Young Forever: The Emerging Science of Longevity

Good afternoon, summit. Y’all awake? Yes. All right. Who wants to live to be 120? All right. That’s a good number. Not all of you. Maybe 10%. What about the rest of you? Scared of dying soon, or no? You, nobody thinks about living to be 120. Because if you think about living to be 120, it’s kind of a scary thought because everything we see around us is abnormal aging. But what if I could tell you that you could reach 120, take a beautiful hike in the mountains with your beloved swim in a cool mountain lake, make a delicious dinner, have a bottle of wine, make love, and just gently drift off into the night. Does that sound good? Well, my friends, that is possible. And that’s what I’m gonna share with you today, because everything we thought about aging is wrong, and we have to completely reimagine everything we thought about human biology, because the science is revolutionarily changing our concepts of health and disease. The paradigm that we’re in now is akin to the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around the earth. But we now know that the chair you’re sitting on is mostly empty space. The time is not linear. And most of us think the earth is not flat, not all. And that is the type of paradigm shift that’s happening right now in medicine. What if I told you the diseases don’t really exist, they’re just constructs. They’re just things that we have created in our minds to describe phenomena. But it’s the wrong description of the reality. Just like thinking the earth is flat or the sun revolves around the earth. So who here thinks that aging as a disease? Couple of you. Most of what we see as aging today is abnormal aging. It leads to frailty, decrepitude, disease, disability dysfunction. Who wants that? Nobody. But that’s not now what’s possible? So the concept that aging is a disease is now emerging among the leading researchers in longevity. And there’s literally billions of dollars flowing into the research around longevity science, not from the government. The NIH budget for aging is minuscule. It’s a couple of billion, but, uh, most of that’s on the diseases of aging like Alzheimer’s, heart disease, cancer, you know, the budget for cancer is 6 billion. The budget for aging mechanism is about a couple hundred million, but there’s literally billions of dollars flowing into this from basically billionaires that don’t wanna die. So, well, it is okay, but we’ll get there. Now. I’m going to be 63 next week. Uh, and I checked my biological age just recently, and in 43, woo. I’m going for 25 Now, what is this measuring? It’s measuring something called your biological clock. And there’s many ways we’re learning how to do this, but this is very new type of research allowing us to look at our epigenome. We here knows what the epigenome is, right? You guys are all smart. Someone walked up to me and say, everybody here is so hot and so smart and so nice. I’m like, yeah, it’s true. It’s true. But the, uh, the the beautiful thing is now we have a metric to look at the interventions that we can do and their impact on our biological age. And Rockwell also can measure in our immune age and many other things we’re gonna talk about. So how do we get there? Should we all become vegans like the Seventh Day Adventist from Loma Linda who live in the blue zone there? Or should we be more like the plains Native Americans? Lakota, who basically lived mostly on bison and had the longest lived population at the turn of the 19 hundreds with many, many centenarians. Uh, what is the limit of aging? Is it like the bowhead whale that lives maybe a couple hundred years? They found a harpoon, an old bowhead that was from, you know, a couple hundred years ago, or the Greenland shark lives 400 years. So we have to kind of reimagine what the limits of aging are. Somewhere even suggesting we can outlive death, we can reach what we call longevity escape velocity, which is the advances in science are gonna be happening so fast that we’re gonna keep extending our life if we can stay alive long enough. So you need about another 10 or 15 years to stay alive, guys. And then we might get there. So we have to rethink medicine. We have to rethink health. We have to rethink disease, and we have to get outta this old model, which is based on describing symptoms and where those symptoms are. It’s medicine by symptom and geography, not by mechanism and cause. And now we’re beginning to understand and pull back the veil on the mechanism. Einstein said, I don’t wanna know the spectrum of this or that element. I wanna know the thoughts of God. The rest are details. Finally, we’re able to start to think about nature of nature. The thoughts of God we’re those are being revealed in the emerging science of longevity. And the medicine we have is essentially whack-a-mole medicine. It’s, it’s, you have, uh, chest pain, you go to the chest doctor, you have a head pain, you go to the head doctor, you have a joint pain, you go to the joint doctor, you have a stomach pain, you go to a stomach doctor. I just had a friend come up to me, uh, when I was walking around and said, you know, thank you for referring to me to this other doctor, another functional medicine doctor who cured his son of anxiety and depression and debilitating psychiatric symptoms by fixing his microbiome. That’s where, where we’re at. And that doesn’t get explained with our current model of thinking. You know, when you go to the rheumatologist, you have joint pain. They don’t say, well, lemme look at your poop, but they should, right? So most of the aging research is about the disease of aging, dementia, heart disease, cancer, diabetes. And, and we’re in a frightening moment because even as we’re beginning to peel back the nature of human biology, understand the laws of biology, we’re seeing an explosion of, of chronic illness. Six outta 10 Americans have a chronic disease. Four out of 10 have two or more. The cost is these slides I keep having to change. This slide says 3.5 trillion now is 4.1 trillion. And when you, depending on how you define chronic disease, it’s even more. We see 12% of Americans a number of years ago were metabolically and healthy. That means they have high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol. And a study came out recently this year, showed that just 6.8% of Americans are metabolically healthy, meaning they have normal blood pressure, normal cholesterol, normal blood sugar, haven’t had a heart attack or stroke, and are not overweight. So, like most of you, we are in the minority here. It’s a good minority. So we are, we are in this moment where we can’t continue in this way. We’re spending more and more and getting less and less and keeping the same thing and having worse outcomes. And the United States is worse than ever. We’re seeing a decline in life expectancy of the first time in history, while we’re spending more and more than any other nation. We spend more than double any other nation and where our health outcomes are worse and sometimes next to last in many health outcomes. So the question is, how do we not just treat disease, but how do we create health? That’s