Why We Are on the Cusp of Curing Most Diseases & Living to 120 | Deepak Chopra

0:07All right, I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is legendary author, speaker, and spiritual guru Deepak Chopra. Deepak, I feel like I could have given you a much, much longer intro there. I mean, 90 plus books, Chopra Center, you've helped heal and spiritually connect literally millions of people for decades now. What do you consider yourself first professionally? You know, Dave, I'm still trying to figure out what I'll do when I grow up. I don't know. Jack of all trades. Jack of all trades. Well, I guess, you know, we're going to, we only have about 25 minutes and I want to use the time wisely.

0:48I want to talk a little bit about some of the AI stuff you're doing. But for somebody that's tuning into this that doesn't know you, I can't imagine such a person exists. um deepak i mean what should they think of you first it's sort of the same question but i i need i need a serious answer you know i am uh trained as a medical doctor i'm an internist board certified then i studied what is called neuroendocrinology which is brain chemistry i uh have practiced as a licensed physician california massachusetts florida i still hold my licenses. I do my single credits. I teach at a couple of medical schools still.

1:33And then I kind of moved on to integrative medicine, mind-body medicine, and ultimately what, for lack of a better word, spiritual intelligence, and what people call the hard problem of consciousness. What is the universe made of, and how do we know it exists? So that's where I am right now. All right. So I think people will understand this is going to be tough to do in 25 minutes, because there's a lot of stuff here. So first off, I'm going to request a second interview before we even start this first one. So how much of what is wrong with us physically is actually a spiritual or mental problem?

2:28Well, that's being too simplistic, so let me get you the science, okay? 5 % of all disease is determined by what are called fully penetrant gene mutations, which a gene mutation is a genetic error. So that's what, think of it, a gene as a word. And think of DNA as the alphabet. And the word, of course, could be part of a sentence. The sentence could be part of a paragraph. Paragraph could be part of a chapter in a book. the human body is an epic of biological evolution, but also cosmic evolution, you know, all the way from the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years to right now. You are a timeline, so am I, parallel timeline, of 13.8 billion years of evolution.

3:33And DNA is the alphabet. which is just four letters, A-T-C-G. Am I getting too complex? So far, so good. I'm with you so far. The English language has 26 letters, but the alphabet of life has four letters, adenine, guanine, cytosine, thiamine, A-T-C-G, short. The alphabets range differently. Just like in English, 26 letters, you can create an epic. You could write Shakespeare with 26 letters, but life writes the whole story of existence in four letters. And you have 25 ,000 genes in your body, half of which you bought from your parents. So mother gave you 12 ,500 or whatever, 12 ,000. Father gave you 12 ,000, 24 ,000 genes.

4:30But in addition, you have 2 million bacterial genes. So technically speaking, you have more bacterial genes than human genes. You are a few human cells hanging on to a bacterial colony. You are the evolution of bacterial consciousness. Anyway, 5 % of disease is due to mutations. Think of a typo. So you have the Encyclopedia Britannica. That's your body. and there's one chapter that has one word that has a typo and that's a mutation. And 5 % of those mutations are fully penetrant. That means if you have that mutation, you're going to get the disease no matter what you do. Those are known gene mutations.

5:23One example is Baraka gene, which is a gene for breast cancer. So the reason I mention it, Angelina Jolie had that gene or has that gene and she had a preventive mastectomy to prevent her from getting breast cancer, which was the right thing to do. Now where we are today with our technology is that we already have a technology called gene editing. So you can cut and paste genes, technically speaking, the way you cut and paste your email. This technology is now approved for sickle cell anemia and a couple of neurological disorders, but soon it will be for cancer, heart disease, autoimmune illness.

6:06So those 5 % of genetic mistakes will be taken care of. Also, thanks to COVID and during COVID, people were doing a lot of research on vaccines, notwithstanding that a lot of people have crazy ideas about vaccines, but vaccines are very effective in preventing infections. And I grew up in India where, you know, I saw people dying of polio, smallpox, all gone now because of vaccines. So you're soon going to have vaccines for cancer, heart disease, everything. So that 5 % is taken care of. Now the remaining 95 % of even the genetic mutations are not fully penetrated, which means they don't guarantee the disease.

6:54They can be modified by mind-body practices, meditation, spiritual experience, but they can also be modified through other things like sleep, good sleep, like stress management, like exercise, like healthy nutrition, sometimes with certain supplements, emotions, relationships, biological rhythms, circadian. You know, when people have jet lag or they're working at night, their rhythms get out of whack. So when we know all this knowledge now, we know that 95 % of disease is preventable, it's predictable, it requires your participation, It's a process, and many diseases are now reversible through these epigenetic modulations.

