Lex Friedman is a martial arts black belt and AI scientist. He's also a good dude and a good friend. We talk about how to find the right partner and what it takes to be a good one, and what to do when you don't know what to look for in a partner. We also talk about what it's like to be an AI scientist in the 21st century, and why it's important to have a good relationship with someone who's good at what they do. And we talk about a new language that's being developed in Japan called Esperanto, which is a language that doesn't require any sort of dictionary or other language, just a bunch of letters and sounds like it's a complete new thing kids would learn from playing Call of Duty. And it's kind of cool. Joe Rogan Experience: Train By Day, by Night, All Day All Day. The Joe Rogans Experience: A Podcast by Day, A Podcast By Night, By Night All Day by Joe and David. Produced in Los Angeles, CA and edited by Alex Blumberg. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art by Jeff Kaale. We are working on transcribing this episode of the podcast and putting it on SoundCloud. Please rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast on whatever you're listening to, and tag us in your podcast and review us on Apple Podcasts! If you like it, please tag us and we'll send us a review and tell us what you think about it's the best thing you've heard so we can post it on the pod. And we'll be sure to include it in next week's episode on the next episode! :) Thank you for listening to the pod! Subscribe, rating, reviewing, rating and reviewing it in the pod, and spreading it everywhere else on your feed! XOXO, <3 - Joe, David, and much more! Love, Joe, Kristy, Krista, Gav, Jai, Sarah, JG, and Kami, Jeezy, JUICYeeeeeayeeeeeeEEEeee, etc. - Tom, Jen, Joe and Kacchus, Jaxon, etc., etc. - Thank you so much, Amy, J.J. & Kami
00:01:26.000Well, what I also didn't know about him is he's been too busy to have much of a social life, so you and I and everyone else should try and find him a good woman.
00:01:40.000That's one of the keys to success and happiness in life, and it's so hard to find the right one.
00:01:47.000And maybe sometimes for some people, hard to recognize if you found the right one, even if you found them.
00:01:53.000Well, the problem is that we're finding them in our teens and 20s often when we have no idea what the other sex or the partner that you're looking for really is.
00:02:00.000And I have a theory that when you're young, you look for the opposite.
00:02:02.000You're attracted by what you cannot do.
00:02:05.000But as you get older, you really want to go for someone who's more like you.
00:03:15.000If someone concocted a universal language, a language that every country could adopt and understand, and they did so in...
00:03:24.000You could do it in the form of a game, where it would be like, as you're getting better at it, you score points, and you do better.
00:03:34.000Say if you're playing a Call of Duty type game, and in that game, in order to increase levels of the game, you must learn this new language.
00:03:42.000And this language is an image-based language that interprets intent through some sort of emoji character system that doesn't require English or kanji or any sort of letters or any sort of way that we interpret sounds and language.
00:04:54.000Well, it's similar to the turn of the 19th to the 20th century where all these gadgets showed up and people were hyper-stressed and agitated with anxiety.
00:05:01.000And we're seeing the same now with this super change.
00:05:03.000And the kids adapt, but a lot of people our age, we're roughly the same age, are just trying to play catch-up.
00:05:44.000If someone says like, if they make a statement and they say that's no cap or whatever, that means like I'm not lying or they'll call out you're lying.
00:05:54.000It's just this is one of these things that's come out of internet culture that you just sort of have to like, what the fuck are they talking about?
00:07:09.000Well, you said that, like, it was years ago that you said that.
00:07:12.000That picture we pulled up, I was trying to think who asked this, where there was two people and a turtle in between it, like, a week or two ago.
00:07:37.000It's fun, but stressful for a lot of people.
00:07:39.000Well, and for your study, for the study of human life extension and anti-aging, when you look at the stresses that are completely, they're very novel.
00:07:50.000To the human experience, like the stresses of social media, the stresses of cell phone use, the stresses of blue light, like staring at screens at night, like all that stuff.
00:08:00.000How much of an effect do you think that's having on people and have we even quantified that yet?
00:08:05.000We are quantifying it, and it's having a real negative effect.
00:08:08.000Mental health issues is going to be the medical problem of the 21st century, no question.
00:08:13.000There are companies that are doing these remote video chats with a psychologist or psychiatrist.
00:09:20.000There's no stationary because we've got problems that we've already created from our own technology that we have to solve with better technology.
00:09:26.000So we're a species that once we've picked up that stick, we're on this path.
00:09:30.000And those things that got us here, there are actually four traits that I can think of that got us here, that make us different from all other animals.
00:09:37.000Those are not just what got us here, they're our biggest threat.
00:09:41.000But we also have to use them to get us out of this problem.
00:10:53.000This is the Ecuadorian rainforest, these people.
00:10:56.000When you look at their feet, I think it's soft ground, and they're walking around in dirt all the time, and their feet splay out.
00:11:07.000And they develop the ability to like push off of things with their feet.
00:11:11.000So it's the exact opposite of the way human beings develop bunions where they smush their feet into like these shoes that don't really fit human feet.
00:11:21.000And then they get these weird bunions where their toes are pointed towards the other toes.
00:12:08.000We are this pathetic physical species that has built tools that got us here but are actually messing with our minds.
00:12:14.000The blue light, the chairs we sit in, the food we eat all the time, these have made us a weaker species.
00:12:20.000So what I'm hoping to do with my research and some companies I'm building...
00:12:24.000Is to get us out of that problem and engineer our way out and also make wellness and health a thing that people actually can take care of themselves.
00:12:35.000There's one thing that people can do and exercise is a good one, right?
00:12:39.000Because of the fact that we live these sedentary lifestyles and most of the time people are sitting down and there's a lot of time spent standing at screens.
00:12:47.000How important do you think it is to get out and do something and what kind of an effect does that have?
00:12:52.000Like what kind of quantifiable effect does that have on life extension?
00:13:16.000You can't just start when you're 80, although it helps, but it's not the best.
00:13:20.000Do you want to just get out of the chair?
00:13:22.000People say walk, but I think it's better to lose your breath, become hypoxic, you know, hypoxia chambers or hyperbaric chambers that stress the body a little bit.
00:13:29.000So run for 10 minutes a few times a week.
00:13:36.000So it's a fact that people who regularly ride bikes, and I think it was something like up to 80 miles a week, they would have a 40% less chance of having a heart attack than someone who didn't do that.
00:14:09.000And we know that if you do these things to animals in controlled settings, they live longer, a lot longer, 20, sometimes 30 percent, because they're healthier for longer.
00:14:18.000They don't get cancer and heart disease and dementia.
00:14:21.000So I don't know why we don't all do that.
00:14:24.000I just think we just like to sit around and eat.
00:14:34.000So when you talk about how eating one meal a day can extend your life, is it because when you're eating all the time, you're taxing your digestive system, which taxes your resources?
00:14:46.000Or is there some sort of a mechanism that leads to decay of the human body from overconsumption?
00:15:08.000And they give our body resilience and fight aging and slow down what we can now measure, the biological clock.
00:15:15.000So I can take your blood, or actually now we've developed a very cheap test, just a swab, to be able to tell you very accurately how old you are, not based on how many times the earth goes around the sun.
00:17:06.000I visited them before COVID, some of my good friends over there.
00:17:09.000And what they do is they put you—I don't know if yours is the same, but this is a really big room, and you can fit about 20 people in there.
