#872 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientist’s Masterclass On Longevity

26:56Correlation is not causation. Most of the variance of muscle mass or most of the relationship between muscle mass and mortality has to do with muscle mass isn't what's keeping you alive. It's just a really good indicator of your overall health. It's like healthy use of bias signal. 100%. So like if you give me an 88 year old woman who is walking out of pain, she's super jacked. Brrrr, it destroys guys' rapers and shit. She's like, you ever seen someone who's not overweight, but they like reach for their luggage, and it's like skin and bones, and like the muscles are like, her biceps like the width of my finger, and you're like, that fuck, is that person moving?

27:34And they're barely moving? she's going to croak probably in not so long a time, but it's because she's 88, and because all of the other health factors have precluded her from building muscle, not as much because if she built a ton of muscle, it would keep her life longer. If she had a good bench press, she'd be sweet. It's true, she had more muscle, it'd probably be healthier for her. But a lot of times, people who are bedridden, people who are suffering from chronic illness, people who are suffering chronic physical and activity, like your hips are totally fucked, So you lose a ton of muscle in your legs and then like people like when you die they measure your muscle mass and a study and they say Well, low muscle mass it's that the low muscle mass specifically the killed you although it did have a small effect It's the fact that like oh shit.

28:17You weren't really poor health in order to get to this muscle mass is downstream from what you've done 100 % and there's a couple things going around the internet people are talking about jump height Your ability jump high related to your mortality and grip strength and like if you try to train to jump higher or grip stronger thinking it's going to keep you alive, a reverse causation, not the best use of your time. Yeah. What about too much muscle? Lots of people listening who maybe we worried about that, they spend all that time in the gym, you as well. A large guy who's competitively body -built, body -built quite a while.

28:50Yes, body -built. So, technically, as soon as you get to be considerably, 10 or 15 pounds heavier than what the insurance tables predict will be the body weight that lets you live the longest. You're probably not doing yourself any favors with longevity. However, this is one of those instances where quality of life and longevity can be a little bit antagonistic to one another. So that definitely has to be stated that no, you can't be as jacked as you want and still live as long as you want. But if you're not using anabolic steroids and growth hormones to get that extra muscle, the amount of muscle a human can gain naturally as long as they don't have a high degree of body fat is just not going to make a huge difference in longevity.

29:35If a quality of life trade off is worth it to you, it's going to be a very small effect less than five years end of life, maybe even less than that. If you use a ton of steroids to get this jacked, then you're going to be doing some time at that time. What are you talking about with, I don't know, take yourself, the sort of course you've done, which I would guess is in the upper range of what most people, even non -professional bodybuilders would take, what sort of life price do you think people are paying? As far as my back of the envelope calculation for myself personally, so there's a big caveat so that I don't embarrass myself posthumously when this is released.

30:14When you die tomorrow or die in a hundred years time. You used to cast a compliment about that. Anyone who just die fucking tomorrow, like, God, blood vessel in his brain just blew up. Trans -ad is head was too big. That kind of weird shit aside, on average, I would have expected myself to probably take about 10 years off of the end of life. Yeah, well, yeah. What is it that the drugs are doing that's speeding up the dying process? Yeah, what are they doing that speeds up? They're growing your heart muscle in a way that makes your heart worse at pumping blood. They are consistently presenting you with cholesterol levels that do nothing good for your arteries.

30:55They are elevating your blood pressure. Now many of those variables I have kabocht, so I could be lucky and be looking at less than five years, but there's also an element of where caring that much excess body weight starts to be a stand in for the muscle. When you weigh, I'm 56 and I currently weigh 235. You weigh 235 pounds of 56. You are, I'm like one obesity category away from the highest one all the time. On BMI, correct. But like the amount of weight you carry around, the amount more forcefully your heart has to pump blood, et cetera, that's still fucking counts. Fatigue. 100 % and so to quote Donald Trump on the heartbeat thing, Again, he's not 100 % wrong.

31:39That definitely is a factor. So if you happen to have used lots of steroids, but you kept most of your health values in check and you just had dog shit genetics for being jacked and you never got really big, you're probably looking at less than five years off your lifespan on average. But I've been pretty big for my size for a long time and my parents are both teeny tiny people with very small frames. I also have a very small frame. I just have a lot of muscle on it, relatively speaking, and a lot of weight. and I have had for years and that's absolutely a big fucking problem. Do you, I think about Chris Bums said when you talk about that someone who's just retired, age 30.

32:16Okay. Six, two, six, three, I think he steps on stage at like 20, to 30, something like that. I'm not too sure. Very mysterious with the classic guys actually wait, but yeah. 20 to 240 or something. Yeah. I think about him, you know, trying to get in and out. He's like, you know, Navy SEAL Team 6. Like kicking a door down, shots someone in the face six times, and then, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you can't get me anymore. I don't have any more Olympia trophies. Yeah, all right. I wonder how much he's been able, obviously genetically elite. I wonder how much he's been able to get in and get out, so to speak.

32:52The more you can get in and get out, the better. I never used preposterously high doses, mostly because I was like, I don't exactly want to die like tomorrow, tomorrow, but also because for me, high doses were just not so great in psychology and stuff. But for someone like Chris Bumstead, I mean, his degree of muscle mass and body weight that he carries for his height and frame were never like insane. Do you know who Big Rami was? Yes. Like is. That's gonna put you in the grave a lot sooner because you are carrying. And you do the just one isn't he like 340 off season correct? See he literally is 100 pounds more than sebum.

33:34At probably a slightly shorter height. Like that's the kind of thing that's going to affect you. So just to reveal its tail and 100 % yeah. So to review the muscularity part, if you were very undermuscled, it's probably not a huge deal for longevity, but being of at least normal musculature for the average person of your sort of height and frame and age. It's probably your best bed at longevity. Having a little extra muscle can help, can hurt, probably cancels out on average. So if you're jacked as a nanny, unless you got super fat to do it, like I did when I was natural, no big deal. And then as you use drugs, if you use drugs to get jacked, but you're really good at controlling your health variables, you never had excessive cholesterol, you never had chronic high blood sugar from mismanagement of insulin and growth hormones, shit like that.

34:20If you did a good job managing that and you never got enormous enormous, Yeah, like the drugs definitely kill you faster, but not psychotically faster. I mean, there are dozens and dozens of golden -era pro bodybuilders that are still alive today. They're in their 70s and 80s. I don't know, it's still kicking it. Like, if this shit was, remember one of my mentors, Dr. Mike Stone, told us something about steroids when we were on a PhD program. He's like, you know, we in the 80s knew that the media was lying because he just went into locker rooms and gyms, it just didn't see any dead bodies. Because you know, like 80s anti -drug hysteria was a totally different level.

34:56I once stared injection, you're criminal, you're in jail, you're addicted to heroin somehow also, and you're for sure dead like tomorrow. That absolutely doesn't happen. However, last category is if you get very, very large, stay large for a long time, stay on tons of gear for a long time, and don't attend to the various health consequences, at that point you're rolling the dice and the only way in which the dice are loaded is with your genetics. because there are juiced up people that have been jacked for forever, they're beat red, and they just like don't die, and they live into their 80s. Not the great model for most people, because they just have ball or genetics.

35:32One of my friends, a mentor of mine, Brader Akchavez, had believed like a grandfather and uncle who like worked literally in the coal mines, and he had like some kind of chest condition. This is an amazing story. It was the 1960s. And he went to the doctor and he's like, oh, something in my like some lungs are shit. And they're like, oh yeah, here are a dianna ball tablets, a D ball tabs, oral steroids, right? So you just got to script for oral steroids. And he was on them for like a generation straight. This isn't oral drug, you're not supposed to take for longer than like six to eight weeks.

36:03He was just on it all the time. And I was like, all right, so what was he like? He was like, jacked and mean. And he lived like well into his like late 60s or 70s and fucking coal mining, right? And Broad said once, he was like, I think he just died because he was just like, God, fuck this. He doesn't wanna be alive anymore. The thing is, most of us do not have genetics like that. So it's really important to say, like if you know someone that's lived a long time in spite of everything, do you wanna take that chance on yourself? I wouldn't. Anything else to say about someone? Actually, that's a question.

36:40There is something else to say. If I want to take a non -body builder, but longevity approach for training for this, very rough, what do I need to do? Yes. Training two to four times per week for 30 to 45 minutes at a time, mostly compound movements, large muscle mass movements, underhand pull downs and pull ups, rows, close grip, bench presses, dips, overhead presses, squats, dead lifts, etc. stuff like that. Obviously vanity shit you can do, usually with relatively short rest breaks, for sets of 10 to 30 repetitions per set, alternating muscles that aren't involved in one movement with those that are involved in the other.

37:21So do some close grip benches, take a quick 10 second breather, do some underhand pull downs, quick 10 second breather, and back and forth and back and forth. That should constrain your workouts to a small amount of time. Interestingly enough, if you're working out exclusively to get more life at the end of your life. You're also consuming a lot of life, being in the gym around sweaty, nasty people. So you have to integrate that in. Yes. But there is a cost. The duration of you spending time in the gym lower, but also because of the short rest intervals and the higher repetitions, it allows you to have some of the benefits of cardiovascular exercise that are sort of enhancing to both quality of life and how long you live.

