual intercourse.
It was a great time.
Got a world record on Grindr.
Yes.
Fasting.
Fasting is awesome for a bunch of different reasons.
Sometimes it fits people's lives better.
Sometimes it lets them control hunger better.
If you get enough protein, it's probably not going to lead you to become emaciated
or whatever. It's not the optimal way to get jacked, but it's not that far off. However,
fasting had this thing a few years back where people were like, this is the thing for longevity.
But it turned out that comparing models of fasting versus not fasting, if you keep the
caloric restriction as the variable that's at play, there's no way to
statistically differentiate fasting versus
not fasting.
Um, Mano Henselman has some really good
insight on this from a compilation of studies.
And so it's not really the fasting that's
probably keeping you alive longer.
It's the fact that you're eating less food
overall and the fact that you are now at a
slower, lower body weight lifetime overall.
So is there no truth to autophagy?
Autophagy happens all the time.
Autophagy itself, uh, can occur in the
presence of food or not the presence of food.
And if your caloric input throughout the day is
the same, the amount of recycling of your own
nutrients that has to occur is also the same.
So autophagy is a thing that you can see very
big spikes of and very big declivities of if
you fast and then feed.
But if you just eat regularly throughout the day,
you get these little spikes in the area.
And the curve ends up being like very, at
least very similar.
Right.
And so if you want to fast, if you suspect that
your reading of literature shows that it
actually has slight longevity benefits,
I'm absolutely not going to stop
anyone I think maybe that's the case.
Just at a, just a cold reading of
the literature, I'm not inclined to
believe this fast.
This is the holy grail.
Yeah.
Like to.
Right.
Like, cause some people like they're
on the longevity kick.
They're like, so you fast, right?
And you're like, no, they're like,
you're just a idiot.
Like, nah, that ain't it.
What about blue zones?
Um, I don't like the color blue.
I like red zones.
You're wearing blue.
I hate shirts.
Awful.
GBRS.
Terrible.
Is this blue to you?
I don't know what it is to me.
Maybe I'm colored.
Sort of blue, blue green.
Teal.
Teal.
I love teal.
I love teal.
Bennett.
Why are various of your staff members laughing at that?
Regularly when we do these shoots,
what it looks like to you, the untrained, unwashed masses,
is just that there's light coming up from places, right?
There's light, but everybody doesn't know.
So the fake sun outside,
and there's fake light underneath all of this.
It's not even actual photons.
It's simulated photons.
Fake light, fake light.
And you can make these tubes any color that you want.
I like them to be teal.
He said that we're not allowed them.
So I'm being abused.
People who know about video things say teal socks.
Yeah, they do.
But you're here in your shirt.
Yes, sorry.
Blue zones, blue zones.
Also the fans are kind of bluish.
They are.
All of these Japanese people keep on living forever.
Yeah.
Why?
Yeah.
So people in the blue zones do a lot of things right.
They tend to not overeat to the extent of being
grotesquely over fat.
They tend to have a high degree of community
involvement and personal involvement.
But, um, and that stuff we can take away from them.
What we categorically cannot take away from them is the ultra specifics of their
diets, because here's how it works in fantasy internet land.
You pick a Blue Zone culture whose diet you seem to like, and you go, it's the
olive oil with the Italians, or it's the fish and rice with the
Japanese or whatever the hell.
That's probably not it.
So the big myth here with Blue Zones is there are ultra specific foods
and diets that you eat.
They're going to just really radically enhance your longevity and ultra
specific other foods and diet types that you eat, they're just going
to croak you out real fast.
That's just not it.
The other thing about blue zones is tons of the blue zone effect is just
straight up genetic in nature.
So people that live long live in areas where their children live long.
Strange.
And they're genetically related to those said children.
Also strange and geographically in proximity.
Um, the, uh, I gotta be careful.
I say this within any two compared species, there are
hundreds of species and oftentimes even within a given
species that has subspecies, you can categorize most
animals on a spectrum of what's called a life history analysis.
Um, it's on the one hand called an R selected group.
Our selected animals don't have long lifespans relatively, and they
produce the very fecund.
So they produce a lot of offspring per individual.
The offspring typically don't mostly survive.