what functional medicine is. It’s a science of creating health for the first time. We’re understanding the laws of biology. The laws of physics are extraordinary. And just with a few natural laws, like you saw Birks talk with a few natural laws of physics, we can create all the things that we see around us, your phone and go to space, and just all the technologies we see come from a few basic natural laws that create a great number of phenomena. The same is true in biology. So the science of longevity is helping us to reveal what are those basic laws of biology and how do we work with those fundamental mechanisms? How do we reimagine aging so that we don’t see what we typically see now, which is that the last 20% of people’s life, they’re not healthy. You want your health span, which is how many years you’re alive to equal your lifespan, right? You wanna maybe spend the last couple of days, not well, and then just go, or maybe not at all. So how do we reimagine aging? How do we rethink what’s possible and, and, and, and kind of capture our imagination back around what’s possible with human health and longevity? Now, right now there’s, there’s this convergence happening of multiple different things throughout science and technology that are allowing us to radically transform healthcare and medicine. And it’s coming fast, except it’s not coming to your doctor’s office. It’s coming on the periphery, on the margin of medicine. Just like Apple created a phone and, you know, changed the major league industry. It’s not gonna come from inside. And so what’s happening is, uh, there’s, there’s a phenomena where we’ve uncovered the, the, the human genome project has discovered our genome that’s led to the understanding, uh, understanding of the omics revolution, proteomics, transcriptomics and microbiome. All these things were sort of unpacking and understanding what’s going on, but it’s huge amounts of data. And so there’s huge big data analytics and quantum computing and artificial intelligence all being now possible to filter all the huge gigabytes of data that are in each one of us. But what’s needed is a framework to understand all that, which is systems biology. It’s a framework of understanding how our biology is a network of networks. You’re an ecosystem. And so to try to treat each part separately doesn’t make any sense. I don’t treat disease, I create health. And when I do that, disease goes away as a side effect. And then we have the quantified self movement. Many of you’re wearing devices and whether it’s an oral ring or a Fitbit or your Apple Watch that are tracking your biometrics, but soon ring me will put it in implantable thing. Not just a continuous glucose monitor, but an implantable chip that might track thousands of your biomarkers in real time, putting it up in the cloud, combining with all the other data you have and learning exactly what is going on in your physiology in a personalized way to help you guide moment tomo decisions about your health. So this is functional medicine. Who’s heard about functional medicine? Amazing. Amazing. Okay. Well, I, I can retire now. I’ve been at this for 30 years and I would ask that question even a few years ago, and I wouldn’t get many hands. So functional medicine is the clinical model that helps us to apply systems biology and thinking. And uh, Einstein said it’s a, uh, wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of complex phenomena. That’s a direct observation, appear to be quite separate things. And, and we’re now finally coming to understand what scientists are calling the hallmarks of aging. These are the fundamental things that go wrong that underlie all disease. Now, some scientists say there’s nine, I added one to 10, which is a microbiome. But it’s important to understand that these hallmarks are still, while they’re upstream from the diseases, they’re still not fully explaining the cause. What causes the hallmarks? What’s the cause of the cause? So functional medicine’s about understanding root causes. So the hallmark’s important to understand ’cause we have to work with them, we have to look at them, we have to measure them. We have to be able to get the metrics to understand what we’re doing and whether it’s working to improve or not. These, these hallmarks of aging. But the important thing is we have to get to the root cause and we’re gonna talk about what those are. And functional medicine helps us figure that out. And we’re gonna get a little bit more into how do we address these things. But we see changes in our epigenome with aging. Who knows what our epigenome is. Basically your genome is your genes. You’ve got 20,000 genes, let’s say about the same as an earthworm. But you have this thing called the epigenome, which means it sits above the genes. You can’t change your genes unless you’re gene editing, but you can change the expression and function of your genes in real time at any age. So when I measured my biological age, I was measuring my epigenome and I was measuring my biological clock by measuring the epigenetic marks on my gene. Basically the bookmarks in my book of life, figuring out which ones are expressed, which is are not, and how I can influence those by my lifestyle, washing over my genes. You basically are at this moment, the sum total of all your life, your experiences, every bite of food you took, every toxin you’re exposed to, every thought you had, every relationship you were in, everything that has happened to you out here. Your life is what we call your exposed home, what you’re exposed to. And that’s far more important than your genome because that washes over you all the time. And you have almost full control over that. That’s what the exciting part is. ’cause you can change your epigenome and reverse your biological clock through addressing how we address this. But there’s more things that go wrong. We have problems with DNA damage. We get thousands of little hits, maybe hundreds of thousands every day. And we have a DNA repair system on board. Thank God we, we have abnormal proteins that form as we age and get disfigured and dysfunctional. And proteins are the communication messengers of your body. We also have the phenomena of our mitochondria, which are energy factories and how those are not functioning as we age. We lose energy. What’s the difference between a 2-year-old running around with energy? Doesn’t stop like an EverReady bunny and somebody who’s 90 years old is kind of moving like this. It’s their mitochondria. So the function of your mitochondria, the number of your mitochondria, the healthier mitochondria determines the quality of your health and aging. And those go dad, as we get older and, and, and related to a lot of these things that we’re talking about, we see zombie cells form, which are these cells that don’t die, but exploit inflammation throughout the body and make other cells, zombie cells, and create this phenomena called inflammaging. Inflammaging is this phenomenon of inflammation that’s underlying all these disease. So obesity, heart disease, cancer, depression, dementia, all these things are disease of inflammation, psychiatric diseases, all of