Hello friends, welcome back to the show.
My guest today is Dr.
Mike Isretel. He's a professor of exercise and sports science at Lehman College and the co -founder of Renaissance periodisation.
As technology advances at an unprecedented pace, the idea of humans living forever feels within reach.
But what's the truth about extending our lives?
What does the latest science reveal about our pursuit of extended lifespan?
Expect to learn the biggest determining factors to increase longevity, the role of genetics, whether fasting is the ultimate hack, how steroid usage impacts lifespan, the best exercises for living longer, the biggest predictors outside of your body that determine how long you live, the biggest myths
for extending your life, the truth about blue zones and much more.
But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr.
Mike Isretel. Mike Isretel, welcome to the show.
Chris, thanks for having me, again.
In a barn, this time.
Yes, the person who picked me up blindfolded me, put a shot in my arm.
I woke up in a helicopter being repelled down to a barn.
I have no idea where we are, but interestingly, I do have some ideas about longevity on the brain.
And the direction. Always.
Just kidding, never.
Talking about longevity, bit of a buzzword, especially the last sort of 5 to 10 years on YouTube.
How'd you come to think about longevity?
Constituent parts, what is it?
Longevity is kind of the big concept and there are two underlying concepts at least that are important to chat about.
One is the duration of your life, how long you're alive, and the end run of that is mortality.
Like if you die at 97 versus you die at 57, then you lived 40 years long or whatever, you had more longevity in that sense.
And that used to be kind of sort of the only way longevity was discussed a generation ago or so and times before that.
But there's an important subcomponent, sort of part two of longevity that has to be in the discussion for it to be the most meaningful discussion possible.
And that is a variable, the end run of which isn't mortality, but it's morbidity.
And that is quality of life.
So the two parts of longevity or how long do you live for?
And what is the quality of life that you're experiencing during that time?
So mortality is how soon you die.
Morbidity is like, what are the last 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years of your life like?
Because it is a very, very different situation to have two people live to 90 and croak summarily at 90 and one day at the same time holding hands, very romantic.
But one of them up until two years ago was living life to the fullest, active, independent, healthy, generally speaking, could travel, maybe could drive all the way up to few restrictions.
Very few restrictions.
The alternative is there are people currently in their late forties that suffer from morbid obesity, that if you somehow just kept them alive and with technological innovation, that is increasingly more possible, that they kick around for a while.
Let's say magically you got someone like that to their nineties.
Let's use a more realistic example.
After age 70, a person is mostly bedridden, requires the care and attention of many people, is bereft of family and friends and lives in a nursing home, tended to hand and foot, very identical mortality.
Same day of death, very different degree of morbidity, one person experienced almost none, one experienced a significant amount.
So for the rest of the discussion we're going to have here today, we're attending to variables that don't just enhance the probability that you live longer, though they will, but they're also going to enhance the quality of life you experience as you age, which is really, really important.
Because if someone's like, do you want to live longer?
And you're like, yeah, they're like in a nursing home with tubes everywhere.
You're like, oh, how much longer?
Like years, decades, you're like cash.
Some people want that sort of thing.
Some people don't. So very important distinction.
Is it a trade off between the two?
Almost never, but almost sometimes there is a trade off between the two.
For example, in very difficult athletic pursuits, there are some data indicate that if you really grind it as an athlete, especially into your later years, you could technically be throughputing so much through your metabolism.
The total human metabolism and the amount of sort of damage and chemical alteration your body takes is kind of like a candle.
If you burn it really fast, it burns out a little quicker and just low key that there is a situation like that.
This is the extreme end though.
Very extreme. Because I think Donald Trump made a comment about you have a limited number of heartbeats in your life and life exercising speeds them up.
Yes. Not quite right.
Donald. One of the many ways in which Donald Trump is more wise than us all, this, he does have a little bit of a point there.
So if you are a hardcore athlete, you may not live quite as long as if you cooled off on the training a little bit.
However, if you're a hardcore athlete, you'll probably just not suffer nearly as much from mobility restrictions, morbidity things, various health maladies.