A few of them will not very long lives, not very fun lives in many cases.
And like spiders, spider mommy has, you know, I,
if it, it seems to me that that gigantic spider
just offset is in roughly the same space.
It was when we first looked at it an hour ago.
It's not a prop.
I promise it's not a prop.
Here's, here's my problem.
On the one hand, if it had moved the supposition
that can move infects my brain with the idea that it's going to move up my leg here not a prop. Here's, here's my problem. On the one hand, if it had moved the supposition that can move, infect my brain
with the idea that it's going to move up my
leg here in a bit, and you're going to hear me
scream and break the table and jump out of the barn.
But also here's the, there's no problem.
The supposition that it hasn't moved at all is
equally disturbing because then it's plotting.
It's waiting.
It's Chris, it's waiting for me.
They say that insects don't have the neural
network size and depth to
experience emotions like we do, but I can tell you that spider sure looks like
it's experienced.
Malice.
Hate.
Malice.
Yes.
Michael Malice.
Michael Malice.
Blue zones.
Ah.
So are selected.
Yep.
Very many offspring, not long lifespans.
Few offspring survive.
Spiders.
On the other end, you have whales.
Very case-selected, which means that
they have very long lifespans.
Individually, each whale is one hell of a survival machine.
It tends not to die super often.
They don't have a ton of offspring,
so that's just how they live their lives.
You can categorize all human subpopulations,
which we used to call races,
but that was racist or something on average into more trending towards are selected or
more trending towards case elect.
No way.
That is the last thing I'll say in depth about this specific topic, because
anything I say further will get me banned.
And with all the best intentions, I love every human race for all of
its various different qualities.
Um, but there's a lot of politically incorrect shit that is both true and
really kind of in some sense, like, damn, that's fucked up kind of shit that you
can take away from this.
There are books you can read, but another thing there's tons of really great shit.
You can take away from it.
Tons of explanatory power.
But one of the things is almost every single, every single blue zone group, as far
as I know, is just coming from a, have like a
known K selected population.
Wow.
Just, there's, there's a little long time you throw
Japanese people anywhere.
They live a fucking long time.
This is what they do.
And so we have to be careful not to conflate
genetics with, let me, let me bring up a, a
different example, slightly different example. me bring up a, a different
example, slightly different example. Those gentlemen, I forgot what this guy's name was a while
back. He was like recommending really ancestral diets and kind of a lot of raw foods. And he was
saying they have an effect on your dentition and like how your teeth are, teeth health, jaw shape.
And he was citing a lot of like African subpopulations that they have such healthy
teeth and it's because of what they eat.
And I'm like, ma fucker, black people just have better teeth than everyone.
Like he just went to Nigerians or whoever have perfect teeth to begin with. And he was like, see, it's their diet.
Like no, it's cause they're Nigerian.
Their diet could play a role, but I was just like the total absence of a discussion
of genetic variation in this was just like disheartening to say the least.
And so when we talk about blue zones, et cetera, if we forget the fact that like, yeah,
like Japanese people, et cetera, just outlive
everyone, we're, if you factor out the genetics,
the blue zone shit starts to shrink down to like,
okay, it's mostly just community involvement,
generally healthy eating, uh, et cetera, et cetera,
socialization.
When you factor those things out, the blue zones,
if you're looking at like, oh, kale, we have
to eat kale or seaweed.
That's the thing you're doing the shit all wrong. You mentioned it zones, if you're looking at like, oh, kale, we have to eat kale or seaweed. That's the thing you're doing the shit all wrong.
You mentioned it earlier on what you're looking
forward to from a future of longevity standpoint.
I imagine some of it's probably got to do with AI.
Some of it's probably got to do with computers
and uploading and all the rest of it.
Yes.
Human brain interface thing.
Yes.
Uh, and I imagine that some of it may be able to
do with actually reversing aging as well.
Drugs, AI, I imagine AI also makes the drugs that
are going to reverse the aging.
Yes.
What are the most promising areas when it comes
to the future of aging research?
Yeah.
Et cetera.
Yeah.
I'll probably do this.
I'll try to do this in order of how it's
likely to appear in the future.
I'll probably get all this wrong so you to do this in order of how it's likely to appear in the future.