7:48So that's a long answer that disease is complicated, but only 5 % is fully genetically determined, probably less. According to the latest statistics, 2 % of disease is fully guaranteed by genetic mutations. Technology will take care of that. The rest is how you live your life, basically. So if we can take care of, through gene editing, the 5%, and then if we do the other stuff that you just mentioned, eat right, sleep right, supplements, good spiritual health, and all those things, are we on the horizon of something else that we will come to think of as human in some sense? You will be able to extend your health span to about 120 years.

8:37and after that probably not because we have genetic programs for death in our body. There's a phenomenon in biology called apoptosis, programmed cellular death and that's very good because if a cell forgets to die, it becomes cancerous. So actually death serves a purpose. Your stomach cells die every five days so you can make new ones. Your skin cells die once a month. Your skeleton recycles every three months, et cetera, et cetera. So death is built into our system for renewal, for recycling. And what we call physical death is the same thing. The universe renews life through physical death, through biological organisms.

9:27You know, we reproduce ourselves and we recycle. Matter recycles, energy cycles, information recycles. and now the evidence is that consciousness recycles. And if by consciousness means your soul, then your soul recycles as a new body, new mind, new brain, everything. To stop death would be the worst thing we'd do. We'd be mummified. We might as well be in a museum like a plastic flower or a marble statue. So death is very important for renewal of life. Would a fairly simple way to look at that be, in essence, if you could not die, really you couldn't rejuvenate? I mean, you couldn't reincarnate?

10:16You couldn't. So you do need death. So death is not the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. Death is the continuum of birth and death. continuum, yeah, sorry, life is the continuum of birth and day. And it's already happening. Every moment cells are dying in your body, new ones are being born. So it's already happening. You don't have the body of a baby now or an infant or a teenager, unless you want to run for president, then you can have an old body and then you can have emotions. So, you know, that's a qualification to run for office these days, that you stop your emotions at the age of eight.

11:01You don't recycle them or you don't evolve. But otherwise, in a normal development process, birth and death is a dance, okay? And it's a healthy dance. But given that, you still will be able to live 120 years, die free of disease, been there, done that, have a party, and celebrate your death, which is, I'm 79 years. that's my next chapter. And, you know, statistically, although I'm in good health, so I find the prospect of death and renewal very exciting. It's the most creative thing you can do. It's an incredible way to look at it. When did you realize the importance of the spiritual element?

11:46I mean, as someone that came from integrative medicine, so you were obviously looking at the body a little bit differently than traditional Western medicine, but when did you realize that the spiritual part was so deeply connected? So this is what happened. I was doing neuroendocrinology in Boston with the number one expert in the world. He's now 101, by the way. And if he finds a snake in his garden, he dissects the brain to look for neurochemicals. So we were looking at neurochemicals in the 1970s and 1980s, like dopamine, oxytocin, and opiates, serotonin, now everybody knows these things. Then it was like, oh, what are these things?

12:28You know, the molecules of emotion, we call them. And these molecules trigger your responses in the body. So, you know, we know that serotonin and dopamine are triggered by emotions. So your emotions and the neurochemicals and your immune system and your endocrine system, hormonal, they're all connected. There's a discipline called psychoneuroimmunoendocrine modulation, which is all this combined thing. That led me to integrative medicine because my training was in brain chemistry. Then I realized that, you know, this is all about the mind. What about, is there something deeper called the spirit?

13:12And then I realized that this is actually the number one and number two open question in science. The number one question in science is what is the universe made of? And without going into details, the answer is that the universe is made of nothing. You know, it starts as nothing and then it looks like everything. So how does nothing become everything? And how do we become aware of that? That's New York music. I was saying, there's something sort of deeply profound about the sirens behind you as you're explaining the meaning of life. The music of New York. So anyway, so what was I saying? The heart problems.

14:02Out of nothing came something. Nothing. Came something. Not something. Everything. And then came something that not only there's existence, this whole thing, but we are conscious of it. How do we know we exist? That is called the hard problem of consciousness. And so if you go on Google or AI and you say, what are the 125 unsolved problems in science? The number one is what's the universe made of? And number two is if it's made of nothing, why does it look like something? and how do we know that it exists? And so that's called the heart problem of consciousness. And I struggled with that along with many people, and people are still struggling.

14:48And then I realized that we are struggling with this problem because we think there's a physical universe made of atoms and molecules and gravity and force fields. And then we say, how does these physical molecules create thought? imagination, feeling, love, compassion, joy, equanimity, self-awareness, existential anxiety, the fear of death. How does matter create this? And it became obvious to me it doesn't. It's the other way around. You start with consciousness. That leads to perceptual activity, which is seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. That leads to cognitive ability, which is thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires.

