back to indexDavid Sinclair: Extending the Human Lifespan Beyond 100 Years | Lex Fridman Podcast #189
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The following is a conversation with David Sinclair.
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He's a professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard
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and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center
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for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School.
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He's the author of the book,
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Lifespan and cofounder of several biotech companies.
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He works on turning age into an engineering problem
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Driven by a vision of a world where billions of people
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can live much longer and much healthier lives.
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Quick mention of our sponsors.
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On It, Clear, National Instruments and I,
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Simply Safe and Linode.
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Check them out in the description
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to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that legivity research
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challenges us to think how science and engineering
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will change society.
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Imagine if we can live 100,000 years,
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even under controlled conditions like in a spaceship, say,
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then suddenly a trip to Alpha Centauri
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that is 4.37 light years away takes a single human lifespan.
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And on the psychological, maybe even philosophical level,
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as the horizons of death drift farther into the distance,
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how will our search for meaning change?
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Does meaning require death
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or does it merely require struggle?
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Reprogramming our biology will require us to delve deeper
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into understanding the human mind and the robot mind.
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Both of these efforts are as exciting
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of a journey as I can imagine.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast
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and here is my conversation with David Sinclair.
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I usually feel like the same person when I was 12,
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like when I, right now, as I think about myself,
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I feel like exactly the same person
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that I was when I was 12.
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And yet, I am getting older, both body and mind,
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and still feel like time hasn't passed at all.
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Do you feel this tension in yourself
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that you're the same person and yet you're aging?
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Yeah, I have this tension that I'm still a kid,
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but that helps in my career.
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Scientists need to have a wonder about the world
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and you don't wanna grow up at 12 year olds
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and even younger, I would say six, seven year olds.
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I've still got that boy in me and I can look at things.
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It's a gift, I think,
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that I can see things for the first time if I choose to
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and then explain them as I would to a six year old
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because I am that mentally.
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But on the other hand, I'm getting older, right?
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I run a lab of 20 people at Harvard.
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I've got a book, I've got science to do, companies to run.
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And so I have to, on most days,
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just pretend to be a grown up and be mature,
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but I definitely don't feel that way.
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There's something I really appreciated
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in the opening of your book.
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You talked about your grandma there.
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And on this kind of theme, on this kind of topic,
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she first of all had a big influence on you.
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My grandmother had a big influence on me.
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And you also mentioned this poem by the author
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of Winnie the Pooh, Alan Alexander Milne.
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Maybe I can read it real quick
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because I love, on the topic of being children.
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When I was one, I had just begun.
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When I was two, I was nearly new.
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When I was three, I was hardly me.
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When I was four, I was not much more.
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When I was five, I was just alive.
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I am as clever, as clever, so I think I'll be six,
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now, forever and ever.
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So this idea of being six and staying six forever,
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being youthful, being curious, being childlike,
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this and other things,
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what influence has your grandmother had
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when you're thinking about life, about death, about love?
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Yeah, I was getting misty eyed as you read that
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because that poem was read to me very often,
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if not every day by my grandmother who partially raised me.
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And she was as much a Bohemian as an artist, philosopher.
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And she's one of those people
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that wouldn't talk about the little things.
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She said, I hate small talk.
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Don't talk to me about politics or the weather.
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Yeah, talk to me about human beings and culture.
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So I was raised on that.
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And this poem was one that she read to me often
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because she knew that the mind of a child is precious,
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it's honest, it's pure.
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And she grew up during the Second World War
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and in Hungary and Budapest witnessed the worst of humanity.
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She was trying to save a whole group of Jewish friends
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saw what happened after the World War, which was there was,
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the Russians were in control
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and locals weren't necessarily treated well
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if they were rebellious, which she was.
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And then there was the revolution in 56,
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which she was part of and had to escape the country.
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So she saw what can happen when humans do their worst.
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And her words to me expressed in part through that poem
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was David, always stay young and innocent
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and have wonder about the world
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and then do your best to make humanity the best it can be.
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And that's who I am.
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That's what I live for.
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That's what I get up in the morning to do
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is to leave the world a better place
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and show to whoever's watching us,
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whether it's aliens or some future human historian,
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that we can do better than we did in the 20th century.
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You know, we mentioned offline this idea
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of bringing people back to life
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through artificial intelligence.
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Sort of, I don't know if you've seen videos
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of basically animating people back to life,
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meaning whether it's, for me,
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a person I've been working on specifically
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about Albert Einstein, but also Alan Turing,
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Isaac Newton, and Richard Feynman.
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And it's an opportunity to bring people
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that meant a lot to others in the world
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and animate them and be able to have a conversation with them.
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At first, to try to visually explore
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the full richness of character that they had
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as they struggle with the ideas of the modern age.
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Sort of, it's less about bringing back their mind
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and more bringing back the visual quirks
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that made them who they are.
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And then maybe in the future,
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it's using the textual, the visual,
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the video, the audio data to actually compress
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down the person for who they are
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and be able to generate text.
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There's a few companies.
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There's Replica, which is a chat engine
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that was born out of the idea of bringing,
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the founder lost her friend to,
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he got ran over by a car.
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And the initial reason she founded the company
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was trying to just have a conversation with her friend.
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She trained machine learning, natural language system
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on the text that they exchanged with each other
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and she had a conversation with him
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sort of after he was gone.
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And the conversation was very trivial.
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It was obvious that it's AI agent,
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but it gave her solace.
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It made her actually feel really good.
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And that's the way I wonder if it's possible
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to bring back people that mean something to us personally,
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not just Einstein, but people that we've lost.
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And in that way achieve a kind of small,
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artificial immortality.
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I don't know if you think about this kind of stuff.
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Well, I definitely think about a lot of things.
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That one's a really good one.
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There's a great Black Mirror episode
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about the wife who brings back the boyfriend or husband.
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I think one of the challenges
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with bringing back Richard Feynman
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would be to capture his sense of humor.
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But that would be awesome.
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But yeah, bringing back loved ones would be great,
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especially if they're young and they die early.
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Though it may hold you back from moving on,
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that's another thing that could happen as a negative.
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But I think that's great.
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And I also think that it's gonna be possible,
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especially when we're recording some of us,
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every aspect of our lives,
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whether it's our face or things we see, right?
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Eventually one day, everything we see can be recorded.
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And then you can build somebody's experience and thoughts,
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speech and you will have replicas of everybody,
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at least digitally and physically,
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you could do that too one day.
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But that's a good idea,
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especially because there are people that I'd like to meet
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and I think it's easier than building a time machine.
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One person I'd love to meet is Benjamin Franklin.
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Well, I wouldn't go back in time, I would,
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but I'd prefer to bring him into the future and say,
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can you believe we have this thinking machine
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in our pockets now?
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And he just see the look on his face
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as to where humanity has come.
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Cause I think of him as a modern guy
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that just was before his time.
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So you're thinking Benjamin Franklin, a scientist,
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not Benjamin Franklin, the political thing.
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Cause he'd be very upset with Congress right now.
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So maybe you talk to him about science and technology,
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not politics, or maybe you just don't get him on Twitter
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because he'll be very upset with human civilization.
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You know, I wonder what their personalities are like.
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Isaac Newton, it does seem complicated to figure out
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what their personality is like.
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Even Friedrich Nietzsche, who I also thought about.
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Feynman is, we just have enough video
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where we get the full kind of,
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I mean, it shows you how important it is
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to get not the official kind of book level presentation
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of a human, but the authentic,
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the full spectrum of humanity.
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You mentioned collecting data about a person,
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collecting the whole thing, the whole of life,
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the ups and downs, the embarrassing stuff,
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the beautiful stuff, not just the things
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that's condensed into a book.
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And then with Feynman, you start to see that a little bit.
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Through conversations, you start to see peaks
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of like that genius.
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And then through stories about him from others.
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And then certainly you, the sad thing about Alan Turing,
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for example, is there's very little, if any,
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In fact, I haven't been able to find recording.
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Allegedly, there's supposed to be a recording of him.
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Doing some kind of radio broadcast,
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but I haven't been able to find anything.
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And so that's truly sad.
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That it feels like it makes you realize
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how the upside, how nice it is to collect data
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about a person, to capture that person.
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That's the upside of the modern internet age,
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the digital age, that that information,
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yeah, creates a kind of immortality.
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And then you can choose to highlight
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the best parts of the person,
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maybe throw away the ugly parts
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and celebrate them even after they're gone.
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So that's a really interesting opportunity.
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You've also mentioned to me offline
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that you're really excited about all the different
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wearables and all the different ways
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we can collect information about our bodies,
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about the whole thing, what's most exciting to you
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in terms of collecting the biological data
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about our human being?
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Well, so I'm a biologist.
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I find animals and humans as machines very interesting.
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It's one of the reasons I didn't become an engineer
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or a surgeon, I wanted to understand
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how we actually built.
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And so I think a lot about machines merging with humans.
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And the first of that are the bio wearables.
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And so I talked a lot about this,
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I wrote about it in Lifespan, the book,
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and pictured a future where you would be monitored constantly
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so that you wouldn't suddenly have a heart attack,
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you'd know that was coming or you wouldn't go to the doctor
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and they don't know if you need an antibiotic or not.
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Long term, how old are you?
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How to fix things, what should you eat?
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What should you take?
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What should your doctor do?
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These devices, I predicted, would be smarter,
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better educated than your physician
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and would augment them.
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And then there'd be a human that would just tick off
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to see if that it's correct and they approve.
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I also was predicting in the book
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that we would have video conferences with our doctors
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and that medicines would be delivered initially by courier
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but eventually by drones and get it to you,
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sometimes in an emergency.
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And that we could even have pills
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that were synthesized or delivered in your kitchen
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and combined certainly.
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What's amazing about that is that,
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what are we now, two years since the book came out,
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even less, and that future is basically here already.
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COVID 19 accelerated that incredibly.
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So where we're at now in society is if you want to pay for it,
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you can have a blood test that will detect cancer
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10, 20 years earlier than it would
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before it forms a tumor.
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You can, of course, do your genome very cheaply
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for less than $100 now.
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There are biowarables already.
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I wear this ring from Aura that I have a number of years of data.
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I've been doing blood tests for the last 12 years
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with a company called Inside Tracker, which I consult for.
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And so I have all of that data as well
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and there's 34 different parameters on my testosterone,
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my blood glucose, my inflammation.
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And I use all that data to, of course,
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I wear a watch that measures things as well.
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I use that data to keep my body in optimal shape.
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So I'm now 51 and according to those parameters,
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I'm at least as good as someone in their early 40s.
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And if I really work at it,
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I can get my biochemistry down to early to mid 30s.
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Though I like to now eat a little dessert once in a while.
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So that's the future we're in right now.
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Anyone can do what I just said.
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But in the very near future, just in the next few years,
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you can be wearing wearables.
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So I'm currently wearing a little,
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what's called a bio sticker.
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This one I just put on last night.
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It's about an inch long, a few millimeters.
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For people just listening, it's on David's chest.
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It's just the, how does it attach?
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It's just kind of.