You just going to croak a little sooner.
And by a little, I mean, maybe on the order of months to a few years sooner, but your quality of life is going to just be completely different, especially in your later years, those distinctions are very rare and they're almost no cases in which mortality and morbidity contradict each other.
Usually it's roughly the same stuff.
Like most of the recommendations we'll have talked about today are going to be like a lot of column a column B both checked off.
When it comes to longevity, quality of life, what's the biggest movers or the number one, what's the biggest determining factor?
Do you know? Is that a question that can be answered?
Technically in the literature.
So it's difficult to say what the biggest factor is by far because the way you ask that question has to include what is the degree of variation you account for.
So if you say that nutrition is the biggest variable, but you're dealing with a hundred people being examined for their nutrition or trying to correlate lifespan, but most of them are eating decently.
Well, it probably won't be the biggest variable.
But, uh, the kind of raw take, to be completely honest in our current environment is probably the degree of adiposity that you carry.
How much body fat you have and how heavy you are beyond what you were genetically designed to hold.
So like the Great Dane effect or the, uh, you know, like large dogs are designed with similar systems as small dogs.
And they almost always die, like half sooner.
Um, humans are all designed on very similar systems and subsystems.
And when you get a human to weigh four or 500 pounds, it strains everything like crazy.
So it's like a reliable way to shorten your life.
One of the most reliable ways to shorten your life would be probably one of the most short of extreme drug abuse.
Like just doing crack or Coke every day, uh, stuff like that.
Um, extreme, uh, prolonged stress and sleep deprivation.
Absolute hunter Biden stuff.
So the laptop type of shit, right?
Uh, but, um, yeah, as far as things that we see humans alter in the real modern world today, it's difficult to reduce both your, uh, longevity, how long you live your lifespan and wildly increase your morbidity in a more dependable way than being severely overweight.
Okay. You mentioned a word there that I thought would maybe be the biggest one, genetics.
What's the role of genetics when it comes to lifespan, longevity, quality of life?
And, uh, I, uh, it's interesting that the way you asked genetics is insanely, insanely pertinent to how long you live and explains almost all of the variants for those wacky stories you hear, which are often false and sometimes true.
Well, my grandfather, he lived till 98.
He smoked 10 packs a day and he means son of a bitch, barely slept, drank all the time and somehow he lives in 98.
And usually people trot out these stories to try to reduce the apparent benefits of improving your lifestyle because there's kind of a fatalism associated with like, dude, if, if, if my grandpa lived till 98, just eaten raw meat, you know what I'm saying?
And smoking eight six and an hour who, why am I going to go eat kale?
That's stupid. I'm not going to waste my time.
If the thing is grandpa probably had just the right stuff genetically.
And if you tried at any given age and you tried at any given level of genetics that you may have, maybe you're closely related to grandpa in that regard.
Maybe not so much because you might only be a quarter related to grandpa.
And if the genes shuffle pretty decently, maybe only an eighth, and you might have other people in the family that like croak at 55, all of a sudden you're like, eh, whatever, so genetics matter a ton, but they are still altered.
So genetics gives you an average of everything's average in your life, average nutrition, average sleep, average, everything.
Genetics will say you're going to die probably about 72, but if you do everything right, you might die at 82.
If you do everything wrong, you might die at 52 62, something like that.
Very big differences about, however, that settling point of longevity, very genetically informed.
However, the reason I said that adiposity is probably the most pertinent variable.
The biggest one explanatory wise is because it's a variable that you can push all the variables to extremity.
You can push your sleep down.
You can push your stress guy high, but it's unlikely you're going to do that to yourself for very long in the free modern world.
Like if you work any decent job in the us or any of the anglophone countries, modern Asia, et cetera, Europe, like you're probably not going to like die cause you overworked voluntarily on a coal mine, unlikely.
But boy are a lot of people voluntarily overeating like crazy and being that we're, are we allowed to disclose the filming location, being that we're in the Austin, Texas metropolitan area.
Lots of people are eating to such high extents that I'll tell you this.
