TECH007: Longevity Roadmap w/ Seb Bunney (Tech Podcast)

26:57They ended up using CRISPR. And I'm going to butcher if I try and explain CRISPR, but basically for anyone who can explain it better, We would love that. Go ahead and explain it on Twitter. CRISPR, from my understanding, they would go into the DNA and they would make precise edits and they would create these breaks in the DNA of these young mice, mimicking decades of accumulated DNA damage, but without actually introducing any mutations. And the result is that the mice ended up aging rapidly and they showed gray hair, fragility, organ decline, even though their DNA sequence, the hardware was kind of unchanged.

27:35They just added in all this noise. And then - I would just, I would say, yeah, basically my take, and I might be wrong too, Seth, but they use CRISPR to go there and open up additional pages in the cell, in the DNA book, right? To have more noise factors, just like what the theory suggests should make the species look old. And when they did this with a rat, it started getting gray hairs and it was decrepit and And basically, it was just acting like a rat that was on its deathbed by going in and performing this epigenetic methylation of the DNA. We're going to take a little bit of a tangent and come back to the mouse here for a second.

28:12But what is fascinating is the book starts going into these things called Yamanaka genes. And this doctor, Shinya Yamanaka, in 2006, he basically discovered these four genes. And these four genes were kind of the OCT4 gene, the SOX2 gene, the KLF4 gene, and the CMYC gene. And this is where it just kind of blew my mind because I always believed once a stem cell had grown into some form of specialized cell, a liver cell, a brain cell, there's no way to reverse that aging back into a stem cell, an unspecialized cell. And this doctor basically found out, well, actually through these genes, tinkering with these genes, you can reset them back to their embryonic state, their unspecialized state.

28:53And it actually ended up winning the Nobel Prize in 2012. But what is fascinating is that Sinclair had kind of dug into these Yamanaka genes and wanted to test this on these mice. And so this mouse that they had aged rapidly, well, they went back and rebooted the epigenetic software using these Yamanaka genes, and they were able to reverse the signs of aging. And so you're just like, that is, to me, that was mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. People hear stem cells all the time, And I would imagine most listeners kind of know what that is. But if not, I'm just going to quickly explain it. Think of a stem cell as the DNA sequence, and it's open to become any type of specialized cell.

29:34So it could become a liver cell. It could become a neuron. It could become whatever. And so because it doesn't have any epigenetics set, it's not saying read page 50, read page 1000. It's saying you can read any page and become any type of cell you want. That's what a stem cell is. And so this is called differentiation of a cell. Once it starts to differentiate itself as a skin cell or you name it inside the body, that's when the pages, the book is wide open as a stem cell, but as it starts to differentiate, all those pages start to get closed and only a select number of pages are open to be read and transcribed.

30:13So to Seb's point here about the Yamanaka factors, these three genes inside the sequence are almost like a reset button to push the book so that it's wide open to become anything again and become a stem cell again. And the analogy I think David Sinclair gives is like, imagine a marble sitting in a mountain range. Like all marbles start out at the top of the mountain range, unspecialized. But as they kind of like roll down the mountain down into a valley, they become specialized. And the problem is, up until this point of these Yamanaka genes being discovered, we just assumed that it was kind of a one-way trajectory.

30:51Once the marbles are down in the valley, how are you getting them back up the hill and then crossing over into another valley? We thought that was impossible. And so this, to me, I had no idea this was possible. And it really opened my eyes. And it shows a whole bunch throughout the book. It kind of gives a whole bunch of studies in which they've done. Most of them are mice, but some of them they've mentioned even with some humans. but most of them have been on mice. They did an eye regeneration study. They even had ones where they had old female mice that were infertile, and they were able to restore eggs after chemotherapy and everything through a similar approach.

31:26So to me, I'm just like, I had no idea this was possible. Not only are the Almanaka factors really important in the grand scheme of things, as far as being able to reset the cell back to this stem cell state, which would enable it to differentiate in any way that it wants. There's also a thing called sirtuin proteins or enzymes. And what the sirtuin proteins and enzymes do is they're able to go in and update or fix the existing settings. So if there was damage to the DNA, if there was damage to, it can go in and unmethylate certain histone tails so that the epigenetics reset in the right way. But these sirtuin, I put it into two different camps here.

