Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #18 Why Aging is a Disease w/ David Sinclair

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

In this episode, David and Peter discuss aging as a disease, the technology needed to reverse aging, and tips and tricks to increase your lifespan. You will learn about: 01:27 | Is aging a disease? 18:20 | It's never too late to begin your Longevity Mindset 25:11 | How long until we reverse aging? 47:28 | Dietary changes to increase your health David Sinclair is a biologist and academic known for his expertise in aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a genetics professor and the Co-Director of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He’s been included in Time100 as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and his research has been featured all over the media. Besides writing a New York Times Best Seller, David has co-founded several biotech companies, a science publication called Aging, and is an inventor of 35 patents _____________ Resources Read David’s book, Lifespan: Why We Age- and Why We Don’t Have To Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about Abundance360. Read the Tech Blog. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. Listen closely. That's not just paint rolling on a wall. It's artistry. A master painter carefully applying Benjamin Moore Regal Select eggshell with deftly executed strokes. The roller, lightly cradled in his hands, applying just the right amount of paint.

It's like hearing poetry in motion. Benjamin Moore, see the love. This limit to human lifespan, there is no biological limit. Of course there isn't. We are the same stuff as a whale that can live a lot longer than us. We're built of the same stuff as tortoises and pretty much the same stuff as trees that live thousands of years. It's a software problem.

I'm putting Greer on the line. It's a software problem, and what's interesting about biology is that software encodes the ability to rebuild the hardware so we got to reset the software and when we do that in my lab we find that tissues regenerate in animals our organoids which are mini human organs regenerate they fix themselves and they function like they're new again so it's in my view 99 a software problem and a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am.

This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Hey, David. Good morning. Good afternoon. How you doing, pal? Peter. Hey, good.

Thanks. How are you doing? Good. I would normally ask you what you have for breakfast or lunch, but I know you skipped those. Yeah, I'm a struggling vegan. I'm not always successful, but I do strive most of the time to skip those meals. Yeah, as do I. But coffee is a mandatory. The question is how much coffee, but we'll get to that conversation later. So I want to talk about a conversation that you and I have, and frankly, you've championed to a large degree, which is, is aging a disease?

I just saw a Twitter poll recently that you retweeted and I did too on that subject. Before we get there, some of the facts that are at both our fingertips that I think are pretty crazy. I just held my longevity platinum trip. And one of the things that was shocking to me was that 70% of all heart attacks have no antecedents. There's no shortness of breath. There's no narrowing on imaging. It's just all of a sudden, you know, someone literally dies from a heart attack from soft plaque. Crazy, right? And the other facts, you know, at Fountain Life, we do full body imaging and coronary imaging. And in seemingly healthy adults, what we're finding is 2% of people have cancers they don't know about, and 2.5% of people have aneurysms they don't know about.

And so it's interesting. We're all optimists about our health, but yet we have very little insight. I don't know. How do you think about that? It's crazy. I think of heart disease and cancer as largely avoidable diseases these days with high technology, the sort of things that found life are doing. And that's through genetic testing, looking at the DNA circulating through blood, as well as new types of imaging. and the sort of things that you and I do,

which is extensive blood work on a regular basis. But that's not able to be reached by most people. And, you know, right now, it's a fair amount of somebody's salary to do all that. So it's not fair to me to say, oh, do this it will be fine but we are heading towards a world where we will know much more about our bodies before we get sick and one of the things that i've rallied against is the old concept and you're a trained md you know this of of medicine thinking of treating disease rather than treating the patient before they get disease. And so that we have to shift from that mindset to take care of people throughout their whole life before they get sick, because what's driving most of these diseases, including sudden death

from an infarction, unstable plaque, or even soft plaque, is the aging process itself. And that's happening every day and depends on how we live our lifestyle and that's largely slowable that the way we live our life will actually slow down the ticking of that clock in my lab here behind me we are routinely measuring that clock in mice and in human samples it's very clear that some people age much more slowly than others and 80 of that effect is not genetic it's's based on lifestyle. Just a personal note, I had one of my best friends die last week, suddenly from a heart attack while he was driving home, a professor at Cornell. And I've lost three people in the last couple of years, very close to

me for the same reason. So yeah, we do need to take preventative action and measure things as best we can. It'll only get better. Yeah. The stat, I was with a mutual friend of ours, Eric Verdon up at the Buck. And we were talking about this, the stat that he threw out is that genetics account for 7% and lifestyle for 93%. And that's extraordinary because we do have control over our lifestyle. But the point you made, which and I also, Brian Binney, who was the pilot who won the Ansari X Prize, made the flight, again, felt dizzy, went to sleep, never woke up, you know, at age 69. And people don't realize this, that heart disease does start early and it is to a