If you weigh 400 pounds and you trot out the genetics bullshit to me of like, why you haven't lost weight, I'm breaking you.
Like, I don't even want to do a shit because you know, like you can really do unbelievable damage and shorten your life substantially.
It kind of doesn't matter where your genetics are at that point.
If you're talking genetics, does that mean all grandparents and both parents seem to have lived for quite a while.
Most people haven't done a full genome assessment or whatever.
I don't even know if we've done a polymorphic trait.
Like here's the long living, here's some of the long jiving, long living groups.
And I can spare the expense.
It's going to be polygenic, but there are.
I mean, there's not one gene that people only live to 55 or 95.
No one in between is very bi -modal.
Right. Um, if you look at it, you can look at genetics from two different perspectives in this regard, at least one perspective is there are no doubt genetic variables about a person that under the hood caused them to live a long time or live a short time.
You might be able to clear mitochondrial damage faster or something like that.
Your genome, the actual like strands of DNA are kept like less methylated than otherwise.
There are a variety of molecular machines that do that.
Some people have more effective variants or more of them, so on and so forth.
You would never even look at a person and tell that's what they have.
They just have that ship.
That's what grandpa had when the coal mining days, when he smoked a cold chimney every hour or whatever the fuck he did, he was, he was literally a cigarette, Chris, a giant walking cigarette and he wouldn't die.
So that is factor number one.
There's a bunch of those kinds of things, but the other kind of genetics, and this is straight up still genetics that affect your lifespan is the genetic propensity for the secondary effects that affect it, for example.
If you have a fucking appetite for very tasty, very not good for you foods and you have a genetically hunger signaling that's just like kind of, you're always hungry or whatever, no pleasure from exercise, a hundred percent.
Um, propensity to do addictive drugs, a propensity to take preposterous risks, a propensity for poor sleep.
Um, that's not under the hood stuff.
It's going to affect what's under the hood, but it's expressed in other measured variables.
So there's two ways to look at that.
Um, how does that impact longevity?
Basically, um, in the current modern world, environment impacts longevity a very small amount because all of our environments are generally kind of really good, good enough that the variance produced by environment is very small.
However, in the developing world, environment has really big effects on longevity, still one of the top killers straight up all around the world is, um, indoor air quality.
Uh, if there are still countries and cultures in which you burn for food and fuel, like sod or some shit like that or hot inside, and it sure goes out the chimney, but believe it or not, some of the molecules stray to the sides and you inhale that shit, you do that for 30, 40 years.
It's going to impact your longevity.
Like crazy. If you've ever been to developing nations like India, for example, you land the internal circulation of the air stops, external air comes in and you're like, the fuck happened here.
And that does not stop until you leave India or go way into the jungle, because like Mumbai has an air quality that like, if we had that in Austin, there would be like, um, like do not travel to Austin, Texas for the next two months kind of shit.
Like, I remember the California wildfires are really big deal and the air quality was like, Oh, it's really bad.
And I remember being there and I was like, what the fuck?
Cause I had been to Mumbai a few times.
I'm like, man, I could live the rest of my life in this.
It wouldn't affect me at all.
I've been to Mumbai.
So outdoor indoor air quality, uh, polluted water, contaminated food, things that we just really just don't deal with in the modern world.
You go to Japan, Taiwan, the UK, Germany, the us it's all free and clear pretty much.
And so in the environment doesn't have huge effects in that sense.
Um, there are other things about the environment that can producer, uh, um, increase longevity stress and things like that.
I don't like to call that environment.
You could be more specific with those, uh, things, but generally speaking, environmental factors just aren't a big deal for us living in the modern world.
Modern world, how rude everyone's modern in the developed world.
It's not a big deal in the developing world.
Yeah. It's a huge deal.
And one of the ways to increase human wellbeing and human lifespan is to help the developing world clean up.
Like in the literal sense of just have cheaper, cleaner energy, cheaper, cleaner energy, cheaper, uh, cleaner abilities to clean up.