I'll probably get all this wrong so you can just take it for what it is.
AI powered drug discovery began in earnest, full bore earlier this year.
The ability of AI to discover new effective drugs, to address various disease conditions is for most people who have thought about it a little bit as
yet unfathomable.
It's a quality leap.
It's nonsense.
If you went back to 1985 in a time machine,
forget that the time machine is also
impressive in this case.
And you gave someone an iPhone fully charged and somehow the iPhone works through the time machine to access that the time machine is also impressive in this case. And you gave someone an iPhone fully charged and
somehow the iPhone works through the time machine
to access the modern internet.
It would be to the very best engineers,
fucking baffling, damn near magic.
But now we take it totally for granted and kids
like jump in the pool with their iPhone and they're
like, ah, crap it, fry it out.
I'll just get another one.
Who cares?
So what I'm about to say, all these crazy
things, remember that most humans do linear I'll just get another one who cares. So what I'm about to say, all these crazy things.
Remember that most humans do linear extrapolation, but the arc of all of history, all of history, including pre-history
and biology and physics and chemistry, chemistry, then
physics is exponential in nature.
This is not up for debate.
It's just, it just is every single human or not human
biological or geological
event that you plot on a chart, you need to
plot on a log chart. So it gets rid of the
exponent and that's still an exponent. So this
is a real thing. And so when we, people are
like, what is 2035 going to be like? They mostly
do a linear approximation, extrapolation, but
it's also a linear extrapolation to the very low slope because most people have an inborn pessimistic bias,
which makes sense in the Paleolithic era in which we evolved because shit
sucked and you expected shit to suck.
Like, yeah, your uncle probably got gored by a bison every other day.
Shit was off.
So things are going to get much better very quickly and then even faster.
Short of machines killing all of us or world War three, crazy shit's going to happen.
Here's roughly how I see the most likely timeline.
Again, huge, just eat the whole salt shaker for this shit.
Buck a grain of salt, all the salt.
That's not good for longevity, so don't do it.
As long as your blood pressure is fine, you're good to go.
Okay.
So probably one of the first things we're going to see is
kaboshing entire categories of disease with insanely powerful drugs we're going to see is. Kaboshing entire categories of disease with insanely powerful drugs.
We're going to see in the late 2020s, early 2030s, like heart disease,
gone cancer, gone Alzheimer's gone, just gone.
Like, don't take my word for it.
We already have a category of viral and bacterial diseases that we've
kabashed who the fuck has, you know, anyone polio like a human. There's people who don't get polio anymore. Who dies of like
rickets and shit like that. Like it's just, we laugh at it now, but it used to
just kill everyone. Can you imagine the 1600s? You're like, dude, scurvy? Not a
thing in the future. They're like, you're kidding. Like, no, like this guy's
drinking the Kool-Aid. There's no way. Like also Kool-Aid's in the future. Like
what's Kool-Aid? You're like, it's great. It's okay. It's red and it's sweet.
And it's based on some berry. I'm not sure.
So when you kibosh entire categories of
disease like that, you just take morbidity
down like crazy.
Cause living with like chronic cancer or
some shit or chronic heart disease condition,
it's a different kind of living than living
truly health.
And in addition to that, it's going to bump
up longevity a ton.
And like nowadays, the average person lives into their late seventies.
That might still be true in about eight years or so,
but, uh, the distribution is going to close
substantially.
Yep.
And so the average person might live into their
mid eighties, not a ton higher, but like way
fewer people are dying in their fifties and sixties.
The bottom tail just goes right up.
Yep.
So that's probably going to be a big thing.
Probably a little bit later, maybe sooner, who knows,
we're going to get some traction on reverse aging.
Uh, David Sinclair has spoken about this at length.
He was real early to the reverse aging thing.
And the way it works in social media and news media is when you
have one rat study that does cool shit, people are like, this is it.
When's it coming?
And it's like, we need some more time to get this going, but there's nothing
about aging really that precludes re altering the expression of your own DNA
to just do better cleanup and reverse your age as you present biologically
chronologically, no time machine yet.
Biologically it's a tractable problem.
There's nothing theoretically about it. That's like, that time machine yet. Biologically, it's a tractable problem. There's nothing theoretically about it.
