#2537 - David Sinclair

Joe Rogan: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan: Mr. Sinclair, good to see you again.

David Sinclair: Dr. Sinclair?

Joe Rogan: Doctor. I'm kidding.

David Sinclair: It's better that way, right?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, do you ever introduce yourself as doctor?

David Sinclair: Never.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, that's a weird thing because you're allowed to.

David Sinclair: I'm actually a Sir David from Australia, but.

Joe Rogan: Are you a sir?

David Sinclair: Yeah, but it's kind of a joke. I don't really...

Joe Rogan: How does that work out? Did you get knighted or some shit?

David Sinclair: The Queen's representative gave me some Australian version of a knighthood. But I get to put AO at the end of my name.

Joe Rogan: AO?

David Sinclair: Yeah, Order of Australia.

Joe Rogan: Oh.

David Sinclair: But it actually makes no difference to my life. So it's just an extra couple of letters. It's kind of cool. Let people know. I'm honored for sure. But it's just a joke.

Joe Rogan: Well, it's kind of like anybody, sir. You meet a guy at the gas station, "How you doing, sir?" It's like, wow, how does he know? Right, you don't say "How you doing, king."

David Sinclair: Yeah, well, I'm David. I'm Australian, so in Australia, if you have any ego, you get beaten up in the playgrounds.

Joe Rogan: That is true. Australia is the land of the tall poppy syndrome. They don't fuck around. They don't like you getting 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. It's such a haul.

David Sinclair: Oh, no. If you just have whiskey in an ambience and you're there without...

Joe Rogan: Is that what you do?

David Sinclair: I used to. I've gone clean. I don't drink much at all anymore.

Joe Rogan: What does that mean? How often does he drink much at all?

David Sinclair: Celebrations.

Joe Rogan: Do you want to drink right now?

David Sinclair: No, it would be a bad look. I've got the coffee that you gave me.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, this is Laird's Superfood Coffee. So Laird Hamilton, 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. Oh, it's great. Delicious. Anti-inflammatory.

David Sinclair: Yes. Which I know you're all about.

Joe Rogan: Yes, as a prophet of longevity.

David Sinclair: Yes.

Joe Rogan: Is that another title of you?

David Sinclair: Yes, you can call me Sir David the Prophet. How about that? Sir David the Prophet, Dr. Sir David the Prophet of Longevity. That do?

Joe Rogan: So there's a lot. Let's just jump right into it because there is a lot going on in the longevity space.

David Sinclair: Thank you for having me back on.

Joe Rogan: My pleasure.

David Sinclair: And by the way, I also want to thank you for, I think this is fourth time on, which is amazing. Thank you. Congrats on all your success.

Joe Rogan: Thank you.

David Sinclair: It's been 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 *Lifespan* became a bestseller. Not just that, but it's now been read millions of times around the world. It's in 40 languages.

Joe Rogan: Well, 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.

David Sinclair: 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.

Joe Rogan: Well, I think that's largely because—not to keep blowing smoke up your rear, but largely because of what you did in the book. So the book went global, and it was right in 2019 when 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, shit, I could die. And I saw the book take off. You launched it. But, yeah, since then, a lot of people have jumped on the bandwagon, and now longevity is, I hear this everywhere I go. It's everything. It's everywhere. People are constantly talking about different modalities. How often do you cold plunge? Are you sauna? What about the red light? What do you think? Is this legit? Is that legit? Like everybody's optimizing everything constantly all the time. But the reason why it'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 like it's all part of it. So if you follow the longevity principles and the ideas behind it, you certainly will live better right now.

David Sinclair: 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 really is not that hard. And that's what I'm excited about telling millions of people today. And maybe we can go over the kind of things that people can do easily to live longer.

Joe Rogan: Well, 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? Because I know that there's some pretty groundbreaking stuff that's in the pipeline right now.

David Sinclair: Yeah. So since 2019, a lot of what we talked about has come true, which is the amazing thing. We were speculating in 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 mice, monkeys. And now we have a human clinical trial. The first potential human age reversal technology is in people right now.

Joe Rogan: 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 people get old and we understand the mechanism, why couldn't we reverse it?

David Sinclair: 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. There was nothing you could 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.

Joe Rogan: And so what is the—is that using CRISPR? Like what are you using to—

David Sinclair: Well, we deliver genes into the body like CRISPR. I have a little prop here I brought in my pocket here. 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. And the eye is a good place to start.

Joe Rogan: How do you pick the people to get on these tests?

David Sinclair: They volunteer. Here. 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.

Joe Rogan: I bet if you have glaucoma you probably like, listen, what's the worst that could happen?

David Sinclair: 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 gone wrong so far. Everything's proceeding according to plan. And we're at a turning point, potentially, in human history, if it works.

Joe Rogan: So I interrupted you, but explain this little virus transport system.

David Sinclair: Oh, 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 the liver, which we've done, and cured mice of 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 were young again.

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Joe Rogan: This sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. You know what I mean? Like the scientist is on a talk show and the scientist is explaining it and everyone's at home like with their coffee like, wow, we're going to get—this is wonderful. We're going to get younger again. And the scientist says, don't worry. It's all going to work out great. 28 days later, garbage in the streets, cars on fire. The guy is waking up from a coma, doesn't know what happened. He goes outside. These optimized humans are eating each other.

David Sinclair: I admit. I admit. It is 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.

Joe Rogan: Well, God knows they never fuck anything up.

David Sinclair: I figured you might say that. Perfect.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Well, it's in the eye. 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-like particles. I shouldn't call them cells. Trillions of capsules that you're putting into the eye. What are they doing for glaucoma?

David Sinclair: Well, what they're doing is there are three genes in this DNA package, and I called 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.

Joe Rogan: These OSK genes. You just see—wait a minute, hold on. When you see old people, you don't see old people. You just say, oh, that poor person needs to be rebooted.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: 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.

David Sinclair: Well, I do. And the reason is that 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 reinstalling 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 songs on. It was awesome at the time.

Joe Rogan: I think most people know. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. That's a bit of a silly joke. Maybe a 10-year-old doesn't.

David Sinclair: When I teach kids at Harvard, most of them have never held a CD. Isn't that wild?

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Though they're not coming back, but albums, definitely.

David Sinclair: 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 genes, OSK. So let me tell you how these three genes work, we found. There was a person whose name is well-known in science circles called Shinya Yamanaka, from Japan, obviously. And he discovered that there was a set of four genes 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'd 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 genes and just use three, OSK, leave out the other one called M, we'd 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 a stem cell has, no identity, we regain identity. So it's actually—I could draw graphs, 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. In between, our cells have a lot of identity. They function beautifully. We're in our 20s. We're at peak. And what we've done is we've 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 glaucoma 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.

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

David Sinclair: Yeah. My student, Wen Cheng Lu, who was doing this in 2017, I said, let's do the liver. Let's rejuvenate the liver. And he said, no, the eye is a good idea. And he was right. So that's exactly why we chose that first. But just think about how many people have vision problems. It's 40 million just in the U.S. for glaucoma. Macular degeneration is even more. And in the lab, we can cure that as well in the mice.

Joe Rogan: Now, macular degeneration and glaucoma, these are diseases of aging, right, you would say? Or glaucoma is a disease?

David Sinclair: Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan: What about people that have had eyeball injuries and things like that? Is there a backup copy of the eyeball where you could sort of reformat the eyeball structure?

David Sinclair: You should come work in my lab. At least come visit.

Joe Rogan: I would love to visit.

David Sinclair: 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 our technology, this OSK stuff, put it into mice that had bad joints, and it regrew their muscle and their bone back to normal.

Joe Rogan: Whoa.

David Sinclair: And so we're also looking at treating injury, back injury, joints, osteoarthritis.

Joe Rogan: That would be phenomenal because there are so many people that are suffering from arthritis. 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 I maintain it, but it's always an issue. I have to stay on it. And there's little you can do, like stem cells, a little bit of relief, but not much. Stem cells give you relief, but not when 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 reconstructed on that knee as well. It's just an issue, but it works pretty good for what it should be. Like if we were living in the 1930s, I'd be a cripple.

David Sinclair: Hang in there because we're going to be in a world where we can rebuild parts of the body, including joints.

Joe Rogan: The problem with that is like how does that apply to 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 and like leap from halfway across the basketball court and dunk. That's probably coming, and there may be DNA tests to see if you've got these OSK genes inserted.

David Sinclair: And we're working on it, working on a drink and a pill as well.

Joe Rogan: A drink and a pill?

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: I mean, we're now eight years ahead of what the public realizes.

David Sinclair: Really? In my lab at Harvard, yeah.

Joe Rogan: A drink and a pill, and what's a drink and a pill going to do?

David Sinclair: Well, right now it's in mice, so we've still got a ways to go. But when we give the drink to mice, they get rejuvenated.

Joe Rogan: You just give it to 80-year-olds. If you're on the way out, like let's fucking go, like give it a chance. The FDA is—they forbid that.

David Sinclair: Yeah, that's what we need to get rid of them. Get rid of the FDA and just give it to old people.

Joe Rogan: If I was an old guy and I was like hanging in there and I'm walking around with 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.

David Sinclair: Well, I get emails a lot. I've had to take my emails off public access because there's a lot of people that want this.

Joe Rogan: Oh, I'm sure.

David Sinclair: There was one guy that wouldn't leave the building until he saw me.

Joe Rogan: 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.

David Sinclair: Yeah, and actually the U.S. government blocked an investment from a foreign country into one of my companies because they were afraid of super soldiers.

Joe Rogan: Ooh, what country?

David Sinclair: Well, they were afraid of technology getting out.

Joe Rogan: Which country? Could I guess?

David Sinclair: Sure.

Joe Rogan: China.

David Sinclair: It wasn't.

Joe Rogan: Was it?

David Sinclair: No, no.

Joe Rogan: Russia?

David Sinclair: It was somewhere in between here and China.

Joe Rogan: Oh, well, that's pretty vague.

David Sinclair: It's a little sensitive. But yeah, the U.S. government does have the ability to block foreign investment, and they did in this case. $160 million they blocked.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

David Sinclair: That was a painful episode.

Joe Rogan: So they were worried that people were going to actually engineer super soldiers.

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Joe Rogan: Yeah, this technology could give an advantage to a country. Do you know about the Russian experiments that they did during World War II where they were trying to come up with a chimpanzee-human hybrid?

David Sinclair: Tell us.

Joe Rogan: 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, you know, 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 hominin.

David Sinclair: Yeah, there's a scientist in New York who does this for a living.

Joe Rogan: What? He does that for a living?

David Sinclair: Well, he's not creating them, but I've seen—I was on stage with him. He made hybrid embryos. They didn't reach birth.

Joe Rogan: See, the thing is if that guy is 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?

David Sinclair: Right, right. Well, there's genetic engineering of humans already and certainly selection.

Joe Rogan: Yes.

David Sinclair: Even parents today in the U.S. can, if they have the money, they can select.

Joe Rogan: Well, people select. Even based on intelligence. People select for hotness. They select for tallness. They select for intelligence. It's like *Gattaca*.

David Sinclair: Yes.

Joe Rogan: It's a great movie if you haven't seen it.

David Sinclair: It is a great movie, yeah.

Joe Rogan: 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 actually was a guy who was also involved in a gigantic fertility scam. Not a scam per se, but he was a doctor that was supposed to be doing fertility treatments with women. Like if you went with your wife to a doctor and said, hey, we're having a hard 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.

David Sinclair: On everybody. Everybody gets mine. One of my kids' partners is from someone in the U.S. who had hundreds of babies.

Joe Rogan: Dude, there is 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 from fertility clinics that use their own sperm. Just insane. But this one doctor that did that also claimed that he impregnated an orangutan.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Like, how? How'd you do that? A Soviet doctor, Joseph Stalin, dictator, obviously, wanted to rebuild the Red Army in the mid-1920s with Planet of the Apes-style troops by crossing humans with apes. Stalin is 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 Kirill Rasianov. Rasianov's study follows the ill-fated attempt by the Russian psychologist or physiologist rather.

David Sinclair: Oh, that word.

Joe Rogan: Ilya 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.

David Sinclair: Yeah, I don't know.

Joe Rogan: However, why the Soviets would find such a human chimp hybridization program in the first place, and what could be learned from this sordid tale of ethical misconduct is an important topic and fascinating in its own right. That's an interesting way of phrasing it, like a sordid tale of ethical misconduct. Like 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 who a nice kid who you know 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?

David Sinclair: Yep, and the average ape can kill a human with one punch. Easy. So they're much stronger than we realize.

Joe Rogan: That's what I'm talking about. Let's go.

David Sinclair: Well, we're in the process of building anthropoid robots that I think will be recruited to the army.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, that's going to be weird. Like our robots beat your robots, so give us your oil. How's that going to work? And if we all have one at home, what stops the government recruiting them all?

David Sinclair: Right. Billions.

Joe Rogan: And also, the real problem is going to be, we both know, the real problem is going to be sex robots.

David Sinclair: Is it a problem?

Joe Rogan: It is going to be a problem for people that don't have a sex robot. People won't leave home. 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.

David Sinclair: Yeah, that, well, 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, we would all love that. But that's not healthy, right? You're so big. This is one of the reasons why actual real relationships between human beings are good. It's 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 to myself, you're right, I was selfish. You get better. It's 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.

Joe Rogan: I know the problem is they're going to be way smarter than us too.

David Sinclair: Right.

Joe Rogan: I don't know how people are going to say, go stack the dishwasher to one of these robots. They're smarter than all humans combined.

David Sinclair: Yeah, but they're not going to mind stacking. They're smart enough to be bored out of hell and they're going to beat us up.

Joe Rogan: They don't care. They're not going to mind doing like menial tasks. But while you're doing it, you can go, explain to me quantum entanglement. While they're filling up the dishwasher.

David Sinclair: They're going to go F you one day.

Joe Rogan: Well, if you have a particle and the particles—

David Sinclair: Yeah, I just invented a cure for aging. Right.

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

David Sinclair: Yeah, 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.

Joe Rogan: What?

