#2537 - David Sinclair

The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Mr Sinclair, good to see you again.

Dr Sinclair. Doctor. I'm kidding. You better not worry.

Yeah, do you ever introduce yourself as Doctor? Never. Yeah, that's a weird thing because you're allowed to. I'm actually a Sir David from Australia.

Are you a Sir? Yeah, but it's kind of a joke. I don't really... How does that work out?

Did you get... Oh, I did a couple of years of... I did a couple of years of... Australian version of a knighthood.

But I get to put AO at the end of my name. AO? Yeah, Order of Australia. Oh.

But it actually makes no difference to my life. So it's just next to a couple of years. It's kind of cool. I'm honored for sure.

But it's just a joke. Well, it's kind of anybody, Sir. You meet a guy at the gas station. How are you doing, Sir?

It's like, wow. How does he know it? Right, you don't say how you doing King. Right?

Well, I'm David. I'm Australian. So in Australia, if you have any ego you get beaten up in the playground. That is true.

Australia is the land of the Tall Poppy Syndrome. They don't fuck around. They don't like to get a big head in Australia. That is true.

I like to go back there, though, because it's a level playing field. Nobody cares who you are. I love the people there. Australian people are some of my favorite people.

They're awesome. They're very friendly and fun. It's a great place to be. It's just too far to get there.

Such a hall. Oh, no. If you just whisk in an ambient and you're there without. Is that what you do?

I used to. I've gone clean. I don't drink much at all anymore. How often does it drink much at all?

Is that one of your drinks? No, it would be bad luck. I've got the coffee that you gave me which I love. Yeah, this is a layered superfood coffee.

So layered Hamilton is a coffee. It's black rifle coffee mixed with his superfood stuff, which is this one's turmeric. So it's turmeric and I think it has coconut milk in it and some other jazz. That's delicious.

And thyme flamatory. Yes. Which I know you're all about. Yes.

As a prophet of longevity. Yes. Is that another title? Yes, you can call me Sir David the prophet.

How about that? Sir David the prophet. Doctor Sir David the prophet of longevity. So let's just jump right into it because there is a lot going on in the longevity space.

I think you have to be back on it. My pleasure. And by the way, I also want to thank you for I think this is fourth time on which is amazing. Congrats on all your success.

Thank you. Wonderful to see. Also the book that I wrote which you first had me on to promote has done so well and it's really because of you. And the book, Lightsman, became a bestseller not just that but it's now been read millions of times around the world.

That's phenomenal and it's my pleasure. And that's not a promo. As you know, you don't make any money from books really but I'm just honored that it was read by so many people around the world because it wasn't an easy read. It was high tech science.

Well people are very interested especially nowadays. I think I've never, I can't recall a time in my life where optimizing your health and longevity has been more of a subject that people are interested in. Well, I think that's largely because not to keep blowing smoking up your career but largely because of what you did in the book. So the book went global and it was right in 2019 in the pandemic hit.

And I think most people saw their own mortality at that point. Most people under the age of about 70 didn't even think about dying but then pandemics like a guy and I saw the book take off. You launched it. But yeah, since then a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and now longevity is everywhere I go.

It's everything. It's everywhere. People are constantly talking about different modalities. How often do you cold plunge?

Are you sawn it? What about the red light? What do you think? Is this legit?

Is that legit? What's caught on is because if you do follow some of the protocols you will feel better. And so that's the ultimate goal. Like longevity is wonderful but feeling better in the moment currently.

Like living your life should be primary. Longevity I think is if you're optimizing your life and you feel better you will live longer. It's all part of it. So it followed the longevity principles and the ideas behind it.

You certainly will live better right now. You will and it's not even that hard. There are basic things, five basic things you can do or avoid and you can live another 15 years. It's really not that hard.

And that's what I'm excited about telling millions of people today is and maybe we can go over the kind of things that people can do easily to live longer. I definitely want to do that but I also want to talk about like what is the current state of science as applied to longevity treatments? Like because I know that there's some pretty groundbreaking stuff that's in the pipeline right now. Yeah.