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Yeah, so on one side you have an on button that you press.
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The lights come on, flashes four times.
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It immediately syncs to your phone.
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And this one, it's called a bio button, nice name.
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And there's another one that I have
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that I haven't tried yet that does EKG on your heart.
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This is mainly for doctors to monitor patients
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that go home after a heart attack or surgery.
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But that's medical grade FDA approved device.
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So there will be a day, in fact, it's already here
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that doctors are using these to get patients to go home
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and save a week in hospital, $2,000 at least
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That's massive savings for the hospital.
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But ultimately what I'm excited about is a future
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that isn't that far off where everybody,
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certainly in developed countries,
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eventually these will cost a few cents and rechargeable.
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The only cost will be the software subscription
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that can be monitored constantly.
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And to give you an idea what this is measuring me
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at 1,000 times a second is my vibrations as I speak,
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my orientation, it already has told me this morning
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how I slept, where I slept, what side I slept on.
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We've got sneezing, coughing, body temperature,
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heart rate, heart of other parameters of the heart
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that would indicate heart health.
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These data are being used to now to predict sickness.
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So eventually we'll have just in the next year or so
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the ability to predict whether something or diagnose
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whether something is pneumonia or just a rhinovirus
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that can be treated or not, right?
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This is really going to not just revolutionize medicine
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but I think extend lives dramatically.
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Because if I'm gonna have a heart attack next week
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and that's possible, this device should know that
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and I'll be in hospital before I even have it.
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Maybe you can talk a little bit about Inside Tracker
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because I saw that there's some really cool things in there.
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Like it actually, so maybe you can talk about,
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I guess that you're collecting blood
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and to give it the data.
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So, and it has like basic recommendations
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on how to improve your life.
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So we're not just talking about diseases, right?
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Like anticipating having a particular disease
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but it's almost like guiding your trajectory to life,
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how to, whether it's extend your life
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or just live a more fulfilling,
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like improve the quality of life,
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I suppose this is the right way to say it.
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What, how does Inside Tracker work?
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What the heck is it?
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Because I thought there was also pretty cool.
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Is it something other people can use?
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You can definitely use it.
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You can sign up, it's consumer.
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It's like a company, consumer facing company.
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And I also want to democratize the ability
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to just take a mouth swab eventually.
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We don't need to have a blood test necessarily.
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But for now it's a blood test
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and you'd go to a lab core request in the US.
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It's also available overseas.
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You can upload your own data for a minimal cost
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and get the algorithms, the AI in the background
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to take that data, plot where you are against others
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in your age group in terms of health and longevity
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at bio age, they call it inner age.
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But also it provides recommendations.
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And this isn't just a bunch of BS.
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It sounds like it might be to say,
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I'll go eat this or go to that restaurant and order that.
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But it's actually based on,
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they basic this company has entered hundreds,
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now it would be thousands of scientific papers
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into their database and hundreds of thousands
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of human data points.
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And they have tens of thousands of individuals
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that have been tracked over time and anonymously
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that data is used to say what works and what doesn't.
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If you eat that, what works?
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If you take that supplement, what works?
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And I was a coauthor on a paper that showed
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that the recommendations for food and supplements
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was better than the leading drug for type two diabetes.
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The idea that you can connect,
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like skipping the human having to do this work,
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you can connect the scientific papers,
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almost like meta analysis of the science
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connected to the individual data.
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And then based on that sort of connect your data
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to whatever the proper group is within the,
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whatever the scientific paper is
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to make the suggestion of how,
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like how that work applies to your life.
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And then that ultimately maps to like a recommendation
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what you should do with your life.
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It all, like this giant system
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that ultimately recommends you should drink more coffee
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Right, and we'll have the genome in there as well.
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You can upload that.
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And so these programs will know us way better
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than we do and our doctors as well.
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The idea of going to a doctor once a year for an annual
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checkup and having, you know,
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males get a finger up their butt and, you know, you cough.
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That to me is a joke.
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That's medieval medicine.
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And that's very soon going to be seen as medieval.
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Yeah, it's a, to me as a computer science person,
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it's always upsetting to go to the doctor
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and just look at him and like realize,
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you know nothing about me.
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Like you're making your like opinions based on like,
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it is very valuable years of intuition building
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about basic symptoms, but you're just like, it is medieval.
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They're very good at it.
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In fact, doctors in medieval times
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will probably damn good at working with very little.
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But the thing is I'd rather prefer a doctor
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that doesn't really know what they're doing,
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but has a huge amount of data to work with.
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Well, you're right.
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And many of my good friends are doctors.
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I work at Harvard.
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So I'm not against the profession at all.
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But I think that they need just as much help
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as anyone else does.
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We wouldn't drive a car without a dashboard.
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We wouldn't think of it.
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So why would doctors do the same?
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If we could, could we step back to the big,
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profound philosophical, both tragic and beautiful question
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about age, how and why do we age?
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Is it from an engineering perspective?
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You said you like the biological machine.
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Is that a feature or a bug of the biological machine?
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It is both a bug and a feature.
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Evolutionary speaking, we only live as long as we need to
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to replace ourselves efficiently.
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If you're a mouse, you're only gonna live
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two and a half years, three years.
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You're probably gonna die of starvation, predation,
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freezing in the winter.
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So they divert most of their resources
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to reproducing rapidly, but they don't put a lot
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of energy into preserving their soma, which is their body.
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Conversely, a baleen type of whale, a bowhead whale
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in particular will live hundreds of years
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because they're at the top of the food chain
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and they can live as long as they want.
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So they breed slowly and build a body at last.
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We're somewhere in between because we've, you know,
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we've really only just come out of the savannas
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where we could be picked off by a cat.
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We were pretty wimpy going back six million years ago.
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So we actually need to evolve quicker than evolution will.
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And that's why we can use our oversized brains
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and intuition to give us what evolution
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not only didn't give us, but took away from us.
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Now we're pathetic, look at our bodies.
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These arms, if any of us, even the strongest person
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in the world went in a cage with a chimpanzee,
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the chimp could knock that person's head off, no question.
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So we're pathetic.
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We need to engineer ourselves to be healthier
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So getting to aging, we can do better, right?
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Whales do way better.
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We're trying to learn how whales do that.
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And if you ask really anybody in the field now, professor,
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they'll say there are eight or nine hallmarks of aging,
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which are really, it's a word for causes of aging.
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So that you probably have heard of some of these.
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Your listeners will have lots of telomeres,
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the ends of the chromosomes, like the little ends
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of shoelaces, that kind of thing.
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They get too short, cells stop dividing,
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becomes senescent, they put out what are called mitogens
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that cause cancer and inflammatory molecules.
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So that's another aspect of aging, cellulose senescence.
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Another one is loss of the energetics.
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So mitochondria, the battery packs wind down.
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There's a whole bunch, stem cells, proteostasis.
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Well, these are our Achilles heels that I'm talking about.
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They're a common amongst old life forms, really.
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But if you want me to jump to the chase as to where,
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what is the upstream defining factor?
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If we boil it down, what do we get?
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So most biologists would say you can't boil it down.
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I would say you can boil it down to an equation,
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which is the preservation of information
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and lost due to entropy, i.e. noise.
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And that is the basis of my research.
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It originally came out of discoveries in yeast cells,
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where I went to MIT in the 1990s.
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You studied bread?
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I studied the makers of bread,
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a little yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae,
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which at the time was one of the hottest, excuse the pun,
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organisms to work on.
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But we figured out in the lab why yeast cells get old
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and found genes that control that process
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and made them live longer,
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which was an amazing four years of my life.
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One of those genes had a name with an acronym SIR2.
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Now the two is irrelevant.
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The SIR is important,
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and the most important letter out of all of those three
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is i, which stands for information.
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Silent information regulator number two.
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When you put more copies of that gene in,
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just put in one more copy,
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the yeast cells lived 30% longer
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and suppressed the cause of aging,
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which was the dysregulation of information in the cell.
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And then, so fast forward to now,
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I've been looking in humans and mice
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because they live shorter and cheaper to study,
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where the loss of information in our bodies
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is a root cause of aging.
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And I think it is.
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Your boldness in viewing biology in this way is fascinating
link |
because that also leads to a kind of,
link |
it's almost like allows for a theory of aging
link |
like you could boil it down to a single equation
link |
and it leads to a perhaps a metric
link |
that allows you to optimize aging,
link |
sort of in the fight against entropy.
link |
It's to figure out which mechanisms,
link |
like you said, the silent information regulator,
link |
which mechanisms allow you to preserve information
link |
like without injecting noise,
link |
without creating entropy,
link |
without creating degradation of that information.
link |
For some reason, converting biology,
link |
which I thought was mostly impossible
link |
into an engineering problem,
link |
feels like it makes it amenable to optimization,
link |
to solving problems, to creating technology
link |
that can, whether that's genetic engineering or AI,
link |
it makes it possible to create the technology
link |
that would improve the degradation of information
link |
Is there more concrete ways you think about
link |
the kind of information we want to preserve?
link |
And also, is there good ideas about regulators
link |
of that information, about ways to prevent the distortion
link |
of the degradation of that information?
link |
We have silent information regulator genes in our bodies.
link |
We have seven of them,
link |
SurT1 through SurT7, they're called.
link |
And we found in mice, one way to slow down
link |
the loss of information is to just give more of these,
link |
to upregulate these genes.
link |
So we made a mouse that has more of this SurT1 gene,
link |
turned it on, and that slowed down the aging of the brain
link |
and preserved their information.
link |
Now, what information am I talking about, you might ask.
link |
Well, again, you can simplify biology.
link |
There are two types of information in the cell primarily.
link |
The one we all read about and know about
link |
is the DNA, the genome.
link |
And that's base four information, ATCG,
link |
the four chemicals that make up the various sequences
link |
of the genome, billions of letters.
link |
And that also degrades over time.
link |
But what's been fascinating is that we find
link |
that that information is pretty much intact
link |
in old animals and people.
link |
You can clone a dog, one of my friends in LA
link |
just cloned his dog three times.
link |
So this is dual, right?
link |
It means that the genome can be intact.
link |
But what's the other type of information?
link |
It's the epigenome, the regulators of the genetic
link |
And physically, that's really just how the DNA is wrapped up
link |
or looped out for the cell to access it and read it.
link |
So it's similar to, and excuse this analogy,
link |
but it's a good one, a compact disc or a DVD.
link |
Those pits in the foil are the digital information.
link |
That's the genome.
link |
And the epigenome is the reader of that information.
link |
And in a different cell, you'd read different music,
link |
different songs, different symphonies.
link |
And that's what gets laid down when we're in the womb
link |
and that makes a skin cell forever a skin cell
link |
and not a brain cell tomorrow.
link |
Thank God, otherwise our brains wouldn't work very well.
link |
But over time, what we see is that the brain cells
link |
start to look more like skin cells.
link |
And the kidney cells start to look more like liver cells.
link |
And what we call X differentiate.
link |
This is a term that we use in my lab, but isn't yet widely
link |
used, but we needed a term to explain this.