38:02And so that's probably be the best way to do it. It's very minimal effect on your schedule and it has probably as much as you'll ever need to extend your lifespan or make it higher quality. If you're training in the gym like two hours a day, six days a week and you're like, it's for longevity, like it's not, it's not bad for you necessarily, but it's overkill. You're over shooting. Yeah, definitely. Sleep. What about sleep? Sleep's a big deal. Sleep is the ultimate stress reducer in everyone's life. Like that's pretty much the one of the main purposes of sleep is to kind of reset the whole system.

38:39And sleep is a thing where again that 90, 1080, 20 rule comes in handy. If you're mostly sleeping enough to feel well rested, which means if you need like, fuck, an eutonic, I need eight cans of monster to keep me awake after 2pm, you're not getting enough sleep. sleep. But if a can or two of an atomic throughout the day is all you need to be your sharpest, then you're good to go and you're probably getting enough sleep seven to nine hours for most people is good of quality of sleep as you can manage. Keep the room dark, keep the room cool, few distractions, no blue light a few hours before that, all the general sleep recommendations that are really awesome.

39:20If you just check list that and you usually get really good sleep, a night or two every few weeks you stay up all night or you get, you know, really busy with work, you don't sleep for hours, no big deal. Generally, that's the recommendation. Chronic, low amounts of sleep in a way that has you feeling it is a big deal. Some people just don't need as much sleep as others. Jocco. Is that true? Supposedly. So the 430AM thing, which I'm reliably told by some of my friends that are fathers that they beat on an almost nightly basis. Yeah, you're never asleep. They've got dad shit to do, yeah, exactly.

39:58But yeah, I mean, there's that genetic mutation that I think the same likelihood of you having that that requires you to only sleep maybe four hours a night and feel okay is the same likelihood as you being hit by lightning twice. Paul, it's like super, super unlikely. Yeah. So a few, very, very, Anyway, Jocco is one of those people that I've heard. I think basically what most special forces select for are people that can deal with sleep depth very well. A very big deal because if you need lots of sleep consistently and you also degrade very heavily in your cognitive and physical function, you just won't make it through selection, even if you're a straight up killer.

40:40That's the kind of guy you want to be like an elite bodyguard for someone like the president who sleeps normal hours. You have a decent rotation for your bodyguarding shifts. You can be like a Delta Force level shooter. You're just like, look, if I don't get my sleep, I'm good to know when after a few days. Tim Kennedy told me this story. Maybe you asked him about it tomorrow if you're chatting to him. Asking him about the time he ran out of ammo and he'll know the story. And I think he said he was awake for the only time he slept was when he was concussed by an IED going off. in like 48, maybe more hours.

41:12He's asleep, awake for two full days, runs out of every different platform, every different magazine, every different piece of ammunition that he had. And he just realized that, okay, that's what the job demands of you. Ross Ejelé, who I think wanted an intro to you to have a chat at some point. I asked him, he's done all of these crazy swam, I did a triathlon holding a tree, a triathlon. He's the first person in history to ever swim around. Great Britain, he did six hours on, six hours off for basically seven months. He's just done the longest single distance river swim in history. It was 300 miles.

41:50Oh my god. 55 hours without touching land, without sleeping, without anything. 55 hours straight through. And I asked him what his superpower is, and it completely makes sense. All of those things together are him allowing to deal with sleep deprivation and to digest just food in very strange situations. Yeah. So people's digestion will shut down. Yeah, I'll try something. So he's able to have piping hot porridge to keep him warm when he was in the Yukon swimming in Canada, piping hot porridge like a internal hot water bottle heating him from the stomach out. But then get back to moving and being horizontal.

42:27If you feed me food, I need to be vertical for at least 45 minutes after it, just the way my digestive tract is put together. Sure. I don't like being horizontal. Sure. So what I'm saying is certain people deal with digestion, sleep, and very, very, very different ways. Yes. So for those people that don't need as much sleep, don't feel like you have to get it, but if you're genuinely not well rested, chronically, you're doing some reduction of lifespan and life quality 100%. What about regularity of sleep? I've heard that the regularity can impact longevity as much as the duration. Yeah. It's probably a little bit of an exaggeration, maybe not by much, especially in extreme cases, it can be pretty nasty.

43:08Shift work is firefight as nurses. Correct. Sleeping roughly with the day and night cycle and getting to bed and waking up at roughly the same time, on most days is probably a good idea. For some people that like that, Brian Johnson robotic lifestyle, every morning you wake up at the same time, every night you go to bed at the same time, dope. But for most people, they're gonna take a hit on social, quality of life factors. And yeah, if you stay up a night or two a week, a little later and wake up a little later, it's just not gonna be a big deal. But regularity is a really, really good thing.

43:46It's a thing that should be built into your life anyway. And violating every now and again is okay. Always being in the mix of God knows when I go to sleep and wake, probably not ideal for longevity.

44:25focus and helps with your digestion. Best of all, there is a 90 day money back guarantee. So you might not be sure. You might think that this is a big commitment, but no, it isn't because you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. And if you don't like it, just give your money back. Right now, AG1 is running a special black Friday offer for all of November. You get a year's free supply, the vitamin D3 K2, five free AG1 travel packs, plus free bonus gift. Just go to the link in the description below. I head to drinkag1 .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1 .com. slash. What a wisdom.

44:58Going back to the exercise portion, realize we touched on muscle mass like the bro side of exercising, but what about more general activity outside of that? Yes. Walking, stretching and cardio and all that stuff. So stretching no reliable mechanism by which it'll let you live longer. But generally, a moderate to high amount of physical activity has a good combination of promoting the longest lifespan and the longest health span. I think that's a computer, a T -A book title I just said by accident, that keeping them morbidly low, having the higher quality of life. So something like just for people's reference frame, six to 12 ,000 steps per day for most people is totally cool.

45:47But a better way to put that is probably if you're doing a lot fewer than five or six six thousand steps per day all the time, and you don't get a lot of physical activity otherwise. You could be living longer if you did more physical activity in most cases. Just to touch on that, I think I'm a good avatar for the Jim Bro who goes quite hard for an hour, and then is sedentary for a lot of the day. I'm doing some exercise. I'm doing probably a significant 95th percentile intense exercise, And also not moving quite so much. What would you say? I imagine a lot of the audience fits into this particular bracket.

46:26I think you're doing really well for yourself. If you wanted a small but meaningful enhancer to quality of life and longevity later down the road, you would break up your periods of physical and activity at least another one time in the day for a serious bout of some kind of aerobic output. Be it walking as easily as that. all the way up to pretty difficult to rub back activity. And so if you lift weights and you do all that and if you get, you know, roughly 10 ,000 ish steps a day, very roughly huge variation for individuals, you're pretty good to go, but there's probably almost certainly a morbidity reduction way of doing it.

47:05And probably in critical lifespan by a little bit, if you have several sessions a week, two to four sessions of 30 to 60 minutes of intense cardiovascular activity. And for most people, a really easy way to measure that is, can you have a conversation with someone while you exercise? I don't mean a few words here and there like, oh, I'm doing good. See tomorrow, like, not that. I'm talking about like consistent conversation like you and I are having now, you and I can have this conversation on a walk. No problem. If we're in really good shape, we could have it out of jog, but we're not pushing the pace with aerobic exercise if we can talk.

47:44So if you can't talk and you're huffing and puffing, doing that at least twice a week for 30 minutes on end and all the way up to four times a week for 60 minutes on end or any combination there in is probably that extra cherry on top for longevity and quality of life enhancements. So if you really want to live as long as possible, I would say some pretty intense regular aerobic activity is probably a good thing and unlikely to be a bad thing. Is that something that you're thinking about now that you're out of? I just want to be as big and lean as possible. World, are you, are you, are you, see your Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as, is that contributing in that sort of manner?

48:23My Brazilian Jiu Jitsu definitely counts as that. And I do be Jijay now roughly five times a week. And at least a few of those sessions have me huffing and puffing. So I'm probably taking good care of that. I am absolutely not the model for longevity and quality of life. I'm in a very perverse, very strange path, a very understood, very chosen path. I think you've at least partly ejected yourself out of that, or sort of gently come into land. Yeah, I suppose. I suppose a abuse level steroid. But yeah, it just makes me think again, I have this idea called the manual pose. Guys, at some point between 28 and 45 that have just wanted to get as jacked and lean as possible.

49:06Maybe they have, I haven't abused PEDs. Maybe they have, I haven't ever tried to do different training modalities. Realize that they become chronically aware of their own mortality. And they think, hey, I shouldn't be out of breath going up those stairs. Or whatever. I can't touch my toes. Or my shoulder hurts always. Yes. Just again, thinking about people pivoting out of that. And it seems to me that if cardio, which for some people is fun apparently, but for other people you need to game it, like you have, which is choke the guy, oh, my heart rate's high. I was trying to choke the guy, my heart rate got high.

49:40For me, pickleball is a good example. Chasing the ball around a thing. Very British. Very British way of engaging. That would be, yeah, I mean, that bulls are polo. But yeah, just trying to think about some of the easiest ways for the non cardio lovers to get themselves to that place. For sure, that's a great, great question, Chris, a great statement because we know from the exercise participation literature in the physical activity participation literature, I actually used to teach a class dedicated pretty much to this. That is encouraging social disapointing behavior. Right, okay. Health behavior is a trip.