David Sinclair: And it's only getting faster. Eventually someone can make a drug on their phone.

Joe Rogan: Say that again. Two months instead of 160 years. Well, what exactly was it that you had to do?

David Sinclair: 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.

Joe Rogan: Are you taking this stuff?

David Sinclair: Not yet.

Joe Rogan: You're thinking about it?

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: No one can stop you.

David Sinclair: Well, that is true. That is true. But it'd be a bad look if I died. So maybe I wouldn't do it.

Joe Rogan: What? You're not going to die. Come on.

David Sinclair: 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.

Joe Rogan: Of course.

David Sinclair: It'd be in private, of course.

Joe Rogan: Of course. Not publicly.

David Sinclair: No, but I'm at a stage where I have to be a good boy because I've got the world watching.

Joe Rogan: Yes.

David Sinclair: A lot is at stake.

Joe Rogan: Yes. A lot is at stake. If this trial has any issues, it's not good. You've got to dot your I's and cross your T's and follow every—I understand that. But please explain again because I'm being rude. I interrupted you. When you're telling me that in two months it did something that would have required 160 years of work, like what do you exactly mean by that?

David Sinclair: 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 the cell. Finding one activity is what pharmaceutical companies do. It takes hundreds of millions, if not billions, to make a drug. We know that, right? 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. So 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 known drugs. With my hands, I'm showing a big funnel. And these are really good at podcasts, you're helping out the audio people and everything. I love it. I relaunched my podcast, that's why.

Joe Rogan: Oh, that's why.

David Sinclair: Yeah, *Lifespan* with David Sinclair. Shameless plug. So this funnel is full of a trillion molecules and we have to come down to one. How do we do that?

Joe Rogan: 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 DeepMind solved the problem of how to all our proteins look, 20,000 of them. And there's a lot of compute but out the other end a couple of months later we have two—I don't have 200 fingers but 200 fingers—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.

David Sinclair: Is there a way to stop them from turning into a baby? Because that's what I would worry about.

Joe Rogan: Yes.

David Sinclair: Yes. I don't want to be a baby again.

Joe Rogan: Right. Some people are already there. I'd like to cut it off at like, I was pretty good at 25. That's what I'm going to get attacked for saying, but that is what we do in the lab. We take 92 year old cells and they stop at 20 something.

David Sinclair: Why would you get attacked for that?

Joe Rogan: 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 BS.

David Sinclair: Of course.

Joe Rogan: Yes, it's out of context.

David Sinclair: 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, OSK, 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 it a drug? And that's been the hard part over the last 10 years.

Joe Rogan: So how would it be able to regulate this reduction or reversal of aging and stop it at 20 years old?

David Sinclair: Well, that took so long. It wasn't obvious that these three Yamanaka genes called OSK were the right cocktail. My student who I mentioned, Wen 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 Yamanaka genes was the trick. Now that we know it's super easy. But in those days, he was ready to quit.

Joe Rogan: How did he find that out?

David Sinclair: 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.

Joe Rogan: And are you measuring them by the length of their telomeres?

David Sinclair: Yeah, partly. But actually, a better measure is the chemicals that are added and subtracted off DNA itself called methyls. 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 nerve 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 change over time. And we found that that happens largely due to DNA damage, going in the sun, these kind of things. We could use this to rapidly age a mouse, which we published in 2023.

Joe Rogan: Oh, so maybe some nefarious state actor, like some Russian spy, could inject something in your coffee and you would turn 99 overnight?

David Sinclair: We know how to do that.

Joe Rogan: Whoa. That's the dark side of this.

David Sinclair: It is. You could spike your husband's drink.

Joe Rogan: Fuck that dude. And turn him into an old man.

David Sinclair: Yeah. Someone tweeted the other day, if a 92-year-old could be 25 again, would you have sex with them?

Joe Rogan: Hell yeah. Imagine how much they know.

David Sinclair: But would they have sex with you?

Joe Rogan: Right. That's the better question.

David Sinclair: That's the question. They'd be looking for another 20-year-old.

Joe Rogan: Right. So anyway, how do we do it? We can measure those chemicals and determine how old a cell is. I could take your skin cells from your mouth or your blood and tell you how old you are.

David Sinclair: I wonder if people would be so disturbed by old rich guys dating young women if that was the case. You couldn't tell if they looked young. Because people get very mad at that. You ever notice?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see some real old decrepit dude with a hot young wife and people are like, god damn it. They get really mad.

David Sinclair: Right. Right now the best way to do that is to have a big bank account, but eventually you'll actually look young again.

Joe Rogan: Right, but people still get grossed out. I wonder if they would get grossed out if he looked 20. They'd be like, he's praying. He has so much more years of knowledge and information. It's not fair. I don't care if he looks 20. That's a 99-year-old man.

David Sinclair: 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.

Joe Rogan: Wow. I wonder if people still lie about their age, if that's the case.

David Sinclair: I wonder if no one will care. You would probably lie the other way, like, I'm 80.

Joe Rogan: That's right. Tom's over there telling everybody he's 80.

David Sinclair: That's right. Well, when we live for hundreds of years, people will do that. They'll be proud of their age.

Joe Rogan: Do you know anything about ancient civilizations and some of the weirdness of the records of like ancient Sumer?

David Sinclair: Well, only really what I've learned from listening to you.

Joe Rogan: Well, what's really weird is the ancient king's lists. The theory among these alternative archaeologist 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 comet impact. And what we have today is a rebuild of civilization. There is 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, Sacsayhuaman, some megalithic structures that don't make any sense, the Trilithon stones in Baalbek, Lebanon, that are hundreds and hundreds of tons, that are massive, that are nine meters off the ground. No one understands exactly how they placed them. When you look at the Sumerian kings list, it gets very weird because there's kings that reigned 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 reigns after a few hundred years become normal, like a normal person like 50 years, 30 years, like that. But thousands of years before. And 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 reigned for 30,000 years. Or had they achieved, not just in building, because in building, we know they'd achieved incredibly complex structures, 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. Like, 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? Because if it's possible today and if that is—I mean, it makes it very difficult because it goes against what you would call like the modern narrative that they're teaching in universities in terms of the timeline of human history. But 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—you're 57 now? About to be 57?

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: You look great, by the way. You really do. Look at your hair. It's so dark. It's incredible. People speculate it's all fake, but it's actually—it's not. But anyway, happy birthday to you.

David Sinclair: Thank you very much. Yeah. I don't look as good as you, though.

Joe Rogan: Yes, you do. It's different. Physically, you're way better than me.

David Sinclair: That's different, though. My face looks older.

Joe Rogan: You look very young for your age.

David Sinclair: You know why?

Joe Rogan: Why?

David Sinclair: Because I've spent all my time in a lab and I haven't gone outdoors for a while. I'm sure that helps.

Joe Rogan: That does help. But 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 a 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. I mean, the exponential increase in technological innovation that we would have in this society would be absolutely mind-blowing.

David Sinclair: Exactly, exactly. This is a really important point. What these... exponential increase in technological innovation that we would have in this society would be absolutely mind-blowing. Exactly, exactly. This is a really important point. And that might be what these alternative history people think. That might be what had taken place tens of thousands of years ago.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

David Sinclair: Well, I'm a Harvard scientist, so I'm not going to say anything that isn't proven.

Joe Rogan: Of course.

David Sinclair: That's for me.

Joe Rogan: Yes.

David Sinclair: That's where I live. That's why I shut up. But you did make some really important points. One is that ancient civilizations have always been way more advanced than we think. Dinosaurs 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 said, which is really important, is that if we do have extension of human lifespan, like the Bible and these civilizations suggest, then how will you think about your life if being 100 is, you know, you're 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 Wright brothers, will we fly? Yeah, we built the glider. We're going to fly around. Question is, will we build a Concorde? Will we go to space? And I think that will happen.

Joe Rogan: 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 in your physical ability, your health. We'd be old men.

David Sinclair: Yeah, we'd be old men.

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

David Sinclair: Yeah, looking to retire. You got no energy.

Joe Rogan: I'm filled with energy. I'm constantly doing—how old is he? 60. That's what it says.

David Sinclair: Oh, no. I don't know if that's accurate.

Joe Rogan: I bet that's accurate. They had no fucking vitamins. Nobody knew what the proper nutrients you should take were. Nobody knew what was really important in terms of resistance training and sleep and red light therapy and all that jazz. And they were doing all the bad stuff like heavy smoking, drinking, not sleeping.

David Sinclair: Not sleeping a lot.

Joe Rogan: Yep, not sleeping a lot. Pesticides and all kinds of terrible shit. 60 year old, what? That guy 60? No way. There's no way that guy's 60. Is that real?

David Sinclair: I doubt it. How about that guy that looks 50 and he says everyone thinks I'm 18, like yeah sure.

Joe Rogan: What sir? There's a guy on Instagram, which I occasionally visit, and he obviously looks old. He looks—

David Sinclair: Oh, he's a crazy person.

Joe Rogan: And he says, people think I look 18.

David Sinclair: Oh.

Joe Rogan: Are you crazy?

David Sinclair: Well, there's a lot of crazy people out there.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

David Sinclair: Well, that's body dysmorphia.

Joe Rogan: It must be. Bodybuilders, they think they're tiny. A lot of people are crazy.

David Sinclair: Yeah. A lot of people have a distorted perception of what they look like.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. The plastic surgery industry is massive. It's just growing and growing. You can see it on the street, L.A. especially. But imagine a world where if I'm 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.

David Sinclair: So in the mice experiments, what have you achieved?

Joe Rogan: Well, a lot. I can reveal here some of it for the first time. This pill that we give them, it's a 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. They, so we put them through tests.

David Sinclair: Just in a couple of days?

Joe Rogan: Oh no, three days a week for a month.

David Sinclair: Oh, okay.

Joe Rogan: I found this guy's Instagram. This is the guy? He went viral last year. He's 59 years old.

David Sinclair: What? I don't fucking... It seems so not real. He looks like he's 30 years old.

Joe Rogan: Maybe 30, exactly. He might have just amazing genetics.

David Sinclair: Well, look at Yoel Romero. There are people that are freaks.

Joe Rogan: He's from Singapore.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Kwando Tan. And he's 60 years old?

David Sinclair: Yeah, he's been gone...

Joe Rogan: Without facelifts?

David Sinclair: Yeah, I don't know. He certainly doesn't look like he's out of facelifts.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, right. His skin is fucking incredible.

David Sinclair: Yeah. But he's probably never been in the sun except for this video. It could be for a full AI account that's trolling everyone. I don't know.

Joe Rogan: That's possible, too. Like look at that picture right there. That looks a little AI. Go back to that one again. Keep your pants on, Jamie. Relax. That looks very AI, doesn't it? I'm just saying it could be.

David Sinclair: His 59th birthday. His whole thing is that he's young. 58 looks half his age.

Joe Rogan: Wow. This will be normal one day. This is 2024. This has been going on for a while.

David Sinclair: Okay, so this is pre-AI.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, if it's fake, then he would have been called out now.

David Sinclair: Right. So he might just be a genetic freak.

Joe Rogan: Could be, yep. Which is interesting, right? Like, do you guys study the different, like, you know, unfortunately, certain people that have like, like pale people, for instance, with thin skin, they age hardcore. They go. And there are those kids that get old in their teens.

David Sinclair: Right. We study that as well.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

David Sinclair: We're reversing that too. But yeah, we do study the genetics of aging. That's the real application for it where people are going to be excited about it. People that have that, what is it called? Progeria?

Joe Rogan: Progeria, exactly. Yeah. And so we have mice that have this same gene mutation and they get old really quickly and we're giving them the drink right now.

David Sinclair: So in the drink, you give it to them how often and for a month?

Joe Rogan: It's once a day, every other day, three days a week for a month. And yeah, in normal old mice, we see them fitter, stronger, better memory. They run around the cage.

David Sinclair: In just a month?

Joe Rogan: It's amazing. We only did a month because it was Christmas holiday season. We didn't want to go for longer, but it worked in four weeks.

David Sinclair: I'm shocked. Even these genes require six to eight weeks to work for recovery of vision. And so this is working on a different pathway?

Joe Rogan: Well, here's the cool thing. We think it's working through the same mechanism, the reboot, the reinstallation of software, the drink, because there are genes called TETs. There are three of them in the body, and they do something.

David Sinclair: Spell that?

Joe Rogan: T-E-T, capital T-E-T. There's one, two, three. And these are genes that make enzymes that remove these methyls off the DNA. So they control the clock. And if we get rid of those genes, our system doesn't work. We cannot restore vision and our pill doesn't work without removing and altering those chemicals. So in other words, it's not just because the chemicals make the cell healthier, it's actually resetting this clock on the DNA.

David Sinclair: Whoa.

Joe Rogan: And that was the big deal. I said whoa when my student told me. And that's why I think it got the cover of Nature magazine, which is we actually looking at the clock of life. And we've realized that this clock that goes around, this biological clock, isn't just a clock. When you move the hands of the clock, time goes backwards for the body. Meaning the clock is aging. And aging is the clock.

David Sinclair: Wow. What is it? You don't really know in terms of humans, but is there any indication that improves cognitive function in mice?

Joe Rogan: Yes. I can say without a doubt that other labs and ours have shown that when you reverse the age of the brain in a mouse, it gets better at learning. And we even have some hints, and we're going to publish this, that lost memories come back.

David Sinclair: Whoa.

Joe Rogan: So Alzheimer's patients, I believe, still have memories. They just cannot access them and that one day we can reverse Alzheimer's disease by making the brain young. And using that approach, making the whole body young, we can cure diseases that are currently incurable.

David Sinclair: Holy shit.

Joe Rogan: Well, young people don't get Alzheimer's. Why? Because the body can tackle the problem. The young body can heal itself. So my approach is make the body young. It'll heal itself in every way.

David Sinclair: Well, do you have children?

Joe Rogan: Three.