large degree preventable. You know, it is expensive, but this is where the work that you do and to some degree my companies do is going to change the game. I'll give you one example, which I'm excited about. And, you know, we have this enzyme in our liver, PCSK9, that generates our bad cholesterol, our LDL. And, you know, we've had these monoclonal antibodies that cost ridiculous amounts of money. It's like $5,000, $10,000 a year. And so it's not a first-line defense to lower your cholesterol by 50%. But we've just finished our primate studies and are going to humans on a vaccine against the PCSK9 enzyme, right? And it will be 50 bucks a year. And you can sort of do this preventively. And I mean, you can talk about

the CRISPR edit of the PCSK9 gene. Well, this is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be done. And I commend you for supporting that kind kind of development uh you know i talked about the the expense and and you and i talk about this a lot is that it starts out for the rich and let's call them the elites who are pushing the boundaries that was that's true for all technology the printing press wasn't available books were not available uh initially flight was not available to most people um and it's going to happen the same way here. Computers get cheaper and biotech is going to get cheaper and you're helping that. So what I'm looking for is in the same way that you are reprogramming. So now we use gene therapy,

we're in non-human primates now correcting vision, restoring the youth of the eye. correcting vision, restoring the youth of the eye. That's still going to be a therapy that is expensive. Gene therapies are expensive by their nature. But my lab is working extensively, hurriedly, with passion. Yes, hurry up, hurry up. Yeah, I walk in every day and push them harder on our behalf, those of us who are over a certain age. They do have molecules and combinations of molecules that can reverse aging without gene therapy.

And so those chemicals could be very cheap. They could be a few cents a day, maybe a few dollars to reverse aging, but save trillions, tens of trillions of dollars overall in GDP costs for the US. And that's the kind of buck that you get. Yeah, I know. It's great. I mean, picking up on the point you said earlier, I think people need to realize that, as you said, technologies in the beginning that are only affordable to the rich also in the

beginning don't work that well. You know, the mobile phone in the beginning was a $100,000 device and would drop a call for a Wall Street banker on every block going down Manhattan. And by the time it works really well, it's cheap and available to everybody. And hopefully the work that you're doing is going to democratize and demonetize these things. And picking up on the trillion side, i'm sure i know you know the stat that came out i don't know nine months a year ago that a single additional productive year of life for the human population is worth 38 trillion dollars the global economy which is i mean that's

mind-boggling we calculated it um and by we i mean andrew scott um and other colleagues uh in the uk we've calculated that it's it's actually 86 trillion for the u.s alone uh extending healthy life by one year and if you do 10 years it's 365 trillion for the u.s uh and so this is the only way of saving that much money is to stop military spending, which obviously we're not going to do. And this is money, remember, that can be used for developing new medicines, education, tackling climate change, pushing technology forward. The idea that slowing aging is going to bankrupt us and overpopulate us turns out to be patently false demonstrably false and uh so that's why you and i think that this is one of the challenges of our time over the next five to ten years to be able to achieve a cheap safe effective age slowing and age reversal yeah i

don't think i mean it's it's a moral obligation and i think people need to realize that. And there's such a pushback. I think people don't realize there are so many institutions that exist today that don't want that because they've built their entire existence on the fact that we die and the fact that we are not living longer. But it's the single greatest gift you can give humanity and any individual. Well, it is. And you give a lot of talks. I'm curious how you have your audiences respond. Mine, what I've learned over the last 25 years is that it's all about framing the question. If I ask people, how long do they want to live? Most people will say oh over age 90 or 100 come shoot me it often offends the 90 year olds 100 year olds in the audience and i i'm also on record saying nobody who's healthy who has friends wants to die tomorrow

nobody no matter how old they are age is irrelevant as long as you're healthy and happy and that's what we're aiming for but also if i frame the question differently it is if you could be healthy at 120 would you and almost everybody wants that and so it's not the longevity that people want it's the health that leads to longevity and the good news the technology does that we i don't know how to make someone live longer without keeping them healthy. Do you? No, I think we need to define for a second the term of lifespan and healthspan, right? And I think really what you and I speak to, to a large degree, constantly is healthspan, is retaining your cognition, your aesthetics, your mobility. So you're thinking clearly, you look good, you're moving well, you know, past 100. And I've had the same experience. I

literally was at a event at the Vatican on stage with an elderman, a rabbi, a priest, a cardinal, sounds like the opening of a joke. And there's this audience of probably about 300 scientists and physicians. And Tony Robbins was there with me. And I asked him, how many of you here would like to live past 120? And it was like crickets. It was like maybe 20% of the room raised their hand. And I was like shocked. And this was in the earliest days of my asking that question.

Of course, I reframe it now in a different way. But there's another, you said it beautifully, which is you need to have friends, right? You need to have people you care about. And the notion that having, you need to have your future in your mind and heart be larger than your past. If you have nothing to live for, why live?