So since 2019 a lot of what we talked about is coming true which is the amazing thing. We are speculating 2019 that we could potentially reverse aging. And that was a sin to say that as a scientist publicly in those days. I put it in the book and it's actually come true since then.

Certainly for the lab for my monkeys and now we have a human clinical trial. The first potential human age reversal technology is in people right now. Listen it completely seems logical. The idea that at one point in time would have been heresy in science to discuss it.

That seems crazy. Like if we if people get old and we understand the mechanism why couldn't we reverse it? Well I think for a long time we had to accept it in the way that cancer used to be accepted 200 years ago probably. That was nothing to do about it.

And then my colleagues and I found that aging has a root cause that's the same in pretty much every cell in the body and that we could control that and that there were genes that not only slowed it down but in 2020 we had a big publication that showed we could actually safely for the first time reverse that process. Like reinstalling software in the cell to make it work again. And so what is the problem? Is that using CRISPR?

What are you using to? Well we deliver genes into the body like CRISPR. I have a little property in the world. What is that?

This is a representation of how we deliver the age reversal genes. It's a virus like capsule that we make in the lab and this is what's going into the patients right now into their eyes initially. The eyes are a good place to start. How do you pick the people to get on these tests?

They volunteer. I was really fortunate to see the first patient get dosed earlier this year. And that person bravely volunteered to be the first person to get trillions of these injected into his eye to see if it could cure his glaucoma loss of vision. I bet if you have glaucoma you're probably like listen what's the worst that could happen?

Well exactly he pretty much was totally blind in one eye and so there's really nothing that he has to lose. There's a risk that something might go wrong but not really. The good news is and I can report to everybody around the world that nothing's going wrong so far. I'm not sitting according to plan and we're at his own point potentially in human history if it works.

So I interrupted you but explain this little virus. Sure and for those of you listening I've got a little rubber ball with spikes on it. It looks a bit like COVID but don't be scared of it. It's not a pathogenic virus.

It's actually a domesticated version of a virus and this little plastic ball has little adapters. These red balls on the surface of the big ball target it to the cells in the back of the eye and you can change the balls to target different tissues. We could change that outside little spike and target it to deliver which we've done and cured my serve their fatty liver disease as well. But this one's for the eye and within that big ball is a protein capsule and inside the protein capsule is our DNA special delivery which we call OSK or ER100.

ER100 is epigenetic reprogramming 100. The drug that we know when we put it into human cells it makes them younger and then they work like they're young again. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website you should try Squarespace.

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See app for details. This sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. You know what I mean? Like the scientist is on a talk show.

The scientist is explaining it and everyone's at home like with their coffee like wow. This is wonderful. We're going to get younger again. And I'm just going to worry it's all going to work out.

28 days later garbage in the streets cars on fire the guys waking up from a coma doesn't know what happened. Yeah. Goes outside these optimized humans are eating each other. I admit.

It's a science fiction and I even have to pinch myself that it's actually happening. But we've done a lot of safety studies and this trial is FDA approved because they've looked at all the data. Well, God knows they never fucking anything up. Yeah.

If you could do you might say that. Perfect. Yeah. Well, it's in the eyes.

So that's why we start with the eye. It's enclosed. It's not going to spread. Nobody's going to grow another eye.

And so these trillions of cells that you're putting into the eyes. The little capsule the virus. The trillions of cells. The trillions of capsules.

The trillions of capsules that you're putting in the eye. What are they doing for glaucoma? Well what they're doing is there are three genes in this DNA package and I call them OSK. OSK are three special genes that we found safely reprogram cells and reboot the backup copy of youth which we now believe exists in our body.

That's a big deal that there's a backup copy of youth. Even an old person. I don't see an old person anymore on the street. I just see a person that needs to be rebooted.

These OSK genes. You just see. Hold on. When you see old people you don't see old people you think you just say oh that poor person needs to be rebooted.

Yeah. You're doing the perfect job for you. Like your personality is perfectly suited for your occupation. If that's how you actually look at people.