Look, cause like if you get a lot of energy, you don't exactly clean up your air doing that.
If you have a five nuclear power plants, you still have to make sure that your production facilities of all these goods are not spewing toxic shit.
You have to have regulatory framework to make sure cars are increasingly expected to have different standards.
Cause like in India, there's like diesel, regular small cars in the road.
And they put out some smoke that I'm like that our cars at home do not fucking smell like that, but you do not pass our regulatory burden.
And obviously of course, like good governance, uh, largely free markets, enough ability to generate wealth, all that stuff.
So, okay. Diet. Touch on body fat, um, body weight earlier on.
Does it matter what you're eating?
Does it matter how it impacts you?
How should we come to think about diet from a longevity standpoint?
Great. A diet that can keep your muscle mass at decent levels and does not make you excessively over fat or overweight probably is something like 80 % of what we mean by diets effect on longevity.
So if you take two people and the two very different diets, but one that they're roughly the same body composition and size, et cetera, they're going to get longevity differences from diet alone, but they're not going to be enormous.
I'm the order of probably five years or less, just on a heuristic basis.
We're not talking about 20 or 30.
If someone weighs 600 pounds, yeah, it's 20 or 30 years, if not more, you know, stop arguing over vegan versus carnivore and instead look at how much they weigh.
Oh my God. By a long shot.
Let's put this in perspective with some characters and we make up in our heads.
If a vegan or carnivore doesn't matter, uh, say, you know, there are 350 pounds of five foot seven and they're like, well, I'm vegan.
So it's not a big deal.
You're going to be like, bro, that ain't it.
Now, if you eat mostly healthy foods, lean proteins, veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, and mostly unprocessed foods, if you do that, whatever body weight you're at, it absolutely matters for longevity, but it matters a little bit and that means you should do it.
But the biggest thing that you get out of those foods is the ability to do weight control because if you are grotesquely overweight, you could be eating fuck all.
It matters, but not by a ton.
How much mitochondrial damage and stuff like that is coming from junk processed foods or is your concern with avoiding ultra processed foods that they're just more palatable than eating the whole of food version?
It's probably another 80 20 or 90 10 situation where mostly they're just a portal to being really fat, but, um, yeah, there is some decent research that says very processed meats, very processed, various other foods do have chemical effects, cellular levels that are absolutely not ideal, especially if the preponderance
of your diet is composed of those foods.
But if you eat, uh, not so healthy foods a few times a week and the rest is healthy, they cannot statistically differentiate you from someone who eats healthy a hundred percent of the time in the mortality or morbidity.
Assuming that you maintain a similar sort of weight.
Correct? Yep. So yes, exactly.
But again, we're fighting with ultra processed foods, more palatable, often more calorie dense.
Go back and watch the fat loss episode that we did before.
You want to learn more about that?
That's it. So that's really important stuff, but I think the big takeaway for me is this.
If you kind of two extremes, one, we already mentioned, if you are following some ultra healthy diet, either ostensibly healthy or actually healthy.
And you have gotten up to 400 pounds and you're not losing weight currently, but you're like, I'm good.
I'm eating the new way.
It's great. You got a bad thing coming your way.
On the other hand, if you happen to be in a position where you are over healthy weight, you're physically active, et cetera, all the other variables we'll talk about are pretty well in line.
And you are looking at a plate of nachos at a Mexican place with your friends.
And they're like, eat some.
And you're like, Ooh, but they're kind of going to kill me because they're native chips and those are bad.
Sorry, crisps. Does that make your English feel that?
Sizing everything. Um, that's also probably the wrong move and it's a, it's a wrong move for at least two reasons.
One, if in moderation and with all the other factors aligned, you eat a some junk every now and again, it's a very difficult story to tell yourself that anything very much matters about if you eat a few chips or zero chips, or even a two bags of chips every now and again, the other way in which it matters
is the, and this is a little bit more about how you approach food.
If you approach food in an erotic fashion, um, anticipating dangers everywhere, trying to curate your lifestyle to only get the organic vegan superfood shit and really worrying a lot about what goes into your body, you almost certainly will live less time than if you just didn't give a shit and ate
mostly good shit, but every now and again, just had 10 burritos, no, no problem.