link |
And that process of X differentiation,
link |
the loss of the reader of the CD or the DVD,
link |
we liken that to scratches on the DVD
link |
so that the reader cannot fully access the information.
link |
Now, we can slow down the scratches, as I mentioned.
link |
We can turn on these genes.
link |
We can even put in molecules into the cell
link |
or even eat them and turn on those pathways,
link |
which my father and I have been trying
link |
to do for about a decade, to slow things down.
link |
But the question that I've had is,
link |
is there a repository of information still in the body?
link |
Because anyone who knows anything
link |
about the loss of information or even
link |
has tried to copy a cassette tape or photocopy or Xerox
link |
anything knows that over time, you lose that information
link |
So I've been looking for a backup copy,
link |
inspired largely by Claude Shannon's work at MIT as well
link |
His mathematical theory of communication
link |
is just brilliant.
link |
And so I've been looking for what he called the observer, which
link |
is the backup copy.
link |
We today might call that the TCPIP protocol of the internet
link |
that stores information in case it doesn't make it
link |
It will fill in the gaps.
link |
And we've been spending about the last five years
link |
to try and find if there really is a backup copy in the body
link |
to reset the epigenome and polish those scratches away.
link |
That's incredible.
link |
So finding the backup, so whenever there are too many
link |
scratches pile up, you can just write a new version.
link |
Not a new version, but go to the backup and restore it.
link |
That's really all we're talking about.
link |
It's not that hard once you know the trick.
link |
And for people that actually remember DVDs and scratches
link |
on them, how frustrating it is, that's
link |
a brilliant metaphor for aging.
link |
And then the reader is the thing that skips.
link |
And then it could destroy your experience,
link |
the richness of the experience that
link |
is listening to your favorite song.
link |
Right, but in biology, it's even worse,
link |
because you'll lose your memory, your kidneys will fail,
link |
you'll get diabetes, your heart will fail.
link |
And we call that aging and age related diseases.
link |
So most people forget that diseases
link |
that we get when we get old are 80% to 90% caused by aging.
link |
And we've been trying to fix things with band aids
link |
after they occur without even generally talking
link |
about the root cause of the problem.
link |
Is there the scratches?
link |
Do those come from, are those programmed or are they failures?
link |
Meaning is it, so if it's by design,
link |
then there's like an encoded timeline schedule
link |
that the body's just on purpose degrading the whole thing.
link |
And then there's just the wear and tear
link |
of the scratches and a disc that happen through time.
link |
That's the source of aging.
link |
It's more akin to wear and tear.
link |
There isn't a program.
link |
Getting back to evolution, there's no selection for aging.
link |
We're not designed to age.
link |
We just live as long as we need to.
link |
And then we're at the whim of entropy, basically.
link |
Second law of thermodynamics stuff falls apart.
link |
We live a bit longer than age 40 only
link |
because there are robust, resilient systems.
link |
But eventually they fail as well.
link |
Current limit to the human lifespan
link |
where they completely fail is 122.
link |
But I don't like to think of it as wear and tear
link |
because there's two aspects to it.
link |
There's a system that's built to keep us alive when we're young.
link |
But actually comes back to bite us as we get older.
link |
And we call this issue antagonistic pleotropy.
link |
What's good for you when you're young
link |
can cause problems when you're older.
link |
So we've been looking, what is the main causes of the noise?
link |
And we've found two of them definitively.
link |
The first one is broken chromosomes.
link |
When a chromosome breaks, the cell has to panic
link |
because that's either gonna cause a cancer or kill the cell.
link |
There's only two outcomes.
link |
It's pretty much a problem.
link |
And so what the cell does is it reorganizes the epigenome
link |
What that leads to is think of it as a tennis match
link |
or a ping pong game.
link |
The proteins are the balls and they now leave
link |
where they should be, which is regulating the genes
link |
that make the cell type, whatever it is.
link |
And after they have a dual function,
link |
they actually go to the break,
link |
the chromosomal break and fix that.
link |
And then they come back.
link |
You might ask, well, why is it set up that way?
link |
Well, it's a beautiful system.
link |
It coordinates gene expression,
link |
the control systems with the repair.
link |
You want them coordinated.
link |
Problem is as we get older, this ping pong game,
link |
some of the balls get lost.
link |
They don't come back to where they originally started.
link |
And that's what we think is the main noise for aging.
link |
And the other cause of aging that we found is cell stress.
link |
We damage nerves and they age rapidly.
link |
So that's the other issue.
link |
There's probably others, smoking, chemicals, for example.
link |
We know accelerates biological age.
link |
Pretty dramatically.
link |
But the question is, can you slow that down
link |
or can you reset them to get those ping pong balls
link |
to go back to where they originally started in the game?
link |
And we think we found a way to do that.
link |
What, can you give me hints?
link |
Whose fault is it, and the ball's not coming back,
link |
is it the proteins themselves?
link |
Like, are they starting?
link |
Again, I've been obsessed with the protein folding problem
link |
from the AI perspective.
link |
So is it the proteins or is it something else?
link |
Well, we know who hits the balls and recruits them.
link |
So that the break is recognized by proteins
link |
who send out a signal through phosphorylation
link |
is a typical way cells talk to other proteins.
link |
And that recruits those repair factors,
link |
those ping pong balls to the break.
link |
So the cells actively doing this to try and help itself.
link |
But we don't know who's to blame for them not coming back.
link |
That could just be a flaw in the quote unquote design.
link |
I don't think that there's something saying,
link |
well, 1% of you balls proteins never go back.
link |
I just think it's hard to reset a system
link |
that's constantly changing.
link |
We have in our bodies close to a trillion DNA breaks every day.
link |
And imagine that over 80 years,
link |
what damage that does to our epigenomic information.
link |
Now, we know that this is, well,
link |
we never know anything in biology,
link |
but we have strong evidence that this is true
link |
because we can mess with animals.
link |
We can create DNA breaks and tickle them with a few breaks,
link |
maybe raise it by three fold of background levels
link |
of normal breakage.
link |
And if we're right, those mice should get old and they do.
link |
We can actually, we've created these breaks
link |
in a way that's titratable.
link |
We can, it's like a rheostat.
link |
We can send it to 11.
link |
And you know, I drove my Tesla here
link |
and I'm a big fan of Spinal Tap 2, going to 11.
link |
If we go to 11, we can make a mouse old
link |
in a matter of months.
link |
We prefer to go to a level of about four
link |
and it gets old in 10 months.
link |
But it's definitely old.
link |
It's got all of the hallmarks of aging.
link |
It's got diseases.
link |
It's got gray hair.
link |
But importantly, we can now measure age
link |
by looking at the scratches.
link |
We can look at the epigenome.
link |
We can measure it and use machine learning
link |
to give us a number.
link |
And those mice are 50% older than normal.
link |
So you can replicate the aging process in a controlled way.
link |
You can, I mean, in a way that, I mean, you could accelerate it
link |
in a controlled way and measure how much exactly it's aging.
link |
And that gives you step one of a two step process
link |
to when you can then figure out, well,
link |
how can we reverse this?
link |
And now we're reversing those mice.
link |
Is there a good, I love what you said.
link |
I mean, in biology, you really don't know.
link |
It's such a beautiful mess.
link |
Is there ideas how to do that?
link |
Is that on the genetic engineering level?
link |
Is it like, what can you mess with?
link |
Is it going to the, trying to discover the backup copies
link |
and restoring from them?
link |
Like what's, if it's possible to convert
link |
into natural language words, what are the ideas here?
link |
What is the observer and how do we contact it?
link |
What's the observer and how do you contact?
link |
Or if there's other ideas,
link |
how to reverse the balls getting lost process.
link |
Yeah. Well, you can slow it down.
link |
But we found a reset switch recently.
link |
We just published this in the December 2020 issue of nature.
link |
And what we found is that there are three embryonic genes
link |
that we could put into the adult animal
link |
to reset the age of the tissues.
link |
And it only takes four to eight weeks to work well.
link |
And we can take a blind mouse that's lost its vision
link |
Neurons aren't working well towards the brain.
link |
Reset those neurons back to a younger age.
link |
And now the mice can see again.
link |
These three genes are famous actually
link |
because they're a set of four genes
link |
discovered by Shinya Yamanaka,
link |
who won the Nobel Prize in 2016,
link |
for discovering that those four genes
link |
when turned on at high levels in adult cells
link |
can generate stem cells.
link |
And this is, I think, well known now
link |
that we can create stem cells from adult tissue.
link |
But what wasn't known is can you partially take age back
link |
without becoming a tumor or generating a stem cell
link |
in the eye, which would be a disaster?
link |
And the answer is yes.
link |
There is a system in the body
link |
that can take the age of a cell back to a certain point,
link |
but no further, safely, and reset the age.
link |
And we're now using that to reset the age of the brain
link |
of those mice that we aged prematurely,
link |
and they're getting their ability to learn back.
link |
This is really exciting, right?
link |
Like, what's the downside of this?
link |
Well, the downside is if you overdo it,
link |
and you don't get it right, you might cause tumors.
link |
But we do it very carefully,
link |
and we also know that in the eye, it's very safe.
link |
We also injected these, we deliver them by viruses,
link |
so we can control where and when they get turned on.
link |
And in this paper, we've published that
link |
if we put high levels in the mouse,
link |
into their veins throughout the body,
link |
they don't get cancer for over a year.
link |
So I'm so optimistic that we're going into human studies
link |
in less than two years from now.
link |
Is there a place where AI can help?
link |
Sorry to inject one of the things
link |
I'm very excited about and passionate about.
link |
So Google DeepMind recently had a big breakthrough
link |
with Alpha Fold 2, but also Alpha Fold two years ago,
link |
with achieving sort of state of the art performance
link |
on the protein folding problem,
link |
single protein folding.
link |
But it also paints a hopeful picture of what's possible
link |
to do in terms of simulating the folding of proteins,
link |
but also simulating biological systems through AI.
link |
Is there something to you combined with this brilliant work
link |
on the biology side that you're hopeful about
link |
where AI can be a tool to help?
link |
Where isn't it a tool?
link |
I mean, if you're not using AI right now in biology,
link |
you're getting left behind.
link |
We use it all the time.
link |
We're using it to generate these biological clocks
link |
to be able to read those scratches.
link |
We're using it to predict the folding of proteins
link |
so we can target molecules and modulate their activity.
link |
We're using it to assemble genomes of different species.
link |
We use it to predict the longevity of a mouse
link |
based on how it reacts to certain things,
link |
hearing eyesight, generally frailty.
link |
So we just put out a paper last year on that.
link |
The other thing we can use it for,
link |
which is a little off the track here,
link |
but we use it for predicting which microorganisms
link |
are in your body, actually not predicting, telling you.
link |
So our daughter, Natalie,
link |
was infected with Lyme disease a few years ago.
link |
Almost went blind from it and the test took four days
link |
and I thought, just give me the DNA from her spinal fluid.
link |
I'll go tell you what's in it.
link |
If it's Lyme disease or not, they refused.
link |
And so at that point I said, this has to be done better.
link |
So I've started a company that now can take a sample
link |
of any part of your body.