32:09You got the sirtuin proteins, which are going and kind of fixing what's already there. And then you have the Yamanaka factors. And these are four specific genes that enable the DNA to go reset completely back to the stem cell. So he talks about a lot of these, and he talks about a lot of the research that's happening because the sirtuin proteins, there's seven different types and goes on and on. It gets very technical. But I would just put those two camps or those two factors as where a lot of his research, or at least the research that he talks about in the book, comes from. And yeah, I think you made a really good point.

32:44And that is being able to break those two things into two different areas. And I think that you've got, obviously, these Yamanaka factors are four genes. And then you've got these pathways. And I would even add two more to that because he talks about the sirtuins. And the sirtuins are named after, as I mentioned, when it came to yeast, There were these SIR, silent information regulator, these enzymes which sit on the DNA and preventing it from expressing or it goes and repairs DNA. And so you've got sirtuins, which are basically these enzymes, and it's the body's longevity managers or maintenance crew.

33:18So basically, there's these seven various enzymes which have been found in humans, and their job is essentially just to stabilize the DNA, repair the DNA, and then make sure it's certain genes are properly switched on and off and how they work and this is where again it just opened my mind they rely on a molecule called nad nicotinamide adenine and i'm not even going to pro dinucleotide i cannot pronounce any of these these chemistry useless at it this episode is part comedy too we're just trying to make sure y 'all are entertained go ahead sam and so you've basically they rely on NAD. NAD is what fuels these sirtuins.

34:00And when levels of NAD in the body are high, as they are in youth, or during like fasting and exercise, sirtuins basically become active, and they repair damaged DNA, and they silence genes. But when they falter, as we age, and as we age, we also see our NAD levels decline sharply by about like half by midlife, these sirtuins just can't keep up. And without this NAD, genes start to lose coordination, DNA repair slows, and cells begin to basically just forget their identity. And so you've basically got these sirtuins, and then you've got two more which he talks about. One of them is called mTOR, M-T-O-R, which is basically the mechanistic target of rapamycin.

34:40Side tangent, I've found that the hardest part about reading these books is once you actually understand how they work, it's not actually that complex. But the words themselves become just never come across these words. My mind is just lost half the time. So I'm like, what are they talking about again? So I've got to go back and actually figure out like, just trying to understand how they work. And so mTOR is basically the body's growth switch. And so mTOR tells cells when to grow and when to divide. And so when nutrients are plentiful, so if you're eating a lot, mTOR is active and it signals the body to store energy, make proteins, go and build tissue.

35:15however when it's overactive you can get like constant activation from this is like overeating frequent meals i think this is what we're happening what's happening globally we've just got an abundance of food and then it keeps cells in this growth mode which then can accelerate aging lead to like cancer and all of those other things and we're able to turn mTOR off through things like fasting low protein intake or the drug rapamycin and so when we're turning it off that's when it's able to help with like maintenance or repair and so the final one and i'll summarize these after just so kind of bring it back full circle is we have this other one called ampk and this is kind of the body's energy sensor and so this activates when cellular energy is low again during like fasting exercise cold exposure and essentially what it does is it switches the body into energy saving mode which increases fat burning and insulin sensitivity and boost mitochondrial health.

36:09And so going back to kind of what we were just discussing, you've effectively got these kind of two areas. You've got these genes. The genes themselves are absolutely necessary for kind of like governing aging in the cells. And you're able to reset cells back to their unspecialized state as Preston, you were discussing. But then at the same time, you've got these pathways, which then help do this. And that is through the sirtuins, which is their kind of longevity managers and maintenance crew, mTOR, which is kind of the body's growth switch. And And then you've also got the AMPK, which is like the body's energy sensor.

36:41And so this is kind of, I think the foundation of the book is diving into these kind of different areas and how to test for these things and what to do in humans to be able to activate or deactivate certain areas. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Curious about online trading, but haven't taken the first step yet. You're not alone. And Plus 500 Futures is a great place to start. The futures markets are moving fast. And with Plus 500, you can explore popular assets like oil, gold, S &P 500, Bitcoin, and more. From crypto to commodities, there's always something happening.

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40:06Whether you're a fast-growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance and earn, improve trust. Get started today at vanta.com slash tip. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash tip. All right, back to the show. I'm going to use an example that I read from not this book, but a different book that really kind of helped me understand this idea of growth versus the cell kind of hunkering down and optimizing itself. The author of the book was Bruce Lipton. He has a book called Biology of Belief. I think there's another one called The Wisdom of Your Cells.