Well, I do. And the reason is that we all. We all have this backup copy that the DNA the instructions to be young that made us into who we are as kids is still in our bodies almost largely intact. You just need to read it again.

And that's why reading something software or I used to use the analogy of a CD. Kids these days probably don't know what a CD is. It's a little plastic circle like a record that we used to put 20 sums on. It was awesome at the time.

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It's a bit of a silly joke. Maybe a 10 year old does it.

When I teach kids at Harvard most of them have never held a CD. In that wild. Yeah. They're not coming back but albums definitely.

So think of it like an album that you scratch and the scratches are like aging. And we are getting rid of the scratches with these three jeans. So let me tell you how these three jeans work. There was a person whose name is well known in science circles called Shinyah Yamanaka from Japan obviously.

And he discovered that there was a set of four jeans that could reliably make adult cells like skin cells into stem cells. And he deservedly won the Nobel Prize for that in 2006. But that wouldn't be useful here. If I turned you into a bunch of stem cells you probably die within a few minutes.

So we don't want to do that. And cancer is also a potential. So it took us about, well from 2019 it took us a while to figure out that if we leave out one of the Yamanaka jeans and just use three, OSK, leave out the other one called M, we get safe age reversal about 75, 80% back to youth. But no further, we don't go back to zero which is what Yamanaka did.

And instead of cells losing their identity which is what is stem cell has no identity. We regain identity. So it's actually a good draw graph but it doesn't really help listeners. But basically old age is losing identity of your cells.

So they don't work. They forget how to work. That's what we think old age is in my lab. And stem cells have no identity.

It was like a very early embryo. And between, we ourselves have a lot of identity. They function beautifully in our 20s where at peak. And what we've done is we figured out how to go back towards youth, get these cells to work like they did again, get the backup copy somewhere it exists.

We're looking for it. And now cells actually behave like they did when we were 20. And if it works, we're going to have glaucomic patients seeing for the first time. And that's the beginning of a whole cascade of drugs that I want to develop for diseases of aging and eventually whole body rejuvenation.

So the initial experiments are on glaucoma because it's a contained thing. The eyeball is a contained thing. And you can do it that way? Yeah.

My student, one Chengler who was doing this in 2017, I said, let's do the liver. Let's read you an egg liver. And he said, no, the eyes are a good idea. And he was right.

So that's exactly why we chose that first. But you think about how many people have vision problems? It's 40 million just in the US for glaucoma. Macular degeneration is even more.

And in the lab, we can cure that as well in the mice. Now macular degeneration and glaucoma, these are diseases of aging, right? You would say or glaucoma is a disease. Oh, yeah.

What about people that have had eyeball injuries and things like, is there a backup copy of the eyeball where you could sort of reformat the eyeball structure? You should come work in my lab. At least come visit. Oh, love to visit.

And the reason I say that is that's the exact question that we're asking. We showed that even if you injure, say, a nerve, whether it's peripheral in your arm or in your brain or in the eye, like the optic nerve, we can regrow those back to where they were. And actually in 2020, on the cover of Nature Magazine, there was the picture of an eye. And in the paper, we published, you could see the nerves regrowing back.

And so we think that injury is also treatable. Actually, a group in China just took out technology, it's always came, put it into mice that had bad joints and it regrew their muscle and their bone back to normal. Whoa. So looking at treating injury, back injury joints, what's your arthritis?

That would be phenomenal because there's so many people that are suffering from arthritis. And so many, I know so many people with injuries, like martial arts injuries, I have one. My left knee is fucked up. It's annoying.

I keep it together. I've got it like, maintain it, but it's always an issue. I have to stay on it. And it's constantly...

You can do stem cells a little bit of relief. Stem cells give you relief, but not once you're dealing with cartilage damage and you're dealing with the... I had a meniscus surgery where they took out a piece of my meniscus and I had my ACL reconstructing on that knee as well. It's just an issue, but it works pretty good for what it should be.

