In this episode, Dr. Joe Rogan joins me to talk about why we don t have to age, and how we can reverse aging. Joe is a world-renowned neuroscientist, author, and podcaster, and is one of the few people in the world with a PhD in the field. He s been around a long time, and has been involved in some of the most cutting-edge research, including the discovery of the so-called Horvath Clock, which could be the key to reversing aging and potentially slowing it down to a point where we could be 80 by the time we're 80, but biologically, we're still only 30 years old! Dr. Rogan and I talk about this and much more, including his new book, Lifespan: Why We Age, and Why We Don t Have To. by David Sinclair, which is out now! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Thanks for listening, and Happy New Year! Timestamps: 3:00 - Why we age? 4:30 - How we don't have to? 5:20 - How to slow aging down? 6:00 7:00- Why we should be 80? 8:20- What we can do to reverse aging? 9:40 - Is aging reversible? 10:30- How we can turn it back? 11:15 - Is there a way to reverse it? 12: How old is too old? 13:20 15: What are we supposed to be? 16:30 17: What is the problem? 18:40- What is aging really is? 19:40 21:10 - Can we turn back the clock? 22:00+ - How old should we turn the clock back ? 23:10- Is aging a good thing? 26:00 + 27: How much time should we be left in life? 27:10 25:00 | What are you going to get? 30:00 & 27:00 Is aging back in a decade or less than a decade? 35:00? 32:00 Can we reverse it back by a decade ? 33:30 | Is it possible to be 80 or more? 36:00 // 33:00 And so on?
00:01:55.000And that's what this study suggests, is that it's not just about slowing down aging, but one day we could be 80, but biologically, 30. Now, when we're talking about the biological age, How is that measured?
00:02:10.000Is this measured by the length of the telomeres?
00:02:12.000Is this measured by physical performance?
00:02:14.000Is it measured by a combination of these factors?
00:02:22.000And what Horvath and others have discovered is that if you read the DNA, and you don't just look at the letters, A-C-T-G, if you look at what's on the letter C, cytosine is called, There are chemical modifications, and those chemicals change as we get older in very linear and predictable ways.
00:02:41.000And if you use a computer, AI, you can say, if I took your blood sample right now, I could read your DNA, look at those chemical groups on the seas, and I could say, you are, okay, you're 52, you might be 46 according to that clock, and also I could predict when you're going to die.
00:03:01.000Yeah, but the good news is, now that we know what's not just measuring aging, we actually think that clock is part of the aging process, we're learning how to reverse it too.
00:03:30.000But I'm sure there's going to be many more discovered.
00:03:32.000We've only had this Horvath clock over the last few years in humans being used widely.
00:03:38.000But I think as we use this clock, we're going to figure out that a whole bunch of stuff that we do and things that we can do and combine will not just slow aging but reverse it.
00:04:09.000Yeah, you may have to do it a few times.
00:04:13.000But the amazing thing about where we are now today with aging, and we're right on the cutting edge, so it's great to be able to share this with your listeners, is this clock changes on the DNA, right?
00:04:27.000What I'm saying in my theory of aging is that it's not the DNA that we lose.
00:04:34.000That's the old theory, you know, the old idea that antioxidants hurt the DNA. Just throw that out for a while, maybe forever.
00:04:41.000What I think is going on is that the DNA is getting modified and the cell can't read the DNA the way it used to.
00:05:31.000Resveratrol was originally thought to be an antioxidant, and it is a mild antioxidant.
00:05:35.000But the way it really works, and we know this is a fact from my lab, is that it's stimulating the body's defenses against aging and disease because it's binding to these enzymes that we work on called sirtuins, and these are the defenders of the body.
00:05:50.000And you were saying, if I remember correctly, you take resveratrol, you take a powdered form, I actually bought exactly what you take, and you mix it with yogurt in the morning?
00:07:05.000If you read the paper, and I have, it turns out one of the effects of this treatment was the reduction in the levels of a protein called CD38. CD38 resides on immune cells, and it goes up as we get older.
00:07:21.000And what they found, one of the biggest effects of the treatment was the levels of this CD38 protein went down.
00:07:28.000So what is the CD38? This is the main enzyme in our bodies that degrades NAD. NAD is required for the sirtuin defenders to work.
00:07:37.000So one possibility is that, and I'm sure it's complicated, but one way this could be working is by allowing your body to make NAD and store it rather than degrading it as we get older.
00:08:33.000Anyway, my point really is that we need to test a lot of different combinations.
00:08:38.000Include anemone, include, there's one called rapamycin, which is a little bit more risky and toxic, but there are better molecules in development.
