Dr David Sinclair - Lifespan: Why We Age & Why We Don’t Have To

Full transcript: Dr David Sinclair on London Real

3:00 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr David Sinclair, the biologist, inventor, entrepreneur and author.

3:19 You are a professor in the Department of Genetics and co-director at the Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School. As one of the preeminent voices in the field of longevity, your work has been featured in five books and two documentary films, including Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole. You’ve received over 35 awards and are listed in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Your groundbreaking book, Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To, reveals the incredible breakthroughs in emerging technologies that can help all of us live longer, younger and healthier.

3:53 David, welcome to London Real.

3:55 David Sinclair: Brian, thanks for having me on. It’s great to be here.

3:58 Brian Rose: Great to be here too. You know, I want to kick it off with a quote from you where you say aging is a disease, and that disease is treatable.

4:06 When you tell people that for the first time, how often do you get these perplexed looks, or are people becoming more hip to this concept, that maybe we’re not destined to just grow old fast?

4:19 David Sinclair: Well, about 10 years ago when I said that for the first time, a lot of people were shocked. But the problem is that we are raised to think that aging is something separate from diseases, and that aging is natural, whereas diseases are not. But it’s actually… it turns out aging is the cause of most of the diseases that we get.

4:41 The root cause, 80 of the causes of cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer’s. And once you explain that, as I’ve been doing for now at least over a decade, very publicly, more and more people are realizing that the current way we do medicine, which is to treat the end result of aging is not as effective as what we’re trying to do. And that is to slow down and reverse the aging process, but it is a psychological mind warp when people first hear it, that aging is a disease, and sometimes it’s insulting to people.

5:15 I don’t have a disease. I’m healthy, but the truth is that we age from conception. We’re all aging every day, and we can measure that now. But the good news is that it’s increasingly preventable and treatable.

5:28 Brian Rose: And certain countries kind of age faster than other countries, right?

5:32 And I know in your book you kind of talk about, like, Russia versus Israel versus America, and they tend to rack up the years, you know, sooner than later. What’s kind of like top G20 countries are better or worse than others, and why typically is that?

5:49 David Sinclair: Yeah. Well, it’s mostly lifestyle. We’re all very similar genetically as a species.

5:54 Some there are some good genes. The Japanese, in general, have some pretty good genes, longevity genes. But across humanity, there are lots of genes that people have. The difference that actually we’ve noticed is that about 80 to 90 percent of longevity and health into our 80s, 90s and beyond is due to how we live our lives across the planet. And there are certain cultures that, for historical reasons, mainly have the type of lifestyles that turn on the body’s defenses against aging.

6:31 Now, we all know that if we exercise and move and eat less often and focus on plants, that tends to be associated with longer life, as well as lower stress and more sociable communities. These are all things that make us live longer, and there are pockets of that around the world. There’s areas of Greece and Japan, US, Australia. These are countries that tend to have a healthier diet, more community, exercise, more, partially because of the climate, partially maybe because they’re working on farms.

7:07 But generally, it’s all about lifestyle, and one of the things I’ve been trying to do, besides my medical research and developing medicines to help people, is to say, all right, the medicines are coming, the pills are coming. Until then, we need to stay alive for longer, and how do you do that? It’s make sure we try, at least try to mimic those cultures, and get our bodies to fight aging rather than just deteriorate, which is what a lot of modern society is built on.

7:37 Right, what one of the problems with the world that we have now, particularly in the West and even worse in the UK and the US, is that we like to be comfortable, and the markets have given us a very comfortable life, those of us who can afford it. And the problem is that that switches off our body’s defenses against aging. Not exercising, don’t eat well, always being satisfied with the amount of food we have. Never being hungry, that’s the worst you can have, because our aging rate just accelerates with that kind of lifestyle.

8:09 Brian Rose: Do most people look at you funny when you say, if you can be kind of starving, if you can be out of breath, if you could be cold, then you’re gonna live this long life? And people are probably looking at you and saying, well, 100 years ago my grandparents were doing the same thing, and my great-grandparents, and they didn’t live very long. Is it hard to get people’s brain around that?

8:34 David Sinclair: Well, it does appear to be a contradiction until you really dig in and find out that yes, eating less often was good for you, and being cold can be good for you, and being hot and not having as much food being thinner is generally good for you, to a point.

8:50 The problem with our great-grandparents and even grandparents was that then they were not doing it in a way that was conducive to longevity, in the sense that they didn’t get the right nutrition, and they were also plagued by infections. And you look at the risks from 100 years ago: childbirth was killing people, cancer was killing people, heart disease was rife because of the type of food a lot of fat people were eating. But if you combine the adversity or at least mimicking adversity that they had in their lives with adequate nutrition and modern medicine, that is what we believe gives you the longest life, and the important thing is, a lot of these adversities don’t have to be extreme.

9:36 They can be a little bit of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and longer lived. We call this process hormesis, and really, it’s not about feeling like you’re gonna die or that you’re going to starve. It’s about giving your body a few of those hints, a little bit of exercise, even just five, ten minutes a day, a little bit of hunger, skip a meal each day and substitute with tea and coffee. These are the things that actually, over the long run, build up to give you maybe an extra 10, even 20 years of extra life.

10:08 Brian Rose: David, I got to ask you a question. We’re seeing these days, they’re like, you know, these real quests and cravings by parts of humanity for these extreme lifestyles. You know, I’ve had Wim Hof on the show, who jumps on the ice baths and has the breathing. I’ve had David Goggins on here, who does these ultramarathons, and you know, we see people celebrating these extremes in life. I mean, do you think there’s something deep down inside of us that that that that is trying to tell us that we need to kind of push the limits of humanity, while we’re all set to also trying to sit in business class and you know, drive in the Range Rover and all that stuff?

10:44 If you ever thought about that,

10:46 David Sinclair: you know, we are for sure, we as humans, we’re not built for a comfortable lifestyle. Our bodies just fall apart if we give them too much of a good time. I call that the abundance mode, and I I mentioned earlier the adversity mode. You’ve got a cycle between the two, because one is the abundance mode, is build and repair, but the adversity is hunker down and survive, and if you don’t have both of those, then you’re just not going to slow down aging and live long.

11:16 And I think there is an inbuilt desire for many of us to get back into more of that adversity mode. We feel better, we have more energy, we think better, and that’s because what happens when you’re in this adversity mode, at least for part of the day or part of the week, is that our bodies turn on these survival genes, some of which I study in my lab called sirtuins. Without those, oh we become lethargic, and our bodies have a much less metabolic activity, much less mental acuity.

11:46 We put on weight, we don’t feel as good. So I think what Wim Hof, David Goggins and others, what they’re trying to do is get back to our evolutionary roots, where we spend at least part of the day turning on these survival genes that made us feel better, work better, live better and even think better. And I also, you know, what they often tell us is that if we live these lifestyles, we also psychologically feel better. We feel better about ourselves, but also the hormones and the molecules that are released in the brain make us more optimistic, make us happier, make us more alive.

12:24 And that’s also what I think drives those guys, or those people, and many of us, to give some adversity during the day. Have some adversity during the day.

12:34 Brian Rose: And look, I want to, I want to jump into a lot of the ideas you have around, out on diet, around exercise and cold, and etc., but maybe quickly to look at what’s actually happening with the genes, because I think you’ve said that only 20 of our longevity is genetically determined. You talk about this concept of epigenetics, and how we might have one set of genes, but actually getting those, I guess, copied over for new cells, or getting those being able to be read efficiently or correctly, is the problem we have as we age, and I think one of your old TED Talks, you really date yourself, is you talk about scratches in a CD Where, again, I’m dating myself because I know what a CD is, but maybe you can talk to people a little bit about how we can all start with the same DNA, but some people by the time they’re 50 are actually replicating kind of more errored cells.

13:27 David Sinclair: Yeah. So this is what I call the information theory of aging. Now the old idea is that we just deteriorate. We get damaged cells and we eventually die. The new idea is that we’re more like computers, where we have software, and the software determines the function of the body.

