"These Habits DESTROY Your Health & Decrease Lifespan!" | Dr. David Sinclair

Dr. David Sinclair 0:00 90% of the diseases in old age are caused by aging itself. And so by reversing the age of a part of the body, we can actually make diseases go away. So the- if there's one thing that I could say to everybody, it would be to eat-

Lewis Howes 0:13 What would you say are a couple daily things we could think about or do-

Dr. David Sinclair 0:17 Mm-hmm

Lewis Howes 0:17 ... to start reversing that aging process?

Dr. David Sinclair 0:19 Yeah. Well, we, we now know enough that you can definitely slow it down. And we've-

Lewis Howes 0:24 Slow it down

Dr. David Sinclair 0:24 ... yeah, we've had some breakthroughs that, that seem to reverse it as well, though they're still experimental. Uh, but we're talking about one day being able to reverse the age of the body by 50, 75%. We do that in mice now.

Lewis Howes 0:36 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 0:36 We can cure old age blindness and this kind of stuff. But importantly, what can we do now to stay alive till those technologies come-

Lewis Howes 0:43 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 0:43 ... online five, 10 years from now? So the- if there's one thing that I could say to everybody, if there was only one thing, it would be to eat less often, okay? I used to say eat this or that, but actually I believe that when you eat is just as important as what you eat, perhaps even more so. And so I've changed my life accordingly. So there's that. Now, there's often, there's the exercise thing, but that's really true, and I'll tell you why it works, actually. That's important to know. Um, and you know, you're a fit guy, so you're doing all those things.

Lewis Howes 1:16 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16 By the way, you look really young.

Lewis Howes 1:17 Thank you.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18 Right?

Lewis Howes 1:18 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:20 I, I would've thought maybe in your 20s, but you're actually in-

Lewis Howes 1:23 Late 30s

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23 ... late 30s? Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:23 Yeah. Th- I'll be 39 in two months.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:26 It's impressive. Yeah. I mean-

Lewis Howes 1:27 Thank you

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27 ... you can't even see the stitches.

Lewis Howes 1:29 [laughs] Exactly.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33 No, it's really great. You have, you haven't aged since I first met you-

Lewis Howes 1:35 Ah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35 ... and that's been a while.

Lewis Howes 1:36 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37 Uh, and then the, the third thing would be to, to eat plants, more plants-

Lewis Howes 1:41 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 1:41 ... but plants in particular that have been stressed out.

Lewis Howes 1:44 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:45 So you can stress plants before you pick them. There's organic of course, but you can pick the fruits and vegetables after they've faced adversity, a lot of light, not enough water, not enough nutrients. And there's a whole theory that we have behind that. But in general, how do you know a plant has these molecules that I'm talking about?

Lewis Howes 2:04 The stressed out molecules.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:06 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06 So plants need to survive just like we do. And those molecules, uh, they protect the animal and, and the plant. And when the plants get perceived adversity, let's take a, a grape vine, okay? That, that, you know, make red wine out of. And I, you know, I'm the guy that said red wine's good for you and resveratrol, and that blew up 30% sales in red wine-

Lewis Howes 2:26 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 2:27 ... 2006. But, uh, so let's take red wine. So the, before you pick the grape, you typically, you dry out the vines or you hope that there's not enough rain.

Lewis Howes 2:38 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:38 And then the plants, the grapevine gets stressed out. Um, not mentally stressed, but you know, it's fearful that it could die. So it starts making these, what are called polyphenols.

Lewis Howes 2:47 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:47 And a phenol is just a ring of carbon with some hydrogens on it, and poly, obviously more. So this resveratrol is two carbon rings with some little eight OHs, oxygen, hydrogen. They make a ton of it. And it's bottled in red wine, and that's why, one of the reasons why you probably have some health benefits when you-

Lewis Howes 3:04 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 3:04 ... drink red wine in moderation.

Lewis Howes 3:06 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 3:07 Um, and when you take resveratrol as a supplement, it also has similar benefits.

Lewis Howes 3:13 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 3:13 It's found in clinical trials.

Lewis Howes 3:14 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 3:15 So what-

Lewis Howes 3:15 In the supplemental form?

Dr. David Sinclair 3:17 Yeah, yeah. So I take, I've been taking resveratrol myself for over a decade now, uh, probably 14 years.

Lewis Howes 3:23 Is that what covers up the stitches? [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 3:25 Yeah. [laughs] Right. Actually, people on the internet make fun of me. They say, you know, "You've had work done, right?"

Lewis Howes 3:30 Right. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 3:31 Uh, and I'm now 52, so-

Lewis Howes 3:32 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 3:33 ... it's getting up there.

Lewis Howes 3:33 52?

Dr. David Sinclair 3:34 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 3:35 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 3:36 Yeah. Time's a [censored] .

Lewis Howes 3:37 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 3:37 Time's, stop that one.

Lewis Howes 3:38 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 3:39 Uh, but anyway, these molecules, you'll, you know a plant has them when the, the plant is full of color.

Lewis Howes 3:44 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 3:45 So try to have a variety of colors. Don't get the, the, the white insipid lettuce.

Lewis Howes 3:49 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 3:49 Get the, get the bright orange whatever.

Lewis Howes 3:53 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 3:53 Um, organic. Uh, if they've been kept in a greenhouse at perfect temperatures, that's probably not the best-

Lewis Howes 3:58 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 3:58 ... kind of food to eat.

Lewis Howes 3:59 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 3:59 Yeah. And I've gone more plant-based. I know there's a lot of people that love meat. I love meat. I wish meat was super healthy. I'd eat it all day.

Lewis Howes 4:06 But based on the scientific-

Dr. David Sinclair 4:07 The science

Lewis Howes 4:07 ... trials and studies-

Dr. David Sinclair 4:09 Yeah. And, and, you know, on, on social media, there's a lot of debate. So I, I don't mind going up-

Lewis Howes 4:14 There's so many-

Dr. David Sinclair 4:14 ... against it

Lewis Howes 4:15 ... but there's so many people that talk about meat who swear by it, and a lot of them look young. You know, a lot of them look really lean and shredded.

Dr. David Sinclair 4:22 Yeah, they will.

Lewis Howes 4:22 And they're like, "You know, I've lost all this body fat from eating meat," and the meat only diets and all these things. "I've gotten rid of the eczema, I've gotten rid of the other," you know-

Dr. David Sinclair 4:31 Sure

Lewis Howes 4:32 ... "allergies," or whatever it might be, you know, challenging them in those times. So you hear certain studies of this from people. But I guess having that diet for 40, 50 years, we haven't really seen that, right? It's like, okay, maybe it works for five years or three years, but how does that affect you with aging long-term, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 4:49 That's right. So I've had debates with Joe Rogan.

Lewis Howes 4:52 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 4:52 Had noises about this.

Lewis Howes 4:53 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 4:53 So what, what... The, the, the way to think of it is that you can mimic adversity or abundance.

Lewis Howes 4:59 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 5:00 And the abundance is the steak, and what I do is the adversity, which is not as much, uh, protein.

Lewis Howes 5:06 Interesting.

Dr. David Sinclair 5:07 And there are systems in the body that sense a slight deficiency of protein, or at least a lower level, and kick in the defenses that we think make us live a long time. But you can go to abundance and you'll feel great, you'll look, can look great, you can build muscle a little bit more, not a lot more, but a little bit more. Uh, but that, when people say, "That works for me," it's, you know, within a few years of timeframe. I'm talking 50, 60, 70, 80 years, like you said.

Lewis Howes 5:32 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 5:33 And that's what I'm betting on. Um, otherwise, you're, you're burning the candle at both ends. Now, one way to do it, perhaps, is to spend a year on a carn- carnivore diet, fix yourself, bulk up-

Lewis Howes 5:43 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 5:43 ... and then switch, and then maybe go back and forth. There's a lot to be said about variety in biology. Uh, and in the case of resveratrol, when we gave resveratrol to the mice, not every day, but every other day, that was the best lifespan extension.

Lewis Howes 5:56 Not giving it to them in abundant formats, but in every other day or-

Dr. David Sinclair 6:00 Pulse it

Lewis Howes 6:01 ... sporadically. Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 6:02 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 6:02 So what happened to the mice when you gave it to them every day as opposed to every other day?

Dr. David Sinclair 6:07 Um, they didn't statistically live longer unless they had some other adversity, which in that case was a high-fat diet. And then resveratrol worked really well to protect them, and they lived longer.

Lewis Howes 6:17 Wow. So have high-fat diet and that supplement.

Dr. David Sinclair 6:21 Then if you're like a mouse, if you are a mouse-

Lewis Howes 6:23 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 6:23 ... then you will do pretty well.

Lewis Howes 6:24 That was benefiting them. Gotcha. But for a human, how would that impact?

Dr. David Sinclair 6:28 Well, we, we don't actually know. There, there's been a number of studies. If you take a high dose, so I take a gram a day in, in a bit, tiny bit of yogurt every day, and that's important. If you mix it with water, it won't, it'll sink to the bottom.

Lewis Howes 6:37 It won't work.

Dr. David Sinclair 6:38 It won't be absorbed into the body.

Lewis Howes 6:39 Really? So it needs to be, you can't just eat it and drink water, I mean, put it in a pill format and drink water.

Dr. David Sinclair 6:44 No.

Lewis Howes 6:44 It's gotta be-

Dr. David Sinclair 6:45 So then-

Lewis Howes 6:45 ... then-

Dr. David Sinclair 6:45 That's a re- a real tip, is you gotta dissolve it in something, a, a yogurt or some olive oil for it to get in.

Lewis Howes 6:51 It doesn't dissolve in water, and it won't, like, penetrate the system or what?

Dr. David Sinclair 6:55 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 6:56 You just kinda-

Dr. David Sinclair 6:56 It'll flow straight through. It's, it's little crystal, crystal lumps. So m- a lot of these plant molecules, there's one called quercetin, fisetin, resveratrol. A lot of the supplements you get, if you break open that capsule, and often they're yellow-

Lewis Howes 7:10 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 7:10 ... or white, and you put it in water and it doesn't dissolve, it'll sink to the bottom in these crunchy little crystals. It's not gonna get absorbed.

Lewis Howes 7:19 So if it dissolves in water, that's good. That's okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 7:22 Right.

Lewis Howes 7:23 Okay. That's fine then.

Dr. David Sinclair 7:23 Some vitamins will, but most of this stuff from plants is, is gonna be just straight through the body. A little bit will get absorbed. But if you take it with yogurt or some food, we actually know you get five times the levels.

Lewis Howes 7:35 So you can take it with food as well and it'll dissolve better, it'll-

Dr. David Sinclair 7:38 Yeah

Lewis Howes 7:38 ... digest better?

Dr. David Sinclair 7:39 Right.

Lewis Howes 7:39 Gotcha. Interesting. Okay. So these are a few things you mentioned. Eat less often. You didn't say eat less. You said eat less often. So you can still eat less often, but pack it in the meal.

Dr. David Sinclair 7:50 Well, that's what I do. I have a big dinner, and I really enjoy it now, 'cause I'm not eating much during the day. Uh, and it, it comes from a study- and actually it's important that when... I'm not talking about malnutrition. Certainly not talking about starvation. So, you know, if you're a teenage kid, you know, this is not for you. It's kind of people in their late-

Lewis Howes 8:07 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 8:07 ... late 20s, 30s at least. But you don't wanna have a calorie deficit unless you, you regard yourself as being obese or your doctor recommends it. Uh, I have to maintain my weight, which I do pretty easily.

Lewis Howes 8:17 You have to eat more calories. Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 8:17 Yeah, so I eat a pretty big dinner, and it's great. Multiple courses. I don't eat dessert, though.

Lewis Howes 8:23 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 8:23 I gave up sugar when I was 40.

Lewis Howes 8:26 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 8:26 And do not regret that at all.

Lewis Howes 8:29 What have been the biggest benefits of 12 years no sugar?

Dr. David Sinclair 8:33 Surprisingly more energy, actually.

Lewis Howes 8:35 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 8:36 Um, this combination of the plant-based one main meal a day and no sugar, I feel so much better. I power through the day, and I measure my blood glucose levels, uh, on occasion.

Lewis Howes 8:47 I'm supposed to be doing that soon. Do you recommend it?

Dr. David Sinclair 8:51 Well, yeah, you'll learn a lot-

Lewis Howes 8:51 You'll learn

Dr. David Sinclair 8:52 ... about your body.

Lewis Howes 8:52 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 8:53 It's-

Lewis Howes 8:53 How, how much junk you put in your body when you... Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 8:55 Yeah, and what, what you'll see, uh, what kind of meals do you have during the day? I mean, three?

Lewis Howes 9:00 Well, I go through, it depends on the season of life, but I try to skip breakfast most times. And then, like, I haven't eaten today, and it's what, 2, 2:45. So I just had a coffee and some ghee, and then, um, yeah, I'll maybe have like a protein bar in the afternoon, and then I'll have a dinner. But it all depends on the season of life. Sometimes I'll have breakfast and lunch and dinner, but sometimes I'm fasting, so.

Dr. David Sinclair 9:26 Okay. But it sounds like you're on your way.

Lewis Howes 9:27 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 9:28 You're, you're doing something-

Lewis Howes 9:29 Yes

Dr. David Sinclair 9:29 ... which is good. Well, you're obviously doing something.

Lewis Howes 9:31 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 9:31 You look like a kid, man. [laughs]

Lewis Howes 9:33 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 9:33 It's great. Whatever you're doing, keep doing that. Uh, but yeah, y- you wanna have this period of about 18 hours at least to let your body, uh, produce its own blood sugar.

Lewis Howes 9:42 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 9:42 And so your blood sugar actually comes from your liver. It's called a process, uh, gluconeogenesis.

Lewis Howes 9:48 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 9:48 Gluco, sugar, neo, new, genesis, obviously. Uh, and what I saw in my blood levels when I was measuring it, and I do this maybe every month, is, uh, contrasted to what somebody who eats three meals a day, it's super steady. I have this green line across here, and it's wiggling here, and then I have dinner, it goes up a little bit, but never out of this zone unless I eat a chocolate or something. Um-

Lewis Howes 10:10 With the blood sugar levels is what you're saying, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 10:12 Glucose levels, yeah.

Lewis Howes 10:13 Glucose levels. Not blood sugar level.

Dr. David Sinclair 10:15 Well, it's called blood sugar, but glucose is the molecule.

Lewis Howes 10:18 It's glucose.

Dr. David Sinclair 10:18 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 10:18 And so it goes up a little bit when you have dinner, but it's steady throughout the day.

Dr. David Sinclair 10:22 For me.

Lewis Howes 10:23 For you. What-

Dr. David Sinclair 10:23 'Cause I've trained my liver to do that

Lewis Howes 10:25 ... to produce, produce it at that level.

Dr. David Sinclair 10:28 Well, it's really smart. It knows what I need. And I power through the day. So I feel so good. I never get the brain fog. I never feel hungry. Well, not, not very. And I certainly don't have that, oh, I'm caffeinated, got a jitters-

Lewis Howes 10:40 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 10:40 ... kind of thing. And that's because it's steady. Um, and I've measured myself eating three meals a day, and this is what happens. This is a typical person. Breakfast, huge spike. About, it goes up, uh, 150, 200 units. Uh, and then you'll feel good for a while, and then three hours later, it's called postprandial, your body puts out a ton of insulin through pancreas, and it'll shoot down, try and, pulling the glucose out of your bloodstream into your tissues, but it'll overshoot. The body just now goes down. So I'm here, an average person goes up here, down there, and now I can tell, now I'm hungry, I can't think, I need a snack, right? And it's down here. And then what do I do? I go and have lunch or a snack. It's back up here again.

Lewis Howes 11:21 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 11:21 And then that's happening three times a day for most people. And that's the problem. You know, if you just wanna not worry about food and be, have a lot of energy and think really clearly, you want that.

Lewis Howes 11:31 So what are other ways of reaching that kind of even blood sugar level or glucose level? Is it doing the one meal a day? Is, can you eat smaller meals, you know, throughout the day? How do you can a case, stay consistent? What are the different ways to do it?

Dr. David Sinclair 11:45 Yeah. Well, you can eat small meals and small bits during the day. That's the old way of doing it.

Lewis Howes 11:50 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 11:50 That's what nutritionists sometimes-

Lewis Howes 11:51 Like eating five times a day, but small.

Dr. David Sinclair 11:53 Yeah, I don't believe that.

Lewis Howes 11:54 Then you're spiking it five different times, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 11:56 A little bit, yeah. But really what you want is for your body to get the, the thought that it could run out of food.

Lewis Howes 12:03 Uh-huh.

Dr. David Sinclair 12:03 This is the adversity mimetic, okay? You always want your, you always want your body to feel like you could die next week.

Lewis Howes 12:10 [laughs] What are the benefits of- Tricking your body to think it's gonna die in a week

Dr. David Sinclair 12:17 Well, it's, it's not having food in your mouth for most of the day

Lewis Howes 12:20 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 12:21 It's running and lifting things, right? We know these are good for us. Now, now I'm telling you why. Uh, and I can tell you about the genes involved too.

Lewis Howes 12:29 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 12:30 Uh, and then, um, you can also change the temperature of your body. That's also puts a bit of a shock in your body. It's called horm- the whole thing is called hormesis. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Lewis Howes 12:39 Yes

Dr. David Sinclair 12:39 And you know that

Lewis Howes 12:40 Yes

Dr. David Sinclair 12:41 Yeah. Uh, you become resilient and long-lived, okay? And, uh, otherwise, if you're always having the abundance, tons of amino acids and meat, your body says, "Hey, this is great. I don't need to do anything but build, build, build." You'll have, you know, a, a pretty good body. Um, by the way, you can still have a good body in this, it's just, you know, you'll, you'll be a little bit leaner-

Lewis Howes 13:00 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 13:00 ... maybe, you know, 5% less bulky, but here it's like burning the candle at both ends, where you're always in a state of, "I got so much food. Screw it. I don't need to worry about protecting my body. I'm gonna have kids for the next five years, replace myself, and then I can be out of here." Whereas my mode of doing it, the adversity mimetic is the thought that my body has is, "Oh, crap, if I have kids right now they might die. I need to stick around until food comes back or the mammoth goes away and doesn't chase me every day-

Lewis Howes 13:31 Mm-hmm. Right

Dr. David Sinclair 13:31 ... and so you stick around for longer. So you can get a couple of decades longer by doing what I do versus that, on average. Everyone's different.

Lewis Howes 13:39 Sure.

Dr. David Sinclair 13:39 But just doing the five main things that doctors tell you and we all know are good, like don't smoke, don't over drink, uh, eat good food, so Mediterranean kind of diet-

Lewis Howes 13:47 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 13:48 ... um, sleep well, and don't stress out, and have friends. Those things are enough to give you an average of 14 years.

Lewis Howes 13:55 Oh, my gosh.

Dr. David Sinclair 13:55 That's just the easy stuff

Lewis Howes 13:57 'Cause what's the average lifespan now for a, a man or a woman in the US?

Dr. David Sinclair 14:01 Went down, dipped a little bit with COVID, but it's around, uh, late 70s.

Lewis Howes 14:04 Late 70s. Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 14:06 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 14:06 And so you're saying if you have those five things at a great level, then it could go an extra five, 10, 14 years is what you're saying.

Dr. David Sinclair 14:14 Oh, easy.

Lewis Howes 14:15 Easy.

Dr. David Sinclair 14:15 So that's just the easy stuff. I haven't to- told you about the science and all of the stuff that I'm doing.

Lewis Howes 14:20 That's just the basics-

Dr. David Sinclair 14:21 That's the basics

Lewis Howes 14:21 ... the foundation.

Dr. David Sinclair 14:21 The sequel.

Lewis Howes 14:22 How, how much... Now, you've mentioned minimal alcohol, but how much does alcohol, smoking, or marijuana, or psychedelics actually affect lifespan? Do we have enough research on this yet or...?

Dr. David Sinclair 14:37 Uh, s- well, we do on, on tobacco smoking. There's-

Lewis Howes 14:41 Yes

Dr. David Sinclair 14:41 ... obviously it's very clear that's a decade off your life, and what's interesting is that what we're learning about these various things that you can do to hurt yourself or to protect yourself is that what's happening is that your body is aging at a different rate. So smokers, you can measure it, are older biologically than people who've never smoked. That's why they look older too.

Lewis Howes 15:03 Wow. Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 15:04 We can measure that now in my lab. If I took your blood, I could tell you how old you are biologically, not just your chronological years.

Lewis Howes 15:09 I wanna do that. I saw you post this on Instagram, that you're like 46. Is that right? Or you're 42-

Dr. David Sinclair 15:14 Uh, my-

Lewis Howes 15:14 ... or what is it?

Dr. David Sinclair 15:14 I went down to, what was it? 44, I think-

Lewis Howes 15:17 Okay. 44. Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 15:17 ... or 42. It, it bounces around, but it's usually a decade younger than I actually am.

Lewis Howes 15:20 That's cool. So, so what do you do? You take the, a blood sample, like-

Dr. David Sinclair 15:25 Yeah

Lewis Howes 15:25 ... and then you what?

Dr. David Sinclair 15:26 You-

Lewis Howes 15:26 Measure the blood?

Dr. David Sinclair 15:27 There's two ways of doing it. Uh, there's one company that I advise called InsideTracker, and that's what I use often.

Lewis Howes 15:33 I've had that too, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 15:33 You've done that? Yeah.

Lewis Howes 15:34 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 15:34 So they come to your home or you, you donate and, and then you get this, uh, this readout of I think it's 40 different parameters-

Lewis Howes 15:41 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 15:41 ... and they use an algorithm and tell you how old you are. So I'm 42 or something like that. I'm on the, I'm in the top 2% of people for my age for youthfulness.

Lewis Howes 15:49 That's-

Dr. David Sinclair 15:50 So I'm-

Lewis Howes 15:50 No, that-

Dr. David Sinclair 15:50 ... I'm happy with that

Lewis Howes 15:51 ... just dust it off, a little brag over there. I like it, yeah. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 15:53 Yeah. Well-

Lewis Howes 15:54 You better be if you're researching this and the top scientist in the world on this.

Dr. David Sinclair 15:58 Oh, yeah. I, I don't like to brag. That's not what-

Lewis Howes 16:00 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 16:00 ... Australians and scientists do.

Lewis Howes 16:01 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 16:02 But what I, I, I do wanna say is I use my body as a, an experiment-

Lewis Howes 16:06 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 16:06 ... and try to be a role model.

Lewis Howes 16:08 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 16:08 And I've been optimizing my lifestyle for 20 years now-

Lewis Howes 16:12 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 16:12 ... based on this fe- feedback from InsideTracker for the last 12, 13 years.

Lewis Howes 16:16 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 16:16 And you can see the graphs of things going out of the optimal zone, and then I make a change based on science and it comes back or even better.

Lewis Howes 16:24 So we know from smokers that their biological age is older when they smoke is what you're saying, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 16:30 Yeah. Well, that's one test. The InsideTracker test is what I do routinely every few months, but there's a new type of test that my colleagues, um, and in, in my lab we've developed. It's called the DNA methylation test. It's also known as the Horvath test, named after my friend Steven Horvath at UCLA. The way to think of this is if you've ever heard of the epigenome-

Lewis Howes 16:50 Uh-huh. I've heard of that

Dr. David Sinclair 16:50 ... these are the, the control systems that control our DNA. It turns out that that system you can measure. Uh, it's chemicals on your DNA that change over time predictably, and we've just developed a way to measure that 100 times cheaper than it was before.