50:19We know pretty well what to tell people to do, but then they're like, and you're like, okay, they won't do it. How do we get them to do it? A big part of that is a two factor thing. One is your physical activity should be pretty fun, and it should also hopefully be something that involves you with other people so that the community reinforcement part is in play and that you have the situation where if you just don't feel like it someday, your Airsoft team is still meeting up to shoot Airsoft pellets at each other. You better be there. And so you just end up falling in and if you fall out of activity, but nobody gives a shit because you're just on a treadmill at home and you have no friends and no one to talk to, you're maybe kind of done, but if people are like, dude, are you gonna make it to Jiu -Jitsu again?

51:05I heard you healed up. You're like, that, that, I do, I should go back. I'd love to do Jiu -Jitsu again. Okay, I'm going back. The fucking social pressure usefulness. That was the thing that I realized when I started doing CrossFit and any fighting, that you know, you're most training for most people, unless you have a really cool gym training buddy. Yeah, is you're steeping in your own neuroses as you stare in the mirror listening to metal or dark thoughts if it's you and or nothing. Yeah And I realized oh this is awesome. I'm like outsourcing all of my exercise motivation to this group of Sure people around me in lightens the burden of me having to do this thing that I kind of probably didn't want to do Yes, and I don't want people to misinterpret that as being like you got to bully your friends and exercise

52:00I don't want people to misconstrue this as us saying you need to bully your friends and to exercise. There's a latent assumed expectation that people have that you're going to come back to aerobics class, that you're going to come back to the pickleball situation, jujitsu, whatever whatever it is, and that internally to people, without anyone ever saying anything, you have this thought of like, well all the guys are at Jiu -Jitsu, I'm gonna go. Social pressure is a hell of a drug. It's a big deal. And also to the early point, it should be something that you ideally look forward to and that it's fun.

52:34You don't want physical activity, nutrition, everything, and longevity, pursuit to start feeling like medicine, to start feeling you just swallow the horse tablet and then you're good to go. People generally don't tend to stick to that sort of thing and the discomfort of it, the less enjoyment that you have, the less involved that you have already actually excess off another longevity variable we'll discuss later, which is like life involvement. So if you like what you're doing, you're doing it with friends and it's healthy for you, fuck man, you got a real good thing going. Yeah, I suppose there's a few times where a more nuclear option is required.

53:09If you have Ethan Sopli that you got to meet the other day and you have 530 pounds and you're going to get down to 250 or something. You got to do the thing. Yeah, you eat the horse tablet all day. But yeah, for most people, there are easier ways to kind of increase compliance. I love that. I didn't even know that exercise behavior. Was it health behavior? Health behavior. I didn't even know, but it makes complete sense. Yeah. What we spoke about last time on the last episode, which I really loved was my favorite of the ones that we've done so far about stress management recovery. what is the role of stress in all its forms on longevity, lifespan, mobility?

53:46Yeah. Stress has what has been described. I say pretty accurately is a hermetic response or association. Too little is not great. Too much definitely not great. So if you never have challenging times in your life. Times where the best of you is required. Times when you have to focus. Times in which you struggle both mentally and physically. You're unlikely to have as high of a quality of life and by a little bit as high of a duration of life as if you have times of life that require you to get tired and beat up and stressed and overwhelmed. However, because there's a lot of really cool shit that happens when your body's overwhelmed and a lot of the crap at secrets when it's overwhelmed are actually like molecules they're studying now that have like longevity and enhancing effects.

54:36However, if you're so stressed all the time or much of the time that you're like lips just above water kind of stressed, you know, like the gasping for air in a pool that's almost your height, then that is overwhelming your body systems and chronic high psychological stress will put you into the grave early almost every single time. There's another consideration here of how you perceive stress because you can look at some successful business people, athletes, whoever, whatever, around there in mothers, five children to raise. If it looks like they're in high stress and to the outside observer, but they're engaged in loving every minute of it.

55:23They don't really pay the cost longevity wise, and it's actually a bit of an enhanced, but if you, no matter your stress level, feel totally overwhelmed, and like when will this end type of situation, and you hate it, just get me out. You know, like, you see a celebrity getting asked for the 50th time, when you're new movie, are you excited about it? And they know these gossed over eyes. It's not just the hero in that time, this glass them over. that kind of constant overwhelm, that's not really great for longevity or quality of life. So what you want to do is sufficiently challenge yourself in life and also get the recovery.

55:59That balance is tough. I myself have had a real hard time striking that balance in my life. I blame my wife for this entirely. Because she's Asian. Oh yeah. Well, I'll get to that in a second. I'll get. So I blame her just for many things in my life. Most really. Even stuff that like happened to me when I was a child, she wasn't even around because why not at this point? But she is a person who is, her industriousness is like off the charts. And she needs to, in many cases, be doing something or else she goes insane. The problem is I'm also like that. So when we're together, we just work a lot.

56:39And we get guilt trips in our own heads about not working enough. And so we're really, really bad about taking time off and time to rest. Nowadays we're a little better at it because per the recovery podcast we did, it's a priority for us as professional work athletes, like athletes rest. The funny, let I can say this in a space where millions of people will see it. My wife sent me, so sorry, the joke is super old, our adopted son Jared Feather, IFBB pro. He is like on exactly that level of crystallized psychosis about work, but probably worse, which he considers a great honor. And it is, but also it comes with a trade off.

57:25He's a very amazing pro classic physique competitor. And you've seen Jared in real life, like you need to see Jared, you're like, why do we even train? There's people that this exists. I don't even belong to the gym. But see, bum, who's in the same division, but is one six Olympia's in Jared's place, like top five, type six and some shows, but has never cracked that I think he will in the future. But it was your podcast. You had sebum on that my wife sent me that clip just like yesterday and she was like, this is funny. And the clip was what does sebum do in the average day. And he was like, I wake up, I do some cardio, I go back to sleep after breakfast, I wake up, I chill, I eat again, I take some pre workout, I train, I come back, I eat, I might take another nap, I chill, do family stuff, eat, chill, do family stuff, eat, go to sleep.

58:14And it was like, if, if, if Crystal was like, LOL, and I was like, LOL, I sent it to Jerry because, and he responded with LOL, like, because we guilt trip Jared for wanting to be as good of a bodybuilder as he can be. But Jared does all our RP social media bullshit, all the help with like app stuff and software. In addition to that, has a full roster of coaching clients for whom he travels all the time across America and the world to help compete. And so like I recently he had to take a little time away from training to recover and he was like, I don't know what to do with myself. And I was like, what do you do for fun?

58:46He's like, uh, uh, uh, work typically or plan to work. I'm like, anything else. He's like, I've got nothing. And so it's like, Jared, if you don't pull back on all the work, how were you going to be stepping onto the Olympia stage? You don't have the recovery timeline in your plan to do so. And so for all of us folks that are super grind kind of thing. And none of us are like, man, grinds that mentality. We never say that because we're just like, isn't that just what everyone does? Isn't that normal? For those of us in that position, pulling back is a good idea. But if you're sitting on the couch, if you're bored, if you're on your fifth doobie, and it's kind of life for you all the time, you're never challenged, never stressed, you will live longer if you stress yourself, especially with things that you're passionate about, involved in and can progress at.

59:31That kind of stress in combination with an equal amount of rest in recovery is the Joua Divi as the French are inclined to say. I don't even know if that's a term. Middle of the bellcode stuff. Yes. Which is tough because so many of us that are prominent for whatever the fuck, New York case, massive success and intellect in my case, my curious head shape, we just kind of work a lot. And we're like, this is great. And here's the thing, if you love it and you're not overwhelmed all the time, It's pretty good. If you're composed to do it. If you're composed to do it and you feel both overwhelmed and the sneaking suspicion that you're a little bitch and you just need to go harder, you're not gonna live as long as other people.

1:00:09Dude, so funny. So I had a call this morning. I had my first full genomic test done. Whoa. Everything. I can show you at some point, unless you clone me. So you're out of a closet now. Yeah, exactly. It turns out it is genetic, who knew? that we went through and you talk about SNPs, different SNPs. We've got this SNP, we've got this SNP, et cetera, and this is correlated with dot, dot, dot. This allows you to methylate better, this allows you to do... Saturums of DNA, right? See 6, 7, 17, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then next to it, there's a percentage number, how rare it is. Oh, cool.

1:00:44And presumably this is across population data or whatever they've got to compare it to. They have a lot of data now. Dude, I was sat listening to my doctor go through this stuff this morning and it was, okay, so you've got two copies of this gene, six percent of the population. You've got two copies of this gene, four percent. You've got one copy of this gene, eighteenths, two copies of this, every single one of them. Dopamine, drive, rheumatoid thoughts, epinephrine, nor epinephrine, don't clear adrenaline well, like all of the things that will just make you very compulsive, very motivated, very industrious.

1:01:20And it's the first time that I've ever looked at the genetic side of behavioral genetics. So you think, my parents have these traits, we know the heritability is a thing, therefore you will have these traits too. But at no point did I ever actually think, okay, and what is the mechanism by which this has passed out? Well, it's the genes, it's the actual genes. And given the fact that we've now got genomics to the point where we can start to see a little bit of the code in the matrix, or Matrix in the code, we can actually look at it. So I was like reading the language of me, the building blocks.