That's like, that's just impossible.
Cause again, it seems like, like the shit, the
genie from Aladdin wouldn't even do, you know,
like how do you reverse aging?
It turns out that your body mostly ages because the
ancestral evolutionary pressures to stay alive
and healthy and well for a long time.
We were just too, are selected for like, you're probably going to
die by the time you're 27.
So if we put one half of your metabolic pathways into doing
constant DNA cleanup, you just suck at everything else.
And then you die when you're 18, the world is not sufficiently stable for you.
And there's not enough providence in the world to keep you upright so that
you can fuel your body for shit like that.
However, if we get age reversal, right, both through therapeutics and genetic
engineering, we can have a situation where your body's actually like, Oh, I'm
just never going to like get lazy about these anti-aging effects.
And you essentially just continue to live in a roughly 22 year old's body.
They've already done this in cell cultures.
They've already done it in a few small animal models.
It is not a huge leap to do it in grand scale in humans at large.
With AI power type of shit that 10 years from now might be a legit thing.
I did a whole on my other philosophy channel.
I've done a whole thing about the implications philosophically, conceptually, socially of what reverse
aging is going to be like, but Chris, can you imagine
taking 100 million elderly Americans in 2037 and three
months later, they all present as age 22, physically
22 years old, cognitively sharp, like 22, energy, like 22,
titties up, like 22.
What happens to your dick and balls sharp, like 22 energy, like 22 titties up, like 22.
What happens to your dick and balls? Something like 22.
Bro nightclub scene, you gotta go back to your
old job, like, holy shit.
Gold rush.
So all this other stuff could very well be on
the horizon.
There's a chance it just never works out.
I would assign that as a low probability of
that.
So aging reversal is a big deal.
They talk about this thing you brought up
earlier, I think off camera, um,
longevity, escape velocity.
When true robust aging reversal comes in, that's the spaceship leaving the
fucking atmosphere because short of getting hit by a bus or getting eaten by
a crocodile, you might just never die.
Cause you're biologically just always 22.
So the most important thing for everybody now to live longer is to live longer.
Okay.
So that's a huge statement.
It sounds like a tautology, but it really is a thing.
If you can just make it to the mid 2030s, there
was a high probability that the great gentle,
powerful arms of biotech are going to lift
you the rest of the way.
Just, just go to 2035.
That's where you need to reach to, right?
You know, when the hero grabs the heroine's hand and lifts her in the helicopter, that type of shit. So, because people are often way, just, just go to 2035. That's where you need to reach you. Right. You know, when the hero grabs the heroin's hand and lifts him the
helicopter, that type of shit.
So, because people are often like, okay, I can have a lot of fun smoking
cigarettes, eating hamburgers, smoking hamburger flavored cigarettes, a
cigarette shaped like a hamburger, every permutation thereof, but like, I
don't want to be 88 in a nursing home.
Who gives a shit up until quite recently, that was like a valid
trade-off you could make like, I'm not going to live forever.
I'm going to rock out.
Dope.
And for spirit energy wise, I think that's great.
However, it's getting to be pretty clear that into the mid and late
2030s, the power of biotech is going to be so fucking absurd.
You probably want to make it to see that because you might just be getting a
whole different level of ability to live longer at a healthy presentation.
So we got that.
The next thing after that, somewhere in the mix is genetic engineering.
There are genes in your body that make proteins that make you age slower or
faster, we can just select for make proteins that make you age slower or faster.
We can just select for the genes that make you age slower or reverse aging or whatever else you want,
or make you just not susceptible to entire categories of disease.
Like we already know the genetic variants that basically like you'll just never get Alzheimer's,
and we know genetic variants that you're probably going to get Alzheimer's probably really soon.
If we just rewire your DNA as an adult human, you take some pills or you take a shot and over
the next several weeks feel kind of look a
little different.
We can do that.
The big problem with that is one is a vector
problem.
How do you introduce the thing that, but, but
CRISPR makes these enormous leaps that you
almost never hear about in the news is
bullshit nerd talk, but now they have
a pretty good control of the bacterial
genome where they can trade in and out.
Switch it on, switch it off.
Yeah.