it are diseases of inflammation. And then our stem cells get pooped out. And then our microbiome degrades because of our diet and stress and various things. And our microbiome plays a big role in driving inflammation in our body. And then there’s this bigger phenomenon, which I think is upstream to a lot of it, which is di dysregulated nutrient sensing. It’s a mouthful, but it basically means how what you eat affects these longevity switches in your body. Things like mTOR, who sort of mTOR, okay, not too many. Okay, I’ll explain what that is. Uh, A MPK and sirtuins and insulin signaling pathways, these are the four key longevity switches that are influenced by what we eat. And so how we eat what we eat when we eat, the quality of the food we eat, all determine whether these longevity switches are being activated to extend our life or to shorten our life. And that’s something we have huge control over. So food is one of the biggest levers we have to regulate our biology. So in a nutshell, that is, and the telomeres, we have these telomeres, which are these little like things at the end of our genes, our chromosomes that have to unwind in order for ourselves to replicate. And they shorten as we get older. And the more short they are, the shorter your life. And we have huge ability to influence those. So we have the ability to influence all these hallmarks of aging by what we do. And these are underlying all these diseases of aging that we talked about. But there are causes of these. And functional medicine helps us figure this out. This is the map of functional medicine. This is what we look at when we see a patient. There’s 155,000 diseases in the code book for medicine. I don’t care about any of that. What I care about is how do I figure out each person’s map? What are the predisposing factors? What are their genes? What are the things that have happened to them in their life? Whether it’s emotional, physical trauma, toxic exposure, infections, how do those predispose them to illness and how, what are their fundamental lifestyle factors? Your diet, exercise, stress, sleep, relationships, community connection. All these things are interacting with these basic biological networks. These seven systems, these net this is, these are networks of networks and they’re all interacting and all dynamic and all working in a web. And, and literally there’s trillions of reactions every second in the body. And so this, this is the map I use to determine what’s going on. So when there’s too much of something or not enough of something, when there’s too much of bad stuff and not enough good stuff, it creates imbalance in these systems. And the imbalances in these systems lead to the symptoms and diseases that we see. So my job as a functional medicine doctor is to create a map of this for every person and figure out what their unique symptoms are telling me about where there’s dysfunction in these systems. And then I, and then all I do is get these systems in balance. I take away the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, and the body has this incredible innate intelligence and has, it has its own built in healing system that we just have to learn how to activate. And that my friends, is what the rest of the talk is gonna be about. So, uh, this is a pretty cool slide. This is, uh, an experiment that was done to show you the power of influencing your epigenome. It’s been that brandy journal who is, uh, one of the leading scientists in the epigenetic field. And he basically took identical genetic mice, the I agouti mice, which was the left, the, the big fat mouse here with the, you know, over here. And this mouse is bred to be obese, diabetic. And um, and they gave these mice some vitamins. The, the mothers, they two took two different groups, right? One group, they just give the regular mouse chow. And the other group they gave the mouse shall puy special vitamins B, vitamins B12, folate, B six trimethylglycine, a few other things, some soy, um, uh, Janine, some phytochemicals. And then when the mother mouse gave birth, they found that the mice who had the vitamins, they weren’t obese and they were thin and healthy. That’s the power of modulating the epigenome through these various compounds, which are available to all of us. And there’s lot of ways to do it not just to B vitamins. It has to do what we call DNA methylation. Methylation just means taking a carbon and three hydrogen in this group. It’s like the currency of your body. And they move around billion some times a second in communication. They’re like the currency of our body, like we use money. This is how your body, uh, exchanges information and in regulates your DNA, it regulates your mood, it regulates detoxification, pretty much everything. And when it’s not working, you’re in trouble. So the epigenetics that, that we now understand is controlled in large part, not only, but in large part by DNA methylation. So understanding what affects it, how to regulate it, what foods impact it, what nutrients impact it, what screws it up is really important. So we have to understand our chronological age. I’m 62, I’m gonna be 63 next week. Doesn’t really matter. It’s our biological age that matters. And I’ve seen people who were 40 who had a biological age of 70, and I’ve seen people who were 70 who have a biological age of 40. That’s what’s possible if we understand how to work with this. So how do we reverse our biological age clock? What do we have to do? Well, this is a patient I had at Cleveland Clinic. Her name was Janice. Um, she had so many problems, right? She had heart disease, heart failure, angina, diabetes on insulin. She had high blood pressure. Her kidneys were failing, her liver was failing. She had fatty liver and she was on a pile of medications. Her copay was 20,000 a year. And she had this whole list of problems, which is why I call myself a holistic doctor ’cause I take care of people with a holistic problems. And, uh, Janice was on her way out. She was headed for a heart transplant and a kidney transplant. And, um, we use this powerful new drug that has the power to transform and improve the expression of tens of thousands of genes to optimize tens of thousands of protein networks to balance and optimize your hormone regulation, to improve your brain chemistry, to optimize your microbiome. And it works faster, better and cheaper than any drug on the planet and is available to almost anybody. Do you know what it is? Food. What you put at the end of your fork is more important than anything you’ll find in prescription bottle within three days of changing her diet. Alright? We did, it’s a Cleveland Clinic and our function for life program, and it’s based on a anti-inflammatory, detoxifying, microbiome supporting, um, diet, which I basically, you know, use my patients part of functional medicine. It’s, it’s a, I call the 10 day detox diet. But it’s essentially, it’s basically whole foods, anti-inflammatory, lots of good fats, low glycemic, lot of phytonutrients. Within three days she was off insulin. Within three months using food as medicine, we’re able to transform all her diseases. Um, and food is, is, is like