I love the idea of the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections.
Depending on the degree of imperfection.
But if you're doing a decent job and you're worrying more than that, you're just going insane.
I did a, a Jeffersonian breakfast with Brian Johnson a couple of months ago.
Okay. What is, I don't know what that means.
So you, everybody gets, I think a minute to speak and you kind of go around and you've got a topic that you're talking on and, uh, it's a way of, I guess, fostering, uh, discussion, some kind.
Uh, and he was talking about some of the research that him or his team had done.
I don't know where it'd come from.
Uh, and he said that eating a McDonald's, uh, kills you 12 minutes earlier.
Uh, that was, uh, some of the, and I do wonder, you know, I like what Brian's doing in the same way as I like having a scout in a army that goes and sort of.
Climb to really, but I'm not climbing that shit.
I don't want to go up there.
But I'm glad he does and maybe tell us some interesting stuff when he comes back down.
However, I do wonder, this is one question I haven't got to ask him yet, which is how are you, or any of the people that are really obsessed with long, I go on the R slash longevity Reddit or whatever other versions of that, the NAD discussion forum, the rest veritrol discussion forum, all of this David
Sinclair stuff from years ago.
I wonder whether those communities have got to the stage yet where they've tried to mediate the longevity induced stress reduction.
You know what I mean?
Yes. Now there are a few ways you could go about this.
If you are a person who's obsessed with longevity in a glass half full sort of way, you're looking at the variables in your life and you're like, Ooh, I want to optimize for longevity.
I love my life. I love science.
I love being intricate and meticulous.
It's just my nature.
I love organizing all the variables and being very strict.
You're not really stressed when you're doing that.
You're actually involved.
It's part of your oldliness.
Yeah. And so not only do you get the benefits of being a perfectionist on never eating any junk, but also you get the benefits of being super involved, which is another big variable we'll discuss later as seems to have some promise for longevity.
But if you're a person who, if they are told, listen, just eat mostly healthy foods and you're good to go, and you're like, Oh my God, thank God.
But if I tell you, look, every fry you put in your mouth is like 30 seconds less life, like you're telling your wife something just beautiful about how much you love her on your death bed.
And you're like, and my favorite part of you is.
And she's like, that's stupid fry from McDonald's.
Oh, my husband's soul.
If you are a person whom that idea and the pursuit of perfectionism tends to give higher stress levels, I'm going to tell you right now, it's probably not worth it, just do a good job.
Don't try to aim for perfect.
We'll get back to talking to Dr.
Mike in one minute.
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What happened to all of the research saying that if you cut a rat calories by 50 % or 30 % that it lives tons longer, whatever happened to the intermittent fasting side of that, you haven't mentioned once calorie restriction for longevity extension.
Um, because it's almost completely encompassed by the variable of body weight.
And I'm going to tell you something completely insane, Chris, you might not believe, but when you feed a rat a little less food or a lot less food, it gets a little or a lot lighter in body weight.
And if you factor that variable of body weight, it already accounts for that.
So it's absolutely true that if you input fewer calories on average in a certain margin, you know, starve, you can starve yourself to death and you've like always been starving to death and you're a skeleton.
But like at 110, you're like, I'm still hanging in fellows.
Can I get a brownie?
Like, no, no, you would die.
Like, I kind of want to die with a brownie in my mouth.
So the body weight basically absorbs all of that variance for us.
So let me put another thing that we should all be fighting to be as low body weight as possible, if you want to live here is an optimal body weight, but it's not one number I can give you because it depends on a bunch of stuff.
Internal genetic variables.
I can't possibly predict cause I don't have an AI scan of your whole genome.
It's coming. I'm sure, but it's not here yet.
Another one is frame size.
Like someone who is six foot two, you're like, yeah, yeah.
Like, and very broad shouldered in the interacromial distance for the bones.
You're like, yeah, you got to weigh like 115 pounds and then you're going to be super like longevity like yeah.