00:08:45.000The question is what is the best combination and do you use it with exercise and fasting or is it bad to combine them all together?
00:08:54.000That's a good question too that I wanted to ask you because one of the things that came out of the podcast was input from some other people that I know that are nutrition experts and performance experts that were skeptical about metformin and they were saying that metformin, although it may have an anti-aging effect,
00:09:10.000it actually decreases physical performance in athletes.
00:09:14.000Well, there is a study that shows that.
00:09:16.000And resveratrol, too, actually, can prevent the great gains from hard exercise.
00:09:23.000So here's the solution that I think is worth trying, a solution.
00:09:27.000And that is a theme that I have in my book and in my research.
00:09:31.000And that is, we don't want to be doing everything every day, necessarily.
00:10:19.000We're right on the cutting edge of human knowledge.
00:10:21.000We don't actually know what the best thing is.
00:10:23.000But my best guess is that we want to allow the body to recover, so I don't take metformin on those days, rather than taking metformin every day like a diabetic would.
00:11:37.000So it expands the number of mitochondria.
00:11:39.000These are ancient remnants of bacteria that entered our cells.
00:11:43.000And we have less if we sit around, like we are now, and we have more if we exercise.
00:11:48.000And metformin, by telling the body, shit, we're running out of energy, the body responds and makes more mitochondria, just like exercise does.
00:11:55.000But I think if you're taking metformin and exercising, that inhibition is preventing the benefits somehow of what you get with exercise.
00:12:49.000So you'd really have to be some sort of a guinea pig to try to fuck with this stuff, to go back and forth from taking it and exercising, not taking it and exercising.
00:13:56.000It's like they can't help their impulses.
00:13:58.000It's like there's so many people like that that are obsessed with various aspects of health or performance, but they just can't get it together.
00:14:07.000Well, I would work out more if I had time.
00:14:09.000I'm usually working till midnight and after that I'm not really keen to go to the gym.
00:16:17.000The last I saw him, I was watching something on Instagram, and I saw him in a sauna with oven mitts on, riding a bike, like one of those...
00:16:28.000Echo bikes, like those rogue, you know, those aerosol bikes, riding one of those fucking things in a sauna.
00:17:09.000If you drink hard every night, you look like shit.
00:17:11.000If you look at two people, one that drinks hard and their brother who just drinks water and runs all the time, boy, that water-drinking guy looks fucking fantastic, doesn't he?
00:18:01.000I was in Africa recently, and I've got to tell you, when you see a wildebeest get attacked and chewed on for 45 minutes by a crocodile, nothing better than going back to the camp and having a beer to calm down.
00:19:42.000And actually, one of the things you realize when you're amongst these animals, it's a huge privilege for us to go for a walk without getting eaten.
00:23:02.000When you talk to him and you see his documentaries that he's put out and his films that they've done with Waterfor and now just with his organization Fight for the Forgotten, you can't help but help.
00:24:41.000It's like whatever survives, survives, and whatever doesn't becomes food, and there's just this constant cycle going on, and you're walking around.
00:29:11.000And they said, well, when you're younger, you have more blood flow to your meniscus and we would just surgically repair it and hope it would fix or perhaps today use stem cells.
00:29:22.000But most likely because of your age, it's not going to heal correctly.
00:30:01.000It's got to be personalized, tailored, measured.
00:30:04.000I think if I wanted to go on safari like that, like you did, I would have to make sure that I wasn't around any cheering assholes like that.
00:30:12.000I would have to take some sort of a solo trip and I'd have to be heavily armed.
00:30:37.000Yeah, but anyway, Les did an episode where he did Survivorman in Africa, and the scenario, he would create these fake scenarios, you know, just man-made scenarios.
00:30:49.000Like, what if you were in a hot air balloon, and the hot air balloon...
00:30:54.000Got a hole in it and crash-landed in these lion-infested territories.
00:32:04.000He would fire up that thing, which is what you use to get in the hot air balloon and scare the shit out of lions.
00:32:11.000So through the night, he would hear...
00:32:15.000He would hear that, look at the fucking zebras and shit, so he'd hear it in the middle of the night, and he'd have to fire that thing up to scare everybody the fuck away, and then after an hour or so, they'd be like, oh fuck, time to fire it up again.
00:32:28.000And so he was out there sleeping in this basket, trying, yeah, so crazy, he's so crazy.
00:32:35.000And he would also do these things where he would have virtually no food for seven, eight days, you know, and just really just get super, super skinny.
00:34:29.000So it was the origins journey, I called it.