15:35So in my mind, that became an obsession. And then I now hooked up with scientists who actually understand what I'm saying, because 99 % of scientists think I'm crazy. But finally I found some who agree with me. And we are tackling this problem. So I'm writing a new book with a cognitive scientist, world famous. It's called Beyond the Matrix, How Conscious Beings Create the Universe. So the universe doesn't exist in the absence of you and me. So if everybody disappeared, there would be no universe. How much of a challenge is that in and of itself to just find scientists who can talk about this stuff?

16:17There's like 1%. But I found some really good scientists. And my next book is with a guy called Don Hoffman. He's a cognitive scientist at the University of California. And he's one of the best. and he wrote a book a few years ago, The Case Against Reality, which means the physical world is not real. It's a simulation. It's like the matrix. It's the matrix. And he came up with the math and the physics and all that. The book was criticized, but I championed it and we became friends. And he's very credible. Now you go to all the mind-body conferences. He's like the keynote speaker. I just saw him yesterday on Instagram speaking on something.

17:07So we're writing a book together. He knows the math. He knows the physics. And I know the spiritual. That's super interesting to me. I often talk about on the show how, in essence, because of the phone, I mean, we're in the matrix in some extent because we are now the battery for the digital world. So I absolutely will read that. Let me ask you something, because obviously on my day-to-day basis, I'm doing more in the political realm rather than the spiritual realm. So this is a nice break for me, to be frank. But what do you make of our, if this is a fair term, what do you make of our collective spiritual experience right now?

17:43The level of which, you know, the anxiety that people feel endlessly, the obsession with politics, the culture wars, all of these things, the endless scrolling on the phones, the inundated, endless slamming of news in their faces. if collective spiritual awareness is a thing, if that's the right term or if you want to give me another one. Our collective mind leaves the spirit alone because the spirit is infinite possibilities. But our collective mind today is insane. We have war, we have terrorism, we have climate change, notwithstanding people who say there's no climate change. We have climate change.

18:24We have war. We have terrorism. We have mechanized death. We have drones. We have chronic disease. We have polarization because the world is being run by gangsters. And we call them leaders. But they're only interested in bar mongering, cronyism, corruption, money laundering, and everything that is basically, you know, they're gangsters. They're not leaders. and we elect them. So we can't even blame them. Okay. So we're all insane. I think a few years when I recognized that, I decided to check out. I mean, I still watch the news, but it doesn't affect me because I look at it as collective insanity.

19:14And unless, and if you don't think it's insane, then we are also insane. So we're declaring our insanity. There are now solutions thanks to AI and thanks to what we know. There are solutions for everything, collective solutions. So, you know, you have shared vision, collective creativity. You create a spiritual-emotional bond. You have maximum diversity, another bad word these days. But diversity is the fundamental essence of creativity. Maximum diversity, shared vision, emotional-spiritual connection, complementing each other's strengths, think of a really good sports team. If we could emulate a sports team collectively, we could change the world.

20:01But I don't see it happening. I have seen medieval minds and modern technologies, perfect recipe for extinction for an insane species. Well, we definitely can't end with that, but we are short on time here, and I really do hope we can pick this up for a more extended interview, hopefully in person. So tell me this. So how are you leveraging AI to solve that, to solve what you just laid out there, which is like Deepak Chopra going dark. I can't do that. So I have my own AI, DeepakShopra.ai, but I've also created a community, DeepakShopra.com, where there are three or four principles, love in action, attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance, insight, creativity, humanity.

20:48And we collectively embark on the change we want to see in the world by first becoming the change ourselves, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi. You can't create peace by being an angry peace activist. That's an oxymoron. It'll get you the Nobel Prize, but you'll never create peace if you don't have peace in yourself. Peace can only be created by those who are peaceful. So how do we have a billion people who are peaceful, who are creative, who have love, empathy, compassion, joy, equanimity, and who are there for each other so we can collectively transform the world? It's a dream, but, you know, it may or may not happen.

21:30But then what's a dream for? You know, that's what I'm doing now. At my age, I'm creating global communities of empathy, compassion, love, creativity, insight, intuition, and joy. Joy is the only measure of success. Otherwise, you wasted your life. Do you feel at all times that you're doing it all right all the time? that, you know, in some sense, because you are the guru in this field that you're able to... No, no, I don't believe in gurus. In fact, the word guru, spell it for me. G-U-R-U? G-U-R-U. Ah. As I said it, I saw what was happening there. So, yes, let's all be gurus of ourselves. And then we have hope.

22:18Deepak, we absolutely will do this again. And I thank you just for this tiny intro. We're going to link to your AI and to the website down below. And good luck in New York with all those sirens. Yeah, I live here. I live here to see that it doesn't bother me. Inner peace amongst the craziness. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you very much.

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