David Sinclair: Yeah. One of the things that's just phenomenal is watching them heal.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

David Sinclair: I'm like, it is so, it's so wild, but also you envy them so much because they get cut. And it's like two days later, like, where's your cut? It's fucking gone? Like, that's crazy. My daughter had a cut. She fell and knocked her head. And she had this like dark spot on her head, like where she got injured. And like four or five days, it was gone. And I was like, that fucking thing would be with me for four months.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. And the good thing is if we rub our cocktail on the skin of the mice, they heal like they're young again.

David Sinclair: Oh, so that would be like a great application for ladies who want the beauty treatment on the face, right?

Joe Rogan: That's where we're headed.

David Sinclair: Whoa.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. And we're working on hair. We can grow human hair on mice now.

David Sinclair: Really?

Joe Rogan: That took a few years. And now we can check if we can regrow hair and make it dark again.

David Sinclair: You can grow human hair on mice?

Joe Rogan: Yeah. I'm not allowed to. Actually, I did post it on Instagram and the university said get that down. But it exists. We grow it from stem cells, from human stem cells. We make little balls of hair. It takes a few months. We open up the balls to make a flat piece of skin, human skin. We put that in the back of a mouse that can accept human skin. And then you get black tufts of hair from humans in a mouse.

David Sinclair: Could you get any kind of hair? Like could I get an afro? I just want to get one to piss people off. I would love an afro, like a Colin Kaepernick type, just a big crazy one.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, we could grow hair. We can do that. We're one of the few labs that can grow this hair. So I thought about doing that for a company, but I think hair transplants would just be easier.

David Sinclair: Oh, right.

Joe Rogan: So you would grow hair in a lab and then transplant those hairs?

David Sinclair: We can do that, yeah.

Joe Rogan: Oh, well, that's the thing because I got a hair transplant. But the way I describe it is like it's like taking people that are really healthy and moving them into a town where everyone's dying. Because you're taking hair from back here where it's going to stay and you're putting it up here where it's all falling out.

David Sinclair: Oh, it didn't thrive?

Joe Rogan: What's that?

David Sinclair: It doesn't thrive if you move it?

Joe Rogan: Oh, it thrives, but everybody else dies.

David Sinclair: Oh, shit.

Joe Rogan: You can only take so much from the back of your head and move it to the top of your head. That's why a lot of guys with hair transplants look goofy because you have this strong hairline in the front and it goes back like that and then everything else looks like chaos.

David Sinclair: Oh, that sucks.

Joe Rogan: You know what I take for my hair?

David Sinclair: What do you take?

Joe Rogan: Among other things. Viagra.

David Sinclair: Viagra, yeah actually. I shouldn't say the brand name. That's why I take it for my hair. That's what I tell everybody.

Joe Rogan: That is true. It's low dose, 7mg a day of Tadalafil, and it's good for a lot of things.

David Sinclair: I know it's good for endurance.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, because I know athletes who take it for endurance. They probably take it to fuck too, let's not kid ourselves. Well, it's a nice benefit. But when a paper just came out about its role in preventing cancer, I tweeted what's not to love. People love that tweet. But the point is actually last week they found that these drugs in mice and seemingly in people who take these drugs are actually resistant to certain types of cancers like head and neck cancer.

David Sinclair: Interesting. So it improves blood flow?

Joe Rogan: Well, two reasons that are not related to blood flow but they related to what's called nitric oxide signaling, which is what helps dilate blood vessels in all your body including your penis. The other two mechanisms: one showed that tadalafil is good for exposing the tumor to the immune system. There are certain cells called MDSCs that protect the tumor from getting attacked, and the drug stops that. So now the tumors shrink in mice and seemingly in people, in tumors. And then the second mechanism is really interesting. It seems to—this was Sildenafil, so this is now Viagra—found that a lot of cancers thrive on cholesterol. And this blocks the ability of cancer cells to use cholesterol.

David Sinclair: I thought they thrived on glucose.

Joe Rogan: That too. Exactly. So you want to be in ketosis if you've got a tumor in general. So fasting is good. But now it looks like these ED drugs might be good for it as well.

David Sinclair: Fascinating. And wasn't, I think Viagra was an accident, right? Wasn't it a blood pressure medication?

Joe Rogan: It's a good story. It was for angina, right? It was for your heart. But the story goes that women especially and the men didn't want to give up the drugs that they had left over. It was amazing. I think it was 75% had a positive reaction for erections and without it, 22. So it's very clear that it was working.

David Sinclair: Interesting. And so how does it help hair?

Joe Rogan: Well, we don't know for sure, but there's a lot of evidence that part of the reason hair dies out and stops growing is a lack of blood flow. And the minoxidil that people put on their hair helps with that.

David Sinclair: Right.

Joe Rogan: Interesting. And then DHT inhibitors.

David Sinclair: Exactly. Also help. That'd be Dutasteride people can take orally. The problem with that is my friend had severe depression when he took that.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

David Sinclair: It really fucked him up. And he didn't realize because he didn't understand that that was this. He was like, what is wrong with me? And he was getting suicidal. And then he got off of it and it just went away. And he's like, oh my God, I can't believe that.

[This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.]

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Well, I'm taking it for a number of reasons, including my hair and my prostate, to see if I can keep it from growing. But fortunately, I haven't had that side effect. It depends, right? It varies biologically depending on the person.

David Sinclair: Yeah, it's important when either of us says that drug's good, that drug's bad. People realize that you have to test it with doctor's supervision.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, that was where I was going to get to was like because different medications have different reactions or different people's reactions to medications, they vary quite wildly. So like before you make this public, like how do you determine whether or not this is going to be safe for a wide variety of people to reverse aging?

David Sinclair: Oh, my drug, our drug that we're making. Well, we will test it on a lot of people before it goes out into the wide world.

Joe Rogan: And you've started testing it on people so far?

David Sinclair: Yeah, there are people right now who have these genes in their eye.

Joe Rogan: And how's it going?

David Sinclair: I'm not allowed to say.

Joe Rogan: Can you wink twice if it's great?

David Sinclair: I would say that everything's on target.

Joe Rogan: Okay. That's good to hear.

David Sinclair: Nothing bad to report.

Joe Rogan: Nothing bad to report.

David Sinclair: I think those might be the words I'm allowed to say.

Joe Rogan: And is that the only clinical trials you've used with any of these applications for humans?

David Sinclair: So far, that was the first. Glaucoma and also sudden blindness. It's called NAION, which is now twice as prevalent because of the GLP-1 drugs.

Joe Rogan: Really?

David Sinclair: It's not well known, obviously. Companies don't want to talk about it. But yes, sudden blindness has doubled seemingly because of these meds.

Joe Rogan: Holy shit. Careful. Sudden blindness has doubled because of GLP-1s?

David Sinclair: Due to NAION, which is like a stroke in your eye. And then your other eye can go, which is pretty scary. And there's nothing you can do about it. Hopefully our drug does work for those people. And obviously correlation does not equal causation but it seems to be—yeah, there's a scientist at Harvard. You could look up his work, Joe Rizzo. It looks like it's repeatable across the planet.

Joe Rogan: Wow, that's terrible because there's so many people out there that are just telling everyone they should get on GLP-1s.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: I've seen that like by online people, like online podcasters saying everyone should get on GLP-1s. It's a groundbreaking technology. This is amazing. It's going to transform society. I'm like, we just started taking these. What the fuck are you saying?

David Sinclair: Yeah. It's not risk-free. Same with ED drugs. Here it goes. Recent studies suggest that a potential rare link between GLP-1 receptor agonist medication, such as Ozempic, Wegovy, blah, blah, blah, and a condition called non-arteritic anterior, what's that word? Ischemic?

Joe Rogan: Ischemic.

David Sinclair: Ischemic optic neuropathy. An eye stroke can cause sudden painless loss of vision in one eye while absolute risk remains very low. Anyone experiencing sudden vision changes should seek emergency medical evaluation immediately.

Joe Rogan: Well, very low is like it's still—what does that mean? 10,000 people? One in 10,000?

David Sinclair: Yeah, yeah, that's no total of 10,000. Oh total of 10,000 so far for taking this time. I think it's pretty—the drugs were 68.6 times more likely to develop this and eight times more likely to develop diabetic. What is that?

Joe Rogan: We only got the blurb. Oh, my God.

David Sinclair: Then, wow.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, man. These things are just rolling out. And the people that are super enthusiastic and also they have some sort of a financial interest in promoting these things, which oftentimes does seem to be the case with a lot of these people. They have either stock in these companies or some sort of a stake in them.

David Sinclair: Yeah, it's true. I will say to counter that, the GLP-1 drugs have probably saved millions of lives already, and they're pretty common. I think it's 10 percent of people are trying them and 25 percent want to.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I mean they don't work for everybody. I have a good friend of mine that had a terrible reaction from it and he was hospitalized. But I know other people where it's completely transformed their life and they've lost a ton of weight, particularly people that just – for whatever reason, the food addiction was so incredibly strong that whatever their constitution, the way they're designed, the way they're built, the way they've evolved as a human being, they weren't capable of overcoming it. They take the GLP-1s and then they sort of start getting moving and then they lose all the weight. They start feeling better. They start making a lot of other positive changes. You get that momentum, which I always talk about, which is one of the most important things for transforming your life. Everyone wants to talk about discipline. I think discipline is the primary engine. But one of the things that comes along with any kind of an exercise program or a changing your life program where you start getting positive results is momentum. And momentum is absolutely huge.

David Sinclair: That's so important.

Joe Rogan: So I think GLP-1s are fantastic for getting people going.

David Sinclair: Yes. Everybody should hear this. It's really important. I'll give you my example. It's a classic case. I couldn't fast for more than about a day. I wanted to do more. I know that three days fasting is good. A week can be even better, but I couldn't do it. I don't have a lot of willpower when it comes to this kind of stuff. I tried a GLP-1 receptor agonist. I gave it and it was easy. I didn't even feel like I needed to snack at night, which is one of the things that I and many people suffer from. But the fact that I could do it, I went off the drug. I didn't need it. But now I can fast for two weeks. A couple of months ago, it's easy now. Now that I know that I can do it mentally, it's not hard at all.

Joe Rogan: The momentum.

David Sinclair: Exactly. I know what's possible.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, that's fascinating. Are you still on a plant-based diet?

David Sinclair: Mostly.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. I just had a conversation with a friend of mine about this. I don't know how much of the information that he was telling me was totally accurate. But what he was saying was that he was told before he did fasting that one of the best – because he's a runner. He said one of the best ways to get into fasting is to get your body into ketosis first. He said and what he thinks is that a carnivore-based diet and what he was told was a good way. If you could do that for a few weeks, it mitigates your appetite. Like one of the things that happens with a lot of these diets that regulate insulin resistance is that when you get used to consuming just fats and protein you don't have the kind of hunger pangs that you have with carbohydrates. Like when I, if I go in a bad streak and I'm eating pizza and pasta and I've done that in the past, I don't really do that much unless I'm on vacation. In the past though, when I would get hungry, I would get crazy hungry. Like I've got to eat now. I don't get that at all anymore because I'm mostly on a carnivore-based diet. Mostly what I eat, like you look at the bulk of my diet, it's meat and fermented vegetables. It's meat and like kimchi and sauerkraut and stuff along those lines. And when I eat like that, my hunger is very easy to control. And I've gone 24 hours like it's nothing, not eating. It's like not a problem at all. But that's the most I've ever fasted is 24 hours.

David Sinclair: Okay. Well, see if you can go for three. It's really worth it. You feel really great. Ketosis is wonderful.

Joe Rogan: That's what everybody says.

David Sinclair: Yeah, and you go into what's called deep cleansing. It's called chaperone-mediated autophagy or CMA. And a friend of mine in New York, Maria Corvo, studies this. And it cleans out a lot of the old proteins in your body. So ketosis doesn't just make you feel good. You're actually renewing your protein in your body and rebuilding it. And so I do that as an anti-aging thing.

Joe Rogan: What I find is the biggest benefit is mental acuity. It has a giant impact when I stick to the diet in terms of my ability to form sentences, like recall information, and just be present in podcasts.

David Sinclair: Yeah. So in my podcast, what you do is really quite difficult. You make it look easy. So when I'm doing my podcast, and often it's solo so it's challenging, I forget things. I have to remember hundreds of papers for these things, they're quite hard. Either I'm going to fast and if I don't remember to fast, I did an experiment. I took some ketones. You can drink these things. Ketone IQ. Fantastic stuff. I love that stuff.

Joe Rogan: I take that before I do UFC broadcasts. I actually took some before. Because that's great for a podcast as well. One of the more difficult things that I do is the UFC commentary because it's six hours. It's six hours of talking on air, live.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: And about fights. And I also recalling fights. And I also seeing positions. So I have to remember in my mind how this is finished because like in jujitsu there might be I don't know how many positions there are. There's thousands and there's moves where I'm like, what is he doing? What is he doing? Oh, that's that. That's the Peruvian necktie. I'm looking at his arms. Your brain is, I am exhausted at the end of six hours and fucking starving. Like after the UFC is over. I can eat so much food. I'm so hungry.

David Sinclair: But you take a little drink?

Joe Rogan: I take a little ketone. A little ketone IQ. I take nootropics. I drink this stuff. My friend Derek makes this. It's Gorilla Mind. It's a nootropic.

David Sinclair: Oh, I gotta try that.

Joe Rogan: So it's a nootropic cocktail with caffeine in it. This stuff's really good for a podcast. I also take AlphaBrain. AlphaBrain Black Label is phenomenal for that. There's a bunch of different ones that I take. The gum. Neurogum. Neurogum's excellent for that too. But I just do everything I can to maximize. So that's how you do it. Secret is now out.

David Sinclair: All right. But what you do is amazing. And I thought you were on modafinil or something.

Joe Rogan: No, I've taken that before in the past, but the problem with that stuff is I think I like it too much and I want to take it all the time. You know, when I used to take that, if I had a gig in San Diego and I drive home after the gig and it was like, you know, one o'clock in the morning when I'm done. And then I'm like, I'll just go home. It's only two and a half hours and I start making the drive and you just get so tired. But if I take Nuvigil or Provigil before I do that, I would be able to drive. No problem. Put a book on tape on.

David Sinclair: Can you sleep after that?

