We Can Now Drive Aging Forward and Backward at Will — Here's What That Means | Impact Theory W. Tom Bilyeu Dr. David Sinclair

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Welcome back to part 2 of this incredible conversation

without further ado.

Here we go.

Okay, so you guys are able to replicate micro-brains.

How do you make them small?

Well, we grow them from single cells.

We turn them into stem cells.

Would they just keep growing and growing and growing and growing

if you fed them?

They reach a certain size where they don't keep growing

because they don't have blood vessels.

Do they have a pituitary gland?

They don't have blood vessels.

I don't know if they have a pituitary gland.

How do they stay alive?

We shake them in liquid and the oxygen diffuses through.

But if they get too big, the core becomes hypoxic

and doesn't grow well.

But what we need to do is to mix them with blood vessel cells

which people are working on.

And then we could grow them really big.

This is so interesting.

Oh my god.

And then it's ethical questions about

if you can grow a brain from scratch,

should you teach it something?

Should you give it something to think about?

Yes.

Anyway, it's a good model for aging, dude.

So wait, there are, it's my understanding,

AI that right now can do like these really rough like

this person is thinking about this

and it like shows you like a horse

and you're like, that's kind of a horse?

It's just like sort of blobby shapes.

We need to apply immediately this AI to these brains.

I need to know if these things are like screaming out.

I'm bored, bro.

Like, come on.

Give me something to do.

This is wild.

Okay.

And look at everything.

And here's the other thing is,

we see them get old.

They lose their firing.

And we can look at them in real time.

They're actually, you see these sparks,

like looking at fireworks.

When they get older, there's fewer sparks.

How are you monitoring the brains?

Well, you put them on the microscope

and we can see calcium changes.

When calcium gets...

These are the fireworks.

The nerve cells when they get calcium.

Under the microscope,

are they now dying at this point?

No, they're living.

We put them back.

Wow.

Okay.

So we see the calcium changes

and wherever calcium comes in,

which is what's happening in our brains right now

with the firing, it lights up with a die.

Not naturally.

We have to give them a die that lights up.

But you can see that.

And so you see with the old brains that are a year old,

that's old for a brain-organoid.

If we give them our genes

or our chemical cocktail,

our three chemical cocktail,

the firing comes on again.

And we did that to a mouse, as I mentioned,

and the mouse's brain worked.

Like the human brain now.

Well, we hope to be testing this in humans

for the brain as well.

Adult humans, you say?

Adult humans, yeah.

I don't know that I want to leave the baby brains yet.

But okay, so adult humans,

what condition would they have to have

to subject themselves to this?

Because this sounds experimental.

Well, the three chemicals are,

we're getting permission to give them

to people in a clinical trial to see what would happen.

But people just say, hey, I'm Bob.

I'm doing fine.

But hit me with the three chemicals.

Let me see what happens.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

People do that.

All the time.

This is amazing.

It's called a phase one clinical trial.

Wow.

Yes.

Okay.

Cool.

Right.

That's amazing.

And so people are going to volunteer

to have these, how are you getting the chemicals

into their brain?

Oh, you swallow it.

You can take it in a pill.

That's the goal.

That's wild.

How does this survive metabolism?

Well, at least two of these molecules

have been taken by humans already.

So we know maybe all three actually by now.

Wow.

You know that they're metabolized.

Huh.

Yeah, AI to improve that three chemical cocktail.

Right.

So that, I don't think that's the ultimate drug

that I'm going to put on the market.

Uh-huh.

I think, though, if I mentioned those three molecules,

you could bet that people be out buying their stuff already.

Yeah.

Didn't you say them at the top?

No, I said the genes.

Something.

Those are OSK genes.

Very careful.

Smart.

I have to be, I mean, hopefully people won't go

and inject them with some solvents.

Well, apparently they'll even just sign up

for a clinical trial because why not?

Okay.

I do know some people have injected themselves

with OSK already, which is.

Uh, okay.

So people are injecting themselves with this stuff,

fascinating because because they think

this deaging thing will work.

Yes.

Okay.

Even though you're saying there's more to it than just that.

Well, just to be clear, these are, these are not FDA,

sanctioned clinical trials.

Yeah.

There is, there's a fringe.

I think people should be able to do their own body

what they want.

Do you think?

So then it's a few people in the world

that are willing to try anything not to age.

But getting back to really mainstream science

and drug development.

Oh, but I was having so much fun with the baby brains

and we can go anywhere you want times.

You're sure?

Yes.

I do want to say though that we,

I'll just tick off the diseases that have worked well.

Yes.

Please.

No, I already did that.

You're talking about in the baby brain though?

Or, I know what I thought those were like thin sheets.

Yeah.

I know what I wanted to tell you that we don't just grow brains.

Oh.

We grow other things.

Such as?

Well, we're growing a uterus.

Why not?

Are we impregnating said uterus?

No.

Why a uterus?

Why are we building a uterus?

Oh.

Because to see if you can reverse fertility problems?

Yes.

Let's go.

Well, we, just in all public disclosure,

I have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome.

So I'm a male.

Yes.

So we males are fairly don't want to come to female health.

Yes.

And my partner Serena is much more expert in female fertility.

That said, I'm a scientist.

And so I want to be able to help women have children for longer

and even have children after they've gone through menopause.

Let's go.

And so we've already shown a number of years back

that using a serotonin, remember the serotonin?

I do.

Serotonin activating molecule that we could reverse infertility

in very old mice, female mice.

And they could produce fresh eggs and have children.

That we published.

That's real.

But I want something more potent than that.

That will truly reverse the age of all parts

of the female reproductive system, including the uterus.

And I have a student, Maria, is working on that.

That's her project.

Damn.

So this is wild.

Okay.

So we grow you.

Give me just a quick timeline for the stuff has to work

with it.

Yeah.

Like when are we talking about a 65-year-old woman

deaging her uterus and having babies?

Well, you don't actually fully have to deage a uterus.

You can have a target.

So I could hear people screaming at us that we don't need

to fix the uterus.

What we need is healthy eggs and a healthy spoon.

I'm not trying to caveat.

So you just said you want to help deage the uterus.

Well, I do.

Because now we're trying to soften it for the screaming people,

the chattering masses in the comment section.

But talk to me about when, so got it,

there are other things people can do right now today.

Yeah.

But I'm saying, when are we going to deage a woman who's 65?

She's been through menopause for a decade.

When are we going to get her producing eggs again

and a womb that can like house a healthy baby to term?

Ballpark me.

The uterus is early stages.

We're still growing those in the lab and looking at menstrual fluid

and that kind of stuff.

Wow.

Is this a full-size uterus?

This isn't flat cells.

This is like I would actually recognize the uterus.

Yeah, we grow it from scratch and it's three-dimensional

and it's in the dish, yes.

And then we're going to age them.

And hopefully deage them, obviously.

But what I can predict with more certainty,

because I can see where we're going.

With more clarity, that this discovery that we made

in the mice is now being tested by others in humans already.

So it's a two-inactivator.

It's a two-inactivator.

It was I think about eight years ago we published that

raising the levels of a certain activator called NAD,

that chemical, which we make less of as we get older,

by raising that the eggs became produced and fresh again.

Just from NAD.

In a month, from raising NAD.

And just last week I saw a study testing women

who were not very fertile, receiving for 10 weeks,

an IV each week of NAD.

And if there's no placebo egg count.

Of egg count, egg quality, embryo quality.

Very rigorous, actually.

And although it's the first of hopefully many studies,

it was extremely promising.

There was a dramatic difference.