And I think that whole psychology is so, so critically important. Right. And you're the expert at this. You inspire people to have goals, which is really what gets us out of bed in the morning. And anyone who doesn't have a passion or a goal in life, just find one. It's essential for health and longevity, and in my view, and happiness. And it can be small, it can be large, but you need one. And it's actually now proven that those who have goals and companions who support them, those two things are the ones that live the longest. In fact, that was even more

important than diet in this long-term Harvard study. Beautiful. Good. I've got both of those in spades. I'm curious. One of the mindsets I talk about is having a longevity mindset, because I think you can will yourself to live and will yourself to die. And I'd love to, you know, you don't use that terminology, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think a longevity mindset means. Well, I've witnessed it. My father, who I wrote about in my book Lifespan, and who recently flew out from Australia to be with me in Boston and helped me teach a course at Harvard to those students. He had to change his mindset. He was a typical 67-year-old at the time, which is a mindset as I understand it. I'm going to

retire. I'll have a good 10 years, hopefully, and then the rest is hellacious. And I don't even want to think about it, but it's going to happen. And my career is over and I'm not sure I'm going to do much, but just sit around and maybe do some gardening. Now that was 67. He's now, well, he became a mid seventies and realized he actually, after adopting these longevity lifestyles that I talk about, which includes we'll get to fasting, eating well, exercising, the usual stuff, but also some supplements. Sleep, yes. He gets a lot of sleep. He has a very good social group.

He hangs out with one of my ex-girlfriends, which keeps him young. True story. ends which keeps him young uh true story and uh and so the supplements you know a lot of people know the supplements that i take myself he takes those as well and together some combination of those has allowed him to get through 70s in a very healthy way he's got no diseases uh he's got he started a new career he uh he went back work. He's helping raise his grandkids. In fact, one of his grandkids is living with him. And he loves life. And he's had to change his mindset.

His mindset is, hey, he told me last night over the Internet, a video conference, hey, I've decided to get a puppy. You know, his mindset is, I'm going to live over 100. I've seen that that i've made it through my 70s i'm getting younger literally he's getting biologically younger as he gets older he's now 83 no diseases uh not even any pain he's got super amount of energy his brain is actually sharper than it used to be in his 40s because he's not distracted by his kids. And so he's loving life like he never did before and realizing that the idea that you have this finite limit, you need to just give that up and say that anything is possible

because science is also advancing at such a rate that we don't know what's going to be possible even five years from now. Five years ago, I didn't know it was possible to reverse aging safely. Now we know at least in animals it is, and it looks like it will be in primates, with which we are one. And so the longer you live, the longer you will live. That's already true, but it's going to be exponential. We need to love what we do, multiple careers, and not have a limit because that does place limits on us mentally as well as physically. This episode is brought to you by Levels.

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I agree 100%, and it's beautiful. consider as well. You know, one of the other, I agree a hundred percent and it's, it's beautiful. And I, one of the things that I do, and I know you inherently do this given your world, your life, your, your, uh, who you spend time with is, uh, actually taking in all of the breakthroughs constantly, uh, that are going on. There's a shocking number of breakthroughs going on across the wide range of the hallmarks of aging and the technologies coming our way and the tools of AI. And so it's when you're deluged by all this positive news in the health tech and biotech world, and you substitute that for all of the news from the Crisis News Network, my name for CNN, it allows you to just be optimistic because it's accelerating, right? I mean, you must feel

a palpable acceleration of the amount of publications and breakthroughs and technologies in this field. Right. Well, my head is spinning and even I can't really keep up. I'm using AI to feed me the papers that I need to read or look at. Social media helps. Before I get out of bed, I know this sounds really bad for myself, but before I get out of bed, I've probably read the abstracts of 20 different papers in this field of advances. And that's just the beginning of my day uh and i'm not exaggerating there's there's a deluge i get feeds for that and these are big breakthroughs we used to think it was exciting to extend the lifespan of a yeast cell by 10 percent uh that was when i was you know in my 20s nowadays you can't open up a major journal

typically without seeing something relevant to aging and a breakthrough in understanding why we age and how to slow it down and even now reverse it and it's a wonderful age where we can do instead of one experiment per month which is how i did my phd we can do a million in a day the the genome is now 100 to 200 instead of being 2 billion billion. And even reading the DNA methylation clock from a cheek swab or a blood, which is one way of measuring your biological age. Speaking of democratization of technology, it's a few hundred dollars at best for a consumer right now to measure their biological age through a blood test or a cheek swab. My student just

developed technology that brings that down by at least two orders of magnitude, probably go three to make it just a few dollars. I mean, it'll keep coming down to where the cost of sending the sample in will be more than the actual test itself. That's the plug, the company, it's called Tally Health, if you want to sign up as one of the early users. I'm excited. Get in line for that. But my point is that we are in a world where things are changing so rapidly that you want to stick around, if not anything but curiosity. Well, it's the most exciting time ever to be alive.