link |
It's typically done now with liver transplant patients
link |
to detect viruses that come out of their organs.
link |
But that's another area that AI is extremely important for.
link |
I think if you're not, in five years,
link |
if you're not using deep learning, you've got a problem
link |
because the amount of data that we generate now
link |
as biologists is just terabytes, can be terabytes per week.
link |
It'll eventually be terabytes per day.
link |
And then we just go from there.
link |
And I actually have trouble recruiting enough
link |
bioinformaticians.
link |
A lot of our work is now just number crunching.
link |
A part of that is collecting the data,
link |
which is kind of something we've talked a little bit about,
link |
but is there something you can say
link |
about how we can collect more and more data,
link |
not just on the one person level,
link |
like for you to understand your various markers,
link |
but to create huge data sets,
link |
to understand how we can detect certain pathogens,
link |
detect certain property characteristics
link |
of whether it's aging or all the other ways
link |
that your human body can fail.
link |
It seems like with biology,
link |
there's a kind of privacy concerns
link |
that, well, actually not privacy concerns,
link |
it's almost like regulation
link |
that kind of prevents like hospitals and sharing data.
link |
You know, I'm not sure exactly how to say it,
link |
but it seems like when you look at autonomous vehicles,
link |
people are much more willing to share data.
link |
When you look at human biology system,
link |
people are much less willing to share data.
link |
Is there a hopeful path forward
link |
where we can share more and more data at a large scale
link |
that ultimately ends up helping us understand the human body
link |
and then treat problems with the human body?
link |
So we are right in the middle.
link |
We're living through what's gonna be seen
link |
as one of the biggest revolutions in human health
link |
through the gathering of data about our bodies.
link |
And 20 years ago, people didn't wanna go on social media
link |
that worried about it.
link |
Now you have to, if you're a kid, that's for sure.
link |
Same with medical records.
link |
These are becoming all digitized and expanded.
link |
Ultimately, we're going to,
link |
even if we don't want to, have to be monitored.
link |
There's gonna be a court case that,
link |
I bet two, three years from now,
link |
someone's gonna say,
link |
how come my father died from a heart attack?
link |
You had these biosensors, 20 bucks,
link |
and you didn't use it, lawsuit right there.
link |
And suddenly all hospitals have to give you one of these.
link |
There'll be a reversal,
link |
like to where it's your fault
link |
if you don't collect the data.
link |
That's brilliant, and that's absolutely right.
link |
I mean, that's absolutely right.
link |
That's the frustration I feel when going to the doctor
link |
is like, it's almost negligent
link |
to not collect the data
link |
because you're making,
link |
if there's something really wrong with me
link |
and you're making decisions based on very few tests,
link |
that's almost negligent
link |
when you have the opportunity
link |
to collect a huge amount more data.
link |
Well, let me tell you something.
link |
Yeah, I've got this inside tracker data
link |
for myself over a decade.
link |
And you'd think my doctor would roll his eyes at this,
link |
oh, he's gone to a consumer company, blah, blah, blah.
link |
I had my first checkup in a year
link |
with him through video conference.
link |
And he was running blind.
link |
He really didn't know what was going on with me.
link |
He asked the usual things,
link |
how am I sleeping?
link |
These kind of usual things.
link |
And I said, well, I've got new tests back from inside tracker.
link |
And he said, great, I'd love to see them.
link |
So I'd share screen and we look at the graphs,
link |
look at the data, and he's loving it.
link |
Cause he cannot order these tests willy nilly.
link |
So I said, well, let's order a HBA1C blood glucose levels
link |
because I'm very interested in that.
link |
That tracks with longevity.
link |
And he said, well, I have no reason to order that.
link |
Do you have a family history?
link |
No, do you have any symptoms of diabetes?
link |
No, well, I can't order the test.
link |
I almost wanted to reach through the computer
link |
But instead, I pay a little bit to get these tests done
link |
and then he looks at them.
link |
So that's now the way consumer health is going
link |
is that you can get better data than your doctor can,
link |
but they like you to do that.
link |
Quick human question, maybe you can educate me.
link |
I think doctors sometimes have a bit of an ego.
link |
I understand that the doctor is super experienced
link |
with a lot of things,
link |
but this is a fundamental question of human variability.
link |
Like I know a lot of specific details about like,
link |
I mean, it depends, of course, what we're talking about,
link |
but I bring a lot of knowledge.
link |
And if I have data with me,
link |
then I have like several orders of magnitude more knowledge.
link |
And I think there's an aspect to it
link |
where the doctor has to put their expert hat,
link |
like take it off and actually be a curious,
link |
open minded person and study and look at that data.
link |
Do you think it's possible to sort of change the culture
link |
of the medical system to where the doctors
link |
are almost, as you said, are excited to see the data?
link |
Or is that already happening?
link |
It's really happening.
link |
Now, we've probably lost the last generation
link |
that there are no hopers,
link |
but so I teach at Harvard Medical School
link |
and they're excited about this.
link |
They're excited about aging,
link |
which is a new aspect to medicine.
link |
Oh wow, we can do something about that.
link |
And then yeah, all this data, what do we do with it?
link |
There's still the traditional pathology and all that stuff
link |
which they need to know,
link |
but time will change their mindset.
link |
I'm not worried about that.
link |
And like we were discussing,
link |
this isn't a question of if, it's just a matter of when.
link |
And I have a front row seat on all of this.
link |
I had breakfast with a CEO who is making this happen
link |
I can tell you for sure that most people have no idea
link |
that this revolution is occurring
link |
and is happening so quickly.
link |
If you're running a hospital
link |
and you can save $2,000 per cardiac patient,
link |
what are you gonna do?
link |
You have to use it.
link |
Otherwise, the hospital down the road
link |
is gonna be beating you.
link |
And there are large hospital aggregation.
link |
So there's Ascension and others
link |
that just have to go this way for budgetary reasons.
link |
And right now the US spends,
link |
what is it, 17% of their GDP on healthcare.
link |
Let's say one of these buttons on my chest
link |
costs 20 bucks, it's rechargeable.
link |
And it can predict people's health
link |
and save on antibiotics to prevent heart attacks.
link |
How many billions, if not trillions of dollars
link |
will that save over the next decade?
link |
Yeah, so when the public wakes up to this,
link |
they'll almost demand it.
link |
Like this should be accepted everywhere.
link |
It's gonna save a lot of money.
link |
It's gonna improve the quality of life.
link |
Well, and the CFOs of hospital groups will have to.
link |
And insurance companies are gonna wanna get in on this.
link |
So now that gets to privacy, right?
link |
If should an insurance company have access to your data?
link |
But you could voluntarily show them some of it
link |
if they give you a discount.
link |
And that's also being worked on right now.
link |
I hope that we do create kind of systems
link |
where I can volunteer to share my data
link |
and I can also take the data back,
link |
meaning like delete the data, request the deletion of data.
link |
And then maybe policy creates rules to where
link |
you can share data, you could delete the data.
link |
And I think if I have the option to delete all my data
link |
that a particular company has,
link |
then I'll share my data with everyone.
link |
I feel like if, because that gives me the tools
link |
to be a consumer, an intelligent consumer,
link |
of awarding my data to a company that deserves it
link |
and taking it back when the company is behaving.
link |
And in that way, encourage, as a consumer
link |
in the capitalist system, encourage the companies
link |
that are doing great work with that data.
link |
Well, yeah, healthcare data security is number one.
link |
On my mind, Inside Tracker made sure that that was true,
link |
but these buttons on your chest, there's very private stuff.
link |
They can probably tell if you're having sex one night, right?
link |
So this is not the kind of stuff you want leaked.
link |
So I don't know whether it's blockchain or something.
link |
Speak for yourself.
link |
I don't want this public.
link |
Well, I guess it depends on how you go.
link |
But there's a lot of stuff you don't want out there.
link |
And this definitely has to be number one,
link |
because it's one thing to have your credit card
link |
information stolen, it's another thing
link |
your health records are permanently out there.
link |
So there's on the biology side,
link |
super exciting ways to slow aging,
link |
but there's also on the lifestyle side.
link |
I've recently did a 72 hour fast,
link |
just an opportunity to take a pause and be,
link |
you know, I appreciate life.
link |
Think about like, there's something about fasting
link |
that encourages you to reflect deeper
link |
than you otherwise might, the time kind of slows.
link |
And you also realize that you're human
link |
because your body needs food.
link |
And you start to see your body is almost as a machine
link |
that takes food and produces thoughts.
link |
And then ends brief.
link |
I mean, you start to, depending who you are,
link |
if you're like engineering minded,
link |
you start to think of this whole thing
link |
as a kind of, yeah, as a machine.
link |
And then also feelings fill this machine.
link |
Feelings of gratitude of love,
link |
but also the uglier things of jealousy and greed
link |
and hate and all those kinds of things.
link |
And you start to think, okay, how do I manage this body
link |
to create a rich experience?
link |
All of that comes from fasting for me.
link |
Anyway, but there's also health benefits to fasting.
link |
I intermittent fast a lot.
link |
I eat just one meal a day most of the time.
link |
Is there something you can say about the benefits
link |
of fasting in your own life
link |
and in general, the anti aging process?
link |
Well, you're a philosopher too.
link |
Sorry, I apologize.
link |
No, I'm impressed, true Renaissance man.
link |
It's a joy to be here.
link |
So when it comes to fasting,
link |
this is being epistemious is one of the oldest ways
link |
to improve health.
link |
Probably they knew this 5,000 plus years ago.
link |
So that's not new.
link |
But what we're figuring out is what is optimal
link |
and how does it work?
link |
And one of the things we help contribute to,
link |
which I can speak to with some authority,
link |
is that these longevity genes we work on,
link |
we showed back in the early 2000s are turned on by fasting.
link |
And at least in yeast, we were the first to show
link |
that how calorie restriction fasting works
link |
to extend lifespan.
link |
And that was the first for any species.
link |
Something similar happens in our bodies.
link |
When we're hungry or put our bodies
link |
under any other perceived adversity,
link |
such as running, our bodies think, wow,
link |
we're getting chased by a sabertooth cat or something.
link |
If we're really hot or cold,
link |
these probably also work to put our bodies
link |
in this defensive state to activate these genes
link |
in the way that whales do and mice don't.
link |
And so hunger is the best way to do that.
link |
In fact, I don't think you have to feel hungry.
link |
You can get used to it.
link |
But if there was one thing I would recommend to anybody
link |
to slow down aging would be to skip a meal or two a day.
link |
Now, it doesn't mean you don't have to live well.
link |
You can go out, I go to restaurants, I eat regular food.
link |
I try to be as healthy as possible.
link |
But I've gone from skipping breakfast most of my life
link |
now to skipping lunch as well.
link |
And I have my physique back that I had when I was 20.
link |
I feel 20 mentally.
link |
I don't feel tired anymore.
link |
So I'm a huge fan of the one meal a day thing.
link |
Where I'm not good at is going beyond one day.
link |
But if you do three days.
link |
Have you ever fasted longer than 24 hours?
link |
I tried doing two days.