40:47And in the book, he provided an example that I think everybody can kind of wrap their head around. He was, and I might mess up the example because I read this book a long time ago, but it went something like this, where he was saying, imagine a farmer that's there working in his fields because the sun's out, there's no storms, there's nothing to be worried of. He's out there, he's harvesting, he's doing all this work, He's in growth mode. Now, imagine that there is a loudspeaker in the town that alerts him when there might be bombers that are coming overhead. So he hears the alert, get inside, hunker down, get safe.

41:25And so the farmer goes into a bunker, he closes the hatch, he goes in there, he has no idea how long it's going to take. But while he's in there, he's trying to do things that allow himself to self-optimize. He's coming up with the plans of when he's going to harvest. He's going to come up with the plans on where he's going to store all of his crops. He's going to do all of these self-reflective type things as he's hunkered down because there's fear and there's concern in the environment, in the outside world that he is trying to always operate in and trying to grow within. Lipton used this example as a way for you to understand how the cell operates and how every cell in your body is functioning.

42:11If you are experiencing hardship, let's say you don't have any food, let's say you're lacking water, let's say you've just run a marathon, you name it, stress. The cells in your body are kicking into efficiency mode. How can I operate most efficiently? How can I fix the damage inside of the cell? How can I do these types of activities that it can't do when it's expanding or transcribing the DNA in order to build new proteins and expand its growth? And what he says is this back and forth where the cell is basically cleaning up itself and having this time to reset is actually extremely healthy. And David Sinclair in his book is talking about the sartuin proteins that then go and the enzymes, the seven enzymes that go there and kind of clean up the cell and fix the damage that's been done in the cell.

43:10The cuing for this, for these sartuin proteins comes from stress. It comes from hormesis, the stress inside the cell. And so this could be through fasting. This is why he's promoting the idea of fasting. Eat in an eight-hour window. Go out there, experience cold exposure. Experience heat stress. Go into a sauna. Go exercise. All of these types of things are actually very healthy if you do it in somewhat moderation. Do you want to go out there and not eat for a week? That's probably not healthy. Do you want to go out there and not eat for maybe a day? That might actually be a really healthy thing to do from time to time because it's forcing your cells, all the cells in your body to go in there and optimize.

43:57But yeah, anything to add on that? No, I think you nailed it. I think you're so good at being able to articulate these complex ideas. And I think that's a perfect analogy. He essentially just talks about these four different areas which make a big difference. and that is eat less to your point. It is plant heavy foods. And this is something that we can talk about at the end. I tend to disagree with somewhat and I think there's a lot of evidence to support it. He is more vegetarian, plant-based and then you've got the fasting, time-restricted eating and then the cold and heat exposure. And the idea behind a lot of this stuff is essentially that hormesis idea.

44:34It's that you want to stress the body. Stress is good because it puts the cells into kind of cellular repair. Again, I can't stress people that are kind of listening to this. To me, I would say what was so fascinating about this book is just understanding these sirtuins. I had no idea that we essentially have, we've got obviously our DNA and these sirtuins sit on top of the DNA, preventing it from expressing in certain ways. As I mentioned at this part, and I'm repeating this because I think it's really important to understand because I would say it was the biggest takeaway from the book for me, is just how these sirtuins work, that they'll sit on the DNA, preventing it from expressing in certain ways.

45:10And so you don't want a liver cell in the brain that's going to create massive issues. And so the sirtuins will sit on the DNA preventing that cell from expressing as a liver cell. However, at the same time, when there starts to be genetic damage, those sirtuins leave their little outpost, they go and repair that genetic damage. However, while they're gone, many times that cell can start to have issues, it can start to express as things that it doesn't want to be in that area of the body, which is what leads to a lot of this decline in health and aging and such. And then the moment it's repaired that DNA, it goes back to his little outpost and then silences that gene.

45:47The problem is as we get older and we get more and more DNA issues throughout the body and our sirtuins leave their little outposts, they're no longer preventing the DNA from expressing in certain ways. And so we start to get mutations, we start to get tumors, we start to get all of these other health issues. And sometimes the sirtuins, from my understanding, can also get lost on their way home, and they can't find their way back to where they initially were. And so this is where essentially what he's been doing is, how do we stimulate more sirtuins or to increase their activity? And that is all through, as I mentioned previously, NAD.

46:19And if we can get more NAD, that fuels the sirtuins, which helps with repairing DNA, and it helps with preventing genes from expressing in ways that we don't want them to be expressing. And that is just what I found really, really fascinating. And so ultimately, yeah, going back to kind of what you were talking about, Preston, I think he very much recommends focusing, eating less, plant heavy, fasting, time-restricted eating, and cold and heat exposure. And that helps support these bodies' natural repair mechanisms. Yes. Let's talk about what I found to be a really interesting part of the book, which was this, where they took the optical nerve on the rat.