code. It’s, it’s, you can rewrite your biological software by what you’re eating. If you understood that with every bite of food you take, you’re literally transforming everything in your body in real time. You would think twice about what you’re eating. Nobody mentioned in particular here, but, um, and this is, uh, what happened to Janice after a year, in three months, she reversed her heart failure, her diabetes, her kidneys normalized, her fatty liver, normalized her blood pressure normalize. She got off all her medication. Her copay, like I said, was 20,000. She saved huge amounts of money and she got her life back and she lost 116 pounds. But like I said, within three days she was off for insulin. In three months she was off everything and then took a bit to get the weight off. And you take type two diabetics who were 400 pounds, they get a gastric bypass and within two weeks their diabetes is gone. Or even a week, they’re still severely obese. What’s the difference? It’s what they’re putting in their mouth. And somebody had the bright idea to do a study and say, well let’s compare bariatric surgery to just changing diet, which you’d eat as if you’d had a bariatric surgery. And there was no difference, right? So when I think about how to treat patients, it really comes down to this really simple formula. Take out the bad stuff and put in the good stuff. We’re either dying of too much or dying of too little, right? We gotta put in the things that our bodies need to thrive. We need to take out bad diet, manage our stress, and remove as much toxins from our diet and life as possible. Address, you know, environmental allergens and food allergens and sensitivities and deal with latent infections or our microbiome, which is a huge factor in aging. And we need to put in the things that make us thrive. You know, we’re biological organisms. Not complicated. If you’re a vet, you know way more about human nutrition, about nutrition than any doctor does. Uh, so whole foods, the right nutrients, the right type of movement and exercise, uh, stress reduction, sleep, community, meaning purpose, community is so important to our health. It’s one of the key anchors of the blue zones where they live a long time, they have really rich community. So let’s kind of get into it. What is causing the dysfunctions that we see in the hallmarks? What are those things that we need to deal with and get rid of? And how do we address those? Well, a lot of it’s driven by inflammation that leads to these problems. And it’s basically our diet. You know, for every 10% of your diet that’s ultra processed food, which is about 60% to 67% of our diet. The risk of death goes up by 14%. So you do the math, it’s a lot. The number one killer in the world today is bad food and not enough good food kills 11 million people a year conservatively. I think it’s a lot higher than that, more than smoking or anything else. It just dwarfs anything. Why did, why did we see America who’s got the health best healthcare system in the world? And is 4% of the population have 16% of the covid cases and deaths? Nobody’s talking about that. It’s the food, it’s sugar. I hate to say it, I love sugar like anybody else, but we are not meant to eat 22 teaspoons a day, which is about the average for the average American. And I know I’m not having that much. So you must be having a little more. And, and, and we used to have 22 teaspoons a a year as hunter gathers, maybe we find a berry patch. And this leads to this phenomena called diabesity, which is the spectrum of pre-diabetes and type two diabetes. This phenomena now affects 93.2% of Americans at some degree or another, depending on how you define it. And I have a more liberal definition. I’m like, what’s the optimal human health? Not what’s the normal range on a lab test, right? The normal range on a lab test keeps changing. ’cause we get to discover, oh, if your blood sugars used to be 140 was diabetes, now it’s 126. And used to be 115 was pre-diabetes. Now it’s a hundred. What, what if it’s 85 to a hundred? Well, your risk of death goes up in a linear fashion from 85 to a hundred. So what’s optimal? Like, so what is, what is optimal? And toxins are a huge factor too. We’re exposed to 80,000 new toxins since the Industrial Revolution. Huge problem. Um, our microbiome has been so dis destroyed. If you look at indigenous cultures, our microbiome is very different. You know, I want to do fecal transplants and find indigenous cultures that Wade Davis was talking about and get poop pills for us all to take. ’cause I think it would help us a lot. That’s coming. Promise. Uh, mitochondria, I’m not kidding by the way. Um, a mitochondria, uh, is, is a huge topic. And a lot of the ways that, uh, the aging and longevity switches work and food works is through mitochondria. What do they mitochondria do? They take the food you eat and the oxygen you breathe and they combust it like an engine in your mitochondria through a whole assembly line and produce energy. And the waste is carbon dioxide. You breathe off and water, you pee out, and there’s some waste free radicals. And our bodies manage that. We deal with oxidative stress. But if we don’t deal with that, right, our mitochondria degrade. They get old, they get pooped out, and we lose energy and we age fast. Uh, and a lot of the disease of aging, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, these, a lot of these are mitochondrial problems. Um, also our sedentary lifestyle. I mean, I love these conferences sitting, but I wouldn’t play tennis for an hour. And I feel much better by not sitting on my butt all day. And, and we, we know that now, uh, the lack of exercise, which, you know, probably maybe 8% of Americans get enough exercise is also contributing a huge way. Uh, loneliness and isolation and disconnection. Why are we all here? ’cause we see our friends and our community, it makes us feel good. This whole phenomenon of social genomics, which is the power of our social interactions and our social networks to create health and wellbeing. I took this model and I created a faith-based wellness program at, uh, Saddleback Church in California where Rick Warren called the Daniel Plan, where we got 15,000 people to sign up in a week. And they lost 250,000 pounds in a year. We went up to write a book called The Daniel Plan. We sold a million copies and, uh, won the Christian Book of the Year award. Of course, I’m the only Jew to win that book award ever. Uh, well that was that one guy 2000 years ago. But, you know, um, so we found that people in that church use the small groups that they had to help each other get healthy. There wasn’t a doctor, a nutritionist, a health coach. They just helped each other and support each other to live better, healthier lives. So how do we reimagine aging? How do we address the hallmarks of aging? How do we, how optimize the matrix? How do we get to where we want to go? So we talked about the hallmarks. Now there’s different ways to get into this. And a lot of science is talking about how do we, how do we fix these problems? How do we optimize these systems? And they’re developing drugs and they’re developing drugs for