00:34:31.000And so we went to – we started in Olduvai Gorge, which is where humans – the original fossils were found going back a few million years.
00:35:06.000That's the most insane thing, where all the religions are on top of each other, touching rocks and blessing the spring, and humans are crazy.
00:35:30.000I definitely would have, because I watched it for hours.
00:35:33.000I just sat there in my room, drinking a cocktail with my feet up, watching these people circle around this, what is that square-shaped thing in the center of Mecca?
00:35:58.000But the watching people circle, they're all wearing the religious garb, this Islamic garb that they have to wear, and they're all circling around this thing, like, for hours and hours and hours.
00:36:56.000It's built around a sacred black stone, a meteorite that the Muslims believe was placed by Abraham and Ismail Ishmael in the corner of the Kaaba, a symbol of God's covenant with Abraham and Ishmael, and by extension with the Muslim community itself.
00:37:36.000And watching this circle around this religious spot is very, very captivating.
00:37:44.000Yeah, the one that I remember most from, I think it was Jerusalem, yeah, was people touching the stone where the crucifix was thought to be, and they were lined up for hours to just touch it for a few seconds.
00:37:56.000Meanwhile, the origin of humans, the fossils, there's maybe two or three people hanging out.
00:40:52.000I'm going to probably have a lot of hate mail for saying this, but it's a fact that when you go to the Wailing Wall, as I did and put a little note in the wall, which was a great experience, by the way, there is a space for men and women.
00:46:18.000I don't know if they have video of it, but they said they saw this monkey sharpening that stone before it was actually breaking the glass with it.
00:53:58.000What was her advice in terms of how do you avoid what adults are doing wrong?
00:54:04.000Well, you know, she'd grown up during the Depression and then World War II and then the communists came into Hungary and raped a lot of people.
00:55:52.000I'm sure she spent most of the time drunk as well.
00:55:54.000Did you see that article that was yesterday where they were interviewing an Australian...
00:56:00.000A guy who's a doctor or a scientist, he was talking about climate change, and he was saying that we have to start eating human bodies, and that human bodies are very nutritious, and that we just put them in the ground.
00:56:16.000I was reading it and I was like, okay, is this guy trolling?
00:56:23.000But his advice was, our dependence on meat is ruining, like in some places where they're stripping the rainforest to make room for cattle grazing.
00:56:37.000He was saying that we're getting rid of perfectly good meat every time we put someone in the ground.
00:56:43.000Well, we are, but to suggest that sounds insane to me.
00:57:49.000Speaking of the food supply, one of the things people worry about if we all live longer is we're going to run out of food and run out of space.
00:57:55.000And one of the things I address in the book is what really will happen.
00:57:58.000If you do the calculations, if you look at human history, that is not going to happen.
00:58:03.000I'm of the strong belief that we can engineer our way out of just about any problem.
00:58:08.000Probably the only thing we can't engineer our way out of is if we get hit by a five mile wide meteorite.
00:58:13.000But everything else I think we're going to be...
00:58:15.000You think climate change we're going to be able to engineer our way out of that?
00:58:18.000Well, I don't think we can stop climate change at this point.
00:58:28.000And so I don't think it's going to be the end of us, but it's going to be a challenge to continue to survive and proliferate as a species in the face of all of those costly things.
00:58:42.000And that's the biggest problem of climate change, besides species losses, the expense.
00:58:47.000And there's only a certain amount of human capital that we have to spend, and we call that money.
00:58:52.000And that's one of the reasons that I'm excited about extending people's health and lifespan is that that'll save tens of trillions in the globe each year.
00:59:01.000And that's money that can be put to combating global warming, saving species, besides wonderful people who donate their earnings as well.
00:59:11.000But really, to solve the big problems on the planet, one of them is to solve what we can do with all the frail elderly people that are coming every year more and more.
00:59:23.000He could be in a nursing home like his mother was, whereas now he's hiking in the jungles looking at watching gorillas with his five grandkids.
01:00:16.000What has happened though is that his outlook on life has changed.
01:00:20.000He was depressed, not just because he was fearful of getting old and my mother was sick at the time, but now he's looking forward to another 10 years of vigorous life, traveling.
01:00:30.000And when you're healthy, you're happy.
01:00:33.000So when he was depressed, was he sedentary?
01:01:51.000You know what you have to do and what the consequences are of not doing what you have to do.
01:01:56.000In terms of being disciplined and being healthy and just meditation and making sure you understand the consequences also of not doing the work that you're supposed to do in terms of the way you feel about yourself, your self-respect.
01:02:12.000The way you just feel about your sense of self-satisfaction.