And it's just a few orders of magnitude,
more complex, but the way AI and biotech
go is they just leap orders of magnitude
every two years or so.
And so we might have in the 2030s, some, I
should have a book called In the 2030s and
it's just blank.
It's like, whatever the fuck you want,
magical bullshit's coming into the picture
of my ugly face.
But there's a situation where, so there's one,
there's a vector problem.
Probably not a big problem because it turns out we can
vector almost anything into your cells at this point.
And we're going to get better at that.
The other problem is a combinatorial problem.
I tweak this gene, I tweak that gene.
This one makes you live longer.
This one makes you live extra long, but their
proteins interact in high concentrations to poison you and you die at age two.
Fuck.
How do we even predict that?
Well, AI can start to predict a lot of stuff and will eventually
be able to predict more or less all of the major functions of
metabolism in the human body.
And because, uh, if you simulate like the, the, uh, the layer of
phospholipids around your cells with a simulation that takes
in most of the variants of how they are.
You don't actually need to simulate every single
quantum interaction to get a 9.999% like
functional, functional, functional simulation.
So AI, this is absolutely intractable for any human
brain to do or any number of groups of scientists
on earth working together.
But for AI, 2030s AI, it would,
there's a way if you just run the numbers,
which like Ray Kurzweil has done, for
example, and many others, it's just like
easily tractable.
It's like, if you ask a human nervous
system at age one, can you kick a soccer
ball into a goal?
You're like, no, fuck that.
What's not advanced student?
What about a 15 year old?
You're like, something's wrong with you.
If you can't do that, like really?
Do you know how complex the biomechanics
of kicking a soccer ball really are? fucking really complex, but for 15 year
old adult nervous system, it's an easy task.
Same for AI taking the human body and being able to essentially unfold all the
DNA, figure out what everything does, figure out the interactive effects, and
then fold it back up and go, here's what you need to change to get this effect.
Once we get that in a completely different era of humanity, you want to be
blue, sweet, you're blue. You want elf ears, you got elf ears. Once we get that in a completely different era of humanity, you want to be blue, sweet, you're blue.
You want elf ears, you got elf ears.
No problem.
What other fuck you want of all of the variation that humans can have
genetically, all of humans ever alive, occupy a fucking drop in an ocean, the
size of the volume of the earth.
So it's not like everything in there kills you and humans are the
only things that are alive.
It's that mostly most of human genetic variation is completely unexplored.
And if you just manually through biotech engineer that you get to a point
where people don't age and they don't die of disease and they're just kind
of dope and they even could be really hardy.
Like for example, they could take a genetic variant and change the
structure of your bones and double layer your skull.
So you get hit by a bus, you die. Now you get hit by a bus and you're like,
ow, and you just walk off. It's totally possible to do all that stuff.
But here's where the really cool stuff happens. At some point, and Jared Feather and I have a
little running kind of inside bet as to what happens first. We don't know.
At some point, cybernetics is going to come in. What the fuck is cybernetics?
You get your arm cut off today.
They can give you a replacement arm, but it kind of sucks compared to a real arm.
However, in 2024, the arm they can install already can ambulate.
It can grab some objects.
You have a little bit of feeling in there interacts with your nerves.
That shit that in 1990 was like straight up science fiction, like total insanity
in the 2030s, maybe 2040s, but maybe earlier, you'll be able
to, when things fall off or don't function
anymore, replace them with robot parts.
Now I want to be on record saying this, I'm
getting the whole fucking thing done.
I'm going to be a robot.
If I get like my leg hurt and they're like,
well, we can also replace it all.
They're like, well, we can't replace your
heart yet.
I'm like, okay, fine.
But everything else.
So the ability to cybernetically replace
things and enhance things means that
you're in a situation where let's say you can no longer ambulate because your
quality of life just totally sucks.
You can't walk cause your knees are too fucked up or something.
If you get bionic knees and bionic lower limbs entirely, all of a sudden
social interaction, community, all that stuff, you have access to it.
So that's going to be a big deal.
It's going to happen.
I can tell you specifically at the point where you're going to see a revolution
where most humans, not all choose enhancement over just staying biological.
And I'll tell you when this happens.