1:01:54Crazy, right? That I was made, dude, it was so fucking interesting. I can't get that done, man. I can send you the link. It was like not that expensive. It happened in a week. You just swabbed the inside of your cheek from your home, send it off. And I was like, this is, but also the other thing that I realized, I was like, yep, see that, yep, see that. And what's really funny is where you go, you've got two copies of this. I'm like, yep, in Mom and Dad, They got one copy of this and you can determine which parent. Holy shit. Because you go, ah, yeah, that's, that's dad. That's not mom or whatever the other way.

1:02:23I was blown away. I can't stop thinking about it all day today. So, um, yes. Do you get to the genes that predict what you're going to be like when you're older? They'll be in there or at least they will have captured them. But you're reading that genome. You'll see some really crazy shit. Wow. Yeah. It was cool. Um, so stress. Don't have overwhelming periods. have overwelling periods, but make sure they're periods, not years at a time or decades at a time, or like always. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or as energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function.

1:02:58They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take that data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. Function track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels and your thyroid function plus nutrient deficiencies, they even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage 1, which is 5 times more data than you get from your annual physical. Best of all, Dr Andrew Cuban is the scientific advisor and Dr Mark Heiming is the chief medical officer, so you can trust that the data and insights you receive are scientifically sound and practical.

1:03:31Getting your blood work analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with function it is only $500. $300. Function has a 300 ,000 -person waitlist. Boo. But every Monday, they open up a few spots for modern wisdom listeners. Yay. Right now, you can get the exact same panels I get by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. You mentioned about engagement, some sort of passionate engagement thing. Yes. That thing you like to do. Yes. What's that? Let me say something super, super quick about the stress thing.

1:04:02You can have days and even weeks of extreme stress and it probably won't reduce your lifespan. As long as you can commentately afterwards, take days or even weeks of much lower stress until you feel like, yeah, I could do this. I'm ready to get back out of stress. Whereas like, you know, day three of a vacation after a really crazy period of work, you're not even relaxed yet. Something that folks might want to know is that seemingly, and this is just based on my inference. As you get older, the amount of time it takes you to unplug during a vacation, or as you say in the kingdom holiday, toss holidays like Christmas Thanksgiving, etc.

1:04:46It goes up. That amount tends to go up and takes a longer time to unplug. And so I remember I had met a gentleman, his very nice man who was a a doorman in New York. When I was on vacation with my parents, I was like my early 20s went to Dominican Republic and we were there for like 10 days, which we thought was a really long time. He was on vacation for three weeks and it all inclusive in the DR. And I was like, dude, are you serious? He's like, when you get older, as you get older, it takes you longer to unplug. He's like, so the first week, I'm unplugging. The second and third week, I'm relaxing.

1:05:21And I was like, that's weird. I need a one week warm -up to my holiday. Dude, seriously? Because like, it's just not true to say that you're relaxed immediately after any stressful activity. Like it takes some time, like imagine someone finishing a 15 -RM on the squat, and as soon as they rack it, you're like, all right, good to go. Let's get in the car and drive off. You're like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, hold on a second, my sweat hasn't even started coming out of me yet. Like, there's a process. And so if you're, as you're getting older, it's important to note that what used to be enough duration at a time of relaxation for you may not be, and that it's good to take a little bit more time to be a little bit extra -recovered.

1:05:59The best way to know if it's time to start grinding again, you start getting itchy for the shit again. Not compulsively, like, you want it again. You want some stress, you feel like a lazy asshole, and you're way beyond relaxed. If you haven't even gotten relaxed yet, you need more vacation. Well, this is why it's so important to work out whether you're a type A person with a type B problem, or a type B person with a type A problem. Sure. Right, again, the patient determines the dose of what is required. It's like, yeah, I've been thinking about this all the time, the just work harder, bro, advice thing.

1:06:32It's been in my head pretty much since our last podcast, white, nookling creativity and how you can't do that. The fact that you don't just get to switch on or switch off the industry -usness - Drive? Yeah, yeah, motivation. It's super interesting. I think it's a really important thing. Also, do you really want to look back and just see all you did was work like an absolute mother fuck at the whole time? It would be the honor of my life to die at my job. Yes. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Some people they look back, you're totally right, Alphacishis is the side. For me, it would be an honor to die at work and having been known as a very hard worker.

1:07:10But for most people, they're like, man, there's all this life to live. I remember I was in an English class at in college. Sorry, in uni. and there was like a short story we read about a guy who was like always super smart and got super straight A's and he like had an opportunity to go it was in the late 60s he had an opportunity to get on a bus and go to like Washington to see to protest something but he didn't because he had exams coming up and he gave like a speech to a college graduating class when he was like 60 or something super successful career and he was like oh you know Mike my wonder regret was it didn't get on that bus?

1:07:50And the only thing I thought at the time was like, yeah, but you got these millions from being a career man, didn't you, motherfucker? And you did that passing some exams, didn't you? So, but for whatever it is as far as how you want to live your life, which transitions into that max topic of enjoyment, make sure you're taking breaks. Don't be stingy with the breaks, but if it's all breaks all the time, put yourself through some difficult shit. It's gonna help you. Okay, passionate engagement. Passion engagement. I'm not an expert in this subfield of longevity by a long shot. So you can probably have someone on the podcast at some point, which I would consider fascinating.

1:08:25I would at least watch the episode. You get one view from me. Hey, I do run a robot farm in China that will give you a hundred million more views. You have to pay for that sort of thing. So at least we have this robust correlational data that shows that people who are passionately engaged in one or multiple sequential or overlapping lifetime pursuits seem to outlive most other people. We know it's correlated. I'm aware of no causative mechanism through which this occurs. It strains my brain to imagine one. And maybe the causation data is already around. I just not up to date on the stuff. So please ask chat GPT about this, ask chat GPT or a clawed or whoever about is there mechanistic presupposition or good evidence of how passionately engaging with anything in your life can increase your longevity and quality of life.

1:09:28That data may exist, but at the very least we know the correlations are pretty fucking airtight. And there's just so many people that have lived much longer than you would expect because they were passionately engaged and so many examples of people that were like, eh, and they don't live a long time. So at least as a check the box, just in case sort of thing. It's probably worthwhile to have in your mind if you want to live the longest, not to have this perspective. and this goes back a little bit to the stress discussion of like, I've I'm gonna make it really far. I got to chill all the time and never involve myself to passionately anything because passion gets the heart rate going and that's bad.

1:10:12On the other hand, you want to consider it as a balance, but also it's at least worth a shot to get into that passionately engaging with something. What do I mean by that? Let's say you are just huge on world of warcraft. Think about it day and night, you play it all the time, you have friends that play it, the game evolves all the time, even something like that is statistically, as a correlation, likely to keep you alive for longer than if you have nothing about your life that really gets you going in the morning. Nothing you're building. Another thing is creating something, a people who create inventors, statistically, outlive like almost everyone, it's really kind of strange.

1:10:54Composers outlive almost everyone, because they have a mission and it keeps them seemingly so engaged that it may have some benefits for longevity in some ways. Maybe. This is a maybe, but here's the thing. On the longevity side to maybe, on the quality of life side, it's 100 % certainty, which is why it also categorically belongs in this discussion. You see, even though the longevity stuff, the lifespan is correlated, maybe it's causative, the causation element of quality of life is 100 % a thing. Your quality of life is measuring in a bunch of different ways, but one of them is like, do you, are you really involved in what you're doing?

1:11:35Do you really like what you're doing? Like imagine you had to describe, you know, you meet someone on a plane sitting next to them and someone's like, what do you do? And you're like, oh, like I do podcasts and stuff. And they're like, do you love it? And you're like, ah, it's all right. It's a living. Like you were clearly being facetious because if I may guess, Chris, this is a deep involvement for you having conversations with mostly intelligent people occasionally sprinkling me in. This is a thing you do and a thing you really give a shit about. That is probably going to be good for your quality of life simply because it's even just a sub definition of the quality of your life.

1:12:11you're in 100 % on something for hours a day. It's a really huge benefit in the statistical literature that we see. And so at least worth a mention on two grounds of might positively enhance your lifespan, but almost certainly will make your quality of life much higher. Is this the effect where we see people who retire from their job at a particular age, and then this seems to be the sort of drop off towards death? People that retire early, people that retire late. Like, be part of that. The other part, as a big proponent of science, physically big, not smart, just big. I wanna say that there's almost certainly a big feature of that dynamic.

1:12:53It's a true dynamic is reverse causation or a causation of an underlying variable. If you just don't have it anymore at work cause you're fucking dying, you quit work, and then you die. Understood. But, but there may very well be this situation where even if you still got it, if you could work your life drains of meaning. And then, yeah, it might be. It's probably multifactorial as well, providing you with community, providing you with structure every single day, or maybe moving, maybe you're on your feet with some sort of job, you're getting a stepson, it's like it's, you know, all of these things.

1:13:30Work will set you free. I shouldn't say that to you. You know, I quoted my dad once on the internet who said work will set you free, and I had a friend reach out and be like, you do know that was like a sign above like Auschwitz or Birkenauer something. And I was like, it's still right though. And like, you know, my dad is as Ashkenazi as he gets. So tell him that shit. Hi, hi. Okay, other people, I've heard that all of the people, I just don't like them Chris. I'm sorry. They smell, they look at me funny. I think they look funny. What else is there to say? That's true. But apparently you need them to live longer.