link |
I might have made it to the third and given up.
link |
I just find that I don't have a lot of willpower.
link |
I also hate exercise.
link |
So I'm not sure how long I'm going to live.
link |
But I've managed to do one meal a day.
link |
So if I can do that, seriously, anybody can do that.
link |
To your listeners and viewers, I would say,
link |
don't try to do it all at once.
link |
You can't go from snacking and eating three meals a day
link |
to what I do easily.
link |
Work your way up to it.
link |
But also compensate with drinking.
link |
If you like tea, if you like coffee, put some milk in it.
link |
You can fill your stomach up with liquids, diet sodas.
link |
I get criticized for drinking, but I'm
link |
going to continue to have those.
link |
But I power through the day.
link |
I definitely don't feel tired.
link |
I don't have a lag anymore.
link |
But also give it at least two weeks
link |
because there's a habit as well.
link |
Having something in your mouth chewing, feeling that fullness.
link |
You can break that habit.
link |
And within two, three weeks, you'll have done it.
link |
So I'm not actually even that strict about it.
link |
You said diet soda.
link |
Yeah, people are very weirdly strict about fasting the rules.
link |
And fasting, like for example, I drink
link |
element electrolytes when I was fasting.
link |
And that has five calories.
link |
And so technically, it's not fasting.
link |
Or people will say, if you drink coffee, there's caffeine.
link |
And they'll say, that's technically not fasting
link |
because there's some kind of biological effects of caffeine,
link |
Of course, there's biological benefits
link |
that you can argue about.
link |
But there's also just experiential benefits.
link |
Just calorie restriction broadly
link |
has a certain experience to it that, for me personally,
link |
just as you said, has made me feel really good.
link |
That said, especially I've gained quite a bit away,
link |
maybe even like 15 pounds or something like that
link |
since I moved to Austin, Texas.
link |
And I still keep the same diet.
link |
But I eat a lot of meat in that one
link |
just because it's delicious.
link |
Because it's also the amazing people I met in Texas.
link |
It's just there's camaraderie, a friendship,
link |
a love to the people that makes you really enjoy
link |
the atmosphere of eating the brisket and the meat.
link |
Is this Joe Rogan insisting?
link |
Joe is very different.
link |
Joe loves bread and pasta.
link |
He knows that his body feels best doing keto or carnivore.
link |
So that's what he usually tries to stick to.
link |
But he also does not hold back.
link |
And he'll just eat pasta when he does pasta.
link |
And he sort of enjoys life in that way.
link |
I don't know how to enjoy life in that way.
link |
I also love pasta, but I'm just not going to enjoy it.
link |
Because I know my body ultimately does not
link |
feel good with pasta.
link |
So it's a funny kind of dichotomies.
link |
I would like to cheat, I guess, by eating more meat
link |
than overeating on the things that I know my body feels
link |
good on, as opposed to eating stuff I shouldn't, like cake
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
I tend to find happiness in overeating the good stuff
link |
versus eating the bad stuff.
link |
And that's the kind of balance.
link |
Him, he's like, fuck it.
link |
Every once in a while, you've got to enjoy it.
link |
And then also coupled with that, for him, is just exercise,
link |
like then faces demons the next day
link |
and just burn a huge amount of calories.
link |
Which is, I mean, whatever's up with that guy's mind,
link |
there's an ability to fully experience life, which
link |
is represented by the pasta, and the ability
link |
to just fight the demons, which is represented
link |
by all the crazy kettle balls and running the hills
link |
and all this kind of stuff that he does.
link |
That takes a lot out of you doing
link |
that kind of insane exercise.
link |
I think I'm more like you, or at least towards your direction,
link |
is like, I really hate exercise.
link |
So I do it, but I really hate it.
link |
And so it's a balance that you have to strike.
link |
Is there something you could say about the diet side of that?
link |
For you personally, but in general,
link |
in order to achieve calorie restriction,
link |
like for me, eating, I know it may not sound healthy,
link |
but eating carnivore, eating mostly meat,
link |
has made me feel really good, both mentally and physically.
link |
Is there something you could say about the kinds of diets
link |
that may improve longevity, but also enable calorie restriction?
link |
I mean, the first thing that's important to know
link |
is that while many people are interested
link |
slash obsessed with what they eat,
link |
the data that's come out of animal studies, at least,
link |
is it's far more important when you eat than what you eat.
link |
And this was a fantastic study a few years ago
link |
by my friend Rafael de Cabo at the National Institutes
link |
of Health in Bethesda.
link |
And he had 10,000 mice on different diets,
link |
hoping to find the perfect mix of carbs, protein, and fat.
link |
And it turns out that the only ones that lived longer
link |
were the ones that only ate once a day.
link |
And so that, we're not mice,
link |
but I think that we're close enough to mice
link |
that this tells us a lot.
link |
But okay, but I still think the best bang
link |
for the longevity buck is to do both well,
link |
eat less often and eat the right things.
link |
Now I'll preface this to say, I'm not a nut about this.
link |
I will eat occasionally, very occasionally a dessert.
link |
Usually I steal from others, which doesn't count, right?
link |
But you gotta live life, right?
link |
What's a long life if it's not enjoyable anyway?
link |
But I also have found, and I'll get to your question
link |
in a second, but my microbiome right now
link |
and stomach is at a point where if I try to overeat
link |
on a steak, which I did a couple of days ago,
link |
I actually had a fried chicken specifically.
link |
For two days I felt terrible.
link |
I couldn't sleep, it wouldn't go down.
link |
So I'm now at a point where even if I want to binge on meat
link |
and fried foods, I just can't, it just feels bad.
link |
But what do I recommend?
link |
Well, what the data says, which I try to follow is
link |
that plant based foods will be better than meat based foods.
link |
And I know that there are a lot of people who disagree.
link |
But one of the facts is, there's a few facts.
link |
One is that people who live a long time
link |
tend to eat those type of diets,
link |
Mediterranean or Canawa diet.
link |
They're eating mostly plants with a little bit of meat
link |
and not a lot of red meat.
link |
And the other fact is that in animals,
link |
we know that there's a mechanism
link |
that's called M to a little M capital TOR
link |
that responds to certain amino acids
link |
that are found in more abundance in meat.
link |
And when it responds, it actually shortens lifespan.
link |
And the converse, if you starve it
link |
of those three amino acids mostly in meat,
link |
then it extends lifespan.
link |
And there's a drug called rapamycin,
link |
which some people are experimenting with that does that.
link |
So you might be able to, I'm just saying this here
link |
from all my colleagues, we don't know the results here,
link |
but you could potentially take a rapamycin like drug
link |
and counteract the effects of meat in the long run.
link |
Don't know, we should try that actually.
link |
We could do that in the lab.
link |
But getting to the bottom of this,
link |
what I think is going on is that
link |
just like testosterone and growth hormone,
link |
you will get temporary, maybe not temporary,
link |
immediate health benefits.
link |
You'll feel great, you'll get more muscle energy.
link |
But the problem is, I think it's at the expense
link |
of longterm health and longevity.
link |
Well, this is actually something I worry about
link |
in terms of longterm effects
link |
or the cost in terms of longevity.
link |
It's very difficult to know how your choices affect
link |
your longevity because the impact is down the line.
link |
Like just because something makes me feel good now,
link |
like eating only meat makes me feel good now,
link |
I wonder what are the costs down the line?
link |
Well, think about what I was saying
link |
about the tradeoffs between growth and reproduction,
link |
which is what a mouse does,
link |
and a whale that grows slowly, reproduces slowly,
link |
lives a long time.
link |
It's called the disposable soma theory.
link |
Coke would just propose that in the 70s.
link |
What meat probably does is put you in the mouse category,
link |
super fertile, grow fast, heal fast,
link |
and then if you want to be a whale,
link |
you should restrict meat and do things
link |
that promote the preservation of your body.
link |
Is it difficult to eat a plant based diet
link |
that you perform well under so mentally and physically?
link |
Just almost, I'm asking almost like an anecdotal question.
link |
All right, unless you know the science.
link |
Well, the science is still being worked out,
link |
but from the synthesis of everything that I've read,
link |
I try to eat a diet that's definitely full of leafy greens,
link |
particularly spinach is great
link |
because it's got the iron that we need, plenty of vitamins.
link |
I also try to avoid too much fruit and berries,
link |
particularly fruit juice,
link |
definitely avoid that sugar high.
link |
Spiking your sugar is not healthy in the long run.
link |
The other thing that's interesting is we discovered
link |
what we called xeno hermetic molecules.
link |
Let me unpack that because it's a terrible name
link |
and I take full responsibility with my friend Conrad Howitz.
link |
The xeno means cross species
link |
and hormesis is the term that what doesn't kill you
link |
makes you live longer and be healthier.
link |
And so we're getting cross species health improvements
link |
by molecules that plants make.
link |
And plants make these molecules
link |
when they're also under adversity or perceived adversity.
link |
For instance, I understand if you want really healthy
link |
or good oranges, you can drive nails into the bark
link |
of the tree before you harvest.
link |
Same with wine, you typically want them to be dry
link |
before you harvest or covered in fungus.
link |
And that's because these plants make these colorful
link |
and xeno hermetic molecules
link |
that make themselves stress resistant,
link |
turn on their sirtuin defenses, the sergines, remember?
link |
And when we eat them, we get those same benefits.
link |
That's the idea and we've evolved to do so.
link |
This isn't a coincidence.
link |
It's my theory, our theory that we want to know
link |
when our food supply is under adversity
link |
because we need to get ready for a famine.
link |
And so we hunker down and preserve our body.
link |
And by eating these colored food,
link |
so practically speaking, if it's full of color,
link |
if there's been some chewing by a caterpillar,
link |
organic, grown locally in local farms,
link |
I'll eat that versus a watery, insipid, light colored
link |
lettuce that's been grown in California.
link |
So you want vegetables that have suffered.
link |
You want the David Goggins as vegetables.
link |
That's the xeno hermetic molecules.
link |
I'm gonna take that one with me.
link |
Oh, I follow him on Instagram.
link |
He's always screaming.
link |
So you want the, that he's basically
link |
the xeno hermetic version of a human.
link |
So these are the molecules that are representative
link |
of the stress that's been,
link |
that a plant has been under.
link |
Yeah, the best example of that is resveratrol,
link |
which many people, including myself,
link |
take as a supplement.
link |
Grape, grapevines produce that in abundance
link |
when they're dried out or they have too much light
link |
And that we've shown activates the SOTU enzyme in our bodies,
link |
which remember is what extends lifespan in yeast
link |
and slows down aging in the brain.
link |
Yeah, I tend to avoid fruit as well.
link |
So green veggies, anything that's not very sweet.
link |
So I would just say you're relatively low.
link |
Like you try to avoid sugary things as well.
link |
Yeah, I'm fairly militant about that.
link |
I rarely would add sugar to anything.
link |
Occasionally I would eat a slice of cheesecake,
link |
but that would be maybe once or twice a year.
link |
You have to give in occasionally.
link |
But yeah, anything that's sweet,
link |
I would rather substitute something like stevia
link |
if I need a sugar hit.