If we were living in the 1930s, I'd be a cripple. Hang in there because we're going to be in a world where we can rebuild parts of the body, including joints. The problem with that is how is that applied athletics? We're going to have fucking super soldiers in every sport.

There's going to be people in every sport that could do what Michael Jordan did, like leap from halfway across the basketball court in Dunk. That's probably coming. And there may be DNA tests to see if you've got these OSK genes inserted. And we're working on a drink and a pill as well for...

A drink and a pill? Yeah. We're now eight years ahead of what the public realizes. Really?

A drink and a pill and what's a drink and a pill going to do? Well, right now it's in mice, so we still go a ways to go, but when we give the drink to mice, they get rejuvenated. You just give it to 80 year olds. If you're on the way out, let's fucking go.

Give it what the FDA is for. They forbid that. Yeah, that's why we need to get rid of them. Get rid of the FDA and just give it to old people.

If I was an old guy, and I was like, hanging in there and I'm walking around with him and you're like, look, this drink and a pill might kill you or you might be like a 30 year old again. I'm like, let's fucking go. I've had to take my emails off public access because there's a lot of people that want this. Oh, I'm sure.

There was one guy that wouldn't leave the building until he saw me. So it's getting to that point. Yeah, there's a little bit of that. Right?

People get a little selfish like it's all about them. Yeah, actually the US government blocked an investment from a foreign country into one of my companies because they were afraid of super soldiers. What country? Well, they're afraid of technology getting out.

Which country? Could I guess? Sure. China.

It wasn't. Was it? No, no. Russia.

It was somewhere in between here and China. Oh, well, that's pretty vague. It's a little sensitive. But yeah, the US government does have the ability to block an investment and they did in this case.

How does it be? No, it's $16 million. Wow. That was a painful episode.

So they were worried that people were going to actually engineer super soldiers. This episode has brought you by superpower. Your doctor spends eight minutes with you and your insurance company decides what blood work you're allowed to get. That's not health care.

It's a broken system with superpower. You have control over your health for $199. You get all the tools you need to understand your body. It starts with one blood test measuring over 100 biomarkers.

Then they give you detailed insights and a personalized plan built around you, your labs, health history, genetics, wearable data and goals. Go to superpower.com slash Rogan and take control of your health. Yeah, the question about Russian experiments that they did during World War II where they were trying to come up with a chimpanzee human hybrid. Tell us.

Yes. So it's very difficult, obviously, to get information out of the former Soviet Union as to what their top secret programs were. But there seems to be an indication that there was actual real research to try to, because obviously Russia lost an incredible amount of people in World War II. I mean, tens of millions of soldiers died in World War II from Russia.

And I think they said, wouldn't it be great if it wasn't people? And so they were doing experiments with hybridization. And they were trying to combine human beings and chimpanzees to create a stable of super soldiers that were like some hybrid hominid. Yeah, there's a scientist in New York who does this for a living.

What? He does that for a living? He ate them, but I was on stage with them. He made hybrid embryos.

They didn't reach. So the thing is, if that guy's doing that and he's ethical and he lives in America and we have rules and regulations and the FDA and all that good stuff, what the fuck is going on in other countries where they don't have that? Right. And then the genetic engineering of humans already and certainly selection.

Even parents today in the US can, if they have the money they can sell it. Well, people select. People select for hotness. They select for tallness.

They select for intelligence. It's like gatico. It's a great movie for him. It is a great movie.

Yeah. So, see if you can find that Russian hybridization program. It never happened. I don't think.

I don't think they did it. But there's actually a guy who was also involved in a gigantic fertility scam, not a scam for per se, but he was a doctor that was supposed to be doing fertility treatments with women. Like, you know, like if you went with your wife to a doctor and said, hey, we're having a heart time getting pregnant and David, I just need some of your sperm and I'll take your wife's egg. We'll make you a nice baby.

And he was using his sperm on everybody. On everybody. Everybody gets mine. One of my kids' partners is from someone in the US who had hundreds of babies.

