The Daily Stoic - Maybe You CAN Make More Time

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy. and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan.

Starting point is 00:00:44 Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. Just got back from the beach with my family. It seems like almost a tradition now that one of us makes a trip to the emergency room while we were there. my son got in a little go-card accident and a sort of theme park thing and I had this health issue that I won't go into. So we ended up going, hey, you know what? If you're going to go, I'll go and get this other thing checked out at the same time. So that was fun. Two people at the emergency room slash urgent care. Well, we went to urgent care and then they sent him to the emergency room and I stayed at the urgent care. It was a whole thing. But it all worked out. We're all

Starting point is 00:01:21 good. Everything was fine. It's funny though, right? Like the Stokes talk about Mementumori. in acceptance, but does that mean they just don't take care of themselves? Mark's has a doctor, and presumably this doctor's job, however rudimentary his understanding of health is, his job is to keep him alive, right? Mark's zeroes isn't trying to die sooner than he needs to, and neither should we. This is why we take care of ourselves. This is why we take care of our health. This is why we eat right. This is why we exercise. This is why when something is worrying us, we go to the doctor. And that's sort of what today's episode is going to be about. If you remember, we ran a chapter from the Stoic Capitalist a few months ago. This is an interesting book by Robert

Starting point is 00:02:06 Rosencranes. He's a self-made billionaire, investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and he's been very influenced by Stoic philosophy. The last chapter we ran was about how you can make more money, but you can't make more time. But then, of course, you can make more time to a certain degree by taking care of yourself. Certainly, you can make less time by not taking care of yourselves, not making good choices,

Starting point is 00:02:32 and by wasting time. After you can make more money, you can't make more time. It's the next chapter. Maybe you can make more time. They were nice enough to let us run this section of the audiobook. As I said, Robert Rosencranz is a billionaire, pioneer in the private equity space hedge funds and the insurance industry. It's also a patron of the

Starting point is 00:02:53 arts. He launched an acclaimed NPR program called Open to Debate. He funded the impetus grants, which extend human health spans, has done a number of other interesting things. We had a really interesting episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I should believe it was a two-parter. I will link to that. And we carry his book, The Wealthy Stoic, and we carry his book, the Stoic capitalist in the Painted Porch. Also, if you want to think more about how the Stoics think about money, are, of course, The Wealthy Stoic, a Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Happy, and Free, I think is really interesting. It is not telling you how to make more money necessarily. It is telling you how to think differently about money, which, of course, is also what the Stoic

Starting point is 00:03:34 capitalist is about. And today's episode is about. Check all of that out. Enjoy. Have a good weekend. The other day after we dropped our kids off at camp, my wife and I realized we had a little more time for you to be at the office. So we took a nice hike through one of my favorite parks, McKinney Falls here in Austin. And when you live in active life like that, you got to take care of yourself.

Starting point is 00:04:05 You got to make sure you're getting nutrients if you want to go on adventures. And Kachava's whole body meal shakes help you do just that. You mix it up with your favorite alternative. of milk or water and you're ready to go. You can throw in a little fruit or nut butter if you want to turn it in kind of a smoothie. With 25 grams of 100% plant-based protein, Kachava is the perfect meal shake to satisfy your hunger. They have five indulgent flavors to choose from chocolate, vanilla, chai, macha, and coconut asaii. With two scoops of kachava, you get 85 plus superfoods, nutrients, and plant-based ingredients. It's non-GMO, no soy, no animal products,

Starting point is 00:04:42 no gluten, no preservatives, no artificial flavors, colors, or sweeteners, and you can try Kachava risk-free with their love-it guarantee. Fuel your day with Kachava. Go to Kachava.com and use code Stoic for 15% off your next order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A-D-com, code Stoic for 15% off. Maybe you can make more time. The Stoics lived in an age when little kids, could be done to prolong life or to mitigate the ills of the elderly.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Stoic writings on the subject deal mostly with accepting bad health and death with equanimity. In this context, they invoke the distinction between things within one's control and outside one's control. Cognitive behavioral psychology, meanwhile, encourages making reasoned choices that are in one's interest. Everyone considers good health as perhaps their most important interest, but many question if it's within their control. It's genetics and luck. Awareness that one's own behaviors and choices will have an important influence on health outcomes is a starting point. The stoic emphasis on time as our most precious resource, especially the time we are in good