01:02:17.000To me, it takes a big hit when I'm lazy.
01:02:20.000It takes a big hit when I don't get things done.
01:02:23.000And I don't expect everybody to do the same things that I do or have the same sort of work ethic.
01:02:29.000I don't want to say work ethic because that implies some sort of...
01:02:35.000It's more of just the idea of what you want to accomplish, like your tasks.
01:02:40.000Everyone has their own idea of what… But if you enjoy doing something and you're working towards something, I feel like… There's more purpose to life.
01:02:51.000You have more satisfaction in accomplishing tasks.
01:02:54.000And that's one of the things that's been highlighted when you read books on happiness and studies on happiness.
01:03:00.000One of the things that seems to be most important is goal setting.
01:03:03.000Goal setting, working towards those goals, and achieving progress.
01:03:07.000These are critical components to happiness for human beings and without them, there's this aimless sort of drifting of life.
01:03:14.000People, for the most part, obviously everyone's different, but for the most part, people don't find satisfaction in just an aimless sort of drifting existence.
01:03:35.000I'm so less stressed than I was in my 20s and 30s.
01:03:39.000And anyone who's listening who's in their 20s and thinks that they're, you know, way better than a 50-year-old, I can tell you from experience, like you, Joe, when I was in my 20s, I thought I knew everything, or at least I looked at myself as a 50-year-old and I thought, what an old fart.
01:03:55.000It's not like that at all, especially with today's, you know, health and, you know, 50-year-olds are just like they were, like a 30-year-old was.
01:04:04.000There was no 52-year-olds like me when I was 20. They didn't exist.
01:04:11.000Well, it's been talked about, I think it was in The New Yorker, that this movie Cocoon, I don't know if everyone's seen it, but it's a pretty interesting movie where these 50, 60-year-olds were given the fountain of youth, and they still look old, but it was really supposed to be quite funny to see these older people with gray hair jumping in the pool and acting 30 years old.
01:05:08.000So in the future, 90 will feel like 50 and 40. Well, we were talking about Laird earlier.
01:05:13.000And Laird, I think, is 55 years old and just as fucking fit as a human being can be.
01:05:19.000And he's doing crazy shit where he's got this whole exercise routine that he does inside the pool where he brings like 70-pound dumbbells.
01:05:29.000And he carries it with one arm and swims across the pool in the other.
01:05:33.000You know, he does two-handed dumbbell things at the bottom of the pool and leaps to the surface, catches a breath of air, drops back down to the bottom again, leaps to the surface while he's carrying these dumbbells.
01:05:42.000I mean, just ruthless, rigorous exercise at 55 years old.
01:05:47.000Well, there'll be a time when you can't really tell how old somebody is, especially when we figure out how to reprogram the body to be young again.
01:05:53.000And it's going to be such a great world when people with 80 years of experience can continue to run companies and be teachers and educate the young people.
01:06:03.000Now, there's a bias, though, against the elderly.
01:06:05.000We've always had this in society, and we have to overcome that.
01:08:28.000No, actually, this is the problem with the other end of the spectrum, which is I was too young to get a medicine that could help me when I get older.
01:09:07.000Right, but shouldn't – isn't – but isn't there some – there's doctors that are arguing that the idea of high cholesterol, whether it's LDL, HDL, whether it's good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, this sort of uniform approach – People with high cholesterol need to take something that lowers their cholesterol.
01:09:26.000And doctors that I've talked to are saying, well, not necessarily.
01:09:30.000You could be incredibly healthy, especially if you're not sedentary, with relatively high cholesterol if everything balances itself out.
01:09:40.000If you have the appropriate ratio of HDL to LDL, do you have the appropriate ratio or is it out of whack?
01:11:30.000And this is what my lab and others figured out in the first few years of the 21st century.
01:11:37.000We figured out that these genes that extend lifespan, these sirtuin genes, are activated by being hungry, in part by raising NAD levels, which NMN will mimic the effect of.
01:11:50.000So being hungry actually raises your lifespan in some sort of way.
01:12:49.000That means that we can have our cake and eat it too, so to speak, as long as the cake doesn't have a lot of sugar in it.
01:12:55.000Now, when you are on this protocol of restricted eating plus metformin, when do you take what, and when do you exercise, and how do you balance it out?
01:14:45.000Nothing special, just on my phone, have a look.
01:14:48.000Okay, so you just have a look at what your resting heart rate is, how much activity, how far you're walking, how many calories you're burning, that kind of deal?