00:17:15.000And they give you oxygen, so extra oxygen, and then they raise the pressure up.
00:17:28.000And then the decreased oxygen makes you feel hypoxic, like running.
00:17:31.000So this is a way of getting, in my view, exercise without having to exercise.
00:17:35.000And then you turn on these longevity genes.
00:17:37.000And I would bet, though I haven't proven it yet, though I am working on it, is that some of these genes that we've discovered, the sirtuins, or discovered to be involved in aging, we didn't discover them, Are activated by this hyperbaric chamber.
00:17:48.000And what they showed in this paper that got probably you excited as well as everyone else is they looked at the ends of chromosomes which shorten over time the telomeres and actually got longer after this therapy.
00:18:00.000And that is a sign of reversing aging.
00:18:02.000It's not as good as the clock that I'm developing, but it is a good sign.
00:18:05.000And they decided after examining these people from 90 days doing 60 sessions that it gave you the equivalent of 20 years decrease in biological age because of the length of the telomeres,
00:18:59.000And the reason that it's not believed by a lot of people, and I'm kind of skeptical to some extent, is that telomeres get shorter when cells divide.
00:19:17.000The test isn't very accurate, whereas the one, what's called the epigenetic age test, or Horvath clock, named after my good friend Steve Horvath, that's much more accurate.
00:19:26.000That doesn't jump around unless you actually do something to either slow down or reverse ageing.
00:19:30.000So I would say that you want to do this test.
00:20:35.000I don't need to make a lot of money, but what I need to do, what I want to do, is to make everybody aware of their health and how to benefit.
00:20:43.000I mean, you and I, we read a lot about this.
00:21:14.000Lives are irrelevant how many birthday candles you have.
00:21:16.000And what's really cool about it is that we didn't know until recently that if you do certain things like hyperbaric oxygen chamber or there's some things you can inject into yourself in one study, you can reverse human aging.
00:21:27.000What's the things you can inject into yourself?
00:21:30.000Alright, I'm not endorsing doing this, but there is a study that came out looking at this clock that we'll measure for people for not a lot of money.
00:21:38.000And so this group, they put a few things into the body of patients, and it was for a few weeks.
00:21:44.000And they measured the clock, and they measured the thymus, which shrinks as you get older.
00:21:49.000So I know you want to know what they are.
00:24:33.000And the reason for that, I think, is metformin interferes with your energy production in these little packages in the cell called mitochondria, the battery packs.
00:24:42.000Is there an ability to accentuate your energy in some sort of other way, like with stimulants?
00:24:56.000I like to do this thing with your hands.
00:24:57.000Well, you know, I'm always – I'm a Harvard professor, and I'm cognizant that they will watch this.
00:25:02.000So I'm not prescribing anything, but I take this molecule NMN, which raises NAD, which we've shown in my lab and others, that it boosts mitochondrial activity, gives more energy, ATP, in animals.
00:25:13.000And we're doing human trials right now, and it looks promising.
00:25:15.000So I try to counteract my metformin with that molecule.
00:25:29.000But long story short, I occasionally, you know, I'll skip a metformin if I'm going to work out, just, you know, in an abundance of caution.
00:25:37.000But this controversy is way overblown, as you can tell.
00:25:40.000Oh, so you could literally work out and then take your metformin, so then you don't have to worry about the negative effects because they're temporary.
00:25:50.000So you're only dealing with a very small number, 5%, and then you could mitigate this by just taking it after exercise, which is, that's a no-brainer.
00:26:38.000And so by inhibiting it, your body builds more.
00:26:41.000So when the drug goes away, you've now got more energy.
00:26:44.000And that also helps the body take up blood sugar, become more what's called insulin sensitive.
00:26:50.000And that's why it works for type 2 diabetics.
00:26:52.000But by accident, this drug has been shown in tens of thousands of veterans, mainly, but tens of thousands of people, To also delay other diseases of aging, heart disease, cancer, frailty, Alzheimer's.
00:27:33.000But we just know that people who take it, a diabetic who is sick and often overweight, who takes metformin, on average lives longer than someone who doesn't have type 2 diabetes and doesn't take the drug.
00:27:47.000So it literally not just mitigates the effect of diabetes, but it enhances your lifespan past the point of a person who doesn't have diabetes.
00:30:14.000So it's needed for life, and it seems the more you have of that, the better.
00:30:18.000Now one thing that one of my companies that I'm helping, and I've invested in to be honest, to be transparent, is developing is a way to punch holes in that membrane so that the hydroelectric dam is less efficient.
00:32:15.000But if you're wondering, David, why are you making a drug that's going to kill people?
00:32:18.000Well, actually, the chemists are working and have made molecules that are sensitive to this acidity, and if it gets too low, it'll turn itself off.
00:32:26.000Why don't you just let people figure out the right dosage?
00:34:48.000I mean, most scientists are like that, but I've got it in abundance, too.
00:34:51.000Well, I think it's also we're dealing with, like, think about what we're talking about here, about your field of study, about life extension and how to maximize health.
00:35:00.000The amount of people that don't know what you're talking about and don't know the science and aren't even aware that this is possible is the majority.
00:35:12.000So for someone to step out and say, you know what I'm going to do?
00:35:15.000I'm going to do sauna and ice baths every day because it increases hormesis and it maximizes my heat shock and cold shock proteins.
00:35:24.000And then I'm going to make sure I use blue light blocking glasses and I shut off my cell phone by 6 p.m.
00:35:31.000and I don't drink coffee after 5 and all these different things.
00:35:34.000Most people don't know that there's an actual...
00:35:38.000The most quantifiable benefit to doing all those things.
00:35:41.000And if you looked at like, this is an Anthony Robbins quote.
00:35:46.000I'm stealing this from him, but it's a very good one.
00:35:49.000That incremental change is if two boats are on the same path.
00:38:04.000So if you have one meal, and say this meal comprises 2,000 calories or whatever, and you have this meal at 6 p.m.
00:38:13.000and you fast for 24 hours until you eat again at 6 p.m.
00:38:15.000If you have this one meal a day, why is it better to do that than to have, say, you know, smaller meals of like 500 calories multiple times per day, little snacks?
00:38:30.000Well, because going back six million years back, you know, we're in the trees and then in the savannah, our bodies were designed, well, or evolved to respond to adversity.
00:38:41.000And we've removed that from our lives because it feels good.
00:38:44.000But we need adversity to be resilient and to fight disease.
00:38:49.000So what I'm saying is that period of hunger.
00:39:52.000I'm just going to go forth and multiply and screw my long-term survival.
00:39:56.000So this is all about long-term survival by making the body freak out that there's tough times.
00:40:01.000And that's running away, like running away from a cat, like the savannah, and being hungry.
00:40:08.000You know, there's molecular reasons that all this works, but, you know, trust me, the data's very clear that this is the way to go if you want to be healthy in your 80s and 90s.
00:40:16.000Well, it actually does make sense when you put it in that way, that your body, when you're fed, relaxes.
00:40:22.000And so if you're just doing that all day long...
00:40:25.000And I know for a fact that when I am not fed and I go and do things, whether it's perform...
00:40:33.000One of the things that I've been doing is I don't eat...
00:40:38.000Before shows like I take many many hours before a comedy show and I used to just like eat whenever I just see and then I would do shows and I would have a meal like an hour before the show and I'm really trying to wake up.