13:46 And because every cell has the same DNA but different functions, each cell has to have a different type of software, so that a brain cell works differently than a skin cell. These software programs are written down as we’re in the womb and then born. Over time, what we’ve discovered in my lab and others around the world is that what probably is a main driver of the aging process is that the software of cells gets corrupted, so that cells, even though they have the original hardware, the DNA to function, the software that reads the DNA breaks down.

14:21 And what we see, we have this big paper coming out in the Los Angeles literature soon that actually is very good evidence that this is true, because we can take a mouse and we can corrupt the software, and we get, can get it to age more rapidly, twice as fast. And then we can even, we’ve discovered there’s a backup copy of this, the original software, that we can reboot the system, and we can get that mouse to de-age, to reverse its aging process and become young again. We used this a few years ago, a couple of years ago, to reset the age of the eye in mice, and get them to go from being blind, in all in old age, to being able to see again.

14:59 And so it’s very exciting that our bodies have this software that can be rebooted and re-established youth, in the same way that you might pull the scratches off a CD to be able to play that music again. And what this actually means is that we’re not just falling apart. We actually have the instructions to be young again. And now when I look at someone who’s elderly, who’s frail, who can barely walk, who might even still be bedridden, I look at that person as still being young.

15:26 Their body just doesn’t know how to read that youthful information, but one day it’ll be possible. I’m certain that we can give someone who’s elderly a pill, for say a couple of months, and reverse their aging process so that they literally don’t just feel young, they do become young again.

15:43 Brian Rose: You know, my grandparents were, you know, farmers and cattlemen and cattle women in Arizona, and they grew up with these kind of hard-working lives. But you know, they also, my grandpa and grandma, they kind of died of heart disease because they didn’t really understand their diet.

16:00 Of course, everybody was probably overeating then, and overdrinking and over smoking. I know you grew up near the kind of, near the Outback, and you had a grandmother really that kind of brought you up, but also she aged, you know, pretty rapidly. And I’m wondering, like you said, you look at older people today, and I’m wondering if you look at them and you’re just thinking, wow, man, if I had been able to educate you 40 years ago, you could be thriving now, as opposed to being in a nursing home.

16:26 And I wonder if you ever think about that, even from your own grandmother and your own mother. And I guess that’s why you’re working on having these supplements to reverse that process?

16:38 David Sinclair: Yeah, well, I don’t sell supplements, but I do work on medicines, and I do try to educate everybody on the planet as best I can reach them to tell them that it’s possible to live at least 15 years longer. I believe 25, 30 years longer just by changing your lifestyle, and the earlier you start, the better.

16:58 In your 20s, you can start this, and I do wish that I could have educated my grandmother and my mother, who both died fairly young and or at least became sick young. My mother developed lung cancer in her 50s, and my grandmother became frail in her 70s, and the kind of lifestyle we’re talking about is not that difficult. We can get into the details in a minute, but the point is that with education, you can make a massive difference. If you don’t smoke, you don’t become obese, you get enough sleep, you focus on plants, you don’t overeat, you eat less often, skip a meal or two a day, a large meal, that is these things are enough.

17:40 It’s been shown scientifically, by looking at tens of thousands of people, very clearly, you can extend your lifespan by 15 years just by doing those simple things that most people know about already. Now the kind of things that I add to are nuances on that, as well as, again, molecules and medicines, some of which are available right now. I believe we can take that 15 years and make it 25, 30. My father is a good example of someone who did get educated early on and took my advice.

18:12 He’s a scientist. He listens and can make his own judgments. He’s now 83 years old. He has no diseases, no aches, no pains, and he’s just as healthy, if not healthier, than he was in his 30s. He’s stronger than me.

18:27 I’m 53, and he’s just loving life, and he’s looking forward to another 20, 30 years to go. And when he was in his 60s, he thought that he’d probably be dead by 75, 80, which is the typical life course of a male who lives in Australia, but he’s had to just change his attitude, because he’s just going on and on and on, and he’s watching not only his wife, who died young, his peers, who are now many of them, half of them at least, are dead now, because they didn’t do the right things. Fascinating.

18:57 Brian Rose: You know, David, I get the benefit of talking to a lot of fascinating people on my show, and I’ve started to notice a lot of them in their mid-70s that are absolutely crushing it right now. You know, people like Graham Hancock was just here in my studio on Friday. Netflix series. 72 Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad. He’s like 75.

19:17 You know, Dan Pena, the trillion-dollar man with a castle up in Scotland, 77. Jim Rickards, you know, all these people. My mom is pretty crushing it, pretty good in her mid-70s, and, you know, they’ve done the right thing, and it’s almost stated like they’re in their prime. You know, another 20 years of this, they could add more to the world than the previous 70 years of their life. It’s like they’ve got their IP dialed in, they’ve got their audiences, they’ve got everything going, and in the past they might have a few more years left, and then whatever, they would break their hip, or they would start to get senile, and then we wouldn’t hear from them again.

19:54 And I’m just imagining what a great world this would be if they could keep cranking that into their 90s. It would be an asset. And I guess this is the question you get a lot: aren’t all of these old people gonna be a liability to society, or can they be assets?

20:10 David Sinclair: Or they can certainly be assets. When you look at my father, he’s helping raise the grandkids, he’s contributing to the community.

20:18 He just recently retired after he started up a new career in his 70s. This is going to be the future, where someone who’s in their 70s and 80s is still considered someone who’s very hirable, who has a lot of wisdom, who can educate the young people. We have to change our attitude to someone who’s 70 and 80. You can be starting a new career in your 80s now, and that’s a normal thing. And we shouldn’t look at our parents and our grandparents as guides to how our lives are going to be.

20:50 Every year that we stay alive, we get another three months of life, and that’s not even with these age reversal technologies that are just around the corner. So what I think is, it’s going to be normal to be in your 90s and still playing tennis with your grandkids and working actively, like the people you mentioned. It’s going to be increasingly common. Now, if we look at the previous generations, let’s take the Queen, the Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth.

21:17 People in her generation, only two percent of them made it to a hundred. Children and kids in their 20s today, half of them are going to make it to a hundred. Half, and that’s just if you draw a straight line. I think we’re going to have an exponential increase in longevity, given that technologies that have just been discovered. So at least half, I think it could be the majority of people in their 20s today are going to be healthy into their hundreds.

21:46 Brian Rose: And you just said for every year you live, you get an extra three months of life. You just said that real quickly. What do you mean by that?

21:54 David Sinclair: Well, we’re just extrapolating over historical trends, and it’s really a straight line over the last 150 years. The increase in longevity because of medicine, technology, improvements in nutrition, are guaranteeing us extra three months of life if you stay alive for another year.

22:11 And it’s that’s been the trend for this length of time. So that’s a guarantee. The cool thing is that with these developments, both technologically in how we can measure ourselves and predict disease, as well as prevent it with medicines and supplements and lifestyle, it’s going to be four months for every year we live, five months eventually, where things get interesting, and where we are with mice now is that for every time period you stay alive, you get an extra time period.

22:45 So for us, every year we’re alive, eventually we’ll get another year of life, and that’s when things get really interesting. And Brian, you brought out something that I didn’t really tackle yet, and that is what happens when people are living over a hundred. What happens to society? And that’s a whole section of my book, as you know. The last third of the book is about what does that world look like.

23:05 And I actually collaborated with a couple of London economists, who are at the top of their game. I’m just a biologist, but what we calculated was that the cost savings of having people live just an extra year of healthy life in the US is actually 86 trillion dollars, by doing that, to the economy over the next few decades. And if you give people an extra 10 years of healthy life, then you are talking about hundreds of trillions of dollars in savings in health care, and also the contribution back to the economy.

23:39 So it’s not that people are a burden to society. They actually give back, and the economy thrives because these people are contributing. They’re traveling, they’re spending, they’re educating, and the world then becomes a much richer, more luxurious and booming society, as opposed to what we do now, which is spend about one-fifth of our economy just on healthcare.

24:05 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s staggering. I mean, you know, every time you get your head around that.

24:11 Was it like 19% of GDP is on health care, or something? It’s just, and that’s been going up like since 8% I think for the last couple decades. I mean, yeah. That speaks a little bit subtly of what you’re talking about here. And then last thing is population.

24:25 We’re seeing birth rates decline in most major countries now, to where they don’t have enough to actually keep the country growing. That’s been happening in Japan for a long time, but now in Europe as well. Many countries can’t sustain population growth.