Two, three-fold difference between those that got the NAD IV

and those that didn't.

I have a feeling you want me to let go on the timeline,

but I'm not going to.

So ballpark me knowing certainly I know that whatever you say

isn't going to be accurate, it'll just be directional.

But if you had to swag me.

If that study is true, again, be cautious.

It's one study.

But let's say it's true.

Then I think it's likely that NAD IVs are going to help women

who want to get pregnant.

Yeah, but timeline.

We're rejuvenating you to ride here.

Well, the uterus is different.

Uterus is more challenging.

But the egg story might be here already.

Okay, so NAD for somebody that's sort of on the cusp.

Yeah, but I want to know when we're.

When's the uterus?

Yeah, I'm talking.

I'm giving you the very specific study.

Thomas, it sounds like you really need a fresh uterus.

No, but this is so interesting.

Yeah.

That the.

So never did I think that already on the sort of pipeline of things

to be tried.

Would we be growing brains?

Actual mini brains in a lab.

Actual uterus in a lab.

Like this is thrilling, exciting, shocking.

But I just, this was not on my bingo card.

So now I want to know, because it's clearly closer than I thought,

given that we have to get through all the FDA and all that.

We're talking 30 years.

Are we talking 15 years?

Like, what are we talking about?

All right.

Well, there's, there's actually, there's two options.

One is the FDA route, which is novel molecule.

AI gives it to us.

We take that.

I've got a company life bioscientist that's ready to go.

And they're all set to go.

So that usually takes five years to get through the FDA

with a small molecule that's been showed to work in animal.

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Let's get right back into the action.

Do we have 20 years of discovery still on the deaging of the uterus

or are we already pretty deep in that process?

Well, we're going parallel.

We're going AI to find the molecule.

And I said we've already gone a lot of that.

And then we're building the uterine in the dish right now

and we'll just put those two together when they're ready.

Yes, so wild.

And then if that works and the mice work,

then we can apply to test this in humans

with adequate safety studies.

Wow.

In animals.

The safety studies take a couple of years.

That's wild.

All right, I want to go back to the brain.

The brain is my thing.

If ever there was something I wanted a fresh new one,

it would be to keep my brain healthy forever.

So there are things that people do now.

So you've got stuff like ketones.

I will take ketone supplements.

I will take caffeine obviously nicotine.

So I do things to sharpen my brain now.

How does that stuff compare to what you're talking about?

Well, right now I think stuff like ketones

are excellent for the brain.

Similar mechanism or totally unrelated.

We don't know.

It's possible that they're related

because beta hydroxybutyrate can actually

not just affect energy in the brain.

And that's why I drink...

There's a group that I'm collaborating with scientifically

as well that are doing good studies at ketone IQ.

The science looks really good.

The brain is what I use it for.

I chug it before I do recording of the podcast

that I'm relaunching season two coming up.

But yeah, I find that when I'm stressed

and I'm having to basically take 15 pages

and remember it in a few minutes,

then I need that extra fuel.

And we know that ketones are very good for the brain.

But you're asking me, is it related to my work?

What's interesting is that these ketones

and one that's related is pseudo-related molecules.

They're kind of related to vinegar.

These molecules actually go in

and they change the structure of how the DNA is packaged

to help with the metals.

It's so acute though.

It's not like I can take one shot of ketones

and my brain is better for a month.

It's very, at least for me, very short-acting.

So that's probably two things happening.

The first is the ketones are good fuel for your brain.

So what we know is when we're fasted for, let's say, about over 15 hours,

ketone levels will go up because they run out of glycogen from the liver.

And then the clarity, mental clarity, you might be a little angry

because you're hungry, but the clarity is there.

We've probably all done this.

If we study and we're not eating a lot, we can focus.

I know I need that because I get distracted by every little bug around me.

So the focus is there and the ketones really help with the focus.

I can mimic fasting and I can even enhance my fasting.

I try to do intermittent fasting as best I can.

And some of these ketones, if you take it with fasting, can actually improve your ketosis.

Those sound like separate mechanisms to me.

One feels very acute and is a...

Hey, there's this molecule that you put into your brain, I'm fumbling, for the mechanism here.

And it's essentially like giving it food to run as processes faster.

The other is reaching into this black box and finding these magical, the observer

and getting that to work, it's magic.

Let's just take a pose on.

You are what you eat and it's not just energy, it actually does modify the DNA

and the structures that package the DNA.

So let's just get back...

The ketones, or...

Well, the ketones like beta-hydroxybutyrate, these molecules actually get attached.

So let me briefly explain to you how is DNA packaged in the cell?

Because that determines whether a gene is on or off.

We talked about these methyls.

When it's methyl, it's blocked, but it's not just a string with chemicals on it.

It's actually wrapped up tightly in proteins that are like balls, tennis balls.

And the tennis balls come together, so now you've got this big structure.

If you look at them, it's called a chromosome.

So these balls, they aren't just tennis balls, they actually have flags on them.

Imagine a tennis ball with little flags that say, read me or ignore me.

Some of these flags are methyls as well on the DNA and on the balls, the protein balls, called histones.

But there are other things.

There's a whole semaphore of flags that tells the cell what to do at that point in the genome.

And two of those chemicals.

One is butyrate that gets attached to the ball.

The other is acetate.

Attached to the ball.

On amino acids, lysines usually.

And these histones have tails.

So it's a tennis ball with a tail, protein amino acid tail.

And it's that tail that accepts these little flags.

So when we know this for a fact that if you drink acetate or butyrate or molecules

like we're talking about these ketones, you can change the pattern on these little flags in ways that are healthy.

So that's another reason why fasting may give you a buzz or focus for a while.

But long term, if you do it for months, you will actually change your gene expression and slow down.

I believe slow down the rate of aging as well.

Okay.

So we have reason to believe that's true through fasting.

Can you supplement your way there?

We don't know.

But there's no reason to believe that that wouldn't work.

Because what we're drinking in these bottles like the one three-butane dial is that is naturally there in our body anyway.

We're just giving up the body more of it.

These are breakdown products of fat.

So after 15 hours of fasting, we get these fatty acids out of our fat.

That's how the body uses fat.

It turns them into these ketones that give fuel but also change the regulation of genes.

Some temporarily, some long term.

Okay.

So that's the exogenous stuff that may or may not have long term sort of stacking effects.

But what you guys are doing now on the brain, the brain is insanely complicated.

I've always assumed that part of the problem with Alzheimer's,

not that the amyloid plaque is the cause, but that you would have built up so much plaque.

I don't see how you start unwinding that if you're not clearing the plaque out.

Do you think the plaque is the brain knows how to get around it?

Or does it get cleared in some way?

How would this look?

That's a really great question and one that we are addressing.

The reason I don't know the answer yet,

and I can tell you what I think is going on based on other experiments in different tissues,

which do clear out proteins like beta amyloid.

But we don't know in the brain for sure.

And the reason we don't know is we don't get a lot of plaque in the mouse model.

We get all these other problems.

There's a protein called tau, phosphotau, we do see that,

and we turn that on in the brain.

But we don't know for sure yet if the plaque goes away,

or if the brain just can handle it better.

What about all of our little mini-brains?

We haven't run.

No.

No.

The mini-brains are not getting plaque.

They just get dysfunctional with the APOE 4G.

Because you're like racing forward, they're aging so much?

Well, it's partly that, but also the APOE 4 is producing this APOE protein

which can cause problems inside the cell.

You don't need to have these collections, these crystals outside the cell to be defective.

But doesn't that tell you that there's something different going on?