Until they die of starvation, summarily one day later.
So a lot of variables play into that.
But as far as body weight is concerned, you're generally going to take the average recommendation of what most of the governing bodies in medicine agree is the statistically healthiest body weight.
And you're going to air either at that body weight or a little bit less.
You start going much less than that.
Not so great. So for example, if the insurance tables say that you're probably in your best health at 150 pounds, given your, they don't usually do frame size.
So already this is fucking shit that 150 pounds, you're good to go anywhere between like 135 and 150.
That's probably your super golden zone.
You can weigh up to 165, 170, 180 if you're more muscular and it'll be almost the same result.
But if you get into like the one twenties or the one tens, just to live longer, it might not work out so well for you.
Is holding muscle mass from a diet perspective?
Quite you. Just what's the role of muscle mass?
Talk to me about how muscle mass plays a role in longevity.
Is it important? Muscle mass plays make sort of two appearances in longevity.
One appearance that muscle makes in longevity is that having a decent amount of muscle has secondary health effects for the rest of your system.
Muscle is a glucose consumer and it keeps your blood glucose chronically lower than if you didn't have plenty of muscle and excessive chronic high blood glucose is a surefire way to just croak fucking early.
That's it. And so there are a few other ways in which muscle has these great systemic effects and those are awesome.
And that's actually the primary driver.
The second thing about muscle is when you look at the statistical literature on people with a certain level of muscle mass and their mortality predictions, you see these massive correlations.
Correlation is not causation.
Most of the variance of muscle mass or most of the relationship between muscle mass and mortality has to do with, uh, 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 a bias signal.
A hundred percent. So like, if you give me an 88 year old woman who is walking on a cane, where she's super jacked, destroying skyscrapers 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, the fuck is that person moving?
And 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 lifelong.
If she had a good bench press, she'd be sweet.
It's true. She had more muscle probably be healthier for her.
But a lot of times people who are bedridden, people are suffering from chronic illness, people are suffering from chronic physical inactivity like your hips are totally fucked.
So you lose a ton of muscle in your legs.
And then like people are like, when you die, they measure your muscle mass and a study and they say, well, it's low muscle mass.
It's at the low muscle mass specifically that killed you.
Although it did have a small effect.
It's the fact that like, Oh shit, you 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 of things going around the internet.
People are talking about jump height, uh, your ability to jump high related to your mortality and grip strength.
And like, if you try to train to jump higher or grip stronger, thinking that's going to keep you alive, uh, 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 their time in the gym.
You as well, somewhat large guy who's competitively body belt, body built for quite a while.
Yes, 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 bodyweight that lets you live the longest, um, 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.
And so if the 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.
What are you, what are you talking about with, uh, 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, uh, 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, when you die tomorrow or die in a hundred years time, huge stochastic element about death, like I can, anyone can just die fucking tomorrow.
They're like, Oh, blood vessel in his brain just blew up.
Turns out his head was too big.
Uh, that kind of weird shit aside, on average, I would have expected myself to probably take about 10 years off of the end of my life.
Yeah. Well, what is it that the drugs are doing that's speeding up the dying process?
Yeah, what aren't they doing that speeds up that, uh, 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.
They are elevating your blood pressure.
Now, many of those variables, I have kaboshed, so I could be lucky and be looking at less than five years, but there's also an element of where carrying that much excess body weight starts to be a stand -in for the muscle.
When you weigh I'm five, six and I currently weigh 235, you weigh 235 pounds of five, six, 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.
Fatiguing. One hundred percent.
And so to quote Donald Trump on the heartbeat thing, again, he's not a hundred percent wrong, um, that 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 that I have had for years and that's absolutely a big fucking problem.
Do you, I think about Chris Bumstead when you talk about that, someone who's just retired, age 30, six to six, three, I think he steps on stage at like two, 20, two 30, something like that.
I'm not too sure. Very mysterious with the classic guy's actually weight, but yeah, two twenty to two forty or something.
Um, I think about him, you know, trying to get in and get out.