24:42 David Sinclair: Exactly, and that’s the good news, is that by doing this, by extending people’s healthy lifespan, we’re going to maintain the economies rather than having a declining economy. We’re already seeing in Japan and even China this decrease in fertility and birth rates, is going to jeopardize their long-term viability, and we really need to solve it.

25:05 And the really the only way to do that, besides improving fertility, is to keep people healthy and productive. And if, you know, I argue it’s not just a risk keeping people alive. It’s actually an imperative. We have to do this to keep the world’s economy going, otherwise we’re going to be spending too much money keeping people alive in nursing homes, and we’re not going to have enough people to fill the jobs that are required in the future. And so, you know, otherwise we’re going to have generations of people just looking after kids and grandparents and great-grandparents, and we just can’t afford to have that.

25:47 Already, you look at Japan, they’re suffering for that reason. Unfortunately, Japan has kept their elderly healthier, that was really the only way out of that issue for the Western world, for the UK and the US. If we don’t do something about this, what we call the gray tsunami, economically we’re going to be in real trouble 20, 30 years from now.

26:08 Brian Rose: It also seems to make a lot of sense. I mean, like you said, if you’ve got someone with this, like, literally a lifetime of intellectual property, connections, wealth, you know, again, why not have them stay with us another five or ten years?

26:22 Like, the world can only be a richer place, as opposed to if you just locked all those people up somewhere and said they couldn’t talk to anybody or liked or died. You want them around, because that adds to the, that adds to the, that adds to everything.

26:40 David Sinclair: Oh, right. Well, it’s a tragedy every time somebody dies whether it’s a kid or an older person, because you’re right, there’s a huge investment in somebody’s life, and when they’re gone, we lose all of that.

26:55 And there’s a richness to society having older people who are around. Increasingly, CEOs are in their 60s and 70s, even 80s, and these are some of the best CEOs out there, because they’ve seen the cycles of business, and they understand how to give people their greatest potential, and how to hire the right people and build teams. Um, no, there are some people who do stick around for too long. There’s some politicians who, I think, in, and many of us think, have gone past their prime, but on the other hand, what if we kept them young?

27:25 Would they maintain their political views, or would they become more youthful in how they looked at the world? There’s also something to be said for people’s outlook. If people think that they’re going to be around for another 30, 40, 50 years, then would they take better care of society and the planet? I think they would.

27:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, one thing I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older is that I just think more about the collective.

27:49 I think more about humanity. I think more about, you know, why we’re all here, and less about me and why I’m here. If that makes sense. And I know when I watch people like Ray Dalio from Bridgewater, you know, he distinctly says, you know, when I was younger it was about competing, and now it’s my time to give back. And that’s what, I can now notice that in myself.

28:13 This is the most important thing for me right now, is to pass on this knowledge in a selfless way. And, um, yeah, I just imagine if we had a lot of people doing that later in the years. Yeah. How that might change the whole world. The narrative, it’s pretty fascinating.

28:29 But, or like you said, maybe if they felt more youthful, maybe that would delay a little bit. It’s interesting how all this might work on your mindset.

28:40 David Sinclair: Yeah, well, I use my father as an example of somebody who was pretty pessimistic about life. He’s the human equivalent of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. Um, and I know that any Brits listening would know that story very well.

28:56 I was raised on that book by my grandmother. My father became more and more optimistic the older he got, and I think that if you stay healthy, that’s what happens. You realize that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves, and especially if we become financially stable and we have our health, then what’s left? It’s all about community. It’s about education, our legacy.

29:21 And I find that myself. I’ve always been an educator, but the older I get the more I realize what I want to leave behind are millions of people who have a better life, and leaders in science and industry that can carry on the, you know, take the, you know, I passed the baton on to them, and carry on this new wave of research into aging. And so, you know, often I think what helps us is we think about what are we going to be most proud of when we’re in our last days.

29:57 Um, and I think a lot of us believe that leaving behind a human legacy, these people who will carry on what we haven’t been able to fulfill in our own lives, is the best way to have this legacy that I think a lot of us are striving for. And we’re all looking for meaning in life. We want to have, I think many of us want to leave the world a better place than we left it, than we found it. And if we don’t achieve what we wanted to do in our lifetimes, the best way to do that is to leave behind those who can fulfill that.

30:32 Brian Rose: Yeah. So I have two young boys. They’re five and six years old, and, um, they’re, they’re a massive handful. They’re like a bunch of bandits, and, you know, I’m gonna look at them differently now after talking to you, but I’m looking at two potential, not only 100-year-olds, but maybe 120-year-olds. I mean, this is a long time.

30:51 They’re going to be on this planet for over a century. You know, like turtles or something, and I’m just wondering, as a parent now, as opposed to, say, a hundred years ago, do I raise them differently now? And also, based on the knowledge that you put out in your book and your talks, what are things I need to know as a parent now, in 2022, that maybe I didn’t know or wouldn’t know in 1922?

31:15 David Sinclair: Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that, Brian. So Lifespan was my first book.

31:20 That is the textbook of why we age and then why we don’t have to. My second book, which I’m almost finished writing the draft of, with Matt LaPlante, my co-author, is the guidebook. What is it about the modern world that we can change in our own daily lives to essentially guarantee that we’ll live another 30 years? And then the third book, which I haven’t fully started writing yet, but I’ve got a lot of references to go back to, is, as parents, how do we raise our kids to guarantee that they live the longest life possible?

31:57 And it turns out that this clock that I refer to, the biological aging clock, starts at conception. We can measure this in my lab. We measure it all the time. We can measure thousands of people. Actually, we have a company that next year will provide a test that should be cheap and accessible.

32:16 It’ll be a mouse cheek swab. You just rub your cheek and send off the DNA, and they’ll tell you how old you are biologically. And, uh, if anyone’s, can I mention the name of it too? Egregiously promoting this, but often people want to know. It’s called TallyHealth, one word, tallyhealth.com, and get on the list.

32:36 There’s about a quarter of a million people already signed up, so get on now.

32:41 Brian Rose: Um, and work for telomere? Is that why?

32:43 David Sinclair: No, it’s more interesting than that. Telomeres are a very old and not as accurate way of determining your health.

32:50 What we measure are the problems in your software, the scratches on your CD, literally what it is, is chemicals that are accumulating on your DNA as you get older. And we measure those, and we can use machine learning to tell us how old you are biologically. We can see how many packets of cigarettes you’ve smoked, if any. We can tell you if you’ve been good in your life, and how you compare on that curve to other people your age. And often people say, well, I don’t want to know that number, because I can’t do much about it.

33:25 But what we want to do is to provide people with the guide to be able to slow down and reverse that number, and increasingly we are able to do that. And so even if you are scared of that number, and if you come out a little higher than you should, the good news is that you can act on that and get it back to average or even below average. And you know, I’m a believer that information is important in our lives. I measure myself daily. I have devices that I stick on my chest or wear on my wrist that measure me a thousand times a second, and then that information is important for me to make decisions about my life.

34:01 And that’s why this aging test that I am developing out of my lab at Harvard, I think, is important to give everyone a credit score for their life. But it’s not, it’s not doom and gloom, even though I can tell you how long you have to live based on that number if you don’t change your lifestyle. The good news is that everybody can change that trajectory. Everybody can slow their aging process. My father didn’t start working on his health realistically and diligently until he was in his 70s, so it’s never too late to start.

34:33 And I think having that number that you can measure every month or so will give people inspiration to change their lifestyles and see what works for them and what isn’t working.

34:44 Brian Rose: I love that. And so you’re telling me that, like, my boys, ever since conception, they’re starting to age. That DNA is starting to break down based on every single choice they’re making, which I guess is the choices I’m making as a parent, at least for their first few years or decade of life.

35:01 And the third book will be kind of how to raise your kids. I’m guessing to also give them the good habits that will probably take them on.

35:11 David Sinclair: Well, yeah, that, that for sure. You definitely want to teach them the habits that are in the books that I write. On top of that, you can make sure that by the time they’re in their 30s, they’re biologically in their 20s, still, by what you feed them, how you expose them to things like chemicals, radiation.