link |
What about exercise?
link |
Your favorite topic?
link |
I don't like talking about it.
link |
Yeah, okay, great.
link |
Is there benefits to longevity from exercise?
link |
Well, no doubt, that's proven.
link |
Just like fasting, it's pretty clear that that works.
link |
For example, there are studies of cyclists.
link |
It was something like people that cycle over 80 miles a week
link |
have a 40% reduction in a variety of diseases,
link |
certainly heart disease.
link |
So that's not even a question.
link |
But what's interesting is that we're learning
link |
that you don't need much to have a big benefit.
link |
It's an asymptotic curve.
link |
And in fact, if you overdo it,
link |
you probably have reduced benefits,
link |
particularly if you start to wear out joints,
link |
that kind of thing.
link |
But just 10 minutes on a treadmill a few times a week,
link |
getting your, lose your breath, get hypoxic as it's called,
link |
seems to be very beneficial for long term health.
link |
And that's the kind of exercise that I like to do.
link |
Though I do enjoy lifting weights.
link |
So that is what I call my exercise,
link |
which has other benefits,
link |
including maintaining hormone levels, male hormone levels.
link |
But also really why I do it is I want to be able to
link |
counteract the effects of sitting for most of the day.
link |
And as you get older, you lose muscle mass.
link |
It's a percent or so a year.
link |
And I don't want to be frail when I'm older
link |
and fall over and break my hip,
link |
which happens every 20 seconds in this country.
link |
So maintaining that strength,
link |
but also doing the cardio for the longevity,
link |
for the avoiding the heart disease.
link |
Yeah, I definitely just like with fasting,
link |
have the philosophical benefit of running long
link |
I enjoy it because it kind of clears the mind
link |
and allows you to think,
link |
actually listen to brown noise as I run.
link |
It really helps remove myself from the world
link |
and just like zoom in on particular thoughts.
link |
What are these brown noise?
link |
It's like white noise, but deeper.
link |
So like the white noise is like,
link |
shh, and then brown noise is more like,
link |
That sounds great.
link |
It's more soothing probably.
link |
There could be science to this.
link |
I need to look this up.
link |
I've been meaning to,
link |
but when I started,
link |
this is maybe like five years ago,
link |
I started listening to brown noise when I work.
link |
And the first time I listened to it,
link |
something happened to my mind
link |
where it just went like zoomed in
link |
to like in a way that it felt like really weird,
link |
like how precisely it was able to sort of remove
link |
the distractions of the world and really help my mind.
link |
Obviously, like the mind is trying to focus
link |
and then it just enabled that process
link |
of trying to focus on a particular problem.
link |
I don't know if this is generalizable to others.
link |
People should definitely try it if you're listening to this.
link |
Maybe it's just my own mind,
link |
but it's funny like it made me,
link |
brown noise made me realize
link |
that there's probably hacks out there
link |
that work for me that I should be constantly looking for.
link |
It's almost like an encouraging and motivating of event
link |
that maybe there's other stuff out there.
link |
Maybe there's other brown noise like things out there
link |
that truly like almost immediately make me feel better.
link |
I don't know if it's generalizable to others,
link |
but it does seem that it's the case
link |
that there's probably for many others
link |
things like that that could be discovered.
link |
And so it's always disappointing when I find things in life
link |
that I wish I would have found earlier.
link |
Like I got LASIK eye surgery a few years ago
link |
and the first thought I had like the next day
link |
when I woke up is like, damn it,
link |
why didn't I do this way earlier?
link |
There's all this stuff of that nature
link |
that there are yet to be discovered.
link |
So it pays to explore.
link |
Yeah, though you have a different mind.
link |
You have quite a beautiful mind.
link |
So I suspect brown noise helps you focus
link |
and cause you're probably all over the place
link |
if you don't control it.
link |
It means something about it.
link |
It's a programmer thing.
link |
I don't, a programming is a really difficult mental journey
link |
cause you have to keep a lot of things in mind.
link |
You have to, so you're constantly designing things
link |
and you have to be extremely precise
link |
by making those things concrete in code.
link |
You also have to look stuff up on the internet
link |
to sort of feed like information
link |
and looking up stuff on the internet.
link |
The internet is full of like distracting things.
link |
So you have to be really focused
link |
in the way you look stuff up in pulling that information in.
link |
So it requires a certain discipline
link |
and a certain focus that I've been very much exploring
link |
how to do, like I do it really well in the morning,
link |
coffee is involved, all those kinds of things.
link |
You're trying to optimize,
link |
keeping very positive, inspired, no social media,
link |
all those kinds of things and trying to optimize for.
link |
And everybody has their own kind of little journey
link |
that they try to understand.
link |
You get this from like writers
link |
when you read about the habits of writers,
link |
like the habits they do in the morning.
link |
They usually write like two, three, four hours a day
link |
It's like they optimize that ritual.
link |
And then there's always Hunter Stompson.
link |
So sometimes it pays off to be wild.
link |
How important is sleep for longevity?
link |
I would guess based on the evidence
link |
that it's really important
link |
and because we don't know for sure.
link |
But what we know from animal studies is the following.
link |
If you restrict sleep from a rat for just two weeks,
link |
it'll develop type two diabetes.
link |
It's that important.
link |
So that's the main thing.
link |
What we also know is at the molecular level
link |
that if you disrupt your sleep wake cycle,
link |
so we actually have proteins that go up and down
link |
that control our sleep wake.
link |
All of us, most of ourselves do that.
link |
If you disrupt that, you'll get premature aging.
link |
The opposite is true.
link |
That as you get older, that cycle,
link |
the amplitude becomes diminished.
link |
And this is why it's harder to get to sleep as you get older
link |
and then you got all sorts of problems.
link |
And I think what's going on is there's positive feedback loop
link |
which is a disaster in your old age,
link |
which is right, you're aging.
link |
You can't at this moment totally prevent that.
link |
And then it's disrupting your sleep
link |
and you get not enough sleep
link |
and then that's gonna accelerate your aging process.
link |
And so it's known that people who are shift workers
link |
are more susceptible to certain age related diseases.
link |
So your bottom line, you definitely wanna work on that.
link |
It's one of the reasons I have this ring on my finger
link |
which helps me optimize my sleep
link |
and learn what I do the day before
link |
if it was a bad idea and I'll stop doing that
link |
like eating a fried chicken.
link |
I see you're still carrying the burdens of that decision.
link |
But yeah, sleep is one of those things
link |
that's making me wonder about the variability
link |
between humans a little bit
link |
and how science is often focused on,
link |
like it's not often focused on high performers
link |
in a particular way.
link |
And it's looking at the aggregate
link |
versus the individual cases.
link |
For example, like for me,
link |
I don't know what the exact hours are,
link |
but like power naps are incredible.
link |
I tend to look at the metric of stress and happiness
link |
and joy and try to optimize those.
link |
So decreasing stress, increasing happiness
link |
and using sleep as just one of the tools to do that
link |
because like hitting the five, six, seven, eight,
link |
nine hour mark or whatever the correct mark is,
link |
I find that to be stress inducing for me
link |
versus stress relieving, like thinking about that.
link |
I feel best if I sleep sometimes for eight hours,
link |
sometimes for four hours in the power nap.
link |
And as long as I have a stupid private,
link |
usually smile on my face,
link |
that's what I'm doing good
link |
as opposed to getting a perfect amount of sleep
link |
according to whatever the latest blog post is.
link |
And I also pull all nighters still.
link |
I also think there's something about the body,
link |
like as long as you do it regularly,
link |
it's not as stress inducing.
link |
Like you know what it is.
link |
The reason I pull all nighters isn't for like,
link |
I'm playing Diablo three or something
link |
is because I'm doing something I'm truly passionate about.
link |
Well, like I'm also love video games,
link |
but I'm doing something I'm truly passionate about.
link |
And it's almost like there's the jockel willing feeling
link |
of when I'm up at seven AM
link |
and I haven't slept all night and still I'm working on it.
link |
There's a kind of a celebration of the human spirit
link |
that I really enjoy it.
link |
Like, and that's happiness.
link |
And to sort of then,
link |
and I usually don't tell that kind of stuff to people
link |
because their first statement will be like,
link |
you should get more sleep.
link |
It's like, no, I'm doing stuff I love.
link |
You should get more love in your life, bro.
link |
So, but that said, in aggregate,
link |
when you look at the full span of life,
link |
it's probably you should be getting
link |
a consistent amount of sleep.
link |
And it seems like it's in that seven, eight hour range.
link |
Yeah, but it's similar to food.
link |
It's the quality, not the quantity.
link |
And when you get it.
link |
So I look at my data pretty often.
link |
And what makes a difference to me is not the amount of hours
link |
but the quality, the depth and the deep sleep
link |
is what will do it.
link |
So if I have a lot of alcohol before going to sleep
link |
and I can see my heart rate being different,
link |
but what really kills me is that I don't get
link |
a lot of that deep sleep and I wake up,
link |
you know, barely remembering stuff.
link |
So that, like you say, if you're happy and contented
link |
and you're not done have these cortisol chemicals
link |
going through your body,
link |
you will more naturally get into that deep state.
link |
And even if you just get four hours,
link |
way better than eight hours of none of that.
link |
Yeah, that's beautiful.
link |
And some of that could be genetic.
link |
For me, I just fall asleep like this.
link |
If you want me to fall asleep right now, I can do it.
link |
It's no, I have no problem with it.
link |
Combined with coffee, I just had two energy drinks
link |
I can probably sleep.
link |
So that, I don't know if that's genetics
link |
or it's kind of, I don't know what it is.
link |
Or maybe that I don't have kids that I'm single.
link |
So I don't have, I'm almost listening to some kind
link |
of biological signal versus societal signal.
link |
I'm not supposed to go to sleep.
link |
So I just go to sleep whenever I feel like going to sleep.
link |
Well, that's cause you're self employed.
link |
Most people don't have that luxury,
link |
but we're lucky the two of us that we can make our own hours.
link |
But yeah, it's super important.
link |
And those people who have the shift work,
link |
I mean, they really need to change the way that works
link |
because they're literally killing those people.
link |
Is there something you can say about the mind and stress
link |
in terms of effect on longevity?
link |
Sort of, cause I don't know if you think about it this way,
link |
but when you talk about the biological machine,
link |
it's always these mechanisms that don't,
link |
are not necessarily directly connected to the brain
link |
or the operation of the brain.
link |
Like what's the role about stress and happiness
link |
and yeah, the sort of higher cognitive things
link |
going on in the brain on longevity.
link |
Well, that's a great point.
link |
The brain is the center for longevity actually.
link |
We do know that first off, when I'm stressed,
link |
I can see mentally stressed,
link |
then I can see it in my body.
link |
Heart rate, hormones, it's clear.
link |
That's no true surprise.
link |
So you've got to work on your brain first and foremost.
link |
If you are totally freaked out, agitated all the time,
link |
you will live shorter.
link |
I'm certain of it.
link |
I keep fish, I'm a big aquarium guy.