01:14:58.000And I'm happy to say my resting heart rate's really low, which means things are going okay so far for me, even though I don't do enough exercise, as you rightly point out.
01:15:08.000I think my resting heart rate's 46. That's very good.
01:15:13.000It's pretty amazing for a guy that barely does exercise.
01:15:49.000Now, what is the difference between the effects of NMN and IV NAD, which is very popular?
01:15:58.000There's people that take IV NAD, and I've never done it, but we've talked about doing it many times and having it brought in here, and sometimes people do it, and they do it very quickly.
01:16:08.000When you do it, it only takes 10 minutes, but it hurts like hell.
01:16:11.000Apparently, it gives you, like, stomach knots, and you feel terrible.
01:16:35.000Now, let's get to the science in a minute, but what I found was, so it was a shot in the butt with some NAD. So why didn't they do it intravenously?
01:18:00.000But what's interesting about this field is that because people have access to information through podcasts like yours and through the internet now that papers...
01:18:08.000You can go to what's called PubMed Central and find papers.
01:18:11.000People are educating themselves just like scientists used to and they can go to the doctor or go to the internet and try experiments on themselves.
01:18:25.000But I find it really interesting that we're in a new phase of society where people can learn more in many cases than their doctors actually know.
01:18:34.000Sure, in particular when it comes to nutrition, because that's one of the things that I've found that's shocking when you talk to some doctors and you talk to them about nutrition, particularly supplementation, and they'll say things like, well, you can get everything from a good diet.
01:19:00.000What are you getting from that good diet?
01:19:02.000How are you getting that vitamin B12 in high doses?
01:19:04.000Where are you getting your C? Where are you getting your D3? What are you getting, huh?
01:19:08.000Where are you getting your essential fatty acids?
01:19:10.000What's the optimal level of essential fatty acids?
01:19:13.000And they don't have a fucking clue what they're talking about.
01:19:16.000You know, there's so many doctors that go through their entire medical, you know, orthopedic surgeons or what have you, they go through their entire medical school with like maybe four or five hours of nutrition research.
01:25:52.000I mean, I don't think you should, you know, we should somehow or another find out Whether there's a way to test if this raw milk is fresh enough for people to eat.
01:26:06.000But if it is, people who live on farms have been drinking raw milk since the beginning of time.
01:27:28.000A friend of ours hung some yeast, what is it, some stuff in a tree, collected the yeast, brought it back to the U.S. and shared it with us.
01:27:39.000Well, he put some wet dough up in a tree and left it there for a few days and caught this wild yeast up in the I think?
01:28:01.000Well, I'm trying to keep my blood glucose levels steady, not spike too much.
01:28:06.000That's pretty clear that that's not healthy.
01:28:08.000And just eating a bunch of bread will be a good way to spike that.
01:28:12.000One of the things that I've heard about the French and Italians in general is that they eat their bread with either butter or olive oil.
01:28:20.000And that these healthy fats that you're getting along with the bread is one of the reasons why it doesn't have the same sort of health hit.
01:28:30.000And then the complex glutens, you know, the engineered wheat that we have.
01:28:37.000When you eat pasta in Italy, it has a different effect on your body.
01:28:44.000So there are a number of people that I know, maybe people you know too, who are putting glucose monitors on their arm here to see what foods they react to.
01:28:53.000Rhonda Patrick's been doing this for a while.
01:28:55.000And actually, I asked her, what's the worst food you've seen in your body to spike glucose?
01:29:15.000Well, there's a thing that you can do with potatoes, right, where you boil them and then cool them off and then reheat them and apparently has a profound effect on the way it impacts your blood sugar levels.
01:29:59.000And it has a much more healthy effect on your blood glucose levels and doesn't spike you in the way that just a straight up baked potato would.
01:30:11.000This would be coming from Chris Kresser.
01:31:02.000The magic of this plan leads to its clinical efficacy is the amount of resistant starch.
01:31:08.000Resistant starch is a type of starch that is indigestible to us but feeds our microbiome.
01:31:13.000When a potato is heated and then cooled, a significant amount of its starch is retrograded into resistant starch.
01:31:21.000This means that the effect on blood sugar is greatly dampened.
01:31:25.000The potato can even be reheated and it will still retain its resistant starch content.
01:31:31.000The nourishment to our gut biome and the subsequent metabolic benefits cannot be overstated.
01:31:37.000I've seen this be crucial in some patients who have stalled on a low-carb or keto eating plan, but still have significant body fat left to lose.
01:31:48.000Historically, resistant starch would have been present in most roots, tubers, unripe bananas, plantains, etc., but is often devoid in our current diets.