46:56So going back to this idea that they were making the rats older, the mice older by adjusting their epigenetics through CRISPR to prove that they could create age or is someone aging faster? And Sinclair had this comment in the book, if I can give you age, if I can increase your age, then I should also be able to take the age away. And for him, the way to prove this, I guess there's a test in this community where they can go and they can perform surgery on a mouse of its optical nerve. The optical nerve connects the eye to the brain. It sends the signal back to the brain so that the mouse can see.

47:36And what they do is they perform a surgery where they go in, they pinch this optical nerve to cause damage. And the optical nerve is one of the parts of the body that cannot rejuvenate itself. So once this damage is done, it's irreversible, or at least it always has been irreversible. So what they did is they did this surgery, caused the optical nerve to have damage through pinching it, and they crushed it. And then they went to these Yamanaka factors, these four genes. And my understanding is they used three of the genes and they pulsed the genes so that they were only being transcribed occasionally.

48:14It wasn't like it was full on because there's issues with it becoming cancerous if they can just constantly have these turned on because basically the cells in that region basically reset to a stem cell. There's no differentiation and the cell has no idea what to be or what to do. So what they did is they pulsed it. They did it through forcing the mice to drink some water occasionally with, I forget what they had in the water that caused these four genes, or I'm sorry, three of the four Yakamoto genes to basically reset the epigenetics of the cells in the optical nerve. And so when they did this, it was provable that they were actually able to restore the eyesight of the mice.

48:55And so this was kind of a really big point in the book where they're proving that depending on how they're able to access these Yamanaka factors, they're actually able to reverse aging and bring something, basically a full reset back to the cells. Now, does this mean that they can turn back the clock and let's say you're 60 years old and now all of a sudden that they can make you 40? I think the answer is that's what they're trying to do, but they're not there yet, but they're experimenting with really crazy ideas like this that almost seem like it's out of a fiction novel. And it seems to be moving there very quickly.

49:34Going back to the original comment that we had at the start of the show when we said about the MIT Ray Kurzweil comment that we're going to be at the longevity escape velocity by 2032. A lot of this research and a lot of the things we're talking about, I think some of these things are five years old to seven years old, some of these studies that have been done. So there's been a lot of progress. I'm kind of curious your thoughts on AI just accelerating so much of this, because when it comes to the terminology, right? To your point, Seb, I'm with you 100%. I think everybody in the audience is with you 100%, especially if they're not in the medical or biology space.

50:15Piecing this all together for something that is so complex and so terminology heavy, AI, I think, is going to just eat through so much of that chaos and confusion with ease. And it's going to lead to insights that I don't even think that we can possibly... And maybe that's why you have Ray Kurzweil. He's really good at seeing a systems of systems kind of culmination of how everything kind of vectors into an accelerated timeline because of these additional factors like AI. What are your thoughts? Do you think that that's going to play a huge part in a lot of this moving forward? I believe so, because I think the way I look at it, and similar to what you just mentioned, is part of the learning curve is not actually the complexity of what's happening.

51:01it's the language to be able to actually piece everything together so half the time i'm going back and being like wait wait what is nad again what is nad doing in the cell and so although you understand this stuff it's just it's essentially like learning a whole new language but once you've learned that language it's not that much different communicating in english as it is to communicating spanish you just got to understand the terminology and i think going back as well to some of these studies, it opened my eyes as to what was possible. I mentioned it very briefly previously. They were also looking at fertility in mice.

51:37And one of the things is this kind of common held belief in society today, women are born with a finite amount of eggs. And as you age, the amount of eggs you have slowly die off, they become unusable. That's what we see in fertility. What he was able to do is he put female mice through chemotherapy and they'd lost all of their viable eggs. And he called this mouse-supports. And then they were given something called NMN. And NMN is the precursor to NAD. I dug into this a little more because I didn't quite understand it. But NAD, which is necessary for these sirtuins, it feeds the sirtuins to be able to remember silence genes and go and repair DNA breaks.