I mean, the only time we're exciting than today is going to be tomorrow. And I agree with you, the deluge is exponentially accelerating. And I ended up building an AI system myself that searches the world's news for converging technologies impacting healthspan and longevity. And I think everybody listening knows where it's longevityinsider.org. And I get 10 to 15 journal articles, tweets, you know, anyway, magazine articles about this. What are the breakthroughs?

And it's staggering. And what's amazing, and David, you mentioned this slightly a little bit earlier, you know, five years ago, really 10 years ago, the idea of working in the field of longevity or aging or an idea of age reversal was a death knell. Now it's the hottest subject. I mean, how many graduate students do you have competing for positions in your labs? I mean, it must be staggering. It's hundreds per position. And we're fortunate that there are a lot of new labs opening up in this field. It's blowing up in a nice big way. There's probably more than $10 billion now committed to investing in aging research and drug development just in the past couple of years. And so there's a lot of opportunity for young people. Not all of them

will end up in my lab. I have a lab of about 20 people, so we're short on space. But it is really exciting to me to see young people jump in. We actually, as a field, made a mistake. About 20 years ago, we thought, even 10 years ago, we thought that the people we want to target with the message of get on board, get with us, get with the program, call aging a disease, were people over 70, 65, maybe 50s might listen. We're not sure. Turns out those that are 18 to 30 are the ones that are most passionate. And I didn't see that coming, but it's really been heartwarming. And I think it bodes really well for the future of humanity.

So for people who are listening, who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, you know, is it the message that it's not too late to start? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely not too late, just to be clear. Yeah, here's the thing to remember is that aging is something

that's really malleable. We know from twin studies that those who change their lifestyle can have a dramatic effect on their ultimate longevity. Animal studies have shown you can intervene at the equivalent of 80, 90 years old and still have the benefit. And that's with relatively old technology, these age-slowing molecules. Now we're reversing age. We can take a blind mouse and make it see again in a week. These are the kind of technologies that are coming online that will allow someone who is of any age to be rejuvenated. And we can now multiply rejuvenate tissues.

We haven't published this yet, so it's a scoop. It's not just a one-time reset. We're actually – this is in a mouse though we reverse the age of their eye and i got to give credit to bruce bruce cassander's lab here at harvard we reverse the age of the eye of the mice they get their vision they age out again and we just hit them again with the reversal and then they go back again and so i see a future where you know a 90 year old goes back to 50, they age out till they're 60, and then they just keep resetting every decade. That technology, we can do this in mice. We're

not that biologically different in terms of our aging process as a mouse is. In fact, the process of aging, as I've shown in my research, is similar all the way from us back to a yeast cell. So I'm very optimistic that these technologies of age resetting will work in the very old as well. I love it. A few pointed questions here for fun. So I'm curious. I've had conversations with Ray Kurzweil about this idea extensively about longevity, escape velocity, right? The point in time in which science is adding a year to your life greater than a year for every year that you're alive. So it's divergent and you escape.

And then I've also had this conversation with George, George Church, a mutual friend, working with us together on our age reversal XPRIZE, which maybe we'll talk about. And they both gave me a number of when they think we'll reach longevity escape velocity. And I am curious if you're willing to offer one. I already know how to ostensibly make someone less age than they currently are. And i can work with them to make them more than a year younger within a year so i would say we already have knowledge how to go back more than a year every year now the critics will say well david you're just measuring the epigenome and you're measuring some biomarkers. That's not proof.

And the answer is, yeah, you're right. But we're certainly not far away from a future where we're able to, if nothing more, stop the aging process. And I truly believe that. If you look at my biological age based on a number of measures, I'm at least a decade younger than my chronological age, my birthday candles would tell you. And I'm not that good at exercise, I could probably be a lot younger if I tried. So I really think that we're on this cusp. If you ask me in what 1903, are we close to flying? I'd say yeah we got the technology it's just a matter of when and it's probably going to happen in the next few years okay so you didn't actually give me an answer you gave me a sort of answer so i i but the question needs to be a finer point because

you're right it's like could you theoretically now when will will you? So I guess the question is, when will a set of treatments exist that might allow age reversal and be accessible to some segment of the general public? All right. 10 years. 10 years. Beautiful. So that's what what Ray said George had it at about 15 but both of those numbers are shocking so I mean when I'm on when I'm speaking to anybody interested in this area I'm saying listen your job is not to live for 50 years your job is to live healthfully for the next 20 to intercept all the technologies coming our way during that period of time exactly and so my father's on that trajectory is 83 he'll be around around, all goes well, at least for another 10 years. So I'm talking about motivation. It's not just about how long do you want to live? It's how long do you want your family to live? And when you phrase it like that, you know, who wouldn't give a lot of money to spend extra year with their parents. It's crazy, right? There is nothing more valuable than our health. And health is the new wealth. And at the end of the day, you're going to spend the money one way or another on