Joe Rogan: Oh yeah. Yeah. It doesn't seem to affect your ability to sleep, which is really interesting. It's not like caffeine.

David Sinclair: Do you do it? Do you take it at all? I'm a definite for talks when I'm traveling.

Joe Rogan: Does it help you?

David Sinclair: Definitely.

Joe Rogan: What like in what way?

David Sinclair: It gets rid of my jet lag and I can focus. My brain often is either scattered or filled with facts that causes me, like now, to not be able to talk properly. But if I'm on it, which I'm not, I'm on point every time.

Joe Rogan: For me, the best thing for jet lag is exercise. There's something about rigorous exercise. It doesn't even have to be long. It just has to be where my heart rate gets really elevated, like above 150 beats per minute for 15, 20 minutes. Like I have to really go hard where I'm sweaty and breathing heavy. Especially if I jack it up to like 180, 190 like I'm doing like Tabata sprints on an Airdyne bike. That kind of stuff completely resets me. Hard kettlebell workouts like I do like a hard series where minimal amount of rest in between. So I'm really pushing it. Once I relax, I'm back. It's like whatever it is where your body just needs to shake it up and get all of it out of your system. It's like now I feel completely normal.

David Sinclair: Yeah. Well, you might remember last time we talked about hormesis.

Joe Rogan: Yes.

David Sinclair: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And that's what you're doing. You're putting your body into survival mode. So one of the reasons I mostly plants, why I take NMN and these other molecules is to mimic that. I don't work out like you do. I should, but I don't.

Joe Rogan: Why don't you?

David Sinclair: I think partly because I tell myself I'm too busy, which is bullshit. I need a partner who will motivate me. I think that would help.

Joe Rogan: Maybe just get a trainer. That's a solution. You got some cheddar. Get a trainer.

David Sinclair: I got some cheddar.

Joe Rogan: Oh, is that money?

David Sinclair: Money, yeah. No, I can definitely afford one.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, you know, it's on me. I actually, I will own that, that I should do more. I just was explaining this to my friend last night. He was like, I got to start working. I'm like, just get a trainer. Get a trainer, someone who's good, and that way they'll develop a program for you. All you have to do is just show up and do what they tell you to do. Just do it. And it's mindless. You can just go through what they tell you to do and you'll just trust the process. You'll improve radically.

David Sinclair: All right. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to take you on.

Joe Rogan: Okay.

David Sinclair: Here's what we're going to do. You're going to get me a jug of that juice.

Joe Rogan: Of this stuff?

David Sinclair: We'll swap, all right? And you'll be my trainer?

Joe Rogan: I'll be your trainer. I will. I've done that before with my comedian friends.

David Sinclair: Really?

Joe Rogan: Sure. Yeah, I'll just come across the mountain. And I do it the right way where I take him through it very easy. I don't have him work out hard at all, especially in the beginning. Everything is like nice and easy. It's like a little bit of strain. You're not going to be exhausted afterwards. And we build you up. I'm a firm believer in not overtaxing the system on people that are sedentary. I really think it's a slow, gradual process. I think you have to get better the same way you got sick over time.

David Sinclair: Okay.

Joe Rogan: You can make radical changes in a short period of time, don't get me wrong. And even just a little bit of moderately rigorous exercise a few days a week will give you great improvements. But I'm not one of those guys who's like, we're going to do two hours today and you're going to go to failure and you're going to be throwing up in a garbage pan. You're not going to do that again the next day. I want you to do it again the next day. I want you to have a nice workout where you're doing like 10 push-ups and 10 sit-ups and 10 bodyweight squats and then we're going to do some of these kettlebell cleans and kettlebell – nothing hard. Like everything is going to be like, whew, okay, you put it down, you're fine. And I want you to leave rejuvenated. Like you feel like, oh, that was like exhilarating, nothing crazy. And then we'll slowly start to add a little bit over time. That's what I think the right thing to do with people who don't work out all the time. You can't just jump in and work out. It's like fasting and skipping meals. You just can't do a day or three without practicing.

David Sinclair: Well, it's also you're going to get injured.

Joe Rogan: And this is one of the main things that happens to people that dive right into the deep end of the pool when they start working out is they get hurt. They get muscle pulls. They get back aches. They get all these different things that happen because I think you just pushed your body too quickly. It's like you're in boot camp. You don't have to be in boot camp. This is not the way to do it. The way to do it is like slowly build up and trust the process slowly. Start by if you're overweight, like my friend Jelly Roll, he lost 250 pounds. What did he do? Started walking. Just started walking, walking around the neighborhood, walk around the block, walk upstairs just slowly, and then change the diet and then add some stuff. And next thing you know, you're doing this. And write it all down too. That's the other thing. Write down what you're going to do and write down how you feel. And then keep doing that. And if you can do that all the time, you'll start developing this like momentum that we were talking about. Like, okay, I'm on the course. I'm on a process. But it doesn't have to be like you're exhausted and then you go to the lab and you're like I can't even concentrate. You know I was doing Tabata sprints on the Airdyne machine like this is crazy.

David Sinclair: Well, that's really good advice and I'm going to take you up on it. So let's say I'm lucky enough to come on the show again.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I'll wear a tight t-shirt.

David Sinclair: Let's go. 20 million people. You're going to have to get off that plant based diet.

Joe Rogan: Well, let's speak about that because that's one of the things we disagree on. I'm on a plant based diet because I seen a lot of work on animals at least that plants promote longevity. I eat a lot of protein.

David Sinclair: It's interesting because you're not an animal. You know that right?

Joe Rogan: I'm not a mouse.

David Sinclair: You're not a mouse.

Joe Rogan: I'm definitely an animal, but I'm a human.

David Sinclair: I agree. Meat is the most nutrient-dense food that's available.

Joe Rogan: I love meat. I love meat. She eats it all the time.

David Sinclair: I believe that there are two states that we can be in. I should try meat, and then we can see if it works.

Joe Rogan: 100%. You'll feel great.

David Sinclair: Because I've been measuring myself with rings and blood tests for the last 20 years.

Joe Rogan: You should try elk. I'll get you an elk steak.

David Sinclair: I'd love to try it. It sounds good. I'm not against meat. I will eat it.

Joe Rogan: You'll eat it and you'll be like, whoa.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Don't get me addicted to meat. You'll feel it right away. Like, oh. Oh, your synapses start firing. Your body starts like, yes, this is what we wanted, David.

David Sinclair: Well, here's some science, which is what I do. There are two states. This is my theory. There's the abundance mode, which is very good for health. You'll build muscle. You'll heal better. That's meat. Kill the mammoth. There's adversity mode, which is we're out of meat. We've got to eat roots and berries. That's adversity. We've got to run, running, exercise, eating less. That's adversity. Both are good for you. This one is pro-survival. This one is pro-growth. This one is longevity. This one is you're going to be stronger, fitter.

Joe Rogan: How do you determine that, though, in terms of what is longevity versus what is just health and vitality currently?

David Sinclair: Well, it's based on the last 30 years of research in a variety of animals.

Joe Rogan: This doesn't have to do with the blue zones, does it?

David Sinclair: No.

Joe Rogan: Because you know that's all horseshit, right?

David Sinclair: I read that recently, yeah.

Joe Rogan: Isn't that nuts?

David Sinclair: It's unfortunate. It's fraud.

Joe Rogan: Well, records are hard.

David Sinclair: Well, it's not just hard. A lot of it is actual fraud where people are getting checks for their grandpa and grandpa was dead. So they weren't writing it into the government. They didn't expose – like this was the problem with Okinawa in particular is that they would have to – in order for these people to get taken off the list, they would have to inform the government that this person died and they just didn't do it. And so they had this list of people that they were counting in their census that were like so old. Like this is crazy. What are you people doing? Everyone is 100 years old.

Joe Rogan: The oldest person in the world, apparently, 122. There's a theory, not proven, that the oldest person in the world was actually the daughter who was faking it to get taxes or avoid taxes. I think it was in France. I hope that's not true. I bet it is true. People are full of shit.

David Sinclair: Well either way the maximum human lifespan is around 117, 118, which is still a lot more than we live. And what's really crazy is none of those people are doing everything right.

Joe Rogan: Exactly. They're all smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and having a good time. And that's a factor that we really need to take into consideration. Loneliness and isolation and sadness are one of the greatest contributors to poor health outcomes.

David Sinclair: It's number one.

Joe Rogan: Is it really?

David Sinclair: Yeah, Robert Voldinger at Harvard had a study for, I think it was 40 years, World War II vets. They looked at everything, blood pressure, cholesterol. The number one thing that predicted longevity in those men was having a reliable partner.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Not just a reliable partner, someone that you love.

David Sinclair: That's true.

Joe Rogan: Someone that you want to be around all the time. You enjoy them. You still enjoy their company, which is possible. Most people don't believe that's possible.

David Sinclair: Well, you're a role model in that.

Joe Rogan: I love my wife. I have fun with her. I've been with her for a long time. I've been married for 17 years. I enjoy her. I enjoy hanging out with her. She's cool. She's fun. And I have friends that aren't in situations like that. And it's so bad when you're – like I have a friend who just – we were actually talking last night. And he just got out of a crazy relationship where he was dating this girl for seven years. It was chaos and this and that. And I said to him, and he was like, he's 40. And he goes, I don't think I'm ever going to have a relationship again. He goes, it was so bad. He goes, being single feels so good. And I said, there's an old saying, it's so much better to be alone than to wish you were alone. And he's like, yes, that's it. Because he was like with this crazy lady. And he was like, I just wish I was – and he finally got free. And now he's like, I think I'm ruined. And I'm like, it doesn't have to be like that. You can find someone that you actually love and you really enjoy their time. You enjoy being with them. It's possible. There's good people out there. But you've got to also be someone that that kind of person wants to be with. That's the other thing.

David Sinclair: For sure. And stress of relationship. We've seen in studies that clock with those chemicals on the DNA, it accelerates when you're under stress or going through a breakup.

Joe Rogan: Oh, yeah. Oh, God. You see it, too.

David Sinclair: Oh, I've seen people going through divorces, and it just takes decades off of their life. They just look wrecked. And it takes a year or two for them to achieve equilibrium again.

Joe Rogan: It's hard.

David Sinclair: It is.

Joe Rogan: I went through that actually just during COVID when our family got shoved in a house together. And yeah, it was brutal. It was unexpected too.

David Sinclair: Wow. That's the stress test, right?

Joe Rogan: It was super stress. It was super stress. It's funny that you said that. Without the pandemic, we might have been able to make it. But forcing us all to be in one little house with no internet working well, it was tough.

David Sinclair: But in any case, I'm great now. I'm very happy. But I do know how bad it can get, and it's brutal.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, bad relationships can wreck people. I mean, it can wreck your health. But also, it's not just relationships in terms of your significant other, husband, wife, partner, whatever you want to call it, but also bad relationships at work. Like if you have a tyrant for a boss and every day you're getting you're working overtime and you're getting yelled at and you're on the phone and you're at home trying to keep up with work and you never get like – that kind of relationship where you have this antagonistic terrible relationship with people that you work with, that's bad too.

David Sinclair: Oh, for sure. Your body doesn't differentiate between romantic relationships and those kind of relationships. They are almost equally bad. Cortisol will be high. This will accelerate you. I used to keep fish. I was one of those people at school. And the fish that got picked on by the dominant fish was small, like color, lived short. It's biology. If you're picked on and you're stressed, you're going to age faster. Fortunately, I think you're probably the same. At my age, I've managed to weed out most of the jerks, and I don't work with them at all. I've got a great partner. We have a hobby of longevity together. So I'm lucky in that regard now.

Joe Rogan: You found a new one.

David Sinclair: Yeah, longevity specialist. Imagine that.

Joe Rogan: Congratulations.

David Sinclair: Well, that's nice too, right? Find someone who just thinks the way you think and has similar likes and interests.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's fun, like you say. Yeah, that definitely can help. Yeah, I know a lot of my friends that are in really good relationships, their significant other has the same hobby as them, like whatever it is. They both like to climb mountains or whatever. Find a thing. But that helps too. So you actually enjoy spending time together doing something that you're both really excited about. So relationships is one and the other four major ones from that study were don't smoke, don't drink, get enough rest, and get exercise. And that was enough to extend by 15 years.

David Sinclair: But what about those old people that live forever and do smoke and drink? Because that's kind of weird.

Joe Rogan: Well, they're 0.01%. They're not examples of what-

David Sinclair: Is that really what it is?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's just-

David Sinclair: So the majority of people who get old and live to centenarians, what are the common things that they have? The big one is that they don't stress a lot. They usually have a good sense of humor.

Joe Rogan: Interesting.

David Sinclair: Right. They haven't been overweight and they say that they typically couldn't remember when they last got sick.

Joe Rogan: I wonder how much time Twitter takes off your life.

David Sinclair: Yeah. We should study that. It's already taken a lot off mine.

Joe Rogan: It does. And if you read the comments even, yep exactly. I'm so much happier since I swore off of all that stuff. It's just not good for you. It's really really bad for you. It's also you're constantly dealing with the problems of the whole world which I think is a lot for a human being that lives in a community in a neighborhood. That shit that's happening over there really shouldn't be a primary focus of your life. Where you're in the moment actually doing your life, it's not the same. You're not in the same area as this problem. But yet this problem is overwhelming your all day long life. And you're in fight or flight constantly.

David Sinclair: All day.

Joe Rogan: All day. Yeah. And you're worried about the climate. Oh, my God. Like there's so much that freaks people out that it really shouldn't be affecting you at all.

David Sinclair: Exactly. And actually, the world doesn't change if you don't read it. So that's what I think. That's the key. But then you're like, well, you're passing off the responsibility to other people.

Joe Rogan: You should get involved. Like, you should get involved. I'm going to be over here.

David Sinclair: That's right. Well, if you focus on doing something good and you're good at it.

Joe Rogan: Yes.

David Sinclair: Like yourself. I think that you don't need to be doing more than that. You can't focus on everything.

Joe Rogan: No. And anybody who tells you you can is a fool. Or anybody who tells you what you should or shouldn't be focusing on is a fool.