52:20Well, NMN, if you actually take NMN, it's the precursor to NAD production in the body so that it actually feeds the tuins. If we just go and take NAD, from my understanding, when it enters the gut, most of it just gets destroyed. We can't actually absorb most of the NAD when we go and take it through supplement levels. So they were feeding these mice NMN and which are boosting these NAD levels. And then what was happening is these infertile mice were regaining fertility and some even produced offspring again. You're just like, that is mind-blowing. And if I remember correctly in the story, one of his friends or family member, so don't quote me on this, he ended up recommending, I think she was going through menopause or something like that.

53:02And he recommended NMN to her. And she actually went back and started having a period again. And so you're just like, this is freaking fascinating. And so I think the world around longevity is definitely an interesting space. And I think there's some beliefs such as the fact that we have a finite amount of eggs that I think we're increasingly going to see studies that allow us to reverse that. Yeah. I don't think that we have any idea how crazy some of this is about to get. I think in the coming decade, it's going to get pretty wild. So for those that are listening to the podcast, you just showed a container of, was that NMN?

53:35That's why we laughed. If you were just listening to the audio, you just heard us burst out laughing and we just kept talking. I've been taking, since I read this book, you know, I read this book years ago, but since I read the book, I've been actually taking NMN ever since I read it probably two years ago or whenever. Do you think you notice a difference? No.

53:56I don't notice a difference at all. But in the book, my big thing was, is if I was feeling any different in a bad way or upset stomach or whatever, I was going to stop immediately. But I think the thing that surprised me most was how I don't feel anything at all, Just for reference in the book, David Sinclair says that he has his father taking NMN and whether it has a longer lifespan enhancement, I don't know. I don't know, but I've been taking it. And this boost, going to Seb's point, this boost your sirtuin protein, supposedly it's boosting your sirtuin proteins to repair your cell. It's a precursor to...

54:38You get a very similar effect if you do these hard things that we were talking about earlier, which was eat less, go out there, sit in a sauna, go do a cold plunge. You do these types of things and you're kind of creating the same NAD plus levels and signaling to your cells to repair themselves. So you can just do the free version of that by stressing yourself a bit and then you don't even have to build. but uh i've been trying like this brings me to the pushback on a lot of this longevity stuff is that we're always looking for a pill for something yeah right people don't like doing the work yeah people want to skip the work in order to be able to just take some form of pill that gets the benefits people want to be able to have the benefits of the gym without going to the gym and so it's just like i think there's countless studies which are showing the amazing benefits of sauna, cold plunge, restrictive eating, those kinds of things, but people don't like discomfort.

55:37That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Amen. Yeah. That is the issue. What are your thoughts on, let's say you can dial back the clock. Let's say that people want to tap into these Yamanaka factors and they can knock 10 years off their life and reset and they start, you know, the wrinkles start going away and whatever. So what are your thoughts? Like, you know, Sinclair talks about this in the book. He goes and he does all these different speaking tours. He asked the audience, what are your thoughts if you could live to 120? And he frames the question this way, like if you could live to 120, 130, and everybody in the audience for all intents and purposes are just like, oh God, no, I wouldn't want to do that.

56:17And he says that a lot of the stigmatism around not wanting to live longer is people equate once I'm 100, I'm literally in a wheelchair or I am going around with a walker and I'm not living a life that I want to live where I have full mobility to do and act the way I was when I was 30. And Sinclair's kind of making the argument, well, what if you could? What if you could have full mobility, full cognitive control, and all these types of things at 100 or 110? Would you still want to live longer? And it just kind of throws people into this cognitive, confused state of not even really fully knowing if that's what they want.

56:59And I think this goes to a bigger point, but I'm going to pause right there and just kind of get your thoughts, Seb. So there's so many different ways you can take this. And the first thing I'll say is that I think you can look at it purely from a selfish perspective. And it's like, for sure, let's just go extend life as long as I'm extending my, as he calls it, his health span, the difference between lifespan and health span. And I think as long as my health span is matching somewhat of my lifespan, then I'm actually living a quality life and I'm able to go and do things. I do not want to be a vegetable, laying in a bed, unable to do anything, poor memory.

57:33That just does not interest me. And so you could say at the base of it, if you're kind of thinking about it from a purely selfish perspective, it sounds great. However, there's a couple of things that kind of come to mind. First off, I think that it's actually the finality of life that gives value to life. It's because we only have a finite amount of time on this earth that actually allows us to enjoy these amazing moments. Whereas if I live to 500, if I live to 1000, you can pretty much go experience most careers, you can go dive down most rabbit holes, and I think you'd lose a lot of interest in life.