So if Alzheimer's were just pure aging,

and part of the phenotypical expression,

which fancy word for what does it look and act like,

and if the expression of aging is the some damage occurs

that causes the buildup of amyloid plaque,

if you artificially put that in air quotes,

but if you artificially age it,

and it does not build up amyloid plaques,

and we know there's some different mechanism happening.

For sure, not everybody gets Alzheimer's, but we all get old.

So the Alzheimer's is accelerating the aging of the cell

and causing it to be dysfunctional.

But what we know is that we don't need to be clearing any plaque

for the animals to get better memory,

and it may not be necessary in humans as well.

But you bring up something to really beat this to death,

maybe this is what you were just about to say,

but how do you interpret that I get two different results?

When I age up my minibrain, it does not build up plaque.

Human life seems to build up plaque.

You might be right that the minibrains don't age 80 years,

which is what humans do.

Maybe we're only aging them to 40,

and we don't get there.

It's not a perfect mimic of the duration of travel,

but...

Yeah, I mean, every model in the lab has its caveats.

You got to take what you can get,

and right now the state of the art is minibrains getting old,

but not getting plaque,

but we do put those genes in there

and they do get dysfunctional quicker.

I think it's an interesting to point out that

the age reversal may clear out the plaque,

and the reason that I'm optimistic that it would in humans

is because we've done this in other tissues.

The eye, for instance, builds up proteins,

like a foskin causes macular degeneration.

And to my surprise,

when we reversed the age of the retina

in a mouse that had those protein inclusions,

they went away.

And the retina regrow and became flat

and nice and functional again.

So what we're finding is it's not just reversing aging,

it's actually rebuilding the body to be young again.

And the best test of that was

we actually pinched optic nerves and destroyed them.

That's one way to test this.

And what we found was the optic nerve regrow back to the brain.

So even something as bad as crushing nerves

causes them to regrow like they were embryos again.

Whoa, hold on.

My whole life, I believe,

that nerves don't regrow.

They don't.

So this really is,

like if this ends up being predictably repeatable,

this would be huge.

Well, that's why, in part,

it got the color of nature, which was,

oh my god, we're able to regrow nose again.

And it's huge, not just for the eye, of course,

anyone who's broken or could worry about like spinal injuries.

Yeah, that's right.

That's, that's low hanging fruit as well.

Huh.

Are there people right now?

Because let me tell you,

if I was a quadriplegic,

I'd be like, yes, I'm first in your trial

and check the life out of me.

Give me whatever you need to give me.

Do we have people lining up for that one?

And is there a reason that we're not already doing that?

It's regulation that's stopping us from doing it.

Because we need to make sure it's safe.

Are you by any chance connected?

You must be.

You know so many of the same people.

Are you connected to Elon Musk?

No.

I don't know him at all.

But I know Peter D. Mendes knows him well.

I know you know Peter well.

Just because obviously what they're doing,

we're trying to sort of bypass all that stuff.

And maybe they wouldn't care.

Maybe it's even contrary to their business model.

But being able to fix somebody who broke their back

would be obviously massive.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not technology that's holding us.

It's safety and rigor and regulations.

Yeah.

I think we're there.

It probably would work because the eye is no different than

the spot.

How profoundly is the nerve re-growing?

Well, you're right.

Looms don't re-grow.

And there have been some small advances over the years.

Other labs have re-grown nerves.

Maybe five percent.

We got a hundred percent.

What the fuck, man?

This is one of those.

There's always such a big gap between what works in the lab,

what works in real life.

So I'm aware of that.

But this is, this is very interesting.

If you're able to, so my wife's grandmother,

I think she actually died from cancer.

But she had Alzheimer's for the last,

God knows how many years of her life.

Absolutely tragic.

My great fear is losing my brain.

The thought of being paralyzed has always been so hopeless

my entire life.

The thought that you can re-grow nerves is absolutely

wild.

Yeah.

And for a disease like ALS,

where the nerves that are holding on to your muscle

are retreating, degrading, regressing.

We're finding that we can re-grow those.

One of the reasons people have falls and can't control themselves

physically when they're older and maintain balance

is that problem.

The nerve muscle junction.

Get retraction.

These nerves go away.

We've got images in my lab when we treat with our chemical cocktail,

those nerves then regrow for the first time ever in biology

to go back to where they came from.

What's going to stop this from being real?

Like this, when something seems to be too good to be true,

it is too good.

So what's the catch in all this?

They're making a drug period,

whether it reverses aging or not, is hugely challenging

from bench to bedside, as they say.

There are biological issues,

so you might be wrong about the theory.

Don't think that's the case.

It may not be relevant to humans.

It could just be in rodents or mice.

Don't think that's true because it's working in monkeys already.

There could be safety issues.

But we've ticked all those off so far.

So what's left?

Well, there's funding.

You need hundreds of millions of dollars.

So I spend a fair amount of my time traveling

with Serena around the world to raise money to do these trials.

And thank you to all the investors that have come in

to help us with that.

And that's the company's called Life Bio Sciences,

which I'm chairman of the board of.

That company has a great team.

You've got to have a great team because you can mess up a clinical trial

and not get great results.

You've got to do it the right way with the right controls.

And then, I don't know, I think that's pretty much it.

And then it works or it doesn't.

And if you're wondering what's the chance now,

I've pegged at least 80% given that it's worked well

in the monkeys multiple times.

In that you're clamping down on the nerve,

effectively killing it, and then re-growing it.

What nerve are you clamping down on?

The entire optic nerve.

Okay.

So you make them blind and then unblind them?

Then they can see again.

That is wild.

Okay, so...

By the way, that's required by law.

It's not something I want to do.

What do you mean?

Well, the government makes us drug developers

do these safety studies and animals before we can touch a human.

Meaning they force you to blind and unblind the monkey.

Yeah.

I wouldn't want to do that, but that's what we've done.

Unfortunately, it worked.

It cured them.

They're all good.

And...

It's wild.

Yeah.

Okay.

And so, are you just clamping the nerve

and the pressure is what makes them blind

and just unclamping it by any chance?

No, it's done differently than a clamp,

because it's harder to do with a clamp.

Clamp.

It was done with a bright light.

So you burn the nerve essentially?

I don't know if you don't like that word choices.

It's not really burning, but it is permanently damaged.

They're not going to see again unless we treat them.

Okay.

Are you doing it just by shining a light into their eyes?

It's a laser.

Interesting.

Okay.

So we are overloading, frying, whatever word feels accurate,

the optic nerve, and then you're able to regrow it.

That is crazy.

Okay.

So...

Oh, let me say in humans, we're not treating laser-induced blindness.

We're treating glaucoma, which is the leading cause of blindness

in the world of the system.

Is that nerve-related?

Oh, yeah.

Interesting.

People think it's the pressure, but it's actually the pressure

that's disrupting the function of the nerves at the back of the eye,

which we can...

Don't you have to alleviate the pressure first?

Or do you just have to keep doing this?

Like, the pressure takes time to crush the nerve again.

Well, the pressure may come back, but there are good drugs already to lower pressure.

But even if you lower the pressure, the nerves are still not going to work.

Wild.

Wild.

Why?

Do you have a guess as to why nerves don't regrow?

I've never understood that.

Like, so many other things in the body do.

Like, oh, you broke your back.

Sorry.

Done.

Yeah.

Well, that's, unfortunately, the cruelty of evolution.

If it's not 100% necessary for a person to survive, and it's rare enough.

It's necessary.

If all of us, in the savannas of Africa, we're getting back damage, we would have figured out how to regrow,

but it was so rare.

By the time you broke your back, you were getting eaten.