1:14:03Yes, through vampiric consumption of their body fluids. Ideally you get them in infancy, but infants are so hard to find nowadays. Birthright decline will do that to you. That's right. That's the real tragedy of birthright decline. No more dream of chrome. Suck the spinal fluid out of. What is Hollywood even doing to stay young and healthy? A very, very similar statistical picture here as to the involvement stuff. Passion involvement with something you like is seen in this situation with community and social relations. Family, friends, community involvement are very tightly correlated with your longevity.

1:14:50and because most people like a certain amount of them, they are in that sub -definition of quality of life, so we could just say that was really great. It's a big deal, and in many cases, people will get all of the socialization they want and no more. Like, I'm an Austin right now doing a bunch of podcasts. If you text me to hang out, and I'm interested in hanging out, I'll be like, where when? If I'm not interested, I'll make up some bullshit excuse like, hey, I'm super busy catching up on something. Anyway, see ya. I'm good to manage my own shit. So that's totally cool. Most people are doing a fine job at that.

1:15:31However, there are many people that have two things going for them. One, is they're not extroverted in a way that outreaches to get other people to hang out with them? And two, they simply are not aware of at least the correlational relationship between that and quality of life and longevity. And so some people are totally fine being hermits, but some people are also totally fine being hermits, but when they actually engage in social interaction when it's foisted upon them, they have like a breath of fresh air go through them. And those people specifically need to be keen on making sure that they do at least the bare minimum to continue to involve themselves with other people.

1:16:12Now typically in many cases it's just not a problem. Middle school, too many fun in people. High school, same people. College, uni, a lot of people. You can be ostracized in those situations, you can be a loner, but a lot of times that's either by choice or by you just don't like those people. As you get older, many people report that their ability to form new friendships or sustain older ones, it falls off. And this is some kind of like doom and gloom scenario where like you know, everyone leaves you and dies That can happen But there are many many many ways in which you can get yourself involved.

1:16:46There are community centers There are various games and sports and involvements and everything at any age It's possible for you to reach out connect with people and regularly schedule a hangout Be it with family and friends be it with other people be it in a volunteering capacity You don't have to have like deep close ties even if you just interact with other humans, like at a soup kitchen for the love of God several times a week, that seems statistically better than just completely walling yourself off if you're a kind of person that's inclined for some sociality. So make the effort is what I'm saying.

1:17:17We'll get back to talking to Dr. Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about element. For the last three years, I have started my morning every single day with element. It is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. Each grab and ghost stick contains a science -backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no coloring, no junk, or any other BS. You might not be under -slapped, you might not need more caffeine, you might just be dehydrated, and proper hydration is not just about having sufficient fluids in your body, it's having enough electrolytes to allow your body to use that water.

1:17:49Best of all, they have a no -questions -ask -refund policy with an unlimited duration, so you can buy it, try it for as long as you want. If you don't like it for any reason, They'll give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you love it. Right now you can try it completely risk -free and get a free sample pack of all eight flavors by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. What you make of Dr. Robert Waldinger's stuff is the Harvard longitudinal life study that is he came on the show and he had found that the single biggest variable in how long people lived was the number of close connections that they have.

1:18:36I was more than smoking, it was more than going to the gym, it was the single biggest determinant. Why would you posit that that might be? I wonder if that factors out age. I haven't seen the actual data. If it doesn't factor out age, it's probably partially correct as causative mechanism, but probably only partially because when you're 88, most of your friends are dead and you outlived all of them. And the reason you die soon isn't because they died. It's partially that, but also because you're 88. Yeah, it's just clax -ticking. So, like I said, the correlational stuff is a big deal. There are other ways in which it might not be causation -driven if you are a crumoginy piece of shit And you're bad to yourself in your own head and you're bad to other people.

1:19:24You just won't have a lot of people around you. If you are very isolated, you're not economically very productive, you're not very involved in things. Most of those things give you more friends. Having more money, having more social connections, having hobbies and common with people, they all independently likely correlate or drive longevity because like when you have more money, you can just before better healthcare in many cases. and also if you have a lot of money, you'll probably high -and -trade conscientiousness, and so you probably care about your health and also eat well and exercise and all that shit.

1:19:57Those people just tend to have more social connections than otherwise, but there may very well be an independent, causative part of community. I'll say another thing. One of the hypotheses that I like, not saying it's true, I just, It feels like a nice thing that makes sense to me is that a certain given level of social interaction is something that the human individual organism has been primed to see as a base level. Because if you look at our ancestral history, like lone humans just die real soon. I'm a fucking lone wolf, bro. Alright, here's a spear. Oh, just kidding. You're the females of the tribe actually picked the plant that wraps the head of the spear.

1:20:47So you don't have a spear anymore. You have a fucking stick. And there's a buffalo. You're just one of you, and that thing weighs 1 ,600 pounds, and it's interested in getting upset at you if you try to kill it. You're not doing shit by yourself. In all of our ancestral history, the lonership is just like, I love that fucking lone samurai bullshit. Like vibes wise, it's awesome. I hate wooden psychotic leftists. You know, whenever does anything by themselves, like, shut up, you just want socialism. Get out of my face. But in the real world, you just draw on your own samurai sword by yourself. This is not how it works.

1:21:16And so humans are prebuilt, primed for living in groups. And you're just unlikely to, as a human, have an evolutionary history behind you, which makes the act of being alone for a long time beneficial. Mothally normal. like fuck beneficial totally, right? But it's just so abnormal that if you expose humans to one closet, no sound, no light, a little bit of food in water, just keep going in a hole in the floor to poop and pee, they're also gonna die real soon. Because people need all those variables just because they're normal. And so social interaction at a pretty high level is normal. Remember, all of us evolved in very communal circumstances where you walk outside of your hut, which might have your wife and your three children in it, but the rest of the village is always every night, every day together, everything's together.

1:22:08We're seeing increasingly more as societies get wealthier and older an atomization of individuals. Like the average Japanese 60 -year -old has nobody, but here's the thing, how the hell are they alive? They don't need to kill bison with spears anymore. They have supermarkets. They have food delivery. They have online work, so you can generate value at home, Consumediet home just never need to leave now watching television shows and listening to music almost certainly will increase your longevity and quality of life You just have no choice of anything else but being around real people I don't think we have to suspect it is some kind of magic fairy dust effect.

1:22:43We're like it's the socialization That's good for you. It's the fact that when you don't have lots of socialization It's such an unusual thing to your human systems your brain that you're like this low -key subconsciously something is off and then your ability to generate passion to have those about to say that is largely gone because you just weren't built for the shit. Yeah, passionate engagement will go up. Maybe you've got people around you. So if you get too fat, they're going to say, hey, Mike, you're getting a little bit fat. Totally. You're on waking up at the right time. So there's this sort of correction mechanism for a lot of other shit.

1:23:15Having grandchildren and children around for whom you maybe take care of, maybe you imbue them with wisdom, that's a lot of meaning and a lot of purpose. You're living for more than just yourself. To parents live longer, do you know? I have no idea. Almost certainly they do. But I wouldn't, I don't have the data in front of me to say that. Okay. That's the things that do impact longevity. What are the biggest myths in the world of longevity in your opinion? Again, as in all of our myths discussions, this has to be highly curtailed for the purposes of time. There are a few things that come to mind and maybe you can remind me of a few.

1:23:48One is that in 2024, Or October, am I allowed to say when this was filmed? Sure. Yeah. Fuck. We don't have any supplements that you can take that are like strong, main effect for enhancing longevity and have been approved or that main effect has been illustrated of wide variety of studies done by different laboratories around the world. And we have a deep understanding of a causal mechanism behind that. I take NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide. And I was, my clip appeared in some other longevity podcast where I went on a longevity rant and one of my other videos. And this longevity expert dude who seemed like sharp guy, and he was talking about, he kind of clowned me on the NMN thing.

1:24:35So I took another look through the literature and turns out actually there is some very decent data for NMN having some longevity effects and actual mechanistic effects as well. but the total number of studies on the breadth of populations it's been studying on, it's just not enough for me to go singing its praises all the fucking time, which is why I mentioned it now twice ever in public. Pulled up for it both times? Right, yes. And so it's just something I take as a hedging mechanism of like, maybe something. I just swallow it, but I swallow a lot of other things. Most, in any case, I won't get enough.

1:25:12So, shut up. Again, so if there were these pills I could take that reliably increased longevity, I would love that. I would love if there were supplements like that. There's Resvera Troll, there's a few other candidates, but none of them have that like, dude, is this really worth my money for sure? Like, if someone's eating only 80 grams of protein per day, and they're like, I can't eat anymore real food. Should I take supplements? You're like, yes, like, will it help with muscle mass? Yes. Like, how many studies? Hundreds on everyone. There's nothing like that for longevity supplements. So in 2024 if someone selling you longevity supplements They could be out of something and there could be some valuable stuff people have in their formulations It actually works, but nothing that we can be ultra -super sure about and really quick No small number of shady fucking supplement companies will tell you you got to take this It's gonna make you live longer and two every single one of them are If their claims are extreme, they're bullshitting you What about metformin?

1:26:14Metform is not a supplement, it's a drug you have to have a prescription for. However, metformin is a life extension drug. Here's the thing, it's a very small effect. The only way we really know metformin extends lifespan is because so many people take it for diabetic outcomes that from that mechanism alone we have just like ungodly numbers of the end size is huge. So with a huge sample size in a study, you can zone into real tiny effects and see them. So if you take Metformin versus not, you're going to probably live a little longer with Metformin than not. But if that's this thing that's going to take like five or 10 years and slap it onto your life, that's what I'm really excited about for the future of medicine.