Lewis Howes 17:05 Hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 17:06 And, uh, I'm gonna bring this test to the public-

Lewis Howes 17:09 That's cool

Dr. David Sinclair 17:09 ... so that people can test their biological age.

Lewis Howes 17:11 At home or something, or...?

Dr. David Sinclair 17:12 It should be a cheek swab. That's what we're developing.

Lewis Howes 17:14 So you don't have to prick or take blood or anything. You do a cheek swab.

Dr. David Sinclair 17:17 Exactly

Lewis Howes 17:17 And then you ship it in or something, or...?

Dr. David Sinclair 17:19 Yeah, you'll post it in, and then you get hopefully just a week later or less, "Here's your credit score for your body."

Lewis Howes 17:24 Well, that's cool

Dr. David Sinclair 17:25 And then even better, "Here's how you, how you slow it down or reverse it based on everything we know about you-

Lewis Howes 17:31 Wow. That's cool

Dr. David Sinclair 17:32 ... and we'll, we'll take you on that journey. So do this, eat this, swallow this."

Lewis Howes 17:36 That is cool. I gotta take that test.

Dr. David Sinclair 17:39 Yeah. Well, you can get on the wait list if you want.

Lewis Howes 17:42 Okay. Where, where do we go?

Dr. David Sinclair 17:43 There, there's a website 'cause we, we are, uh, taking names right now. We may do some studies with early adopters too.

Lewis Howes 17:49 That's cool. What's-

Dr. David Sinclair 17:50 Um, so it's-

Lewis Howes 17:50 Where's the wait list for that?

Dr. David Sinclair 17:50 It's called Tally.

Lewis Howes 17:52 T-A-

Dr. David Sinclair 17:53 A-L-L-Y, tallyhealth.com. And, uh, the reason I'm excited about it is it's very hard to focus on what works because we have no idea. You exercise, you hope that it's good.

Lewis Howes 18:03 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 18:03 Is it too much? Too little? If I eat this, does it help me? Uh, we need a dashboard for our bodies, and that's what that, what these give you.

Lewis Howes 18:10 That is really cool. Okay. So we know that smoking- Makes you age biologically. That's why it makes you look older, smoking. What about drinking alcohol? You know, we've talked about wine and the, the s- the substance in wine that could be supportive, but alcohol in general, does that affect biological age and aging?

Dr. David Sinclair 18:31 Well, it's all, it all depends on quantity.

Lewis Howes 18:34 Gotcha.

Dr. David Sinclair 18:34 Uh, one glass a day most doctors would say, especially if it's red wine, it's fine. And the alcohol actually can help with car- the cardiovascular system.

Lewis Howes 18:42 Hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 18:42 Reduces, uh, bad cholesterol and more importantly raises the, the good cholesterol, HDL.

Lewis Howes 18:47 This is for red wine.

Dr. David Sinclair 18:49 Uh, and the alcohol in white wine does a little bit of good too.

Lewis Howes 18:51 Got it. But beer-

Dr. David Sinclair 18:53 So beer will raise the levels of uric acid, which is a breakdown product of, uh, a protein breakdown product-

Lewis Howes 19:01 Hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 19:01 ... that you can pee out. Um, but if you have too much beer and other types of food that contain a lot of this type of protein, you will raise your uric acid level. So why does that matter?

Lewis Howes 19:13 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 19:14 It's being, becoming very clear that if you have high uric acid levels your body will age faster.

Lewis Howes 19:20 We just had, uh, Dr. David Perlmutter on-

Dr. David Sinclair 19:23 Exactly

Lewis Howes 19:23 ... who has a book about uric acid-

Dr. David Sinclair 19:25 Yeah

Lewis Howes 19:25 ... talking about like this is one of the, the root causes of poor health-

Dr. David Sinclair 19:29 Yeah

Lewis Howes 19:29 ... and aging faster and things like that. So-

Dr. David Sinclair 19:32 Well, alcohol-

Lewis Howes 19:32 ... alcohol. You talk to him a lot?

Dr. David Sinclair 19:34 Yeah, yeah. I actually was, was, uh, one of the first people to read his book before it came out.

Lewis Howes 19:38 Yeah, it's really good.

Dr. David Sinclair 19:39 And it, it blew my mind.

Lewis Howes 19:40 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 19:40 Uh, I now measure my uric acid levels. You can get little test strips, uh, you can just buy-

Lewis Howes 19:45 Pee on it

Dr. David Sinclair 19:46 ... unusual.

Lewis Howes 19:46 You just pee on it-

Dr. David Sinclair 19:46 No

Lewis Howes 19:47 ... and how does it, you swallow it?

Dr. David Sinclair 19:48 You, you spit on it-

Lewis Howes 19:48 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 19:48 ... and 10 seconds later you see-

Lewis Howes 19:50 You see your levels

Dr. David Sinclair 19:51 ... the acid levels. Yeah.

Lewis Howes 19:52 And so the, the lower the level the better.

Dr. David Sinclair 19:55 Right.

Lewis Howes 19:55 The higher the level means there's risk for what?

Dr. David Sinclair 19:59 Everything according to David. It's really bad for cancers and heart disease mainly. But, uh, I, I think he's right that it's a, it's a sign of, of accelerated aging.

Lewis Howes 20:09 The higher the uric level the faster you're gonna be aging.

Dr. David Sinclair 20:12 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 20:13 And a larger c- amount of consumption of alcohol, specifically beer I'm hearing, raises that level.

Dr. David Sinclair 20:21 Beer in particular-

Lewis Howes 20:22 Beer in particular

Dr. David Sinclair 20:22 ... has a lot of the chemicals in it that will raise uric acid unfortunately. And that, and that's from David Perlmutter. He gave me a list of foods and-

Lewis Howes 20:30 So beer is-

Dr. David Sinclair 20:30 ... I saw beer on there, like, oh, that sucks

Lewis Howes 20:32 ... now is, is there any benefit to beer in biology, in science? Is it, uh, help you improve the quality of your health? Your m- does your brain get better? Does your, your body, your system get better? Does it m- make you younger at all? Or are there no benefits to beer biologically and in your brain?

Dr. David Sinclair 20:51 There are benefits because there's alcohol in there, and a little bit of alcohol is good for your cardiovascular system. But-

Lewis Howes 20:58 But there's other things that's good for your cardiovascular system-

Dr. David Sinclair 21:00 There's sure

Lewis Howes 21:00 ... too, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 21:00 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 21:00 That you don't, that you don't need. That-

Dr. David Sinclair 21:02 So beer on the, on the list of alcohols is at the bottom for health-

Lewis Howes 21:06 Got it

Dr. David Sinclair 21:07 ... uh, mostly. Unless it's full of sugar, uh, you know, like those very sweet wines I think would be a problem. But beer does have a lot of vitamin, uh, B, B group vitamins, B3, tons of it. Um-

Lewis Howes 21:17 But you can get that in other ways too

Dr. David Sinclair 21:19 ... which is, you can.

Lewis Howes 21:19 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 21:21 So what can you do? I mean, you gotta live as well.

Lewis Howes 21:22 Right, right. I hear you.

Dr. David Sinclair 21:23 I, I don't prescribe-

Lewis Howes 21:24 Yes

Dr. David Sinclair 21:24 ... a life that's, that's prolonging and feels longer. You know-

Lewis Howes 21:28 Oh

Dr. David Sinclair 21:28 ... you gotta live a little.

Lewis Howes 21:29 Right, right. Enjoyment.

Dr. David Sinclair 21:30 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 21:30 The enjoyment of the richness of life, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 21:32 Right. Though I am trying not to drink alcohol these days. Uh-

Lewis Howes 21:35 I've never been drunk in my life.

Dr. David Sinclair 21:37 Yeah, amazing.

Lewis Howes 21:38 Never been drunk. I don't find it, um, amazing because I just never found the, the, uh, the des- I never had the desire to do it. I never s- I like tasted some when I was 16 and I was like, "I don't understand why I would ever drink this." Plus it was also for me, maybe that's one of the reasons in your mind I look younger, I look like I haven't aged more, is because I found it as a, an advantage in sports when everyone else was drinking I was like, "Oh, it's weakening their immune system, it's making them slower. Mentally this will give me an edge in athletics." They were hungover after games, in practice, and I was like, "I'm gonna be sharp." And so I just kept on with it. I was like, this is just gonna make me sharper.

Dr. David Sinclair 22:19 Hmm.

Lewis Howes 22:19 Now, I have my other vi- I use, you know, sugar in other ways is my vice.

Dr. David Sinclair 22:23 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 22:24 So I'm not perfect. But, um, does alcohol make you look older too?

Dr. David Sinclair 22:30 In excess, yeah.

Lewis Howes 22:31 In excess, gotcha.

Dr. David Sinclair 22:32 Yeah, yeah. So a little bit every day is, is okay. A little bit.

Lewis Howes 22:35 Little bit.

Dr. David Sinclair 22:35 But most doctors, um, like physicians would say if you overdo it you, you will age. And actually what, what you do as a researcher is you look at people who live a long time and compare them to either their twin, which has been done-

Lewis Howes 22:48 Oh

Dr. David Sinclair 22:48 ... or family members.

Lewis Howes 22:49 Interesting.

Dr. David Sinclair 22:50 Yeah. And actually how you live your life has a massive impact on how long you live. There's a twin study. They took identical twins, genetically identical, uh, in Denmark, and they said, "Okay, let's look at them through their life." And there were massive differences in how they looked and how they, how long they lived. And when they went back to see what the causes were they could figure out, first of all, that 80% of their lifespan was determined by how they lived, not their genetics.

Lewis Howes 23:19 You mean the way they felt about themselves, the people they hung out with, their environment, the activities they took on, or what do you mean?

Dr. David Sinclair 23:26 Well, mostly their lifestyle. What they ate-

Lewis Howes 23:28 Oh, yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 23:28 ... did they smoke, did they drink, did they exercise? Those are the big things.

Lewis Howes 23:30 Did they sleep well, all that stuff.

Dr. David Sinclair 23:32 Right.

Lewis Howes 23:32 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 23:32 And those that did all the good things, the same genetics, twins born the same day, one could live 10 years longer than the other.

Lewis Howes 23:39 Now this is what I'm curious about. Were these twins hanging out all the time? Or were they... Because usually when you're hanging out with someone all the time you pick up the similar habits, right? You pick up a similar lifestyle habit, uh, as your parents, as your partner, and you kind of eat the same things. It's really hard to be like, "I'm gonna drink every day," and, "I'm not gonna drink every day" if you're living together and in the same room, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 24:00 Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how-

Lewis Howes 24:02 So I wonder how that is, yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 24:02 ... but, but maybe they, they got separated at birth or something.

Lewis Howes 24:05 Interesting.

Dr. David Sinclair 24:05 Uh, but it does tell you a lot. The, the fact that 80% of our future health is in our own hands is, is liberating.

Lewis Howes 24:11 That's really cool.

Dr. David Sinclair 24:11 'Cause often we think, "Ah, it's not gonna make a big difference." It really makes a big difference how you live your life. Every day. Focus on that. And one thing that I do is I look at my future self and I ask myself, "What's that guy saying to me today, if he could speak to me?"

Lewis Howes 24:26 What's he saying? Please don't eat that.

Dr. David Sinclair 24:28 Exactly. Right?

Lewis Howes 24:28 Please don't drink that anymore. You had enough, like-

Dr. David Sinclair 24:31 Exactly

Lewis Howes 24:31 ... you're gonna hurt me in 10 years.

Dr. David Sinclair 24:32 Yes. That's how you need to think about it.

Lewis Howes 24:34 It's coaching yourself 10, 20, 30 years out.

Dr. David Sinclair 24:37 Right.

Lewis Howes 24:37 It's interesting, I asked David Perlmutter, I said, "What are some things you wish you would've done young- uh, sooner to improve the quality of your health?" And he was like, "Flossing."

Dr. David Sinclair 24:46 [laughs]

Lewis Howes 24:47 He was like, he's like, I... And I, I didn't go deeper into that, but I remember him saying that. And I was like, there's wisdom in whatever it is. Maybe he had some gum is- issues or something he had to deal with at one point that was really affecting him for a year or two. I don't know, I'm just making this up. But if he could go back, he'd be like, "I wish I would've done this better so I didn't have to suffer later." Right?

Dr. David Sinclair 25:07 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 25:08 Aging is a disease, is that right?

Dr. David Sinclair 25:10 Well, that's what I think, yeah.

Lewis Howes 25:11 That's what you think it is. Is- would that mean death is a disease as well?

Dr. David Sinclair 25:16 Uh, well, death is the, the, the end product of aging.

Lewis Howes 25:19 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 25:19 Right? So we, we've cured just about every other major disease. So you don't die from an infection. You typically don't die in childbirth if you're a woman. So now what's left is aging. And while we're whacking-

Lewis Howes 25:33 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 25:33 ... each of these diseases, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, trying to whack them on the head like a Whac-A-Mole game-

Lewis Howes 25:37 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 25:38 ... we forget that the main reason all these diseases occur is that our bodies are aging. If you don't get old, you don't get those diseases.

Lewis Howes 25:47 Is that because your immune system is strong and so that it fights against disease essentially? Or-

Dr. David Sinclair 25:51 Well, yes, it's similar, but it's not the immune system that you're thinking of. We actually have inbuilt defenses, we call them longevity genes-

Lewis Howes 25:59 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 25:59 ... that we can activate in our daily lives by doing certain things. Putting-

Lewis Howes 26:03 Longevity genes?

Dr. David Sinclair 26:05 Yes. That's what we call them.

Lewis Howes 26:06 How many genes do we have?

Dr. David Sinclair 26:08 Oh, we've got about 23, 24,000 of them.

Lewis Howes 26:11 23 to 24,000 genes.

Dr. David Sinclair 26:13 Right. But there's only about 50 really important ones for longevity.

Lewis Howes 26:17 Okay. And what are the- what are those longevity gene?

Dr. David Sinclair 26:20 Well, the, the ones we study-

Lewis Howes 26:21 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 26:21 ... are called s- called sirtuins, and there are seven of those. And they're in all parts of the body, and they do all really crazy good stuff for us.

Lewis Howes 26:29 Okay. And where do telomeres come into play? In-

Dr. David Sinclair 26:32 Well, they- they're part of it.

Lewis Howes 26:33 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 26:33 Yeah. There are seven hallmarks, or eight, depending. Uh, these are causes of aging. So telomeres are one of those hallmarks. Other things are like the battery packs winding down, those mitochondria in our cells. Uh, we lose stem cells. All this other stuff. But here's the, the important point. Uh, we think, A, that there's a unified cause, a, a whole, uh, upstream cause of all of those things. We can talk about that.

Lewis Howes 26:59 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 27:00 But also, the sirtuins, they defend against all of those. So while we used to think we'd have to develop eight different drugs to slow down aging, if you just tap into these longevity genes, they, they take care of everything.

Lewis Howes 27:12 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 27:12 Mm-hmm.

Lewis Howes 27:13 They continue to regenerate good cells, they continue to fight against disease or stress or whatever it may be? Or-

Dr. David Sinclair 27:20 They do. They're, they're really smart. They-

Lewis Howes 27:22 Okay

Dr. David Sinclair 27:22 ... they're, they make proteins that are, act like traffic cops telling the body how to fend against adversity.

Lewis Howes 27:28 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 27:28 And they've been with us on the planet since life first arose.

Lewis Howes 27:32 And there's seven of them?

Dr. David Sinclair 27:33 Well, the ones I study, there are seven. There are others. There are seven sirtuins and there are three classes of longevity gene. The ones I study, those seven, and there's a couple of others that you can turn on otherwise.

Lewis Howes 27:45 Why don't you study the others?

Dr. David Sinclair 27:47 Well-

Lewis Howes 27:47 Are they not, are they not credible enough? Or they're not-

Dr. David Sinclair 27:50 We do. We do. But we scientists, we like to, uh-

Lewis Howes 27:52 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 27:53 ... specialize.

Lewis Howes 27:54 Gotcha. Gotcha.

Dr. David Sinclair 27:54 But in truth, even though 10 years ago we used to fight with each other, "My longevity gene is more important than your longevity gene," it was, it was ridiculous.

Lewis Howes 28:01 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 28:02 "My worm's living longer than your worm."

Lewis Howes 28:04 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 28:05 It was really silly. But now we've realized, most of us admit that all these genes are talking to each other, and if you tweak one set-

Lewis Howes 28:12 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 28:12 ... the others will be tweaked too.

Lewis Howes 28:13 Right. Okay. So these genes, when you say you study them, what does that actually mean? You're pulling, like, blood out of different humans, and you're putting them in a tube, and you're researching, and you're... Like, what's actually happening to study these?

Dr. David Sinclair 28:28 Yeah, that, that-

Lewis Howes 28:29 'Cause I'm a non-scientist. I have no clue what that actually means.

Dr. David Sinclair 28:32 Right.

Lewis Howes 28:33 Is it, like, rats? Is it humans? Is it, you know?

Dr. David Sinclair 28:36 You've gotta come to the lab. You gotta-

Lewis Howes 28:38 Okay

Dr. David Sinclair 28:38 ... see what's going on, 'cause it, it's crazy stuff. We, we do anything we can to answer a question.

Lewis Howes 28:42 You're, you're cloning humans in there, you're doing all sorts of stuff, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 28:45 We, we, it, it's crazy stuff.

Lewis Howes 28:46 [laughs] Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 28:47 So we, we're driven by the question, not by the technology. So most labs will say, "Okay, I'm an expert in rats." I don't give a rats about a rat.

Lewis Howes 28:55 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 28:55 I care about answering a question.

Lewis Howes 28:57 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 28:57 And our question is, why do we age and what can we do about it?

Lewis Howes 28:59 Uh-huh.

Dr. David Sinclair 29:00 And will, will that transform medicine?

Lewis Howes 29:02 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 29:02 And so what we do, if you came to the lab, you'd see we've got, we've got jellyfish growing, we've got mice that are living longer and running on little treadmills.

Lewis Howes 29:10 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 29:10 Up in the lab we, we have stem cells that we're growing and, uh, actually turning them back in time. We can reverse the aging of these-

Lewis Howes 29:18 Stem cells?

Dr. David Sinclair 29:18 ... human cells. Yeah.

Lewis Howes 29:20 So what does that mean? You, you take a cell from a human-

Dr. David Sinclair 29:24 Yeah

Lewis Howes 29:24 ... like a, like a sample, like a skin sample, like a blood-

Dr. David Sinclair 29:27 Skin, brain cells grow in the dish.

Lewis Howes 29:28 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 29:29 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lewis Howes 29:29 Wait, brain cells grow in the dish?

Dr. David Sinclair 29:31 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 29:31 So, like, you take it from, like, a, a living human?

Dr. David Sinclair 29:33 Yes.

Lewis Howes 29:34 You take a little piece of brain-

Dr. David Sinclair 29:35 Yes

Lewis Howes 29:36 ... you put it in a dish-

Dr. David Sinclair 29:37 Usually-

Lewis Howes 29:37 ... and you reverse the age of the brain?

Dr. David Sinclair 29:39 Correct.

Lewis Howes 29:40 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 29:41 Yeah. That's what we do. Now we can actually grow little, little brains in the dish too.

Lewis Howes 29:44 [laughs] From scratch?

Dr. David Sinclair 29:46 Uh, well, you start with a network of cells, and then you coach them into forming-

Lewis Howes 29:50 No way

Dr. David Sinclair 29:50 ... these networks and, and it's like a mini-brain, yeah.

Lewis Howes 29:52 [laughs] Okay. So-

Dr. David Sinclair 29:55 And we can age them forwards, make them older.

Lewis Howes 29:57 No way.

Dr. David Sinclair 29:57 'Cause we think we understand what's driving the aging process.

Lewis Howes 30:00 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 30:00 And then we s- reset it.

Lewis Howes 30:01 And then you reverse it?

Dr. David Sinclair 30:02 Right.

Lewis Howes 30:02 So you can create a brain from nothing, a bunch of little cells that come together and-

Dr. David Sinclair 30:07 Correct

Lewis Howes 30:07 ... create a, a, a thinking brain.

Dr. David Sinclair 30:09 Well, I don't know how much it thinks-

Lewis Howes 30:11 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 30:11 ... but it'll, it'll respond to stimuli. It'll-

Lewis Howes 30:13 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 30:13 ... it'll fire, yeah.

Lewis Howes 30:14 And then you can make it older.

Dr. David Sinclair 30:16 Uh-huh

Lewis Howes 30:17 Like Benjamin Button and then reverse its aging.

Dr. David Sinclair 30:20 Right.

Lewis Howes 30:21 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 30:21 I- I'm telling you, it's, it's crazy. But when I'm in the lab and, and with my students, for us it's just every day.

Lewis Howes 30:27 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 30:27 It's like going to work and doing stuff.

Lewis Howes 30:28 It's just like, "Ah, there's a brain. It's getting older, it's getting younger," yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 30:31 Yeah, yeah. But now that I'm talking about it with you, it does-

Lewis Howes 30:33 It's fascinating-

Dr. David Sinclair 30:33 ... sound bizarre

Lewis Howes 30:34 ... for a non-scientist.

Dr. David Sinclair 30:35 Yeah. The, the other thing that's weird about this profession, or anyone who wants to go into it-

Lewis Howes 30:38 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 30:39 ... is that essentially y- you're an apprentice under me, and you, you work in the lab, and you spend a few years learning how to do all this stuff. It's not easy. The first two years basically you screw up.

Lewis Howes 30:49 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 30:50 But it's weird that, to think about it, you get a bench in a lab and some chemicals, and you have to make the chemicals yourself usually, and then your job is to discover something nobody else has discovered.

Lewis Howes 31:01 New. Something new.

Dr. David Sinclair 31:01 It's gotta be not, not just slightly new. Radically new-

Lewis Howes 31:05 Really

Dr. David Sinclair 31:05 ... 'cause I'm at Harvard. They don't give prizes for discovering something obvious.

Lewis Howes 31:09 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 31:09 It's gotta be shocking. And if it's not shocking, it's not worth studying.

Lewis Howes 31:13 And haven't you discovered like tens or you- like mult- 30 something, 35 awards for new discoveries or something, or 35 patents? What do you have? Something crazy.

Dr. David Sinclair 31:22 Well, it's some- some numbers like that. We don't-

Lewis Howes 31:24 You've discovered a lot of new things.

Dr. David Sinclair 31:26 Well, yeah, yeah. If, if I didn't, I wouldn't have a job.

Lewis Howes 31:29 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 31:29 So there's motivation to always be doing cutting edge stuff. But what drives us and the reason I think we've been successful, uh, is that we're driven by the question-

Lewis Howes 31:38 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 31:39 ... not by the technology.

Lewis Howes 31:40 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 31:40 And the technology comes second. So what I'll do is I'll say, "Okay, here's a question. We wanna figure out why does cold improve health? Or why does fasting, not eating, improve health?" How do you figure that out? Well, then you gotta pull together teams of people, uh, molecular biologists, biochemists, mathematicians, computer software people, and we get in a room and we, we figure it out.

Lewis Howes 32:03 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 32:03 Mm-hmm.

Lewis Howes 32:04 So what would you say, and your questions are why do we age and how do we reverse it? Is that the two questions you're focused on the most right now?

Dr. David Sinclair 32:12 Uh, yeah, that's, that's pretty good. Yeah.

Lewis Howes 32:14 Why do we age and how do we reverse aging?

Dr. David Sinclair 32:15 Right.

Lewis Howes 32:16 Do you think, and so you say aging is a disease. Is, is death a disease as well then in your mind? Is it like that just leads into... And can we reverse death? Is that a possibility?