health. And the question is, do you want to spend it at the end of life fighting a multitude of diseases in and out of the hospital? Or do you want to pay the attention and prevent these diseases from happening in the first place? I mean, it's that cut and dry. How old do you want to live, pal? I mean, that's not a fair, I don't think that's a question I can ask you without, with a straight face because of all the conversations we've had. Yeah, no, here's the thing. I've been changing my views over the years.

Here's the thing. I've been changing my views over the years. I could have told you very honestly, if you asked me, let's say 10 years ago, let's say when we were hanging out at the TEDMED conference in San Diego, how long do you want to live? And I would have honestly said, I'm not doing this because I want to live longer. I'm doing this because I hope future generations will live longer. And I really believe that. I'm now at a point where I've had a lot of fun biohacking my body, measuring things, taking things, getting younger, feeling better, arguably looking better. And I'm just having so much fun doing this. I don't want to stop doing that. I'm not afraid of death. Anyone who's seen me drive my Tesla around knows that's true.

That's one of the reasons I got autopilot. So, you know, I'm not personally scared of what's to come. But I am now, I'm hoping that I'll be able to stick around for another 50 years, maybe 100 years, to help push the field forward, to see what happens, to help inspire others as well and train others. And so I'm now more of, you know, I'd love to live to 150 if I could. Before, I really didn't think about it. Yeah, it's interesting, right? I remember when I was in medical school, not far from where you are right now, I watched this television show on long live sea life. And you know, bowhead whales are living in 200 years and Greenland sharks for 500 years and sea turtles, potentially longer. And I remember thinking, you know, if they can live that long, why can't we? And it's either a

hardware problem or a software problem. And we're going to solve that and i i see this decade is that time we're making that that uh we're getting the tools to do that but then i i stop and i think you know there appears to be some kind of a existing limit in the 120 time frame that has never been statistic there's you know no one's we haven't seen any examples of out of billions of people anybody living longer than that yeah i got into that yeah that's a bunch of bunch of baloney good i'm glad to hear that that's ridiculous that that's not it that's not even logic to use that argument uh you know, it's 1899. Let's look at the statistics of human flight.

What are you going to project? It's impossible to fly because it's never been done. But this limit to human lifespan, there is no biological limit. Of course there isn't. We are the same stuff as a whale that can live a lot longer than us. We're built of the same stuff as tortoises and pretty much the same stuff as trees that live thousands of years. It's a software problem. I'm putting my career on the line.

It's a software problem. And what's interesting about biology is that software encodes the ability to rebuild the hardware. So we've got to reset the software. And when we do that in my lab, we find that tissues regenerate in animals. Our organoids, which are mini human organs, regenerate. They fix themselves and they function like they're new again. So it's, in my view, 99% a software problem. And that's the good news because you can reboot software pretty easily. We do this all the time in my lab. And what blows my mind in a paper that we published in 2020 was that we discovered that there is a backup copy of the original software

in the body that you can access and flip the reset switch and it all comes back to life. And December, December 2020 cover issue. I remember it well. It was epic. It was, it was fun to discover and a shock. And actually, that was one of the biggest moments of my life because of my career, because we didn't know if there was a backup copy. It's one of those gifts to humanity that it exists. We don't exactly know how it's encoded, whether it's in a protein or on the DNA or some other thing we haven't thought of yet.

But 100%, we know that it exists and we can tap into that now. I love you for that, buddy. Thank you for your passion and your extraordinary, extraordinary work. Let me flip the conversation slightly to the morality of living longer. Because if you ask the general public, many of them would say, you know, it's immoral or it's not fair. We don't have enough resources. It's overpopulation. And they come up with a multitude of reasons of why it's a bad thing to live longer.

And I just for those who might be having a dinner conversation that goes that direction, I'd like to forearm them with the opposite. Sure. Well, read the last third of my book. It's all about that. I wrote it because a lot of these same points were brought up. are some very simple answers in in my view and i've debated bioethicists uh leon cass was someone who advised the bush administration who i debated on on public radio um so that i've thought a lot about this so that the summary would be that um ethically it is our duty to to allow people to choose when they die. We don't get to choose when we're born, but I think everybody has a right to choose how long they live. It should be a human right. If they're a tool to do that, you get a choice.