That's what it came for.

One of us is expendable, but you've got to keep the children coming.

And it was mostly men who were getting broken backs anyway, probably from war and whatever.

We're expendable.

So wild.

Yeah.

But there are some species that do regrow their nerves and grow, regrow arms, even.

Salamanders.

Yeah, yeah.

I thought you were saying for humans for a second.

I was like, wait.

I wish.

Not yet.

But we know that it's possible in biology.

And we actually have evidence that what we're tapping into to regrow the optic nerve and fix the liver and skin

is the same process as lizards and salamanders used to regrow limbs.

Interesting.

Okay.

So what's the approach to skin?

How do we...

Same idea.

It doesn't matter the cell type.

We're going to get these three...

So wait.

Can you then...

If it's not an injection and we do turn this into a pill, is it just...

Everything that can't be positively impacted by this will be?

How will that work?

In terms of...

Flash me forward.

It's 10 or 15 years from now.

We've identified the single molecule or the best combination of these.

And are we...

Do you see this as a targeted thing where we go in and say, okay, this is the optic nerve treatment.

This is the broken back treatment.

This is the liver treatment.

Or is it just like...

Take this thing and it goes and D.H. is all your cells.

Yes.

Is the answer.

What I mean by that is...

I talked about two paths.

The first path is FDA, which takes a decade or more.

Fortunately, we're in the clinic, this next quarter.

So we've come a long way.

That's on its way.

But there's another path to getting this technology to everybody and democratizing it

and making it cheaper and available.

And that's the non-FDA path, which is going down the consumer product route.

And just making it work like a supplement?

It could be a supplement?

It could be a cream?

It could be a spray?

It could be even an IV.

I guess that's not too consumer, but there are some IVs that are...

If it's a natural molecule, you can get delivered like a supplement.

So where we're at now is...

So we've formed a company to spin out the molecules that we're finding.

We have a patent already that's been filed and spun out.

A paradigm 88 with Serena.

He's the CEO, my partner.

And we are developing consumer products that we hope that will not be 10 years.

It may be a lot less, pretty soon, that we have natural, safe versions of the superdrugs

that we're developing that will be available much sooner and cheaper.

And it could be something for the hair, for the skin, could be a drink, could be something like that.

I won't reveal what it is.

We're developing the product right now.

We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

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Let's get right back into the action.

My base assumption is that if it can be delivered in that sort of over the counter fashion,

that it's like some bullshit, that it's not like the real deal.

How is it possible that it can be so effective to regrow a nerve

and yet be over the counter in an IV bag?

Yeah. Well, we're not developing something to cure blindness.

That's super potent gene therapy currently, gene manipulation.

What we're talking about here, or gene introduction.

We're not manipulating anybody's genes.

What we're talking about here is something that undoubtedly will be less potent.

But you don't need to cure blindness just to regrow hair or make your skin look better,

or to feel better.

So we're going to have something we believe available that will show by clinical trials.

I'm not going to put something out there that isn't proven to work.

That will rejuvenate the body over time.

That we'll turn on the same mechanisms that we're currently working on.

And I believe it's possible because we already have three molecules.

Some of those are already natural that we can get it to work.

And it works within four weeks.

And what do we get in the mice?

Maybe people want to know what the heck do you see in the mouse?

Well, we don't know about the hair yet because the mice weren't bald.

But we did see, and this was a year ago,

we gave it to the mice down their throats for four weeks.

And what we saw was rejuvenation.

So they were better on tests of strength, memory, balance.

We have a whole set of tests, about 20 of them,

that tell us whether a mouse is young or not.

And based on those parameters, the mouse was deaged in four weeks.

Okay, so your job right now is basically to tell the AI,

hey, here's what we've got in the industrial strength version.

I need you to find a natural correlate that I can do over the counter that will work.

Don't build the already done.

We're at the stage of testing.

But yes, we have those natural molecules, that list.

Okay, and are you already taking these bad boys?

Some of them.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Well, I got to say, up close and personal, you look good.

Thank you.

You look good, man.

Keep me posted on when these become available.

So skin hair, those are the ones that we're focusing on right now.

Well, antol body, because it's working as a drink in the animal,

we'll see if we can make a drink.

So you'll feel better.

But skin and hair, you'll be able to see.

Right.

You either have less gray hair or you don't.

That one, the hair is probably the most like non-placebo zone one that you're going to get.

Yes.

And it's by popular demand everywhere I go.

It's like, David, what am I going to do with my hair?

Really ask people to regrow hair or just go from gray to color.

We still have to prove it out.

But we've deaged the skin.

So we know that the skin gets younger.

The hair is next.

And the way we're testing that is one of the tissues that we grow in the lab,

besides brain and the placenta, the uterus, is we're growing skin, human skin, from scratch.

And you age it and then deage it.

Yeah.

Wild.

Yeah.

And it's pretty cool to see the hair growing.

Do you have anything like that or this stuff?

Yeah.

I could get permission.

I mean, my employer Harvard University isn't that keen on sharing pictures of my growing human hair on their backs.

But maybe we could.

I mean, if you want to talk about a great marketing campaign, a bar other,

like if you're able to show, like here we are aging it up.

Here we are aging it back down.

Like people go crazy.

Now, needless to say, people are going to come out of the woodwork and be like,

yeah, it's all good at first.

And then you're going to Benjamin Button or whatever I guess he was the opposite direction.

That there's going to be some complication that only manifests itself 10 years down the road.

And the immediate one is going to be, well, if the catastrophic fail state is cancer,

how do I know this isn't going to give me cancer in 10 years?

Well, that's why we don't rush into these things.

And why I think it's too early to be trying this systemically in our whole body.

We'll start with the eye and see how that goes.

You said you're already taking some of this stuff.

Oh, the natural molecules, yeah.

And some of these molecules have been in ancient medicine for a while.

So I'm not too worried.

The safety is not.

I'm not taking anything where.

So you're saying there's sort of two grades of this stuff.

There's the hardcore stuff.

Is it the hardcore stuff that's going to degrade your hair?

Or is it the over-the-counter ancient herbal Chinese medicine that's going to degrade the hair?

My expectation is that we'll find natural versions in the tens of thousands of molecules

that have been in the human food supply that the right combination of those,

or maybe one, will be sufficient to fix hair.

Because in skin it's working beautifully.

The wrinkles go away.

The thing skin gets thicker.

What's the, I mean, I guess you're saying we're reaching into the black box

and we're just getting it to solve the information problem.

This isn't like, oh, it's collagen.

All right.

It's a lot more powerful than that.

You hit a good point just there.

The approach with disease and of cosmetics up until this point is,

let's fix one thing that's missing or overproduced.

We're fixing everything.

We're going in and changing the biology back to what it was when it was young.

Which affects tens of thousands of processes with a single treatment.

It's crazy.

It's crazy that it works.

It's crazy that it's so far safe.

I mean, it's a gift to humanity.

Maybe that's the best proof that we're in a simulation that this stuff is actually happening.

Because in the real world you're like, what's the chance that you get AI and you get age reversal?

Come on.

But it's happening.

So whoever's watching and making this happen, maybe they're having fun.

It's bananas.

Did your dad age as well as you?

He's aging better than me.

But I'm saying like before you came up with all this stuff.

Like because if dad looked like you at whatever 50-ish you are,

then okay, you just have good fucking genes.

But if this is dad look like a normal 55-year-old,

there's more hope.

Well, my mother did better off though, she died of cancer,

but lung cancer, she had good skin and not a lot of gray.

But my father, yeah, he looks like when he was my age 56,

he looked like a 56-year-old.