Dr. David Sinclair 32:27 Uh, no. Not yet.

Lewis Howes 32:29 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 32:30 Not yet. So anyone who's had their head frozen, there, there's nothing I can do for you right now. But we can, uh, turn back the clock radically. Just in the last couple of years we've figured out that there's a backup hard drive of youthfulness in the cell that we can access to reset it. So usually the earlier you start in turning on your longevity genes, the better. We've learned from studying mice and now humans for many years-

Lewis Howes 32:55 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 32:55 ... that if you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, you wanna start.

Lewis Howes 32:59 Turn it on now.

Dr. David Sinclair 33:00 Do it now, 'cause-

Lewis Howes 33:00 Don't wait till you're 80 and then say, "How do I go be 60 again?"

Dr. David Sinclair 33:03 But most people do. They wait too long.

Lewis Howes 33:06 Why?

Dr. David Sinclair 33:07 Well, 'cause they're in denial that they're mortal. And, and we used to think that aging was, was a one-way street. You couldn't do anything about it.

Lewis Howes 33:15 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 33:15 We now know from studying twins that 80% of your health in old age is up to you, how you live your life.

Lewis Howes 33:24 Right. Your community, your positivity, your thinking, your food, the sleep you have. Like, all those things, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 33:30 Yeah. And the reason that they work, we've discovered, is 'cause they turn on the longevity genes.

Lewis Howes 33:34 Oh.

Dr. David Sinclair 33:35 That's the breakthrough.

Lewis Howes 33:36 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 33:37 So now we're artificially tweaking these longevity genes genetically or with supplements or hopefully medicine soon.

Lewis Howes 33:43 Gotcha. But you can do it in more natural, organic ways is what I'm hearing.

Dr. David Sinclair 33:47 Well, right now that's what we've got. And even if you just do the five obvious things, things like skip meals and don't smoke and exercise, that'll get you an extra 14 years on average.

Lewis Howes 33:58 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 33:58 It's that big. That's not even using-

Lewis Howes 34:00 It's simple

Dr. David Sinclair 34:01 ... high tech.

Lewis Howes 34:01 That's just, there's no technology.

Dr. David Sinclair 34:03 Right.

Lewis Howes 34:03 Just like living a good life.

Dr. David Sinclair 34:04 Right.

Lewis Howes 34:05 So what are the main things to turning on the longevity that anyone can do without technology, without money, you know, science?

Dr. David Sinclair 34:13 Yeah. Well, okay. So we, we- first of all, don't smoke.

Lewis Howes 34:17 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 34:17 That'll damage your DNA. That'll accelerate the aging process.

Lewis Howes 34:20 Does that include like e-cigarettes and all these other vaping? Does that also include that?

Dr. David Sinclair 34:27 Well, I'm a, I'm a big, uh, advocate for, uh, for putting nothing artificial in your body-

Lewis Howes 34:33 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 34:33 ... including vaping.

Lewis Howes 34:34 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 34:35 My, my mother died from lung cancer, so I'm pretty militant about it.

Lewis Howes 34:38 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 34:38 Um, I don't think vaping is as bad in terms of the number of chemicals getting into your body-

Lewis Howes 34:43 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 34:43 ... but we've seen recently it's probably not healthy anyway.

Lewis Howes 34:46 Yeah, yeah. Okay, so no smoking. That's one.

Dr. David Sinclair 34:49 That's one. Next one is don't eat so much. Eat less often. So not malnutrition, of course. Um, you don't wanna get too thin, but this three meals a day plus snacks is ridiculous-

Lewis Howes 35:01 Right. That's been my life

Dr. David Sinclair 35:01 ... in the future. [laughs] You'll do great.

Lewis Howes 35:04 I need to get rid of that. I need-

Dr. David Sinclair 35:05 Yeah, well, you're also working out. But-

Lewis Howes 35:07 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 35:07 ... someone like me who didn't, who's not an athlete-

Lewis Howes 35:09 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 35:09 ... the most exercise I do during the day typically is typing. Uh-

Lewis Howes 35:13 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 35:13 ... three meals a day is too much. Actually, one meal is enough for someone like me.

Lewis Howes 35:17 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 35:17 Yeah, I'm now 50, so my metabolism is way down.

Lewis Howes 35:20 50? You look like you're 37.

Dr. David Sinclair 35:21 Oh, thanks.

Lewis Howes 35:22 It's great, man.

Dr. David Sinclair 35:23 You might need glasses.

Lewis Howes 35:23 I thought you, you're like 100 and you look, look at 37. You've probably reversed the aging.

Dr. David Sinclair 35:28 Uh, well, I'm glad I don't look, uh, 80, 'cause that would really be bad for-

Lewis Howes 35:31 That'd be bad for your- [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 35:32 ... for my message. [laughs]

Lewis Howes 35:34 Okay. So we got s- uh, no smoking.

Dr. David Sinclair 35:36 Right.

Lewis Howes 35:37 Uh, eating less.

Dr. David Sinclair 35:38 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 35:39 Um-

Dr. David Sinclair 35:39 Next one would be the, the obvious. High intensity interval training.

Lewis Howes 35:43 Uh-huh.

Dr. David Sinclair 35:43 Lose your breath once in a while.

Lewis Howes 35:45 Lose your breath? What do you mean? Just by like working out, like in a-

Dr. David Sinclair 35:48 Yeah, become hypoxic. Uh, tell your body that you're being chased by a sa- saber-toothed tiger or something like that.

Lewis Howes 35:55 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 35:55 The reason all of this stuff works in terms of the diet and exercise, uh, it's not that your blood flows more or that being hungry is, is just healthy for the body. It's actually that your longevity genes get turned on by these things. And why does that happen? Why does it happen in humans, in mice, even in yeast cells for bread and beer?

Lewis Howes 36:12 Ah.

Dr. David Sinclair 36:13 The reason is that the body senses adversity and says, "Ah- We gotta fight back. We, we might die next week without food, and we, you know, we're running away from tigers and lions. That's what this survival network, this longevity gene does.

Lewis Howes 36:29 So it turns it on when it feels like it's in survival mode.

Dr. David Sinclair 36:32 That's it. We wanna be in survival mode, and we spend our whole lives trying to reduce our adversity.

Lewis Howes 36:40 Right, being comfortable.

Dr. David Sinclair 36:41 Right.

Lewis Howes 36:41 Being warm all the time.

Dr. David Sinclair 36:42 Don't be hungry.

Lewis Howes 36:43 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 36:43 Don't be puffed. Don't walk. You know, valet your car.

Lewis Howes 36:47 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 36:48 Roll your suitcase. Don't carry it, for goodness sakes.

Lewis Howes 36:51 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 36:51 We've done the worst. No wonder we're, we're getting sicker and sicker.

Lewis Howes 36:54 We're in a world of convenience.

Dr. David Sinclair 36:56 Right, and it's the worst thing we could do-

Lewis Howes 36:58 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 36:58 ... for our bodies in terms of longevity. So those three things.

Lewis Howes 37:02 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 37:02 Uh, the other two, um, ah, let's see, what else is there? Oh, the type of food you eat is important. Uh, yeah, there's a big debate of course about-

Lewis Howes 37:11 They say, like, plant-based is gonna extend the telomeres, right? If you're eating leafy greens. That's what I've heard, but-

Dr. David Sinclair 37:18 Right. Well, a- among other things, it's also going to have, um, a couple of really important types of molecules. One are the monounsaturated fats.

Lewis Howes 37:27 Uh-huh.

Dr. David Sinclair 37:28 Fatty acids. You get that from olive oil and avocados. Those are great. And, uh, we've just learned that that's a really important trigger for a, a certain longevity gene.

Lewis Howes 37:37 Olive oil.

Dr. David Sinclair 37:38 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 37:38 I think, uh, when I had Gundry on, he was like, "I drink a cup of olive oil a day," or something like teaspoons of olive oil. He's just eating it.

Dr. David Sinclair 37:45 Yeah. Well-

Lewis Howes 37:46 He's like, "I'm trying to get as much in as I can"-

Dr. David Sinclair 37:48 He's smart

Lewis Howes 37:48 ... putting it on everything.

Dr. David Sinclair 37:50 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 37:50 So.

Dr. David Sinclair 37:51 Well, let- let's get back to that because there's a, there's a new discovery as of a week ago that says we think we understand how that works. But in olive oil, there's also what are called ... the other, the other important component of a plant-based diet are polyphenols-

Lewis Howes 38:04 Uh-huh

Dr. David Sinclair 38:05 ... which are the molecules that plants make when they're under adversity, when they're stressed. And I believe that we've evolved to sense when our food is running out. So we get that signal when our plants are stressed. So you don't wanna eat plants that are like this wi-

Lewis Howes 38:19 Withered [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 38:20 ... white li- liquid lettuce you can buy, Californian lettuce.

Lewis Howes 38:23 Right, right.

Dr. David Sinclair 38:23 You want these colored vegetables that have-

Lewis Howes 38:25 Ah

Dr. David Sinclair 38:25 ... been a little bit stressed-

Lewis Howes 38:26 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 38:26 ... a little bit dried out. Wine is a perfect example. It's full of polyphenols, one called resveratrol that we've worked on for 20 years.

Lewis Howes 38:33 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 38:34 And it activates these longevity pathways really well.

Lewis Howes 38:37 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 38:37 So stress your food.

Lewis Howes 38:39 Stress it.

Dr. David Sinclair 38:39 Organic.

Lewis Howes 38:40 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 38:40 Um, I am for a plant-based diet, but I do eat meat-

Lewis Howes 38:43 Yeah, me too

Dr. David Sinclair 38:43 ... occasionally. It tastes pretty good. But, um, but you know, it's very clear, Dan Buettner is right. Where you go to the longest lived places in the world-

Lewis Howes 38:51 The blue zones, right

Dr. David Sinclair 38:52 ... Sardinia, right, the Okinawa island-

Lewis Howes 38:55 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 38:55 ... in Japan, they're not eating all meat. Um, and actually, we know that if you eat a lot of meat, you shut down some of these longevity pathways.

Lewis Howes 39:03 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 39:03 Yeah. So you actually ... You might look good and grow muscle, and that's great when you're young. You wanna find a mate, you wanna look good, you wanna feel good. But in the long run, I don't think that's healthy, healthy.

Lewis Howes 39:13 Really? So cutting down, less and less meat at least, having more plants is the way to go.

Dr. David Sinclair 39:19 Yeah, that's, that's what I've done. I was on an Okinawa diet in my 20s and 30s.

Lewis Howes 39:23 Which is what, just rice and leaves and-

Dr. David Sinclair 39:26 It's a bit of rice. You gotta watch out for white rice-

Lewis Howes 39:28 That's a lot

Dr. David Sinclair 39:28 ... 'cause it'll spike your sugar.

Lewis Howes 39:29 Yeah, it's a lot.

Dr. David Sinclair 39:30 But it's, uh, it's a lot of tofu, miso soup-

Lewis Howes 39:33 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 39:33 ... uh, green leafy vegetables, dark greens for these-

Lewis Howes 39:36 Uh-huh

Dr. David Sinclair 39:36 ... phytochemicals.

Lewis Howes 39:38 [clears throat]

Dr. David Sinclair 39:39 Uh, and then what else was it? There was, uh, a bit of fish.

Lewis Howes 39:41 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 39:41 Yeah. But, but also what's important is not a lot of food. And these days-

Lewis Howes 39:46 [sighs]

Dr. David Sinclair 39:46 ... I'm stopping eating when I'm about 60, 70% full. And I'm trying to-

Lewis Howes 39:50 I just never feel full

Dr. David Sinclair 39:51 ... breakfast, lunch.

Lewis Howes 39:52 Until I've, like, eaten so much, and then I'm like, "Okay, I'm full."

Dr. David Sinclair 39:55 Well, you're a young-

Lewis Howes 39:56 So I probably, I-

Dr. David Sinclair 39:56 ... active, hungry man.

Lewis Howes 39:57 Well, here's one of the things. I think, one, when you eat slower, you start to get fuller. You start to feel it. And I've ... I'm the youngest of four, and so as a kid, we didn't have a lot of money growing up in a small town in Ohio, and there wasn't that much food. So I learned to, like, grab and just shove it in my mouth, and that became a habit-

Dr. David Sinclair 40:16 Mm-hmm

Lewis Howes 40:16 ... that I've kinda stuck with. And I'm not starving anymore. Like, the food's available at any time. I can afford it, and I have it all the time. But I think it's reconditioning my mind or a habit or a routine of, like ... I mean, I'm not scarfing my face down right now, but you know, it's that mindset of, ah, what if I'm gonna go hungry?

Dr. David Sinclair 40:33 For sure. Uh, we all suffer from that. Well, not all of us, but-

Lewis Howes 40:36 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 40:36 ... those of us who grew up in regular families, we were told to finish our meals.

Lewis Howes 40:39 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 40:40 And-

Lewis Howes 40:40 Don't leave anything on the plate

Dr. David Sinclair 40:41 ... and if you've got brothers-

Lewis Howes 40:41 There's hungry kids everywhere. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 40:42 ... brothers and sisters, right, they're stealing your food. Uh, my wife grew up, um, in a very poor family. Um, and, uh, even when she was a student, she could barely afford food. She would scrounge and bu-

Lewis Howes 40:53 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 40:54 ... buy potatoes.

Lewis Howes 40:55 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 40:55 And at the dinner table, she'll kill me, kill me for this, but, uh, she will eat like it's gonna all go away tomorrow.

Lewis Howes 41:01 [laughs] That's great.

Dr. David Sinclair 41:02 But I have to, have to remind her and everybody, everyone should know this, there's always gonna be another meal.

Lewis Howes 41:08 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 41:08 There will be another meal. Don't worry. Uh, but we're conditioned-

Lewis Howes 41:11 [sighs]

Dr. David Sinclair 41:12 ... to eat food when we, it's in front of us.

Lewis Howes 41:14 I think it's a mental conditioning, and it's also, like, you f- either your body's tricking you or it's your brain or it's your gut or something is tricking you, like, "I'm still hungry." Even though you had 2,000 calories in 10 minutes-

Dr. David Sinclair 41:26 Yeah

Lewis Howes 41:26 ... you're still like, "Oh, there's food." It's like turning something on where you're like, "I wanna eat that." I don't know why that is.

Dr. David Sinclair 41:33 Well, yeah. I mean, it, it's the reason that we're here.

Lewis Howes 41:35 And it's sugar, it's, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 41:35 Our ancestors, uh, put on fat and they survived the famine. We don't have famines anymore, thank goodness.

Lewis Howes 41:41 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 41:41 But we, we've descended from those people.

Lewis Howes 41:43 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 41:43 So we've got the, the genes in our brain that say, "Eat, eat, eat." Um, and it turns out-

Lewis Howes 41:47 How do you turn that gene off? [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 41:50 Well, well, you, you can, you can take certain types of food. I, I drink a lot of tea-

Lewis Howes 41:54 Oh

Dr. David Sinclair 41:54 ... uh, and coffee, uh, hot water even, just to fill up my stomach.

Lewis Howes 41:57 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 41:58 That works really well.

Lewis Howes 41:59 Okay. Hot water, not cold water?

Dr. David Sinclair 42:01 Uh, I just like the feeling of hot water.

Lewis Howes 42:02 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 42:02 Cold water, uh, isn't as ... I actually, it might be something about the heat. I've never thought about it, but for me, that's what works. So when I get a little bit hungry at lunchtime, I'll just-

Lewis Howes 42:12 Warm water

Dr. David Sinclair 42:12 ... I'm, I'm basically drinking tea.

Lewis Howes 42:13 Warm water, tea. Yeah, you put it like some-

Dr. David Sinclair 42:16 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 42:16 Oh, interesting. Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 42:16 But it, but it's a fight all the time.

Lewis Howes 42:18 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 42:18 You know, I fly a lot and, and people are bringing nuts-

Lewis Howes 42:21 Nuts and cookies and ice cream and-

Dr. David Sinclair 42:23 And you gotta fight it, and it's really hard to fight all the time.

Lewis Howes 42:26 How do you say no?

Dr. David Sinclair 42:28 Well, I do.

Lewis Howes 42:28 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 42:30 But how do I do that? So I've trained myself-

Lewis Howes 42:32 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 42:32 ... ah, to fight it. And the best thing that I do besides saying, "Can I have a cup of tea?" is what do I wanna look like next week?

Lewis Howes 42:39 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 42:40 What do I wanna look, look like a year from now?

Lewis Howes 42:42 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 42:42 What do I wanna look like when I'm 80?

Lewis Howes 42:44 So you a- you tell yourself that. You ask yourself the question. I think it's also how do you wanna feel-

Dr. David Sinclair 42:49 Yeah

Lewis Howes 42:49 ... tonight, tomorrow, next week, when you're 80. It's like look like and feel combination is powerful.

Dr. David Sinclair 42:55 Right, 'cause y- your mind is saying now is important.

Lewis Howes 42:58 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 42:58 And you gotta train yourself to say tomorrow and the next year is just as important.

Lewis Howes 43:02 The rest of my life, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 43:03 Right, and that's more important.

Lewis Howes 43:05 Okay. So was that the fourth thing or the fifth thing? I can't-

Dr. David Sinclair 43:07 The fifth thing, uh, I didn't mention. Uh, there are a couple of things. Uh, let's divide it up. One is get good night's sleep.

Lewis Howes 43:12 Sleep is everything.

Dr. David Sinclair 43:13 Yeah. And then surround yourself by friends and people who take care of you.

Lewis Howes 43:17 Yeah. That's like the Blue Zone way too, right? It's like be around a good community, get lots of rest and naps, move a little bit, eat healthy, right? So-

Dr. David Sinclair 43:27 Well, the- these are things that most people should know-

Lewis Howes 43:30 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 43:30 ... but they don't do. So you and I are here to motivate people to do that.

Lewis Howes 43:33 Exactly. [coughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 43:34 Uh, but the research, uh, that I discuss in the book is how to take that to a new level, how to optimize those things-

Lewis Howes 43:40 Uh-huh

Dr. David Sinclair 43:40 ... and add some science in there.

Lewis Howes 43:43 To reverse it.

Dr. David Sinclair 43:45 Or get, getting there.

Lewis Howes 43:46 I like this. Do you think human beings will ever be able to become immortal?

Dr. David Sinclair 43:52 Oh. Yeah, that, that's a tough question. Y- He- here's the honest answer. Uh, no. I don't think so. [laughs]

Lewis Howes 44:02 Never? In 1,000 years, 10,000 years, never?

Dr. David Sinclair 44:06 Well, never is, is pretty hard statement. I would say that with the technology that, that I can envisage, even the best technology, give it 1,000 years of development, I think we can live many hundreds of years.

Lewis Howes 44:20 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 44:21 Well, well, let's get into that later. I, I, I think we've, we've got some new technology coming out of the aging field that, that makes the old stuff, even things just two years ago, look primitive. But immortality is so hard. I mean, we're fighting entropy. We're fighting the second law of ther- thermodynamics, which is a very powerful law of nature. And really what, what we've discovered in my lab and some others around the world is that it's hard to preserve adult living things for a long, long time. You can keep them together and functioning for longer. We've got some species on the planet, particularly plants, that can live thousands of years and many hundreds of years for some mammals, bowhead whale, for example. But going, you know, im- immortality, you're, you're fighting what turns out to be a loss of information. Um, you know, we all understand the importance of information. Our computers get corrupted. Our, uh, we, you know, we used to have things like compact discs and DVDs that got scratched. These are examples of, of-

Lewis Howes 45:22 Hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 45:22 ... the problems with trying to store information forever. You know, how, how long would an iPhone last? It's not gonna last for 1,000 years, that's for sure.

Lewis Howes 45:29 But if the information's in the cloud, then it can't be scratched.

Dr. David Sinclair 45:35 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 45:35 Maybe digitally scratched, but-

Dr. David Sinclair 45:36 Well, that, that's the saving grace. Maybe if we are able to upload ourselves somehow or rebuild ourselves from scratch, that's immortality. That's beyond anything that I'm seeing right now. Um, I think a lot of people who say, "Oh, let's just download our brains into the internet," are underestimating the complexity of the human brain.

Lewis Howes 45:57 Hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 45:57 It's not like just wires contacting each other. Every one of those wires is extremely complex, com- more complex than anything in the known universe. Uh, and so you put a, a few trillion of those together into one thing, and it's very hard to map it without damaging it, um, and let alone rebuild it. Um, it's-

Lewis Howes 46:18 So the br- the brain wiring is more complex than anything in the universe.

Dr. David Sinclair 46:22 Our brains are the most complex, uh, thing in the universe.

Lewis Howes 46:25 Do you think it's more complex than, than the understanding of God or source or the creator?

Dr. David Sinclair 46:31 I, I think that's pretty simple. You believe it or you don't. We've inherited brains from our ancestors-

Lewis Howes 46:36 Hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 46:37 ... that have consciousness, and then we're able to ask these questions. Where do we come from? Is there a force beyond what we understand that gave rise to everything around us, or are we just an accident of nature?

Lewis Howes 46:50 In your opinion, what do you think is an ideal lifespan for humans then? With the technology we have today and the technology we're gonna have over the next two decades, what do you think is the ideal lifespan where we'll be functioning, healthy human beings that have memory and not just blobs that just last longer?

Dr. David Sinclair 47:11 Yeah. You, you, that's a really good question, and I, I don't recall ever having been asked that one. Right now, the maximum human lifespan, uh, that's recorded at least, and even that is debatable, is 122 years old-

Lewis Howes 47:23 Hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 47:23 ... for the French woman, Jeanne Calment. The thing about living that long, uh, is that, and we often forget, is that that means she was still very active. I'm sure she was, you know, riding her bicycle around, uh, her village when she was 105.

Lewis Howes 47:39 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 47:39 So if you live that long, you have this period of, of health where you don't have diseases. Aging brings on those diseases. And so when you think about extending lifespan, the important thing is to realize that you don't live longer in old age. You live longer in a, in a youthful state.

Lewis Howes 47:56 What do you mean by that?

Dr. David Sinclair 47:57 Well, we, we do have technology in, in animals, let's say mice, to make them live 20% longer. They don't live 20% longer at the end of life. They actually live 20% longer, uh, in midlife so that they don't get diseases.

Lewis Howes 48:11 They stay younger longer earlier.

Dr. David Sinclair 48:14 Right. So that you can compare these animals. You can actually do this pretty easily. Actually, anybody could do it. You take a, a mouse and, and another mouse and you give a lot less food to one of them or feed them every other day. Uh, and yeah, they'll, they'll be hungry. I think they eventually can get used to it. Uh, but what happens is you can compare those two mice or, you know, 50 mice in one group and 50 in the other. This is what has been done for now 80 years. And the ones that have spent some time in hunger, uh, or not always satisfied, they are remarkably different. Their coats look all shiny. They have very little cancer or evidence of cancer. They're running around the cage. And the mice that have been eating as much as they ever wanted, which is kind of how we live now, uh, most people, uh, they are decrepit. They are s- you know, not moving. They've lost a lot of their ability to remember things. They don't bother making a nest. It's, it's dramatic, and this has been done for monkeys as well. It's been done for Labrador dogs. It's a really universal thing in life. So t- to get to your question, Lewis, actually, what's the optimal life if you had the chance to stay young? Uh, why would you want to die? I, I don't think anybody who's healthy and has friends and is enjoying their life says, "I wanna die tomorrow." I haven't ever met anybody like that. You know, there, there, there's, there's pain, there's suffering, there's depression, but if you don't have those, why would you want to die? I mean, maybe boredom, but, you know, there are-

Lewis Howes 49:42 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 49:42 ... ways of dealing with it.