David Sinclair: Yeah. A few years ago, someone at a talk that I gave said, you should be working on climate change. Fuck off. After I cure aging, I'll get to climate change.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

David Sinclair: Why don't you go to China and tell them to stop making coal factories? Shut the fuck up. Just shut up.

Joe Rogan: No. You're not going to fix it. Yeah. Somebody is. Somebody is working on it and that's their goal and god bless them, good luck.

David Sinclair: Yeah. Well, what I try to spend my day is efficiently helping the world. So that people ask me why do I study aging in the first place and it really is that I'm trying to please my grandmother. Like some of us. She was the one that told me that I need to make the world a better place and she's gone. That's what she said to you when I was four.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

David Sinclair: Being that ever since, she told me two things. Humans are evil. She lived through World War II in Hungary.

Joe Rogan: Oh, wow.

David Sinclair: The Russians came in and raped everybody, she said. So she escaped to Australia. And then she said that the other issue is that we don't do enough as humans to better the world. And so I had that stuck in my mind. She also, by the way, said, oh, we all die. And I thought, that's not really fair, is it? And that set me on this path. Make the world a better place and we all die. And you're like, ah. And what I've noticed with my kids is that even if you tell them that, they forget about it because it's brutal to think about death every day. But for some reason, it's just stuck in my head. And every day I'm like, another 150,000 people are going to die today due to aging-related diseases. So my lab is mission-oriented. If we are a day late with something, and there's a lot of people that are suffering potentially avoidable diseases. That's why it's sort of understandable that people show up outside of your lab and like, I need to talk to you. I need this.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, blind people want to get in the trial.

David Sinclair: It's big. And I think if the trial works, it's going to be a very strange world, especially for my lab and for me. But we'll see. And even if it doesn't work this time, the science is strong enough that we'll figure it out. We will do this. It's just a question of when.

Joe Rogan: And so do you think that AI is going to have a significant impact on the kind of improvements that you're able to?

David Sinclair: It already is. We're going super fast. And AI has revolutionized biology. It's revolutionizing everything, of course. But particularly in biology where we used to have to read 15 papers a day. Now we can read a million if we want. It's totally different.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

David Sinclair: Yeah. It's super brain. A 19-year-old came to my lab this summer. And the lab grows from 20 to 40 people and we're trying to figure out how do these three genes reset the cell. How does the cell remember what it was 30, 40 years ago? Where is that information stored in the cell? And I got this theory that there's some new biology there, a record in the DNA somewhere. And I gave him that task. I said, can you just go to the databases of the whole world, look at all the data that's there, exabytes of data, and see if my prediction is true, or at least you can get evidence for it. Two weeks later, he came back and the whole team, not the whole team, but five other people were smiling. We have to show you something, David. All right, come in my office. We sat down. He shows up on the board on this LCD screen. I think we found the smoking gun for what your theory suggests. And he used AI to process all that data. And the AI came back and said, yeah, you're probably right. And it's a 19 year old straight out of high school who did this, that did something that the whole field and all these professors and all these fancy sirs could not figure out until now.

Joe Rogan: That is phenomenal. That's so promising.

David Sinclair: It's so exciting. It is. I mean, the future really does belong to people who can wrangle AI even on their phone. I think people on their phones are going to be making medicines or at least designing them.

Joe Rogan: Or bombs. That's the problem. And bioweapons.

David Sinclair: Right. I mean, you recently had, was it Anna on the show, to talk about bioweapons and this kind of stuff. That is a big worry. I actually had to disclose to the U.S. government when I first got here that I did have the capability of making a bioweapon.

Joe Rogan: The Anna Jacobson episode that we just did on bioweapons was absolutely terrifying.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: She's, I mean, she scared the shit out of the world with her nuclear war book, and now she's scaring everybody with her bioweapons book.

David Sinclair: Yeah. That's scary. It is. What I've got is a database of all known pathogens and new ones that could come. So I'm trying to do my bit there to help the world if it happens again, pandemic or something unnatural.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Well, that would be, I mean, when you think about diseases that people get that just wreck their entire body, if you really do have an original copy somewhere in their genome of what they look like as a healthy person, and you could switch that back on with a factory reboot. I mean, we could potentially get rid of all diseases, which is just bananas. And injuries, fix injuries, grow new limbs potentially.

David Sinclair: There's a new paper that just came out a few days ago that showed that the tips of the fingers of baby mice can be coaxed once they healed over as a stub to regrow part of the finger.

Joe Rogan: Haven't people done that before?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, they found just two factors were enough. So it's not that hard. The point is we've got the instructions to be young and to regrow body parts in our body. We just don't use them. That's nuts. So like a salamander can grow an extra leg or a leg that gets chopped off.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: I believe we still have that capability. We just don't use it. It just didn't make sense to regrow a limb. It was quicker and safer to just heal it over as a stub and move on. But salamanders, which get their limbs presumably eaten pretty often, maintain that ability. So give us, you know, I wouldn't say that we could evolve this, but I think using a combination of our technology plus this new technology that we're seeing come out where these two factors can grow new limbs, I don't see a reason why we can't become like a Deadpool where injury doesn't hurt us, aging can't hurt us, and we can regrow body parts. How far do you think we are away from being able to regrow body parts?

David Sinclair: Oh, I mean, realistically, probably a couple of decades. But I've seen enough. That's not that far. I've seen enough to know that it's doable.

Joe Rogan: A couple of decades ago was 2006. Well, things are going super fast. I mean, 10 years ago, we didn't even know aging was irreversible. And now it's in humans. That's nuts. Think of that. Well, 2019, when you came here, there was no AI.

David Sinclair: Right. 2019, it was an idea that we had just got the result in mice, and I divulged that to the world. Then it was published, and then we're in humans now. So if it works, then it's going to be a very different world.

Joe Rogan: And you feel very confidently that some of this stuff is going to work?

David Sinclair: Well, it's going to work. I don't know if this trial is going to be successful, but there's going to be a lot of people doing these trials. I have some competition now.

Joe Rogan: Do you know about that?

David Sinclair: No. So since I started my company, Life Biosciences, which is doing the trials with ER100, others have joined in and the party. So Jeff Bezos and others have started Altos Pharma. They are based in three cities around the world. They have a few billion dollars to catch up. Sam Altman has RetroBio and let's see, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, the CEO, started one called New Limit and they've got a lot of money, all billions.

Joe Rogan: You think it's good that there's all these people involved in this?

David Sinclair: I welcome it, yeah. Competition. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not doing this for my own personal benefit. I want humanity to be changed the way it could be and the more people like Jeff Bezos, the more people with a large bank account that are invested in this, the better. Fantastic. And of course the guy like Bezos, he's balling out of control. Why wouldn't you want to live forever?

Joe Rogan: Well, what's left if you've got everything else? Well, also it's like if you've got the amount of money that he has and you can tackle all these different issues, like his space program that he's working on, all these different things. Of course. Why wouldn't you want to do cool things? What's cooler than being able to grow limbs?

David Sinclair: Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan: What's cooler than being able to cure all diseases and reverse aging?

David Sinclair: Well, I don't think there's much cooler. That's why I'm doing it because that, I think, can be the biggest gift to humanity is what you just said. So I don't know if I'll achieve it, probably not in my lifetime, but at least I've moved the needle and pushed the ball globally in that direction.

Joe Rogan: I wonder if we're going to get to a point in time where we can engineer consciousness in terms of like find out – like you find out someone's a sociopath. You find out someone's a kleptomaniac or someone's an arsonist, like whatever it is. Like if you could figure out like what these little flaws are in the way the mind works, if we can completely map it out and go, oh, this is the error. This is where you're not making these two connections.

David Sinclair: Of course. Of course. It's all just biology and engineering. There's nothing that stops us. And this is the century that we are able to control our own biology, starting with cancer, heart disease and aging.

Joe Rogan: A true utopian world of peaceful people living in harmony. But healthy.

David Sinclair: Not peaceful? I don't think world peace. I think curing aging is easier than world peace.

Joe Rogan: Well, if everybody achieved a state of consciousness that allowed them to understand that we're all in this together.

David Sinclair: Yeah, how do we do that?

Joe Rogan: Mushrooms. Yeah. Well, there are certain companies working on this. I know. That's what's interesting, right? Like Eli Lilly is involved in pharmaceuticals. Well, the pharmaceutical company, rather, is involved in psychedelics. They just bought a tie. I think it was like $3.8 billion. So they're all in with real capital.

David Sinclair: Yeah. I love it.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, me too. That great. I love that they doing that. We need more of that. There too much depression and anxiety in the world. And drug addiction. I mean that why I went to the White House and got the president to get involved in this executive order on Ibogaine.

David Sinclair: Yes.

Joe Rogan: Because I've talked to so many people that have had their life completely turned around with Ibogaine. So many people that were opioid addiction and also brain injuries, oddly enough. Brain injuries, all sorts of TBI and CTE, that they've had phenomenal results from this iboga tree, which is so crazy that this thing had been around for so long and is a schedule one substance in the United States for no reason whatsoever. There's no risk of addiction. There is no recreational use of it. It's a horrible experience. I've not done it, but apparently it's fucking terrible. And it lasts for like 24 hours. Like no one's going to be doing that for funsies.

David Sinclair: Right. Well, the question I think that comes up with all of these drugs is do you have to have the trip and experience the craziness to get the benefit?

Joe Rogan: To get the benefit.

David Sinclair: And I don't think so. I think you should be able to separate them.

Joe Rogan: Well, you know, they've actually figured this out with LSD. Yeah. Right? Do you know about this?

David Sinclair: No.

Joe Rogan: Okay. So they've engineered a different version of LSD that doesn't give you the hallucinogenic effects but does give you the benefits in terms of like the cognitive effects.

David Sinclair: The Atai guys or someone else?

Joe Rogan: I don't know what company has done this. See if you can find that, Jamie. I think it might be Atai. But what they've essentially done and I think it's basically in the lab work stage right now. I don't think that's applied to humans yet. But what they've done is engineered a version of LSD that has all the positive effects that LSD has in terms of like introspection, being able to like rethink and remap and reset the way you view things. But without like watching people's face melt and thinking that demons are eating you and all the weird stuff that comes with it.

David Sinclair: Outstanding. It should happen with psychedelics the way it's happened with all medicines, right? We start with something from the bark of a willow tree and then we have aspirin.

Joe Rogan: Right.

David Sinclair: We're not eating bark anymore.

Joe Rogan: Right. But sometimes the bark is the really way to go.

David Sinclair: Right. Unfortunately, sometimes that's the part of the problem is these pharmaceutical drug companies, they patent these natural compounds and use petroleum synthetic methods of creating these medications now that they can sell and profit wildly off of whereas they really the best way to do it is actually to get the plant. It's true that there's the whole issue though that if it's not approved then it's the Wild West. You don't know what you're getting right.

Joe Rogan: That's true too. We need a middle ground. We need something you can get fast in a market that's known to be safe. So what we're gonna need is mind reading because we need to know if people are full of shit. That's what we're going to need. We're going to need.

David Sinclair: Got to work on that.

Joe Rogan: Yes. I think that's going to change humanity more than anything. I think you've got a good bullshit detector.

David Sinclair: It's okay. There's a few people that have snuck through, unfortunately.

Joe Rogan: You know, some people they get through and they're like, it takes a while. And you're like, ah, shit. They're never coming back on the show.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Well, there's that. The show, you know, you learn a lot from a person in about three hours. You can kind of – after a while, you can kind of see little things. And you have to be forgiving and you have to be charitable. And some people are just nervous and they misstate things or they exaggerate things or they forget something and they get it wrong. But then there's people that are just – essentially they really don't care about anybody but themselves. And some of those people are really good at pretending to be people. They're really good at it. Pretending. You know, they're really good at pretending to be like a normal person.

David Sinclair: Oh, here's the LSD thing. Researchers recently engineered an LSD analog called, how do you say it, plus minus JRT, that appears to keep many of the LSD's brain beneficial and cognitive effects while dramatically reducing and possibly eliminating its hallucinogenic trip in animal studies. So it's almost the same molecule as LSD, but scientists swapped the positions of just two atoms in the structure. The subtle change makes JRT bind more selectively to serotonin receptors in a way that promotes neuroplasticity, growth and repair of synapses, but minimizes hallucinogenic signaling.

Joe Rogan: That's incredible.

David Sinclair: Antidepressant. Look at this. Strong antidepressant effects at doses reported to be around 100 times more potent than ketamine. Standard rodent tests cognitive benefits improved cognitive flexibility and performance in tasks modeling the negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia. Holy shit, that's incredible. When and where do we get it?

Joe Rogan: Well, I think it fairly recent. UC at a UC Davis study. They just developed it. Oh, it in my. Shout out to our AI sponsor Perplexity for providing us with this information. This is, again, I mean, like we could just get this information now through AI. Like, I mean, this – the AI for our show has been gigantic. I mean, just the ability to just ask it a question instead of Google searching and having to go through all these different fucking articles. What does it say? What is that? Who's right? What's this one? What's the website. You just ask AI and perplexity just gives us all the information. So, proceedings from National Academy of Science, researchers at California of San Diego Davis, excuse me, University of California Davis, reported the creation of JRT, chemically modified version of LSD. So this is like what year? So 2025, so last year. So it's exciting. Five years away, but still, you're right.

David Sinclair: Is that the timeline? At a minimum, usually it takes that long. But that's exciting. At least the principle is there that you don't need to hallucinate.

Joe Rogan: Well, how about for schizophrenia? That's incredible. You need something.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: I mean, that is incredible because that is one of the saddest things, to watch somebody fall into the grips of schizophrenia.

David Sinclair: Yeah. I've seen people fall in and come out, which is interesting. I thought for the bullshit detector, we could have an AI that either dings or has a green or a red on your forehead.

Joe Rogan: I'm pretty good at it. But I think no one's perfect at it. And I think ultimately if we get to a place, whether it's a technological innovation or what have you, where we can actually read the contents of someone's thoughts, I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility.