There's a ton of those guys. As I was doing research for this, I started looking up all these stories and I said, wait, this is a different story? The same thing. There's been a ton of these doctors for fertility clinics that use their own sperm, just insane.

But there's one doctor that did that also claimed that he impregnated an orangutan. Yeah. Like how'd you do that? Soviet doctor, Joseph Stalin.

Dictator. Oh, obviously. We wanted to rebuild the Red Army in the mid 1920s with planet-a-a-style troops by crossing humans with apes. Stalin said to have told Ivanov, I want a new invincible human being insensitive to pain resistant and indifferent about the quality of the food they ate, which is crazy.

The only legitimate source of the claim comes from a 2002 paper in the academic journal Science in Context by the Russian historian of science, Karel Rassianov. Rassianov's study follows the ill-fated attempt by the Russian psychologist or physiologist, rather. He said that word, Iliad Ivanov to crossbreed humans with anthropoid apes. His research offers an important warning about the ethical abuses.

Did you do it? What happened? The alleged quote from Stalin is not found in the paper and there's no evidence of Stalin ever made such a statement. Yeah, I don't know.

However, why the Soviets would find such a human, chimp hybridization program in the first place and what could be learned from the sort of tale of ethical misconduct is an important topic and fascinating in its own right. That's an interesting way of phrasing it, like a sort of tale of ethical misconduct. However, if you are going to go to war, would you rather have like human-made orcs fight for us or, you know, Johnny Robinson, who grew up down the street as a nice kid, who just really wanted money for college and so he signed up for military service and you're going to fly him over to fight this war that maybe he doesn't need to die in when you can have these monsters that you made a lab fight? Yep, and the average ape can kill a human with one punch.

Easy. So they're much stronger than we were. That's what I'm talking about. Let's go.

Well, we're in the process of building anthropoid robots that I think will be recruited to the army. Yeah, that's going to be weird. Let's beat your robots, so give us your oil. And if we all have one at home, what's the government recruiting them all?

Right. And also, what's the real problem is going to be? We both know. The real problem is going to be sex robots.

Is the problem? It is going to be a problem for people that don't have a sex robot. It's going to be a problem with people that want a regular person and there's none available because everybody's got a sex robot. Yeah, well, it comes with a few strings attached.

It also comes with the same problems that AI comes with, right, where AI says, David, you're amazing. Everything you do is wonderful. You should be so proud of yourself. I love that.

No real fat. We all love that, but that's not healthy, right? You're so big. One of the reasons is why actual real relationships between human beings are good is because you do things that are annoying.

You don't realize they're annoying and then your wife or your husband or whatever it is tells you, hey, you're fucking annoying. And you're like, I'm sorry. I'll fix that. I didn't mean to.

That's not what I was trying to do. I was in my own head. I was thinking about myself. You're right.

I was selfish. You get better. You get to like how people grow. Like relationships are important to help people grow.

Not with AI. Like you can fart in my face any day, David. I don't mind at all. Your farts are amazing.

You know, they're probably going to be way smarter than us too. Right. They go stack the dishwasher to one of these robots. That's smarter than all humans combined.

Yeah, but they're not going to mind stacking. They're smart enough to be. They're out of hell and they're going to beat us up. They don't care.

They're not going to mind doing like menial tasks. But while you're doing it, you know, you can go explain to me quantum entanglement. Like some other... I'm already filling up the dishwasher.

If you go... If you have a particle in the particles... Yeah, I get a super-dication for you, right? Yeah.

Right. Well, look at what it's done with mathematics. Like just over the last couple weeks, they've solved more than 50 program or 50 mathematical equations that they have struggled for a decade upon decade to try to solve. And AI is like, oh, I got it.

Well, biology is a little bit more complicated, but already AI is doing a lot of the science that we used to do in my lab. In fact, what we just recently did in a couple of months would have taken about 160 years to complete. What? And it's only getting faster eventually so much.

Wait a minute. Two months instead of 160 years. Well, what exactly was it that you had to do? Oh, so this drink and the pill that we're looking for?