link |
And you can see the difference
link |
between the fish that's having a good time and dominant
link |
and one that gets picked on.
link |
It just looks like crap.
link |
You don't want to be the little fish getting picked on
link |
if you can help it.
link |
So I used to be extremely stressed as a kid.
link |
I was a perfectionist, very shy,
link |
always worried about being a failure.
link |
If I didn't get an A+, I was crying in my bedroom,
link |
that kind of sad existence.
link |
I got into my 20s, picked then in my 30s
link |
and realized that's not the way to live.
link |
So I've worked very hard to get to this point
link |
where I almost never get stressed, never.
link |
There's nothing that, I've never gotten angry in my lab.
link |
Sometimes it's like a, most of the time
link |
it's like a kindergarten.
link |
I haven't lost my temper.
link |
I'm very calm, but that's intentional.
link |
And I don't worry about stuff.
link |
Millions of dollars, billions of dollars at stake sometimes.
link |
We're all headed to the same place anyway.
link |
Don't worry about it.
link |
But to answer your question, I think in a better way,
link |
if you manipulate the brain of an animal,
link |
I'll give you an example.
link |
If we turn on this certain gene that I mentioned,
link |
sort one, we, a good friend of mine at Wash U,
link |
Sheena Mai did this.
link |
They upregulated that gene just in the neurons
link |
of the animal, it lived longer.
link |
So that's sufficient to extend lifespan.
link |
We also know that you can manipulate the part of the brain
link |
called the hypothalamus, which leaches a lot of chemicals
link |
into the body and proteins, most of which we don't know yet,
link |
but just changing the inflammation of that little organ
link |
or part of the brain is sufficient
link |
to make animals live longer as well.
link |
So get your brain in order first
link |
before you tackle anything else, I would say.
link |
So you kind of mentioned this with the inside tracker,
link |
there's a ability to take blood measurement
link |
and then infer from that a bunch of different things
link |
about your body, how you can improve,
link |
how you can improve the longevity.
link |
And you've also mentioned saliva in more efficient ways
link |
What does that involve?
link |
What's the future of data collection?
link |
Yeah, for the human biological system.
link |
Well, yeah, the issue with blood
link |
is you need someone to take it.
link |
I mean, already prick your finger, which hurts.
link |
So you've got to have something better.
link |
So I think what the future looks like
link |
is that you'll spit onto a little piece of paper
link |
and stick it in a machine, it'll do that for you.
link |
But we're not there yet.
link |
So the intermediate future that I'm building right now
link |
is that you would take a swab of the inside of your mouth,
link |
which is the easiest way to take cells out of your body
link |
and just ship them off.
link |
Okay, so it's called a buckle swab.
link |
I think we became very used to that right now
link |
because of COVID, people don't like going to the doctor
link |
as much, they don't like going out,
link |
they just want to have home tests.
link |
And so that I think is the next 10 years
link |
where you'll get a kit in the mail,
link |
you'll swab your cheek, stick it back in an envelope,
link |
send it off and a week later,
link |
you have either a doctor's report or a health recommendation.
link |
And what can you get off a cheek swab?
link |
Well, you can get anything,
link |
you can get hormones, stress levels,
link |
stress hormones, blood glucose levels.
link |
You can also tell your age reasonably accurately
link |
doing that, actually quite accurately.
link |
And those clocks cannot just tell you
link |
how you're doing over time,
link |
but can be used to give you recommendations
link |
to slow that process down.
link |
Cause some people sometimes are 10 years older biologically
link |
than their actual chronological age.
link |
I mean, why does it matter how many times
link |
the earth's gone around the sun seriously?
link |
Who cares about birthdays?
link |
It's how long your body's clock has been ticking
link |
So I could take a cheek swab from you today,
link |
Lex, take it back to my lab.
link |
And we then by tomorrow tell you
link |
how old you are biologically
link |
based on what we call the epigenetic clock.
link |
And you might be freaked out, you might be happy,
link |
but either way, we can advise you
link |
on how to improve the trajectory.
link |
Cause we know that smoking increases
link |
the speed of that clock.
link |
We also know that fasting and people who eat the right foods
link |
have a slower clock.
link |
Without that knowledge, you're flying blind.
link |
But I like the idea of a swab cause it's just so easy.
link |
We've, a lot of us have done something like that
link |
It's not a big deal.
link |
I've been doing a lot of rapid antigen tests.
link |
So let me say that particular one rapid antigen tests,
link |
they've been a source of frustration for me
link |
because like everybody should be doing it.
link |
We've also been working in my lab
link |
on democratizing these tests
link |
to bring them down from a few hundred bucks to a dollar.
link |
So just to clarify, you're talking about not research,
link |
you're talking about like company stuff,
link |
like actual consumer facing things.
link |
The research on bringing the price down
link |
has occurred in my lab at Harvard.
link |
And then that intellectual property is being licensed
link |
and has been licensed out to a company
link |
that will be consumer facing.
link |
So anybody for a small amount of money can do this.
link |
Well, you got subscriber number one obsessed.
link |
I think that's a beautiful, beautiful idea.
link |
So somebody who maybe I would have been more hesitant
link |
about it until COVID, but the home tests are super easy.
link |
I almost wanted to share that data with the world,
link |
like in some way, not the entirety of the data,
link |
but like some visualization of like how I'm doing.
link |
Like it's almost like, like, you know,
link |
when you share if you had like a long run
link |
or something like that,
link |
I wish I could share because it inspires others
link |
and then you can have a conversation about like,
link |
well, what are the hacks that you've tried
link |
and have a conversation about like
link |
how to improve lifestyle and those kinds of things
link |
that's grounded in data.
link |
That's exactly, that's what's gonna happen.
link |
Now, everything's anonymous, of course.
link |
We talked about security there,
link |
but once it's anonymized, you can then plot these numbers.
link |
And I've plotted my epigenetic age
link |
versus hundreds of other people who have taken this test now.
link |
And I can tell you where I fit relative to others
link |
in terms of my biological age.
link |
And I'm happy to share that with you all
link |
because it's pretty low.
link |
You can choose to share it, of course,
link |
not everyone wants to share that.
link |
But when you go to the doctor,
link |
first of all, your doctor does treat you
link |
as though you're an average person
link |
and none of us are average, there's no such thing.
link |
But second of all, we never know
link |
how we're doing relative to others
link |
because we all, most of us, we don't share our information.
link |
So we might have this number and that number,
link |
but do you know that your numbers are good for your age or not?
link |
Even your doctor probably doesn't even know.
link |
So this graph that I'm talking about
link |
is the beginning of a world where you can say,
link |
I'm a, you know, for the two of us,
link |
we're white and we're male and we're this age.
link |
And we do this, are we good?
link |
Are we doing the right things or the wrong things?
link |
Do we need to fix certain things?
link |
And this is what the future is.
link |
It's forget about just experimenting
link |
and not knowing the result.
link |
I mean, who doesn't experiment
link |
and doesn't look at the data?
link |
No one, it makes no sense.
link |
So we're gonna enter a world where we have a dashboard
link |
on our body, the swabs, the blood tests,
link |
the biosensors where our doctors can look at that,
link |
but we can also look at it and they can recommend,
link |
you know, go to this restaurant down the road.
link |
They've got this great meal.
link |
It's high in whatever you need today
link |
because you're lacking vitamin D and vitamin K2.
link |
Ridiculous question or perhaps not.
link |
If you look maybe 50 years from now
link |
or a hundred years from now, a person born then,
link |
what do you think is a good goal
link |
in terms of how long a person would live?
link |
Like what is the maximum longevity
link |
that we can achieve through the methods
link |
that we have today of,
link |
or are developing some of the things
link |
we've been talking about in terms of genetics,
link |
in terms of biology?
link |
What's, is there a number?
link |
Right, well, so it changes all the time
link |
because technology's changing so quickly.
link |
I keep revising the number upward,
link |
but I would say that if you do the right things
link |
during your life and start at an early age, let's say 25,
link |
we don't want malnutrition starvation.
link |
That's not what I'm talking about.
link |
But in your 20s, start eating the kind of diets
link |
that I talked about, skipping meals.
link |
In animals, that gives you an extra 20 to 30%.
link |
We don't know if that's true for humans
link |
and that would, even 5% more would be a good,
link |
a big deal for the planet.
link |
I think that we should all aim to at least reach a century.
link |
I'm a little bit behind.
link |
I was born too early to benefit the most
link |
from all of this discovery.
link |
Those of you who are in your 20s,
link |
you should definitely aim to reach 100.
link |
I don't see why not.
link |
Consider this, this is really important.
link |
The average lifespan of a human
link |
that looks after themselves but doesn't pay attention
link |
is about 80, okay?
link |
Japan, that's the average age for a male bit higher.
link |
If you do the right things in your life,
link |
which is eat healthy food, don't overeat,
link |
don't become obese, do a bit of exercise,
link |
get good sleep and don't stress.
link |
That gives you, on average, 14 extra years.
link |
That gets you to 94.
link |
So, getting to 100, if you just focus
link |
on what I'm talking about, it's not a big deal.
link |
So, what's the maximum?
link |
Well, we know that one human made it to 122
link |
and a number of them make it into their teens.
link |
I think that's also the next level
link |
of where we can get to with the types of technologies
link |
that I'm talking about.
link |
Medicines, like I mentioned, Rappamycin,
link |
is one called Metformin, which is the diabetes drug,
link |
That, in combination with these lifestyle changes,
link |
should get us beyond 100.
link |
How long can we ultimately live?
link |
Well, there's no maximum limit to human lifespan.
link |
Why can a whale live 300 years, but we cannot?
link |
We're basically the same structure.
link |
We just need to learn from them.
link |
So, anyone who says, oh, you max out at X,
link |
I think is full of it.
link |
There's nothing that I've seen
link |
that says biological organisms have to die.
link |
There are trees that live for thousands of years
link |
and their biochemistry is pretty close to ours.
link |
What do you think it means to live for a very long time?
link |
Let's say if it's 200 years we're talking about
link |
or 1,000 years, there's some sense,
link |
you could argue that there is immortal organisms
link |
already living on earth, like there's bacteria.
link |
So, there's certain living organisms
link |
that in some fundamental way do not die
link |
because they keep replicating their genetic,
link |
they keep like cloning themselves.
link |
Is it the same human if we can somehow persist
link |
the human mind, like copy clone certain aspects
link |
and just keep replacing body parts?
link |
Do you think that's another way to achieve immortality,
link |
to achieve of a prolonged sort of increased longevity
link |
is to replace the parts that break easily
link |
and keep, because actually from your theory
link |
of aging as degradation of information,
link |
it's an information theory view of aging,
link |
like what is the key information that makes a human?
link |
Can we persist that information
link |
and just replace the trivial parts?
link |
Yeah, I mean, the short answer is yes.
link |
We're already replacing body parts,
link |
but what makes us human is our brain.
link |
Everything else is suboptimal, except our brain.
link |
The ability to replace actual neurons is really hard.
link |
All right, I think it might be easy to upload
link |
rather than replace neurons because they're so tight,
link |
it's such a network and just perturbing the system.