You don't have to take the technology or use the technology, but I want everyone to have that choice. So it's also, I think, not just a right, it's your obligation to live as healthy and as long as you can to do the right things. I do that not just for selfish reasons. I'm not vegan just because I want to live long. I don't want to be a financial and other burden on my kids. Who hasn't had parents that have cost them a lot of time, money, and angst, sorrow, desperation, because their parent didn't look after themselves or was sick for 10 years? I've had a parent that was suffering for 20 years. Now, I'm not upset. This was just the

way life went for my mother. But she did smoke. She didn't take care of herself. And I would say that having seen the difference between my mother and my father now, we have an obligation to our family to look after ourselves. And that's my view on the ethics of it. Yeah, I'll just add, you know, one of the concerns people have is overpopulation of the planet. And if you look at the charts, it may be exactly the opposite. You know, Elon, who now has, I guess, on record 10 children, goes on to point this out for different reasons. But, you know, 50 years ago, the average children per family globally was something like 5.6. It's now dropped down to below 2.4.

The U.S. is below the replacement rate, as is Japan by a large margin in many parts of Europe. And it may well be that we have a massive underpopulation on the planet. And, you know, just go fly across any country and look out the window. Yes, we have our megacities, but the majority of the planet is underpopulated. And yes, we need to feed, clothe, provide energy, clean water to everyone, especially as people become wealthier. They want better quality of health care, better education and better food sources. But we can do that. And that's what technology does. You know, it's from everything

from cellular agriculture to solar. This is the direction we're going. But saying to a group of people, thou shalt not have the right to live a longer, healthier that doesn't sound like a uh an ethical option well no and even doctors should feel that that um their mission is to prolong life there is no great greater or nobler cause than the prolongation of life this is francis bacon uh 16 14 we add to a prolongation of a healthy life yes exactly even better um and that includes mental health you gotta keep the brain young otherwise there's no point uh but your point is well taken which is that what we're doing in this field addressing either 80 or 90 something percent of the cause of ill health on the planet is the right thing to do for our species and for the

planet also considering how much we could save um and how much is wasted right now on what i call sick care rather than health care so there's a devastating devastating and it just made one point united the united states ranks 42nd in terms of population longevity on the planet. It's insane. Well, this is because technology is distributed unevenly. And that we need to figure out a better way. I'm from Australia originally, where everyone has free health care. And it works great. You know, because people who get sick are a major burden on all of us. We forget that it's not just isolated and it impacts all of us socially as well. So really what we want is cheap and effective, not just medicines that treat diseases at the end stage, these, you know, Band-Aids or what I call whack-a-mole medicine. We want these cheap medicines to make it possible for us to get

through our 60s without the fear of cancer and our 70s and 80s without heart disease. These are medicines that are right on the cusp of being available. There are some medicines such as metformin and low dose of rapamycin that are already on the market and are being used to prolong health that way. And these are the drugs that I think are going to have a huge impact on the future of humanity in the same way when antibiotics and vaccines were discovered. Yes, thank you. Let's jump in for a few minutes into what you and I both do that others can do that is effectively cheap and reasonably affordable for everybody. And then talk a little bit about what the next layer of activities are to maximize.

So let's go back and forth. I'll start with sleep. I didn't get enough sleep last night, but I prioritize it. I used to in medical school shoot for five and a half. I considered my stability point. But I just sat down with Matt Walker for an hour. And the stats are staggering. There's nobody who can actually sleep under six hours and have good health.

We need at least seven, closer to eight hours to be able to do that. I use an eye mask. I use a cooling blanket. I use a basically a process of bringing the lights down and ultimately getting myself to bed at the same time every night, which is like 930 because my eyes pop open at 5 30 6 45 similar for you yeah so exercise and sleep are my downfalls i have worked on it as well i i was talking with our mutual friend tony robbins about this and serena poon we were on on also on a podcast um uh in instagram live to be specific and we were comparing our sleep patterns and after that we followed up with our uh our actual sleep measurements we're all measuring it and uh i thought i was bad i was getting an average of about 5.5 serena

uh i think tony was less than five and then serena was four point something. So here we are professing, and we are, you know, the worst offenders of probably most people. So I think that I freely admit that I'm not perfect. And I am striving. You mentioned some some hacks. I have a bed that reduces my body temperature. So I get better sleep, deeper sleep. I also use other things such as dimming lights as well. But I really do need to do better. One of the things that's not well appreciated is why is it so important to get sleep? Now, there's two things. New discoveries have said that it's a way of cleaning the toxins out of the brain. There are draining channels that pump when we're asleep. That's important. That's even true for flies, fruit flies.

The other thing is that these longevity genes that we've worked on for years called the sirtuins control not just our longevity clock, our biological clock, but they also control our 24-hour clock. And when either of those clocks gets messed up, they affect each other. And so by sleeping well, you also slow down your rate of aging. Interesting. Let's get to exercise next. It's a weak point for anybody busy.