Starting point is 00:06:10 health and can enjoy life to the fullest, helps turn an awareness into a priority. Unless we have such awareness and prioritize making more time, it is very easy to opt for day-to-day choices that ultimately impair health and shorten life. You know intellectually that diet and exercise matter, that smoking and excessive sunlight are health hazards. But mustering the will to do things right is a very different thing. A smoke satisfies an urge. A couple of drinks help you have a good time. A creamy dessert tastes delicious. Lying in the warm sun is pleasant and you look better with a tan. On the flip side, exercise can be boring. A healthy diet can be dreary. Doctor visits scary. Medical tests unpleasant. Necessary meds you've been

Starting point is 00:07:13 prescribed may have annoying side effects. Obtuse, slow-footed institutions like hospitals and insurance companies can be endlessly frustrating to deal with. Indeed, our entire medical system is activated only when things go wrong. It does very little to prolong the period when things are going right. Making the right choices requires a good measure of mindfulness, of self-possession, and a habit of long-term thinking. If you are burdened by anger, fear, jealousy, and other corrosive emotions, if the people in situations in your daily life leave you frustrated and stressed,

Starting point is 00:07:56 your mental state will undermine your physical health. but if you can use reason to regulate your responses, you will be better both mentally and physically. In Stoic philosophy, this would make you a progressor toward wisdom. Cognitive behavioral therapy promotes a similar way of thinking. In either case, you will be far more likely to make the small daily adjustments and sacrifices needed to extend your health span, quite literally, to make more time. I first encountered the idea of health span in 2016, when the topic of one of our public debates was, lifespans are long enough.

Starting point is 00:08:44 Among the debaters was Brian Kennedy, director of the Buck Institute of Aging Research in Nevada, California. He made the important distinction between lifespan, the total number of years we live, and health span, how many of those years we remain healthy and free from disease. The idea really took root for me during the onset of COVID, when, as an older New Yorker living in an epicenter of the pandemic, I felt personally vulnerable. Exiled from my office, I had more time to read,

Starting point is 00:09:21 and picked up a book by David Sinclair, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Harvard Medical School, and a biomedical entrepreneur. His book, Lifespan, Why We Age and Why We Don't Have to, was my introduction to the science. Soon after reading it, I arranged to meet him at Harvard and get a tour of his lab. In modern medicine, age-related research

Starting point is 00:09:49 is overwhelmingly focused on the major diseases that tend to increase with age. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson, Alzheimer's, not on aging itself. Sinclair is prominent among the growing legion of doctors and scientists who are digging deeper into the fundamental question of how we age in the first place. Why do the trillions of cells in our bodies become less resilient over time, more vulnerable to disease, and less able to perform their specialized functions?

Starting point is 00:10:25 A practical goal of this research is to slow or reverse the aging of cells, potentially delaying the onset of major diseases and extending human health spans by 10 to 15 years. As a result of experiments in his lab, Sinclair has come to believe that cells age because of information loss in the epigenome, the biochemical signaling and marking system that is closely coupled with the body's DNA. The epigenome activates and guides stem cells in the creation of specialized cells, skin, liver, brain, muscle, nerve, etc., to replace cells that are diseased or that otherwise cease to function. In his lab, Sinclair has been able to both accelerate and slow down the

Starting point is 00:11:21 aging process in mice. In one dramatic experiment, published in 2021, he actually reversed the aging process in old, blind mice, enabling them to recover the information needed to generate new, functionally young retina cells and regain their eyesight. The success has been replicated in primates and the techniques will shortly be applied in human trials. As I learned of this, I felt I had found something to support, a potentially vast contribution to human flourishing, and yet a field in which I might make a difference with gifts I could afford. To school myself and some of the scientific basics, I took Harvard's molecular biology course by a distance learning as COVID was winding down.