That's not easy. So we have some candidate molecules. We have a cocktail that works. But we want to see you taking stuff?

Not yet. You're thinking about it? Yeah. I don't want to stop you.

Well, that is true. That is true. But it'd be a bad look if I died. So maybe I'm going to die.

I don't think so. We've done a lot of safety tests and it looks really safe. But I'm not going to publicly do anything against the law. Of course.

Of course. Publicly. I'm at a stage where I have to be a good boy because I've got the red watching. Yes.

A lot of the stake. Yes. And if this trial is any issues, it's not good. You've got to die your eyes and cross your teeth and follow every, I understand that.

I was going to get exactly the root. I'll be rude. I either up to do it. When you're telling me that in two months it did something that would have required us to work.

What do you exactly mean by that? Yeah. And now it would probably be impossible in thousands of years because what we do is we're looking for molecules, a single molecule that can replace this cocktail. So you need a molecule to do three or four activities in a cell.

Finding one activity is what pharmaceutical companies do. It takes hundreds of millions, if not billions, to make a drug. We know that. My little lab of 20 people and students, young kids, are trying to make one drug do three or four different things.

That's beyond the reach of pharmaceutical experience at least five years ago. What we do is we've teamed up with a group at St. Jude's Hospital where they can take. It was 10 billion.

Now it's a trillion theoretical and also drug known drugs. With my hands I'm showing a big funnel. And it's really good at the podcast. You're really helping out the audio people and everything.

I realized my podcast. Wow, that's why. Yeah. Life's about Davidson clear.

So this funnel is full of trillion molecules and we have to come down to one. How do we do that? Well, we don't look for a trillion molecules at the bench. That would take 160 or thousands of years with the case of a trillion molecules, even with robots, even with a lot of graduate students.

So we do it inside the computer. We just use a lot of compute and we dock each of these molecules against the enzymes that we now know how they work, thanks to Google to keep mine solve the problem of how all our proteins look 20,000 of them. And there's a lot of compute, but at the other end a couple months later we have 200, I don't have 200 fingers, but 200 molecules that we can now test in the lab within a few weeks. Actually next week we're testing these 200 against human cells and we've also got AI helping us to tell us if the human cells go from 92 years old back to 20.

We can tell that just by looking at them, thanks to the AI. Is there a way to stop them from turning you into a baby? Because that's what I would worry about. Yes, yes.

I don't want to be a baby again. Right, some people are already there. I'd like to cut it off at like, I was pretty good at 25. You know, that's, I'm going to get the tech for saying this, but that is what we do in the lab.

We take 92 year old cells and they stop at 20 something. Why would you get attacked with that? Because on the internet people take a clip and they say, Sinclair says we can all go back to being 20 again. You suffer from this too, right?

They take a clip and it's out of context. Yeah. And I'm just saying, cells from humans, skin cells, we take them back to 25. All my students can do this.

In fact, if you had these little genes always K, in your garage you could do this experiment. It's not hard at all to reverse aging. The question is, how do you safely make a drug? And that's been the hard part over the last 10 years.

So how would it be able to regulate this reduction or reversal of aging and stop it at 20 something years old? Well, that's what took so long. It wasn't obvious that these three human archigenes, gloascape, were the right cocktail. My student, who I mentioned, one Chang, he was struggling.

He was trying a lot of different genes. Most of them from embryos because we know embryos have to do a reset in the first week of life. Otherwise, they stay the age of the parents. And he found that leaving out one of the human archigenes was the trick.

Now that we know it's super easy, but in those days he was ready to quit. How did he find that out? Well, he tried lots of different combinations, hundreds in human cells. And you look at the cells to see if they get younger, and then we can measure molecularly that they get younger.

And are you measuring them by the length of their telomeres? Yeah, partly, but actually a better measure is the chemicals that are added and subtracted off DNA itself called methyls. And it's just a carbon molecule with three hydrogens, very simple molecule. But what cells do is they use these methyls to tag genes to be switched off.