58:06And I think that the other thing that's interesting is I went and dug into a handful of studies. And one in particular, there's a guy called Samuel Ellis. And in 2018, he followed 52 different species and found post-reproductive stages are rare in mammals. And essentially, it's only humans and there's a couple of toothed whales that have post-reproductive life. And you could argue that this isn't accidental. It's that evolution tends to favor lifespans that are just long enough to ensure successful reproduction and survival of the offspring. But once that job is done, continued existence offers very diminishing evolutionary returns.

58:44Because you're obviously now consuming resources that could be for the next generation and are necessary for that generation to survive. And so I think there's an adaptability issue that arises with longevity around as older generations kind of pass on, newer ones emerge that are better suited to the current environment. And the longer species live, the more ossified I think they become, both like biologically and behaviorally. And we even see this in like the financial world, the S &P 500, the average age of a company in the S &P 500 today, if you look 100 years ago, it was like 50 years. Today, it's like nine years or something like that.

59:22It's dropping so rapidly because it's so easy to become ossified. And I think that as a species, if we want humanity to thrive, I would argue that longevity is probably not going to be the way for humanity to thrive. It's actually probably just maintaining whatever lifespan we're meant to be born with because it allows us to adapt to our environment. And the final point that I'll kind of mention along those lines is that I think that a lot of this longevity space evolved out of fear. Like if we look at the difference between Western medicine and Eastern medicine, well, pre-current modern medicine, when the Eastern side of things, like if you got ill, you got a terminal illness, you're going to die within a few months.

1:00:02And so a lot of people experienced and saw their elders kind of pass on very rapidly. And so they spent a lot of time with their elders. They passed on wisdom. Death was a part of life. But I think that as we've got better at being able to extend life, but not necessarily health, we see people that live for another 15, 20 years with Alzheimer's and tumors and they're suffering and the quality of life is just not there. And so we've now got this fear of death. People in the Western world are so scared of death because they just don't see it. And we end up putting a lot of these elderly people in homes.

1:00:35Yeah, we essentially just kind of lock them up. We don't see them. we don't experience death. So I think that a lot of life today, we are fearful of death. So we want to constantly extend life. But I don't necessarily think that's the reason why we should be extending life. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I just think at the core, if a person doesn't feel like they're providing value to society, like what's the point? What's the point of extending your life? Because deep down inside, I don't think people are going to be happy if they don't feel like they're contributing in some way, some fashion or feel like they're providing some type of service or productivity to society, you get bored, you get stagnant, you just get unsatisfied.

1:01:15You hear this all the time with people that make a bunch of money all the time. People say, oh yeah, I made$50 million or whatever the number is. And then they're like, and I sold my business and I just didn't really know what to do after that. And I was just deeply dissatisfied for quite a period in my life. And I think that when you think of a person that's really older and of age, a lot of that comes from just not physically being able to do anything. They've become a victim of their own environment because they just can't even really get around and be mobile and do things. So how can they create value to society at that point?

1:01:56They're cognitively declined. It's really hard to compete. They've got their friends and whatnot, but at the same time, they're just kind of ready to go. It's not that they want to go, but it's not like they're upset about it at the same time. And I think a lot of it comes down to just your happiness of feeling like you're contributing something new to the world or something novel to the world. A few years back, I remember looking into, and don't quote me on this, I remember looking into the oldest working individual in the UK. And if I remember correctly, this guy has basically smoked since he was like 15 years old.

1:02:29He finishes work, he goes down to the pub and has a pint and drinks, sorry, eats like fish and chips, which are basically just cooked in seed oils. And this guy was like 106 or something like that. And he's still working full time. And you're just like, this guy's just defied everything that we've been discussing in the whole idea of longevity. And so then you ask, you're like, well, what is at the root of this? And I think sometimes we're trying to alter ourselves on a cellular level. Yet, what if it's, and to your point, what if it's actually got, if you want to extend life, It's not about the cellular level.

1:02:59It's about finding purpose. And if you ever read the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, who was kind of in World War II, he talks about how like the tension between what a man has achieved and what they want to achieve is what basically allows us to survive. And there's people, there was, I think one of the analogies or one of the examples he gives in the book is there was this guy that had been in one of these camps during World War II. He'd been in one of these heinous camps for multiple years. And what had kept him alive is knowing that if he's able to get out of this camp, he's going to go find his wife.