00:40:52.000I'm really trying to come on come on Come on.
00:42:53.000So I woke up, hung out with the dog, had some coffee, sat out, you know, like just went over some emails, did some shit, just a relaxed morning, and then rolled into here, no food.
00:43:05.000I won't eat until we're going to dinner tonight.
00:43:14.000Yeah, so you're doing the right things, certainly better than most people.
00:43:19.000But what I'm trying to build or make are molecules that mimic fasting as well.
00:43:24.000So if you cannot fast like I do, then you can just take a pill.
00:43:28.000And what we've shown in mice, at least, is that if you give them this molecule that I'm taking, NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide, which, as I mentioned, speeds up metabolisms and all that stuff, those mice could run 50% further.
00:43:42.000These old mice, we gave it to them for three weeks, put them back on a treadmill, and those that had the NMN in their water ran 50% further.
00:43:49.000They had better blood flow, better oxygenation, better energy.
00:43:52.000And that is literally exercise in a pill.
00:44:54.000And as we get older, the levels of NAD go down.
00:44:57.000Our body makes less and actually also degrades it more.
00:45:00.000So if you take my skin, or in the study that they took people's skin, when you're 50, you've got half the levels of this NAD than you did when you were 20. Which is scary because this molecule is required for life.
00:45:14.000So what we're doing with our clinical trials is giving a precursor, a smaller version of this, that the body will turn into NAD and bring those levels back up from where they are when you're old to where you are when you're young.
00:45:26.000And we see at least in animals and hopefully in people that it revs up their metabolism and makes them fight aging and disease like we do when we're young.
00:45:35.000I mean, there's a reason we don't get a lot of heart disease when we're young or Alzheimer's because our bodies fight against disease as we get older and especially if we sit around or smoke and don't exercise, our bodies just give up.
00:45:55.000What is the difference between this NMN supplementation versus IV drip and what's superior?
00:46:03.000Well, so there's just a delivery route.
00:46:07.000My assumption is that they're working the same way, same effects, but nobody's put them head to head.
00:46:14.000I'm yet to see a clinical trial that shows that literally any of them actually work the way they're advertised, but the theory is that you'll have the same effect.
00:47:08.000But I went out to California and met with some of the power broker people in Hollywood who shall remain nameless, but there's plenty of people you and I know out there who are doing this.
00:47:22.000They recommended this one person who's well known and very kind.
00:48:24.000Yeah, they basically take acupuncture needles and they stick them in stiff muscles.
00:48:29.000And a lot of times they do it in conjunction with electrical muscular stimulation.
00:48:35.000So they'll put these little clamps onto the acupuncture needles and it just goes doot, doot, doot.
00:48:42.000It gives you this weird pulsating thing in your muscles, but it's really beneficial for releasing and relaxing really tight and tense muscles.
00:48:53.000I have an imbalance in my back because of power kicking on my right side.
00:49:00.000My left side is what stabilizes it, so the left side of my back is thicker than the right side of my back.
00:49:07.000Because if you think about it, if you're standing here like this and you're doing this all the time, you're leaning into the left side and throwing a kick with the right leg.
00:49:16.000And then also when I draw a bow back, I always draw it with my right side.
00:49:21.000And so my right shoulder is stronger than my left shoulder.
00:49:26.000But my left shoulder is stronger pushing because the left shoulder pushes and the right shoulder pushes.
00:49:31.000I've got all these fucking weird imbalances in my body.
00:49:34.000You probably do something else with one hand, too, that doesn't help.
00:51:09.000If you smoke some marijuana before you get an NAD drip, I did it in 10 minutes.
00:51:13.000Yeah, I just sat high as fuck, sat there, but so high, I got paranoid.
00:51:20.000But if you, there's something that happens with, you know, marijuana reduces nausea in patients with cancer, going through chemotherapy, a lot of people that have wasting issues, different ailments where they have a difficult time eating.
00:53:12.000So a good friend of mine at Wash U, Shin Amai and colleagues, showed that the NAD levels in the body of an animal, probably in a human, they cycle through the day.
00:53:22.000They go up in the morning, get you ready, and then they go down at night.
00:53:27.000So you don't want to be taking these supplements or having this stuff injected into you late at night because it'll make your body believe that it's the morning.
00:53:34.000And I also believe, and it really is backed up by the mouse studies, that jet lag is caused by a disruption of this cycle of NAD going up and down in your body.
00:53:42.000And so I've been using NMN, this supplement, to reset my body when I travel.
00:54:13.000And what actually happens, unfortunately, is even if you get your light in your eyes, which resets your brain, your liver has a clock, other tissues.
00:54:20.000There's separate clocks within the body, and if they're out of sync, maybe your liver is looking for a meal, but your brain says it's the middle of the night, and you don't know what to do, and that's why you feel like crap.
00:54:29.000The only thing that's ever helped me reset it, and it's not profound, but it does help a lot, is exercise.
00:54:35.000So what I would do is if I fly, the moment I would land somewhere, I would just put my stuff in my room and go straight to the gym.
00:58:14.000The winding down thing is really hard for people that are like high-performance people that are working all the time and you're go, go, go, go, go throughout the day.
00:58:21.000And then sometimes when you lie down, it's the only time where you're not engaged with an activity.
00:58:26.000So then your mind starts racing and starts doing an assessment of all the various things that are going on in your life and throughout your day.
00:58:34.000When I go down, I have to make sure that I do not allow my mind to start going on a rampage and thinking about various projects I'm involved in or different things that I'm working on.
00:58:57.000And sometimes when you're just laying there, your mind's like, oh, we got nothing to do.
00:59:01.000Terrific, because there's a lot of shit I've been wanting to talk to you about.
00:59:04.000It's like, you know, it's like if you don't have a conversation with your spouse and then, you know, you don't talk all day but a lot of things are going on, then finally at the end of the day, like, okay, here's the things we need to talk about.
00:59:15.000Like, that's what it's like with my brain at night.
00:59:17.000It's like, hey, fuckface, there's a lot of shit you need to work on.
00:59:20.000Like, let's do this and then that and what about that and how about this?
00:59:22.000And here's what I screwed up, damn it.
01:00:25.000Like I feel myself starting to think about maybe like a bit that I'm working on that I need to correct or, you know, this is not the right way to do it.
01:00:35.000I gotta go, hey, hey, hey, stop and just think about your breathing.
01:00:40.000So my number one trick is just concentrating on in and out and in and out.
01:00:49.000Along the way, I will go right back into the things that are bothering me and write down, oh, I screwed up this, or I shouldn't have said that, and in and out, and in and get myself right back on track, and eventually I fall asleep.
01:08:25.000But a scientist says that doesn't prove anything.
01:08:28.000But it's certainly inspirational, like my father is.
01:08:30.000It doesn't prove that he's staying young because of me.
01:08:33.000But it doesn't seem to be hurting him at all.
01:08:35.000But you're pretty confident that with further research, it's most likely going to determine that all these things are extremely beneficial to basically the overall population.
01:09:19.000So there's a photo of the two of them in the Top Gun movie where she's young and beautiful and he's young and handsome and then there's a photo of the two of them now and she's kind of let herself go a little bit.
01:09:31.000He has not and he looks fucking fantastic.
01:09:35.000It's kind of crazy when you see the contrast of the difference between someone who's taking care of themselves and someone who's not.