Lewis Howes 49:44 Right. You'd always wanna live. You'd always... If you had a purpose, if you had community, if you were pain-free, you'd wanna keep living, I would assume. If you were enjoying your life and you had love and connection and mission, then you'd wanna live as long as you could. So what I'm hearing you say is that it's almost like food becomes the disease if you don't manage it properly. It's what is a big cause of death the more you eat.

Dr. David Sinclair 50:10 Well, yeah. Well, the food isn't the cause of death. We need food, and we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation by any means. You know, that... I want that to be clear.

Lewis Howes 50:18 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 50:18 We're not talking about eating disorders here. But we are talking about not having three large meals a day. And the way to think about it is not that the food is killing you. What it's doing is it's turning off your body's protective mechanisms against disease.

Lewis Howes 50:31 So creating some smaller stresses in the body turns on the immune system to fight against disease.

Dr. David Sinclair 50:40 Yeah. Well, not just the immune system, but that is a big part of it. It also turns on repair of DNA. It clears the body of old proteins that are, are just accumulating and causing issues, rejuvenates the mitochondria, which are those battery packs, the energy parts of the cell. A lot of things happen. We don't understand everything that's going on when animals or we are hungry, but we know that there are... at least we know of three main pathways that... And by pathways I mean biochemical workhorses in our cells, proteins that do good things. Three main pathways that are activated when we're hungry and go to work and tell other parts of the cell to repair the body and clear out the old stuff.

Lewis Howes 51:22 So in your opinion, what's the ideal lifespan?

Dr. David Sinclair 51:24 Well, [laughs] it, it's personal, but I would say I wouldn't mind living for 200 years. There's a lot I'd like to see in the future.

Lewis Howes 51:32 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 51:33 But I think if I, if I reach 200 years, I'll still feel young. Uh, I might feel young, and then why would I wanna die? It's all about being healthy. Now, what's the optimal lifespan for 7 billion humans?

Lewis Howes 51:46 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 51:46 That's a different question. Uh, you know, we can't all live 1,000 years and expect the planet to do well. But what I talk about, um, in my book is that when you do the numbers, allowing people to be lo- live longer and healthier adds huge amounts of, uh, of percentage to the GDP, right? We're spending at least 17% of our GDP in the US on taking care of, of people who are sick-

Lewis Howes 52:14 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 52:14 ... and most of that is spent in the last few years of life. And it turns out the longer that somebody lives, they actually are less costly to the healthcare system because they die quicker.

Lewis Howes 52:25 Huh.

Dr. David Sinclair 52:25 And so if you draw a graph and... You know, I, I tend not to draw graphs, but this, this is one I have to. So we, we used to die off as a population like this, and, and people would often get sick and stay alive for a lot longer in a sick state. I mean, now it's still possible to, to get cancer and, and suffer for, for 10 years trying to fight that disease. Heart disease the same. But in a world where we can push that out and people tend to live to 100 years, we know that's possible, there are people that do this all the time, um, then there's the very quick die off. Um, and a lot of people get to that point, would get to that point, uh, and then quickly die, die off. And, and that's a, that's a world that I think would be far better than this one where, uh, from a, from an economic standpoint and from an individual and family standpoint, um, anyone who's ha- had a grandparent or a parent who became chronically ill, you know, this is just nothing you would wish even on your enemy.

Lewis Howes 53:23 When it, when it's, like, five years, 10 years, and it keeps extending where it's just uncomfortable suffering pain, as opposed to what I'm hearing you say is live a great life, and then once you start to feel a little sick, die quicker as opposed to die over 10 years of suffering.

Dr. David Sinclair 53:39 That, that's the ultimate goal with this research. And, and it looks feasible based on the work that's been done over the last 20, 30 years.

Lewis Howes 53:45 Because essentially we're... um, what I'm hearing you say is we're not dying effectively. We should be dying in a better way that's better for us as individuals, that's better for our families, that's better for the economy, the planet, is what I'm hearing you say.

Dr. David Sinclair 53:59 Right. No, we see that today as well, people who don't take care of themselves, who never exercise and, and eat the wrong foods and too much of it. You can see that those are the people that develop diseases in their 60s and 70s that are often horrific, you know, diabetes and having limbs cut off from lack of blood flow.

Lewis Howes 54:17 Yes. Yes.

Dr. David Sinclair 54:18 And this i- in large part is preventable already. We know how to do that.

Lewis Howes 54:23 It's really sad. I know some people a- at that stage of life where it's just... a- you can't really come back from it. Once you've gotten to that point, you can't really reverse- ... back to a healthy state. Is that correct? Maybe you can manage it a little bit, but it's not a reversible thing at, at that point.

Dr. David Sinclair 54:38 If you asked me that last year, I probably would have said it's not possible to come back from that. But this new work that I'm hinting at, uh, really does look like an age reset is possible in complex tissues and maybe one day an entire body.

Lewis Howes 54:55 Really? So someone who's 60s, 70s who's got diabetes, and it's really slowing them down, and they're losing, you know, function in their, their body. You're saying that in the future potentially we could reverse that?

Dr. David Sinclair 55:08 Right, theoretically. Now, we haven't tested it in the context of diabetes. We tested it in the context of, of vision loss dur- due to aging or due to damage to the, the optic nerve. But there it was very easy. In, in three weeks we're able to recover a lot of eyesight from, in a bli- a blind old mouse by resetting the age of the eye.

Lewis Howes 55:28 We haven't tested this on humans yet?

Dr. David Sinclair 55:30 No, I'm, I'm trying to do that, um-

Lewis Howes 55:32 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 55:34 ... in, in, uh, hopefully clinical trials will be two, three years from now.

Lewis Howes 55:38 That's amazing. So I remember you saying in our last interview that you wouldn't want to live forever, but as you say in- with research, things change, and the last year you th- would've said something, and this year it's different now. Uh, and you might wanna live to 200, but if you were still healthy at 200, would you wanna say, "Hey, let's keep doing this another century"? Or would you say, "I'm healthy. Uh, I have love in my life. Eh, but I wanna call it quits." Is there ever a time if you were healthy still you'd wanna call it quits?

Dr. David Sinclair 56:09 I don't think so.

Lewis Howes 56:10 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 56:10 I, I really don't. I haven't met a happy, healthy person who wants to die. Have you?

Lewis Howes 56:14 No. So it only becomes when it's a time of, like, suffering pain, immobility to, to function at life at a normal level.

Dr. David Sinclair 56:22 Yeah, or depression or let's face it, there are a lot of people on the planet that are not living great lives, you know, countries that are not as well off as, as these ones are, that we-

Lewis Howes 56:32 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 56:32 ... particularly. So I can understand there may be situations where you wouldn't wanna live longer if, if you're doing a profession that every day is painful or, you know, just way too much work. Um, you know, you and I have the privilege that we can, we can do jobs from an armchair, but not everybody-

Lewis Howes 56:49 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 56:49 ... can do that. So I just wanna, you know, realize may- that, um, not everybody's in our situation, but hopefully if you have an extended lifespan, you'll be able to change professions-

Lewis Howes 57:00 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 57:00 ... um, if you're in one that you don't like and have the possibility of three, four, five different careers.

Lewis Howes 57:05 Right.

Lewis Howes 57:05 What are the things you've done or you're doing now that your 10-year-old self will be so happy for? That if he was in front of you right now, he'd just be hugging you and high-fiving you nonstop, the things you're doing that he will appreciate in 10 years. And then what are a few things that he's gonna say, "Man, I really wish you wouldn't do that right now."

Dr. David Sinclair 57:26 Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. So, um, let's see. So I'm- uh, so I, I measure myself so I can speak scientifically, not just that it-

Lewis Howes 57:33 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 57:34 ... made me feel good. Uh, it's the, the one meal, one main meal a day.

Lewis Howes 57:38 He would be grateful for?

Dr. David Sinclair 57:39 I'm sure of it. And, and as a result, I'm leaner and, uh, you know, more ripped. Uh, I hate to say that word, but-

Lewis Howes 57:48 You look, you look lean.

Dr. David Sinclair 57:49 I am lean.

Lewis Howes 57:49 You look really lean-

Dr. David Sinclair 57:50 I, I've gone-

Lewis Howes 57:50 ... and shredded

Dr. David Sinclair 57:51 ... over the last two years from 150 pounds to 133.

Lewis Howes 57:55 Yeah, you look leaner even from when I s- the first time I had you on. Your face is leaner and chiseled.

Dr. David Sinclair 58:00 Yeah. I've, I don't think I can lose any- I wanna lose any more weight.

Lewis Howes 58:03 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 58:03 I need to go back to the gym and do a-

Lewis Howes 58:05 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 58:05 ... little bit more. Um-

Lewis Howes 58:06 So the one meal a day, but you weren't doing one meal a day, what, five, 10 years ago?

Dr. David Sinclair 58:11 No, I only started during the pandemic. Um, yeah, this is new for me, too. It's hard actually. When you begin-

Lewis Howes 58:17 Very hard

Dr. David Sinclair 58:18 ... you feel hungry 'cause you've got those crashes that make you really hungry, and you've got this in- um, hormone called ghrelin that makes you hungry. But once you get through that, it takes about three weeks.

Lewis Howes 58:27 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 58:27 So anyone who, who tries it, make sure that you don't give up early. Just power through and then you-

Lewis Howes 58:32 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 58:32 ... your liver will wake up.

Lewis Howes 58:34 One main meal a day.

Dr. David Sinclair 58:35 So that's one.

Lewis Howes 58:35 Gosh.

Dr. David Sinclair 58:36 Um, the other thing I'd, I think that he will be happy is don't eat sugary foods.

Lewis Howes 58:42 Oh, man.

Dr. David Sinclair 58:44 Yeah. Don't, don't eat that cake.

Lewis Howes 58:46 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 58:46 So at, at a restaurant when they said, "You want dessert?" I always say no, but then I'm hoping that someone at the table orders what I want.

Lewis Howes 58:54 And that you take a bite. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 58:54 Yeah. I ... That's all, but that's all you w- all I need.

Lewis Howes 58:56 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 58:56 I need to taste it.

Lewis Howes 58:57 Right, right.

Dr. David Sinclair 58:57 I don't need to fill myself with a cake.

Lewis Howes 58:59 Gotcha.

Dr. David Sinclair 59:00 Um-

Lewis Howes 59:00 'Cause you still wanna enjoy your life and live a full life-

Dr. David Sinclair 59:03 Yeah

Lewis Howes 59:03 ... but you don't want to, in 10 years be like, "Why did I eat cake every day?"

Dr. David Sinclair 59:07 It's not worth it.

Lewis Howes 59:08 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 59:09 Really. Uh, your future self will thank you for it.

Lewis Howes 59:11 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 59:12 Um, lifting weights, I know d- you do that, so I, I need to do more of that. I, I got a standing desk, uh, so most of the day I'm standing, which is great. Again, you have to get used to it.

Lewis Howes 59:22 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 59:23 You'll feel tired for the first few weeks.

Lewis Howes 59:24 Yes.

Dr. David Sinclair 59:25 Uh, your legs will. Uh, I'm now mostly focused on eating plants. I'm-

Lewis Howes 59:33 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 59:33 ... I know that-

Lewis Howes 59:33 When did you start that?

Dr. David Sinclair 59:34 That's recently. Uh-

Lewis Howes 59:37 Eating mostly plants.

Dr. David Sinclair 59:38 Yeah, I've switched. I, I love meat. I wish that I could eat more, but you just gotta look at the science. There's some really good studies of thousands of people who just look at how long people live and what they eat, and I mean, it's not even an argument.

Lewis Howes 59:50 But there's so many people that bring in the argument, well, all these people have cured these diseases or whatever, you know, gotten rid of these things from meat only and, but people make the argument, right? Like, you see it online, people making the argument for meat, meat, meat. So how, where are they finding these research studies of people living longer on a only meat diet?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:00:09 Uh, I don't know. I don't know.

Lewis Howes 1:00:11 But you're not seeing them. You're not seeing studies of anyone that lives over 100 that all they do is eat meat.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:00:16 Well, there might be one person or two, but-

Lewis Howes 1:00:18 Right, right

Dr. David Sinclair 1:00:18 ... when you look at 10,000 people, what they eat, it's, uh, it's the vegan and, and the pescatarian that win out.

Lewis Howes 1:00:25 In the blue zones, right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:00:26 Yeah. And, and the, the numbers are something like the, you, you drop it down to, you got 88% less chance or actually it's, it's 12% chance for most diseases. So most diseases are protected by these diets.

Lewis Howes 1:00:38 Really? What do you mean? 88% less chance of what?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:00:42 ... uh, of dying at any one point, uh, in the age range of the study, which-

Lewis Howes 1:00:47 Oh, wow

Dr. David Sinclair 1:00:48 ... which is, uh, you know, 60 or older

Lewis Howes 1:00:49 By, by ea- by being a pescatarian.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:00:51 Yeah. Yeah. So it's vegan, pescatarian, those are the best. Then above that would be, um... Actually, pescatarian was better than vegetarian. A little bit of meat seemed to help, but, but it has to be fish.

Lewis Howes 1:01:01 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:02 And then-

Lewis Howes 1:01:02 With the omega-3s in there, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:04 Yeah, and, and particularly, uh, oleic acid's good, which is found in avocados and olive oil. Uh, that activates one of the p- protective enzymes that we study in the lab.

Lewis Howes 1:01:14 Which acid?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:15 Oleic. O-L-E-I-C.

Lewis Howes 1:01:18 What is- Some of that, but not a lot of that.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:20 It's a monounsaturated fatty acid, or a MUFA. Uh, if you have a bit of olive oil, um, there's a supplement online that I get that has high levels of oleic acid in it that I take every day-

Lewis Howes 1:01:30 Okay, cool

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:30 ... with the DHA and EPA-

Lewis Howes 1:01:32 Yeah, all that stuff. Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:33 ... all that good stuff.

Lewis Howes 1:01:33 Yes. Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:34 Uh, so that's my, that's my fish intake is a pill.

Lewis Howes 1:01:37 You don't eat fish, or you very little.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:39 Well, you know, I'm evolving my-

Lewis Howes 1:01:41 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:41 ... my diet. So I've, I've, I've gone from a Mediterranean diet over the last 10 years to the last two, three months to all plant-based.

Lewis Howes 1:01:51 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:51 No dairy and, yeah, no meat. And I'm just seeing what happens to my body. I'm measuring things. It's an experiment.

Lewis Howes 1:01:57 Yes.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:01:58 It's not a philosophy, and if things don't work out biologically-

Lewis Howes 1:02:02 You'll go back

Dr. David Sinclair 1:02:02 ... I'll go back.

Lewis Howes 1:02:02 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:02:02 I mean, I'd love to go back to a steak.

Lewis Howes 1:02:04 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:02:04 I'm Australian, after all.

Lewis Howes 1:02:05 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:02:06 But, you know, I'm, I'm driven by science-

Lewis Howes 1:02:08 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:02:08 ... and that's all that is.

Lewis Howes 1:02:09 Yeah. Okay, so you got these four. Was there another thing that your future self would thank you for? One meal a day, don't eat sugary foods. That's gonna be the, one of the most challenging for me. Lifting weights, eating mostly plants. Was there anything else?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:02:25 Get control over psychological stress.

Lewis Howes 1:02:27 Oh, yeah. Why is this so important?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:02:31 Well, the, the main problem is you have high levels of cortisol when you're stressed out psychologically, and it, it's clear that people who have high levels of, really high levels of stress, uh, are chronically ill.

Lewis Howes 1:02:45 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:02:45 And even it accelerates gray hair. That's actually a fact. It's not just a myth. You really are getting older is, if you have stress.

Lewis Howes 1:02:52 Really? So this scientifically proven that if you're stressed out all the time or more frequently, you're gonna get older biologically.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:03:00 Correct.

Lewis Howes 1:03:01 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:03:01 Yeah. Yeah, and-

Lewis Howes 1:03:01 Can you reverse gray hair-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:03:03 Well, I-

Lewis Howes 1:03:04 ... without dyes?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:03:06 Uh, yes.

Lewis Howes 1:03:08 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:03:08 Well, not routinely, but there are examples of that. Um, there are, uh, some drugs that have shown in the clinic that, that make hair go gray, uh, from gray to brown. The, the, the best example I can tell you is that, that when people are stressed out, let's say they're in, they're in the banking world and they're, they're losing their minds, um, you can find hairs that start to turn gray. Okay? So you look at them and they're a little bit gray at the bottom. Oh, good. I'm turning gray. Okay. Then they get given a vacation and they go away for a couple of weeks, and guess what happens to the hair shaft?

Lewis Howes 1:03:43 It gets brown.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:03:44 It's brown again.

Lewis Howes 1:03:45 Come on.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:03:45 You can find these gray-brown segments of hair-

Lewis Howes 1:03:49 Interesting

Dr. David Sinclair 1:03:49 ... in people. Yeah. And what they, they tracked it down to-

Lewis Howes 1:03:53 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 1:03:53 ... was that the cells that make the hair pigment start to shut down, but they can be reinvigorated. But I suspect once you've been gray for a number of years, it's really hard-

Lewis Howes 1:04:01 It's hard to reverse that

Dr. David Sinclair 1:04:02 ... to get back again.

Lewis Howes 1:04:03 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:04:03 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:04:03 So you-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:04:03 But, but, you know, I'm, I'm the first person to say aging is, is not unidirectional. In my lab, we're driving it forwards and backwards at will. It's not-

Lewis Howes 1:04:12 That's crazy

Dr. David Sinclair 1:04:13 ... really difficult anymore once you figure it out. Any high school student could do it, uh, these days in a mouse at least.

Lewis Howes 1:04:19 To drive the aging process faster and also reverse it at any time.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:04:24 Right.

Lewis Howes 1:04:25 Just by doing a few of these things.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:04:27 Well, tho- those things will certainly slow it down and-

Lewis Howes 1:04:29 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:04:29 ... maybe even reverse it by a couple of years. The Mediterranean diet, there was a study that came out, what is it, last year, and people on a, on a Mediterranean diet, which-

Lewis Howes 1:04:38 Which includes what? What are the-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:04:39 So it's, it's, it's a lot of plants. It's, um, focusing on good fats, the avocado kind of, and olive oil. You know, think Greek kind of food. Uh, a little bit of meat, but mostly fish.

Lewis Howes 1:04:50 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:04:50 That's Mediterranean. And a bit of red wine. So that's that. Uh, that, if you give that to people or tell them to eat it for a year, they will be younger at the end of that year than people who didn't switch.

Lewis Howes 1:05:00 Mm. Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:01 Yeah. But age reversal is a little different. I don't think just by, uh, avoiding sugar you're gonna reverse your age, otherwise we'd have people living 1,000 years. But what it does, what we do know is that you can actually flip a switch and reset the body, at least a human cell or a mouse, to be about 50% younger, even more than that.

Lewis Howes 1:05:21 By not eating sugar.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:23 No.

Lewis Howes 1:05:23 Or by all these other things.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:25 By, by my lab at Harvard. [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:05:26 [laughs] Got you.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:27 Right. Not, we, it's not mainstream yet, but it-

Lewis Howes 1:05:29 Gotcha

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:29 ... we hope it will be. So we're developing medicines that can reverse the aging.

Lewis Howes 1:05:32 Can reverse aging-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:34 Reverse, yeah

Lewis Howes 1:05:34 ... by 50% you're saying.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:36 At least 50%.

Lewis Howes 1:05:37 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:38 Uh, we do it in the eye all the time. We've just published this, um, about a year ago, that we could reset the age of a mouse's eyes so that it was f- it went from being blind to having a young eye again.

Lewis Howes 1:05:47 That's crazy.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:48 And then it, it stays young, and then the mice get old and die with young eyes.

Lewis Howes 1:05:52 No way.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:52 [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:05:53 So they can keep looking, like, sharp and clear, have 20/20 vision-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:56 Right

Lewis Howes 1:05:57 ... but the body shuts down.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:05:59 Yeah. So, so now what we've done is-

Lewis Howes 1:06:00 How is that possible?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:06:00 ... we've, we've learned how to age mice. We can do that. We understand aging well enough to do that. So we drive their age forward. So we have twin, twin mice.

Lewis Howes 1:06:09 Come on.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:06:09 If you come to my lab, and you've got to come.

Lewis Howes 1:06:11 I, I gotta see this. In Boston.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:06:12 You've got... Yep, yep, at, at Harvard Medical School. We have mice that are twins and they're born with black hair, and when we age them, they get gray hair. And so you've got these twins in the same cage, they've grown up eating the same stuff. One's gray and one's black, same age, but we've aged one 50%. That we've been doing for a decade. That's, that's in my book. That, that we've been able to do. That's not hard.

Lewis Howes 1:06:35 You've been able to age them.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:06:37 Aging things has been easy.

Lewis Howes 1:06:38 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:06:39 I know it sounds crazy, but-

Lewis Howes 1:06:40 Eat poorly, don't sleep well.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:06:42 [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:06:42 Have a stressful environment, yes.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:06:43 Well, the, we, we do it a little bit more differ- differently.

Lewis Howes 1:06:45 Yes.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:06:46 We use an, an enzyme to cut their chromosomes, and that accelerates the changes.

Lewis Howes 1:06:49 Oh, wow. Interesting. Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:06:51 But here's the thing: now we can take those mice, what we're doing in the lab now is not just reprogramming and resetting the age of the eyes of those old mice, but the whole body.

Lewis Howes 1:07:00 And you've already done that?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:07:01 It's in progress. We have-

Lewis Howes 1:07:02 That's crazy

Dr. David Sinclair 1:07:02 ... we have a mouse called Lisa, who's our first test case, and she's having her age reversed right now.

Lewis Howes 1:07:07 Have you been seeing, like, she had, so she had white hair or gray hair?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:07:11 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:07:11 And is it-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:07:12 And frailty and sickness. Well, we'll see. It's in progress.

Lewis Howes 1:07:14 The bones are like, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:07:15 But we're hopeful. We've, we've reprogrammed, um, a middle-aged mouse and let it go for a year, and it seemed healthier. It didn't have any more cancer. If anything, it had less cancer. But here's the thing with science: you have to do what the reviewers, the judges of your s- of your paper tell you to do if you wanna publish it, which is our currency. And this paper we published a year ago, which was in the journal Nature, which is really hard to get into, the reviewer said, "You have to prove to us that this treatment," which is a gene therapy, we turn on three genes in the body of the mouse, in the eye of the mouse, "Prove to us that it doesn't cause cancer."

Lewis Howes 1:07:47 Right, that's one.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:07:49 Yeah, but how do you prove that? Well, we had these mice that we had, we're hoping to make, live for, you know, another three years instead of two years. But they're all the mice we had, so we had to kill our precious mice that we were testing age reversal on to see if there was any cancer in them.

Lewis Howes 1:08:04 Oh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:08:04 Now, there wasn't. There was slightly less, but n- we've had to go back and restart. But there are technical challenges to reversing aging right now. The gene therapy is, it's not easy to, to give the genes to the mouse or the human.

Lewis Howes 1:08:18 Mm. Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:08:19 I mean, theoretically, you'd come to my lab, we could inject ourselves and see what happens. We won't do that, but theoretically, you could. But the problem with it is, A, we don't know human safety.

Lewis Howes 1:08:28 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:08:28 The other problem technically is that trying to give these genes to all the cells in the body is hard. If we inject a mouse with these gene therapy, so they're viruses that carry genes, uh, we can get it into the eye, just put it in the eye in a needle. It's easy.