Though it slowed down, anyone who's seen the photos out there,

he slowed down over the last 20 years.

His aging.

Because of what kind of protocols that you've been advising him on?

Well, I'm not experimenting on my dad.

He's a scientist as well.

But he listens and he takes a few other things that I do,

about five of them.

And he physically doesn't look like he's aging.

And at 86 he's in better health than he has been in decades.

No aches or pains.

If you see him walk, he doesn't walk like an 86-year-old.

Climb the harbour bridge in Sydney, which is a massive thing for anybody.

And for him, it's no big deal.

Actually, Serena and I, we did 20,000 steps around the city

before we climbed the bridge.

And at 86, most men are in the ground or gone.

And my father's run out of friends.

His age that he can hang out with and go for walks,

because they're all very frail.

And he's like, what's the big deal?

I got nothing wrong with me and I'm going out every night.

So you know, it might be coincidence.

It's an NF1, which is basically you can't draw any conclusions.

Sure.

But like you say, he was old at my age looking.

He'd lost his hair.

It was all gray in his 50s, 60s.

But physically he hasn't changed since then.

Since he started working on it.

Which is about 25 years of work.

Well, if you can regrow hair, you've got a monster hit.

Even D gray hair, you've got a hit.

And man, if you can make especially women skin look younger.

Ooh, buddy.

I'm really optimistic that we will have a new approach

to cosmetics.

What products out there?

They'll say they do skin.

But which ones?

Like permanently do skin.

None.

And you might understand.

You're saying it permanently doages if you keep using it.

Because my understanding was that you have to pulse this stuff

so that as you use it, it deagers.

But then it starts aging again.

Then you use it again.

Right.

But it's not like a collagen or a moisturizer where

a week later, you don't see it or Botox,

which has gone in months or whatever.

What we see in our studies is, in the case of the mouse,

we cured its glaucoma.

It could see again.

And then it wasn't for another third of its life

that it lost its sight again.

But the good news is we could turn it back on again.

So the timeline for us is you treat

and then you treat maybe five, ten years later

and you just keep treating.

And the treatment is interesting that we've engineered it

so that you don't need to get an injection every time.

You just take a drug to turn on the genes and D.H.

D.I.

or D.H.

The body.

And that's a proprietary system.

And we used a molecule doxycycline.

It's used to treat Lyme disease.

But we're using it over a matter of a few weeks

or really six weeks to turn on those three genes, or OK.

And so really the D.A. gene comes down to one shot

and then antibiotic treatment for as often as you need it.

And is that an altered variation of the antibiotic

or literally if you want a D.H.

go take Lyme medication?

Yeah, it is the drug and we chose it

because it was well established as a gene inducer,

the way it was engineered.

Ideally, we want to change that

and get away from an antibiotic

because of course, you know,

you want your gut bacteria.

Yeah, I was going to say my wife has been hammered

from too many antibiotics.

Yeah.

That said, it was the most reliable system.

And if it works, we will engineer a new system,

but we need to make sure it works.

If it fails, we're going to set the field back by years.

So we've got to make sure it works.

Then we can use something else to turn it on

besides doxycycline.

That said, you know, if you're a paraplegic

or you've lost your eyesight,

you'll take some probiotics to restore your gut.

Yeah, yeah.

Wild.

OK.

Talk to me about personal protocols.

And when I take a molecule,

I see what happens to me before I take something else.

I'm very scientific about it.

So it's taken me 25, 30 years to get to the point

where I'm taking a set, a corset of things.

And I know what each one does and in combination,

taking a lot more simultaneously.

And when you do that,

it's impossible to know exactly what the interactions are,

what's affecting what exactly.

So it's different and so it's hard to figure out.

If you take something, what is the effect of that molecule alone,

which is the way science is generally done?

Now, do you trust that like if I could run a similar protocol

in terms of being able to afford it,

if I were to go that crazy,

are you like, yeah, if you're taking 80 things,

but you're looking at these 36 biomarkers or whatever,

if those biomarkers are going in the right direction,

I can't tell you which one of the 80 things

is actually doing the work or what combination,

but yeah, those are the biomarkers go for it.

Hmm.

Well, I want to be cautious

because there could be long-term negative consequences

that you can't see with a blood test.

So first of all, it's not for everybody.

It does require doctor supervision and testing.

Otherwise, if you start taking that stuff,

you could react very badly.

You can measure the rate of aging by looking at how these metals change over time.

And it's called a DNA methylation clock, if you want to look it up.

I would say that there's not one clock through all of them all,

but we also, it's still an association.

The association is never conclusive in science.

The association, though,

mostly from my good friend Steve Horvath,

who developed these clocks originally,

he found that people with slower rates of change in those clocks

or had less age in those clocks tended to live longer

and have fewer diseases.

That's pretty good.

But we don't know if changing the rate of your clock midlife

makes a difference, probably.

Right.

But that's, I got it, you know, you're very rigorous

in what's bullshit and what's not.

So I'm being very careful about delineating what we know and what we don't.

His major assertion is, I'm slowing my aging down

because I believe that AI on a long enough timeline

is going to make us that humans can live forever.

Do you see a stopper in biology that will make that impossible?

Obviously, nobody knows how to do it yet.

But do you see anything where it's like, because of that,

there's no way we're going to be able to do this.

Or to you, is it just, I don't know.

It's in between.

And now, I'm not a kind of guy that I'm not stupid.

I don't want to bet against Ray Kurzweil too much.

He's been right a lot and he's talking about singularity.

Do you remember the day it's in the mid-2045, I think?

Yeah, it's something like that.

Now, I'd be the happiest person on the planet if our stuff works

and we can live forever, that's not a bad day.

But I think that being at the forefront of this change,

there is something that concerns me that may prevent us

within that time frame of becoming, you know,

living for a thousand years, at least.

Immortality, I think, is so far out there.

I think it's better to talk about,

is there going to be a small change of five years

or is it going to be hundreds of years or a thousand?

And one of the problems with aging

is that there are two types of information.

There's the methods, which is the epigenetic information.

And I know how to reverse that 75% multiple times.

Probably eventually, we'll lose information eventually.

There's no way it's 100% pure reversal.

So there's noise in the system, even if I reverse it.

But we're not very good at reversing is the genetic information loss.

Epigenetic is cool. There's a backup copy.

We've found that.

But if you've lost both copies of the gene for X in a cell,

there's no backup.

And so trying to do that for those cells is very difficult right now.

We do know how to edit genes.

We can fix genes, but doing that on a cell-by-cell basis

is beyond current imagination and technology,

even imagining technology to do that.

You can't just flood the body with stem cells or whatever.

Not currently, no, because the stem cells that people inject,

they stick around, but they don't find their niche.

You can't yet cure gray hair as far as I know by injecting stem cells.

And the reason is you have to get them into that very small,

almost microscopic niche hole where they sit.

So no, not yet.

Hopefully someone will come up with either type of stem cell

or a type of gene therapy that can go into a cell,

figure out what's missing or broken and correct the genome.

And then my stuff will come along and reverse the epigenome.

And then I can imagine living thousands of years.

Because I can imagine it.

People say, a thousand years, that's crazy.

The reason that I think it's doable is there are already

living things that last that long.

Why? Because they have very stable information.

There's a plant in the Nabib desert that lasts for,

it's been around since the pyramids, some of these plants.

Whoa.

And when you look at their genome,

they have a very special genome that protects the information

and preserves it for thousands of years.

We lose our information pretty fast.