01:09:41.000Yeah, I wrote about this in my book and in fact I used Tom as the example of what you can do and If you look at somebody his age that was in a previous generation, those actors look really old, and he looks great,
01:09:59.000I'm sure there's probably some other work that he's had done, but it can make a huge difference how you live your life.
01:10:03.000That's the goal of me now, is to say, don't wait, because you don't want to waste away or have an accelerated age clock, the one that we measure.
01:10:15.000And often it's going to be too late if you just wait.
01:10:18.000In my life, I've been doing this since I was 33, doing various things, adding things along the way.
01:10:25.000What do you think someone should do if maybe they are 80 and they're listening to this for the first time?
01:10:30.000We don't want to rule them out or count them out.
01:10:32.000What should someone do if you're saying it's too late, but if you are 80 and you're like, God, I wish I had done this earlier, but what can I do now?
01:10:41.000Well, so I know a little bit about this because I have some friends who are that old.
01:10:47.000And when they do the kind of things that we've talked about today, it's a remarkable change.
01:10:55.000In fact, the speed that you walk is the best determinant besides this clock that I talked about of how long you're going to live.
01:11:01.000And there was somebody that I was talking to the other day that in their 80s started fasting, doing all these things, took some supplements.
01:11:09.000And their walking speed went back to a young person within a matter of months.
01:11:29.000So even if you're older, look, it'll definitely have some effect, but the correct way to approach this is if you're a young person, don't wait until you get old.
01:12:35.000So I do my best to extrapolate from animals and look at societies that live a long time and make the best I can scientific judgment as to what will work.
01:12:44.000And when you say your whole life you skip breakfast, was that instinctual?
01:12:49.000Like, was that just you don't enjoy eating breakfast?
01:12:53.000No, I love a Vegemite on toast, like any Australian.
01:14:07.000And so that's why measuring things with the clock, with the cheek swab, you've got to measure it, otherwise you don't know what works for you.
01:14:16.000And what works for me may not work as well for someone else.
01:14:18.000That whole breakfast is the most important part of the day.
01:14:22.000I think people need to kind of know that that really doesn't make sense.
01:15:33.000So one of my points in the book that I'm writing about how we got here and how we get out of it, this treadmill that we're on, is that we're slaves.
01:15:42.000Our limbic system that you and Elon talked about, the core of the brain that we don't seem to control very well with our frontal cortex, it's telling us Eat all the time, eat high calories, sugar, fat, have sex.
01:18:15.000The thing about potatoes, though, potatoes, there's an effect that happens when you cook a potato and then cool it down and then reheat it.
01:18:25.000It apparently has much less of an impact on your blood glucose levels.
01:20:14.000I don't think they're good for you, though.
01:20:17.000Probably not because of all the shit you're putting on it, but would not fresh French fries then be kind of good because they're frozen and then you're reheating them?
01:21:21.000But it's also been shown that your microbiome changes as you get older.
01:21:23.000And one way to restore that to a more youthful mix is not to eat so much.
01:21:30.000You need to get your gut microbiome ready for Gus's Fried Chicken because there's a place in town called Gus's Fried Chicken if you never had it.
01:21:41.000It's a goddamn sensational fried chicken.
01:21:43.000We need to have a pill that you eat before that of the bacteria to...
01:23:32.000She's the reason I'm doing what I'm doing.
01:23:34.000She told me to try and make humanity better.
01:23:37.000So Vera used to smoke a lot and drink a lot.
01:23:40.000It's surprising she made it as far as she did to 92. So when she quit smoking, it wasn't the addiction, but she had this thing she needed to put in her mouth.
01:23:49.000So she had one of those cigarette holders, and she was chewing and sucking on that for a couple of decades, which as a kid was really off-putting.
01:23:56.000But now I understand why she needed to.
01:23:59.000Andrew Dice Clay, you know the comedian?
01:25:24.000To me, it's very odd that people have such incredibly ingrained patterns that physical activity of just putting something to your mouth can help alleviate some of the cravings.
01:25:37.000There's a little wick or something in there, it looks like.
01:26:43.000I don't even think it's marketed towards smoking, even though it obviously is, but it's calling itself aromatherapy as opposed to smoking or something like that.
01:27:39.000John Hopkins, I know, is doing some work.
01:27:41.000They're planning on doing studies with former UFC fighters and dealing with people that have CTE. Yeah, because neurogenesis, because psilocybin in particular.
01:28:04.000PTSD, I had Rick Doblin in here the other day from MAPS. And he's the one who is at the forefront of all this work and pushing this forward and getting approval to use all of these Schedule I substances and trying to make them available for therapeutic use for people with all sorts of issues,
01:28:25.000It's an exciting time for brain research actually and for the patients because there hasn't been much you could do for people who had mental issues and even Alzheimer's.
01:28:33.000Now we have these tools that are only going to get better.
01:28:46.000So since we last spoke, we published a paper in the journal Nature in December that showed we could not just accelerate aging, but now we can reprogram cells to make them, you know, a little bit.
01:28:56.000So we were able to reprogram the eye of a mouse.
01:28:59.000A blind mouse became able to see again by making the eye younger again.
01:29:03.000It's a gene therapy, but ultimately you want to make it just a pill that reverses aging.
01:29:21.000In humans, people get that all the time if they have macular degeneration or need gene therapy to correct their genetic defect in their eye.
01:29:32.000And what we did with those mice was we then turned on these three genes that are normally only turned on in embryos, And we reversed the age of those eyes, and the mice could see again.
01:29:43.000And now we're just ticking off the various tissues and organs that we can rejuvenate and turn the clock back.
01:29:47.000And this is the same clock that I'm talking about with the cheek swab.
01:29:50.000We now have the ability to turn that clock back, and it looks like it's permanent.
01:29:54.000And so you set the clock back 50% in the body.
01:29:58.000Now we do the eye, but hopefully the whole body.
01:29:59.000And then you age out another couple of decades, take another course of antibiotics, go back again, and just rinse and repeat.
01:31:34.000Those loops and bundles of DNA go back to their original structure, like playing a concerto again.
01:31:40.000Or, I mean, I use the analogy of a compact disc.
01:31:43.000For the young people, that's a little disc we used to put music on.
01:31:46.000But the aging process is analogous to scratches on a CD, so that you skip songs when you get older, and literally we're skipping genes reading when we get older.
01:31:58.000And our treatment is polishing the CD so that the cell can now read the beautiful music of youth.
01:32:06.000Is this the stuff that Andrew Huberman at Stanford is working on as well?
01:32:47.000And so down the line, this may be a thing that people do where every X amount of months or years, you go in and you get a shot and it backs your age up a few years.
01:33:38.000I mean, your gut is so important, and the gut-blood barrier is increasingly known to be important for aging.
01:33:43.000As that breaks down, bacteria in your gut leak across, leaky gut syndrome, and we're finding, we scientists are finding bacteria showing up in cancers and even in the brain of Alzheimer's patients, and we think that they might be a cause of these diseases.
01:35:21.000But there are a lot of us, like Andrew Huberman you mentioned, a really good guy, a good friend of ours.
01:35:26.000He also wants to change the world, and he's from Stanford, one of the lesser universities.
01:35:31.000But I love guys like that, people like that, because a lot of scientists are just about what's my next publication, but there are a few of us that look at what is the goal?
