Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1234 - David Sinclair
Uploaded: 2019-01-29T23:14:57.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1234 - David Sinclair' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-01-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1234 - David Sinclair' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-01-29. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1234 - David Sinclair

Here we go, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, David!
Joe.
How are you, sir?
Great, thanks.
Thanks for being here, man. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
Really looking forward to talking to you. Very much so.
This is a fascinating subject for me, anti-aging.
The idea that you'll be able to stop aging or even possibly pull it back or at
the very least slow it down.
What do you think?
I think that's all on the table. We've been doing this for years in the lab.
Now we've just got to figure out how to do it in people.
When I talk to someone like you as an actual research scientist at this stuff,
I always want to know, what are you doing to yourself?
Ah, how long have you got?
Like, what do you do on a daily basis?
What do I do?
First of all, are you 100 years old?
Getting there.
How old are you?
Turning 50.
You're turning 50? Hmm, I wouldn't have thought you were 50.
I would have figured you were for about 41, 42.
Well, that's kind of you.
Well, my brother's the negative control and he's...
Does he look like shit?
Well, I can't say that, but people say that he doesn't look as young as me and
he's about three and a half years younger.
Oh.
So what are you doing personally?
Well, you know, most of the time I'm in the lab and trying to run a bunch of
companies to make these drugs a reality.
But daily, you know, I try to keep a healthy weight.
I do intermittent fasting, which is pretty easy because I'm so busy I forget to
eat.
How many hours do you give yourself every night?
Well, I suffer from late night snacking, but I try to skip breakfast and even
skip lunch if I'm busy.
So I'm a night eater.
But that seemed to be good because a study came out about a couple of weeks ago,
at least in mice, that it's not what you eat, it's when you eat that's most
important for longevity.
Really?
Yeah.
And when being when, like what's the best?
It doesn't actually matter if you eat a lot in the morning or a lot at night.
I like nighttime eating.
But you need a period during the day, at least if you're a mouse, probably if
you're a human, where you're hungry.
And that puts your body in a defensive mode.
And these are the things that we've been studying in my lab for the last 20
years.
What are the processes that diet and exercise do for us that keep us healthy?
And why does calorie restriction and intermittent fasting make animals live so
much longer?
And we think we've figured out a large part of how that works.
And now we're mimicking that with molecules.
Is the is the idea that you can mimic it with molecules and it will be as
effective as intermittent fasting?
I think the molecules will be better.
And not only that, when we add them on to a healthy diet and exercise in the
animals, they do even better.
It's like a supercharged mouse.
Now, when you add them on to the mice, do you also add them on with
intermittent fasting?
And is there an additional benefit?
We do.
We do.
One of the first molecules that infamous molecules that we are known for is resveratrol
from red wine.
That molecule discovered it in my 30s or at least linked it to aging.
What we showed was that if you give it to a fat mouse, they're as healthy as a
thin mouse.
They live just as long.
They didn't get heart disease and all of the other bad stuff.
Then what we did was interesting.
We gave it to the mice either every day in their food or let them skip a meal
every day so that they were fed every other day.
And that combination of resveratrol plus every other day feeding, we had the
longest lifespan we'd ever seen.
And so it was additive.
Same with exercise.
If we give our latest molecule called AMN to a mouse and we exercise it, it'll
run even further than it could with either of those alone.
So it's not an excuse to sit around and just eat chips and watch TV.
It augments a healthy lifestyle.
It gets you further than what you could get naturally.
So are you seeing a benefit in addition?
So is the idea to compound all those things together?
Exactly.
Right.
So you asked about myself.
So I do, I eat healthy.
I try to skip meals.
I also take supplements.
And in fact, most of my colleagues are in the field of aging or anti-aging as
people call it.
So I take NMN every morning.
What is NMN?
Good question.
So let me take a quick step back.
Oh, sure.
So about 20 years ago, Lenny Garanti and a team of us at MIT discovered a set
of genes that controls aging in yeast cells.
Just brewers yeast, what you find in beer and bread.
And those genes are called sirtuins.
And there are seven of them in our bodies, five in yeast.
And what they do is they protect all organisms on the planet, plants, bacteria,
humans, from deterioration and disease.
They're like the Pentagon.
They sense when we're hungry, sense when we're exercising, and they send out
the troops to defend us.
So when you put more of these genes into a yeast cell or a mouse, they'll live
longer, between 5% to 20% longer.
And so we think that these genes are responsible for the effects of dieting and
exercise, which is great.
What that means is we can now mimic that with molecules.
So NMN is one of those molecules.
So is resveratrol.
You can think of resveratrol as the accelerator pedal for the sirtuin genes.
And the NMN is the fuel.
And without fuel, resveratrol won't work.
So NMN is the gas in the car.
I've heard of resveratrol, but is NMN a new molecule?
Is this commercially available?
Some people have started selling it on the internet.
The fucking internet.
It's related to NR, which is sold by a bunch of companies.
NR?
Yeah, nicotinamide riboside is a supplement that raises the levels of a
molecule called NAD.
I feel like I should make a shopping list.
So they get a pen.
So why are you writing that down, Joe?
So the sirtuins.
Okay, get this.
So sirtuins need NAD to work.
Without them, they don't work.
In fact, if you don't have NAD in your body, you'd be dead in about 30 seconds.
It's a really important molecule.
But as we get older, we lose NAD.