35:33 Even x-rays, we found, can accelerate the aging process. Exercise, of course, is very important. Type of exercise, types of food they eat, when they eat, the amount of sleep they get, the amount of stress, psychological and physically they get. And these are all things that are increasingly shown to affect their clock. And you know, let’s take the extreme example: a child that’s raised on ultra-processed foods, who doesn’t ever exercise, who is obese, who’s eating the wrong types of foods, he’s not getting the type of chemicals from the plant world that we know can slow down aging.

36:11 That child will accelerate. They will be older than a child that does all the right things. And I believe that’s why we’re seeing this massive growth rate increase in our children. Why are they bigger? And often reaching maturity sexually faster than we did, and certainly faster than our parents did.

36:35 That’s because they’re actually literally getting older faster.

36:40 Brian Rose: Wow, that’s scary.

36:41 David Sinclair: And it echoes decades in the future. Right? How we raise our kids will affect how healthy they are in their 60s and 70s.

36:50 Brian Rose: Wow. Well, let’s jump in, because now everyone’s been waiting on how they can dial back their age and how they can try to become younger. And let’s talk about some of these things. A quote from you is, quite simply, you said, after 25 years of researching aging and having read thousands of scientific papers, if there’s one piece of advice I can offer, one surefire way to stay healthy longer, one thing you can do to maximize your lifespan right now, it’s this: eat less.

37:21 Speak on this, David, because nobody wants to hear this, and every message we get all day long is the opposite of that message.

37:29 David Sinclair: Yeah, well, yeah, it’s a disaster. The modern world, as we call it, is all about eating, and nutritionists have, really, many of them have done a really poor job in making us live longer. The old idea, and even the current idea for many nutritionists, is don’t be hungry, eat lots of little meals, make sure that you’re always fed.

37:50 And so we live in a world now where breakfast is, quote unquote, the most important meal of the day. Turns out that’s an advertising campaign that’s not based on science. You want to have a snack mid-morning, don’t be hungry, have a lunch snack in the afternoon, have your protein bar, then have a dinner, then you might even snack late at night. This is the recipe for having a short lifespan. You might feel good, but the problem is what you’re doing is you’re never letting your body go into adversity mode, and the genes that protect us against aging and diseases of aging are suppressed by our lifestyle.

38:32 So when I say eat less, I should have really said eat less often, because I eat the normal amounts of food that I should for someone my age. I maintain my weight. I’m not getting thinner. We don’t want malnutrition, we don’t want starvation, for sure, especially in our kids. But what I want to do is to have an eating window of time that’s not spread out through the day.

38:54 And so what I try to do is I try to skip breakfast, have a very small amount for breakfast, I have a little bit of yogurt, and then I try to go as long as I can, drinking a lot of hot tea. I have right here next to me, a lot of beverages. I drink a thick green tea, much. I finished that one. I drink beverages that don’t have a lot of calories, have no sugar in them, but will give me the nutrients that I need during the day.

39:20 I don’t get hungry, and then I eat a really enjoyable large dinner to pack in my calories into about two to three hours. That’s my eating window. Now, if I get hungry, I’ll eat a little bit of sugar-free chocolate or some nuts. I’m not so strict about it. If I’m hungry, I will eat a little bit, but I, again, I try to pack it in, but don’t try to do that tomorrow.

39:40 If you’re a three-meals-and-snacks kind of person, start with trying to skip one meal or eat a smaller amount and get your body used to it. It turns out your body can make its own sugar. Your liver does what’s called gluconeogenesis. It makes its own sugar. You can measure it if you want to.

39:58 Get a glucose monitor and slap it on your arm, by all means do that, and you’ll see that over two weeks of doing what I’m telling you, your liver will get used to it and start making its own sugar. So instead of having these super high spikes of blood sugar and then deficits, and then you get the brain fog and the hunger, and then you eat again, and it’s this cycle of too much sugar and not enough sugar in your body. That’s the modern, that’s the current existence of most people.

40:24 It’s horrible. I go through the day not feeling hungry, not having any brain fog. I have lots of focus, lots of brain energy, lots of physical energy through the day, and that’s a much better way to live. And the good news is that if you do what I’m telling you, science says that your body will fight aging far more than if your body’s always just in this abundance mode.

40:46 Brian Rose: This is such an important point to make, and the reason we eat so often is because of marketing, right?

40:52 It’s this entire marketing campaign that we grew up in. You’re in the States right now. It’s even worse there. You know, eating is worse there. Portions are massive.

41:01 Food is everywhere. I, you know, I grew up in California, and in America, in a weird way, a food, you almost measure the man by the size of his food. There’s a really weird relationship of food in that country, and I think we’re starting to see it in a damaging way in obesity levels. But, you know, I had a guest on my show who had just come off of a very long fast. I think you just come off like a 20-day fast, and he came to talk to me about it.

41:26 His name is Timothy Chief, and I basically decided to do a 48-hour kind of water fast on the back of it, first time ever, and I did it, and David, one of the things I realized was, when I went to grab a piece of food or a drink or something, I soon realized that that urge had nothing to do with calorie deficit, had nothing to do with nutrition. It was a habit I had picked up, just like a dopamine habit, to pull out my phone when I was bored or to do something like that. And I realized once I got over that, I felt fine.

42:01 I felt great. Everything was okay. I just had to resist this urge that I had. It just made me feel better is all it really was. And again, I went the whole day and a half, whatever, you go to sleep one night, you don’t eat all day, you go to sleep the next night, and I learned a ton about myself of just my own psychology, of my triggers to eat.

42:20 And I wouldn’t say I was on the bad end of the spectrum either. I don’t know, does this sound familiar? Some of these reactions.

42:28 David Sinclair: Yes, it really does, and I’m not a David Goggins. I’m a David Sinclair, and David Sinclair is pretty lazy.

42:34 He likes food. So if I can do this, anyone can. Seriously. So what I do is first of all, I ask myself, am I really hungry or am I just bored or stressed? Yeah, that’s the first question.

42:46 And usually, like you say, it’s I’m just bored or stressed, I’m not really hungry. But if I am hungry, what I then do, or even if I’m stressed, I’ll reach for something liquid rather than solid. So here I always have some water around, or something hot. I’ll make a tea. I definitely give my kidneys a run for their money.

43:03 Put a bit of lemon in there, a bit of monk fruit sugar or stevia if I like sweetness. Think about beverages, focus on beverages, not sugar. Beverages, but anything, but that’s what gets me through the day. It’s you know, where mammals, we like to put stuff in our mouths. It’s just a habit of ours.

43:24 But it’s fine. I think that you need to substitute something. I wouldn’t say try to never put something in your mouth. Just substitute, you know, put something that you can chew on. It might be, you know, I’m not a big fan of chewing gum, but if that helps, if it’s sugar-free gum or something else, a little bit of sugar-free chocolate.

43:44 As I mentioned, those things will get you through those moments of weakness.

43:49 Brian Rose: Yeah, very much so. So I’ve kind of ecked in a routine, and I just want to, like, lay it on you. This is what my day looks like. I wake up.

43:59 I’ve never been a breakfast person. I remember the slogan, and everyone’s saying you’ve got to have this, but I’m okay to skip breakfast. And again, my go-to now is our puer tea, which is like a fermented Chinese tea that looks purple and smells like fish heads, but you kind of like it after a while. There’s no calories. English tea I’ve gotten used to.

44:17 And what I do is I go until about one o’clock, two o’clock, and then I go train, and I do about an hour of hard anaerobic cardio, and then I get back, and I finally order my meal, which is usually protein and some vegetables, and I eat around four or four thirty every day. And I’ve worked that routine in before I read your book, by the way, and it’s something I can sustain for a long period of time. And if I keep that up, I feel really good. It’s only on the weekends where I have an opportunity to mess that up, that I start feeling bad and I start making poor choices.

44:51 Um, I got the Oura ring on, so I’m tracking everything, including my sleep and activity, and I’m watching myself. Usually my sleep. I’m just trying to get dialed in, and then I’m taking the cold showers and I’m doing breathing exercises to jack up my, I guess, sympathetic nervous system or something, and this is kind of like my life, and then I try to broadcast like a madman and teaching my Academy. So that’s like my life, and I get a lot from it. I can sustain it.