01:33:01.000I think we're attracted to it because they're colorful.
01:33:03.000But what our bodies get out of it is that these chemicals go into our bloodstream and they turn on our defenses against disease to survive.
01:33:12.000Why did that evolve or potentially evolve?
01:33:16.000I think because when our food supply was stressed, we need to get ready for adversity because we probably run out of food.
01:33:22.000And if you're a bird or some other dumb animal, dumber animal, or even a yeast cell, how are you going to know if your food supply is going to run out?
01:33:32.000So these chemicals are a heads up that adversity is coming.
01:33:36.000So if you eat a lot of these chemicals through, say, red wine, which is stressed grapes and other things like that, blueberries, these chemicals, they're probably not working mainly through antioxidant activity.
01:33:47.000They're giving us this stress heads up.
01:33:49.000Isn't there, there's, that's a controversial thing, the red wine thing, correct?
01:33:54.000Like whether or not red wine, the actual compound of resveratrol is where we're getting our benefit from because it's apparently a very small amount of resveratrol in red wine.
01:34:35.000But wine, if you don't have too much of it, will have a concentrated amount of these xenohermetic molecules like resveratrol and quercetin.
01:35:23.000So they were immune to eating shitty food, like the negative aspects of eating shitty food?
01:35:28.000Yeah, this was 2003. That's why it hit all the newspapers, because it was the first molecule that was safe and could mimic the effects of fasting or caloric restriction without actually having to be hungry.
01:36:01.000I'm taking a higher dose because I've looked at human clinical data and I think that a higher dose may be required to have an even better effect on longevity.
01:36:13.000When we opened up these mice, maybe I shouldn't have said that, when we examined those mice, carefully put them to sleep for scientific purposes, It was clear that they were healthier.
01:36:31.000Their livers were like a healthy, lean, young mouse.
01:36:35.000And when we looked at their metabolism, it was like a younger mouse.
01:36:39.000So let me ask you this then, because you take statins.
01:36:42.000If you are fairly convinced because of the research of the positive benefits of resveratrol in healthy aging and healthy metabolism in their arteries, why are you taking statins?
01:36:54.000Because you know that there are some negative effects of statins.
01:41:21.000Dr. Matthew Walker was a guy that I had on my podcast who studies sleep and he was fascinating and it changed my entire opinion about what's necessary.
01:41:31.000There's a direct correlation between limited amounts of sleep and Alzheimer's.
01:45:29.000And then you're drinking by the fire, all that kind of stuff.
01:45:32.000But it's all about shock your body, get your body out of complacency.
01:45:35.000And our lifestyle, everything we do, everything we buy, everything on TV that's being advertised to make your life better is shortening your lifespan by making it easier for our bodies to exist.
01:48:08.000You could take NMN, which we've shown in mice, protect them against the effects of radiation.
01:48:13.000And that's one of the things we've talked to NASA about for getting to Mars and back safely.
01:48:18.000So when I'm on a flight, I take some NMN in the expectation that it's going to boost my body's ability to prevent those changes to the clock.
01:48:26.000Now, is there a commercially available NMN that you would suggest if someone wants to purchase it somewhere?
01:48:34.000Well, so I don't divulge company names, and there's two reasons for that.
01:48:39.000One is I haven't tested them, so I actually literally don't know.
01:48:42.000But the other is that I want to stay above the fray and not get involved.
01:48:48.000But there are, if people want to go Google and go look online, they can find commercially available NMN? Right.
01:48:56.000So yeah, again, I've got a number of pages in the book on that, so it's all laid out.
01:49:45.000Anyway, so the NMN, there are companies that sell it.
01:49:48.000It's more expensive than another molecule that's related called NR or nicotinamide riboside, which is also what the body can use to boost NAD levels.
01:50:00.000And they've both been shown in animals to boost the sirtuins and help those animals be healthier in old age and reverse some aspects of aging like endurance, loss of endurance, that kind of thing.
01:50:11.000Protect the eye, protect the hearing as well.
01:50:14.000So we don't know if it works in humans.
01:50:24.000Do you have any high hopes for things like CRISPR? Things where there's going to be genetic alterations, and they are starting to do some experience.
01:50:35.000You have a big smile on your face right now, so I'll let you talk.
01:50:39.000Well, so I'm a geneticist, and I'm just down the hall from George Church, who's in my department at Harvard.
01:50:46.000I'm a big believer in CRISPR in the sense that it will revolutionize medicine.
01:50:51.000Can you explain it to people who don't know what it means?
01:50:54.000So CRISPR is an acronym for basically a system that is from bacteria that they use to kill and destroy the DNA of invading organisms like a virus.