lytic cells, for zombie cells. And they’re trying to develop drugs to work on these various pathways that we’re gonna talk about in a minute, like mTOR. And they’re looking at how do we, you know, affect telomeres by different compounds? And we may be using medication. I’m not against medication, but we have a lot of the tools already. And one of the things that we know is that calorie restriction is a powerful tool for extending life. It’s the only thing that works in animal models over and over again to extend life by a third. So if you’re wanna live to be as a human, 120, that’s the amount, right? If you’re, if you’re 80 is the average life, expect to see you extend it by a third, that’s 120. So this is repeatable, of course. Nobody wants to be starving and eat a third’s less calories ’cause you’re gonna be hungry all the time and not bring much fun to be around like me when I don’t eat. And, and this is an experiment they did with these mice. Uh, these are not mice, these are monkeys. And they, they basically put the monkey on the left, uh, on a calorie restricted diet. And the other monkey not, and the other monkey age very fast. And his biological was worse, his labs are worse. He got arthritis and decrepit, his skin was bad, and his hair was falling out. And, you know, it’s not fun. And, and what does calie restriction do? It gives our bodies a chance to repair itself through this process called autophagy. Who’s root of autophagy? Oh god, you guys are good. Okay, so autophagy is key to healthy aging, which is basically the idea that we have our own repair and recycling system when we’re starving and don’t get enough food, we still need proteins. We still need to do stuff with our bodies. So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna harvest old cells and parts and we’re gonna break ’em down and digest them, and we’re gonna get the amino acids and all the pieces, and we’re gonna stick ’em back together to make new proteins and new parts so we can live. That’s what autophagy is. It’s basically self cannibalism in the service of repair and regeneration. Now, Cal restriction does a lot of other things too. It reduces inflammation. It, it reduces oxidative stress. It helps improve your stem cell function. DNA repair, it’s like this whole cascade of things start to go into play when you do calie restriction, but you don’t really wanna do that all the time. There’s ways to hack calie restriction. We’re gonna talk about that. There’s, there’s dietary ways, there’s also supplement ways, there’s nutrient ways, there’s even medication. So this is kind of a more technical slide, but I want to talk about these four nutrient pathways switches quickly, which is mTOR, which means mammalian target of rapamycin. And we’re gonna get into what that is in a minute. But that’s essentially a nutrient sensing pathway that senses protein and sugars. Now if you’re activating this pathway and you wanna build muscle, it’s a good thing. You want protein to build muscle. I, I wanna talk about that moment. But muscle is the currency of aging. If you lose muscle, you age rapidly, your muscle is the most important organ this neglected in your body because it has to function well and you need to make muscle. So you need to activate mTOR. But if you turn around all the time, which we do, we just keep eating all the time and eat late and eat early and don’t take breaks. We basically are activating this pathway. When you do too much. It’s like you get cancer and you get degeneration, all this other stuff, you just keep, it’s like, it’s like cooking all day in your kitchen, never cleaning it up. Now mTOR silencing is a big thing in longevity research and a lot of longevity research. Oh, how do we silence mTOR? We get rid of protein. Well, if you get rid of protein or if you’re have vegan, your muscles aren’t gonna be able to be built in the ways that you need to build them in order to maintain muscle mass. As you, and I wish I had an hour to talk about this one topic ’cause it’s a big topic, but I wrote a book, it’s called Young Forever. It’s coming out in February. It’s all in there. And, and so we wanna activate mTOR in the right moments. It’s like Goldilocks and, but not all the time. And we want to inhibit mTOR in the right moments, particularly at night. So having a pathway to do that is really important. The other switch is A MPK, which is, uh, regulated by sugar and nutrient sensing and sirtuins, which you might’ve heard about from resveratrol. You might’ve heard about metformin being used for longevity that works on MPK. You might’ve heard about, uh, you know, resveratrol from, you know, grapes using for s sirtuin activation, which is involved with DNA repair. It’s activated by NAD. We’ll talk about that. And insulin signaling, that’s one of the worst things. If you keep your sugar high, you’re basically accelerating aging throughout your, your life. So you end up looking at, at your body as you age, and you, you’re 30 years old, you have a certain amount of muscle and you can be the same weight that 30 and 80 and and have totally different body composition. Your body could be half fat even though you look the same weight. So you don’t want your muscle to become like rib eye. You want it like filet mignon. And, and it’s important. This is Emma Murano who lived to be 117 years old. She was dwindling, dwindling in her nineties. And her doctor said she should eat 150 grams of raw meat a day. And she did. And she lived to 117 years old. Uh, so there’s many ways to hack this, but you’ve heard of intermittent fasting, time, restricted eating, there’s all these ways to do it. But basically if you don’t eat for 12 hours overnight, that’s a good start. If you wanna extend it to 14 hours, okay, 16 hours may be better. And there’s, everybody’s a little different and different people may be able to tolerate this better, but the idea is nobody should be having any food within a 12 hour period every single day. Now you can do extended fast for a day a week. You could do, you know, uh, you know, every quarter, a five day fast. There’s all kinds of ways to do this. There’s the fasting mimicking diets. Uh, there’s ketogenic diets which do the same thing because when you’re on a ketogenic diet, your body is doing exactly the same thing as if you, you hadn’t been eating because it thinks you’re starving, which is not a bad thing. And ketogenic diets have been shown to reverse cancer and, and dementia and, and autism. And there it is really quite an interesting phenomenon of how do we activate these healing mechanisms. So the question is, what the heck should I eat? What should I have for lunch? I wish I could again talk to you about this. I’ve written more books than I care to say about this topic. Food, what the, should I eat food actually cookbook, uh, my new book, young Forever. I talk a lot about food and longevity, the pegan diet, but basically it’s very simple. You want to eat a lot of this as many colorful variety of plant foods as you can. So your, your diet should be plant rich. That’s different than plant-based. Plant rich means, you know, 70, 80% of your plate should be colorful fruits and vegetables, and then the rest is fat and, and protein. And, and the question is how much protein you need. It changes as you age, but as you age, you need more. And you pro. And the minimum amount that people are saying is 8.8 grams per kelo. That’s, that’s the minimum amount to not get a deficiency disease. How much vitamin C do you not get? Scurvy? 