So when we're growing as an embryo, the cells that want to become neurons will shut off all these other unwanted genes like liver genes and skin genes. And the ones that don't get this methyl chemical stay on for our life, and that's how no cells develop and stay healthy. But what happens during aging, a friend of mine, Steve Horvath discovered that you can use this as a clock. These chemicals, they change over time.

And we found that that happens largely due to DNA damage going on. These kind of things, we could use this to rapidly age a mouse, which we published in 2023. Oh, so maybe some nefarious state actor, like some Russian spy could inject something in your coffee, and you would turn 99 over 99? And you know how to do that.

Whoa. That's the dark side of this. You could spike your husband's drink. Fuck that dude.

And turn him into an old man. And what do you do? Someone tweeted the other day, if a 92 year old could be 25 again, would you have sex with them? Am I still?

Hell yeah. Imagine how much they know? But would they have sex with you? Right.

That's the question. That's the question. That's the question. They'd be looking for another 20 year old.

Right. So anyway, how do we do it? We can measure those chemicals and determine how old a cell is. Or human.

I could take your skin cells from your mouth or your blood. Tell you how old people would be so disturbed by old rich guys dating young women. If that was the case, you know, tell if they looked young, because people get very mad at that. You ever notice?

Yeah. Yeah. You see some real old decrepit dude with a hot young wife and people are, God damn it. They get really mad.

Right. Right. Now the best way to do that is to have a big bank account, but eventually you'll like. Right.

But people still get grossed out. I wonder if they would get grossed out if you look 20. They'd be like, he's praying. He has so much more years of knowledge and information.

I don't care if he looks 20. That's a 99 year old man. That day will come. That day will come where you will not be able to tell how old somebody is by looking at them.

You'll have to do a test for these genes. Wow. You would probably lie the other way. I'm 80.

Tom's allowed to be there when he's 80. That's right. Well, when we live for hundreds of years, people will do that. They'll be proud of their age.

Do you know anything about ancient civilizations and some of the weirdness of the records of like ancient Sumer? Well, only really what I've learned from listening to you. Well, there's what's really weird is that ancient kings lists because, so, okay, the theory, the theory among these alternative archeologist types is that there was a very advanced civilization that existed on Earth tens of thousands of years ago and we were probably wiped out by a common impact. What we have today is a rebuild of civilization.

There's not a linear progression from caveman to us and that at one point in time we had reached great heights. This explains the pyramids. This explains Machu Picchu, Saksi Waman, some megalithic structures that don't make any sense. The Chilathon stones and Balbak lemidon that are hundreds and hundreds of tons that are massive.

They're nine meters off the ground. No one understands exactly how they place them. When you look at the Sumerian kings list, it gets very weird because there's kings that rain for thousands of years and then you have the flood and then after the flood, the age of these people drops pretty dramatically and the rains are after a few hundred years become normal, become like a normal person, 50 years, 30 years like that, but thousands of years before. Then people are looking at it like, okay, is this just myth?

Is this poor record keeping? Do they have just these hyperbolic elevated stories about these kings? They were so amazing. They rained for 30,000 years or have they achieved not just in building because in building we know they'd achieve incredibly complex structure, like the pyramid for instance.

They had insane engineering. Somehow or another, the ability to move these 500 ton stones from hundreds of miles away. How did they do this? We don't really know, but we know that they did it.

Did they also have the kind of technology that you're talking about right now? If it's possible today, it makes it very difficult because it goes against what you would call the modern narrative that they're teaching in universities in terms of the timeline of human history. If that changes and we have undeniable evidence, well, it looks like these people were far more advanced than we thought and there probably was some sort of a reset of civilization. What else had they accomplished and had they gotten involved in genetic engineering?

Had they figured out a way to extend lifespan? And if they did, imagine all the work that you've accomplished in your 57 now, about 57? You look great, by the way. You really do.

It's so dark. It's incredible. People speculate it's all fake, but it's not. Anyway, you're at the heavy, but they do.

Thank you very much. I don't look as good as you though. Yes, you do. It's different.