So by the time you're 50, like I almost am, you have about half the levels of
what you had when you were 20.
So that's not good.
And these sirtuins, they don't protect the body without high levels of NAD.
So what NMN does, and this other molecule called NR, which both you can get on
the internet,
they boost the body's levels of NAD back up to youthful levels again.
And if we give them to mice, these molecules to mice or even to worms or yeast,
they live longer and they're super healthy.
Now, what level, like how many milligrams are you taking of these things?
So, yeah, NMN is something I get from myself.
I'm not selling anything.
So I take a gram of NMN in the morning based on clinical trials.
It's been shown that that will raise NAD.
With or without food?
I take a little bit of yogurt that I make myself at home just to sit on me.
Yeah, I've been doing this for a while.
And I only start doing stuff when I see it work in animals first.
So take the yogurt, mix in some resveratrol.
Resveratrol is great, but it's really insoluble.
It's like brick dust.
So in the yogurt, it'll dissolve.
Take another half a gram of resveratrol.
And how much?
Half a gram?
Yeah.
It's a powder.
I have a few kilos left over from clinical trials in my basement.
So, yeah, that's going to last me a few decades.
And then I also take at night some metformin, which is probably the most
radical thing that
I take, which is a prescribable drug for diabetes.
Metformin?
Met.
Met.
M?
M-E-T.
And prescribable drug.
So you, but you don't have diabetes.
I do not.
But you take it for?
For preventing cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, and aging.
Metformin.
Can you spell it?
M-E-T.
F-O-R-M-I-N.
And so out of studies of 10,000 people and more, it's been shown that people
who take
metformin, even if they have diabetes, are protected against other diseases of
aging,
even frailty.
And so most scientists, if you ask them in my field, will say, yeah, metformin
is likely
to extend your lifespan.
It's just that the FDA doesn't let you have it for aging, because aging isn't a
disease
yet.
So do you have to get diabetes to get it?
Or do you have to get a sneaky doctor?
Well, I wouldn't call it a sneaky doctor, but the doctor typically has to be
convinced,
because they don't keep up with the literature.
And it's off-label.
Okay.
And how much do you take of that?
I take a gram of that as well, which is about a low dose.
Some diabetics take two grams, so it's not crazy amounts.
Is there any side effects?
Well, the good news is that it's extremely rare that you get sick from any of
these molecules.
In millions of patients around the world, nobody's getting sick.
The worst you'll have, as far as I can tell, is a stomach upset.
And I get that, which is actually helpful.
If I'm hungry, I lose my appetite.
But I think the downside is extremely low, and the upside is, you know,
anything's better
than what's coming.
And what is the mechanism that metformin is operating under?
Okay.
So this is the great thing, is that over the last 20 years, we have figured out,
we scientists
have figured out, that there are universal regulators of aging, from yeast to
worms to mice
and in humans.
And there are three main pathways that we've figured out, respond to what we
eat and how
we exercise.
And one of them is called AMPK.
And this is a target of metformin.
And so when I take metformin, I'm activating my AMPK, which will send out the
troops.
The sirtuins I've mentioned, that's the second of the pathways.
And so I take NMN and resveratrol for that.
And then the third one is called mTOR, which is a pathway in the body that
responds to how
many amino acids, how much meat you're eating.
And it will also protect the body if you tweak it just the right way.
And there's only, besides eating low amounts of protein, the only way to affect
that pathway
is with a drug called rapamycin, which is a little dangerous to try and is used
for
immunosuppressants.
So it's not something that I would recommend and I don't take it.
Wow.
So this is your daily routine along with what kind of like diet do you follow?
Well, I try to not eat too much.
It's pretty easy to overeat.
So I try to skip one or two meals a day.
I avoid sugars and carbs.
I try to run once a week.
I do workouts on the weekend.
Like you, I love saunas.
I like to put my body in some temperature stress.
So I go heat and then I jump in a cold bath, back and forth.
That works well for yeast.
We can do that in the lab and they live 30% longer.
So there's all that.
Generally, I eat normally.
Do you ever try going from sauna to cryotherapy?
No, I haven't tried actual cryotherapy.
Just a...
Oh, you haven't done it at all?
No.
You want to do it today?
Sure.
Have you got one?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll take you.
Take you down the street.
There's a great one because it's...
There's different kinds and some of them are from the neck down where they're
using liquid nitrogen.
The other ones, they actually freeze the air.
So when they're using the nitrogen to freeze the air and they're pumping in air
that's 240 degrees below zero and you're going to do about two minutes.
I do three because I do it all the time, but it's awesome.
I do three and then I take 10 minutes off and then I go back in for another
three.
Yeah, it makes sense.
And what you're doing to your body when you do that, we think, is to activate
these longevity pathways like the sirtuins.
Yeah.
And that's really the trick is to activate your body's defenses against aging.
I mean, the old theories about aging, you've got to throw them out.
Most people at parties will tell you, oh, antioxidants, free radicals, DNA
damage, or mutations.
That is all, for the most part, incorrect.
That antioxidants cause DNA damage?
No, that's true.
That it repairs DNA damage.
Well, antioxidants have been a rather big failure in the aging field.
But resveratrol is an antioxidant, correct?
It's a mild antioxidant, but it doesn't work by being an antioxidant.
Oh, what does it work?
What is the pathway?
It steps on the accelerator pedal of these sirtuin enz