60 milligrams, you know, not much. How much vitamin D do you need to not get rickets? 30 units? How much you need to prevent osteoporosis and prevent cancer and, you know, help with all the other things in immune system. Probably more 5,000 units. So it’s really about the amount. High quality protein, good fats, nuts and seeds. All that stuff’s really important. Uh, we also need adequate sleep. Really important underestimated. Matthew Walker’s got a great book on this. We need to learn how to reset our nervous systems, especially in this current culture, which is so activating. We need to learn how to activate our relaxation response. And it’s an active process. It’s not a passive process. You have to work to relax in a way, which means meditation, yoga, breath work, whatever, whatever turns you on, there’s a million ways to do it. We need community. That’s why we’re all here, right? We’re all here because we feel good when we’re in relationship right’s like a human in the middle of forest or in the middle of a jungle or in the middle of the desert. And they’re not gonna survive by themselves. So we are bred to be in community. EO Wilson wrote book called The Social Conquest of the Earth, which is all about that. Also optimism and meaning and purpose enhance our lives. Literally, if you, if you look at the data on meaning and purpose, you actually extend your life by seven years if you have meaning and purpose in your life. Uh, also altruism is pretty awesome because the same thing that happens when you have cocaine or alcohol or nicotine, you activate this air of your brain called the nucleus accumbens accumbens. It’s simulated by dopamine. The same thing happens when you are of service. Nim cab ba basically had it right? Love everybody, serve everybody, feed everybody. So that’s my job. Um, so let’s talk about how we support healthy aging. What do we have to do to actually help support healthy aging? Let’s get into some of the nitty gritty hormesis. Who’s heard of hormesis? Great guys are good. Cut hormesis essentially is the idea of, it’s a stress that doesn’t kill you, but makes you stronger. So our bodies are not meant to live in a thermo regulated 68 degree temperature and be in these controlled environments. 24 7. We’re meant to be stressed and stress activates our longevity pathways. So there’s hormesis foods, foods that are stressed, work to help heal our bodies. That’s why wild foods are better than regenerative foods are better than organic foods are better than commercial foods because they contain higher levels of phytochemicals. The greatest example of this is the Himalayan tery buckwheat, which is grown in the Himalayas in the worst conditions and has 130 phytochemicals. Some never found in any other place in the world that regulate your immune system, that activate these longevity switches that kill zombie cells. And you can make pancakes out of them. And there’s also, you can take it as supplements. So these are powerful compounds that we know, know are in, in foods, and you just wanna eat a lot of this stuff. Uh, you can activate these pathways by what we talked about. Time restricted eating, intermittent fasting, longer, fast fasting, mimicing diets, ketogenic diets, all do the same thing. Exercise, really important, moving your body. And there’s two kinds of exercise. One is aerobic and that’s to increase something called your VO two max, which is the maximum ability to use oxygen. And that’s a measure of your mitochondrial function. So the higher your VO two max, the the fitter you are, the longer you lift. And the way to do that is interval training. Like I was running around tennis court and I couldn’t catch my breath. Basically, that’s what you wanna be doing. And then obviously strength training and not like this, but you know, you wanna be able to, to stress your muscles, stress your body in a way to build more muscle. So that’s what, that’s what hormesis is a great example. You use exercise to build your muscle. You, you lift weights and your body’s getting torn and damaged in a way, but your body responds by actually repairing and healing and making you stronger. Uh, saunas are amazing. This show that by looking at finished sauna users, if you use it a couple times a week, you reduce your risk of death by like 24%. If you did it like four or five times a week, it was like 45%. And that was like, the control was like one time a week. There’s enough saunas in Finland, everybody can be in a sauna at the same time. So the control group was already doing one sauna a week. So saunas activate heat shock proteins they activate, which is, uh, they activate urin innate immune system. They increase your cardiovascular system health, they increase heart rate variability. Uh, they help you spread out toxins. They make you feel good. It’s a very powerful tool for longevity. Um, also you might maybe know w Hoff, uh, he’s, he’s a good friend. He’s a crazy man. Um, I once gave a presentation at a big Tony Robbins event and he came on before me and he like runs on stage this big split. And I’m like, what am I gonna do? Okay, so, um, so this is a powerful thing. You know, when you, when you’re in a cold dad, this is, you know, basically a friend who had a, a very, you know, uh, homemade economically, uh, affordable coal punch was basically a trough for animal water. And you pour full of ice cubes and water and you jump in. And, and that actually also activates all these longevity switches in the body. Activates our brown fat and our mitochondria and helps our immune function and, and helps us increase dopamine and focus and attention. So I mean it’s, it’s, it’s basically you need to know the right dose, right? Too much heat. You’re gonna have heat stroke and die too much cold. You’re gonna hypothermia die. So it’s that right balance and these therapies you can start to incorporate in your life. There’s also hypoxia, another stress. So going to Mount Everest, like the Villa Baba people in Ecuador live a long time. They limit high altitudes. We actually know that by reducing oxygen, you increase the function of your mitochondria or clean up old mitochondria and you repair your tissues. So you can use these hypoxia machines like a cel gym or these masks you can buy for 50 bucks and exercise with ’em or sit at your desk and like starve yourself oxygen for periods of time. Hyperbaric oxygen, another tool. Amazing. This is where you increase pressure on your body. So like two atmospheres under the, uh, ocean. And then that, uh, at a hundred percent oxygen. And then what that does is that in, in some really interesting longevity research from Israel, uh, kills all these zombie cells and increase telomere length more than any other therapy. So this, this might be an increasingly used tool. Ozone therapy might, might’ve heard about ozone, but