01:51:08.000But we can now use that system to cut and change our own genomes.
01:51:13.000It's basically a DNA cutting enzyme that doesn't cut randomly.
01:51:19.000You can give it a barcode in the form of what's called RNA molecule that tells where that enzyme will cut in the genome.
01:51:26.000Let's say you, Joe Rogan, have a terrible gene that's causing heart disease.
01:51:58.000And they're doing some experiments on human beings.
01:52:02.000I know there was something that they were doing, I believe, somewhere in Asia, if I remember correctly, I believe it was China, where they had done some manipulation to people to help prevent AIDS. And in the process of doing so,
01:52:19.000they may have boosted intelligence, or the potential for intelligence.
01:52:24.000Which was so convoluted that my puny little brain cannot understand the study.
01:52:29.000I had to go over the same paragraph like four or five times just to try to figure out what the fuck they were saying.
01:53:55.000And I think it's because we live in a world with a 24-hour news cycle.
01:53:58.000But isn't that also because it's being – if it was during the Bush world, I mean, the protests would really take place if it was done here.
01:54:06.000The thing about things that are done in China or overseas, like, huh, it's like it's so far away, like, well, let's keep an eye on them.
01:55:04.000Just Google my name in BioArchive, B-I-O-R-X-I-V. The reason that's interesting is that what we're showing is, in mice at least, we can reverse the age of the retina and restore the vision of old mice.
01:55:48.000And what would you do in those clinical trials?
01:55:50.000So we'd reprogram the eye to be young again.
01:55:52.000So we now know that there's a set of genes called reprogramming factors.
01:55:55.000Also known as Yamanaka factors that are named after this Japanese fellow who won the Nobel Prize in 2012. These factors are used all over the world, even probably in high schools, to reprogram skin cells, other cells to be what we call pluripotent stem cells.
01:56:11.000These are cells that can be used to make new organs or new blood cells.
01:56:15.000But what people hadn't tried until recently was, can you do this in a living animal or are you just going to mess it up?
01:56:23.000And what we found out is that if you do it the wrong way, you mess up the animal and it'll die.
01:56:27.000But what we've shown for the first time in this paper is you can do it in a safe way.
01:56:32.000And not only that, reverse the clock, make the cells young and restore how they work and get back vision.
01:57:38.000That was the idea that people were, the resistance to malaria was that trait from people that evolved in the area where they would get malaria was also what led to people getting sickle cell, correct?
01:59:00.000In fact, the same drug that I took when I was in Africa, called doxycycline, is the same drug we can feed to the mice, turns on the reprogramming genes for a few weeks, restores their vision back to a young mouse, and then we just take away the doxycycline, an antibiotic, and the mice have their vision back.
01:59:16.000And how long does it take before it starts deteriorating again?
01:59:19.000We don't know yet, but we think that it's permanent.
01:59:22.000Because the age of the cells has gone back.
01:59:35.000That you'll get a delivery of this virus, you'll take the antibiotic for a few weeks, be fully rejuvenated, and the doctor says, come back in a couple of decades.
01:59:45.000We'll give you some antibiotic in a couple of decades.
01:59:47.000But then it gets really weird if you engineer your children to have this system.
01:59:52.000If that ever happens, let's imagine it could.
01:59:54.000We could do this right now with technology.
01:59:56.000And you have people engineered to be able to be reversed in their age.
02:00:00.000Or let's say they have an accident and their optic nerve gets damaged or they lose their hearing from a bomb or something, a spinal injury.
02:00:09.000Give them an IV of antibiotics, and they become just like an embryo.
02:00:14.000They can rejuvenate, they can regrow their optic nerve, regrow their spine, fixed, back like new.
02:00:20.000The vision thing, do you think that we're going to see that in our lifetimes?
02:00:23.000I mean, is this something that you're going to see that's going to be available to the general public?
02:00:27.000Well, so I'm an entrepreneur, as we discussed before.
02:00:32.000And so one of the companies that I've started is exactly that, raised money to be able to make this virus.
02:00:40.000And we'll hopefully, with the FDA's approval, inject it into people's eyes.
02:00:44.000Now, first, it won't just be guys like you.
02:00:47.000First of all, we have to go into an area where it's FDA-approvable, which is a disease like glaucoma, which is pressure in the eye, or macular degeneration.
02:01:13.000So one of the things we also did in this paper that we've put online Is we pinched the optic nerve and what normally happens is it just degrades.
02:01:43.000Do you think that that's something that inside of his lifetime they could see something, the use of this technology that could regenerate his eye?