link |
It's frozen, Gizcat, you change everything
link |
once you get in there.
link |
The problem is, well, I guess the solution,
link |
let me go to the solution, that's more interesting.
link |
What we're learning is that if you reverse the age
link |
of nerve cells, it looks like they get their memories back.
link |
So the memories are not lost,
link |
they're just that the cells don't know how to interpret them
link |
and function correctly.
link |
And this is one of the things we're studying in my lab,
link |
if you take an old mouse that has learned something
link |
when it was young, but forgotten, does it get that back?
link |
And all evidence points to that being true.
link |
So I'd rather go in and rejuvenate the brain
link |
as it sits rather than replace individual cells,
link |
which would be really hard.
link |
What do you think about efforts like Neuralink,
link |
which basically, you mentioned uploading,
link |
are trying to figure out,
link |
so creating brain computer interfaces,
link |
they're trying to figure out how to communicate
link |
with the brain, but one of the features of that
link |
is trying to record the human brain more and more accurately.
link |
Do you have hope for that to, of course it will lead
link |
to us better understanding from a neuroscience perspective
link |
of the human mind, but do you have hope for it
link |
to increase longevity in terms of how it's used?
link |
I think that it can help with certain diseases.
link |
But I see, at least within our lifetime,
link |
that's the best use of it, is to be able to replace parts
link |
of the body that are not functioning,
link |
such as the retina and other parts,
link |
the visual cortex back here, that's going to be doable.
link |
In terms of longevity, maybe we could put something
link |
on the hypothalamus and start secreting those hormones
link |
and get that back.
link |
Ultimately, I think the best way to preserve the brain
link |
is going to be to record it,
link |
but also, I think it's going to require death,
link |
unfortunately, to then do very detailed scans,
link |
even if you have enough time and money,
link |
atomic microscopy, and rebuild the brain from scratch.
link |
Rebuild from scratch, yeah.
link |
I mean, we are living more and more in a digital world.
link |
I wonder if the scanning is good enough
link |
for the critical things in terms of memories,
link |
in terms of the particular quirks
link |
of your cognitive processes.
link |
They're not, they're not, yeah.
link |
We're not close, yes, but we've made quite a bit of progress,
link |
so it's, if you're an exponential type of person.
link |
Yeah, well, let's dream a little here.
link |
Yes, that's the point. The way it would work
link |
that I could see it working is,
link |
so you take a single cell slice through your dead brain,
link |
and we can now, the problem with the engineering aspect
link |
is that the engineering is,
link |
the physical aspect of the brain is not even half
link |
the problem, the problem is which genes
link |
are switched on and off.
link |
This experience that we're having here
link |
is altering certain genes in neurons
link |
that will be preserved hopefully for a number of decades,
link |
but you cannot see that with a microscope easily,
link |
but there are technologies invented,
link |
actually just down the hall in the building I'm at,
link |
George Church invented a way,
link |
his lab invented a way to look at
link |
which genes are switched on and off,
link |
not only in a single cell,
link |
which any lab can do these days,
link |
but in situ, where it's situated in the brain.
link |
So you can say, okay, this nerve cell
link |
had these genes switched on and these switched off,
link |
we can recreate that,
link |
but just scanning the brain
link |
and looking how the nerves are touching each other
link |
is not gonna do it.
link |
So you have to scan the full biology,
link |
And look at the epigenome.
link |
And the epigenome too.
link |
Yeah, which genes are on and off?
link |
It's just easier to reset the epigenome
link |
and get them to work like they used to.
link |
We're doing that now.
link |
Use the hardware we already have,
link |
just figure out how to make that hardware last longer.
link |
Right, ultimately information will be lost,
link |
even genetic information degrades slowly through mutation.
link |
So we, immortality is not achievable through that means,
link |
though I think we could potentially reset the body
link |
hundreds of times and live for thousands of years.
link |
Okay, so we talked about biology.
link |
but let's talk about philosophy for just a brief moment.
link |
So somebody I've enjoyed reading,
link |
Ernest Becker wrote the Denial of Death.
link |
There's also Martin Heidegger.
link |
There's a bunch of philosophers who claim
link |
that most people live life in denial of death.
link |
Sort of, we don't fully internalize
link |
the idea that we're going to die.
link |
Because if we did, as they say,
link |
there will be a kind of terror of,
link |
I mean, a deep fear of death.
link |
The fact that we don't know what's,
link |
like we almost don't know what to do with non existence
link |
with disappearing, like the way we draw meaning from life
link |
seems to be grounded in the fact that we exist
link |
and that we some point will not exist is terrifying.
link |
And so we live in an illusion that we're not going to die
link |
and we run from that terror.
link |
That's what Ernest Becker would say.
link |
Do you think there's any truth to that?
link |
Oh, I know there's truth to that.
link |
I experience it every day when I talk to people.
link |
We have to live that way, although unfortunately I can't,
link |
but for most people it's extremely distressing
link |
to think about their own mortality.
link |
We think about it occasionally.
link |
And if we really thought about it every day,
link |
we'd probably be brought to tears.
link |
How much we not just miss ourselves,
link |
but miss our family, our friends.
link |
We are of all living life forms have evolved
link |
to not want to die.
link |
And what I mean want,
link |
biochemically, genetically, physically,
link |
that yeast cell, the cells that I studied at MIT,
link |
they were fighting for their lives.
link |
They didn't think,
link |
but our brain has evolved the same survival aspect.
link |
Of course, we don't want to die,
link |
but the problem for us unfortunately,
link |
it's a curse and a blessing is the way now conscious.
link |
We know that we're going to die.
link |
Most species that have ever existed don't.
link |
That's a burden, that's a curse.
link |
And so what I think's happened is
link |
we've evolved certainly to want to live for a long time,
link |
perhaps never want to die.
link |
But the thought about dying is so traumatic
link |
that there isn't an innate part of our brains.
link |
And it's probably genetically wired to not think about it.
link |
I really think that's part of being human.
link |
Because, you know, think about tribes
link |
that obsessed with longevity every day
link |
and that we're going to die.
link |
They probably didn't make much technological progress
link |
because they were just crying in their huts every day
link |
or, you know, in the savannah.
link |
I really think that we've evolved to naturally deny aging.
link |
And it's one of the problems that I face in my career.
link |
And, you know, when I speak publicly and on social media,
link |
is that it's shocking.
link |
People don't want to think about their age,
link |
but I think it's getting better.
link |
I think my book has helped.
link |
These tests that we're developing should help people
link |
understand it's not a problem
link |
to think about your longterm health.
link |
In fact, if you don't, you're going to reach 80
link |
and really regret it.
link |
And the other side of it, so again, Ernest Becker,
link |
but also Victor Franco, I recommend a highly manned search
link |
for meaning, Bernard Williams is a moral philosopher.
link |
They kind of argue that this knowledge of death,
link |
even if we often don't contemplate it, we do at times.
link |
And the very, what you call the curse,
link |
which I agree with you, it's a curse and a blessing
link |
that we're able to contemplate our own mortality.
link |
That gives meaning to life.
link |
So death gives meaning to life.
link |
As what Victor Franco's argues,
link |
I would probably argue the same.
link |
There's something about the scarcity of life
link |
and contemplating that makes each moment that much sweeter.
link |
Is there something to that?
link |
I think it's individual.
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In my case, it's completely wrong.
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I appreciate you saying that.
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I don't get joy out of every day
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because I think I'm going to die.
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I get joy out of every day because every day is joyous
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and I make it that way.
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And even if I thought I was going to live forever,
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I would still be enjoying this moment just as much.
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And I bet you would too.
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Well, that's, I think about that a lot.
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I think it's very difficult to know.
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I'm almost afraid that I wouldn't enjoy it as much
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if I was immortal.
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I'm almost afraid to want to be immortal
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or to live longer because it perhaps is a kind of justification
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for me to accept that I'm going to die.
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It's saying like, oh, if I was immortal,
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I wouldn't be able to enjoy life as much as I do.
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But it's very possible that I would enjoy just as much.
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Of course, enjoying life, whether you're immortal or not,
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Like it requires you to have the right kind of frame of mind.
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You can discover, you can focus your mind
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on the ugliness of life.
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There's plenty of ugly things in this world
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and you can focus on them.
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Whenever, like, you know, if it's raining outside,
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you can focus on the fact that you have shelter
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and enjoy the hell out of it
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or you can enjoy running in the rain when it's warm
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and the beauty of nature just being one with nature
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or you can just complain this fucking weather again in Boston
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and then it's either always raining or freezing,
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damn it, and the same thing with Wi Fi going out
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You can either complain about stupid Wi Fi
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on JetBlue or something,
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or you could say like, how incredible it is
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that I can fly through the sky
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and in a matter of hours be anywhere else in the world.
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And then it could also on occasion,
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watch, like, check email and even watch movies
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through this, while connecting through satellites
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that are flying through space.
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So it's a matter of perspective
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and perhaps there's an extra level of work required
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when you're immortal because it's easier
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when you're immortal or live longer to be lazy,
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But if you're not, you can still derive the same amount
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It's possible, it's possible.
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It's definitely possible in my life.
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I went from being the nothing's working
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to everyday's great to wake up to.
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And I think even if you live,
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think you're gonna live forever,
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you can enjoy every day.
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What I do is everything's relative.
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We can compare ourselves to our neighbor
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who has more money or to the flight
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that should have had Wi Fi,
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or which is what I do, I'm still six years old, remember?
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What a six year old does, says, look,
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I can, when I tell my fingers to form a fist,
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they actually do that.
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That's really cool.
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That's how I live my life.
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I can pick up on your desk here, this metal object.
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It's a metal cube, about an inch by an inch by an inch.
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And I tell myself, not about cubes,
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but about inanimate objects.
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Probably once a day I'll say, I am a living thing.
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I can think, I can move, I can eat.
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I am full of energy.
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And there's that leaf or this cube here
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that will never be alive.
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That's what I look at and compare myself to.
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And for as long as I live, if it's forever,
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of course it won't be, but even if it was forever,
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the relative to this lump of metal on this table here,
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we are wondrous things in the universe.
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And probably the most wondrous things in the universe.
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Yeah, we're able to deeply appreciate the leaf or the cube
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and deeply appreciate ourselves,
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which is, it can be a curse, but it's mostly a gift.
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Especially when you're, it's such a beautiful poem.
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Now I'm six, I'm as clever as clever.
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So I think I'll be six now forever and ever.
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That's a good thing to aspire to.
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Your grandmother was onto something.
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David, this was an incredible conversation.
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I'm a huge fan of your work.
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So thank you for wasting your valuable time with me today.
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I really, really appreciate it.
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Thank you for having me on Lex, appreciate it.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation
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with David Sinclair, and thank you too.
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On It, Clear, National Instruments,
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Simply Safe, and Linode.
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Check them out in the description
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to support this podcast.
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And now let me leave you some words
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from Arthur Schopenhauer.
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All truth passes through three stages.
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First, it is ridiculed.
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Second, it is violently opposed.
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Third, it is accepted as being self evident.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.