oh, that’s not just bad ’cause it’s from the atmosphere and you’ve inhale, you, you’re gonna die. That’s dangerous. Well, yeah, it’s dangerous, but if you inhale it, it’s dangerous. Um, like, like so is water. If you inhale it, it’s very dangerous. It’s called drowning. It’s where you put it that matters. Uh, but this is a hormetic therapy. It’s an oxidative therapy. It creates a burst of oxidation in your body. Your body responds by activating stem cells, reduce inflammation, activating your mitochondria, helping to, um, reduce inflammation and many, many other things. So these are the, the sort of negative stresses, but there’s also abundance, uh, not just adversity but abundance that can help. And so these compounds we’re learning about from plants like resveratrol that binds to the sirtuin pathways. One of those four longevity switches and activates our DNA repair, reduces inflammation and, and and increases, you know, even cardiovascular fitness. Cetin from strawberries kills those zombie cells we talked about. Pomegranate has something called ULI a, which is, uh, metabolite. It’s a metabolite of your gut microbiome when you consume pomegranate, although many of us don’t have the right gut bacteria to do that. So we end up not being able to do it. But you can take this extract of pomegranate called U left a, it turns out it increases your fitness, your strength and improves mitophagy, which is like the recycling your mitochondria and mitochondrial function and fitness. And this is just from a plant food. These are beneficial compounds. So you want to eat a lot of these plant compounds. You want a lot of good fats in your diet. You wanna include a lot of spices. Really important spices are fully these phytochemicals like curcumin. Some of the plant foods are really worth mentioning. Like quercetin, you might have heard about this with COD. It’s a great immune modulator. Uh, they did a study, uh, I think it was at Mayo where they gave them quercetin another drug and they were able to reverse biological age in these patients. Uh, lytics are another compound that are really important, which are drugs that are being developed to kill the zombie cells. But there’s also a lot of plant s like cetin from strawberries. So important NAD is something your body makes in, in the process of creating energy. You can take it as a supplement, you can take it as a subcutaneous injection. You can take an IV who has had an N-I-D-N-A-D infusion? Anybody? Lot of you. Okay. Uh, and it’s, uh, you know, I had an incredible patient with Parkinson’s and we gave this to her and her tremor stopped her, her movement improved. It was pretty remarkable ’cause it activates the mitochondria repair systems. And uh, it also activates CNA repair activates her two ends and has just so many benefits. Um, and so it’s, it’s one of those key, I think potential longevity, uh, tools that we can use that’s easy to get. Um, and then there’s people talking about metformin, which is a diabetes drug, but I’m not a big fan of that because, um, from the studies I’ve seen, there are a lot better ways to optimize your insulin signaling pathways and taking a drug to do that. And there’s downside effects of this. Uh, in one large study in diabetes, uh, they were trying to prevent diabetes and they used lifestyle, uh, metformin or a control group. And, uh, the lifestyle group, you know, had a 50% reduction in progression. Diabetes, the metformin was 31%. Um, but the diet was so bad, it was a high carb, low fat diet, which is the worst diet for diabetes. So when you kind of stack metformin against an optimal diet, I don’t think it’s gonna come out very good. But there’s a large trial going on called the TAME trial. My mind’s open, but I’m not convinced and I don’t recommend it. There’s a really cool compound that was found in Rapidi. So remember that thing I talked about mTOR, that is called mammalian target of rapamycin. Rapamycin is named after rapanui, which is where the scientists went in the sixties and they scraped some stuff off one of these statues and they said, oh, we’re gonna find some new drugs. And they thought it was an antifungal, didn’t work. It’s, they found maybe it modulates immune system. They use it in transplant medicine. But then some scientists found that it silences mTOR. I mean, it shuts off that pathway that you need to shut off in order to create autophagy. So it’s kinda like hacking calorie restriction. And a lot of longevity researchers are now taking this. I’m not recommending my patients yet, I need more data, but it’s really an important compound that is available now, that’s a prescription. You can get it very inexpensive and may have the potential to really extend life in, in humans as it does in animals. So what are the things coming down the pike? What are the exciting things? And then I’m gonna open up some questions. Uh, this is kind of a kaleidoscopic view of, you know, decades of research on, uh, on scientists, years of research for me and basically all in my book that’s coming out. Um, but it’s, it’s really, it’s really an exciting moment because now we’re we’re having the ability to do testing to look at these aging biomarkers like d nna, methylation, immune age, uh, and, and other factors. We’re looking at functional testing, which isn’t just the testing you get when you go to your doctor, but a whole range of other tests that are important in looking at these matrix systems. How do we look at your microbiome, your immune system, your hormones, your your detoxification system, your structural system, your transport system? How do we tell what you’re made of? And how do we modify those things in order to enhance your health? We can now measure telomere length, which I did in myself and uh, a few years ago. And I was 58 when I did it. And my telomeres were 39. So we, we, we have the potential to modify our biology all the time. There’s this test coming out, it’s not out yet called the, uh, IH test was from a professor at Stanford I just met with yesterday, uh, David Furman, who created a thousand immunes project. The immune is basically the sum total of all your immune function and genes that regulated and the immune proteins that form. And he was able to track, you know, looking through AI and incredible, you know, mapping of diseases and people, just huge stuff that we could never do before. These analytes that we now can find to track against inflammation in our bodies that mod be modified with our lifestyle and other factors that we couldn’t test before as a biomarker of aging. So we can look at your immunological clock. Uh, also the biometrics we talked about, the sensors and all the gizmos and gadgets we’re wearing that help moderates and real time are gonna feed all this data and, and help us figure this out. There’s also a whole field of regenerative medicine, which is, uh, what does our bodies already used to repair and heal? Like I said, our bodies have this innate immune system, innate intelligence, innate healing and repair mechanisms, and all these longevity switches. How do we naturally activate them? ’cause our bodies are designed to do that. Like we’re just, we just get in the way