1:26:52What I'm here to say is in mid to late 2024, it's just not here yet. And Metformin is not something you just go out and take. It should be a conversation with your health provider, not everyone reacts very well to Metformin. And again, the longevity benefits are quite small. There's other tons of side effects you can have with it. There's some really good main effects tons of people are on it for diabetic control But it's not some kind of anti -aging wonder drug. I will say There's literature coming up a little bit now that some of the mechanistic effects that you see with metformin are even higher with Smeglotide and a lot of the new anorectic drugs the fat loss drugs So when people say like well, I'm gonna take this drug But when I get off that want to regain the weight and like yeah Probably and they're like well, so I just got to be on it forever like uh -huh But isn't that bad for me?

1:27:35Like, no, it actually might be better for you to be on these drugs than not on these drugs in like seven out of ten days. Is that a direct mechanism from the semi -glutide or is it that it's stopping you from your weed addiction and your food addiction and your fucking pollin addiction? It blows at least one mechanism off hand. I can I talk about it lowers your blood sugar Your chronic area under the curve of blood sugar substantially and that itself has like five different ways in which it doesn't and toxifier organs over time. It was definitely a thing. So there are some things like informants and magnetized that are in the conversation for like, oh, me, they have little longevity boosting effects.

1:28:09But there's just, unfortunately, no drug or supplement currently yet made. That's like, this is the thing you need to take for longevity. And here's the thing, like, there are people that are, I say anti -capitalist, anti -fitness industry, anti -supplement industry that will say the same things as I'm saying, and it'll be true. I'm the opposite of all of those things. Insanely proven. Supplement optimists, supplement optimists, et cetera. I just happen to think like, first of all, I want a lot of people. I also don't sell supplements. I wouldn't make any money off that. Now, if I have to lot of people to make money, holy shit, welcome.

1:28:42But it's just one of those things that I really wish was true, but it's just not true yet yet. That doesn't mean we're not several years away from massive, massive changes and how drugs and other things can affect longevity. One of the other most common pathways, intimate and fasting. You spoke about calorie restriction earlier on. But intimate and fasting is a very specific type of that with what's that thing that it does? A tophergy. A tophergy. A tophergy. Auto -fagy. There's another way to say that that's slightly a slur or so out. Aha, ha, ha, ha, which we both are. Yes. I wake up in the morning and the switch has been flipped.

1:29:19Always, my switch broke off through violent homosexual intercourse.

1:29:28It was great time. Got a world record on grind. Yes, fasting. Fasting is awesome. For a bunch of different reasons, sometimes it fits people's lives better, sometimes it lets them control hunger better. If you get enough protein, it's probably not going to lead you to become emaciated or whatever. It's not the optimal way to get jacked, but it's not that far off. However, fasting had this thing a few years back where people are like, this is the thing for longevity. But it turned out that comparing models of fasting versus not fasting, if you keep the caloric restriction as the variable that's at play, there's no way to statistically differentiate fasting versus not fasting.

1:30:08thing. Manohenselman has some really good insight on this from a compilation of studies. And so it's not really the fasting that's probably keeping you alive longer. It's the fact that you're eating less food overall and the fact that you are now at a lower bodyweight lifetime overall. So is there no truth to autophagy? Autophagy happens all the time. Autophagy itself can occur in the presence of food or not the presence of food. And if your caloric Like input throughout the day is the same, the amount of recycling of your own nutrients that has to occur is also the same. So autophagy is a thing that you can see very big spikes of and very big declivenities of if you fast and then feed.

1:30:49But if you just eat regularly throughout the day, you get these little spikes in the area on the Earth. And so being like very, at least very similar. And so if you want to fast, if you suspect that your reading of the literature shows it actually has slight longevity benefits. I'm absolutely not gonna stop anyway. I think maybe that's the case. Just at a cold reading of the literature, I'm not inclined to believe the fasting has like. It is a holy grail. Yeah, right. Like, some people like they're on the longevity kick. They're like, so you're fast, right? And they're like, no, they're like, oh, so you're just a fucking idiot.

1:31:20Like, nah, that ain't it. What about blue zones?

1:31:27I don't like the color blue. I like red zones. You're wearing blue. I hate shirts awful GBRS terrible. Is this blue to you? I don't know what it is to me. Maybe I'm colorblind. Sort of blue, blue, green, teal. Teal, I love teal. I love teal, Bennett. Why are various of your staff members laughing at that? Regularly when we do these shoots, what it looks like to you, the untrained unwashed masses, is just that there's light coming up from places, right? There's light. but everybody doesn't know. So the fake sun outside, there's fake light underneath all of this. It's not even actual photons. So you can make these tubes any color that you want.

1:32:12I like them to be teal. He said that we're not allowed them. So I'm being abused. People who know about video things say teal socks. Yeah, they do. But you're here in your shirt. Yes, sorry. Blue zones, blue zones. Also the fans are kind of blueish. There. All of these Japanese people keep on living forever. Yeah. Why? Yeah. So people in the blue zones do a lot of things right. They tend to not overeat to the extent of being grotesquely over fat. They tend to have a high degree of community involvement and personal involvement. But um, and that stuff we can take away from them. What we categorically cannot take away from them is the ultra -specific of their diets, because here's how it works in fantasy internet land.

1:33:00You pick a blue zone culture whose diet you seem to like, and you go, it's the olive oil with the Italians, or it's the fish and rice with the Japanese or whatever the hell. That's probably not it, so the big myth here with blue zones is there ultra -specific foods and diets that you eat. they're gonna just really radically enhance your longevity and ultra -specific other foods and diet types that you eat they're just gonna croak you out real fast. That's just not it. The other thing about blue zones is tons of the blue zone effect is just straight up genetic in nature. So people that live long, live in areas where that children live long.

1:33:37Strange. And they're genetically related to those said children. Also strange and geographically in proximity.

1:33:46I gotta be careful, I say this. Within any two compared species, there are hundreds of species, and oftentimes even within a given species that has subspecies, you can categorize most animals on a spectrum of what's called a life history analysis. It's on the one hand called an R -selected group. R -selected animals don't have long life spans relatively and they produce the very fecon, so they produce a lot of offspring per individual. The offspring typically don't mostly survive, a few of them will, not very long lives, not very fun lives in many cases, and like spiders. Spider -mommy has, you know, So it seems to be that that gigantic spider just offset isn't roughly the same space it was when we first looked at it an hour ago.

1:34:39It's not a prop. I promise it's not a prop. Here's my problem. On the one hand, if it had moved, the supposition that can move infects my brain with the idea that it's going to move out my leg here in a bit, and you're going to hear me scream and break the table and jump out of the barn. But also, here's the supposition that it hasn't moved at all is equally disturbing because then it's plotting. It's waiting. It's Chris. It's waiting for me. They say that insects don't have the neural network size and depth to experience Emotions like we do, but I can tell you that spider sure looks like it's experiencing.

1:35:10Males hate. Males. Yes, Michael. Males. Michael Males Blue zones on So are selected. Yep. Very many offspring not long lifespans few offspring survive spiders on the other end you have whales, very case selected, which means that they have very long life spans. Individually, each whale has one hell of a survival machine. It tends not to die super often. They don't have a ton of offspring. So that's just how they live their lives. You can categorize all human subpopulations, which we used to call races, but that was racist or something. On average, into more trending towards our selected or more trending towards case selected.

1:35:52No way. That is the last thing I'll say in depth about this specific topic, because anything I say further will get me banned. And with all the best intentions, I love every human race for all of its various different qualities. But there is a lot of politically incorrect shit that is both true and really kind of in some sense, like damn, that's fucked up kind of shit, that you can take away from this. There are books you can read. But another thing, there's tons of really great shit you can take away from it. tons of explanatory power. One of the things is almost every single, every single blue zone group as far as I know is just coming from a known K -selected population.

1:36:34This is a live -along time. You throw Japanese people anywhere. They live a long time. This is what they do. And so we have to be careful not to conflate genetics. Let me bring up a different example. This is a gentleman, I forgot what's guy's name was a while back. He was like recommending really ancestral diets and kind of a lot of raw foods. And he was saying they have an effect on your dentition and like how your teeth are teeth health, jaw shape. And he was citing a lot of like African subpopulations that they have such healthy teeth and it's because of what they eat. And I'm like, my fucker, black people just have better teeth than everyone.

1:37:10Like he just went to Nigerians or whoever have perfect teeth to begin with and he was like see, it's their diet. Like no, it's because they're Nigerian. Now, their diet could play a role, but I was just like, the total absence of a discussion of genetic variation in this was just like, disheartening to say the least. And so when we talk about blue zones, et cetera, if we forget the fact that like, the other Japanese people, et cetera, just outlive everyone, where if you factor out the genetics, the blue zone shit starts to shrink down to like, okay, it's mostly just community involvement, generally healthy eating, et cetera, et cetera, socialization, when you factor those things out, the blue zones, if you're looking at like, oh, kale, we have to eat kale, or seaweed, that's the thing.