Lewis Howes 1:08:41 And it won't go through the rest of the body?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:08:42 No, it stays in the eye. That's what's great about that as a therapy. It's not gonna cause-

Lewis Howes 1:08:46 Interesting, right

Dr. David Sinclair 1:08:46 ... cancer in the liver, 'cause it's stuck in the eye. It's also not gonna ignite or, uh, turn on your immune system if it's just in the eye.

Lewis Howes 1:08:54 Oh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:08:54 It's called immune privileged.

Lewis Howes 1:08:55 Inter- the eyeball is?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:08:56 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:08:57 But isn't it connected to the brain? Isn't it a part of the brain-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:08:59 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:08:59 ... from Huberman saying it's a-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:01 It will

Lewis Howes 1:09:01 ... piece of the brain?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:01 Yeah, but yeah, it does. Actually, it can get into the brain.

Lewis Howes 1:09:02 So does it go into the brain that way, or does it stop in the eye?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:05 No, gene therapy will travel all the way into the brain too.

Lewis Howes 1:09:08 The brain. But that doesn't go into the immune system?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:10 No. No, it stops there.

Lewis Howes 1:09:11 But does it cause tumors in the brain or ca-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:14 No. Thank goodness. No, we haven't seen any evidence of tumors.

Lewis Howes 1:09:16 Interesting.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:17 But what we need to do is to develop these viruses, um, and eventually chemicals in a pill and a supplement that can do the same thing and, and spread this, uh, age reversal throughout the body evenly, and we don't have good technology to do that yet. Mostly, it goes to the liver, um, and to some other parts of the body, like the spleen.

Lewis Howes 1:09:36 So it spreads right now?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:37 It spreads, but imagine being able to take a pill. So what we're doing in my lab right now, so my, you know, some people forget that I'm, that I'm professor, 'cause I-

Lewis Howes 1:09:45 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:45 ... I profess too much.

Lewis Howes 1:09:46 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:47 But I have a lab of 20 people-

Lewis Howes 1:09:48 Uh-huh

Dr. David Sinclair 1:09:48 ... a lot of students and, and budding what we call postdoc PhDs, and their goal, one of them, is to understand how do, how do you reset the body? Where is the backup copy of youth? We don't know where that is yet. We know how to flip the switch, but where it's stored, we don't know. We're looking for the hard drive. Uh, so there's that, but also, I think one of the coolest things is can you r- reverse the age of the body with chemicals? And by chemicals, I mean maybe a plant molecule or something in food. And, and there's some evidence, there's a study that just came out of a chemical that we all make in our bodies, not a lot of it, called alpha-ketoglutarate. Um, there's probably 10 grams of it in our bodies, my guess. But, uh, if you, if you give people, I think it was a gram a day, but don't quote me on that, but it's, it's a high dose, and measure their biological age with this test that I was telling you about, looking at the chemicals on the DNA, they claim, all right, it's a big claim, that within eight months, no, seven months, they went back eight years-

Lewis Howes 1:10:50 Come on

Dr. David Sinclair 1:10:51 ... in age. I know. It's crazy, isn't it?

Lewis Howes 1:10:53 So they did a, there was this study that already came out, this recent study?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:10:56 A few months ago.

Lewis Howes 1:10:58 Are you guys... Now, what happens in the scientific world? Do you guys, I mean, scientists go and try to discredit this or disprove it? Or how does it-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:11:06 Oh, yeah, that's our job. Our job is to be skeptics.

Lewis Howes 1:11:08 So you, so you go in and say, "Okay, I'm gonna use the exact same protocol you used-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:11:12 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:11:13 ... and see if I can discredit this." But, but then if you do it, and then it works, and you take the, the blood draw and the biologic, the, uh, biological age is the same, then you say, "Okay, I reviewed this paper, and it's either it works or it didn't work." So what happens, what needs to happen in order for it to, a, a paper to actually be credible in the science world?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:11:35 That, Lewis, that's a really important question, 'cause science works this way. And, and a lot of people don't understand how hard it is to get something proven in science. If you show it once, no one's gonna believe you. It has to be shown not just once, but probably 10 times.

Lewis Howes 1:11:49 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:11:50 And it has to be done in, reproduced independently by someone who has, who's not your best friend, who gives no crap about your career, and if they cannot disprove you, after a few years, you might actually be right. But it takes this vetting. So these new studies that come out in the press about, oh, you know, eat this, you'll, you know, you'll be fitter or if you stop taking-

Lewis Howes 1:12:09 But if it's one study, it doesn't mean anything.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:12:11 No. It, usually it's, yeah, pull the other one. Like-

Lewis Howes 1:12:15 Interesting

Dr. David Sinclair 1:12:16 ... this one. Um, fortunately, um, I, I haven't had that happen to me, where we put out something that was disproven, but, but it happens all the time.

Lewis Howes 1:12:24 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:12:24 But I, I think it, scientists shouldn't be fearful of making mistakes.

Lewis Howes 1:12:28 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:12:29 It's the same in business.

Lewis Howes 1:12:29 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:12:29 You gotta take a risk and go for it, and that's progress. Uh, but it's pretty brutal when people, uh, when scientists make a mistake. Sometimes it's inadvertent. Sometimes it's just-

Lewis Howes 1:12:38 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 1:12:39 ... too complicated, or they make wrong conclusions. But you can have careers destroyed by being really wrong about something.

Lewis Howes 1:12:45 So what's this paper giving you hope about then? Even though it's not fully vetted yet in the science world, but what is it telling you?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:12:53 Well, let's imagine that even only 10% of it is true, and you can go back-

Lewis Howes 1:13:00 A year or two

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:00 ... a year. Yeah. That's still a freaking big deal.

Lewis Howes 1:13:04 And that's by just taking, what, a supplement?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:06 It's a supplement. Alpha-ketoglutarate. I have nothing to do with the company. I'm not-

Lewis Howes 1:13:10 Have you taken this before or no?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:11 Promoting it. [laughs] I, I am taking it, actually.

Lewis Howes 1:13:13 Now you are.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:14 I'm taking it-

Lewis Howes 1:13:15 Based on your study?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:15 ... after that study.

Lewis Howes 1:13:16 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:16 To see what happens. I'm measuring my biological age fairly frequently to see what happens. I'm, I'm the guinea pig.

Lewis Howes 1:13:22 You're the guinea pig. Alpha, what is it?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:24 Keto-

Lewis Howes 1:13:24 Keto-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:25 ... glutarate. Uh, it's just a little chemical that the body uses, uh, in what's called the citric acid cycle or TCA cycle. It makes energy in the body.

Lewis Howes 1:13:36 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:37 But it also has this other role. It's used as fuel to control the clock. And-

Lewis Howes 1:13:43 How so?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:44 I can draw it if you want.

Lewis Howes 1:13:45 Yes.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:45 I know we have a whiteboard somewhere.

Lewis Howes 1:13:47 We got a whiteboard. We got a whiteboard. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:48 All right. Let's do that.

Lewis Howes 1:13:49 We got this board here.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:49 I'm left-handed. I'll see if I can do this for everybody.

Lewis Howes 1:13:51 Yes. Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:52 So h- here's what I'm, I'm gonna draw-

Lewis Howes 1:13:54 Yes

Dr. David Sinclair 1:13:54 ... for Lewis and the rest of you. All right. DNA is a long string of chemi- of a chemical in the cell which is six foot long in every cell.

Lewis Howes 1:14:01 A DNA is a six-foot-long chemical in a cell.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:04 Yes.

Lewis Howes 1:14:05 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:05 But it has to be wrapped up.

Lewis Howes 1:14:07 In the cell?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:08 It's wrapped up in the cells 'cause it has to fit into a microscopic little bag of, membranous bag.

Lewis Howes 1:14:12 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:13 And there's six of those, six feet of those.

Lewis Howes 1:14:15 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:15 When you add that up over your whole body, you can go to the moon and back eight times.

Lewis Howes 1:14:20 That's crazy.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:20 That's how long this chemical is in health. But it has to fit in your body and into a cell, it has to be wrapped up.

Lewis Howes 1:14:27 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:27 And that's, that's partly what's controlling which genes are on and which genes are off.

Lewis Howes 1:14:31 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:32 So let me draw DNA as a line here. Right, so what I've drawn little circles on a board, and these are called histones. These are the DNA-packing proteins. These allow that string to be put into a microscopic size.

Lewis Howes 1:14:44 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:44 And the way they do it is that the DNA, and this is now, DNA is this little line I'm drawing. It goes around about two times.

Lewis Howes 1:14:50 It's so fascinating, the human body.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:52 You know, when, when you see-

Lewis Howes 1:14:53 It's crazy

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:53 ... how complicated the body is, you-

Lewis Howes 1:14:54 How in the world did this emerge?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:14:55 It's hard to imagine how it, how it actually happened. But four billion years is a long time for something to happen.

Lewis Howes 1:15:00 Yeah. Right, right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:15:01 Um, all right. So now we've got this, this DNA molecule wrapped around proteins. My point is that these packing proteins are not evenly distributed. Some parts of the DNA are-

Lewis Howes 1:15:14 No

Dr. David Sinclair 1:15:14 ... totally packed. So this is your DNA. This is your double helix, and there's a code on here. A, some of these are Ts, some of these are Cs, and some of these are Gs. Okay, and that's the code. But it could be A, T-

Lewis Howes 1:15:28 A, T. Okay, it can be any order, though.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:15:30 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:15:30 A, T, C, G.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:15:31 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:15:31 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:15:31 And there's billions of them in this strand that make up this chemical. And, you know, we have 23 different chromosomes-

Lewis Howes 1:15:37 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 1:15:37 ... so they're split into 23 chunks.

Lewis Howes 1:15:38 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:15:39 Okay? Six feet divided by, into 23. And this letter code is what tells the cell how to make new proteins, how to behave, and it also, um, encodes the d- the, the genes for every type of cell in the body. So this code here might be the gene for a nerve cell.

Lewis Howes 1:15:59 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16:01 Um, but there's a problem. This DNA's also gonna be in a liver cell. So what the heck would a liver cell wanna do with a nerve cell, or with a nerve gene?

Lewis Howes 1:16:08 It doesn't need it, does it?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16:09 It doesn't need it.

Lewis Howes 1:16:09 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16:10 But it's still in the cell, so the cell has a problem. The gene is there but doesn't need it. In fact, the, not only does it not need it, it's a bad thing if it turns it on. 'Cause there are-

Lewis Howes 1:16:19 Turns into cancer or tumors or what?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16:21 Yeah, or it'll start to function like a nerve cell and it's supposed to be a liver cell-

Lewis Howes 1:16:24 Ah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16:25 ... and vice versa. So when we're developing in the embryo and we start to get, 'cause we're multi-cell, you know, we have a trillion cells, each cell starts to package things differently. So this packaging here in a nerve cell is gonna be different than a liver cell.

Lewis Howes 1:16:43 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16:43 So this is what's called silencing. Okay, so this gene is off.

Lewis Howes 1:16:46 'Cause it's in the liver.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16:49 Right.

Lewis Howes 1:16:49 Do not need it, so it's turned off.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16:50 Yep. And this gene here in this little segment here, we're gonna say that's on 'cause that's needed for the nerve cell.

Lewis Howes 1:16:58 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:16:58 So now you got-

Lewis Howes 1:16:59 Interesting. So one-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:00 On, on, off, on

Lewis Howes 1:17:00 ... yeah. So it's a strand of genes throughout the body and some are turned off in certain areas of the body that don't need to be turned on.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:07 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:17:08 Got it.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:08 And that's what gives our cells, uh, specificity.

Lewis Howes 1:17:12 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:12 That's how they know how to behave when we're young. It's why we work optimally when, when we're young. 'Cause this structure, this pattern of on off, on off, is perfect.

Lewis Howes 1:17:21 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:21 But-

Lewis Howes 1:17:22 We mess it up as adults

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:24 ... it changes over time.

Lewis Howes 1:17:25 Oh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:26 And we can measure that 'cause there's a chemical that binds to the C letter called a methyl. I'm calling it ME for short, right? So that ME is a DNA methyl. A methyl is pretty simple. It's just a carbon with three hydrogens on it. But it's a chemical tag that says, "In this cell, can you please keep this gene off forever?"

Lewis Howes 1:17:47 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:49 But this doesn't have methyls, so that's on.

Lewis Howes 1:17:51 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:52 So that's the way the cell says off, on.

Lewis Howes 1:17:55 Is with the methyls.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:56 The methyls, in part.

Lewis Howes 1:17:58 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:17:58 It's a major thing. But what we can do, now we go into the lab and I take your DNA and I can say, "Oh, wow. In some of your cells, that methyl got taken away."

Lewis Howes 1:18:06 Hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:07 Holy crap.

Lewis Howes 1:18:08 So it's on when it's supposed to be off.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:09 Right. And-

Lewis Howes 1:18:10 Which is not good

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:11 ... and now your brain cell is partially behaving like a liver cell-

Lewis Howes 1:18:16 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:16 ... which is bad news. You do not want that.

Lewis Howes 1:18:19 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:19 And that, I believe, sir, is what is aging.

Lewis Howes 1:18:23 Ooh. So what happens when this meth- methyl-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:27 Yep

Lewis Howes 1:18:27 ... I think it's called.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:27 Yep.

Lewis Howes 1:18:28 When does this start to not function?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:31 Well, it'll be, it'll be removed over time, um, through all sorts of issues. Um, one is a broken chromosome will, will cause these problems, accelerate aging. Crushing a nerve will accelerate it.

Lewis Howes 1:18:43 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:44 Really bad damage to a cell takes these away.

Lewis Howes 1:18:47 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:48 So you, you want these to stick around.

Lewis Howes 1:18:49 You wanna stick around. How do you strengthen those, then? How do you get them to stick around, all these things you're talking about?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:54 The things that we do in our daily lives- We know preserve that pattern

Lewis Howes 1:18:59 Interesting

Dr. David Sinclair 1:18:59 So nerve cells remember that they need to be nerve cells. But here's the thing, now we have the technology to put them back on where they belong.

Lewis Howes 1:19:06 We do?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:19:07 Yeah, my- the reprogramming stuff I just told you about

Lewis Howes 1:19:09 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 1:19:09 And somehow there's a, a backup copy of this pattern in cells that we can turn on and it takes a few weeks, but that's how we reinstate youthfulness in the body.

Lewis Howes 1:19:20 That's pretty cool.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:19:21 It's really cool. And I don't even know how it works.

Lewis Howes 1:19:23 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:19:24 Somehow the cell remembers that if that's missing, it needs to go back on there.

Lewis Howes 1:19:28 And it puts it back in.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:19:29 We don't know how. Maybe there's some other chemical on here that we don't know that is a flag that says, "This is where it should go if you wanna be young again." And we're looking for that right now.

Lewis Howes 1:19:39 That's fascinating. So that is aging right there.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:19:43 I think so.

Lewis Howes 1:19:43 When those things are turned off when they're not sup- or when they were b- removed when they're not supposed to be removed.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:19:49 Yeah. And, uh, you know, sometimes you get one over here that shouldn't be here as well.

Lewis Howes 1:19:53 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:19:53 But it, it's this, what we call DNA methylation pattern that changes over time, and I can read that and tell you how old you are exactly, within about 5% error, and predict when you're gonna die, unless you change your life.

Lewis Howes 1:20:06 Do you know- [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:20:07 We can draw a graph, right?

Lewis Howes 1:20:09 Yes, tell me.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:20:09 When, when you're young, you age pretty quickly, surprisingly, even before birth. And then it's linear. You get a straight line.

Lewis Howes 1:20:15 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:20:16 Okay? And this is, what is this? Let's call this 80 years at the bottom here. So I can take someone's blood. Let's take Lewis's blood.

Lewis Howes 1:20:25 Yes.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:20:26 Lewis, I'm gonna say, he's pretty young. He's been doing the right things, doesn't drink a lot. And what, you're 39?

Lewis Howes 1:20:31 Yep.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:20:32 All right. Let's put you halfway through life.

Lewis Howes 1:20:34 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:20:35 You're gonna come out here, compared to people who have smoked, drank, didn't exercise, didn't get a standing desk. They'll come out here. And that means they're much closer to death-

Lewis Howes 1:20:46 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:20:46 ... than you are.

Lewis Howes 1:20:48 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:20:49 But here's the good news. You can slow this down. You can change the trajectory. If you're here, and you know you're gonna die in the year 2070, you can slow that down so that you can live-

Lewis Howes 1:21:00 You can extend it

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:00 ... you can extend your life that way-

Lewis Howes 1:21:02 That's so fascinating

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:02 ... by doing the right things.

Lewis Howes 1:21:04 That's so fascinating.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:04 And eventually we will be able to take that person and bring them back down-

Lewis Howes 1:21:07 Come on

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:08 ... to there.

Lewis Howes 1:21:09 That's fascinating.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:09 We, we do that in, we do that already in the eye.

Lewis Howes 1:21:11 That's so crazy. So you can do it in a, in the eye, but not in the whole body yet.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:16 Give us a few years.

Lewis Howes 1:21:17 Give a few years. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:18 Well, we're not just working on it. There's been billions of dollars now invested in this.

Lewis Howes 1:21:21 Oh, sure, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:22 Jeff Bezos and the like have put money into it.

Lewis Howes 1:21:24 Yeah, I'm sure. They're trying, they're trying to live longer, too. They wanna extend this.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:28 Oh, yeah. Uh, imagine a world where you could do that for, for people. And it's, it's not about living forever. This is really important, Lewis-

Lewis Howes 1:21:35 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:35 ... is that the reason I do this is because I think medicine can be done better.

Lewis Howes 1:21:39 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:39 We're treating aging at the end of life, when diseases caused by aging have taken hold. Trying to treat Alzheimer's without taking into account aging is, is crazy. That's like putting a Band-Aid on, you know, the thing that's actually cutting you.

Lewis Howes 1:21:53 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:21:53 Um, so we, we far too often ignore the thing that's causing the problem, and 90% of the diseases in old age are caused by aging itself, by probably by that process that I was drawing before. And so by reversing the age of a part of the body, we can actually make diseases go away-

Lewis Howes 1:22:11 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 1:22:11 ... which is better than just trying to slow them down. And we, we know, well, I should say we, we don't know. In biology, we never know anything.

Lewis Howes 1:22:18 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:22:18 It's not like physics. So in biology, we think what's going on is that if you can reverse the age of an Alzheimer's brain, that mouse will not have Alzheimer's, and we're doing this in the lab right now.

Lewis Howes 1:22:28 How did you get into this fascination or curiosity of reversing aging in the first place? Was there-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:22:35 Mm

Lewis Howes 1:22:36 ... someone that inspired you? Was there a moment? Was there a, a- an event? Did something happen?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:22:41 Uh, yeah, it was an event that I think we've all gone through, we, we just forgot about. We learnt that there's such thing as death.

Lewis Howes 1:22:48 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:22:48 We don't live in a Disney movie.

Lewis Howes 1:22:50 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:22:50 And, um-

Lewis Howes 1:22:51 It's not all happily ever after

Dr. David Sinclair 1:22:52 ... it's not. It's shocking. When we're four or five, we're told this-

Lewis Howes 1:22:55 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:22:55 ... and we realize it, and we're in denial. You know, "Oh, no, that's not gonna happen." But, uh, for me, I haven't been able to get that out of my mind.

Lewis Howes 1:23:03 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23:04 Uh, it's cruel, don't you think, that we're sentient beings that, that know that this is all gonna end? And it might be-

Lewis Howes 1:23:09 We fall in love with, we love people, they take care of us, and then they're gone.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23:12 Yeah. And I don't wanna live forever. Um, I would just like to leave the world a better place.

Lewis Howes 1:23:17 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23:18 And I think one of the big things that we're missing in medicine is that aging is driving a l- a lot of our sickness.

Lewis Howes 1:23:23 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23:24 And when we treat diseases, we're treating them far too late. Once you've got, well, I won't say which disease, but, you know, take my mother, for example. Um, let's, let's use her lung cancer as an example.

Lewis Howes 1:23:36 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23:36 Uh, she could have not smoked. She could have done all the things we've talked about. She could have perhaps taken some molecules that we work on, uh, and not had lung cancer.

Lewis Howes 1:23:45 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23:45 By the time she had a tumor that was the size of a grapefruit in her lung, it's game over.

Lewis Howes 1:23:49 She couldn't do anything.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23:50 Right. And but we, but we've-

Lewis Howes 1:23:51 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23:51 ... put billions of dollars trying to cure lung cancer, not prevent it.

Lewis Howes 1:23:55 If we just prevented it, we wouldn't have to worry about it. We could live longer.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:23:58 Prevention's easier.

Lewis Howes 1:23:59 Prevention's very easy.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:00 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:24:00 Right? So how old were you when your mom passed away from lung cancer?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:05 I was 25.

Lewis Howes 1:24:06 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:07 And, uh, oh, no, let me take that back. She was diagnosed when she was 25.

Lewis Howes 1:24:12 When she was 25.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:12 When I was 25.

Lewis Howes 1:24:13 When you were 25.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:14 And, uh, she went on another 20 years.

Lewis Howes 1:24:16 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:16 Yeah. But it wasn't-

Lewis Howes 1:24:18 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:18 ... wasn't really an enjoyable life.

Lewis Howes 1:24:20 It was a-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:20 They took out her l- uh, left lung.

Lewis Howes 1:24:23 So was she breathing from a tube or was it like-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:26 Uh, she could breathe, but she wasn't, she was always short of breath. Uh, there were times when she thought she was just gonna suffocate in front of us. Eventually she did, by the way. That was not pleasant.

Lewis Howes 1:24:36 Oh, my gosh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:37 That's not something anybody wants.

Lewis Howes 1:24:38 In front of you.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:39 Yeah. And no one tells you what it's like to see your mother die or your parents die. It's, it's horrific.

Lewis Howes 1:24:45 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:45 Uh, I d- I've never experienced another death, just this one, but it was not pleasant. And we don't talk about it. We deny it. You know, "Oh, they're gonna drift off into sleep."

Lewis Howes 1:24:54 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:54 That's not what happened to my mom.

Lewis Howes 1:24:55 It's suffering. It's pain, it's agony, it's suffering, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:24:59 Yeah, my mother was turned into a writhing lizard in front of me, and I, all I could do is whisper into her, her ear, "Thanks for being the best mom I could ever hope for."

Lewis Howes 1:25:08 Oh my gosh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:25:09 And that, that was it. Couple of minutes later she's turned blue and choking and-

Lewis Howes 1:25:12 No way.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:25:13 It-

Lewis Howes 1:25:13 You can't do anything for her

Dr. David Sinclair 1:25:15 ... right, that's it. You're helpless. You're helpless. It's just, um, anyone who smokes, please, please work to give it up. It's just not, not a good ending.

Lewis Howes 1:25:24 Wow. Were you, were you with her alone? Were you with family? With friends? Was it-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:25:28 Yeah, my father and my brother and I. Um, I was also in denial, 'cause I flew from America to Australia to be with her.

Lewis Howes 1:25:36 And you're like, "Gosh, she's gonna get through this-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:25:37 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:25:37 ... she's gonna be fine."

Dr. David Sinclair 1:25:38 You tell yourself she's always recovered, last 20 years, she'll pull through. And the doctor pulled us aside and said, "We've X-rayed her lung. There's barely any lung left that's working."

Lewis Howes 1:25:48 Oh my gosh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:25:49 "You better say goodbye." And I said, "What are you talking about?"