02:01:50.000Well, I get a lot of emails, so I'm not really trying to over-promise anything.
02:01:55.000What I think is possible is that initially it'll be used for disease, a chronic disease.
02:02:01.000Then it'll be used for injuries like that, but fresh injuries.
02:02:04.000I think it's probably likely to work better if it's fresh.
02:02:08.000I don't know where this technology is going.
02:04:14.000Now, we've done glaucoma, which is an old injury.
02:04:18.000So theoretically, what we could do is, at least with the existing nerves, if they're still attached, we should be able to rejuvenate those and make them work better.
02:04:26.000Because he has some vision in his eye.
02:04:43.000Well, we're literally reversing not just the effects of aging, but aging itself.
02:04:48.000So if I gave you those retinas, very little retinas, here you go, Joe, and you were a scientist, you could look at that retina and analyze it molecularly, measure its clock.
02:05:32.000So there's a lab at the Salk Institute, Juan Carlos Belmonte.
02:05:35.000Who may win the Nobel Prize for his work on this.
02:05:38.000In 2016 and a couple of years since, he's been showing that it doesn't just rejuvenate old mice, it actually is also rejuvenating the skin.
02:05:48.000If he puts it on a wound that's in an old mouse, that mouse will heal better.
02:05:53.000Now that doesn't prove wrinkles, but it does prove the skin can be rejuvenated as well.
02:05:59.000So there could be possibly some sort of a treatment to skin, maybe a re-injuring.
02:06:05.000There's this thing that they do, I think it's called a vampire facial.
02:06:09.000They take platelet-rich plasma and then they micro-needle your entire face and then they somehow or another apply this platelet-rich plasma on To the areas that have been micro-needled and it has some sort of an effect in increasing collagen and elasticity of the skin and tightening of the skin.
02:06:54.000There are factors that many of which we haven't discovered or identified that exist that you can rejuvenate.
02:07:00.000And I would bet that they're working most likely through this reversal of the clock.
02:07:06.000And so one of the things we're doing in my lab is taking what are called exosomes which exist in these preparations and seeing if they reverse the clock.
02:07:29.000Well, it's a weird thing, the exosomes and stem cells, and there's a new product called Wharton's Jelly that's also very effective and potent because there's not a lot of papers on these things.
02:07:43.000The research on it, some of it's a little shaky, but the efficacy, at least anecdotal efficacy, is pretty substantial, and I'm one of those pieces of anecdotal evidence.
02:08:23.000I'm glad you brought up the study of the old mice and the young mice where they put the blood in the old mice and then the old mice started behaving like young mice and the blood of the old mice and the young mice and the young mice started behaving like they were tired.
02:08:38.000Because there's a company in Northern California that's supposedly doing this with humans, where they're injecting people with the blood of old people, or young people rather, some sort of transfusion.
02:09:12.000I do not remember the name of it, but I remember they were erroneously linked to Peter Thiel, and then Peter denied that he's ever used that.
02:09:20.000You know, the billionaire founder of PayPal, who I've met, who's a wonderful man.
02:13:21.000So senescent cells we've known for decades exist in the body, but what was not clear was whether they cause aging.
02:13:28.000Now it's pretty clear, from animal studies at least, is that we get lots of these accumulating and that they do cause aging.
02:13:35.000And one of the best experiments that was done from Mayo Clinic was to genetically delete the senescent cells that accumulated in an old mouse.
02:14:02.000I want to mention that in the biological clock, when I was saying that the clock is part of the aging process, what we think is that as we get older, and it's detailed a lot more in my book, so if people read it, they'll understand a lot more what I'm saying,
02:14:17.000but this clock is messing up the cell's ability to be what it used to be.
02:14:49.000We think that the ultimate problem for the cell, when it loses its total identity or gets a long way towards that, is it shuts itself down because it says, fuck, I don't even know what I am anymore.
02:15:24.000So getting back to senolytics, these drugs are designed to be a pill or an injection into your joint to kill off these zombie cells, these senescent cells, and theoretically rejuvenate the tissue and reverse that aspect of aging.
02:15:38.000And that's another treatment, like reprogramming, that could be a one-shot delivery and take you back a decade.
02:18:10.000And so much is happening in our lifetime that I thought was just imaginary, or for the future.
02:18:16.000Now the question is, are we going to reap all the benefits of this, or are we going to be the last generation to lead a normal human lifespan?
02:18:22.000I think that we already have things we can do in our daily lives, just in lifestyle and in molecules you can take, that give us a very good chance of living beyond what's naturally possible.