1:37:45you're doing the shit all wrong. You mentioned it earlier on, what you're looking forward to from a future of longevity standpoint. I imagine some of it's probably got to do with AI. Some of it's probably got to do with computers and uploading and all the rest of it. Human brain interface thing. Yes. And I imagine that some of it may be able to do with actually reversing aging as well. Drugs. I imagine AI also makes the drugs that are going to reverse the aging. Yes. Yes. What are the most promising areas when it comes to the future of aging research? Yeah, etc. Yeah. I'll try to do this in order of how it's likely to appear in the future.

1:38:25I'll probably get all this wrong so you can just take it for what it is. AI power drug discovery began in earnest. Full bore. Earlier this year. The ability of AI to discover new effective drugs to address various disease conditions is for most people who have thought about it a little bit as yet unfathomable. It's a quality leap. It's nonsense. If you went back to 1985 in a time machine, forget that the time machine is also impressive of in this case, and you gave someone an iPhone fully charged and somehow the iPhone worked through the time machine to access the modern internet. It would be to the very best engineers, fucking baffling damn near magic.

1:39:15But now we take it totally for granted to kids that jump in the pool with the iPhone and they're like, ah crap, it fried out. I'll just get another one who cares. So what I'm about to say, all these crazy things, remember that most humans do linear extrapolation, but the arc of all of history, all of history, including prehistory and biology and physics and chemistry, chemistry then physics, is exponential in nature. This is not up for debate. It just is. Every single human or not human biological or geological event that you plot on a chart, you need to plot on a log chart so it gets rid of the exponent, and that's still an exponent.

1:39:53So this is a real thing. And so when people are like, what is 2035 gonna be like? They mostly do a linear approximation, extrapolation, but it's also a linear extrapolation to the very low slope because most people have an inborn pessimistic bias, which makes sense in the paleolithic era in which we evolved because shit sucked, you expect it shit to suck, yeah, your uncle probably got gourd by a bison every other day, shit was off. So things are gonna get much better very quickly and then even faster. Short of machines killing all of us, or World War Three, crazy shit's gonna happen. Here's roughly how I see the most likely timeline.

1:40:29Again, you just eat the whole salt shaker for this shit. Buck a grain of salt, all the salt. That's not good for longevity, so don't do it. As long as your blood pressure is fine, you're good to go. Okay, so probably one of the first things we're gonna see is caboshing entire categories of disease with insanely powerful drugs. We're gonna see in the late 2020s, early 2030s. Like heart disease gone cancer gone Alzheimer's gone just gone Like don't take my word for it We already have a category of viral and bacterial diseases that we've kabocht who the fuck has you know anyone polio Like a human Just people just don't get polio anymore who dies of like Rickets and shit like that like it's just we laugh at it now But it used to just kill everyone can you imagine the 1600s?

1:41:11You're like dude scurvy not a thing in the future They're like you're kidding like no like this guy's drinking the Kool -Aid. There's no way like also Kool -Aids in the future like what's Kool -Aid like it's great. It's okay. It's red and it's sweet. And it's based on some berry, I'm not sure. So when you cobbosh entire categories of disease like that, you just take morbidity down like crazy because living with like chronic cancer, some shit or chronic heart disease condition, it's a different kind of living than living truly health. And in addition to that, it's going to bump up longevity a ton and like nowadays the average person lives into their late 70s.

1:41:47That might still be true in about eight years or so, but the distribution is going to close substantially. And so the average person might live into their mid 80s, not a ton higher, but like, way fewer people are dying. 50 % of the bottom tail just goes right up. Yep. So that's probably going to be a big thing. Probably a little bit later, maybe sooner, who knows, we're going to get some traction on reverse aging. Davidson Claire has spoken about this at length. He was real early. to the reverse aging thing and the way it works in social media and news media is when you have one rat study that does cool shit people like this is it when's it coming and it's like we need some more time to get this going.

1:42:27But there's nothing about aging really that precludes re altering the expression of your own DNA to just do better clean up and reverse your age as you percent biologically chronologically no time machine yet. But, I logically, it's a tractable problem. There's nothing theoretically about it that's just impossible. Again, it seems like the genie from Aladdin wouldn't even do. Like, how do you reverse aging? It turns out that your body mostly ages because the ancestral evolutionary pressures to stay alive and healthy and well for a long time, we were just too are selected for. You're probably going to die by the time you're 27.

1:43:09So if we put one half of your metabolic pathways into doing constant DNA clean up, you just suck at everything else and then you die when you're 18. The world is not sufficiently stable for you and there's not enough providence in the world to keep you upright so that you can fuel your body for shit like that. However, if we get age reversal right both through therapeutics and genetic engineering, we can have a situation where your body's actually like, oh, I'm just never going to get lazy about these anti -aging effects and you essentially just continue to live in a roughly 22 -year -old's body.

1:43:43They've already done this in cell cultures. They've already done it in a few small animal models. It is not a huge leap to do it in grand scale in humans at large. With AI power, type of shit, that 10 years from now might be a legit thing. I've done a whole on my other philosophy channel. I've done a whole thing about the implications philosophically, conceptually. socially, socially of what reverse aging is going to be like, but Chris, can you imagine taking 100 million elderly Americans and 2037 and three months later, they all present as age 22, physically 22 years old, cognitively sharp like 22 energy, like 22, tadees up like 22.

1:44:25What happens to your dick and balls? Something like 22. Bro, nightclub scene, you got to go back to your old job. Like holy shit. Gold rush. So all this other stuff could very well be on the horizon. As a chance, it just never works out. I would assign that as a low probability that. So aging reversal is a big deal. They talk about this thing you brought up earlier, I think, off camera, longevity -escape velocity. When true robust aging reversal comes in, that's the spaceship leaving the fucking atmosphere because, short of getting hit by a bus or getting eaten by a crocodile, you might just never die because you're biologically just always 22.

1:44:59So the most important thing for everybody now to live longer is to live longer. Okay, so that's a huge statement. It sounds like a Tatology, but it really is a thing. If you can just make it to the mid -2030s There is a high probability that the great gentle powerful arms of biotech are gonna lift you the rest of the way Just just go this 2035. That's where you need to reach you, right? You know when the hero grabs the hero's hand and lifts him the helicopter that type of shit So, as people are often like, okay, I can have a lot of fun smoking cigarettes, eating hamburgers, smoking hamburger flavored cigarettes, a cigarette shaped like a hamburger, every permutation thereof, but like, I don't want to be 88 in an nursing home who gives a shit.

1:45:44Up until quite recently, that was like a valid tradeoff you could make. Like, I'm not gonna live forever, I'm gonna fucking rock out, dope, and for spirit energy wise, anything that's great. However, it's getting to be pretty clear that into the mid and late 2030s, the power of biotech is going to be so fucking absurd, you probably want to make it to see that because you might just be getting a whole different level of ability to live longer at a healthy presentation. So we got that. The next thing after that, somewhere in the mix, is genetic engineering. There are genes in your body that make proteins that make you age slower or faster.

1:46:25We can just select for the genes that make you age slower, or reverse aging, or whatever else you want, or make you just not susceptible to entire categories of disease. Like we already know the genetic variants that basically like, you'll just never get all timers. And we know genetic variants that you're probably going to get all timers, probably really soon. If we just rewire your DNA as an adult human, you take some pills, you take a shot, and over the next several weeks feel kind of look a little different, we can do that. The big problem with that is one is a vector problem. How do you introduce the thing that, but CRISPR makes these enormous leaps that you almost never hear about in the news whose bullshit nerd talk, but now they have a pretty good control of the bacterial genome where they can trade in a lot of...

1:47:08It's switched it on, it's switched it off. Yeah, and it's just a few orders of magnitude more complex, but the way AI and biotech go is they just leap orders of magnitude every two years or so. And so we might have in the 2030s, some I should have a book called in the 2030s and it's just blank. It's like, whatever the fuck you want, magical bullshit's coming into the picture of my ugly face. But there's a situation where so there's one is a vector problem, probably not a big problem because it turns out we can vector almost anything into yourselves at this point and we're going to get better at that.

1:47:36The other problem is a combinatorial problem. I tweak this gene, I tweak that gene. This one makes you live longer. This one makes you live extra long. but their proteins interact in high concentrations to poison you and you die at age two. Fuck, how do we even predict that? Well, AI can start to predict a lot of stuff and will eventually be able to predict more or less all of the major functions and the metabolism of the human body. And because if you simulate like the layer of phospholipids around your cells with a simulation that takes in most of the variants of how they are, you don't actually need to simulate every single quantum interaction to get a 9 .99 % functional simulation.

1:48:16So AI, this is absolutely intractable for any human brain to do or any number of group of scientists on Earth working together. But for AI, 2030's AI, there's a way if you just run the numbers, which Ray Kurzweil has done, for example, to many others, it's just like easily tractable. It's like, if you ask a human nervous system at age one, can you kick a soccer ball into a goal? You're like, no, fuck no, it's not advanced doing that. What about a 15 -year -old? You're like, something's wrong with you. If you can't do that, Like really, do you know how complex the biomechanics of kicking soccer ball really are like fucking really complex?

1:48:47But for a 15 year old adult nervous system, it's an easy task. Same for AI, taking the human body and being able to essentially unfold all the DNA, figure out what everything does, figure out the interactive effects, and then fold it back up and go, here's what you need to change to get this effect. Once we get that, I'm a completely different era of humanity. You want to be blue, sweet, you're blue. You want elfirs, you got elfirs, no problem, another fucking one. Of all of the variation that humans can have genetically, all of humans ever alive occupy a fucking drop in an ocean the size of the volume of the earth.