01:35:46.000Well, we'll innovate, we'll have IP, we'll start companies, we'll make drugs, and hopefully we'll be saving lives.
01:35:51.000One of the things I really like about Huberman is he does things publicly.
01:35:55.000So he's really big on using social media.
01:35:58.000He puts videos up on Instagram explaining these things, puts videos up on YouTube, and they're really easy to follow.
01:36:04.000And he'll show you and demonstrate to you, like he had one today, on the benefits of focus and posture, that there's some actual real benefits in terms of alertness just by posture and where you're looking at with your eyes.
01:36:53.000He looks like a guy that you would say that if you saw a Marvel Comics movie and that guy was a scientist, you'd be like, that guy's not a fucking scientist.
01:41:24.000It's been one of the greatest things is bringing up three kids and telling them about the world.
01:41:28.000And I want to do that on a grand scale.
01:41:30.000Well, you certainly have a lot to offer, and you certainly have a perspective that I think a lot of people could benefit from, and you understand things that are super important for life that most people are unaware of when it comes to longevity and the strategies and the actual significant impact of all these things that we've discussed so far today.
01:41:52.000I mean, it's amazing when I talk to people that are seemingly health conscious that are not aware of all this stuff.
01:42:01.000And I kind of get it, because one of the beautiful things about this podcast is it's my job to talk to people like you.
01:42:08.000So I've gotten this sort of accidental education over the past 12 years.
01:42:15.000Guys like me, people like me and scientists, we never had this platform to come and speak to you.
01:42:20.000Before that, we were speaking through reporters, newspaper reporters, typically.
01:42:23.000And it was mangled and hyped and it was embarrassing and every story there was a lie or something wrong in there and a headline that was, we're all going to live forever.
01:42:31.000And I rarely talk to the old media anymore because it's just too risky.
01:42:37.000I want to talk directly to the public and it's been great.
01:42:41.000That's exactly how I feel about interviews.
01:42:43.000That's why I don't do interviews because they'll take my words out of context, they'll edit it, they'll take something that I've said and put meaning to it that's not true.
01:42:52.000And they do it because of clickbait, because their business is to sell things.
01:42:58.000I think it's changed pretty radically since the internet.
01:43:00.000It's one of the few things that I think true journalism has suffered in some ways because of the internet.
01:43:06.000I think independent journalism, like the Matt Taibbi's and the Glenn Greenwald's and the people that still practice independent journalism, they've thrived because of this vacuum that's been created.
01:43:18.000I think there's many publications today, particularly the ones that are online, that survive by clickbait.
01:43:27.000And if they don't get clicks, they don't get advertisements.
01:43:29.000So if they can twist things a little bit in the title or give you a deceptive title but then sort of correct itself in the body of the work, they'll do that.
01:43:37.000But a lot of people just read the title.
01:43:39.000And they're like, did you hear David Sinclair says he's living forever?
01:43:42.000And then next thing you know, you have to talk to your colleagues.
01:43:45.000So, David, telling people you're living forever?
01:44:11.000But when someone writes something that's not accurate about me, Then I go, okay, well, what are you telling me that's not accurate about Syria?
01:44:56.000You know, don't you want to know about this or this or this?
01:44:58.000And I said, for example, give me a prostate-specific antigen test, PSA, which is important for people our age because prostate cancer can show up.
01:45:06.000So his question to me was, well, do you have a family history?
01:45:51.000And, you know, I think that we'd really have a much better society if we came in early and tried to stop things before they actually occurred and we went in and we were sick.
01:46:48.000There's new breakthroughs all the time in leading scientific journals and companies being developed for new ways to treat skin, to rejuvenate that, livers, kidneys, and eventually whole bodies.
01:46:57.000So is it going to happen in my lifetime that we can reverse aging in part of the body?
01:47:08.000Can we make old ladies look young again?
01:47:10.000I don't know, but I know that just in the same way as the Wright brothers built the Wright Flyer with powered flight, it was an inevitability that there was going to be a Concorde and a jumbo jet, 747, and go to the moon.
01:47:38.000In the future, let's not even put a timeline on it, but let's think about how this technology progresses and just assuming we don't blow ourselves up or get hit by an asteroid or the aliens land and stop all the nonsense.
01:47:52.000When you look at the future, you anticipate human beings, science, to have complete control over this process.
01:48:03.000and the ability to literally bring the body back to peak form in their prime absolutely We are toolmakers.
01:48:44.000We can engineer ourselves either through medicine or through even genetically changing our species so that we don't ever get cancer, at least not for centuries.
01:48:52.000And that's doable with today's technology.
01:48:55.000What about genetically engineering ourselves so we're not susceptible to viruses?
01:48:59.000Things like COVID. Like getting ourselves into a position where those things have a minuscule effect on us.
01:49:07.000Like that something like COVID would really only be like, like it is for the most healthy folks where it's like a minor cold.
01:49:15.000Well, what COVID taught us is that your age matters, not just for how you look and diseases like heart disease, but dying from infection.
01:49:25.000So if you can stay young, let's say you've been exercising, eating the right things, eating less, you will be literally younger based on that clock and you will have a much better chance of surviving COVID if you're obese and you don't exercise.
01:49:36.000We saw those were the most susceptible to infections.
01:49:41.000The second is there will be medicines to rejuvenate the body.
01:49:45.000We're testing our NAD boosting drug right now in COVID in 30 hospitals around the US. So fingers crossed for that.
01:49:52.000Maybe not for COVID, but eventually the next virus that will definitely come.
01:49:56.000By the way, I don't know if you remember in my book, which came out a few months before COVID, I said we're going to be hit by a virus, a pandemic.
01:50:04.000And most people went, yeah, here he goes again.
01:50:41.000Just the way vaccines work, you stimulate the production of antibodies that recognize certain proteins, like the spike protein on the outside of COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2.
01:50:53.000And so we could definitely make children that would never have a problem with SARS. The problem, though, is that viruses are smarter than us in many ways because they evolve super fast, and we always are one step behind them.
01:51:08.000So I don't think it makes sense actually to genetically modify for specific viruses.
01:51:13.000But there might be ways that are universal.
01:51:15.000An antibody that recognizes all flu proteins.
01:51:18.000We could put that into children and they never get flu.
01:51:22.000Now, when you look at human bodies, one of the things that's always been interesting to me is how much variety there is in terms of how we react to certain things.
01:51:34.000How allergies and things along those lines and how people react differently to different foods.
01:51:41.000Is there a way that you can anticipate where one day we'll be able to give someone a test and say, oh, your ancestors thrived on these particular types of foods and these are more beneficial to your body?
01:52:00.000It seems like this one-size-fits-all approach that some people preach, it's just not effective for everybody.
01:52:41.000There's some people that eat carnivore diets and their eczema clears up and their brain fog goes away and they're healthier.
01:52:48.000These sort of diets where your elimination, elimination diets.
01:52:53.000But I know other people that go vegan and they go vegetarian and they just, they basically get all their protein from plants and they feel much better.
01:53:02.000So there's obviously some sort of a biological variability that exists in people.
01:53:08.000I'm not allergic to peanuts, but you can't even eat peanuts on planes anymore because some people are so allergic that the dust from you chewing peanuts can get them deathly ill.
01:53:18.000Well, thank you for saying that because for far too long we've treated the average human and none of us are average.