Starting point is 00:12:15 Then, during about a half year of investigation, I sought out top researchers in the field. Some of these scientists, for example, Tom Rando at UCLA, approached the question by focusing on stem cells. Others investigate senescent cells that stop dividing but remain alive and produce harmful toxins, Jim Kirkland at Mayo. Others research the role of the immune response mechanism, Tony Weiss-Core at Stanford. Still others study centenarians who are disease-free at

Starting point is 00:12:51 age 100, near Barzali at Einstein Medical School, to identify key genetic mutations they have in common. My study convinced me that this field was radically underfunded relative to its potential to improve the quality of life. Many major foundations regard longevity research with deep skepticism. The same is true of major universities, where the notion of health span extension gets confused with images of frail residents of nursing homes, not of effective people extending their prime productive years by a decade or more. Longevity research is sometimes seen as retrograde, a threat that could increase the burden on the planet

Starting point is 00:13:40 by adding several billion old people to the global population. Another progressive concern is the worsening of income inequality and racial injustice. Treatments to extend health spans will be expensive and richer white people will be the first to benefit. Meanwhile, academic economists worry that an aging population, with more retirees relative to the number of workers, will be fiscally unsustainable. Each of these concerns is open to debate, but I have enough experience to know that public opinion most often aligns with the techno-pessimists. In precincts where techno-optimism tends to prevail, like Silicon Valley, longevity research is a hot topic. In the past decade, it has spawned dozens of startups

Starting point is 00:14:34 and spurred investments from some of tech's wealthiest individuals, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The most interesting startup is Altos Labs, founded by Rick Klausner, a brilliant scientist-organization builder who has led both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Cancer Institute. He is modeled Altos on Bell Labs, the legendary Cold War Technology Invention Factory,

Starting point is 00:15:10 and with $3 billion of committed capital funding, the company has been luring top scientists from academia with million-dollar salaries and promises of research autonomy. It describes its mission as to restore cellular health and resilience through cellular rejuvenation programming, to reverse disease, injury,

Starting point is 00:15:34 and the disabilities that can occur throughout life. For my part, I've joined the Board of the Buck Institute, the leading independent non-profit research center in the field. I also contribute to Sinclair's work. as well as Randos and Barzolize, through our HealthSpan Extension Initiative at the Rosencranz Foundation. So far, my biggest commitment

Starting point is 00:16:00 has been as lead funder of a round of impetus grants, masterminded by Martin Borsh Jensen, a young biotech innovator in the San Francisco area. These are grants to support around 35 research scientists with longevity-related projects selected from more than a thousand applicants. If successful, these experiments can have a dramatic impact, but are too unorthodox or speculative to get funding from the National Institutes of Health, NIH. The first round of impetus grants in late 2020 has already generated more than a dozen published

Starting point is 00:16:41 papers, including some potentially major breakthroughs. In 2023, Saudi Arabia's Hevolution Foundation, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salam al-Saud, agreed to match my grant. I am confident we will be making a real contribution, both to the basic science of aging and to the careers of some of its brightest and most creative researchers. Evolution was established in 2021,

Starting point is 00:17:14 and under the leadership of Dr. Mahmoud Khan, has already emerged as the second largest funder of longevity research in the world, after the NIH. I have developed a productive working relationship with Hevolution and was honored to join the board of Hevolution's U.S. Arm. There is extraordinary personal satisfaction in supporting scientific research that can plausibly enrich human flourishing by enabling people to live healthy and productive lives for an extra decade or more. In true, selfish philanthropist fashion, I have gained tangible personal benefits as well.

Starting point is 00:17:58 By following the recommendations of top anti-aging scientists over the last few years, I am objectively skiing better, playing a more competitive game of singles tennis, and seeing demonstrable improvement in my long-term memory. So, yes, you can make more time. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.

Starting point is 00:18:40 Thank you.

The Daily Stoic - Maybe You CAN Make More Time

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.