Um, look at the trajectory of how much cell phones have gotten better or TVs
have gotten better over time.
It's the improvement trajectory of technology versus biology, radically fast
measured in decades prior.
Now it's measured in like every year your current iPhone sucks
and the new one's way better.
That is going to be the paradigm it already is to artificial limbs, for example.
So whatever the best.
You're going to merge technological progress speeds with biological
progress, or at least technological progress speeds are going to
drag you along for the ride.
Yes.
And here's the thing.
progress or at least technological progress speeds are going to drag you along for the
ride.
Yes.
And here's the thing.
If a bionic arm is roughly the same ability set
as your natural arm, very few psychotic weirdos
like me are going to go get their natural arm cut
off and put a bionic arm, just vibes.
But if a bionic arm, three years later is 10 times
better at everything that your arm used to do than your real arm.
A few of your friends got it.
You're like, dude, you're nuts, bro.
You cut off your own arm like, yeah, like,
you get tired at work.
Nope.
It never gets tired.
Like, dude, I saw you hiking.
Aren't there a lot of like lions and shit around?
You're like, my arm is, I can punch one lion and
it just dies.
And like, I have laser, shoots lasers, whatever.
The laser thing is a joke, but at some point when technology gets so much
faster than biology and the arm is a hundred or
a thousand times in every possible way better,
people will choose to excise their limbs and
various other body parts.
Eyes.
Think about this.
Have you ever seen the movie, um, ghost in the
shell, the cinematic rendition?
It's a, uh, Scarlett Johansson's in it.
So it's nice even if you put it on mute, but, uh, this one dude gets his
eyes fucked up through an explosion.
He's like a special forces dude.
And he gets, uh, bionic eyes implanted.
And one of the features he talks about, he's like, yeah, they got this.
They got that.
They got mile zoom.
I had to like rewind and go back miles zoom, but you can see one mile ahead.
If those eyes are real and they look like human eyes or even like a little bit
cyberpunk, but not exactly human, dude, I'm getting that shit.
I want to fucking see him. I want to see in the dark.
And if you're 22 or if you're 35 or 45, you're not taking your realize out for
shit. They're like, well, there's a 0.001% that surgery goes wrong and you die.
You never can see again. Fuck that.
But if you're 87 and you need a fucking, you know, you can't even see anymore.
I'm getting the fucking cybernetic eyes.
So the cybernetic stuff is gonna start this process,
which has a distinct end.
And that process is replacing human parts
with machine parts until we can scan your brain,
know exactly every detail of your brain
that we need to simulate your entire you,
because everything about you that's you
is entirely enclosed in this period.
Once we have the scanning technology and the AI
tech to do that, you can take your brain and
download it into a robot body and have a separate
copy of your brain doing one of two things.
One is sitting dormantly in the cloud so that when
your robot body gets crushed by a boulder,
cause you decide to climb Mount Everest, you wake
up in a bed and you're like, what the fuck? Where was I? And they're you decided to climb Mount Everest, you wake up in a bed and you're like,
what the fuck?
Where was I?
And they're like, you climb Mount Everest, you die.
Yes, you do.
I, this is not a philosophical debate at all.
This is a, this is a giant red herring.
I'll take this one on the chin.
I'm getting really pumped.
I can tell this is the most animated you've been.
What happens if you have a biological you and someone scans your brain and puts
that brain and robot body and turns it off.
Which one's the real you?
There's a categorically correct answer to this question.
Both.
There's two of you now.
They're both you.
They're both going to feel exactly like you did just
before they copied the brain.
So if the real you dies fucking on Mount Everest, and then you get
uploaded to a new robot and you wake up in a hospital bed and they're like, Hey, you died on Mount Everest.
Congratulations.
Here are pictures of you dying.
You're like, Oh, that's dope.
You won't remember that unless you were uploading to the Tesla cloud.
And then you will, uh, you will be the real you in every sense of the word
that feels like the real you, you're absolutely the real you, cause you're
not even the real you used to be all of the molecules of your brain got replaced.
The cells replaced every few days.
Anyway, you think you'd have psychological continuity from that? Obviously not even the real you used to be. All of the molecules of your brain got replaced. The cells replaced every few days. Anyway. Do you think you'd have psychological continuity
from that?