1:49:20So it's not like everything in there kills you, and humans are the only things that are alive. It's that mostly most of human genetic variation is completely unexplored. And if you just manually through biotech engineer that you get to a point where people don't age and they don't die of disease and they just kind of fucking dope and They even could be really hardy. Like for example, they could take a genetic variant and change the structure of your bones and double layer your skull. So you get hit by a bus you die, now you get hit by a bus and you're like, oh, you just walk off. It's totally possible to do all that stuff.

1:49:51But here's the real cool stuff happens. At some point, and Jared Feather and I have a little running kind of inside better as to what happens first, we don't know. At some point, cybernetics is gonna come in with a fucking cybernetics. You get your arm cut off today. They can give you a replacement arm, but it kind of sucks compared to a real arm. However, in 2024, the arm they can install already can emulate, it can grab some objects, you have a little bit of feeling in there, interacts with your nerves, that ship in a 1990 was like straight up science fiction, like total insanity. In the 2030s, maybe 2040s, but maybe earlier, you'll be able to when things fall off or don't function anymore, replace them with robot parts now.

1:50:30I want to be on record saying this. I'm getting the whole fucking thing done. I'm gonna be a robot. If I get like my leg hurt and they're like, well, we can also replace it all. They're like, well, we can't replace your heart yet. I'm like, okay, fine, but everything else. So the ability to cybernatically replace things and enhance things means that you're in the situation where let's say you can no longer ambulate because your quality of life just totally sucks. You can't walk because your knees are too fucked up or something. If you get bionic knees and bionic lower limbs entirely, all of a sudden social interaction, community, all that stuff.

1:51:00You have access to it. So that's going to be a big deal. It's going to happen. I can tell you specifically at the point where you're going to see a revolution where most humans, not all, choose enhancement over just staying biological. I'll tell you when this happens. Look at the trajectory of how much cell phones have gotten better or TVs have gotten better over time. It's the improvement trajectory of technology versus biology radically fast measured in decades prior. Now it's measured in like every year your current iPhone sucks and the new ones way better. That is going to be the paradigm it already is to artificial limbs for example.

1:51:35So whatever the best. You're going to merge technological progress speeds with biological progress or at least technological progress speeds are going to drag you along for the rest. Yes. And here's the thing. If a bionic arm is roughly the same ability set as your natural arm, very few psychotic weirdos like me are going to go get their natural arm cut off and and put a fucking bionic on just for vibes. But if a bionic arm, three years later, is 10 times better at everything that your arm used to do, than your real arm, a few of your friends got it. You're like, dude, you're nuts, bro, you cut off your arm, like, yeah, I'm like, you get tired at work?

1:52:13Nope, it never gets tired. Like, dude, I saw you hiking. Aren't there a lot of lions and shit around? You're like, my arm is like a punch one lion and it just dies. It's like I have lathe shoots, lasers, whatever. The laser thing is a joke. But at some point when technology gets so much faster than biology and the arm is a hundred or a thousand times in every possible He better people will choose to excise their limbs and various other body parts eyes Think about this have you ever seen the movie? Ghost in the shell the no cinematic rendition it's a Scrawled your hands and send it so it's nice even if you put it on mute But this one dude gets his eyes fucked up through an explosion.

1:52:47He's like a special forces dude And he gets a bionic eyes implanted and And one of the features he talks about, he's like, yeah, they got this, they got that, they got myel zoom. I had to like, rewind and go back myel zoom. Like, you can see one mile ahead. If those eyes are real and they look like human eyes or even like a little bit cyberpunk, but not exactly human, dude, I'm getting that shit. I'm gonna fucking see a mile. I want to see in the dark. And if you're 22 or if you're 35 or 45, you're not taking your real eyes out for shit. There's a point zero zero, 1 % that surgery goes wrong and you die, you never can see again.

1:53:18Fuck that. But if you're 87 and you need to fucking the inner you can't even see anymore, I'm getting the fucking cybernetic guys So the cybernetic stuff is gonna start this process which has a distinct end and that process is replacing human parts with machine parts until we can scan your brain No exactly every detail of your brain that we need to simulate your entire you because everything about you that's you is Entirely enclosed in this period Once we have the scanning technology and the AI tech to do that, you can take your brain and download it into a robot body and have a separate copy of your brain doing one of two things.

1:53:57One is sitting dormantly in the cloud so that when your robot body gets crushed by a boulder because you decide a cloud mon Everest, you wake up in a bed and you're like, what the fuck? Where was I? They're like, you don't wake up in the bed. Yes, you do. This is not a philosophical debate at all. This is a giant red herring. I'll take this one on the chin. and now I'm getting really pumped. Fuckin' tell, this is the most animated you've been. What happens if you have a biological you and someone scans your brain and puts that brain and roll about body and transit off? Which one's the real you?

1:54:26There's a categorically correct answer to this question. Both. There's two of you now. They're both you. They're both going to feel exactly like you did just before they copied the brain. So if the real you dies fucking on Mount Everest and then you get uploaded to Neuro -O -Bot and you wake up in a hospital bed and they're like, hey, you died on my Everest, congratulations. Here are pictures of you dying. You're like, oh, that's dope. You won't remember that unless you were uploading to the Tesla Cloud and then you will. You will be the real you in every sense of the word that feels like the real you.

1:54:58You're absolutely the real you. Because you're not even the real you used to be all of the molecules of your brain got replaced. The cells replace every few days. If you think you'd have psychological continuity from that, obviously not from the dying thing, you're not gonna transport your sense of self from the guy under the boulder to the person in the bed. What do you think here? We're getting into philosophy. Yeah, I've hypothesized a thought experiment in which you will have continuity. So what we do is put you in a kind of giant MRI scanner, live sort of situation, and it starts scanning your brain and it already simulated your entire brain and your current thoughts.

1:55:31And then it clones the thoughts. And now there is a you that lives in the cloud that's looking over your head with the camera systems installed. I'm going holy shit. I can see into my own And fucking that's me right there. But the you and here, you're just looking up and you're like, okay, is there me? Did the copying work? And remember, scanning everything live. And so what they do, this is very morbid, they probably do it in a better way. But they go, okay, you're ready to, for full transfer and you go, uh -huh, and they go, they just cut your head right off. So you, you, you biological, you dies.

1:56:00But every part of the brain activity, including your experience of your own death, is modeled and experienced live by CyberU. So go, my God, I'm dying. Holy shit, but then I'm still here in the cloud. So once we can do that, and again, it's tractable for AI to do this. This is no mystical stuff involved. Then when you can live in a robot body or live in the cloud, there's going to be a couple of different ways people will go with that. Some people will just never do it. God bless the fuck it. It's weird. I believe in the soul. Fuck that. The other thing is some people might embody themselves in robot bodies do things in the physical world, and then maybe like spend some other time in the digital world entirely in simulation.

1:56:39There are many, many people I'm convinced that will just be like, I don't need a robot body, I just want to live in the fucking cloud. Because in the cloud, for a nominally easy small amount of compute, you could just live as the hero in a permanent Lord of the Rings fantasy that never ends. You could speed up your brain to go a thousand x, you can live as a pirate, you can live as a clown, you can live as a whatever, infinite lifetimes of modeling. That is super futuristic post singularity type of shit, but that's where that's all headed. So, TLDR for this insane rant, for me, the thing that keeps me at least to my extent of trade -offs interested in promoting my longevity and quality of life, specifically the longevity part, is I want to make it to that dope AI medicine part.

1:57:21And once you make it to that, your probability of death shifts down considerably. You make it to genetic engineering, it shifts again. You make it to Asia -versal, it shifts again. you make it to cybernetic, it shifts again. If whoever makes it to when we're regularly uploading people into the cloud, a short of the Earth getting hit by a comet and all the computer systems going, you're never going to die. Never. You know, at some point the protons decay whenever one times 10 to the 126 million years in the future. So for the first time, it's realistic, optimistic, but realistic to say, if you're ever interested in longevity and quality of life improvement, 2024, it's a fucking big deal now.

1:58:04Now's the time to gather shit, especially if you're older. Look, if you're 22, you want to smoke a shit with a cigarette? Fine, you'll probably still make it. Who gives a shit? You're like, hey, you're in the smiley smoking cigarette. I never quit. I never quit. I'll text that one out. Oh, yeah. Jesus. You're like, so, but if you're in your 40s, especially if in your 50s and 60s and 70s, now's the time to do all the right shit we've been talking about because the payoff might not just be you live 10 years longer and it probably will be. It might be that weird as it seems to say, you might just not die at a human time scale whatsoever.

1:58:39And then you're, you know, you're into some cool shit. Dude, what a hopeful way to finish a conversation about longevity and dying. Yeah. Mike is your tell. Ladies and gentlemen, dude. Thank you so much. You already know that I love all of the stuff that you're doing. It's been the best period to watch you guys crush. RP Strength, I've been using my training at the moment. The last nine, ten months or so, I told you when we trained together, it's been the best gains I've made in probably a decade using the app. So I highly recommend people go and check it out at the website, which is It's like a fine O don't say that you say that what rpstrength .com.

1:59:16Yes, that's it But also go on our YouTube and follow all the links and we'll kick you to the site sooner or later Hell yeah, Mike I appreciate you Chris. Thank you so much, man