We've kind of lost a lot of our information by age 80,

whereas these plants, and somewhere in between a whale,

preserves information even better than we do.

It's incredible.

Okay, give me one prognostication.

Where do you think this goes in the call it near term?

So what are we looking at?

What changes will we actively experience in the next three years?

And then I'll really give you some wiggle room

and tell me what it looks like 20 years from now.

The next few months are critical.

I'm going to find out if this gene therapy,

I shouldn't call it gene therapy.

It's more of a gene introduction.

The age reversal technology, if it works in people.

The world will probably find out a year from now.

I'm going to be sworn to secrecy.

I'm not even going to be able to wink.

It's that important.

But I'm going to know in a few months if this works.

But anyway, let's say a year from now,

everyone knows that it works.

This is best case scenario.

And again, it's, I think, 80, 90 percent chance.

Then the world goes nuts.

That's a chat GPT moment for biology for aging.

Because we've got it to work in humans.

Now the question is, now what do you do with that technology?

There's going to be a gold rush.

Already there are billions of dollars spread across my company

and others, competitors.

Same Altman's company, Brian Armstrong,

even Jeff Bezos is in this.

There's going to be a massive gold rush to try and catch up,

to break my patents, to get around them,

and to treat other things besides vision.

And just like AI is now,

what is it, it's only three years since chat GPT came?

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Crazy.

So there's going to be that kind of a momentum if this works,

where the world will just be listening to every result,

every pendant on this topic.

That's my prediction for the short term.

In 20 years, I think that whether I'm successful or not,

we're still going to have somebody achieve what I'm talking about.

And it could be a traversal for many organs.

And again, there's billions of dollars put to this.

Does everyone just look 25?

What does that actually look like?

It's possible that my father who looks 86 could look like us

after treating himself for a few months.

That's wild.

So you think though it's shaved maybe 30 or 40% off your life.

It's not you go back to looking 25.

Because like fat storage, the type of fat, where it's stored,

all that stuff matters is not just skin.

Exactly.

So I'm hedging my bets here saying that he's going to look middle aged.

Right.

So it's going to be far more complicated.

It's not like you take an IV drip and like death becomes her,

like her boobs get perky again and her ass tucks up

and her skin changes.

It's not, yeah, it's not going to quite be that.

We don't know.

We really don't know.

I've seen nothing to suggest that that would happen.

It's just where at the beginning,

we're at the beginning, it'd be like asking again,

the right brothers, do you imagine that there'll be a concord jet

that can fly around the world?

They're like, yeah, of course.

But we're still building the right flyer right now.

So it's coming.

No question.

We've shown the biology is there and we can do it.

But it's going to take some work to get to that kind of a molecule,

I think.

We can take a pill and truly regenerate our entire body back to being 20.

That said, you do want to stick around,

because this technology's coming.

And if you start early, now eventually imagine that the drug,

I don't know if it'll ever be over the counter,

but imagine that it is.

You can go down to your local store and get this stuff.

It might be five dollars a pill.

I don't know.

Something like that.

And start when you're 25.

And you just stay 25 for a while.

For a long while.

Deaging my father from 86 is much more challenging than starting at 25.

Yeah.

Hurry, please.

Okay.

So given that we've got to buy ourselves a little bit of time,

while the technology gets finalized, proven, all of that,

how should people be approaching their health with things

that they can do right now today?

But I want to start by saying, I do some experimental stuff

and some regular stuff.

So I'll tell you as much as I can tell everybody.

One of the reasons that I'm starting, restarting my podcast

is because every day, literally on the street,

people say, when's your podcast starting?

Yeah, brother.

It is about time.

Yeah, thanks.

I've been busy working on these drugs.

But now that they're in the clinic, I've got the time now.

You know, the future is set.

It's going to happen or not.

So I want to start re-educating everybody about what have we,

what's happened recently that everyone needs to know about?

And so that's coming.

We'll just start editing now.

So that's exciting.

Very exciting.

And it's new and improved.

So you'll see.

Also, I just want to remind everybody that the stack that I had

when my book came out in lifespan, the book lifespan,

is still true.

I'm still taking what's on page 304.

But I've added a few things which we'll talk about.

All right.

So let's start with the fundamentals that my father takes

and I take.

And we've been taking them for over a decade.

So far so good.

I'm still alive.

He's still alive, which is good.

When we started taking them, by the way, people said,

what are you taking that stuff for?

It's not known.

Right.

So now 10 years later,

the first one is NMN.

NMN do not confuse with NMNs.

Right.

Very different.

Not making much to my dismay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I heard you have podcast about sugar the other day.

Yeah.

Not a fan.

Me neither.

No.

And we should talk about what to avoid actually.

But what you should consider taking what I've started taking

with my father is NMN.

And I take a gram of that as capsules every day.

And you just want to make sure it's really pure.

It should either taste slightly sour.

Like a sour patch kid if you're in the US.

Or there's a form of it that tastes a bit like sweet popcorn.

Do you have say more?

Do you have a brand that you can recommend?

Or is that weird given your position?

Yeah.

You know what happens time is if I mention a brand,

it's all over the internet.

No, I'm used to sell millions of dollars of product.

Yeah.

That's not fair to anybody.

And even if I don't mention it, my name is all over the product as well.

So I don't want to endorse a product.

But I will guide people to say look for GMP pure.

And you can look for it.

It should be pure white.

If it's not pure white, it's not pure.

And it should taste like those two things.

And that's the best thing.

But I want to mention brands.

I don't want to be lumped in.

Already people think I sell supplements for a living,

which is BS.

I don't want to make that worse.

I'm just a scientist developing medicines.

Yeah, but you're on the internet.

And welcome.

Well, yeah, you and I know how AI is getting crazy.

It's a wild.

I can only imagine how many AI divots and clairs are out in the world.

There's a number.

And the biggest one where there were millions of views.

God, take it down last week.

Thank God.

Yeah.

But that's a future.

So everyone listening, be aware of fake versions of me giving out health advice.

So lifespan.com.

And the lifespan podcast is the original.

It's going to be real.

So there's NMN.

Next one is resveratrol.

That's a staple of mine for 15 years.

Resveratrol is that red wine molecule.

But I don't drink red wine anymore.

Serena, tell me it's better not to drink.

It's very smart.

Yep.

And you don't drink alcohol either.

So it is smart.

I'm not as funny as I used to be.

But I do have mental clarity like never before.

It's my 20s.

Now it's rough.

I love alcohol.

If it was optimizing me, I would do it all the time.

It is very enjoyable.

It's a glass.

Yeah.

So what you want to do is take out the molecule without the alcohol, which is what I do.

I take a small spoonful.

It's about a gram of resveratrol.

Again, look for white or slightly gray.

If it's brown or brownish, throw it away.

It's contaminated with other stuff that can give you diarrhea.

Fun.

Yeah.

So there's plenty of resveratrol out on the supplement.

And again, look for 98, 99% pure stuff.

And I mix that with something that dissolves it because it...

If you put it into a cup of water, it'll sink to the bottom.

And it will just go straight through your tract.

Most of it, you will not get absorbed.

You can increase that fivefold by mixing it with either olive oil or a bit of yogurt.

I do either.

Is it fat-soluble or is that white?

Yeah.

It's like brick dust.

Yeah.

Otherwise.

Yeah.

So most people don't know that.

And even clinical trials that have been done on resveratrol have failed because they just gave it to them with water.

Interesting.

Yeah.

All these little details matter.

Yeah.

Okay.

The third thing is a glucose lowering medicine.

Interesting.

Or supplement.

Why not just eat low sugar?

That too.

Is it because people don't do it?