like our, our, our job is to get out of the way and let our bodies do what they’re supposed to do. So we’ve heard about stem cells coming down the pike and there’s a lot of research coming down the pike on stem cells. Still not ready for prime time, but exciting exosome therapy. Who’s heard of exosomes? Okay, exosomes basically are the little packets of healing factors that are in stem cells. And the stem cells go around. I mean, you know what stem cells are basically, you cut yourself. How does it heal? Well, your body has to center on stem cells, release all these healing factors and make new skin, right? We experience all that. But exosomes basically takes these out by growing them, um, uh, picking a placenta or you can get it from amniotic fluid growing the, the stem cells out in the lab, and then you can manufacture huge amounts of these exosomes and then you can inject them where there’s pain. I, I basically had back surgery 30 years ago and could barely walk and my back was killing me for decades. And I saw, um, someone who’s actually here, Matt Cook, one of my friends and heroes, uh, and he injected my back over the last couple years. And I’m, um, my back is pretty much out of pain, which is quite amazing after, after decades. So these things can be really helpful. And, uh, various chronic illnesses they can be helpful in, in repairing broken, damaged joints. And then, um, peptide therapies. You’ve all heard of peptides, but there’s all these peptides. Your body makes thousands and thousands of these peptides. There’s o over 80 of them that are approved by the FDA ozempic for weight loss. You might have heard of as a peptide. Insulin’s a peptide. Uh, and we’re learning now how to use these to modify biological functions. So these are our body’s messengers. They’re how our body communicates and heals parabiosis. Another cool thing you might have heard about where you can hook up the circulation of an old mice to young mice. The young mice gives its blood to the old mice and the old mice become young, but you don’t actually have to do that. They did studies where you could do something called plasmapheresis, which is essentially where you filter your blood, you take out the cells, the red cells, white cells, platelets, and you put them back in and you cake out the plasma, which is basically the fluid that your cells float around on. And in the plasmas all this stuff, it kind of accumulates as we age, damage proteins, inflammatory molecules, all kinds of junk. And cleaning it out actually helps to rejuvenate health and, and actually reverse some of the biological aging that we see. And these studies have been done in mice and more is coming on humans. In fact, I had a lot of this done the other day at my friend Matt Cook’s house. That’s me. Uh, that’s my plasma. Uh, and he basically, I got, I got, I got the, I got the works, you know, so you know, the car wash, you get the works. I got the works, I got plasmapheresis that oz into the blood when I went in. I had exosomes and peptides and IV vitamins and NEDI had the whole cocktail. So that’s why I’m up here having a good time. And uh, and uh, and of course there’s natural killer cells, infusions, which help our immune system work better and kill cancer. And there’s also injections which you can get for broken body parts, uh, which are great. And that’s a really important part of healing. If you have, you know, basically like need to go to the body shop. We have ways to now repair these damaged joints, tissues and, and things that are kind of messed up. And I have a lot of that. And then there’s one last thing I’d like to talk about was is our minds, because we can heal our bodies, but we have to heal our minds in order to be healthy because our minds, the biggest pharmacy in the world is right between your ears. You don’t fix that if you don’t fix your thinking and your mindset and your beliefs. You know, like Jim Quick said, you know, you can do this, but then if you go around you can do this. Like, that’s what he is talking about. And, and Esther talked about your imagination and then the way we need to think about imagining things differently. So we have to heal. And there’s exciting moment. And, and Jai talked to you about how there’s an emerging therapies now that we didn’t have before to heal deep trauma. And we’re all victims of trauma, whether it’s microtrauma or macro trauma, whether it’s the trauma of living in the 21st century with all the bad news or toxins or the stress of our diet, or whether it’s the macro trauma of sexual abuse, and, uh, whether it’s your parents just not loving you well enough. All those things register in our biology. They literally land in our epigenome and that gets laid down to transmit what happens throughout our life. So the rate of aging is determined by epigenome, and our epigenome is modified by trauma. We know this from the Holocaust survivors. And as there’s, like, she was talking about her parents were in the Holocaust and we see this and she talked about having anxiety. Why is that? Because these are, things are hardwired. We seemingly hardwired into our, into our nervous system, but we now know through things like psychedelics and other things, we can change this. We can change the structure and the function of our neurons. We can affect our neuroplasticity. So these ancient cultures that Wade talked about have these traditions and bring us all sorts of things. There’s modern medicines like ketamine, which also changes the structure and function and neuroplasticity of your brain. I began that We see having remarkable effects that, you know, overnight will prevent heroin addicts from having withdrawal and reset their nervous system. So we have this potential moment in history where we can combine a lot of these things to activate our body’s innate healing system and have a, a radical new view of longevity. And this is all the stuff that actually is pretty much available now, depending on your resources and where you are, you can access a lot of this stuff. And there’s stuff that’s coming down the pike like the application of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, uh, nanorobots, uh, 3D printing of your organs, uh, gene editing. All this is coming down the road. And the point of all of it is this. Right? Have fun, enjoy your life. Like what’s the point of living to 120? It’s not a hedonistic narcissistic pursuit. It’s because as we get older, we gather wisdom and intelligence and we actually have a more balanced view of life in ourselves and the world. And it’s, can we start to contribute? I mean, I’m feeling like I’m 20 years old and just starting my life at this point. I’m just trying to reimagine the rest of my life, which could be 60 or 70 or 80 or maybe more years. And so I feel like at this point I finally figured s**t out and it’s like, why should I die now? Right? Uh, uh, this is, uh, this is a great woman. She had very good genes. Okay, madam come out. She lived to 122. She was a wine drinking, smoking chocoholic who made it to 122. So sometimes it’s about enjoying life. Sometimes it’s about good genes too. Um, thank you very much. This has been really fun. Um.