It's basically way better than me. That's different, though. My face looks older. You look very young for your age.

I spend all the time in the lab and I haven't gone outdoors for a while. I'm sure that helps. That does help. My point is, imagine if you had 500 years to do research, not just 57 years.

Imagine if you could continue learning and growing and they did develop some sort of life extension technology where you could not just be older but be healthier than you've ever been before and live for a thousand years, you would get so much done. The exponential increase in technological innovation that we have in the society would be absolutely mind blowing. Exactly. This is a really important point.

I think what these alternative history people think might be what had taken place tens of thousands of years ago. Yeah. Well, I'm a Harvard scientist. I'm not going to say anything that isn't.

Of course. That's for me. Yes. That's where I live.

But you did make some really important points. One is that ancient civilizations have always been way more advanced than we think. Scientists are a lot more real than we make them look. We always get things wrong looking back in time and looking forward in time.

But the other thing that you say was really important is that if we do have extension of human lifespan like the Bible and these civilizations suggest then how you think about your life, if being a hundred is still in your prime, you do things very differently. Who would you marry? What career would you think about? You might have multiple lifetimes, multiple marriages, multiple families.

And that will happen. It's not really a question of if anymore. It's like asking the right brothers. Will we fly?

Yeah, we build a glider. We're going to fly around. Question is, will we build a concord? Will we go to space?

And I think that will happen. Yeah. No, I think so too. I think, well, certainly one thing that we know is that there's a giant difference between people who are 57 years old today versus 57 years old in the 1930s.

It's just a giant difference. A giant difference in your physical ability, your health. You'd be old men. Yeah, we'd be old men.

And what, I mean, when I was a child, I thought of people, I'm almost 59, I'll be 59 a week. I used to think of a 59 year old as being basically dead. Like you're barely getting around. You know, you're probably tired all the time.

Looking towards higher. Yeah, looking at a tire. You got no energy. I'm filled with energy.

I'm constantly doing, how will this be? 60. Oh no. I don't know if that's accurate.

I meant that's accurate. They had no fucking vitamins. Nobody knew what the proper nutrients you should take where. Nobody knew what was really important in terms of like resistance training and sleep and red light therapy and all that.

And they were doing all the bad stuff like heavy smoking, drinking, not sleeping a lot. Yep, not sleeping a lot. And pesticides and all kinds of terrible shit. 60 year old.

What? That guy's 60? No way. Come on.

Shut up. That guy's fucking 28 years old. There's no way. That guy's 60.

Is that real? I doubt it. I doubt it. How about that guy that looks 15?

He says, everyone thinks I'm 18. Sure. What's up? There's a guy on Instagram which I occasionally visit.

And he obviously looks old. Like he looks. Oh, he's a crazy person. And he says, people think I look 18.

Oh, crazy. Well, there's a lot of crazy people out there. They must be bodybuilders. They think they're tiny.

A lot of people are crazy. A lot of people have a distorted perception of what they look like. The plastic surgery industry is massive. It's just growing and growing.

You can see it on the street, LA especially. But imagine a world where you find successful, you can take a pill, your doctor could get it, or eventually it's a cream on your face and you literally get younger. We do this in mice already. The mice get younger.

Is it going to work in humans? I think it's just a matter of time. So in the mice experiments, what have you achieved? Well, a lot.

I can reveal here some of it for the first time. There's pill that we give them to drink actually because they can't chew. The mice within four weeks with this cocktail, it has three components, which are top secret. My lab is sworn to secrecy.

They, after four weeks, we give it to them three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, weekends off. Within those four weeks, they get better physically, mentally. Excuse me. So we put them through test.

It'd be just in a couple of days. Oh, no, three days a week for a month. Oh, OK. I found this guy.

This is the guy. He went viral last year. He's 3 and 59 years old. What?

Oh, fucking, it seems so not real. He looks like he's 30 years old. He might have just amazing genetics. Well, look at YOL Romero.

There are people that are freaks. Singapore. Wow. Twando, Kwando Tan.