Or even if, like me, my glucose is low because I am...

I'm a disciplined freak.

And if I decide I'm not eating something, that's that.

So my glucose lives in the mid-80s.

You're saying even there, I should take something to push it down even more.

Well, mid-80s, you could go slightly slower, a lower.

But I mean, if it was fasting 80...

No, I don't fast it 80.

If I'm fasted, it's mid to low 60s.

I see.

Okay.

Then you're good.

It might actually be...

You know, it might be too much for you to take one of these things.

You might get high vocalizedemia, though that's not common.

I, on the other hand, have diabetes in my family and without a very strict diet

and one of these medicines, I'm probably going to be about 100.

Really?

What are you eating?

And then fasted.

Well, wait, hold on.

Because you're like super veggie forward, right?

Yeah.

So you're probably intake a lot more carbs than I am.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know exactly your diet.

But I am taking a lot more vegetables than I used to for health reasons.

But I'm taking in the plants because I want the polyphenols in the plants as well as part of my diet, which meat does not have.

Okay.

Give me percentage of total calories over a year, meat versus vegetable matter.

95 plant.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I changed the plants because Serena is actually vegan and I tried it.

And within 30 days, inflammation in my body came way down and glucose came down, actually.

So, but I was, I was, I had a measure by C-reactive protein.

What were we measuring for the inflammation?

C-reactive protein was the big one that came down, but I'm also measuring things like TNF alpha, IL-1 beta, IL-6.

But yeah, C-R-P is a good way to get it down is to cut out, I cut out dairy and I cut out meat for a while.

I still occasionally eat meat.

I'm not total vegan anymore.

Yeah.

But 5% over a year, that's not a lot.

Okay.

Cool.

I will say that I'm, I have an advantage, which is that Serena is in L.A. and I'm in L.A.

Yeah.

A fair bit.

It's great food in this city.

Boston not so much.

But I also, I can afford good food.

So I buy the best quality foods, fresh, organic, good restaurants that cook, don't overcook the food.

Listen, my wife and I eat from a vegan restaurant routinely.

I just put meat on it.

I'm not kidding.

But their stuff is so flavorful that I'm like, give me more.

Yeah.

But I got to add meat.

Yeah.

So the drugs that, the drug that people typically take is metformin.

I think that's pretty well known.

And you can get that online or from a doctor, but it is prescription you need to talk to a doctor

and you want to monitor your blood glucose levels accordingly and your liver.

Now, from other podcasts, you go on and off metformin, you don't stay on metformin.

I do a couple of things that are worth noting.

The metformin that I get in the US wreaks havoc on my stomach.

I'm one of the 40% of people that have a stomach upset.

The stuff that I don't get from the US, let's put it that way.

When I'm acting like an Australian, for example, their version is coded and I don't get that problem.

So that's actually one of the reasons that I change from metformin to this other more natural

or totally natural form called burberine.

Okay.

Same idea though.

Yeah, burberine is burberine over the counter.

Yeah, yeah.

I take serena supplement because I can contrast her supplements being pure.

But yeah, burberine has been shown clinically to reduce blood glucose very similar to what metformin does.

So those are three big ones.

You good with those?

Yeah.

So my father's on that.

We recently added a couple of things to my father's regimen, not we, he did.

One is nato kinase, which is an enzyme that comes from fermented soybeans.

Just like powder format?

It's a capsule powder.

Yeah, okay.

I have cardiovascular disease in my family.

Okay.

And my father also has cardiovascular risk.

Do you have a marker that you look for?

Do you?

Are you getting...

I do ultrasounds or would be...

I do.

I'm getting...

Actually, I want to qualify.

I really, really low LDLC.

You can also reverse some plaque.

So it's not the only thing, but it's the most natural way.

And yeah, so I get carotid ultrasounds.

And look at the...

In IMT.

You know about that?

No.

Not by that name, how about that?

Yeah.

So that measures the thickness of the wall of the...

Yeah, the flexibility and all that.

I've had my artery scan before years ago.

How often do you do it?

Eally.

Okay.

And have you seen an improvement or it just stays steady?

Not yet, because I've not been on it for a year.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Report back.

Yeah.

Yeah, I will.

Good.

So there's another kind of...

I'm also taking half a gram of niacin, vitamin B3, these days,

because I have high levels of something that everybody should measure,

called LP parentheses little A.

Okay.

What is it?

It is a lipoprotein that carries cholesterol in the bloodstream

and is thought to be responsible for the deposition of cholesterol

and inflammation in the artery.

Oh, okay.

And it was first found just by association.

People who had high levels of this lipoprotein, LP little A,

were susceptible to cardiovascular disease, but over the last ten years,

it's been steadily showing that people with high levels are really at risk

in as much as having high LDL C levels.

Interesting, okay.

And so much so that there's a lot of money being spent in the pharmaceutical industry

to make a drug that will lower LP little A levels.

Of course.

And there's one syndrome that's in phase three that looks promising.

But I'm one of the people that my father is,

because of our Ashkenazi Jew heritage,

that we have a version of the LP little A that is highly expressed.

So my levels were 34 and you'd want it to be more like 10 or less.

So I immediately increased the levels of the statin.

And I know there's pluses and minuses for statins.

But I've been on a statin successfully since I was 29.

What?

Wow.

My grandmother had a stroke at 30.

Bro.

The fact that I'm still alive is good news.

Jesus.

Yeah.

Was this like a stress induced?

Was she like in World War II?

Like what are we talking about here?

It might be that.

Yeah.

Because 30 is young.

Well, she didn't have a very healthy childhood,

because she grew up after the Depression in Hungary.

Then there was the Second World War where her part of our family was wiped out.

Yeah.

She Ashkenazi as well.

No.

Ashkenazi.

We haven't been Jewish for the last four generations.

But I recently did my family tree and could trace back a thousand years.

So I'm one of probably many descendants of some of the most famous rabbis from the Middle Ages.

Didn't know that till this season.

But anyway, the point is that gene coming from that line makes me highly susceptible to heart disease.

And I've had to fight it since I was 29.

A statin.

Doesn't make you joints hurt and stuff like that?

Like I hear horror stories about stats.

Not for me.

I, of course, make sure that I'm okay on a particular drug, because we'll react differently.

And for me, the statins being great.

It's not for everybody, of course.

And they're actually alternatives now that are not statins.

There's PCSK9 inhibitors, which are really effective for lowering LDL.

And there's more to come.

The drugs that are getting there for blood pressure, for cholesterol, and alpha blood sugar are amazing.

We really shouldn't be dying from those diseases anymore.

That's wild.

Yeah.

And we're going to have cancer.

The prevention for cancer is getting to the point where getting scans, getting DNA blood tests.

We're at a point where you have to be really unlucky to get cancer.

So what I just got cancer.

Yeah.

So say more about that.

So skin cancer, I have lived my whole life with an abundance of caution around the sun.

So nobody, I've been clowned on by my wife for decades because I stay out of the sun.

I wear hats like ridiculous hats.

I've never seen you with a tan.

Bro.

So we belly need lights.

Yeah.

So what the fuck?

Like, yeah.

Any guesses?

Well, people can get lung cancer without it smoking.

There is a skin cancer.

Are you getting a skin cancer without overexposure of the sun for real?

It can happen.

For real?

For real?

Yes.

What do we...

How do we fight that fight?

What's the protocol?

Well, so the start is statins on which you've done your whole life?

Well, first of all, I grew up in Tacoma, Washington.

So there is no sun.

And then here, I've always stayed in the shade now because my wife is Greek and loves the

sun more than anything in this universe.