01:53:23.000And we're changing the way we treat people in medicine and with wellness because we have to personalize it.
01:53:33.000And the only way to personalize something and to know if it's working for you is to measure it.
01:53:37.000Hence, you know, the company that I'm building to measure things.
01:53:41.000But that's really important because it now means we can tailor your food to you, your supplements, your exercise.
01:53:48.000Because they're really, like you say, everybody responds differently.
01:53:52.000I have a different microbiome in my gut than anyone else on the planet.
01:53:59.000And so in the future, and not too distant future, we can even have an app on our phone that will say, all right, your latest reading from your heart, from your swab, says that you're deficient in these things and your epigenome, the scratches on the CD are looking like this.
01:54:14.000You've got that scratch, you've got that scratch.
01:54:16.000To correct that, go to that restaurant.
01:54:26.000That would be the most bizarre thing if you go to a restaurant and a restaurant would serve you a meal that's been genetically engineered to correct all the issues that you have.
01:54:38.000And the problem today is that we can measure our genome and there are a number of companies that can do that.
01:54:43.000But we're missing the other half of the information, which I would say is even more important for health, which is the epigenome, the control systems, this clock that I'm talking about, which we can measure.
01:54:53.000And that together tells you whether you're going to be an asthmatic or susceptible to diabetes.
01:55:05.000We don't know how that code is being used throughout our life and it changes.
01:55:09.000Every time we have a meal, every time you see something, it's changing in your body.
01:55:13.000So you've got to measure both of those to get the real answer to whether what you're doing is working and how to fix it.
01:55:20.000This has got to be a very rewarding career path for you because you're not just engaged in something that's intellectually stimulating, but you're engaged in something that could potentially benefit the human race in a spectacular way.
01:55:35.000What is that like knowing that you're working on this stuff?
01:55:41.000Well, I'm Australian, so I'm just happy to be here.
01:57:42.000But we also have technology to solve the way we treat the planet.
01:57:46.000There's no way we can continue exploiting the planet the way we do right now, even with the current 79 billion that we'll have on the planet steady state, which is predicted.
01:57:56.000Bill Gates talks about this wonderfully on YouTube.
01:57:58.000Please check it out if you haven't seen it.
01:58:01.000And so the future of humanity is it's going to be steady state.
01:58:24.000And if you can save, let's say, even a few percent of that, Within that decade, that's trillions of dollars that you save that can be put towards research and development for climate change and other things that we need to solve as well.
01:58:36.000There was a woman that I had on recently, Dr. Shanna, the woman who talked about phthalates and all the various—she's an environmental epidemiologist, Shanna Swan, and she was amazing.
01:58:50.000And she wrote a book—what is the book called?
01:58:55.000She wrote a book on declining fertility rates, declining testosterone rates, increase in miscarriages, and declining birth rates in people that's directly related to the amount of phthalates that we find in their body,
01:59:14.000which come from environmental toxins, primarily from plastics.
01:59:20.000It's called Countdown, How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.
01:59:36.000She has a thing on her Instagram called The Jizz Quiz.
01:59:41.000Because literally, if you track the phthalates in the water supply and in food supply and in human beings, there's a direct correlation between the introduction of petrochemical products and the decline in sperm production and the decrease in the size of the taint.
02:00:04.000Which is really crazy because taints apparently in mammals are one of the very best ways of telling the difference between males and females because the taints in males are generally fifty to a hundred percent larger than the taints in females.
02:00:19.000But the introduction of phthalates is shrinking these taints and it's making male penises smaller, it's making the testicles smaller, and lowering the sperm count.
02:00:29.000And people are on testosterone replacement earlier in life, they have lower fertility, lower sperm count earlier in life, and generally they have less energy, they have less vitality, and it's these fucking chemicals that are in our plastics that are leaching into our bodies.
02:00:48.000But it's measurable, and it's only really been studied to the extent where she's describing it in these peer-reviewed studies that have come out over the last decade.
02:00:57.000This is a new science and a new understanding of this impact, and it's really terrifying.
02:01:30.000I truly believe that that is an issue for us.
02:01:36.000There's a real problem with testosterone, too, with men, that it goes down with aging, but it's just going way down.
02:01:43.000One of the best ways besides taking either a cream or an injection of testosterone is what you do, and what I do a little less than you, is to build up your core body muscles.
02:01:55.000The big muscles actually tell your testes to make more testosterone.
02:02:09.000Well, partly because my piriformis was destroyed, but also because at least my trainer says that that'll help me maintain strength around my core.
02:02:19.000And one of the problems with aging is when you fall over, you break your hip, and this is going to prevent that.
02:02:24.000Well, any time you're adding weight, like any weight-pushing exercises, you're building bone density.
02:02:30.000And one of the problems with sedentary people is when you're not weight-bearing, you're not carrying things around, not lifting, and you don't have any resistance exercises, your bones get fragile as you get older.
02:02:40.000Especially with our mineral-poor diets, you know, there's just...
02:02:44.000Mineral poor diets, no weight resistance, not good.
02:02:48.000But if there was like one exercise that you can do that is like if someone said, all right, I just want to do one thing, I might say kettlebell swings.
02:03:58.000I'm not calling it prescription, but what I've done to my body over the last 10 years, if you measure my blood biochemistry, and even this mouth swab test, I'm younger than my chronological age.
02:04:11.000In fact, I've been getting younger over the last decade.
02:05:05.000But I think that through what I'm doing and through mind exercises and just running a marathon in my mind, figuratively speaking, every day, I am smarter than I used to be.
02:05:50.000Well, this is why we need to live longer.
02:05:52.000Because, I mean, you're in peak condition mentally, physically.
02:05:56.000I'm in very good condition both, yeah.
02:05:58.000I think definitely mentally this is as smart as I've ever been.
02:06:01.000Physically there's certain things just because of injuries, particularly like back injuries, that my body has a hard time doing at full clip, like martial arts.
02:06:09.000But it's just because of the unusually extreme demands that the things that I'm interested in require.
02:06:15.000Like jujitsu and kickboxing are two very explosive things.
02:06:20.000So the pressure on the tendons and the joints is pretty extreme.
02:09:10.000If you're busting roads for a living and you hate it, Why not have two years of a paid skillbatical from the government or a loan and change?
02:09:17.000Go make guitars or start a band or become a therapist.
02:09:22.000Whatever you want to do, it gives you more options during life if you're not worried at 50 that it's all downhill.
02:09:41.000I think you're making a ton of sense and I think also as you get older, there's something that happens to people as you live your life, hopefully, where you keep making mistakes but you make less of the same mistakes because you go, oh,
02:09:56.000I remember the last time I fucked this up.
02:09:59.000I'm not going to do this like that anymore.
02:10:01.000And then you anticipate, well, if I do that, that's going to cause problems, so I'm going to do this.
02:10:06.000And then as you get to be 50 years old, you have a lifetime of these things that you can draw upon.
02:10:12.000Hopefully, you have a lifetime of corrections of mistakes that led to success.
02:10:18.000Unfortunately for some people, it's just disaster after disaster, and they never develop either a strategy or a pattern of behavior that leads to improvement in the way they think and behave.
02:10:33.000And this is us as the time traveler species that makes us different than all of the others, is that we have a very good ability of, in general, learning from our mistakes.
02:10:44.000And people like us, every night, are like, oh man, I screwed that up.