45:19 In my 20s I was drinking and smoking and doing drugs, and it took me another couple decades, and I’ve now stopped doing all of those things, and I’ve dialed it into where I feel like I can do this for a long time. Um, David, so I know you’re not my doctor, but I was wondering what you think of that. If you have any suggestions, and anything you note there as being helpful or good, or something worth changing?

45:42 David Sinclair: Yeah, well, first of all, congratulations. Good, good for you.

45:45 Everything I heard is on the right path. Your skin looks great. So what if you’re doing, keep doing that. What I didn’t hear was, are you taking vitamin supplements and moving? Are you exercising?

46:01 What, how are you doing in those areas?

46:04 Brian Rose: Yes, so I do an hour a day of some type of hard cardio. I just came back from swimming, where my instructor made me do 12 relay laps with the butterfly strokes. I’m breathing heavy. That, I’m breakdancing, or I’m one of these things.

46:20 I stopped taking supplements about a year ago after trying all of them, because they weren’t making my stomach feel very good, and I just thought, you know what, I’m just gonna not do them. So I don’t. I mean, I have MCT oil with my meals and stuff, but I don’t go out of my way to take supplements, and I haven’t tried any of the things in some of your 12-plus companies as well. So yeah, that’s where I’m at. Thoughts on that?

46:45 David Sinclair: Yeah, well, so my 12-plus companies, just to clarify, most of them are pharmaceutical companies. I don’t sell supplements, even though people put my name and face all over the internet. There are some drugs on the market that you can get through doctors that are thought to slow aging. One is the drug called metformin, which I take. I don’t have type 2 diabetes or high blood sugar, but I take it because, looking at tens of thousands of people who take metformin for their diabetes, they actually, on average, live longer than people who don’t have type 2 diabetes.

47:22 And so I do that. Um, I also take a number of supplements. I take a symphony of supplements, actually, that I’ve learned through testing my blood, mainly, but also wearing devices. What works for me and what doesn’t. Exercise is important.

47:37 I don’t exercise enough. It sounds like you’re doing all the right things. You want to have at least 10 minutes a day of losing your breath, whether it’s, you know, exercise in bed with someone you love, or just walking quickly. Running a little bit goes a long way. A new study just came out a couple of weeks ago that shows just five minutes a few times a week will separate you from the pack who doesn’t exercise at all, and lower your rate of getting heart disease and even dementia by a whopping 30 to 40 percent.

48:10 So a little bit goes a long way. So I applaud what you’re doing, um, in terms of food. Often people say, well, should I just eat meat? Should I eat plants? What I like to focus on are fresh fruits and vegetables.

48:26 The reason for that is that plants contain a couple of really important components. One is it’s a ratio of amino acids that turns on longevity-protective genes, and particularly that you want foods that are low in branched- chain amino acids, such as leucine, isoleucine and valine. And plants tend to have that more than meat. And the other thing that plants have that meat doesn’t have are chemicals that sometimes you can buy supplements that actually turn on longevity genes without having to be hungry or exercise, or can supplement those activities.

49:04 And so I do both. I eat plants that have these chemicals, and I also take them as supplements. And some of those go by the names of resveratrol, quercetin, pterostilbene. They’re outlined in my book, Lifespan. And what I think is going on, if you’re wondering why do plants make these molecules, is it just a happy coincidence?

49:25 I think not. When our food supply is stressed, we need to know that, and we’ve evolved to sense the chemical cues in our food supply. So for instance, resveratrol, which is found in grapes and in red wine, goes up dramatically when the plants don’t get enough water. Oleic acid, which is in olive oil, goes up dramatically when the olive trees are not watered or they don’t get enough nutrients. So the plant world can also supplement, literally supplement, what we do in our daily lives, which should include exercise and eating less often.

50:04 Brian Rose: You mentioned stress, and talk about a lot in your book, and I remember taking tours of vineyards in Italy and Tuscany, and I remember going on a specific tour where it had gone from a table wine producing vineyard to a fine wine producing vineyard, and the head guy was saying it’s because we stressed the vines. When we stressed the vines, we get the best wine. And I was just, the first thing that came to me, and you just mentioned it now. Do you see this parallel in nature?

50:36 David Sinclair: We do. So the hypothesis that I came up with, with Konrad Howitz, another doctor in the US, is called xenohormesis, and when plants are stressed, they make these polyphenols, they’re called, and there’s dozens of them that are in our food supply that in my research I’ve shown activate the sirtuins, which are these longevity regulators in our body, which come on when we’re hungry and when we exercise. So when plants are stressed, they make these polyphenols, but they also make a lot of flavor and color, and that’s why if you have a lot of flavor and color in your food, it’s a good bet that you’re also getting these healthy, longevity-promoting molecules.

51:19 Brian Rose: You also mentioned in the book that we could focus on cancer and a few other, like, death ailments, but if we just cure those, you’re saying we actually only add on average, like, one to two years of life back to people. Which is really counterintuitive, because most people think of those as the things that kill everybody or hurt everybody or hurt society in large. But you argue it’s actually this lack of longevity. Can you just speak on that?

51:48 David Sinclair: Well, the first thing to realize is that aging is the root cause of all of these diseases, and if we can slow down and reverse aging, I believe they go away.

51:58 Okay, we’re working on a cure for Alzheimer’s by reversing the age of the brain, which we can do easily in mice now. They get their ability to learn back. So that’s the important first bit of knowledge. The other is that modern medicine is, as we call it, is part of what, instead of calling it healthcare, I call it sick care, because what we’re doing is sticking Band-Aids on the end products of aging. Okay, and imagine that we’re constantly getting cuts, and we go into the doctor, and they stick a Band-Aid on there.

52:32 Medicine is basically putting Band-Aids on aging, but we’re constantly getting cuts, and the doctor will put a Band-Aid on the cut and say go home, and we get another cut, and another cut, another cut, and then it’s exponential. We’re getting more and more cuts all the time, and the older we get, the more cuts, and eventually you’re going to run out of Band-Aids, which is what eventually kills us. And it’s the reason why medicines typically don’t help us live longer than another couple of years, because by preventing cancer, it doesn’t stop all the other things that are happening with aging to really live a long time, to live another 20, 30, eventually 50 years longer than today’s lifespan, we have to get at the root cause, which is the aging process itself.

53:15 And that’s why it baffles me that more people aren’t talking about or working on this problem.

53:21 Brian Rose: It goes down to that weird psychology. Isn’t where we, um, we also, we kind of outsource our health to our doctors. They’re the ones that are supposed to fix us. You know, that’s the way I grew up, right?

53:33 We outsource, we used to outsource, you know, our nutrition to those specialists. We used to outsource all these things, and then we would just show up and give me the pill and tell me what to do. Whereas nowadays with new media, we’re starting to realize that it’s actually your responsibility to take action. It’s not the doctor’s responsibility to fix you, because then it’s too late anyways. But maybe you can speak on this.

53:57 We have these entire industries, legacy industries that have been built around this psychology. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Go to the doctor and, what’s the most profitable thing in doctors? Is to test your blood pressure and up your blood pressure medication or your cholesterol medication. It’s like, it’s why doctors’ practices exist, from what I hear.

54:21 So you have to break a lot of institutions, which is a tough thing to do.

54:26 David Sinclair: Yeah, and it’s also the way doctors are trained traditionally. I’m at Harvard Medical School, so I know how doctors are trained, and the idea is you treat disease. You typically don’t try to prevent it. And we all know this from my experience.

54:41 I go to my doctor who’s at Harvard, and you think I’d have one of the best doctors in the world, and I go in there and he says, hey, thanks for coming in, and I’m thinking, yeah, I haven’t seen you in a couple of years, right? It’s up to me to come see you. You don’t check in on me ever. And then I’m there and he says, so how you feeling? I feel pretty good.

55:02 How are you sleeping? Not so well. Any other problems? And then you go through this, and then they go, okay, well, you seem pretty good to me. Let me bang on your knee and check your blood pressure, and then you’re out of here.