David Sinclair: You'd need an implant, I think. Elon says the Neuralink is going to be able to pull that off.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. You're going to be able to talk without using words. And I'm like, what? I think he's right, though. I think if we all like lock into a hive mind and then if we develop like through AI, if we develop a universal language worldwide.

David Sinclair: Well, we already have that. What do we have?

Joe Rogan: Well, the new headphones from a big company that I won't name, you can translate.

David Sinclair: Translate, yes.

Joe Rogan: Translate, but it's translating to English. The problem with that is there's context, there's all sorts of different things that other cultures and different languages, when it's deciphered and changed and translated into English, you lose a lot of the meaning and the context is weird. If we develop a universal language.

David Sinclair: That'd be ideal.

Joe Rogan: English is a good substitute. I was shocked. I'm always shocked, traveling globally, how many people can just speak English now.

David Sinclair: Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

Joe Rogan: It's because America rules. You're welcome.

David Sinclair: Well, we have to thank Britain for that.

Joe Rogan: America should say you're welcome.

David Sinclair: Yeah, they're cute. They did a good job of starting it out, but we took the ball and spread it all over the world.

Joe Rogan: So who's next? China? God, I hope not. I don't want to learn Chinese. That's too hard. It's all fucking characters. That's ridiculous. Even people that I know that can speak Mandarin, they can't write it. To get to that level, I have a couple friends that speak fluent Mandarin, and they can't write it. Writing it is.

David Sinclair: Yeah. Well, the students in my lab who come from China, they're being picked on by the immigration, but they don't want to go home. They love it here.

Joe Rogan: I'm sure, because they're stealing all your secrets and they're bringing it back home.

David Sinclair: Well, there's that. There's a lot of regulation on that now as a scientist.

Joe Rogan: Oh, yeah. Do you know that?

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Oh, I can imagine.

David Sinclair: Yeah. I mean, well, it has to be because that is an actual real threat.

Joe Rogan: Exactly.

David Sinclair: So the people that come through my lab have to be vetted now.

Joe Rogan: Right. But the people that come over here and experience the kind of freedom that you have in America.

David Sinclair: Oh, yeah. I came here from Australia. Australia is pretty free, but compared to Australia, America is so different. Yeah. I can't go back.

Joe Rogan: What's the big difference?

David Sinclair: That I feel I can do anything I want if I just put my mind to it. There's not social barriers. There's not monetary barriers, at least for a white male like me who's got a degree. I know it's not for everybody. But I feel like if I want to start a company, I've got a great idea. I can do that here. Fat chance you'll do that in Australia. People aren't willing to invest in great ideas down there. Not often.

Joe Rogan: That's a bummer. Do you think that changes anytime soon?

David Sinclair: No. The U.S. is so unique. There's a lot of money flowing. People are willing to place a bet and even lose the money. That's rare. Australians, most of the world, if not all, people are scared to lose their money if they have it. Here, it's like, okay, I risked it. I helped the world. I feel good. It's a very generous country, very. And I love it here. When I arrived here, I just felt, ah, I'm home.

Joe Rogan: I love hearing that from people that have come from somewhere else because it kind of reaffirms why people in America are so proud of what this country is. It should be, yeah. And that why it bums me out when people are so mad at America in terms of I get look in terms of foreign policy and some of the things that are wrong with America but just in overall this experiment in self is pretty remarkable.

David Sinclair: Yeah, I watched the TV show, was it the American Experiment? It came out for the anniversary of 250th.

Joe Rogan: I haven't seen it. You got to see it. What's it on?

David Sinclair: It's the founding fathers and their lives and how they were fighting and what was going on behind the scenes. They were just young kids. They were in their 20s, 30s.

Joe Rogan: I know. Isn't that nuts?

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Just Benjamin Franklin was the old dude. But they were so young. But they were in the middle of it. They kind of realized they were making history. But so many things could have gone wrong. We would not have had the United States if just a few votes went one way or the other.

David Sinclair: And a few wars.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. A few different battles that they had.

David Sinclair: Exactly. The U.S. was losing the war against Britain badly.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, they burned the White House down.

David Sinclair: Yeah, we don't thank the French enough, actually.

Joe Rogan: I know, right? Somehow they became our enemy.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Remember during the Gulf War, they turned French fries into freedom fries because people hated the French?

David Sinclair: Yeah, but everyone hates the French because they're so arrogant. Sorry, French. I have some friends who are good friends with French. I think generally when people are arrogant, it's because they did something fucking awesome.

Joe Rogan: Well, in the 1800s, they did.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: They conquered Europe. Not sure if that's awesome. Here's a fun perplexing search I just did. I said, do Americans have a risk gene?

David Sinclair: A risk gene?

Joe Rogan: Yeah. One of the best studied variants in the dopamine receptor gene DRD4, specifically the 7-repeat, 7R version. It's associated in some studies with novelty-seeking impulsivity and higher financial or social risk-taking.

David Sinclair: I wonder if I have that gene.

Joe Rogan: For sure. This 7, probably not. Who knows? The 7R variant is unevenly distributed around the world. It's in populations across the Americas. It shows up in roughly 48% of chromosomes studied, while in East Asia, it's found in only about 2%.

David Sinclair: Wow.

Joe Rogan: Whoa. That's crazy. It all comes down to genetics. Evolutionary work suggests it became more common in groups that migrated further after leaving Africa, and those lineages are strongly represented in the Americas today.

David Sinclair: That's cool.

Joe Rogan: I was thinking of the people that had the balls to fucking come here.

David Sinclair: Yeah. You don have to do that much but you can still have balls to gamble and take risks. That must be it. But then Australians should have it. That completely meant.

Joe Rogan: Well sort of. You guys got forced there. They moved everybody over there because they were criminals.

David Sinclair: Right. This DDR gene that you just saw, was it DDR4? I know a bit about it because I'm writing it in my next book. DRD4? Thanks, Jamie. I call this the FU gene because I'm trying to figure out what makes humans special over other animals. And this is one of them that we are seekers of explorers. And it turns out that this gene is turned on in teenagers. It gets eventually switched off. Not totally. But that might be why teenagers say F you to their parents. But it's a way, genetically, to get them out of the nest. Like, oh, I can't stand these parents. They suck. They're idiots. I'm out of here. That's in this gene.

Joe Rogan: Well, it's also um i as a parent have been very aware of not doing that to my kids like not forcing them into something that they don't want to do or pushing them in any general direction but rather encouraging them to seek out their interests and encouraging them to just like take and if i ever correct them if i ever get upset about something one of the first things that i tell them is I've done all everything that you've done. I've made every mistake. I've fucked up. I'm you're, you're smarter than me. I've fucked up everything. I've lied to my parents. I lied to teachers. I've done everything that you're doing. So it's, this is not a unique thing. I'm just telling you from my own personal experience and my perspective, this is why I think, cause I love you and I want you to do well in life. And I just want you to recognize this. And that's how I correct my kids.

David Sinclair: I love that. It's never like, you listen to me because I'm your father. There's none of that shit.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah. The old way we were raised doesn't work.

David Sinclair: No. And it makes you resentment, but also probably makes you want to do better than your parents. So it motivates you in a certain way. My parents were not risk takers at all. And my whole life I've been a wild risk taker.

Joe Rogan: Really same.

David Sinclair: Yeah. I was resentful that my father didn't have enough ambition. Now he's a great guy. We're best friends, actually. It's been the greatest thing for me. But one of the things I did with my kids, you're reminding me, is he's 19. He's a well-built guy because we were going to the gym for a number of years. I've tried to train him in health. But he spent the summer with me. He's literally still working for me this summer to help with the podcast and the magazine we about to launch. And Benjamin his name. He the best kid but he slacked off. He was like Ben, I put you in charge of social media. You haven't posted in a week. What's going on? Well, you know, I slept in. So I had to think, am I going to get mad at him like I would a normal employee or do I treat him differently? And I decided to treat him differently, probably because he's my son, but I didn't want to ruin relationship. But what I did was I said, you know, I really think you can do better. I think everything you've done, the weightlifting, the calculus, you're amazing. But in this, you're not. So what's going on? And it worked. We've become closer. He's really into it. He's doing a good job.

Joe Rogan: That's great. So that's the way to do it. I think you can't be too hard on them.

David Sinclair: Right.

Joe Rogan: You fucked up. Yeah. I mean, that kind of can work, but it's a blunt instrument. And it doesn't work on everybody and it also develops resentment and they also they miss out on experiencing your perspective as a like for them to understand that you are just a person who's lived longer than them and that you can help them navigate this road.

David Sinclair: Yes, so you don't have to make the same mistakes.

Joe Rogan: Yes, that's why you're helping them. You're talking to them about this not because you're just a mean dad who likes to fucking tell the kids what to do because we've all experienced that. I mean, I had friends growing up with fathers would fucking scream at them and throw things and and beat them and it's like god and then you just grow up fucking traumatized and always resentful and angry instead of just recognizing that like oh i'm so fortunate that my parents have this perspective where they can explain to me why i'm going through what i'm going through and how they got through it. Like a mentor.

David Sinclair: You're not their best friend. You're their mentor.

Joe Rogan: Yes.

David Sinclair: Best friend doesn't work either.

Joe Rogan: No, that doesn't work either because that just allows too much shenanigans. You know, you have to have some rules. You know, you have to have some sort of regulations.

David Sinclair: Yeah. And your kids turned out well.

Joe Rogan: What's that?

David Sinclair: How'd your kids turn out?

Joe Rogan: Oh, they're great. Great. I'm so, so lucky. So fucking lucky. I mean, I feel so fortunate. They're so smart and ambitious and driven. It's wild. It's wild to watch, you know, and talented. And also, like, we never went through that period where they hit teenage years and they hate you.

David Sinclair: Really?

Joe Rogan: No.

David Sinclair: Well, I experienced that. God, that's so nice.

Joe Rogan: I mean, my youngest, she'd get upset at me sometimes about certain things, but she bounces back quickly. It's never like some kids where they just grow to hate their parents.

David Sinclair: The RD4 gene. Maybe they don't have a strong one.

Joe Rogan: I don't know about that. I think it's how you communicate with them. I really do. I think that's a big factor. You have to communicate with them like you truly care about their development. And the most important thing I think is that I always tell them, whatever you've done, whatever mistake you've made, I made way worse mistakes. I was like, I am not coming at you from a flawless person. I'm not coming at you from the perspective of someone who like, you're an idiot. I figured that out. You should figure it out. Like, no. I whenever that went from the time they were really little anytime I had to correct them I said I did everything that you're doing. Everything. I threw my food on the floor, too. Yes all the above whatever fucking stupid thing you've done as a kid I guarantee you that is great advice really great advice.

David Sinclair: So I hope everyone listening hears that because I actually had to learn the hard way my first kid. I did what my parents did which was you can't say that.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

David Sinclair: And my first is a lot more rebellious and distant than my third for that reason.

Joe Rogan: Isn't that interesting?

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: It actually is really true. I've seen it.

David Sinclair: Yeah, and I thought it was going to kill their motivation, but it doesn't at all. I thought like, you know, making things easy for them and not being strict, like maybe it's good to be strict because then you just have this determination to show everybody. I don't think that was my thing as a child. Like I'll fucking show you. But I don't think everybody needs that. I think you're much better off having a healthy relationship with ambition where you're excited about things because you're passionate about them and you find great reward in being creative or being enthusiastic about something.

Joe Rogan: Exactly. And open their eyes to the world that exists.

David Sinclair: Yes.

Joe Rogan: We used to do work experience. You go and do a job and that's your work experience. The reason I wanted my son Ben to work with me is he can see what it's like to be an entrepreneur and build something and be excited. And work is super fun.

David Sinclair: Yes.

Joe Rogan: I think a lot of kids just don get that experience. They don know what possible.

David Sinclair: Right.

Joe Rogan: And just showing them the world is what we can do as parents. That awesome.

David Sinclair: Yeah. And you know, I mean some people don have that at home unfortunately.

Joe Rogan: But that's one of the cool things about the world that we live in is that kids today have access to so many different perspectives now because of the Internet. There's so many different podcasts and YouTube conversations and different things where they can just take a little tool from that, just take a little piece from that and apply it to the way they interact with the world.

David Sinclair: Yeah, for sure. And I would encourage parents to give their kids stuff to read. We talked about social media, how that's just addictive. I saw how my kids wanted to just scroll through their phones and read. And if they can't read a book, give them a magazine. I subscribe to Nat Geo, National Geographic for my kids and I think get them used to reading. It's going to be a lost art if we don't.

Joe Rogan: I know, isn't that nuts? I maybe read 10% of the things that I consume. I consume so much in audio just for time reasons because there's so much time where I'm driving my car or I'm working out or I'm in the sauna or I'm in the hyperbaric chamber or I'm in the red light therapy.

David Sinclair: That's reading through your ears. It is similar, but I think it's only like 70% of reading. I don't think it's 100%. I don't think you get the full effect, but it's still way better than not doing it. But I'm aware that sitting there concentrating, actually reading a book without hearing another person's voice talking, there's another mechanism. There's another thing that's going on. It's a different way you interact with the material, whether it's non-fiction or fiction.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I like the fact that I can listen to you and I'm doing something else. I don't have to sit down, can move, go for a walk.

David Sinclair: Yeah, that's, for me, it's just I have too many interests. I have way too many things that I do. So it's very hard for me to just allocate a certain amount of time to sit there in silence and read.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I use reading to fall asleep. That's a good way.

David Sinclair: It does do that, right? It's kind of nuts how well it does that.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, although I am finding it's harder to read now that my eyes aren't young.

David Sinclair: I need some of my gene therapy myself. I've tried that.

Joe Rogan: Does it work for you?

David Sinclair: Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan: Oh I mean people are skeptical about this and they think I full of shit. No I don need reading glasses anymore.

David Sinclair: Really?

Joe Rogan: Yes. I always have these fucking things laying around. I don even use them anymore.