02:10:52.000And, you know, I know when you're 20, probably you and I, as well as most 20-year-olds, think that we're the smartest people on the planet.
02:10:59.000We can solve everything and the old people don't know anything.
02:11:01.000But if you're 20 and listening to this, I can tell you, guaranteed, that when you're our age at 50, you've got so much wisdom to refer to because you will make mistakes and you will learn from them.
02:11:11.000And that's why I like being an educator, is that I don't want my students or anyone on the planet to make the same mistakes I've made, and I've made plenty along the way.
02:11:20.000Yeah, that's one of the benefits of being able to talk to people.
02:11:23.000It's like you can learn from their mistakes without having to make the same mistakes.
02:12:52.000But then when you find out that there's a disease that targets old people disproportionately, and then unfortunately what happened in places like New York State where they were taking people that are COVID positive and bringing them back into nursing homes and it ran through them like fire...
02:13:11.000It just makes you so sad when you think about the last few years with your grandmother that you could have enjoyed and now she's gone because of this fucking disease.
02:13:21.000People say, oh, well, she was 86. What'd you expect?
02:13:25.000Well, didn't expect someone to bring a COVID-positive patient back into the nursing home and infect her and everybody else around her.
02:13:32.000Like, she could have lived a few extra years and enjoyed her family a few extra years and they could have had those memories.
02:13:38.000So I think it made us directly aware of many, many things about our mortality and about what's precious and what's important.
02:13:46.000And because so many people were forced to stop working and so many people lost their businesses, I think it made people rely on community more, too.
02:13:56.000There's a lot of negatives that happen during this COVID, this pandemic, where a lot of really hysterical people, and I don't mean that in a funny way, I mean people that were prone to anxiety and people that have a difficult time with stress.
02:14:15.000In a difficult time with adverse conditions and situations, this accentuated them past their breaking point.
02:14:22.000And you see them on Twitter just freaking out, wearing three masks and screaming out the window.
02:14:26.000There's a lot of people that lost their fucking mind.
02:14:29.000And I'm hoping that we can bring some of those people back to baseline over the next few months and slowly, you know, just...
02:14:41.000And what I really hope people learn as they go over the studies and they look at all these things that we've learned is your health is of paramount importance.
02:16:11.000A guy gaining 10 pounds and losing 10 pounds.
02:16:14.000That's not a lot, but if you're 50, 60, 70 pounds, like my friend Laura Bites, she's a hilarious stand-up comic, and she was on a podcast recently and I hadn't seen her since I was in California, and she lost like, how much did she lose,
02:17:15.000So, a friend of mine who I've co-published a couple of papers with, Ray Cronus, he advocates the cold therapy.
02:17:22.000And we came up together and we published this thing called the Metabolic Winter Hypothesis, which is when we were out in caves where Cro-Magnon people...
02:17:31.000We would go through winter being hungry and cold, and that is what we need to be healthy, or at least mimic that.
02:17:39.000And so the fasting and cold therapy is what we've evolved and what our bodies need to be in tip-top shape.
02:17:47.000And the problem is we basically stay warm.
02:17:50.000Especially here in Austin, it's pretty warm mostly.
02:17:54.000And so his prescription, which has worked really well for some celebrities he's worked with, among others, is that you want to be slightly chilly.
02:18:03.000Keep your house temperature down, sleep without blankets, and don't eat a lot.
02:18:08.000And he says, I think it was something like, if you don't shed half a pound a day, you're not doing it right.
02:18:14.000Half a pound a day, eventually you'll be nothing.
02:18:16.000Right, but he's starting with people who are really big.
02:18:58.000And then the other time one of them leaked and it was my mattress was wet.
02:19:05.000I was like, what the fuck is going on?
02:19:07.000You know, because what it is is essentially like you put this cover over it and the cover has these tubes in it and the tubes have water and then there's a machine that sits by the bed and the machine cools the whole deal.
02:20:25.000A lot of these Tim Ferriss type dudes, they're always into those chilly mattresses.
02:20:29.000I used it for a brief amount of time and I think there was some benefit in it, but I stopped using it.
02:20:33.000Yeah, well, I could barely sleep last night in my hotel, because it was warm, and I had to rip all the...
02:20:39.000I did a show last night at Vulcan Gas Company, and then we went to Golden Tiger, which is maybe the best fucking cheeseburgers in the world, and I had two of those bitches.
02:20:50.000Two double cheeseburgers at one in the morning.
02:22:59.000But what he's done on top of all this exercise and diet and taking care of himself is express himself and talk about what the struggle was like.
02:23:11.000And part of it was like, at one point in time, he had lost so much weight that he had to get his skin cut and removed, and then he gained 100 pounds.
02:23:20.000So he goes back and forth and back and forth.
02:23:23.000And he did this over like 20 years until he got to where he is now.
02:23:43.000Weird psychological shit that's going on with people that do things that they know are bad, but they keep doing it anyway, whether it's cigarettes or gambling.
02:23:53.000But he got it dialed in, and it's a massive inspiration to people because you see him now.
02:23:59.000Anybody that would say you shouldn't talk badly about obesity, you shouldn't say that obesity is bad because you're going to make people's feelings hurt when they're obese, I'm not trying to do that.
02:24:12.000I'm trying to inspire you to try to achieve what that guy's done, what my friend Laura's done, what many people that I know have done.
02:24:20.000I'm trying to inspire people because it's possible.
02:24:54.000For years and years and years, he slowly avoided temptation and then even fucked up and gained all this weight again and then slowly got back down again and now he's at a completely healthy weight where he looks amazing.
02:25:09.000Yeah, one of the things I'd like to figure out is if you lose a lot of weight, how far back does your biological clock go?
02:25:39.000But it's also, you know, you need help.
02:25:44.000And you need help from either counseling or coaches or loved ones or friends or...
02:25:51.000Someone that can kind of like help you along too because it's difficult.
02:25:57.000And actually your social circle has been shown to work against you in many cases.
02:26:01.000So Ray I mentioned, he said that when he works with his clients, I think it's okay to mention that Penn Jillette has lost a lot of weight thanks to Ray.
02:26:10.000And he found that you shouldn't tell people that you're trying to lose weight because there'll come a point where they say, you've lost too much weight, you should eat something.
02:26:49.000Lonely people, that's got to be like a painful existence.
02:26:53.000The feeling of, you know, that's why like the concept of incels, you know, involuntary celibates, like that is one of the most depressing things in our culture.
02:27:17.000Well, yeah, that's the issue that we do need friends and we need partners to take care of us when we're older.
02:27:25.000But I think, generally, the reason that my guess, those people live a long time, and it's a fact that they live longer, is that you're countering cortisol levels.
02:27:34.000When you're stressed out and worried and you don't have a lot of friends, you have these stress hormones, and cortisol is the worst one, the insidious one that causes you to age more rapidly.
02:27:53.000Yeah, and I want to be really clear, Joe, that when I talk about adversity and stress on the body, hormesis, it's not the same as mental stress.
02:28:18.000Is released by the body under situations of uncontrollable stress or situations where things are unmanageable or you've gotten past your breaking point?
02:28:32.000What is the difference between the stress that one experiences through cortisol or where cortisol is released versus the stress of, say, high-level chess playing?
02:28:43.000You know, where this is obviously very beneficial to the mind.