55:15 I’ll see you in another couple of years. That’s not medicine, in my view. Really what you want to be doing is sitting down with someone who spends the time to look at all your blood work extensively, not just a couple of things. Asks you about your nutrition, what are you eating, when are you eating, what about your exercise, what kind of exercise are you doing? Here’s a trainer if you want.

55:38 Here’s a nutritionist. Here’s the kind of foods that you should be eating. Even here are the brands that you should look for. These are the kind of details that I think doctors should be also trained in. The problem is, and in all defense of them, they only have 15 minutes to half an hour with you, and it’s really just not enough time to be able to give you the kind of information that I’m giving people, that will prevent the diseases that they treat.

56:04 And so we need both. Doctors, you know, if you get cancer or something lethal, your doctor is suddenly your best friend, right? But until then, really your best friend is yourself, taking your own life into your own hands, monitoring yourself. You can get blood tests on your own. You don’t need your doctor now for most people that’s affordable.

56:21 You can monitor your own nutrition. There are apps, there’s education, your exercise. Everybody now knows the kind of exercise that’s good for you. We’re in a world now where we can educate ourselves, whereas before it was only our doctors that knew about the best things. And one of the things that happened when I went to my doctor recently is, so I’m, I’m of the belief that cancer is largely a preventable disease, so so is heart disease, by that, for that matter.

56:47 So there are blood tests you can do to detect most types of cancer. Now there are MRI scans that I had done a couple of weeks ago, looking, using AI to find very small cancers years before they’d show up as symptoms that would take you to your doctor. And I said to my doctor, hey, can you get me this test, this blood test for this cancer screening? And he said, what test? You mean you can actually do that now?

57:14 And I wanted to reach over and strangle him, because he’s the guy that should be on top of this, not me. So really we’re in a world now where the patient can be more educated than the doctor.

57:25 Brian Rose: How many people do that? And do you think the future will be everybody taking responsibility, or not?

57:31 David Sinclair: I think we should be doing that.

57:33 Whether or not that happens, I’m not sure. I think it’s up to people like me, and for doctors, scientists and doctors, to educate the public through books, through podcasts, to get the word out. I’m hoping to do a TV show in the next year or so that’ll reach, I hope, millions more people than I’ve been able to reach before, so that it’s easy to be able to take your own wellness, health and longevity into your own hands, to supplement what your doctor only has time for a few times a year, at best, to help you with.

58:05 And really, I think it’s not just should, it’s really a must. Everybody must take their own health into their own hands, because no one else will do it.

58:13 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, if there’s one lesson people need to get today, it’s that you can’t outsource your health to anyone else. It’s not their responsibility. They’re not going to be able to help you.

58:24 And unless you’re looking at every hour of the day and what you’re doing to be proactive, in, to be honest, your education, your health, your financial future, your rights, your human rights. It’s kind of on you, and these days there’s so much information out there that you can learn this stuff. Um, talk to me about wearables. I mean, you see a future where everyone’s going to be dialed in, plugged in, and we can start to see all of these indicators in real time, early indications, like you talked about, this MRI scan.

58:54 Is that a future that’s happening soon?

58:56 David Sinclair: Well, it’s here right now. It’s just not evenly distributed, and it’s fairly expensive. You know, MRI is still a few hundred bucks, even a thousand dollars, if you’re just doing it for health reasons, not if you have a disease. The monitors are getting cheaper and cheaper, so that’s the good news.

59:15 The ring you mentioned, I’m wearing one. There are a couple hundred bucks, which I think most people can afford. They could give up coffee every day and afford one of those increasingly. We will be monitored constantly. I mean, right now it’s primitive.

59:31 We look at our phones, we see our heartbeats, we see how well we slept. That’s the beginning of a revolution that will eventually be that we’ll have stick-on patches on our chest, on our wrist, even implantables, so that we don’t really have to think about it. You know, who wants to be thinking about the health all the time? Most people are too busy. Where I have other hobbies, whereas you know, you and I are exceptions.

59:54 What we want is a system where a practitioner, maybe a nurse, is monitoring us, or even a computer is monitoring us 24/7, a thousand times a second. This technology exists. I’ve worn a patch that monitored me a thousand times a second and could tell my doctor remotely if I was going to have a heart attack next week, or even if I was developing a cold or a flu, or even getting depressed. That is the future, which really will be a future in the next five to ten years for a lot of people.

1:00:25 People in 20 years, it’ll be normal. When that future comes, we’ll think, how is it possible that we waited till we got sick before we went to our doctors? That’s craziness. That’s too late. You don’t want to have a tumor in your body before you go to your doctor.

1:00:41 You will look back on this time in 100 years and just, you know, just shake our heads, like, how backward it was, like when they used to put leeches on people to get out the diseases. I already think of medicine that way. The way medicine’s practiced is already medieval, in my view. What I need to do, what we need to do, is to use modern technology and the technologies that are available to us, and those that we can afford, to be able to see diseases before they arise, and that time is now for a lot of us.

1:01:14 A lot of your listeners here, we can do a lot more. So I would say to everybody, get educated. Read books on this topic. If you want to pick up my book, it’s a good place to start, Lifespan, and get educated on what these technologies are. We actually know more about the health of our cars that we know about the health of our bodies, and you know, we wouldn’t drive without a dashboard.

1:01:36 Why do we do that with our bodies, which are far more important than our cars? And stop accepting this conditioning that we’ve been put through, that aging is natural, right?

1:01:46 Brian Rose: We just give up. Don’t we? It’s almost like, oh yeah, well, you were born poor, you’re going to be poor your whole life, or you were born a slave, so you’re going to live your whole life a slave.

1:01:57 It’s like you don’t have to accept that. Do you?

1:02:00 David Sinclair: You don’t have to. Well, aging is natural, but so is living out in the forest with a campfire. That’s natural.

1:02:07 We don’t do that. Cancer is natural. Heart disease, natural. Alzheimer’s is natural. But we don’t accept those things.

1:02:16 I mean, what about our world right now? Look around the room you’re in, Brian. I’m looking at my room. There’s nothing natural. The air is air conditioned and filtered.

1:02:26 The walls, houses are not natural. So why do we, even though aging is natural, why do we accept that? It’s pretty much the only thing in our lives that is acceptable because it’s natural. Is not an excuse to ignore it. And some people say, well, I wouldn’t enjoy life.

1:02:43 The agency of life wouldn’t be there if I was not going to die at 80 or 90. I reject that. I don’t think that we get up in the morning and feel good about life because we know we’re going to die at 80. I don’t know anybody that does that when it comes to the end of life. When, if you could get another year of life, or another 10 years of life, or even 20, 30 years of life, everybody without exception, and I’ve seen this over and over again, wants that.

1:03:13 It’s only when we think about the future and think, oh yeah, when I’m 80, that’s someone else, it’s not me. You know, I want to die. Then that’s not true. Everybody wants to live a healthier, longer life when it gets down to it. Yeah.

1:03:26 Brian Rose: So you reject the assumption that if you get to live to 120, that life won’t be as meaningful. You’re like,

1:03:32 David Sinclair: no, that’s not true, because at 100, if you’ve got friends and you’re healthy, no one wants to die the next day. I promise you that. Yeah.

1:03:39 Brian Rose: Do you think much about our relationship with death?

1:03:42 Again, it’s kind of the Western world, and I mean, that’s quite complicated in itself, and all the different myths and stories and institutions we create to get ourselves around this one thing that’s facing us every single day, that we don’t like to talk about. Because you talk a little bit about death. Is that something you think about? And do you think even talking about some of these issues would change people’s relationship with death or living?

1:04:08 David Sinclair: Yeah, I do.

1:04:09 I think realizing our own mortality, accepting it, thinking about it, it’s important. Often, too often, we don’t think about life and death until a parent dies, and then we get into our 50s and we can see that there are possibly fewer days ahead than before. It um, and that’s, I think, to me, is a mistake. I think it’s important to realize that every day is precious, and how we live every day will give us extra life, and that how we live now really will echo into the future, and our future selves will thank us for how we live today.

1:04:50 And it’s really important to realize that our future selves are really ourselves now. Often we just, I mentioned this, so we distance our souls from our future selves. It’s not true. Brian, do you feel any different as a human being than you did 10, 20 years ago?