Lewis Howes 1:25:51 Oh my gosh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:25:52 She's laughing in the bed. She's fine. And 10 minutes later she starts choking, and fluid's building up in her lungs. And it, you know, if, if you've ever seen somebody have something stuck in their throat, that's what it was like.

Lewis Howes 1:26:05 Oh my, and you can't get it out.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:26:06 Can't get it out.

Lewis Howes 1:26:07 You can't sh- you can't-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:26:08 She's drowning

Lewis Howes 1:26:08 ... Heimlich maneuver. You can't CPR. You can't try to-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:26:12 Well, I'm running around saying, "Help me, help me," and all the nurses are like, "There's nothing we can do."

Lewis Howes 1:26:18 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:26:20 Uh, so that's traumatic, so please, uh, you know, let's try to prevent these diseases as long as possible.

Lewis Howes 1:26:24 How old was your mom when she passed?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:26:26 Uh, so she was my age when she was diagnosed with lung cancer, and then she lived till 70.

Lewis Howes 1:26:32 Wow, but she could have, hypothetically, you know, if she didn't get hit by a bus or something, she could have lived a long, much longer life if she didn't have the cancer.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:26:39 Oh, absolutely. And through my teenage years I would shout at her, "Stop smoking, you're gonna die when you, when you're in hospital. I'm not gonna come visit you."

Lewis Howes 1:26:47 Oh my gosh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:26:48 You're only given one life. 'Cause I, I'm pro-life. Everything about me is we are so lucky to be alive.

Lewis Howes 1:26:54 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:26:54 You know, one in a trillion sperm from your parent, from your dad, and it's you. What's the chance?

Lewis Howes 1:27:00 It's a gift.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:00 It is. Don't throw it away. And she was the opposite. She was like, uh, you know, drinking and smoking and, "I've lived a good life. Don't, don't bother me." And she paid the consequence.

Lewis Howes 1:27:09 Oh my gosh. Not only did she pay it, but you and your family had to, like, go through it also.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:16 Yeah. Well, you know, I did go and visit her in hospital. When your mom's sick, you know, everything-

Lewis Howes 1:27:20 Yeah, of course

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:20 ... is out the window.

Lewis Howes 1:27:20 Of course.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:21 Uh, but my father's the opposite. He's taken good care of himself.

Lewis Howes 1:27:24 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:25 And, uh, you know, now he's 80, uh, perfect health. N- no aches, no pains. Running around the world like a 25-year-old.

Lewis Howes 1:27:32 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:33 So that, that's the dichotomy there. If you do the right things, it's a very different ending.

Lewis Howes 1:27:38 Now, were you already into anti-aging when she was diagnosed? Or was it be- way before that? Was it shortly after that? Or when-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:47 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:27:47 ... when did you become kind of obsessed with being the master of anti-aging?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:52 Well, I've, I've got an obsessive personality.

Lewis Howes 1:27:54 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:54 Uh, I think anyone who's, uh-

Lewis Howes 1:27:57 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:27:57 ... you know, be- become at the top of their profession-

Lewis Howes 1:28:00 Of course

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:00 ... has to be obsessed with something. They're not normal people.

Lewis Howes 1:28:02 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:02 They're not normal. Um, at age four I became obsessed with it actually.

Lewis Howes 1:28:06 Four?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:07 Yeah, at four.

Lewis Howes 1:28:08 My, my first memory is four. I don't even know [laughs] how-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:10 Well, this is my first memory.

Lewis Howes 1:28:12 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:12 It is.

Lewis Howes 1:28:12 What was it? Seeing your mom smoke and being like, "I don't wanna do that"?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:15 Well, there was that. Yeah, it, you know, in the s- in the '70s, early '70s when I was a kid, uh, the smoke was everywhere. I couldn't stand it. But that, that was not really my motivation. It was that my grandmother, who helped raise me-

Lewis Howes 1:28:26 Oh

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:26 ... told me, "Everybody's gonna die, and so are you, and so is your cat." And my grandmother was brutal. She didn't lie. She s- told it as it was. But she said, "Now that I've told you that..." You know, here am I, crying, "My cat's gonna die."

Lewis Howes 1:28:41 [laughs] Santa Claus isn't real.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:43 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:28:43 My cat's gonna die.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:44 It was my cat that was the problem at the time.

Lewis Howes 1:28:45 Oh my God, you loved this cat.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:47 Yeah, 'cause it, she said, "Oh, your cat's gonna die before you're 20," or whatever.

Lewis Howes 1:28:51 [laughs] Oh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:52 But that, she said, "Now that you've realized that-

Lewis Howes 1:28:54 Oh my gosh

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:54 ... here's the lesson. Make the most of life."

Lewis Howes 1:28:57 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:28:57 "Do your best to make humanity the best it can be-

Lewis Howes 1:29:01 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:01 ... and don't waste a second." And that, that was it for me. Okay, I'm gonna go for it.

Lewis Howes 1:29:07 But when did you actually start researching, like-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:09 Yeah

Lewis Howes 1:29:09 ... okay, now maybe you had this positive mindset, "I'm gonna make the most of every moment. I'm gonna enjoy my life. I'm gonna learn quickly and not be stuck in these, these painful moments." What was it, like, middle school or high school where you're like, "Oh, mitochondria and telomeres," and you know?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:25 So I was a pretty average kid. Um, I liked to have a lot of fun, and I didn't-

Lewis Howes 1:29:28 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:29 ... didn't really take care of myself. Um, actually, you'd be surprised, I was, I was pretty chubby as a kid.

Lewis Howes 1:29:33 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:34 Yeah. But I got to college, and two things happened. One was-

Lewis Howes 1:29:37 And where were you in sch-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:38 ... I decided-

Lewis Howes 1:29:38 Where were you in school?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:39 I was in Sydney.

Lewis Howes 1:29:40 In Sydney, okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:40 So I went to, there, there aren't that many choices in Sydney.

Lewis Howes 1:29:43 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:43 I went to, uh, called, it's called the University of New South Wales, like the MIT-

Lewis Howes 1:29:47 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:47 ... of, uh, of Boston. So I was there, and I wanted to get a degree in g- what we used to call genetic engineering.

Lewis Howes 1:29:55 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:29:55 And I thought, "That's a cool thing. Everyone's going into computing. I'll do something..." 'Cause I've got also the personality that I don't like to be told what to do-

Lewis Howes 1:30:02 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:02 ... and I like to be different, so.

Lewis Howes 1:30:03 Be unique, one of a kind. Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:05 Yeah. I, I do.

Lewis Howes 1:30:06 Me too.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:07 So, uh, so I-

Lewis Howes 1:30:08 I was the big dumb jock who never drank a sip of alcohol in college, who learned salsa dancing and guitar, who was in choir, in the musical. Like, I was-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:17 [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:30:17 Whatever you thought I was gonna be, I was like, "I'm gonna do the opposite." So we have that in common.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:22 Yeah, probably your parents weren't there to tell you-

Lewis Howes 1:30:23 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:24 ... the opposite of what they wanted you to do.

Lewis Howes 1:30:25 Yeah [laughs] , exactly.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:26 Uh, so I went, I went to college, and I realized two things. One was if I'm, uh, chubby I'm not gonna get a girlfriend.

Lewis Howes 1:30:33 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:34 So I started working out.

Lewis Howes 1:30:34 Survival.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:35 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:30:35 Survival mode. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:37 I ate carrots for a month and shed, um, 15 kilos, whatever that is in pounds.

Lewis Howes 1:30:42 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:42 Uh, got a, a best body I would've dreamed of. It, it's long gone. That was one thing. So I became healthy.

Lewis Howes 1:30:49 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:50 And I've, I've been this weight ever since-

Lewis Howes 1:30:51 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:51 ... basically, haven't changed. It, it takes effort. Um-

Lewis Howes 1:30:54 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:30:54 ... and the second thing I realized was that I think I could make a difference in the world- And I was playing cards with friends. We did a, did a lot of drinking. They did a lot of smoking. Um, typical college life.

Lewis Howes 1:31:08 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:31:09 And there was a moment where somebody, um, was talking about, um, old age and laughing at old age and making fun of old people, w- which we, we do sometimes as kids.

Lewis Howes 1:31:20 Yeah, we're young. Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:31:21 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:31:21 Look how old they are.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:31:22 And, and I had an epiphany. I think I was 18 years old and I said, "Do you realize everybody... Hold it. No cards. Shut the fuck up. I've got a, I've got something to tell you. I've just realized that we are probably the last generation of humans to live a normal lifespan, 'cause there's gonna be a breakthrough and we're gonna miss out by one generation."

Lewis Howes 1:31:42 Oh my God.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:31:43 Out of the how many hundred thousand generations leading up to us of primates, we're it. We're the last ones. We're pathetic.

Lewis Howes 1:31:49 We're gonna die at 100 or 80 or whatever.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:31:51 Right. And our kids are gonna live to 130, who knows what.

Lewis Howes 1:31:55 And their kids are gonna be 160.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:31:56 Yeah. So then I thought, "Hey, that's what I wanna do. I wanna make that future be a re- reality in my lifetime."

Lewis Howes 1:32:03 Wow. Isn't it sad if just, give, give us another 50 years to be born?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:32:07 [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:32:08 How much farther you could extend life, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:32:11 Yeah. I didn't realize how quickly the, the science would go. I thought that I'd probably be lucky to see a little bit of change in my lifetime.

Lewis Howes 1:32:18 Like 5, 10, 20 years, maybe more.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:32:21 Well, we already got 14 just on what we talked about.

Lewis Howes 1:32:23 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:32:23 But the kind of breakthroughs that we've made now, um... You know, I get criticized for looking too far into the future 'cause I'm supposed to be a Harvard scientist, but I think another 5, 10 years is easy. Look at my dad. He's doing all the right things. Also taking some molecules that we've worked on in my lab.

Lewis Howes 1:32:41 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:32:41 They're not doing any harm. I hope that he makes it past 100. It's, uh, it's not a clinical trial clearly-

Lewis Howes 1:32:48 Right. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:32:48 ... with one subject. Um, but, but he's a role model for what life can be and should be like.

Lewis Howes 1:32:54 Right. So now is this molecule the same molecule that you worked on 10 years ago that got, uh, a lot of credibility and then was debunked, I guess, by some researchers and then now in the last week has come back to be verified as true?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:10 Uh, one of them, yeah. So resveratrol is the red wine molecule. It's one of these polyphenols that plants make when they're stressed out-

Lewis Howes 1:33:17 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:18 ... and that we found, uh, we at least we thought that when you take this molecule over many decades, uh, or as a supplement, you'll be protected against a whole variety of diseases including obesity.

Lewis Howes 1:33:30 Hmm. Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:31 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:33:31 Is that why everyone says like drink a glass of wine every night or something, it's gonna make you live longer?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:36 Well, that, that's basically because of me, but-

Lewis Howes 1:33:38 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:39 ... there, there, there's other research of course.

Lewis Howes 1:33:40 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:40 Other people have studied red wine and found that people who drink red wine tend to live longer.

Lewis Howes 1:33:45 Live longer. Gotcha.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:46 You know?

Lewis Howes 1:33:46 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:46 Dan Buettner will tell you all about the blue zones.

Lewis Howes 1:33:48 Right. So this molecule, is it something you discovered 10 years ago or you started researching 10 years ago?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:54 Well, so remember these longevity genes-

Lewis Howes 1:33:55 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:33:55 ... they make proteins that, that tell the cell how to survive, and we can turn on the production of these proteins by being hungry and exercising and being out of breath.

Lewis Howes 1:34:06 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:07 Um, but we wanted to do it artificially because if-

Lewis Howes 1:34:09 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:09 ... if you're an older person in a wheelchair or you're like my mom and she-

Lewis Howes 1:34:14 You're not doing HIIT workouts at 90

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:15 ... yeah, you need a drug. You can't just expect them to run marathons or go hungry. So we, we wanted to figure out how does fasting, how does exercise work?

Lewis Howes 1:34:24 Hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:24 That's another important-

Lewis Howes 1:34:26 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:26 ... question, couple of questions. And we found that this, this sirtuin number one, there are seven, number one was very important. In mice if we turned it on, we can make mice with extra genes by the way in the lab.

Lewis Howes 1:34:37 You can make them?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:39 We, we make mice.

Lewis Howes 1:34:39 From scratch?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:40 Well, from stem cells.

Lewis Howes 1:34:42 From a cell you can turn it into a moving mouse-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:45 Yeah, that's easy

Lewis Howes 1:34:46 ... that bakes and breathes and has a heartbeat.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:47 Come to my lab. You can make a mouse.

Lewis Howes 1:34:48 What? [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:49 We can make them glow green if we want. It's not that hard.

Lewis Howes 1:34:52 You can take cells and they just what? Kind of like form together and turn into a mouse?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:56 Well, we need another mouse to gestate it, but it's-

Lewis Howes 1:34:58 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 1:34:58 ... yeah, it's pretty, pretty easy these days.

Lewis Howes 1:35:00 [laughs] Okay. This is crazy.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:03 You, you can take-

Lewis Howes 1:35:03 I'm coming. I wanna check it out

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:04 ... you can take a skin cell of a mouse, turn it into a stem cell, make a sperm, make an egg, fertilize itself, and make a mouse out of it.

Lewis Howes 1:35:11 What? [laughs] This is nuts.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:13 Anything's possible these days.

Lewis Howes 1:35:14 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:14 So we, we, we engineer the mouse to have more of this sirtuin one gene.

Lewis Howes 1:35:19 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:19 And it was protected against a whole variety of diseases.

Lewis Howes 1:35:22 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:22 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:35:22 Were you, were you injecting with disease to like test that or just natural environment diseases?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:28 Uh, so we, we have a lab where we-

Lewis Howes 1:35:30 It's like other mice have the disease

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:31 ... we let them age.

Lewis Howes 1:35:32 [laughs] Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:34 And that's the main thing. We have a lot of old mice and we test them if they're frail.

Lewis Howes 1:35:38 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:38 Uh, we look at their strength, put them on treadmills, test their memory.

Lewis Howes 1:35:42 [laughs] This is crazy.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:43 Uh, we've got this whole floor in the building-

Lewis Howes 1:35:46 Of mice

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:46 ... of mouse testing-

Lewis Howes 1:35:48 Shut up

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:49 ... machines.

Lewis Howes 1:35:49 How many mice are in the lab?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:52 Um-

Lewis Howes 1:35:52 Thousands?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:52 Well, I, I don't want-

Lewis Howes 1:35:54 You don't wanna tell me

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:54 ... um, anyone to be upset 'cause we do have a large number of mice.

Lewis Howes 1:35:57 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:35:58 But we- our goal is to make them healthy-

Lewis Howes 1:36:00 Gotcha

Dr. David Sinclair 1:36:00 ... unlike other, a lot of other labs.

Lewis Howes 1:36:01 You're not trying to kill them like most labs.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:36:03 No, no, no.

Lewis Howes 1:36:03 You're trying to say, "How can we keep them as healthy and, and live longer?"

Dr. David Sinclair 1:36:05 And our mice live, our mice live longer. So that, we're one of the few labs-

Lewis Howes 1:36:08 Right. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:36:08 ... where we do that. Uh, but yeah, so we, we, this, this sirtuin one gene, it makes a protein that helps the cell. So we found this red wine molecule just coincidentally turns it on. So if you put the ends, we can put in the little test tube, where these little test tubes, and we put in the, the protein, and we can test whether it's more active or not by how much it glows or fluoresces.

Lewis Howes 1:36:30 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:36:30 And then we tested thousands of molecules, and the one that worked the best was this one from red wine. It, it made it glow really brightly-

Lewis Howes 1:36:38 Hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 1:36:38 ... fluoresce. And, uh, that was the beginning of this story where we found a molecule from red wine that turned on our body's defensive enzyme.

Lewis Howes 1:36:46 Huh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:36:47 And that, that was great. We, we put it onto yeast cells. They lived longer. I did that experiment in my dining room actually. You can make yeast cells live longer-

Lewis Howes 1:36:55 Oh my gosh

Dr. David Sinclair 1:36:56 ... imagine that.

Lewis Howes 1:36:56 Crazy.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:36:57 Uh, we fed it to mice and they were much healthier. They were resistant to obesity and diabetes and cardiovascular problems.

Lewis Howes 1:37:05 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:05 It basically made mice immune to a high-fat Western diet.

Lewis Howes 1:37:08 Wow. They could eat whatever and it wouldn't affect them

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:11 And they lived just as long-

Lewis Howes 1:37:12 They just burn it

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:12 ... as those that w- were-

Lewis Howes 1:37:13 They burn the fat quicker.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:15 Well, they were actually still fat. That was the crazy thing.

Lewis Howes 1:37:17 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:17 But fat didn't, didn't hurt them.

Lewis Howes 1:37:19 Oh, okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:19 They were immune to the effects of being fat.

Lewis Howes 1:37:21 Wow. [laughs] That's amazing.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:23 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:37:23 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:23 But, but, but then, uh, and this is the o- one that my father started taking about a decade ago, same as me. Um, but he, he was what ha- happened in... That was 2003 to 2006. Things were great. We started making better molecules. We made thousands of them.

Lewis Howes 1:37:39 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:39 They went into human clinical trials. Put it on the skin of patients with psoriasis. They were- Actually it was a pill, and their psoriasis got better.

Lewis Howes 1:37:48 No way.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:49 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:37:50 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:50 We- we're on track to having a medicine for aging and diseases that are related to aging and inflammation.

Lewis Howes 1:37:56 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:56 But then everything fell apart.

Lewis Howes 1:37:59 Why?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:37:59 So in 2010, a couple of companies published scientific papers that said it's all wrong, that this molecule, resveratrol, does not activate this enzyme. This fluorescence that we're looking at in this test tube was just an artifact. It was fluorescing for other reasons.

Lewis Howes 1:38:15 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:38:15 It wasn't real. And, uh, yeah, my world fell apart. The company stopped working on it. And it was hell.

Lewis Howes 1:38:23 You stopped working on it?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:38:25 Well, we didn't. Well, for about two weeks I stayed in bed. It was horrific. I went into mild depression. My lab didn't know what to do. Uh, I had friends calling me, well, ex-friends, who called me and said, "You know, I'm really sorry," and didn't hear from them again.

Lewis Howes 1:38:39 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:38:39 It was a tough time. And when you're, you know, and this is what I built my career on. I was known in the world for this, and then it went away.

Lewis Howes 1:38:47 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:38:48 And if you're a scientist and you lose your reputation-

Lewis Howes 1:38:50 You're done

Dr. David Sinclair 1:38:51 ... you're screwed because you're relying on grants and your colleagues' opinion of you to give you the money, to give you those grants.

Lewis Howes 1:38:57 Their endorsements, their recommendations, things like that.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:39:00 Right, right. So-

Lewis Howes 1:39:01 So if no one's recommending you anymore, no one's giving you money.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:39:04 Yeah. Grants dried up. Uh, I had 20 people, vibrant lab, world leading science, top of the world, gonna make this medicine. Bam, um, most people left.

Lewis Howes 1:39:15 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:39:15 No money. Four people, tiny little lab. Uh, even people in my lab said, "I'm out of here. This is crazy. You're full of it." And there was one student who I had, his name's Basil Hubbard, and he said, "You know what? There's something to this."

Lewis Howes 1:39:30 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:39:30 "I'm not gonna give up."

Lewis Howes 1:39:31 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:39:32 And, uh, but the other people in the lab, one guy in particular, was really mean. He just said, "You're, you're working on this BS stuff-

Lewis Howes 1:39:39 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 1:39:39 ... this resveratrol stuff." But he figured it out. It took him three years to figure out that this-

Lewis Howes 1:39:45 The intern? The one-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:39:46 Uh, the-

Lewis Howes 1:39:46 ... person working-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:39:46 He was a PhD student

Lewis Howes 1:39:48 Okay, gotcha

Dr. David Sinclair 1:39:48 ... Basil. And, uh, just through grit and, uh, stubbornness and, and genius, he figured out that it, it was real. And we published in 2013, three years later, that there was good evidence that we were not wrong. So okay, take a deep breath. I'm swimming. I'm not drowning anymore.

Lewis Howes 1:40:08 This is three years of, like, depression or just-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:11 It was hard

Lewis Howes 1:40:11 ... figuring out, how am I gonna get to my life, my career, everything back on track?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:15 Right, right. I, I was so mad with the world.

Lewis Howes 1:40:18 I'm sure.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:19 I said, "Screw everyone."

Lewis Howes 1:40:20 You know, I can't trust anyone anymore.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:22 Well, it was that, because I'd devoted my whole life to this. I'd barely taken a weekend off in my life.

Lewis Howes 1:40:28 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:28 And, uh, to have that happen, it was like, oh, you know. I, I, I could have retired at that point.

Lewis Howes 1:40:33 How did you recover?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:35 Uh, well, so the problem was that I didn't want to die not knowing the answer.

Lewis Howes 1:40:42 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:43 Needed to figure this out.

Lewis Howes 1:40:44 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:45 And knowing that I was wrong was still better than not knowing at all.

Lewis Howes 1:40:50 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:50 So we tried to figure it out.

Lewis Howes 1:40:52 'Cause it's better to be like, "Okay, I'm actually wrong. Here's the proof. Here's the science." You can live with that, is what you're saying.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:40:57 Right.

Lewis Howes 1:40:58 Knowing the truth. And then, okay, how do we solve it? And then what's the new f- solution, right? Where, where do I go next?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:41:06 Yeah. And we actually had evidence that we weren't, we weren't wrong.

Lewis Howes 1:41:09 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:41:10 So that's why-

Lewis Howes 1:41:11 It's frustrating

Dr. David Sinclair 1:41:11 ... I got out of bed, went back to the lab-

Lewis Howes 1:41:14 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 1:41:14 ... and, uh, said, "Let's figure this out. Let's do some key tests that'll tell us either way if we're right or we're wrong."

Lewis Howes 1:41:22 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:41:22 And, uh, it turns out, uh, we weren't wrong. And there was this study you referred to that came out a week ago that said, "You know what? That mechanism that you discovered actually is really important for being activated when you're fasting, when you're hungry."

Lewis Howes 1:41:40 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:41:40 What happens is when you, when you deplete fat, let's say you're hungry. You haven't eaten breakfast. You'll melt away some of the fat, and you'll generate what are called free fatty acids. And some of them we can get from plants, from olive oil, monounsaturated fatty acids, the good ones. A lab discovered that the way resveratrol works is actually just mimicking those unsaturated fatty acids that-

Lewis Howes 1:42:06 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 1:42:06 ... we already know are good for you. And Dan Buettner in the blue zones would tell you, from the blue zones, would tell you that these are what leads to long life.

Lewis Howes 1:42:13 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:42:14 And so it turns out resveratrol, if this is true, is basically mimicking gobs of olive oil, but without all the calories.

Lewis Howes 1:42:23 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:42:24 So my father and I, you know, maybe we've been doing the right thing.

Lewis Howes 1:42:27 So he's been doing, your father's been doing this for 10 years.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:42:29 Right.

Lewis Howes 1:42:30 Even though people try to say, "This isn't true. This is stupid. It's not actually doing anything." But he's been taking it consistently.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:42:38 Right. Well, he's a scientist too.

Lewis Howes 1:42:39 Ah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:42:39 Everyone in my family's a scientist-

Lewis Howes 1:42:40 Gotcha

Dr. David Sinclair 1:42:40 ... including my wife. And people say, "Oh, are you testing this on your father?" No. He's a scientist. He can read this stuff for himself, and he's the one that made the decision, that he believed in it.