1:03:32And he ends up finding out that his wife had been killed and he dies the next day. And you wonder, you're like, that was just hope keeping him alive. It was his mental perseverance keeping him alive. And so I think that we can change ourselves on a cellular level as much as we want. But in the end, the most important factor, and this goes back to your point, Preston, is purpose. It's like actually feeling like we're creating value in society. Because even if we may be healthy, even if we may be able to extend longevity and stuff, if we don't have purpose in life, what is the point? Yeah. I think a lot of people just don't want to reinvent themselves too.

1:04:10Because that's a lot of work, right? It goes back to the difficulty of sitting in a cold plunge or getting into a sauna. Some people can't stand it. other people like it. But I think when you think about adding value, the world is a super competitive place. And a lot of the times people want to be in control of whatever they're creating. And a lot of jobs, you're not in control. You're just answering to somebody else that's telling you. And so if you've worked that job for somebody else, and you've never really even had the opportunity to create something yourself, because it's super hard and super competitive, As you get older and you've gone through this and you're 80, 90, 100 years old, I think a lot of people may not want to keep battling the competition to add value.

1:04:57They're just kind of done. They're tapped out. I don't know. Maybe that's a pessimistic way to look at it. But I think there are going to be some people that enjoy the hell out of that competition and they're going to want to keep going, right? One thing that I found really interesting is a little while back, I read a book called Deep Nutrition. And this lady, Catherine Shanahan, this book, I highly recommend for anyone who's kind of diving into the health side of things, the food side of things. And she mentioned a study and I had to go back through my notes to try and find this study. And one of the things she mentioned is they did this study in 1994 called Length in Life in the Ancient World, a Controlled Study.

1:05:34And they basically looked at Rome between the years of 650 BC and 602 AD. So this is like a 1 ,000 year, no 1 ,200 year period. And they look just at males. They removed infant mortality. They removed people that were assassinated through the death penalty and they removed death in battle. And what they found is that the average person in Rome during that time was living between 75 to 80 years old. and you're just like wild so when you remove these other issues infant mortality death penalty death in battle well now let's compare that to the u.s today well in 2023 and i had a look up this yesterday the cdc the center for disease control says that the average male in the u.s in 2023 lived to 75.8 years old now if you remove infant mortality from that which in the u.s is very it's like six deaths per, I think it was like a thousand or 10 ,000 or something.

1:06:31And so if you remove infant mortality from that, it increases it to 76.2. Well, 76.2 is no longer than what the Romans were living once you remove out those factors. And so this is where I think you start to look at the incentives. And there is an incentive for pharma and the medical industry to push that we have been aging, that we have been able to increase the average age of the individual in the face of all of these things that are going on in the world. But in reality, I think there are some studies that would say that's not necessarily true. And I think that what you can also say is that the health of the general population today, like from over the last, say, 50 years, we've seen rising rates of diabetes.

1:07:11We have seen rising rates of allergies, chronic illness, all of these things. I would not say that the average person is healthy. And so that's where I tend to think that if you're looking at the journal data, the scientific journals, a lot of this stuff, when you start going down these rabbit holes, is curated. A lot of it is manipulated. And I would argue that when you start looking at the data from a different perspective, we may not have increased lifespan to the extent that we might believe we have increased lifespan. I don't know what your thoughts are on that. Yeah, I think to date, I think you're exactly right.

1:07:43I don't think that there's anything that's especially comparing the metric back to Rome, right? Like that's crazy. It doesn't surprise me though. It doesn't surprise me. I think that when you look at a Western diet right now, I think that's one of the reasons why it's as bad as it is. But I think I kind of suspect in the coming decade or two that we're going to really start to see the glass ceiling get shattered with respect to the ages that we see people start living, especially if people are, you know, eating appropriately and you kind of lean into some of this technology that I think we're really starting to deeply understand of how the body actually functions and how it regulates itself.

1:08:24I think it'll be interesting over the next, say, 50 years. Yeah. So Preston, when you hit 100 and when I hit 80, we'll have a look back and listen to this episode and see what's happening. What are you implying here, sir? What are you implying? I'm turning red. Okay. That's all I had. Is there anything else you want to cover on this particular one, Seb? I did a little bit of research again because I like to try to understand like what is the accuracy of this information and I think to be able to be fair to the science what's interesting is there is actually quite a lot of studies that go against what lifespan has also been saying and so there was a guy specifically uh Charles Brenner and he did a whole bunch of studies on this stuff and one of the things he found is like in yeast sirtuin genes help only one in five million cells live longer.