1:05:05 Brian Rose: No.

1:05:05 No, yeah.

1:05:06 David Sinclair: So when you’re 80 you’ll still be that guy who you are today, and we need to realize that, because otherwise we just put off the future and we don’t worry about that person. But we need to think that that person is us, and it’s not that far away now. There are a lot of myths, like you said. There’s religion, of course, that makes death more palatable, more acceptable, and I’m not saying to do away with religion at all.

1:05:29 I think it’s very healthy for a lot of people and comforting, but I do think that we shouldn’t accept aging and death, because we really never have when it comes to medicine, and aging is no different. In fact, tackling aging is probably the best way to practice medicine that I can think of.

1:05:46 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think a lot of us have this conversation when we’re in our 20s, that like, oh yeah, well, when I’m 80 I’ll just be barely there. I’ll be frailing in a home and it doesn’t matter.

1:05:56 I’m going to live my life now. But then it’s like, but then when you get to be nearing that age, you’re kind of thinking, you know, uh, you know, I kind of wish you hadn’t done that, you know, because again, I remember my grandma. She was like in her 80s and she used to say, she’d be like, Brian, I don’t feel any, I feel the same as I did when I was 20. You know, I still feel the same. I still want the same things.

1:06:18 I still want to do all these things. So you don’t want to sell out the future version of you, and you’re basically doing that every day when you’re not putting these practices into place.

1:06:32 David Sinclair: Well said, very, very well said. Another thing that I recall somebody told me who was elderly is, no one tells you how horrible aging is. It really is.

1:06:43 It’s a nightmare, and it’s, we’re all headed for that, if we’re lucky enough to get there, and we’re in denial of that, and we’ve got to realize that aging is no cakewalk. It is hell for a lot of people, and it can be held for a decade of suffering. Anyone who’s had a parent or grandparent go through this knows how bad it is, and actually death is not pleasant either. I watched my mother suffocate to death in front of me. It was nothing we could do for her.

1:07:11 Um, I think we need to talk about that more often, because certainly in the Western world we tend to ignore that. We ignore what it’s like to be old. We ignore what it’s like to die, and I think if we think about it more often, we would be a lot more diligent in our daily practices. Yeah. Amen to that.

1:07:28 Brian Rose: David, you mentioned Alzheimer’s, and it’s something I think that scares people, because they feel like maybe they have even less control over losing their mental faculties, and we all know someone, or know someone that knew someone, that just completely wasn’t there in their last years. Talk about one of the very ugly things about aging, that’s the one that maybe scares people even more. Yeah. Talk about the work you’re doing with that, and I guess a lot of these practices speak about the aging of the brain.

1:08:03 David Sinclair: Yeah, that’s one of the most important things about the research that I do. It’s that if I discover something that slows down aging in the body but doesn’t slow down aging in the brain, I don’t study it. We have to keep the brain young as well as the body. The good news is that, so far, without, well, maybe with one or two exceptions, what we have discovered slows down aging in the brain as well. And our latest research, which works on age reversal and resetting the software in the body, works really well in the brain.

1:08:39 In fact, so far it works in the brain better than anywhere else in the body. Nerves, it turns out, are very easy to reset the age of, and we’re studying mice right now, because it’s easier and permitted, and what we’re taking are old mice that have lost their ability to learn and they’re blind, and we can reset their eyes and their brain. The eyes are part of the brain, and we get back the vision and we get back learning. And we think that this is going to be a future approach to treating, and certainly preventing, dementia.

1:09:13 One of the things I’m hopeful about is that even lost memories can be regained by reversing the age of the brain. So that’s a future where, you know, I look forward to where people can not worry about losing their ability to recognize family members or forget things that they learned in their youth and during their careers. Keeping the brain healthy is super important. One of the problems with medical research is that, because researchers haven’t studied, haven’t taken aging into account, and have been sticking these Band-Aids on the problem.

1:09:52 There’s been very little progress in slowing down the diseases of aging in the brain, and I think with this new approach of slowing the cause of these diseases, which is aging, we have a real fighting chance of being able to have a big impact on keeping people having normal cognition into their 80s and 90s, like my father is said to have.

1:10:16 Brian Rose: Is there an upper limit, ultimately, David, on aging? I mean, when you start getting up to 150,200, is there something that’s going to stop or not?

1:10:26 David Sinclair: Well, anyone who says there’s a maximum lifespan to humans, a biological limit, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. There’s no evidence for a biological limit to humans. There are many species that live longer than us. Some of them are very similar to us genetically. Whales, for example, some of them can live two, three hundred years, and we are not so different from them.

1:10:49 What we need to do is study them and understand what is it about their bodies that protects them from cancer and heart disease and dementia. Their software seems to be very robust. They don’t get corrupted. Software, the so-called epigenome stability, is what they have, and by finding medicines that give us those capabilities of those animals, I don’t see why we couldn’t live just as long as they do.

1:11:13 Brian Rose: Now, in our lifetimes, what are we likely to see?

1:11:16 David Sinclair: Well, Given the advances in age reversal, I’m now more and more optimistic that the first person to live 250 is already here on the planet. I said that, and that quote has now been echoed around the world. You might have heard that before. Yeah, and I still believe that. In fact, I increasingly believe that to be true.

1:11:36 Brian Rose: Wow. Do you ever wish, David, that you were born maybe 50 years later?

1:11:42 David Sinclair: But definitely don’t. I think it’s exciting to see where humanity is going. I was concerned as a kid that we would run out of fuel, there’d be no cars, when I was in my 30s, and that we’d probably have nuclear Armageddon by the time I was, you know, midway through my life.

1:12:03 I’m much more of an optimistic person now. I’ve seen that human ingenuity can solve just about any problem that we put our minds to, if we just cure, put focus on that and give it resources. So I think that humanity and civilization is going to be around for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, going into the future. I’d love to see that. I don’t think I’ll be around in 10,000 years, but I would like to stick around to see some of those advancements.

1:12:29 Brian Rose: Now, here’s the important thing. As Ray Kurzweil has said, we’re going to reach a moment where for every year we live, we get another year of life. He thinks that, I think it’s roughly 20 years away. He thinks maybe sooner. Is this the singularity, or that’s slightly different than that?

1:12:45 David Sinclair: No, no, it’s the singularity. 2030, I think, he’s predicting. Well, he’s changed his view on longevity recently, and that may come earlier than the singularity, which is when human intelligence builds machines that are far more intelligent than humans, and then you get this runaway intelligence that’s beyond what we can imagine. But longevity is going very quickly. The science of longevity is now big business.

1:13:13 Um, since we published this paper on the cover of Nature two years ago about age reversal in the eye, over four billion dollars have been invested in this area, and hundreds of labs have taken up the charge around the world. So I think that within our lifetimes we’ll see the ability to extend lifespan by at least a couple of decades or more. But here’s the important point. There will be a time when we can keep living longer and longer and longer. Perhaps I wouldn’t say be immortal, but I think there’ll be this sudden change in our ability to live perhaps centuries.

1:13:49 Whether or not we, as our generation, I think Brian, you and I are in the same generation, whether or not we make it to that point or not, it depends on how we live our lives. And we’re not going to make it there if we just live the way big business wants us to live and eat all the time and eat crap and don’t exercise and just watch movies and eat popcorn. That is a life that’s guaranteed to miss out on that opportunity of living a vastly longer life. But some of us will make it there.

1:14:17 Brian Rose: I, I wish I’d been born later, because that would guarantee that I’d make it there. But I think, you know, we can’t choose when we were born, but we can choose roughly when we’re going to die, and I think that’s very empowering, because if you were born 50 years later, you could argue you would live 50 years longer, and maybe you’d ride that singularity wave or whatever it is, to where you could live centuries longer.

1:14:41 David Sinclair: Well, for sure. Think about this: a child born today will live into the 22nd century.

1:14:46 Think of the technology that they’ll have then. Today we’re reversing aging in a whole mouse. By the 22nd century, I think it’ll be common to get medicine delivered to your home by drone, or by just by mail, and you’ll go through a course of pills, and in two months you go back a couple of decades in age, and every couple of decades you age out, and then you just reset the system, and you can repeat that, possibly dozens of times, maybe hundreds of times in that century.