But one of my takeaways from this longevity platinum trip I just finished because everybody was over and over and over stating exercise is one of the most important, if you would, compliments to any longevity plan. And if it was a drug, it'd be a multi-trillion dollar drug. How far are we from exercise memetics that can help maintain muscle mass? Well, I think we're already here. It's just not well known. So the first thing is that exercise plus these memetics gives you a double bang for the buck based on animal studies and some hints in human. One of the molecules that we've worked on for many years, resveratrol, is an excisemimetic, makes mice run further, gives human more energy. The one that's more recent for my work is called NMN.

Not to be confused with M&Ms. Please don't switch those out. NMN is a precursor. And Peter, you're... I'm imagining everybody who knows your work and who's read David's amazing book, Lifespan, yes. So with NMN, the mice run further, and it's even better if they exercise. But we have new data from Metro Biotech, which was spun out of my lab 10 years ago, and using a molecule that also raises

NAD in muscle and other tissues, those people had increased endurance as well as lower other parameters such as cholesterol and blood pressure. So again, probably an exercise memetic. You know, I'll let you in on a little bit of a secret working with the military who are helping sponsor these trials i'm allowed i'm now allowed to say that i saw the news when it came out when it was leaked yeah well i went on joe rogan's podcast uh and he asked me about that and i got in huge trouble for even mentioning it uh and that's all i did i mentioned it uh and then then the military put out their own press release a couple of years later, and I thought, okay, all right, now I can talk about it. But we're also, and we're just increasing the number of patients there being tested by a lot, by another hundred. But that study's gone

really well. And so I think that this NAD boosting is one of these exercise memetics. Are we going to be in a world where just pop a pill and we're just as fit as we would otherwise be we're a long way from that because exercise does a lot of things um there's an interesting new molecule uh called lac phi which is a little lactate plus phenylalanine amino acid which was shown in a recent paper that that is what stimulates um hunger after exercise and one of the reasons it's hard to lose weight after you exercise or if you exercise and so there are these discoveries where we're able to manipulate our physiology and our mental state as well and those things i think together will help us but also products that you mentioned like the pcs k9 inhibitors are also helping people

lose weight and bring their metabolism back to more of a healthy lean state as well and i just want to encourage people to try and lose weight if they are overweight because there's really few things that really accelerate the biological clock it's smoking it's lack of sleep but it's it's also obesity so try and bring your body down to a bmi of around 25 or less it'd really help a brief note from our sponsors let's talk about sleep sleep has become one of my number one longevity priorities in life you're getting eight deep uninterrupted hours of sleep is one of the most important things you can do to increase your vitality and energy and increase the health span that you have here on earth. You know, when I was in medical school years ago, I used to pride myself on how little sleep I could get.

You know, it used to be five, five and a half hours. Today, I pride myself on how much sleep I can get. And I shoot for eight hours every single night. Now, usually I'm great at going to sleep. If I'm exhausted, you know, I've worked a hard day, I'm right out. But if I'm having difficulty, and it occurs, I'm having insomnia, or my mind's overactive and I need help to get that eight hours, I turn to a supplement product by Lifeforce called Peak Rest. Now, Peak Rest has been formulated with an extraordinary scientific depth and background. It includes everything from long-lasting melatonin

to magnesium to L-glycine to rosemary extract, just to name a few. This product is about creating a sense of rest and really giving you the depth and length of sleep that you need for recovery. It's a product I hope you'll try. It works for me and I'm sure it will work for you. If you're interested, go to mylifehorse.com backslash Peter to get a discount from Lifeforce on this product. But you'll also see a whole set of other longevity and vitality related supplements that I use. We'll talk about them some other time. But in terms of sleep, Peak Rest is my go-to supplement. Hope you'll enjoy it.

Go to mylifehorse.com backslash Peter for your discount. For those interested, I mean, my exercise protocol, I will do all I can to get 10,000 steps in. I'll take my conference calls there. I can't do my podcast there because of the noise, but I'll take walking meetings wherever I can. And then I'll do a heavy weight workout once a week at the gym. And then I've just got a catalyst suit. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the catalyst suit that uses electro, electro muscular stem in a whole suit you're wearing. And a video it's it's check it out. So it's catalyst with a K but it's it's a pretty cool technology that I use for exercising at home, sort of the exponential tech version of it.