Obviously not from the dying thing.
You're not going to like transport your sense
of self from the guy under the boulder to
the person in the bed.
Yeah.
What do you think here?
We're getting into philosophy.
Yeah, there I've hypothesized a thought
experiment in which you will have continuity.
So what we do is put you in a kind of giant
MRI scanner, live sort of situation, and it starts
scanning your brain and it already simulated your
entire brain and your current thoughts.
And then it clones the thoughts.
And now there is an, a you that lives in the cloud
that's looking over your head with the camera
systems installed and going, holy shit, I can see
into my own fucking, that's me right there.
But the you in here, you're just looking up and you're like, okay, is there me?
Did the copying work?
And remember scanning everything live.
And so what they do at this is very morbid.
They'd probably do it in a better way, but they go, okay, you ready to
for full transfer and you go, uh-huh.
And they go, they just cut your head right off.
So you biologically you dies, but every part of the brain activity, including
your experience of your own death,
is modeled and experienced live by cyber you.
So go, oh my God, I'm dying.
Right. Holy shit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But then I'm still here in the cloud.
So once we can do that, and again, it's
tractable for AI to do this.
This is no mystical stuff involved.
Then when you can live in a robot body or live
in the cloud, there's going to be a couple of different ways people will go with that.
Some people will just never do it and God bless it. Fuck it. It's weird. I believe in the soul. Fuck that.
The other thing is some people might embody themselves in robot bodies to do things in the physical world and then maybe like spend some other time in the digital world entirely in simulation.
There are many, many people I'm convinced that will just be like, I don't need a robot body.
I'm convinced that will just be like, I don't need a robot body.
I just want to live in the fucking cloud.
Cause in the cloud, from nominally easy, small amount of compute, you could just live as the hero in a permanent Lord of the Rings fantasy
that never ends, you could speed up your brain to go a thousand X.
You can live as a pirate.
You can live as a clown.
You can live as a whatever infinite lifetimes of modeling.
That is super futuristic post-singularity type of shit, but
that's where that's all headed.
So TLDR for this insane rant, the, for me, the thing that keeps me at least to my
extent of trade-offs interested in promoting my longevity and quality of life,
specifically the longevity part is I want to make it to that dope AI medicine part.
And once you make it to that, your probability of death shifts down considerably.
You make it to genetic engineering, it shifts
again, you make it to age reversal, it shifts
again, you make it to cybernetic, it shifts
again, if whoever makes it to when we're
regularly uploading people into the cloud, short
of the earth getting hit by a comet and all the
computer systems going, you're never going to die.
Never.
You know, at some point the protons decay, whatever, one times 10 to the 126 million
years in the future. So for the first time, it's realistic, optimistic, but realistic to say,
if you're ever interested in longevity and quality of life improvement, 2024, it's a fucking big deal
now. Now's the time to gather shit, especially
if you're older, look, if you're 22, you want to
smoke a shitload of cigarettes.
Fine.
You'll probably still make it.
Who gives a shit?
You're like, Hey, you're, you're in the
clouds smoking cigarettes.
I never quit.
I never quit X that one out.
Jesus.
So, but if you're in your forties, especially
if in your fifties and sixties and seventies,
now's the time to do all the right shit we've
been talking about because the payoff might
not just be you live 10 years longer.
And it probably will be, it might be that weird
as it seems to say, you might just not die at
a human time scale whatsoever.
And then you're, you know, you're into some
cool shit.
Dude, what a hopeful way to finish a
conversation about longevity and dying.
Yeah.
Mike is retail, ladies and gentlemen, dude.
Thank you so much.
You already know that I love all of the stuff
that you're doing.
It's been the best period to watch you guys
crush RP strength.
I've been using my training at the moment, the
last nine, 10 months or so.
I told you when we trained together, it's been
the best gains I've made in probably a decade using the app.
So I highly recommend people go and check it out at the website, which is.
Flacafino.
Don't say that.
You say that.
RPstrength.com.
Yes, that's it.
But also go on our YouTube and follow all the links and we'll kick you to the site
sooner or later.
Hell yeah.
Mike, I appreciate you.
Chris, thank you so much.