1:15:15 So yeah, kids born today are going to see a very different world and look back at today with pity at us, who go to the doctor once a year and who get frail in their 70s and 80s. That’s going to be uncommon, unimaginable for our kids when they reach our age. And you mentioned, Brian, Chris.

1:15:33 Brian Rose: Wow, what do you think about these people that just want to upload themselves into the cloud and then, you know, freeze their bodies? Is that an alternative?

1:15:42 Because if it is, I guess people don’t care about aging.

1:15:46 David Sinclair: Well, yeah, I think that that vastly underestimates the complexity of the human brain. Our minds are massively complex machines that are analog, not digital, and just the fact of reading what’s in the brain is going to disturb it, and so I don’t see any way currently to download our brains into a machine, so I’m not optimistic about that. Freezing the brain, again, it does a heck of a lot of damage to the brain.

1:16:16 I don’t think that that’s a viable solution either, although it does give you at least a at least a vanishingly small chance, that’s not zero, of coming back into existence, but I think our best bet by far is to look after our bodies and push ourselves to the limit of our longevity, and to make use of technologies that are coming down the line that will continue to improve as we live longer and longer.

1:16:41 Brian Rose: I want to finish and ask you about some of the companies you’re working on. But you know, you are now living in America, and you’re in a place where the opposite is happening with people’s lifestyle choices.

1:16:54 You know, obesity is on the up. There’s more comforts being introduced, so there’s less stress on our lives. Do you ever look at these two things and think, well, I don’t know how we can turn this thing back around?

1:17:05 David Sinclair: Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s what book number two that I’ve just written is all about.

1:17:10 It’s about how did we get here, what is it about our evolutionary history and economic history and capitalism that got us to this point. And there are four human traits, let’s see if I can remember them: that there’s tool makers and explorers and time travelers and storytellers, and these got us to this point, but now we’re basically in big trouble, because we have a world that is satisfying our need for comfort, and satiety, which is the worst for longevity. We didn’t evolve this way.

1:17:42 We don’t respond well to that. So in our daily lives we need to remember that our bodies need a little bit of adversity to be reminded to turn on our defenses that exist in all of our cells, to slow down and reverse that clock that ticks every day. And if we don’t do that, then really what we’re doing is succumbing to companies that profit from our future misery.

1:18:06 Brian Rose: I can’t wait for that second book. Um, you need to tell us how we can get a copy of that.

1:18:12 And then maybe lastly, talk about some of these companies. I’ve heard you explain a few of them. They sound pretty interesting. Yeah, what’s coming up?

1:18:22 David Sinclair: Well, lots of interesting stuff.

1:18:24 So I mentioned TallyHealth, not tally T-A-L-L-Y, for the mouth swab test. Sign up for that. Um, you might get to be one of the early users. Um, I have a pet longevity company that I haven’t actually talked about publicly, but I’m going to mention it here as a real treat. It’s called leapyears.com, and, uh, we have dog treats, and soon cat treats, that have clinically been shown to increase vitality, sleep, even memory in your pet, and so that’s coming out very soon, and there’s a website you can sign up for information on that, and you know, I want to make sure that our companion animals also don’t get neglected.

1:19:15 I would love to have dogs that live as long as we do, and I think we’ll eventually get there, and cats can’t forget the cats. So that’s leapyears.com. Um, I also, InsideTracker is the blood testing company that I work with and use every few months. Um, and, uh, yeah, so those are the main ones. My book, again, you kindly mentioned, is called Lifespan, and it has all the information on page 304, where I talk about what I do and what my father does on a daily basis to be able to use science to hopefully live a lot longer.

1:19:54 And, um, book two, that’ll be coming out probably in late 2023. And stay tuned for that. I’m on social media, so I talk about these things and the latest science that comes out on Instagram and Twitter, so you can find me there, and that’s a good way of keeping up to speed with the latest developments.

1:20:13 Brian Rose: Fantastic. I love the pet company.

1:20:15 That’s probably more money in the pet company than the humans.

1:20:19 David Sinclair: Well, you know, people really mourn their pets when they outlive their pets. It’s a big thing, and it’ll also give me justification, because I constantly like to put our cat through physical challenges and dietary challenges and temperature challenges, and I always knew there was a method to my madness there. So yeah, well, we overfeed our pets for sure. Um, oh, I mentioned your good-looking skin.

1:20:47 Um, you know, I’m 53 and I don’t have many wrinkles or whatever, so part of the trick is to know how to nourish the skin and slow down aging in the skin. I’m Australian, so the first part of my life was burning at the beach, so that was not a good start. Um, I have co-developed a skin product out of my lab, and in a cloud, in collaboration with NASA, where actually we found an organism that survives in outer space that has components that protect the skin and can slow down aging, and so that’s called Delavie, D-E-L-A-V-I-E, Sciences, at delavie.com.

1:21:23 And so that’s my first foray with a product to slow down the outward appearance of aging as well, and the cosmetic industry has so little science in it. It’s really quite, quite sad. And so we innovated there, and that product just came out. So if you’d like to try that, you know, be my guest.

1:21:43 Brian Rose: That’s fantastic.

1:21:44 You’re a busy guy. You’re bi-coastal. Books dropping later, and you’ve got 12-plus companies.

1:21:51 David Sinclair: Oh, and people want to know when my podcast season two comes out. I’m working on that.

1:21:57 I’ve been a little busy, been working on TV as well, on something, but that’ll be coming out next year. People, Brian, get, get upset because the first podcast was such a, so interesting to people and successful, that, uh, am I doing a season two? The answer is yes, and thanks for your patience. And we have a big study coming out in the journal Cell in 2023, uh, and watch out for that. That is, uh, what I think is my most important study yet.

1:22:27 It took 13 years to do that study, and it took 60 researchers, 15 labs around the world, and I’m excited to release that paper. It’s coming out shortly.

1:22:37 Brian Rose: This is super exciting. And, um, like you said, David, it’s always surprising how little people engage with this or know about something that seems to be the most important topic in the world for all of humans. And so if anyone takes away something today, it’s aging is a disease, that disease is treatable.

1:22:58 You can treat it with your actions every single day, but you’re probably going to have to deprogram yourself from massive marketing machines that have programmed you into making a lot of poor decisions that deep down you probably know are wrong. The good news is you can change that pretty quick and probably see some results fairly quick.

1:23:17 David Sinclair: Well said. Yeah, and it’s up to us, because no one else is going to do it for you, and we have the knowledge now on the internet and in books to be able to educate ourselves, so that there is no excuse anymore.

1:23:29 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, exactly, and stop outsourcing your education as well, because it’s all out there. Um, I’m kind of glad I was born in the early 70s, just to close this out, because I can tell my kids these stories of when you had to pick up the phone and it was on a wire. I was telling my boys to stay the night and they look at me like I’m crazy. I got these, um, you can’t, you’ll see them in the final edit. I got typewriters on my walls here.

1:23:50 They’re mounted on the walls, and my son’s coming like, what are these? And I’m like, well, they’re typewriters. We used to type letters on pieces of paper. They look at me like I’ve got four heads. So, um, and a pre-internet world, at least we saw that, right, David, so we could tell these stories.

1:24:04 David Sinclair: Yeah, well, we have something in common. I have a wall of computers um, going back really to last century with the mechanical ones, and I think you and I are similar in that we love to see old technology and advancements, and you know, with respect, that where these technologies that we’re talking about are standing on the shoulders of people who came before us, and it’s a long line of human innovation, and it’s just exciting to extrapolate to where we’re going next.

1:24:32 Brian Rose: Fantastic.

1:24:33 The book is Lifespan, why we age and why we don’t have to. Pick up a copy of that. Follow this man on social. The how-to books coming out soon. I can’t wait to see that, and of course I’ll pre-order the parenting guide as well, whenever you’ve got a link for that.

1:24:47 Um, but David, thank you very much. I really appreciate this, you give me a lot to meditate on and work on, and, uh, next time let’s do this in London.

1:24:54 David Sinclair: All right. That sounds good. Thanks for having me on.

1:24:56 Brian Rose: It’s great to see you. All right, appreciate it. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next time on London Real. Bye.