David Sinclair: That awesome.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. There a lot of science now for red light. It real. I can tell you as a regular user for multiple years it took a while. It took like, I was waiting for it in the beginning. Like what the fuck? And in fact, and not only that in the beginning, because I don't close my eyes in the red light bed, I thought it was making things blurrier. I was like, oh my God, am I fucking up my eyesight, like listening to these assholes? But no, it just took a while. And then over the course of like many months, I started seeing some small improvements. And then I started seeing some pretty big improvements over the course of about a year. Whereas now, my eyes aren't perfect. They aren't like they were when I was 20, but they are way better than they were when I was 50.

David Sinclair: How often did you have to do that?

Joe Rogan: I do it three times a week minimum. That's what I try to do. But sometimes I'll do it five days a week. I just get in there and it's 20 minutes. I lay in a light bed, close my eyes, open my eyes, whatever. It seems to work on your vision even if you wear a blindfold.

David Sinclair: What about people that can't afford a bed? Can you get little devices?

Joe Rogan: Yes. You can get – well, there's a company called – it's called Juve, right? J-U-U-V. Is that the name of the company?

Joe Rogan: They were our sponsor at one point in time. That's how I started it. They had just a light panel that you stand in front of.

David Sinclair: Oh, yeah. I've got one of those.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. And that works too. But this one, the one that I got, a red and near infrared light therapy device, JOOV, J-O-O-V-V, medical grade light therapy devices. I had one of those. And that's when I started seeing benefits. But the big one that I got, I got from Gary Brekka from his company. It's like a fucking tanning bed and you lie in it. And that one's amazing. But that's expensive. But I don't think you have to have that for those kind of improvements. Also improves collagen in your skin, makes you look better. But for me, the most obvious and profound was the improvement in my vision.

David Sinclair: Well, it makes sense. The science behind red light wasn't there 10 years ago and people were questioning it. But now we know if you shine certain wavelengths like near infrared on cells, the mitochondria, which are important for reversing aging or slowing it, get revved up. It's actually related to Viagra. Long story, but Viagra and red light have something in common and it does help mitochondria. And that's very important for the eye. The mitochondria are actually the most important in any part of your body. The eye is the most important part. And part of the reason we lose our vision is the mitochondria don't make enough energy for the eye.

Joe Rogan: How come you haven't done red light therapy before then?

David Sinclair: Well, I do, but not routinely. So I have one of those bricks that I turn on while I'm in the shower. And I have a red light cap for my hair, which there's some evidence... my wife is one of those... it works a little bit.

Joe Rogan: She looks like a fucking alien.

David Sinclair: What I do is... yeah, it does. It looks a little bit silly. It's weird. I don't wear it in public, but I do lower it and I look at it and it shines in my eyes and on my face in the hopes that it might help.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, they have one that you wear like Dr. Doom, like fits over your face and blasts red light in your whole face. I definitely feel a bit weird afterwards and I can see speckles, but I think the science says that it can help.

David Sinclair: Well, all I know is my own anecdotal experience and for me it has radically improved my vision.

Joe Rogan: That's a good tip. Yeah, it stopped. My vision was degrading like it was... I first started using reading glasses like a 1x, like it made it a little better. I'm like, oh, there's a little better, makes it clearer. And then I went to two and then I was using 2.5, right? And it made it better. But it was like, God, this is annoying. And then if I would try to read an email and I didn't have my reading glasses, I couldn't read shit. Now, crystal clear. No problem at all.

David Sinclair: Well, so my latest show is about the eye and how to protect the eye's health. So there's a lot you can do, actually. Supplements, red light, other things.

Joe Rogan: I take supplements for it, too. I should mention that. I have no affiliation with these people. So Pure Encapsulations makes a supplement called Macular Support, and I take that. It's a combination of lutein and a few other things.

David Sinclair: Yeah, there was a trial a while ago that showed that taking xanthine and others, astaxanthine, lutein, they're good for the eye. So you can get products like that.

Joe Rogan: Do you take it?

David Sinclair: Not that brand, but yes, I take something similar.

Joe Rogan: And has it helped you at all?

David Sinclair: I don't know. I haven't done an experiment.

Joe Rogan: Right. Well, if you weren't taking it, maybe you would have more degeneration.

David Sinclair: Yeah, well, you know, I've got near-perfect vision. I don't need glasses.

Joe Rogan: Do you really?

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Near-perfect?

David Sinclair: Near-perfect. I mean, I think low light is the issue. Low light is with me, yeah. Where I'll go to a restaurant with my kids, and they can read the menu, and I'm like, that is so embarrassing. You can read that? How do you even read that? I can't read shit.

Joe Rogan: Do you know why?

David Sinclair: Why?

Joe Rogan: Well, this is what I think.

David Sinclair: So we know from my lab's work that the retina, because it has tens of thousands of endings that pick up the light, as you get older, those nerves lose their identity and they're not working as well. And what we do is with our therapy, we can restore those nerves back to being functional nerves. And that's why mice and monkeys that lose their retinal function get their perfect vision back again. We're reminding those cells that have forgotten how to work. So in your eye and my eye, we're 22 months apart, those nerves, about half of them have forgotten how to work properly. So we want to fix that and go back to being young. It's not that our nerves are gone. They're not dead. They're right there and we can restore them. And that's going to be true for a lot of organs. The cells are still there. They just need to be reminded how to work again.

Joe Rogan: What are the potential negative consequences of this kind of work? Like when you sit up at night and you worry, I hope it doesn't do this. Is it cancer? Is that the big one?

David Sinclair: Yeah. Though we've done a lot of work to allay real fears, it is possible that if we go too young, we can cause dysplasia, which is cells doing what they shouldn't, or if they multiply and spread, that would be cancer. If you make the cells too young. Like what I was saying before about don't turn me into a baby. We don't want to go there. That's what Yamanaka did and got the Nobel for it. But that's not good here. But we never see our cells turn into stem cells again. We had mice that we left the gene therapy on for 21 months in the eye and 19 months in the whole body of the animal. And if anything, they had less tumors than the ones that didn't get treated. And we actually know from a wonderful student in my lab, Nalat, she's a PhD student. She found that when you turn on these three same genes, not in the eye but in cancer cells and tumors growing in mice, human cancers growing in mice, they shrink. So we think it might actually help for cancer as well, which was a nice surprise.

Joe Rogan: Wow. That's incredible. It makes sense, right? If you wake up a cancer cell and it says, "Crap, I shouldn't be growing, I should be a liver cell or something similar," now it kills itself.

David Sinclair: So we see that cells wake up, they realize what they were 30 years ago, and then they kill themselves.

Joe Rogan: What is on the horizon in terms of what would you like to accomplish or would you like to work on that you can't do currently?

David Sinclair: Well, lots. Lots. Funding in my lab got completely cut last year, and we've managed to survive through donations.

Joe Rogan: Why did the funding get cut? Was it a USAID thing?

David Sinclair: You remember there was a spat between Harvard and the federal government? All of the funding to Harvard Medical School got cut.

Joe Rogan: Was that during the time where the president was defending those anti-Semitic comments on campuses?

David Sinclair: Yeah. Well, allegedly, I'm not getting into the politics.

Joe Rogan: No need to get into politics.

David Sinclair: But during that whole thing. Yeah. So what happened, I almost had to fire most of the people in my lab during that episode. It was quite scary. But I raised... so now my lab survives on donations, not on federal government money. Thank you, friends. Thank you.

Joe Rogan: Well, the thing is you've accomplished enough where people are like, "I think he's on to something and I want to live forever."

David Sinclair: Well, I'm lucky. Most scientists can't raise money like that. So really, it's a blessing. And now I'm raising money through a foundation to help other scientists survive. But, yeah, it's been a blessing. But your question was what do I wish I could do. I wish I could go faster. I wish I could try multiple approaches so we don't just have one shot on goal. It's going slower than I would want. With a big injection of cash, we could do a lot of trials, a lot of different tissues. We could do a whole body rejuvenation as well.

Joe Rogan: Do you have a website where people can donate?

David Sinclair: I do. It's lifespan.com. So if you go to lifespan.com, there's a link there. Yeah, we have a foundation, and we're raising money for this type of research.

Joe Rogan: Is it tax deductible?

David Sinclair: Depends on how big the donation is. For $10 you get the new magazine that we're putting out and you learn all about how to live longer. I'm hoping to build the world's largest longevity community of millions of people who can learn how to really live longer and build healthcare from the ground up, because top-down from the government hasn't worked.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Actually, I have a gift for you.

David Sinclair: Well, yeah, I made something for you that's unique. Oh, this is for you, Joe, as a thanks for all the support you've given me and the science over the years. First edition Lifespan magazine, ladies and gentlemen. Look at that. It's written by scientists. It's got a velvet cover.

Joe Rogan: What is this material? It's beautiful.

David Sinclair: Velour.

Joe Rogan: Velour, of course.

David Sinclair: At great expense. No, the magazine doesn't come with velour. That's just special for Joe as a thank you present.

Joe Rogan: Thank you very much.

David Sinclair: Most science out there is written by reporters who don't know what they're talking about. And so we wrote this for the public, and you can believe whatever you read in there.

Joe Rogan: Beautiful. And it's velour, so you have to trust it.

David Sinclair: So that's at Lifespan.com. You can subscribe, get that every month just for $10.

Joe Rogan: I like the tag at the bottom: "Life's too short, let's fix that."

David Sinclair: That's our slogan at Lifespan.

Joe Rogan: That's a great slogan.

David Sinclair: Yeah. So it's a community. It's the show. My show is also called Lifespan on YouTube. But the magazine is a passion project. I want to put out something that people love. It's beautiful. It's like National Geographic. By the way, just today, this is no joke, it seems crazy, but my lab's research is on the cover of National Geographic.

Joe Rogan: Oh, that's awesome.

David Sinclair: That just came out today. They heard, by the way, at NatGeo, they said, "You're going on Joe Rogan?" I went, "Yeah." They go, "All right, we'll put it out early." So you can now read about my lab's research on NatGeo as well today.

Joe Rogan: That's very cool. So you would just like to do more, have more funding, do more. That's the thing that you wish you could be working on now, is having more different studies and tests running concurrently.

David Sinclair: We could go so fast with AI because it's spitting out new drug candidates all the time that we can't test. It takes years to get through. So with money, we could do a lot more trials and put these through different diseases much faster.

Joe Rogan: If you had no regulations, like an Island of Dr. Moreau type deal?

David Sinclair: Yeah. Well, at the risk of getting kicked out of my university, theoretically we could very safely do more animal studies and with those best candidates put them into humans quicker. Right now it takes years. It's taken us close to ten years to go from the first discovery in my lab in Nature magazine to now. But that's too slow. There are people dying, 150 a day on this planet. It's terrible. So I would love to have the resources, you know, like Jeff Bezos and others.

Joe Rogan: My company, by the way, even though we lead the pack of all these guys, we're really small. We're a pretty small little outfit in Boston. We've raised a lot less money, but because I think we're focused and we started earlier, we're doing pretty well.

David Sinclair: That's the big one. You started earlier. You have a lot of momentum on your side.

Joe Rogan: I think we could have a big impact on aging in our lifetime with more money directed in general at the field, not just me, but spread it. And so the money that we raise from the magazine is going to support other labs as well and students who can find these medicines quicker.

David Sinclair: So if you, in a perfect world, and you had unlimited resources, you would just run a bunch of different clinical trials and studies concurrently?

Joe Rogan: Yeah. AI is feeding us molecules. We put them into mice. We go to monkeys. We go to humans. And it would just be fast. One of my friends, Alex Zakharonkov, he has a similar company, but not on exactly what we do, not on reprogramming. But he's able, I think he's on his 35th drug, but he's driven by AI and robots. His whole lab is robots, at least he says they are, and then goes into humans. And his company is worth billions. That approach applied to what we do would be incredible. That's best case scenario.

Joe Rogan: That would be incredible. Well, I'm hoping through this conversation that people are going to reach out. And I'm hoping through this conversation that people realize, "Oh, so much work has been done and so many breakthroughs have been made if they had more access to resources, more access to different, whatever you need," and that you could run all these different studies.

David Sinclair: We could. Our budget in my lab is only, it's almost three and a bit million. It's not much, right, compared to what impact it could have on the planet, which is trillions of dollars saved just in the U.S. alone. So a little bit of donation or getting a magazine, the impact would be life-changing for all of us. Who doesn't age? Who doesn't get diseases?

Joe Rogan: Right. And who doesn't want to feel better?

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: It's also like so much, you can get so much more done if you feel better.

David Sinclair: Well, we take it for granted until we feel sick, and then it's like, "Oh, I forgot what it's like to feel well."

Joe Rogan: Exactly. I had a day a week and a half ago where I came back from Italy. I was a little jet-lagged. I didn't sleep right. And I worked out really hard a bunch of days in a row. And I was working constantly. And then I had one day I was like, "I kind of feel like shit. I better not do anything today." And after I was done work, I just watched TV and relaxed. I was like, "I can't wait to feel better again."

David Sinclair: Well, imagine what it's like being old and frail. That's every day. Or sick. And right now you can't do anything about it.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

David Sinclair: And while you're healthy, you take it for granted. And that's the real sin. You're like, "Ah, I'm fine. I'm great."

Joe Rogan: I mean, this is what people do when they go out drinking, right? They take advantage of the fact that it's worth it for a good time to just poison myself for a night.

David Sinclair: Well, it's not worth it because that also accelerates aging. But big time, right? This is what I tell my kids who like alcohol, like most kids. You might feel better in a few days, but the memory of that is going to be in your body.

Joe Rogan: You can drink. It's fine to get drunk once in a while, but not a lot, not constantly. I used to drink once a day and I do not do that anymore because the data is incontrovertible that it affects the brain, even the size of the brain, if you drink constantly.

David Sinclair: I took eight months off of no alcohol at all and I felt a lot better.

Joe Rogan: Exactly.

David Sinclair: I started drinking again one night. I went to dinner with my wife and had a margarita. I was like, "Ooh, I think I'm back."

Joe Rogan: Ah, really?

David Sinclair: Well, I drink now, but I do not get drunk. I haven't gotten drunk. This was over a year ago. It was when I had a drink again. I think it was a year. I'm not sure. But point is, I have not been drunk since then.