1:09:12And across the whole batch of 5 million cells, they actually shorten lifespan. Lifespan extension effect in yeast is statistically negligible. There was another study that looked at in 2011, researchers from seven institutions published that sirtuin genes do not extend lifespan in worms or flies. And then there was basically just a whole other bunch of results that there was a lot of media bias. While the positive results made global headlines, a lot of the negative results were not published. And so there's a bit of selective storytelling. And so overall, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, I thought the book was really fascinating.

1:09:45And I think that from deepening my understanding about how our body thinks about repair, how our body thinks about aging, it opened my eyes massively. However, I would say that the author, it sounds like he's very much like bought into the medical industry, the pharmaceutical industry. And as a result of that, he's citing things like, well, he wants to be a vegan vegetarian is best. But now we're starting to see a lot of the literature coming out, which is disproving a lot of the historical literature, because you realize that historical literature has been bought and paid for by certain corporations and entities that benefit from that narrative.

1:10:25So I think that there's definitely fascinating points that you can dig into throughout the book. But I think there's some interesting points as well, which I think aren't necessarily backed up by current understanding of food and health and such. But overall, I thought it was a really super interesting book. Yeah. I would say on the contrarian point, to kind of add some to what you're saying, number one, he has a lot of investments in a lot of these companies that are working in some of these areas. The other thing that I had heard, this was years ago, was that the book was somewhat of a fundraising tour to raise money for his lab and the research that he was doing to get more money there.

1:11:03The point on the sartuins, the enzymes was really interesting because I never even thought about that life or the time of the algae and whether statistically being able to prove whether that's actually extending it or not because it's such a short span of time. I never even thought about that, but that's a really interesting point of view. The one thing that I think is for whatever reason, I just really buy into it. This idea that the aging is based on information loss, I just totally buy into it. The way he lays it out in the book, it just intuitively makes sense. It seems to be simple enough to actually represent what's probably taking place.

1:11:46And I think that the loss of information with respect to the epigenetics, I think they're onto something really, really big with that simple idea. But as we know, the body is so freaking complex. And I guess that's why I'm kind of excited for them to kind of stick AI on it and to assist in some of the further research and where it might be all going in the future. But this is where I think it'll be interesting to see. This is all very multifactorial. So we may be able to go in and reverse aging in some of these cells. But if a person doesn't have a desire to live, is their life still going to come to an end.

1:12:22And so I think that that's where it's really interesting is like weighing up all of these different ideas and purpose and spirituality and all of this stuff, I think is really, really fascinating. But again, it's definitely an interesting book to read. And I definitely recommend people giving it a read. And some of the stories, some of the examples of what they're doing in mice is mind-blowing. One other thing that I'll say, having gone to a lot of Bitcoin conferences and meetups and talking to a lot of Bitcoiners, Bitcoiners love talking about longevity. like you can throw around a lot of these terms that we were talking about on this show.

1:12:54And most people in the Bitcoin space are like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all about that. And then they go off on their tangent. And I don't know if that's been your experience, Seb, but that's been my experience talking to Bitcoiners as they're totally into this stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. Anyway, just a side note. That's all we have for you guys. I apologize if our terminology is off. Our examples we provided weren't helpful. We were trying. We had fun recording it. Personally, I had fun recording this. And we really appreciate you guys tuning in. And if you have any good longevity books or any new insights into this space, we would love to cover it more.

1:13:32I love learning about this kind of stuff. And Seb, give people a handoff to anything that you want to promote or talk about. Cool. Thanks, Preston. Yeah. And again, I really appreciate everyone just giving this a listen. And just as Preston mentioned, I apologize, we butchered some of the explanations. A lot of this stuff, I feel like you guys are going to be learning alongside Preston and I wasn't learning. And I highly recommend giving the book a read and really just trying to dig in and think about what it is they're saying. Because I've found that actually having to speak about this together on this podcast has hugely improved my understanding of these topics.

1:14:09It it has hugely improved my understanding these topics. And so I highly recommend taking notes, going and digging into this stuff. And if you don't quite understand something, type it into YouTube, type it into AI these days. AI has blown me away. You just ask a question. I don't quite understand this. Can you explain it to me and give me an analogy? And it just lays out phenomenal examples. But if anyone wants to find me, you can find me at just saidbunny, B-U-N-N-E-Y on Twitter. And then you've got my website, saidbunny.com, which you can find my books that didn't cost money and such. But again, as always, I appreciate you guys giving it a listen.

1:14:41And thanks a lot, Preston, for having me on. Okay. Until next week. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Infinite Tech on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on our episodes. To access our show notes and courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.