Peter's wearing a suit that electrically stimulates his whole body. Let's go to diet. Let's begin with the fact that sugar is a poison. Yeah, that is true. Do you watch how much sugar you eat i i do i'm usually i just took off my cgm i use a continuous glucose monitor to monitor it and listen i'm not perfect but it is i think twice about eating uh sugar and people need to realize the body did you know humanity did not evolve over the last hundred thousand years in an environment that had

all the sugarcane and all the sugar it's an inflammatory molecule it causes hypercholesterolemia neuro inflammatory cardiac inflammatory it's not good for you to say the least yeah i've avoided it um as much as i can since my since i turned 40. uh i don't eat desserts unless i steal it um and then i i look at sugar again it like it it's not going to kill me but i do think of it as a poison it helps me get over it because our bodies crave sugar it's what how we evolve it's a good source of quick energy but it does it one of the things that it also does is it covalently um very tightly attaches to proteins and makes them malfunction or even become toxic and so one of the the readouts of for type 2 diabetes is uh what's called uh glycated hemoglobin or hba1c which is a glucose

attached to our hemoglobin protein but what most people don't remember is that hemoglobin is just one protein out of 20-something thousand that also get attacked slash attached to glucose, and that's bad for the body. So keeping those levels steady as well and as low as possible without feeling tired is a goal. So practically what I do, I'm wearing a CGM right now, down here on my tummy, I won't show you that for obvious reasons. But I like to see as steady levels as I can. That also doesn't just mean I'm going to be healthy. But it's also means that I

don't get the rushes and then the brain fog during the day. And that used to be my life, I would eat and then I'd get hungry and eat hungry and with my glucose doing this and it's no way to get through life i can now just power through the day my liver takes care of my sugar levels for most of the time i don't feel hungry and i just think and i can focus yeah no it's it is amazing i use a i use levels as the the system, the app that I use. They work with Dexcom. And it's interesting, right? So both of us do a size amount of intermittent fasting.

I think you do more than I do. I will try and fast 6 o'clock at night through 1 the next day. I'll have a late lunch and a dinner. But you have an extraordinary amount of energy, more than people realize when you're able to do that, because you're not, you know, blood's not flowing to your gut, and people need to try it. It's a fascinating feeling. I mean, I literally felt hyper when I started that the first time. Yeah, you're right. It's a fallacy that you get tired, because that's what happened when you start, because your liver is lazy.

It won't make glucose for probably the first two weeks. So power through that zone. Drink a lot of water, tea, coffee, whatever gets you through. Fill up your tummy. And you'll find that you end up having more energy than you've ever had in your life. Yeah, it's amazing. So we hit sleep, exercise, diet. I think mindset is clearly one of the most

important things as well. And that comes with love, community, hugs, and just purpose in life. And then we can talk about it some other time, but there's a whole slew of I call it don't die from something stupid category, which is, you know, imaging yourself in a way, you know, this is through life force, through fountain life, through inside tracker. These are ways to understand what's going on inside your body so that you can be data driven in in the decisions that you make exactly yeah so i i work with top athletes and other well-known people who want to optimize their body for performance and longevity and i cannot do anything scientific or even effective without measuring something and i i either use inside tracker i've been involved with them for many years and i into just full disclosure i put an early investment in that company um but there are other measuring companies telehealth is one i'm

now developing for biological age um there's like uh the whole uh life group. They do a lot of measuring. So what I made the case for in my book was that we need a dashboard on our bodies as good as or better than we have for our cars. And we wouldn't drive our cars without a dashboard. It would be crazy. We wouldn't know where we're going, how fast we're going, if we're running out of fuel. Why do we do that on our bodies? Why do we go to the doctor for an annual physical? This is medieval. We need our bodies to be checked up a thousand times a second, which is what you can do now with monitors like, you know,

Levels Health provides. That's just glucose. The future, as you know, is that we're going to be monitoring thousands of analytes constantly. And it's all going to your ai that is optimizing your life if you wanted to if you don't if i'd be a couch potato that is your option but you should have the option to actually maximize your health buddy uh uh i am grateful for our time uh i'd love to come together and uh on our next conversation do a little bit of an AMA. We both have a large Twitter audience. I think both of us have asked them what they'd like us to talk about. So on our next session, why don't we take some conversation from the community?

But I wish you an extraordinary day and week ahead, pal. Appreciate you. Well, week ahead, pal. Appreciate you. Well, thank you, Peter. And likewise, what you do for us people at the forefront of technology is you inspire us and give us the resources to make the impossible possible. Thank you. Thank you. I'm proud, by the way, everybody, to be a benefactor to David's research in his lab along with Tony Robbins. We love what he does and

counting on you so much, David. All right. Take care, buddy. You too. Bye. Bye. Everyone, this is Peter again. Before you take off, I want to take a moment to just invite you to subscribe to my weekly tech blog. Today, over 200,000 people receive this email twice per week. In the tech blog, I share with you my insights on converging exponential technologies, what's going on in AI, how longevity is transforming, adding decades to our life. In the tech blog, I often look at the 20 meta trends that are going to

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