Joe Rogan: I will have a glass of wine with dinner or I will have a shot of whiskey before I go on stage, like a little bit, but I do not get drunk anymore. It's just not worth it to me. The feeling afterwards is so terrible. The morning, and especially for me because I work out so much, when I wake up, that workout is gonna get done. Whether I feel like shit or not, that workout is going to get done. And this is going to be rough. And then you got the sweats. It's horrible. Versus when I feel great, I love the workout. I'm excited. I look forward to it. Even when it's hard. When it's over, I'm like, "Whew, all right, let's eat." And I don't feel bad. I feel good. And it's like, why am I giving that up for a few hours of "Ah!"? It's not worth it.

David Sinclair: Yeah, well, you're funny even without alcohol, but I'm not. So I've lost a lot of my humor. But there's nothing better than feeling great, right?

Joe Rogan: Yes, nothing better than feeling great. And if you can make it your hobby of working on your health and your longevity, you'll enjoy it. It shouldn't be a chore. It'll also directly affect the other things that you love because you will have more energy. Your life energy, your vitality is so important for anything you're doing, whether it's a creative thing or an intellectual thing. If you have more energy, you'll be able to apply more energy to that thing. It's that simple.

David Sinclair: You're building a bigger gas tank for yourself. You're building a larger engine. And that's what you're doing.

Joe Rogan: Exactly. Mentally, physically, you can do so much when you feel good. You jump out of bed. If you wake up and you're tired, woozy, your eyes are puffy, that's not how it should be when you wake up.

David Sinclair: Right. And sleep is important for longevity, of course. If you're getting good deep sleep, then you should wake up and you feel great.

Joe Rogan: You don't even necessarily need a cup of coffee, but it's not bad if you have one. I like coffee. I'm not going to stop drinking it. I don't give a fuck what anybody says.

David Sinclair: Right. It's good. And it's also conflicting information. Some people say it's good for you. There's benefits. It's good for you.

Joe Rogan: Come on. That's what I say.

David Sinclair: Oh, it really is. Anyone that says it's not doesn't read the literature.

Joe Rogan: Well, I would imagine an overabundance of caffeine is not good. Too much is not good. But that's true for everything. Too much salt will kill you.

David Sinclair: Yeah, exactly. A pound of salt, you'd be dead in an hour.

Joe Rogan: Right.

David Sinclair: And you can get away with very little sleep, actually, as long as it's deep sleep. Because what it's doing is clearing out the misfolded proteins in your brain and the toxins. We know this, the glymphatic system. And if you get deep sleep for an hour, you're actually going to wake up much cleaner, healthier. And what I've been able to do with some work is figure out how to get deep sleep every night. Efficiency on these rings that say above 90 sometimes.

Joe Rogan: I like you say rings because you're wearing two Oura rings. Different companies. Why do you wear two different rings?

David Sinclair: Because when I've got two, neither of them is correct. No, the truth is some of them are really good for sleep. The others are good for heart. And so this one's my heart and this is my sleep.

Joe Rogan: What is the difference in the companies? Which one's which? You don't mind me saying who they are?

David Sinclair: No, I don't care. This is an Oura, the fat one. And then the thinner one is called Ultrahuman.

Joe Rogan: Ultrahuman. And which one is good for what?

David Sinclair: Well, I find Oura really good for sleep. That's their specialty. And then the heart for Ultrahuman, my cardiac age.

Joe Rogan: So it's just like giving you data all the time.

David Sinclair: Yeah. And they're getting even better because, I don't get paid by these companies, but I do like that they pop up with AI information now. "Have you noticed that da-da-da?" or "I noticed that you ate a meal last night that spiked your glucose?" And this one I'm monitoring right now so I can see what's going on. But yeah, they're becoming like a...

Joe Rogan: You are fucking monitored, bro.

David Sinclair: I am. Two rings and a patch? It's a hobby. But you learn a lot. And I put one of these on my son and he stopped eating bad food for a long while. Because he was just recognizing the impact that it had on his body. It's good for kids. Now, I wouldn't say slap it on a kid without a pediatrician recommendation, but it was amazing what happened when he could see the crap that was going in his mouth was doing to his blood sugar.

Joe Rogan: Really? I think it's a great learning tool, if nothing else. Just to have actual data. I know a lot of people, it's changed their opinion on alcohol, particularly the Oura Ring, when they look at their sleep. Because even just a couple of drinks before you go to bed, like a couple of drinks at dinner, and then you realize, "Oh, God, my sleep was all fucked up because of those drinks."

David Sinclair: Yeah. Lay off the modafinil too, for me anyway.

Joe Rogan: Yeah? Some modafinil fucks with your sleep as well?

David Sinclair: Yeah. I have to work really hard to sleep well. There's quiet time. There's relaxation. The lights are dimmed. I think about a happy place rather than work. I had to do that because for 50 years I was burning the candle at all ends. I was really burnt out. And so I've fixed that now. I don't worry.

Joe Rogan: So are you one of those guys that dims the lights in your house a couple hours before you go to bed and prepare, stay off your phone, all that stuff?

David Sinclair: Well, I don't stay off my phone as much as I want to, but yes. You wear red light glasses or anything like blockers?

Joe Rogan: I used to. I haven't found a big difference for myself. But interesting fact that isn't well known: if you block blue light during the day or just stay indoors, there's a guy in Japan who says that what happens is you get short-sightedness.

David Sinclair: Really?

Joe Rogan: Because the mice that lack the ability to sense violet light get myopia, short-sighted. And he's got a device that indoors you can shine this. But our modern world, the LEDs, and being indoors means we barely get violet light. And that would be so interesting if that's what's causing us to have to wear glasses.

David Sinclair: Wow. And he claims that people that live out in the countryside that see blue light all the time because they go out don't have as much need for glasses.

Joe Rogan: That actually makes sense. Particularly artificial light and then also light that's from a close source. One of the things is if I'm tired and I lay in bed and I try to read something online on my phone, it hurts my eyes. The room's dark and it irritates my eyes where it never irritates my eyes normally. But it's at the end of the day, I guess I'm more fatigued and so then I'm trying to focus.

David Sinclair: Yeah. So now think about that when people are doing it all day long. Maybe doing it at work where you have to stare at a computer monitor from three feet away or closer, and then you're looking at your phone all the time or you're working from a tablet or you're watching television. It's like you're constantly staring at these light sources that are artificial.

Joe Rogan: And also keep in mind that the muscles have to focus. You don't naturally look this far. You naturally relax. You see out there. But to look here, your muscles here have to be straining for hours. And they get very tired. And I guess eventually they age to a point where you cannot keep it up. And sometimes I do this to see better, though.

David Sinclair: Well, it all makes sense if you think about it, particularly if your eyes are accustomed to only focusing on things that are close. I mean, that was what they would say about reading when people would have glasses. "Oh, you fucked up your vision reading," which I used to think was nonsense. But I'm like, well, it kind of makes sense if you spend all day long focused, even though it's on a screen, you're spending all day long focusing on a book that's only a foot from your face.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. It does make sense. And the lens gets really inflexible.

David Sinclair: Right. And I'm seeing this with my father. He's otherwise in perfect health at 87, which is amazing, but it's his eyes that are failing him.

Joe Rogan: Maybe you should get him a red light bed.

David Sinclair: That's a great idea. Yeah, I'm gonna do that. He's arriving tonight actually from Sydney.

Joe Rogan: Get him a red light bed, man. Because I'm telling you, there's not a thing that I've done that's impacted me in a more obvious way than that. In terms of something that's hugely important.

David Sinclair: I'm gonna do it. And I mean, he's into science. He's been taking NMN, resveratrol, metformin, exercising. He goes to the gym two or three times a week.

Joe Rogan: Oh, that's great.

David Sinclair: He's a role model at 87 with no diseases, no aches or pains, traveling the world. He was in Japan two weeks ago.

Joe Rogan: Wow. I mean, just coming to Boston. That's so cool. I love hearing about people that are older that just keep on top of it and stay active and stay alive and enjoy life.

David Sinclair: Yeah, exactly. He's a great role model. And what it shows is he was an average guy till he was in his 60s and he figured he was going to die in his 70s probably because everyone in my family dies young because we've got pretty bad genes. But he's just taken life by the horns and is running with it and has not physically aged except for his eyes in the last 20 years.

Joe Rogan: That's incredible.

David Sinclair: And that's not an exaggeration. Anyone who's seen him knows he walks, he moves, he travels, he does everything like he was when he was 40.

Joe Rogan: That's where things like resistance exercises are so important because it maintains bone density, maintains muscle mass, maintains your ability to just get around and do things. That's the other reason to do that. I mean, you're gonna be really strong when you're older and you won't fall and if you do fall, you'll bounce. You won't break a bone.

David Sinclair: And he's like that. He's been working out at the gym, mostly strength training, but balance as well. It's very important to maintain balance. He's better at the gym than me at 87.

Joe Rogan: That's incredible. That just shows how weak I am.

David Sinclair: Yeah, I got to go to the gym.

Joe Rogan: How about next time if you have me on, you're going to be buff.

David Sinclair: Deal.

Joe Rogan: We'll get you a trainer. You're in Massachusetts. There's a ton of trainers out there.

David Sinclair: Great. It's a deal.

Joe Rogan: We'll find you someone. Three days a week. That's all you need. The other days you could do stuff elective. Do stuff that you want. But three days a week, get a personal trainer and work out with them.

David Sinclair: You're on. All right. I will let you know when it's going or you help me. I can hear, though, that there's probably a few million people right now screaming, "David, just go to the lab. Forget about the gym. You need to make more discoveries."

Joe Rogan: Well, it'll help your lab work. It'll help everything. It'll help the amount of research you're able to do. You'll have more energy. You'll be more excited about things. I'm sure you've seen those MRI cross-sections of people's tissue where they take like a 70-year-old man who's sedentary versus a 70-year-old man who's a marathon runner. It's fucking extraordinary.

David Sinclair: I've seen my own. There's too much fat in the muscle. Got to get rid of it.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. It's really extraordinary when you see those images. Like those really bring it home. And the bone changes. Bone turns to fat too. Parts of the bone. So you got to have the strength training for sure. 100%. Keep your bones strong.

David Sinclair: 100%. Strength training, that's mandatory.

Joe Rogan: And then do you do a lot of aerobic exercises?

David Sinclair: Yes.

Joe Rogan: Good.

David Sinclair: I saw the training bike.

Joe Rogan: Oh, yeah. Well, you saw my hypoxia machine that I just got installed today.

David Sinclair: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: The hypoxia thing, what it does is it replicates 14,000 feet above sea level. And you train in it. And it also has a heat element so you can ramp the heat up to 115 degrees. So 115 degrees and 14,000 feet above sea level.

David Sinclair: What's that, Machu Picchu kind of stuff?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, you're going to hell. That's what it is. You're going straight to hell. I feel like it. But it should work. Hypoxia is great for muscle and for adaptation. That's the big thing. And my friend Roman who installed it, one of the guys from the company, they're very specific with this protocol in terms of monitoring your heart rate, when to do it, when to push, how much time to spend, and how you do it. And it's very scientific in terms of the application on athletes. And my friend Adam Greentree turned me on to it, a fellow Australian. And he's a big hunter and does a lot of mountain hunting. And he said there's nothing he's ever done that's had more of an impact on his cardio. So it's been phenomenal.

David Sinclair: Sounds wonderful, actually. There's a lot of science behind that. You probably know it. The best results are when people are either having too much oxygen or not enough. And you might say, "Well, that's weird. Why does it matter?"

David Sinclair: Well, you got to get out of your comfort zone, hormesis we keep talking about. And there's a big study in Israel where they put people in these hyperbaric chambers. I've done that protocol.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah. 60 sessions of 90 minutes over 90 days.

David Sinclair: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have one in my house.

Joe Rogan: You do?

David Sinclair: Yeah, because the data is incontrovertible. Better wound healing, better memory, increase in telomere length.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I saw that one. That's the Israel study.

David Sinclair: Yes. What I thought was interesting was when I went over there myself and sat in that thing. They made a joke over there in Israel, by the way. They said, "This gas chamber here that you're going into, made by Germans." I thought, that's not a funny joke. Don't say that again. Anyway, I probably shouldn't have shared that.

I did go into the chamber and what I found out was that they believe what I believe, which is it's not so much the high pressure that's good for you. It's the coming down that mimics hypoxia, which your room will mimic. So the lack of oxygen or the perceived lack of oxygen from a high state is the benefit.

Joe Rogan: Interesting.

David Sinclair: And that makes a lot of sense. You're going to grow new blood vessels, just like Viagra is going to open things up. We actually had a paper in 2012 that found that one of the supplements that I take, which everyone knows about, NMN, could allow animals to grow new blood vessels by getting rid of a protein that accumulates with aging.

The bottom line is we could mimic this lack of blood vessels with this pill. But by exercising, it's the same. What I really believe, which is barely talked about in the medical establishment, is that a major reason we get sick when we get older is lack of blood flow. It's rarely talked about, right? Vascular dementia, second largest cause of dementia in the world. Blood flow. And it's the easiest to reverse. You just do exercise, or take one of these PDE5 inhibitors, Viagra, or you take my stuff, which is NMN, which we think also works. Or all of the above, which is probably the best approach.

Joe Rogan: I'm two out of three. Hopefully soon three out of three.

David Sinclair: But yeah, to protect your brain, which is the most important because you don't want to be old and demented. That's worse than anything. Keep the blood flowing in your body. Remember that. Blood flowing is important.

Joe Rogan: Yes. Couldn't agree more. David, you're a treasure. I really appreciate you. Thank you for being here. You've been so kind. And thank you for getting the word out here about the great science that's going on.

David Sinclair: Oh, my pleasure, dude. I'm so happy there's someone like you out there doing this. I mean, it's such an enormous benefit to people that are listening to the world. And you're doing, you're literally doing God's work.

Joe Rogan: We'll try to do more. Thank you very much. Lifespan.com is the website. Please, folks, if you're so inclined, go donate. It'll really help. It'll change the world. David, love you too. Thank you.

David Sinclair: Bye, everybody.

Joe Rogan: Bye.