02:28:51.000From my understanding of the science is that if you reach a tipping point and you have real anxiety, that's going to secrete cortisol.
02:28:59.000But being focused and having a high focus on what you're doing and taking your mind to the next level, even if your heart rate goes up a little bit, That challenge to the body and the mind, my understanding is that doesn't release a lot of cortisol.
02:29:14.000But the hormesis effect, it's a U-shaped curve that once you get a little bit of intensity and biological stress and even mental stress, it's a good thing.
02:29:25.000But you go over a tipping point and then it becomes bad again.
02:29:28.000Same thing with physical exercise, right?
02:29:30.000Like those people that run the ultramarathons, after it's over, they're wrecked.
02:29:36.000Actually, hormesis, the way it was discovered was people were spraying herbicides on plants, and they kept diluting them down, and everyone thinks, you know, the less you have, the less it'll work.
02:29:46.000But the plants that got the really low dose, this is not homeopathy, this is real science, plants got low-dose herbicide that would kill a plant at high doses, grew better than the untreated plants.
02:29:58.000And so what you want to do, even if you're a plant, is to experience adversity, whether it's a plant like a grapevine making wine.
02:30:05.000It's a little bit dried out or fungus.
02:31:02.000And when your body's releasing cortisol because of the high stress that you're in, this unmanageable stress, that is also one of the benefits of exercise that you can actually reduce that cortisol.
02:31:15.000You can reduce that physical stress, right?
02:31:36.000And it's one of those things that if you can just write down a routine and force yourself to do it, in the beginning, you'll still be stressed out.
02:31:46.000You'll be like, ah, fucking everything sucks.
02:31:49.000But if you just keep going, if you just keep going, and when you get through the routine, you will literally experience during a one-hour exercise routine the actual alleviation of stress.
02:32:39.000I think people it's entirely too easy to get through life for most folks and I think we're not wired for that.
02:32:46.000We're wired for overcoming great odds and obstacles.
02:32:50.000I think human beings are wired for predator attacks and all kinds of shit and we're worried about things that are real that are and when they don't happen I think we fucking stress ourselves out about little things.
02:33:03.000Somebody said something once, I forget who said it, but it's a great expression and I like to repeat it all the time and I wish I could attribute it to that person, but they said, the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you, even if it's not much.
02:33:18.000Human beings respond to the worst thing that's ever happened to them.
02:33:20.000If the worst thing that's ever happened to you is your mom took your phone away when you're 16 and you're a brat, you know, like, you're like, fuck it, mom!
02:33:31.000That is a person with no character because this is the worst thing that can happen to this spoiled baby is his mom took his phone away from him.
02:33:38.000Whereas if you grew up in war-torn Serbia, if you, you know, whatever, you've had a very difficult life on the farm, you've been wrestling since you're 10 years old and you're preparing for tournaments all the time, that kind of person has experienced a level of stress and difficulty that makes normal situations in life far more easy to manage.
02:34:03.000Even before us, that was the greatest generation.
02:34:07.000My grandmother grew up in World War II Depression, and she never got stressed.
02:34:13.000For her, there was nothing that could compare to that.
02:34:15.000I became a different person after I saw my mother die in front of me, and I couldn't do anything but whisper into her ear that she was the best mom I could ever have.
02:34:23.000After that, nothing was as bad as that.
02:34:26.000I would have a bad day at work and I'd come home.
02:34:40.000If you could stay on this earth and enjoy your friends and enjoy your loved ones and do something that you actually love and get satisfaction out of for an occupation.
02:35:13.000It's just so many people, unfortunately, get so stuck in whatever path they were initially on that it's so difficult for them to course correct.
02:35:23.000They get stuck where they develop debt, they got a lease for a car, and they got a mortgage, and they got a this and a that, and then they have a family independence, and then they're moving up the corporate ladder, and the company needs you, Mike.
02:37:05.000And then over the next few years, I thought, that's cruel to have consciousness, a species that knows that's going to happen, the future seer species, and be burdened with that knowledge that everything that you love is going to die, in many cases,
02:37:21.000So I decided at age four to make that my purpose, and I've been working back from that goal ever since and figuring out how to get there, get a PhD, come to America, MIT, Harvard, make discoveries, go on a podcast.
02:38:50.000And it's heavy also that through horrible tragedy and the worst part of human nature...
02:39:00.000through genocide and war that she comes out of it the other end determined to only concentrate on important things and good only focus on what's significant and then to look at you and to think that you can really change this place I think you can man I think she's right I mean I think you've you've honored her with your choices trying every day thanks Joe Now
02:40:03.000It's also optimizing the quality of the time while they're still alive, which is so important as well.
02:40:10.000Just because someone's alive and in a vegetative state, just sitting in the corner drooling for the next 15, 20 years while they're still alive.
02:40:17.000I experienced that with my grandmother, unfortunately.
02:40:20.000My grandmother had a stroke when I was young.
02:41:28.000She's just a really unique lady and then to see her in this and she was so fiery and she was always like yelling about things and she's always passionate about things and then to see her completely immobile for the last 12 years of her life and then When I moved to New Jersey,
02:41:47.000well, I stayed in New Jersey for a while with them trying to save up money for an apartment.
02:41:51.000And when I was doing that, I just got to see firsthand, like really clearly, like this life doesn't end well.
02:41:59.000And it can end the way it ended for my grandmother.
02:42:02.000In a terrible way where she was just in agony and it just it was me at really the beginning of a new stage in my life where I was signed by a manager who's still my manager to this day as a comedian and I was embarking on this like very promising aspect of my life and I was very excited.
02:43:41.000And honor your mistakes and who you were and feel that pain and recognize that regret is very valuable.
02:43:50.000Because regret teaches you that there's a real there's a cost to mistakes There's a tangible feeling that coincides with knowing you did the wrong thing or you fucked up or you you made an error Learn from that and use it as fuel and be the best person that you could be and it's possible for everybody to do that everybody can improve and It's not impossible.
02:44:16.000And even if it's just incremental improvements in the quality of the relationships that you have, or in the way you interact with people at work, or in the amount of exercise you get in a week, or in how you stick to your diet...
02:44:31.000All those little incremental steps, as we were talking about earlier, the little shift of a couple degrees of the path of a boat over the course of the entire journey, it's going in a completely different direction now.
02:45:02.000Listen man, you are in a weird position right now.
02:45:06.000Just imagine if you kept people alive for an extra 10-15 years and those people that you kept alive had an incredible impact on the way our culture is formed because they've drawn from their lifetime of experience and all the things that they've learned and they've expanded on that and had the opportunity because they stayed alive for 20 extra years or 30 extra years.
02:45:31.000To spread that to so many other people that also learned and it has this overwhelming effect on everybody.
02:46:27.000I manage my stress, but I've always been quite a nervous, insecure person deep down.
02:46:33.000And pushing myself to do things that I wouldn't actually do has been the best decision I ever made.
02:46:39.000Yeah, there's not a lot of growth in comfort.
02:46:42.000That's an important lesson for people.
02:46:45.000But also, here's an even more important lesson.
02:46:48.000The comfort that you get after growth is so much more enjoyable.
02:46:53.000Because if you've gone through difficult things, especially self-imposed difficulties, the comfort that you get afterwards, like when you can actually earn relaxation.
02:47:05.000When I plop down on the couch after a long, hard day, and I watch some TV, it's like, ah!