Lewis Howes 1:42:51 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:42:51 And, uh, yeah, I'm glad that he did because so far so good.

Lewis Howes 1:42:54 Wow. Okay, so that just happened last week. So 10 years you've been waiting for this to be, like, proven again.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:43:01 Right. And we've always predicted, I've always said resveratrol isn't the big, big story. The big story is, A, can we make a medicine-

Lewis Howes 1:43:09 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:43:09 ... which we're still trying. But, B- What, we call it the endogenous activator. What's in our own bodies that resveratrol is mimicking?

Lewis Howes 1:43:18 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:43:18 And it's these monounsaturated fatty acids that come from when we're hungry or if we eat these healthy plants.

Lewis Howes 1:43:24 Wow, okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:43:26 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:43:26 That's pretty exciting.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:43:27 It's, it's damn exciting, but it, it's not as exciting as I thought it would be 'cause, uh, you know, in life, it's always an anticlimax, right? You think, "I can't wait until this in my life happens," and then it happens. You think, "Yeah, but tomorrow I've got something else to- [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:43:40 I know

Dr. David Sinclair 1:43:40 ... to figure out."

Lewis Howes 1:43:41 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:43:41 So really-

Lewis Howes 1:43:42 Isn't that funny?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:43:42 ... maybe that's just my personality. Are you like that?

Lewis Howes 1:43:45 I'm very much like that. I remember, um, my whole life I wanted to be an All-American athlete. Like I dr- this is one of my first memories is, like watching a football game on TV with my dad and him, like, continuing talking about these few guys on the Ohio State football team who are All-Americans. And, you know, you wanna, you want your dad's approval, and he's talking about a few guys on the team, and I'm like, "I wanna be an All-American athlete. You know, if these are the best of the best, that's what I wanna be." And all I did was obsess about being the best athlete I could be and becoming an All-American. And I remember I was in the, um, decathlon national championships in 2005, and there's 16 athletes that go to the national championships for each event, but the top eight are All-Americans, so you gotta be in the top eight to qualify as an All-American. And the decathlon's a two-day event. First day I have a pretty good day. Second day, um, I struggle a little bit, and it gets down to the last event, which is the 1500. And my coach was like, "Okay, you need to beat these two people, and if you get in front of them, you're gonna make it." And I literally cross the line with, like, one other guy next to me that I needed to beat. It was, like, neck and neck, and I didn't know who, who went in front of the other. And so I'm, I'm waiting for, like, 30 minutes for the final results, and they make the announcements of the final eight, and I got eighth place. And I remember feeling like this, so much excitement. I'm on the podium. I'm, like, holding the trophy. I'm like, "I did it. My childhood dream came true." And then probably 20 minutes later, I was angry. I was negative. We're all having dinner celebrating, and I'm like, "I don't wanna be around anyone." And I didn't know why that was.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:45:31 Mm.

Lewis Howes 1:45:31 But that's like with every accomplishment I had in my teens and 20s. I kinda had that same nature where I was just like, "Well, this is not good enough. I need to go after the, become a professional athlete. I need to do it twice. I need to..." I don't know why that is.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:45:44 Well, that's why you and I are sitting here, I think.

Lewis Howes 1:45:46 [laughs] Exactly.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:45:46 Because we, we never rest.

Lewis Howes 1:45:47 Exactly, yeah. So anyways, but we have a lot in common. I'm like a scientist. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:45:53 I'm, I'm gonna train you.

Lewis Howes 1:45:55 Yeah, exactly.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:45:55 You're gonna come.

Lewis Howes 1:45:56 We're gonna build a rat from scratch.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:45:57 [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:45:58 It'll be amazing. Um, okay, so, so this paper came out or this finding came out a week ago. You had a nice moment, but then you were like, "Well, onto the next."

Dr. David Sinclair 1:46:09 Right. Right. Um, I don't know why. I, I, I think it's because I, I was hangry at the time-

Lewis Howes 1:46:15 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:46:15 ... on a plane drinking tea, but-

Lewis Howes 1:46:17 When you read it or when you just found it or ...

Dr. David Sinclair 1:46:19 Well, actually, so the, the guy that trained me, I ... So I went to MIT after Australia.

Lewis Howes 1:46:24 Uh-huh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:46:24 And Lenny Guarente, he taught me how to be a, a world-class scientist, and he and I have been good friends, but frenemies kind of-

Lewis Howes 1:46:34 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:46:34 ... butting heads scientifically, but w- we're very close.

Lewis Howes 1:46:36 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:46:37 Anyway, like all mentors, I look up to him. His opinion of me matters.

Lewis Howes 1:46:42 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:46:42 And it was he who wrote an email to me last week, and the subject line was, "Wow!" And in there was this paper saying-

Lewis Howes 1:46:53 "You were right"

Dr. David Sinclair 1:46:54 ... "Dan, you were right." Yeah. But n- he didn't write anything. That was it. "Wow!" Those three letters.

Lewis Howes 1:46:58 But then the paper. This is-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:46:59 And the paper. That's it.

Lewis Howes 1:47:00 And you knew what it meant, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:01 That was it, yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:47:02 Was he on your side after the whole paper came out seven years ago or eight years ago, I guess?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:06 Yeah, I gotta give him credit. He never gave up on me.

Lewis Howes 1:47:08 He stayed with you.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:09 Yeah, but he's been through hell, too. This field-

Lewis Howes 1:47:11 Isn't that-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:12 ... is really tough

Lewis Howes 1:47:12 ... isn't that interesting? The people that, who've gone through the most crap, ups and downs, they're usually the ones that stick with you when you've got some type of public shaming.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:20 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 1:47:21 I noticed that as well. That's crazy. So that's good. So you had a few people that kinda stuck with you and said, "Hey, listen, like this is gonna hurt for a few years, but eventually you're gonna do something else, and then people are gonna forget or they're gonna move on, and ..."

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:34 Yeah. Well, he's not that touchy feely, but, uh-

Lewis Howes 1:47:36 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:37 He, he was very supportive and, uh, you know, we're, we're both the two guys that drove this field of sirtuins, these longevity genes.

Lewis Howes 1:47:45 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:45 So we're comrades.

Lewis Howes 1:47:46 Gotcha. You're f- frenemies, but you're like, "We need each other to push it forward and to-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:50 Right

Lewis Howes 1:47:50 ... validate our, our, our research."

Dr. David Sinclair 1:47:53 And, right. Your enemy is, is, uh, you know, my enemy.

Lewis Howes 1:47:56 Right. Okay. Is it, in your opinion, more important to extend life or reverse aging or live better with the years that we currently have?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:48:05 Huh. Well, yeah, obviously you, you wanna do both, and actually it turns out if you, if you live better during the years that, quote-unquote, "you have," uh, you will live longer. If you're making the most of life, you're enjoying your life, you're have a career that you, you love, getting out in the outdoors, you know, that will lead to longer life. We know that. So a good life actually leads to a longer life.

Lewis Howes 1:48:29 What's your, what's your thoughts on, uh, the difference between humans and artificial beings or some other species that, uh, the more we alter our bodies in non-natural ways, like what's the difference between natural humans and kind of altered bodies with artificial beings?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:48:48 Yeah. Well, we're, we're already there. I mean, what about our surroundings right now is natural? Uh, maybe, ev- even the air is different thanks to humans. So, you know, we're, we're ... I'm wearing a computer on my wrist, right?

Lewis Howes 1:49:03 Me too.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:49:04 I'm a cyborg.

Lewis Howes 1:49:05 Yeah. We're, we're, we have a cellphone that has access to all the information in the world at, at our fingertips. It's almo-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:49:11 Right

Lewis Howes 1:49:11 ... it's probably eventually gonna be embedded in our brain in some way in hundreds of years.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:49:16 Sure. For sure. That's coming. Uh, but even things that we don't think about, the vaccines that hopefully we'll have soon, that's artificial. That's partly biologically cyborg. But these are early steps. You know, eventually our, uh, grandkids will have things integrated more into their bodies. I don't see anything wrong with that. It's just an extension of what we've been doing for the last probably few hundred thousand years as, as humans.

Lewis Howes 1:49:41 Yeah. You mentioned vaccines. I did... I had a doctor on a few months ago, and I asked him, "What's a misconception about the, the medical world that you feel like people have that they, that they should believe in more?" And he said, "It's really sad when people don't..." I'm paraphrasing this, but he said something like, "It's really sad when people don't believe in vaccines because, especially with kids, because they don't have the choice, and a lot of kids get sick and die without... And they could just take a vaccine that wa- that could save their life." And I got a lot of heat for even allowing that to be said on my show from parents and mothers who are completely against vaccines because of the side effects that they believe it had or whether it's true or not, I don't know, 'cause I'm not the, the researcher. Um, what are your thoughts on vaccines in general? I mean, should we be taking vaccines? Is this... You know, there's, there's a lot of angry people that say, "Don't listen to the vaccine people," but what is science saying?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:50:46 You want some more hate mail?

Lewis Howes 1:50:47 I don't know if I want more hate mail. I'm always trying to find the truth. I'm trying to find answers-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:50:52 Okay

Lewis Howes 1:50:52 ... and I, I don't want people to hate on you or me [laughs] or anything. I'm just like, "Okay, what's the information?" And I always want everyone to do their own research and figure out what works for them and make their own choices, but I'm just curious based on your research.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:51:06 Well, my, my research is really just reading the scientific literature when it comes to vaccines. There have been a number of scientific papers that have been retracted that show that vaccines were, for example, causing autism. So in the scientific literature, you know, this isn't me saying it, this is published work, uh, in journals, and other scientists have done other work and looked at that work and rep- tried to repeat it, and it's come to the point within the scientific community that some of the original work that gave rise to these fears was unfounded, uh, and was not scientifically valid.

Lewis Howes 1:51:46 So in normal layman's terms, there was some research that said vaccines are bad or can cause side effects like autism. There was research that said that, and now what I'm hearing you say is there's other research out there that says that was not true.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:51:59 Right. And when a paper turns out not to be correct, the journal or the author or both decide to retract the paper so it's no longer in the literature.

Lewis Howes 1:52:08 Oh.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:52:09 And that has happened to those original papers. Now-

Lewis Howes 1:52:12 But you, you said scientists are always trying to prove themselves wrong every couple of years, so all the s- all the science could be wrong still, we just don't know. But what we've found so far is that it's doesn't cause autism based on these scientific studies.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:52:29 Well, yeah, I think if you, if you ask 1,000 scientists, 998 roughly would say what I'm saying-

Lewis Howes 1:52:36 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 1:52:36 ... which is based on scientific literature. Now, please don't... You know, everyone listening, don't attack me. I'm not-

Lewis Howes 1:52:42 Right. You're not saying this. [laughs] You're saying-

Dr. David Sinclair 1:52:44 I'm not a doctor, but I can read scientific papers. Uh, and, uh, that's just... I'm stating a fact.

Lewis Howes 1:52:49 Makes sense. I'm always trying to find the answers and the truth, and I feel like it's always evolving and, uh, you know, we're always trying to learn more stuff. I'm, I'm curious, with all this artificialness in us right now, it sounds like none of us are real, like, whole, complete human beings anymore. If you take a vaccine, if you're wearing a, a, a digital watch, you know, using cell phones, the air is different, the environment is different, it's almost like there's not a real human being anymore. What makes a human human? And as medicine improves, how will we know if we're no longer human?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:53:25 Uh, well, I, I found out last night, uh, I took one of those little tests online and, uh, it said I'm not a robot, which was good news, right? [laughs]

Lewis Howes 1:53:34 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:53:35 Didn't... It came as a surprise. Um-

Lewis Howes 1:53:37 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 1:53:38 Beyond those little robot, I'm not a robot tests, we, we'll, we'll always be human, um, unless it's life synthesized from scratch or it's, it's some other life form or a com- computer intelligence. I don't think we'll lose our humanity. You know, augmenting the brain, I think, is still we're gonna retain our humanity. So I'm, I'm not so worried about that. I think more interesting is the debate about will artificial intelligence ever be close enough to be called human thought? And I, I think one day we may actually get there.

Lewis Howes 1:54:15 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:54:17 Yeah, as soon as computers, uh, develop their own type of consciousness, um, and we model it based on the way we think, it's quite possible that-

Lewis Howes 1:54:25 You think it's possible that computers could have human thought?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:54:29 Yeah, sure.

Lewis Howes 1:54:30 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:54:30 They, they could. Um, it's... It, it probably is gonna be different than human because they... We're not mimicking the human brain currently.

Lewis Howes 1:54:39 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:54:39 But adv- you know, let's say in 1,000 years, there are some researchers even now that are modeling the human brain in a way that's different than your typical neural net that, say, Google is working on. The idea is to mimic nerve cells rather than mimic just computer connections.

Lewis Howes 1:54:58 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 1:54:58 And these nerve cells, as I mentioned, are very complex. They, they have inner workings, and they're actually analog devices, meaning they're not just ones and zeros, they have these waves that pass through, chemical waves that pass through. By mimicking an actual human neuron and then putting, uh, you know, he's got millions of them, he can actually mimic what happens in thought and in, in a, in a mouse brain, and now he's b- building a human brain. So that's a new approach, and I, I think it's

Lewis Howes 1:55:26 Crazy

Dr. David Sinclair 1:55:26 ... going to work well

Lewis Howes 1:55:28 Two months ago, maybe three months ago, I decided to give myself an experiment, and I wasn't happy with the results I was getting with my health. I was training hard, I was eating well, I, I was intermittent fasting for 16 hours a day, I was sleeping well, I was taking supplements. Like, I was trying a lot of stuff. And I wanted to try to, like, lose some extra weight, but also just kind of feel like there's some little inflammation here from past injuries in sports. I was like, "Ah, I just wanna get rid of it."

Dr. David Sinclair 1:55:58 Mm-hmm.

Lewis Howes 1:55:59 And I said, "I've never tried a, you know, multiple day fast." And I remember you mentioning about just, hey, eating less will help you live longer and help you get less disease, which will help you live longer. And I said, "Okay, I'm gonna try a..." I did a four days no food, essentially. Four days no food. Water. I had a little bit of juice on some days and I had black coffee, and I'd just drink a lot of water. It wasn't until a week after the four-day fast when I started to feel the effects. Sure, I, like, lost some weight 'cause I wasn't eating for four days, and I felt, like, healthier in general. I felt super focused and clear. But it wasn't until, like, a week, two weeks later when I was like, "Huh, I just feel better." I feel lighter. I felt, like, more flexible, less inflammation. What is the power of doing a one-day fast, a two, three-day fast? How often should we be doing these types of fasting? And I wanna make sure that I don't tell people go and not eat for three or four days without talking to a, a doctor or a nutritionist or something, but what is the, the benefit of not eating for a day or two days? What does that do for our body long-term?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:57:13 Well, we're, we're still learning, right? Um, we've only just finished doing... We as a field of scientists have only just finished doing a lot of animal experiments. But we're now in a, a period where we're actually finally doing these in humans. So what do we know? Uh, we know that if you fast for one day, you're gonna turn on these, these three main mechanisms that protect the cell. Um, their names, by the way, the- there's one called mTOR, which senses in- amino acids that we eat. Uh, there's one called AMPK, which it controls and registers how much energy the cell has. So if you eat sugar, you'll switch it off. If you're not eating sugar, it'll switch on. And then the ones that we work on, they're called sirtuins, and there are seven of these sirtuin proteins that protect the cell in very different ways. Um, but all, all seemingly good. The question is how much should you be doing? Well, we know from fasting for one day that you, you activate these defenses, and that's why some-

Lewis Howes 1:58:11 These three defenses, we wanna, we wanna activate these three things as much as possible or once in a while?

Dr. David Sinclair 1:58:16 Good question. I, I think it's better to do it once in a while. You don't wanna always have them on. And the reason I can say that is based on animal studies. The best effects we've had, and my colleagues have had, is when you do things and let the body rest afterwards. For example, we did a study with resveratrol, this molecule from red wine, that activates one of these sirtuins that I was telling you about. We gave it every day to mice, uh, or we gave them this calorie restricted fasting diet. But it was when we actually gave them resveratrol every second day that we got the longest lived mice, uh, in combination with caloric restriction. So that's just an example of many that we're finding that it's helpful to, to pulse the body and let it, let it rest. And it, it, it does make sense that you wanna have a hunker down period where your body is fixing itself and re- removing bad stuff, but then also a repair phase. So when you s- go back to eating regularly or, uh, you're not, you know, running marathons every other day, which some people, uh, tend to do, then your body can recover and grow and heal. So yeah, long answer to your question, but I think pulsing it is the right way to go.

Lewis Howes 1:59:36 Is there a calculated approach to say, "Okay, if you're, um, 225 pounds, male, 37 years old, how many calories should I be eating a day?" Like, is there a, you know, a perfect system to this of like, "Okay, if you eat 1,000 calories a day for three days in a row, then you have 2,000 for a day, then you fast a day." Have you figured out this process yet with rats?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:00:01 No. No.

Lewis Howes 2:00:02 [laughs] Bummer.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:00:02 It's not, it's not a system like that yet. Um-

Lewis Howes 2:00:05 That could be interesting.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:00:07 Yeah. The problem that we face in the field is, uh, we were talking earlier, you and I, uh, before we went on air about funding for science. We don't have tens of millions of dollars to run these clinical trials. We're, we're always sc- scrounging for money and always worried about what's gonna happen when it runs out. Um, so we can do some experiments, but consider, uh, some of these longevity experiments in, even in rats and mice, they take about three years. Um-

Lewis Howes 2:00:35 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 2:00:36 ... and if you do it in monkeys, then y- your whole career is used up by one experiment. And so what, what we're trying to now figure out is what's the right combination of what you eat, when you eat, and what supplements to take, and that combination is hundreds of thousands, and you can't run hundreds of thousands of these experiments.

Lewis Howes 2:00:56 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:00:56 So it, it's, it's hard to find the optimum. But in general, what I would say is that if you fast for one day, you get some benefits. If you fast for three days, something interesting happens. You turn on another level of, of cell cleansing. And, uh, I'll, I'll tell you a bit about that. So there's this process called autophagy, or some people call it autophagy. It, it is what it sounds like. Auto, which is self, and phagy is eating. So you're self-eating. And what that means is that proteins that have gotten old-

Lewis Howes 2:01:27 [laughs] Crazy. You're eating yourself, you're killing it

Dr. David Sinclair 2:01:30 Well, eating the, getting rid of the bad stuff, recycling the bad proteins. As we get older and also if, if we have damaged proteins, say if we eat a lot of burnt food, we will accumulate proteins that have, uh, oxidation is one, for example. And these proteins also are very hard to get rid of. They tend to clump, uh, and-

Lewis Howes 2:01:50 They're sticky

Dr. David Sinclair 2:01:50 ... they- they're sticky. Um, and- and Alzheimer's is, is disease is a good example of that, of, uh, proteins that stick together and, and just accumulate and you can't get rid of them easily. But autophagy is this process where the cells can chew these up and recycle the amino acids in those proteins. But we, our bodies, especially as we get older, do a, a, a pretty crappy job at doing that. Um, and it leads to things like macular degeneration, neurodegeneration, and others. Now, what, what one-day fasting does is it turns on autophagy and will clear out some of the proteins. But, uh, from my reading, if you do three days of fasting, something else kicks in. It's a different type of autophagy. Uh, it's called chaperone mediated autophagy, or, um, CMA. And it was discovered by, uh, a good friend of mine in New York, Ana Maria, uh, Cuervo. And, uh, she has shown that this CMA process is really important for extending the health and the lifespan of-

Lewis Howes 2:02:50 Wow

Dr. David Sinclair 2:02:50 ... of mice. And I'm, I'm helping her a little bit with, uh, one of her companies to bring this to humans and hopefully treat diseases, uh, so for example, like macular degeneration.

Lewis Howes 2:03:01 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:03:01 But anyway, long story. Uh-

Lewis Howes 2:03:04 So three days really starts to kick in the benefits. Is there a time when fasting too long hurts the body?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:03:11 Well, sure. You need nutrition, right? Your body needs to, needs amino acids to repair itself. I, I can't stress enough that we don't want anybody to lose so much weight that it's bad for them.

Lewis Howes 2:03:21 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:03:21 There, there are a lot of especially young people who, who can overdo it.

Lewis Howes 2:03:25 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:03:26 You, you always wanna have some adipose, for fat on your body. You need it for, for lean times, and your body needs it for, you know, energy when you're sleeping, for example. But so I, I, I think that going for a week is okay. I haven't done it myself. It's too difficult, but, um-

Lewis Howes 2:03:41 What's the longest you've gone personally?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:03:43 I, I'm not that good at it. Uh, I-

Lewis Howes 2:03:45 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 2:03:45 ... I've gone for a day. That's about it.

Lewis Howes 2:03:49 I tell you what, I went, four days was tough, but it was also like once I set my mind to it and I was just like, "I'm gonna commit to this," I also wasn't that hungry. I was just like, "Okay, I can go a little farther." It was just weird 'cause I'm so used to eating every, I don't know, four or five hours. I was just like-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:04:05 [laughs]

Lewis Howes 2:04:07 ... "Is everything okay?" Like, but I felt the effects. It felt like it was getting better, like my body was healing. I felt like the pain was starting to go away, and I just felt clear and focused.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:04:18 That's a common, um, thing that people report is you'd think that you'd be distracted by hunger, but what actually happens once you do it for a longer time or you've, you've done ev- every other day eating for a while, or even in my case where I, I like to skip breakfast and have a late lunch, or maybe even go straight to dinner, your body gets used to it. You don't feel those hunger pains. If, if you drink a cup of tea or even a glass of water, it, it nu- numbs any desire.

Lewis Howes 2:04:46 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:04:47 That's when you know you're doing it right. But also what people report, uh, and I, I can tell you from my experience, it also focuses the mind and you're not distracted at all. In fact, it's, it's, it's, it's like a high that you get. Uh, and I can get a lot of work done when I, I'm, uh-

Lewis Howes 2:05:02 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:02 ... in that phase.

Lewis Howes 2:05:03 If someone already has Alzheimer's, are you able to reverse that, or is that very challenging to do?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:08 Well, right now it's impossible.

Lewis Howes 2:05:10 There's no solution for it right now.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:11 Right.

Lewis Howes 2:05:12 Once you have it, it's like just trying to do, what? Keep the brain active enough to, like-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:16 Yeah

Lewis Howes 2:05:16 ... maintain the memory and that activity as long as you can?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:20 Yes. Yes. But, but that's because the cause of the disease, which is aging, is not being addressed. The age of the brain is old. You, you don't get Alzheimer's when you're 20 and 30. There's a reason, 'cause the brain is young and youthful and can, can repair itself.

Lewis Howes 2:05:33 And so you gotta think of what are the activities that will keep my brain young longer?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:39 Right. Long enough until we can de-age your brain.

Lewis Howes 2:05:41 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:42 And then so we, we-

Lewis Howes 2:05:43 And these are the things you're talking about right here. That'll help the brain-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:45 That's it. Do, do those things

Lewis Howes 2:05:46 ... do these five things-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:48 Stay young. Yeah

Lewis Howes 2:05:48 ... and you'll hopefully prevent Alzheimer's or you'll, you'll wait longer until you have it.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:05:55 Well, yeah. I mean, that, that's, that's not even debatable. We know the people who do those things, the kind of things that I do in my life, uh, delay those diseases by a lot, um, independent of, of genetics. Now, there are some bad genes. There's one called APOE4 allele-

Lewis Howes 2:06:11 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:11 ... it's called, that predisposes to Alzheimer's. And we've put that and gene variants like that into mice, uh, and we're giving them the equivalent of Alzheimer's. And we also age their brains so that the mouse doesn't have a two-year-old brain. It's like 30, 40-year-old mouse brain. So remember, we can drive aging forwards. But we can also take away aging, and we've de-aged those mouse brains that have gotten dementia, Alzheimer's. And guess what happens?