There's no doubt that I'm sun adjacent a lot.

So I'll be under the umbrella while my wife suntans.

But I can burn in the shade just to give you an idea of where we're at here.

So I've had to be paranoid because I will burn so easily.

Do you have any family history?

My dad has had skin cancer multiple times.

So if I did your genome...

Have you done your genome?

No.

See, because you could be susceptible in some ways.

Well, apparently I am susceptible.

Yeah, and that's another good reason for getting your genome done if you can afford it.

It can really make sure that you do the right thing.

Now, besides staying out of the sun, you can also, with your diet, maybe not prevent,

but reduce your chances of getting certain types of cancer, including skin cancer.

Like.

I thought you'd ask.

Are we in the avoid mechanism here now?

You said we should talk about what to avoid.

Oh, for sure avoid.

That's, that's the easy stuff.

Is that where we're ahead of a skin cancer?

No, I was thinking, say what you can take.

Say more.

So the polyphenols in plants.

One of the reasons I take a lot of plants, especially colored ones, serenuses,

take, eat the rainbow.

Isn't there a ton of polyphenols in olive oil?

Yes.

Okay.

So olive oil.

Most olive oil.

And green tea, matcha.

The thick, dark green stock with matcha.

But maybe I should, okay.

Those are highly anti-cancer.

And they're preventing DNA damage.

They're reducing inflammation that all can drive cancer.

Interesting.

Yeah.

About to go hard on matcha then.

So we do serenot, again, you can tell serenot play a big role in my life.

The matcha we drink every morning, at least one.

And I don't drink coffee much anymore instead.

And then throughout the day I'm drinking tea and eventually caffeine-free tea after lunch.

But I'm always with liquids and the matcha is being a great change to my life.

And I don't own shares in any matcha companies, by the way.

But I do love it.

And so the kind of foods, I mean, there are some good books about that, about how to eat

to prevent cancer or treat cancer as well.

And if you do have cancer, look into it.

We talked about ketosis and drinking ketones.

Those are...

They have anti-cancer properties.

Yeah.

There are some types of cancers.

So cancer loves sugar, just like the brain.

But they don't...

Just like the brain.

But not like the brain.

They don't like ketones.

So what often is recommended for someone, I'll give you an example, my neighbor developed

prostate cancer.

Very common in men, of course.

Most of us, my age, we have something coming along.

He went immediately, and he was an expert, I say was, because he's not around anymore.

But he specialised in oncology.

Oh, God.

And he immediately went on a keto diet and took loads of metformin.

Yeah, yeah.

We studied this back at Quest, but he died.

So the punchline here is not great unless he was hit by a bus and totally unrelated to

the prostate cancer.

He didn't die from cancer.

Really?

What do you die from?

I don't know if I should say, but it...

I'm too curious now, you got to say.

It was depression.

Really?

Oh, shit.

Okay.

Secondary effect of the cancer, though, like...

Yeah, yeah.

It's cruel.

What happened to him?

I haven't mentioned his name, so I think it's okay to talk about it.

He was on testosterone therapy, anti-testosterone therapy, which for men is tough.

And he lost libido, he lost will to live.

It was the middle of...

Incoming off of it.

No, while on the drug knocking down the levels of his hormones so that the tumor wouldn't

thrive.

Right, right, right.

He's man-hot.

Yeah.

And went into depression because of it's common.

Back.

And it was the middle of the pandemic, too.

Oh, God.

So he didn't choose to stick around.

Yo.

That's rough, okay.

So on that note, yeah, do what you can to prevent cancer.

Get yourself scanned.

Have you got that?

I...

Well, I've...

I'm obviously...

Now I get visually scanned routinely.

But no, I have not done the like full body.

I'm waiting for Peter, the amandist, to open his LA branch.

He's been trying to get me out to Florida or wherever the other ones are, which now obviously

when I got the skin cancer, I was like, damn it.

Well, we'll get that scanned, for sure.

MRI scans are good.

Serena and I get one of those every year.

And that's full body.

It won't pick up melanoma, most likely, because it's small.

So you do need to be visually scanned.

You can either get that done by your physician or by...

I believe she was in melanoma.

Melanoma, I would have been like, this is a diet problem.

This was another one I forget what it's called, but they say this is from sun exposure.

Oh, so it was on a place, which is exposed then?

Yeah, it was on the...

Base.

That's good.

That's probably...

That's good.

No, no, no.

That's not good.

I don't think I said that's good.

I said that makes sense that it was on your...

If I said that's good, I didn't mean that.

That's good.

I'm glad that you're happy for my...

No.

But it's gone now.

I can't see.

Yes, it's gone now.

Is it okay if I ask you about it?

Yeah, go crazy.

Did you treat it with any cream?

No, so we looked at that option and it was going to be like three weeks of open sore

on my face and then may not work.

And so they were saying, listen, you should just get it removed.

And then I was like, I don't trust you.

I need to go get another opinion.

And so I went and did like a deep dive on like what are the pros and cons.

And given that it itself can leave a scar because it's basically like chemotherapy,

topically.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

Hydrocytaria.

So I said, let's just go to the one that's like 98%.

Oh, I'm curious.

I'm curious.

So I did that.

Yeah.

In the replicating strand of DNA and kill cells that are dividing.

That's wild.

Yeah.

Actually, my father recently, for the same reason, skin cancer on his head, his bald head,

put the cream on.

So yeah, if you are, how do you wear it?

Go, okay.

Be careful.

Wear a hat.

Yeah.

It went okay, but you peel and it's, you know, it's not good.

Did it get rid of it?

He had it surgery as well.

Yeah.

I was like, I don't want to do the one to punch.

It's like, if I'm going to have the surgery, let's just do the surgery.

Yeah.

But he also put the cream on everywhere because...

Just in case to like get some early stature.

That's what's often done.

Got it.

And a friend of mine did it all over his face.

It was like a burning your face, but he had a few.

And just to try and get rid of what's left, they do that in case there's little ones

that you can't see.

But I'd recommend you do a blood test as well.

I've done the blood test.

Yeah.

And the great irony was like, I knew it had already been diagnosed like I'd had the biopsy.

And so when I got the blood test back and it's like, you're fine.

I was like, well, and I know this thing isn't a hundred percent because I actively have

it right now.

Yeah.

Well, that's also something that everyone should know is that these are adjuncts, that

these tests, these blood tests.

If they say you're cancer-free, it doesn't mean you're cancer-free.

Yeah.

You don't have anything that we know how to detect.

Yes.

Yeah.

And there's also false positives as well.

So I use the test as a warning sign, not as a diagnosis.

Very smart.

But still, if you can afford it and you really want to put money into your health rather

than, I don't know what, toys, then it's a good way to invest, get the full body MRI

and get a blood test for cancer.

And you may miss something, but you may pick something up as well.

But there are also probably doctors who are listening to this saying, great, everyone's

going to go out and get an MRI and find that they've got some disease that isn't real.

There is some truth to that.

But on an MRI, you can find things that are not going to kill you.

And you might want to investigate.

My personal view about that as a scientist, not as a doctor, I'm a PhD, is that more

data is better in biology and in health.

And that's why I science the shit out of myself.

And I'm also a guinea pig that I want to learn and educate.

But I don't want to shy away from learning something, even if I find a false positive.

You know, I'd rather not live in ignorance.

Yeah, no, I'm with you on that.

And then you get a baseline.

So my baseline over the last few years has been perfect health.

But if something changes, AI will, or the doctor will detect it.

So it's better to get a baseline before you sick in life.

You don't.