Lewis Howes 2:06:36 What?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:36 They can learn again.

Lewis Howes 2:06:37 No way.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:38 Really. Yeah, that's in the lab right now. We haven't published it, so I don't wanna speak myself-

Lewis Howes 2:06:42 It's not peer reviewed yet. Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:43 It's not peer reviewed. Um, but I can tell you-

Lewis Howes 2:06:45 But you're seeing-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:45 ... what's happening.

Lewis Howes 2:06:46 That's pretty cool.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:47 And we can also do this in the dish. We grow little brains, uh, from human cells.

Lewis Howes 2:06:50 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:51 I could, I could make a mini Lewis Howes brain-

Lewis Howes 2:06:53 Come on

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:53 ... in a lab.

Lewis Howes 2:06:54 You can make a little brain?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:55 I can make brains.

Lewis Howes 2:06:56 From what? Just a-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:57 From s-

Lewis Howes 2:06:57 ... some blood?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:06:57 I take some skin back to the lab.

Lewis Howes 2:06:59 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:00 I could... What I would do is dedifferentiate, which means put them back to a stem cell state. So make them age zero instead of age, you know, 85% less, go to 100% less. Now, that cell will make millions of copies of itself. We'll have dishes of your cells. And then by applying the right genes and chemicals, I can make anything from those.

Lewis Howes 2:07:21 What? You can make a-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:22 Well, not a car.

Lewis Howes 2:07:22 You can make a brain.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:22 But biologically, I can-

Lewis Howes 2:07:23 You can make a brain.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:24 We do this every month in my lab.

Lewis Howes 2:07:26 So you can see an actual... You can take my cells of my skin, put it in a, a, a test tube, and then-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:32 Yeah. It's a little plate like that.

Lewis Howes 2:07:33 A little, uh-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:34 Yeah

Lewis Howes 2:07:34 ... dish.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:35 A Petri dish. Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:07:36 Petri dish.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:36 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:07:36 And you can... How big can this brain actually get to?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:39 Pretty big. Uh, well, you know, it's, it's small-

Lewis Howes 2:07:42 A small brain

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:42 ... it's like a pea, a big pea. Uh, but they think. They've got brain waves. We can measure the electrical activity.

Lewis Howes 2:07:47 They think?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:48 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:07:48 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:48 I think they might even dream at night. I'm not sure about that.

Lewis Howes 2:07:50 [laughs] Oh.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:50 But they definitely have brain waves.

Lewis Howes 2:07:52 That's-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:52 Yeah, yeah

Lewis Howes 2:07:53 ... wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:54 It's, so it-

Lewis Howes 2:07:54 So it can't, it won't grow bigger though, huh?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:56 Well, the-

Lewis Howes 2:07:56 It's a small brain

Dr. David Sinclair 2:07:57 ... the longer you leave it, the bigger they grow. But eventually they don't have a, um, a bloodstream, so-

Lewis Howes 2:08:01 Oh, right. Gotcha

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:01 ... it's hard for the oxygen to get in. But they, they, they have parts of the brain with different cell types.

Lewis Howes 2:08:07 That is fascinating.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:08 Even immune cells in there.

Lewis Howes 2:08:09 Well, I hear they're growing organs and ears and all these other things, right? I mean, this has been happening-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:13 Yeah

Lewis Howes 2:08:13 ... for a long time now.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:14 Exactly. This is the cutting edge of biology right now. But, but here's, uh, one of the cool things is you can, you can see these things, and I've got whole plates of shaking little brains.

Lewis Howes 2:08:22 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:23 Uh, if you, if you go to my Instagram, I've got some photos of this.

Lewis Howes 2:08:26 I want to see this.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:26 Yeah, check it out.

Lewis Howes 2:08:27 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:27 They're, they're little, really cute.

Lewis Howes 2:08:28 Little brains.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:29 We call them the, the little, little gufs. Um-

Lewis Howes 2:08:31 Do you have a brain? A little bit, baby brain?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:33 I don't have my own brain.

Lewis Howes 2:08:34 Why not?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:36 Um-

Lewis Howes 2:08:36 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:37 Well, I think Harvard frowns on, on that.

Lewis Howes 2:08:39 Oh, got, got you.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:40 Um-

Lewis Howes 2:08:40 You could do like little mice brain or something, or like little-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:43 Oh, that, that we can do.

Lewis Howes 2:08:43 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:43 That's easy.

Lewis Howes 2:08:44 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:08:44 But what we do is we take, uh, skin cells from people that have gotten Alzheimer's disease or are already old, uh, versus normal people who don't get Alzheimer's typically, and we can make mini brains out of those and have a look what happens when we age them to, to, you know, 80 years, and then reverse them. And that's what we're doing now, and it's working.

Lewis Howes 2:09:04 Wow. So what will that, what will you be able to do then? Will you be able to take the stem cells and inject that into, uh, a person who has Alzheimer's? Is that like, you know, in the future what that would be like? Or how is that? To help them reverse-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:09:15 Well, so my, my philosophy in biology, it's better to fix what you've got, 'cause it's already assembled.

Lewis Howes 2:09:20 Prevent what you have. Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:09:22 Well, prevent's the most important. What we talk about today that you do in your life, that's number one.

Lewis Howes 2:09:26 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:09:26 That doesn't take a lot of technology. In fact, that just takes a bit of willpower, uh, and a change of lifestyle and habit.

Lewis Howes 2:09:31 Discipline, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:09:32 Yeah. So that's, that's easy to do. Uh, but stay alive till these technologies come online over the next 5, 10, 20 years. The, the important part of it is that we can actually, uh, fix what's in place. So in the case of the eye, when we reprogrammed the mouse's eye, we didn't add any new cells. We just woke them up from being old. We rejuvenated them, and then they could see like normal, like a young mouse again.

Lewis Howes 2:09:56 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:09:57 And that's so much easier than trying to replace the cells, you know, it, by putting stem cells in the eye. To me, that is just-

Lewis Howes 2:10:04 Right

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:04 ... technically challenging.

Lewis Howes 2:10:05 So you just wake it up.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:06 Yeah. And I think we, we forget that the body still has the information, the DNA, to be young. It's just not packaged correctly.

Lewis Howes 2:10:13 Int- it's the methanols, right? That are-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:15 The, the methyls

Lewis Howes 2:10:16 ... methyls-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:17 Methyls get messed up

Lewis Howes 2:10:18 ... that, that get messed up.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:19 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:10:19 Got you.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:19 And put those back on and make those, those bundles and those loops that say off and on go back to the original pattern. In the same way, it's like, um, polishing a scratched CD if-

Lewis Howes 2:10:31 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:31 ... anyone remembers-

Lewis Howes 2:10:32 Yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:32 ... an old CD. Uh, instead of skipping songs, you polish it. Now it can read the right songs or the right genes at the right time, and that's youth again.

Lewis Howes 2:10:40 That's interesting.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:41 But how cool is that? And someone who is 100 years old who looks 100, for most of their cells could be young. They have the information in their DNA to be young again, just put the methyls back on.

Lewis Howes 2:10:51 Could it make them look younger too?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:10:53 Well, of course. It's-

Lewis Howes 2:10:54 So if you're 100, you can make you look what, 70? I mean, how, how young could you look potentially?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:11:01 Well, yeah. This, this is where-

Lewis Howes 2:11:02 If I'm 100

Dr. David Sinclair 2:11:03 ... my colleagues start to get upset, but there's no biological law that says we can't rejuvenate externally and internally. We've done internally. That's easy. Right? The eye looked younger when we looked at it. Uh, its shape, the structures that are complicated went back to being young again.

Lewis Howes 2:11:19 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:11:19 It should be true for the hair and the, the skin as well.

Lewis Howes 2:11:22 Really? That's fa- but we don't have, we haven't seen it yet for-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:11:26 Well, we've got that experiment in progress. Lisa is being rejuvenated right now.

Lewis Howes 2:11:30 That's fascinating. Do you have a video of Lisa somewhere on your Instagram? I want to see this.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:11:34 I, yeah, Lisa is on my Instagram.

Lewis Howes 2:11:36 Okay, I'll check it out. Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:11:37 There's a couple of mice. The brother is there.

Lewis Howes 2:11:39 Oh my gosh, this is fascinating stuff. What are the three technologies that are coming in 5, 10, 20 years that will be connected to us or we'll be using to really help reverse aging?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:11:54 Well, connected to us is important. We're living in an age where, uh, we're gonna be fused or at least stuck to machines that measure us all the time.

Lewis Howes 2:12:04 That's happening now with Levels and these other, you know, devices, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:12:07 Yeah. Levels is, is just the first foray into that. I talk a lot about, about it in my book about where we're going from having a big patch that measures one thing to having a patch under the skin that measures thousands of things.

Lewis Howes 2:12:19 That's crazy.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:12:20 And in the future, and it's not that far away, uh, we will have on our phones an avatar that tells us how we're doing and what we should eat, where we should go for lunch, we're deficient in that, or if we're gonna have a heart attack next week, get to the doctor now.

Lewis Howes 2:12:34 That's fascinating.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:12:35 So why couldn't we live another decade on top of what I'm doing just by predicting diseases by measuring things constantly? How crazy is it that we go to the doctor once a year for a checkup and they say, "Oh, how are you feeling?" That's not medicine.

Lewis Howes 2:12:49 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:12:49 It should, we should be measured a thousand times a second, and there are devices that do that. Um, I have, I have one that I put on my chest. I ... If I didn't put it down, I might even have it. It's still in my pocket. Hold on. So th- this normally goes on my chest.

Lewis Howes 2:13:03 What is it?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:03 It ran out of batteries, but it lasts for two weeks. It's called a BioButton.

Lewis Howes 2:13:07 You stick it on.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:08 Stick it on your chest.

Lewis Howes 2:13:09 You lea- you can leave it there.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:10 Leave it there. You, you can swim and shower with it. And it's measuring the body at a thousand times a second.

Lewis Howes 2:13:16 Really?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:16 Oh, it just flashed. And it communicates with your phone, and it tells your doctor and you if you have any heart issues. But it also measures your body temperature, your movement, your sleep, uh, even can tell if you have a cold or a flu or a COVID.

Lewis Howes 2:13:32 What's this called?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:33 It's called a BioButton.

Lewis Howes 2:13:34 BioButton.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:36 Yeah. And it's actually FDA, FDA approved, which means your hospital-

Lewis Howes 2:13:40 Hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:40 ... your doctor can send you home with one of these, and you'll be monitored by a nurse or a doctor 24/7-

Lewis Howes 2:13:45 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:45 ... in case something goes wrong.

Lewis Howes 2:13:46 That's crazy.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:47 And the moment-

Lewis Howes 2:13:48 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 2:13:48 ... that somebody dies from a heart attack- Where the doctor didn't give them one of these for 20 bucks, there's gonna be a lawsuit that says, "Why didn't you give my dad or mom one of these BioButtons for 20 bucks?" And-

Lewis Howes 2:14:00 That would predict when a heart attack is coming

Dr. David Sinclair 2:14:02 ... could have saved his or her life, and then these will become ubiquitous. Your doctor will probably send you one of these in the mail a week before you come in for a checkup. Eventually, we'll all not wanna leave the home without one. We'll sleep with them because, I mean, who wants to die from a heart attack if you can pre- prevent it?

Lewis Howes 2:14:18 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:14:19 That's what these will do.

Lewis Howes 2:14:20 That's amazing. There's other, so there's devices out there like the BioButton, uh, like levels, like Oura Ring, that are, that are telling us information now.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:14:29 Yeah, and they're exploding. I, I get my heart rate and my sleep patterns done, uh, by my bed every night, and it's adjusting the temperature.

Lewis Howes 2:14:36 The bed is doing that for you?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:14:37 The bed does all of that, yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:14:39 Interesting.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:14:39 I- my bed knows more about my sex life than-

Lewis Howes 2:14:41 [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 2:14:42 ... than probably anybody but my partner.

Lewis Howes 2:14:44 Which bed do you have? Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:14:45 Uh, it's called Eight Sleep.

Lewis Howes 2:14:46 Eight Sleep. I know that one, yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:14:47 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:14:48 And that tells you, it's what? Tracking your body temperature or-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:14:52 Temperature and movement, uh, heart rate.

Lewis Howes 2:14:56 Really? And it'll what? Make it cooler or hotter based on how you're sleeping?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:15:01 Um, I don't know if it's got that much feedback, but you can adjust it to your preferences.

Lewis Howes 2:15:05 Gotcha.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:15:05 And it lowers your body temperature through the night, and then warms up when you need to wake up.

Lewis Howes 2:15:09 In the morning.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:15:10 And there's even a vibration in there that wakes you up in the morning.

Lewis Howes 2:15:12 Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. Eight Sleep. What else is coming? What do you think is g- like, what are the crazy things that are gonna be happening in five, 10, 20 years in terms of devices or technologies?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:15:26 Well, so when I wrote Lifespan-

Lewis Howes 2:15:28 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 2:15:28 ... this was 2000, end of 2019, uh, I predicted a world where we wouldn't need to go to the doctor and we'd have these, these telemedicine things, and they'd send the, the, the drugs in the mail. It's pretty funny. It's only two years later, and that's the world already. So trying to predict the world 10, 20 years from now is really hard. It's going super fast and, and medicine is going faster than probably any other thing on, on the planet with perhaps the exception of, uh, NFTs right now. [laughs]

Lewis Howes 2:15:53 Right, NFTs are crypto, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:15:54 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:15:54 Yeah, the Metaverse.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:15:55 Yeah, all that's going crazy, but, but medicine is totally different. So as well from, uh, you know, the iPhone isn't changing much these days, but what's the data coming into the iPhone or, or I should say any phone is, uh, is what's gonna change.

Lewis Howes 2:16:08 How will the Metaverse and being in, um, virtual reality affect us in aging or anti-aging? By, if we're in five, 10 years, let's say we're all hooked up to devices-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:16:23 Yeah

Lewis Howes 2:16:23 ... staring into a world that we could never imagine in the real world through our devices, or working eight to 10 hours a day in these devices playing games, watching movies, hanging out with friends in the virtual world.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:16:35 Mm-hmm.

Lewis Howes 2:16:36 What do you think would happen to our bodies, our minds, our eyes-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:16:42 Yeah

Lewis Howes 2:16:42 ... uh, and the longevity of our genes by being hooked up on this device?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:16:47 This is what my next book is about, the world that we built and the pluses and minuses and how the heck do we get out of this mess we've created over the last million years. Uh, and so I've thought about this. There are pluses and minuses to the Metaverse. Uh, the, the, the pluses are the following, that, that if you have friends, uh, or a pet, it's known that that's gonna make you live longer. Actually, the, the strongest effect, uh, and there was a study at, done at Harvard of, uh, men who after, um, it was the First World War, I believe, they tracked their whole lives and then found out what made them live the longest, and some of it was food, some of it was exercise, but the biggest effect was having a reliable partner. So there you go. Or get a pet if you don't have a human partner.

Lewis Howes 2:17:32 Friends, a g- a, a healthy partner, and pets-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:17:36 Yeah

Lewis Howes 2:17:36 ... will help you live longer.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:17:38 Right, and the Metaverse could help there.

Lewis Howes 2:17:40 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:17:40 Uh, you could have lots of friends there.

Lewis Howes 2:17:42 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:17:42 That's the upside. I would imagine you could also be doing meditation and c- relaxation in, in there. The downsides, th- there are a number. So I have a, a 14-year-old son, Benjamin.

Lewis Howes 2:17:53 Mm-hmm. Is he in the Metaver- is he in one-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:17:55 He's got a virtual headset. He's got a couple of virtual headse- uh, reality headsets, and if he's not in virtual reality, he's, he's got-

Lewis Howes 2:18:02 Screens

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:02 ... screens, yeah. So that- that's not gonna make you live longer. I mean, your brain'll stay active. There's some ben- brain benefits, but mostly it's ba- poor sleep from all the blue light coming in at night. Um, and mostly, honestly, it's, it's a lack of exercise.

Lewis Howes 2:18:17 Right. Well, now they're trying to do, you see all the boxing videos of people wearing, like, the goggles, and then they're, like, boxing in there.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:23 Yeah, yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:18:23 I guess if you're moving and you're doing something where you're moving, that's good, but the light constantly is probably still not good for you, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:30 Right, right. Now, there are some move- I mean, the virtual reality, there's a little bit of movement-

Lewis Howes 2:18:34 Right, right

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:34 ... with, with some light-

Lewis Howes 2:18:35 Somewhat

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:35 ... lightsabers and whatever, but for the most part, if I look at my son, for example, he's not getting enough exercise like a normal kid who's outside. You know, I was, I was talking to my brother about this the other day, that we used to... and you're probably the same

Lewis Howes 2:18:46 Oh, yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:46 ... but we used to get scratched up, and-

Lewis Howes 2:18:48 Oh, yeah

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:48 ... we'd always have bruises.

Lewis Howes 2:18:49 Dirty, yeah, of course.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:50 Kids these days, they rarely get a bruise.

Lewis Howes 2:18:53 Too safe. Too safe.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:53 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:18:54 They get a bruise hitting their head on something when they're in the virtual reality world. [laughs]

Dr. David Sinclair 2:18:57 [laughs] The, the grazes and scratches and dirt on their knees-

Lewis Howes 2:19:00 No, you never see that

Dr. David Sinclair 2:19:01 ... where.

Lewis Howes 2:19:01 They're too clean, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:19:02 Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:19:02 They never get scuffed up. So ima- imagine someone's in this, let's say, eight hours a day, 'cause I think in the future, well, based on what I'm seeing Facebook wants is people working in the Metaverse in the future is what I saw in his kinda, like, videos, is like, once you're in here, you'll be able to work. You can do all these things. If someone's out in the goggles eight hours a day, would that make them live longer or less do you think? Even if they're moving in the goggles and all these other things, do you think they could extend their life?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:19:34 No.

Lewis Howes 2:19:35 No?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:19:36 I think the, the, the downsides don't outweigh the benefits unfortunately.

Lewis Howes 2:19:40 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:19:40 I think mo- just moving, uh, in the 3D world is, is extremely beneficial.

Lewis Howes 2:19:45 Mm-hmm.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:19:46 Um, interacting with people in 3D, uh, physically moving. I mean- Unless you're on a treadmill with your virtual headset, which I don't think people are gonna wanna do-

Lewis Howes 2:19:55 Mm-hmm

Dr. David Sinclair 2:19:56 ... you're not getting enough exercise.

Lewis Howes 2:19:57 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:19:58 Uh, lifting weights is very important. Um, do yoga if that's not your thing. All that good stuff.

Lewis Howes 2:20:04 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:20:04 And socializing with meals and whatever, that's real life. That, these are real benefits-

Lewis Howes 2:20:09 Mm

Dr. David Sinclair 2:20:09 ... to longevity. Uh, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, I'm, I'm afraid. I'm just telling you my thoughts.

Lewis Howes 2:20:15 Yeah, I mean, maybe everything in moderation. Maybe you get on there for an hour a day, and that's not gonna hurt you.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:20:20 Sure. That's true.

Lewis Howes 2:20:20 But if you're on eight hours a day, I'm hearing you say that's, that's probably not gonna benefit you in living longer and healthier.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:20:27 I think it's just gonna make the obesity epidemic worse.

Lewis Howes 2:20:30 'Cause there's just more sugar, more, you know, sodas, more bad food. Quick stuff to get calories in while you're in goggle land, I guess.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:20:39 Well, it's, it's a lot like the ending to WALL-E, the Disney movie.

Lewis Howes 2:20:42 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:20:43 Um, the Pixar movie, yeah. Just sitting around with eating.

Lewis Howes 2:20:49 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:20:49 And I see this with Benjamin that, I mean, if he's, has a choice, he'll be on, on a game all day-

Lewis Howes 2:20:55 Eating sugar

Dr. David Sinclair 2:20:55 ... eating and drinking. Yeah.

Lewis Howes 2:20:57 What do you like, intermittent fasting-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:20:58 No idea

Lewis Howes 2:20:58 ... or do you like the 24-hour fast? Do you like a, a three-day fast? What do you think is ideal-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:03 Well, I think-

Lewis Howes 2:21:03 ... for most people?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:05 Well, yeah, scientifically I think going for three days is great. So-

Lewis Howes 2:21:09 Scientifically. Okay

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:10 ... Peter Attia, hats off to him. That's his profession. He can do that.

Lewis Howes 2:21:14 Is this the, uh, what's the... Prolong? Or what's the, uh, diet? What's this guy?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:19 Peter Attia?

Lewis Howes 2:21:20 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:20 I don't know what his diet is called.

Lewis Howes 2:21:21 Does he have a diet? Does he have, like, a program for this, or no? Or this is just his finding-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:24 I, I don't think so.

Lewis Howes 2:21:25 Okay.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:25 He's a, he's a doctor who's experimenting on his body in severe ways.

Lewis Howes 2:21:30 And three days is, like, what he does.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:31 Well, he goes for a week without food. He dr- just drinks water.

Lewis Howes 2:21:34 Wow.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:35 And, uh-

Lewis Howes 2:21:36 He's probably, like, skin and bones, though, right?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:37 Yeah. Well-

Lewis Howes 2:21:38 It's probably not the best for high performance of, like-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:40 No, no, no. If you're an athlete, forget it.

Lewis Howes 2:21:42 So what if, if you're an athlete, if you wanna work out and do HIIT training-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:45 Yeah

Lewis Howes 2:21:46 ... what, what do you think is scientifically right? Like, one day fast, and then intermittent fasting, and skipping meals?

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:53 Well, so he, I get asked this every day.

Lewis Howes 2:21:55 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:21:55 Um, and the simple answer is, uh, do as much as you can, and the more the better, uh, in general, without losing your energy. But the other fact is that nobody knows the true answer. Anyone who says, "This is the way to do it-

Lewis Howes 2:22:10 Yeah, don't know

Dr. David Sinclair 2:22:11 ... is BS-ing you."

Lewis Howes 2:22:12 'Cause everyone's different, and we all have different needs-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:22:14 Exactly

Lewis Howes 2:22:16 ... and-

Dr. David Sinclair 2:22:16 Different bacteria in the gut, different energy levels, different genes, uh, different lifestyles, different professions.

Lewis Howes 2:22:24 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:22:24 And so for someone like me, I'll tell you what works for me is, so I'm, I'm often sitting probably for half the day. I got a standing desk. That's a start. [laughs]

Lewis Howes 2:22:34 Right. You're not working out.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:22:36 No.

Lewis Howes 2:22:36 Yeah.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:22:36 No. I work out once a week for a few hours. That's about it.

Lewis Howes 2:22:39 Right. That's it.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:22:40 It's much as I can do. So for me, what I do is I, I very rarely eat breakfast. Um, I'm not hungry in the morning anyway. I try to skip lunch with my cups of tea.

Lewis Howes 2:22:50 Mm.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:22:51 I would say I'm about 70% successful. Um, I might have a little nibble of something in the afternoon, 'cause I can't focus well.

Lewis Howes 2:23:00 Right.

Dr. David Sinclair 2:23:01 But then I have a normal dinner. I go out to dinner and I'm-

Lewis Howes 2:23:03 Right,