He's like, you know, Navy SEAL team six, like kicking a door down, shot someone in the face six times and then like, you can't get me anymore.
I don't have any more Olympia trophies.
Yeah. All right. Uh, I wonder.
Wonder how much he's been able, obviously genetically elite.
Uh, I wonder how much he's been able to get in and get out, so to speak.
The more you can get in and get out, the better.
Um, 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 enough by psychology and stuff.
Yeah. But, uh, 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. Um, that's going to put you in the grave a lot sooner because you are caring in the ordinary amount of one, isn't he like 340 off season?
See he literally is 100 pounds more than sebum at probably a slightly shorter height.
Like that's the kind of thing that's going to affect you.
So just to review the tail end a hundred percent.
Yeah. So to review the muscularity part, if you are very under muscled, 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 was probably your best bet at longevity having a little extra muscle can help,
can hurt probably cancels out on average.
So if you're jacked as a natty, 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 a chronic high blood sugar for mismanagement of insulin and growth hormones, shit like that.
If 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.
There are their seventies and eighties Arnold still kicking it.
Like if this shit was remember one of my mentors, um, Dr.
Mike stone, uh, told us something about the steroids when we were on PhD program.
He's like, you know, we in the eighties knew that the media was lying because you just went into locker rooms and gyms and just didn't see any dead bodies.
Cause you know, like eighties, anti -drug hysteria was a totally different level.
I once dared 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, but 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 Jack for forever.
They're beat red and they just like don't die and they live into their eighties.
Not the great model for most people because they just have baller genetics.
One of my friends and a mentor of mine broader Chavez hit, I believe like a grandfather and uncle who like worked literally in the coal mines.
And he had like a, some kind of chest condition.
This is an amazing story.
It was the 1960s. And he like went to the doctor and he's like, Oh, something in my, like some lungs or shit and they're like, Oh yeah, here are Diana ball tablets, a d ball taps oral stairs.
Right. You just got a 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 them longer than like six to eight weeks.
He 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 sixties or seventies and fucking coal mining, right.
And I brought broad said once he was like, I think he just died because he was just like, God, fuck this don't want to be alive anymore.
The thing is most of us do not have genetics like that.
So really important to say, like, if you know someone that's lived a long time in spite of everything, do you want to take that chance on yourself?
I wouldn't. Anything else to say?
Actually that's a question.
There is something else to say if I want to take a non bodybuilder, but longevity approach for training for this.
Very rough hewn. 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, deadlifts, et cetera, 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.
So 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, like you're also consuming a lot of life being in the gym around sweaty, nasty people, so you have to integrate that in, but there is a, 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.
And so that's probably 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 for longevity, like it's not, it's not bad for you necessarily, but it's overkill.
You're overshooting.
Yeah, definitely. Sleep.
What about sleep? Sleep is a big deal.
Sleep is the ultimate stress reducer and everyone's life.
Like that's pretty much the one of the main purposes of sleep is to kind of reset the whole system and sleep is a thing where again, that 90 10 80 20 rule comes in handy, if you're mostly sleeping enough to feel well rested, which means if you need like fuck new tonic, I need eight cans of monster to
keep me awake after 2pm, you're not getting enough sleep.
But if a can or two of new tonic 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.
As 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 bed, all the general sleep recommendations that are really awesome.
If you just checklist 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 few 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.
Jaco. Uh, is that true?
Supposedly so the 4 30 am thing, which I'm reliably told by some of my friends that are fathers that they beat on an almost nightly basis.
Easy. I'm never asleep.
They've got dad shit to do.
Yeah, exactly. Um, but yet, 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.
Holy shit. It's like super, super unlikely.
So a few very, very rare.
Anyway, um, Jaco 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 debt very well.
Very big deal. Because if you, 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, that's the kind of guy you want to be like an elite bodyguard for someone like
the president who sleeps normal hours.
Do you have a decent rotation for your body guarding shifts?
You can be like a Delta force level shooter.
You're just like, look, if I don't get my sleep, I'm, 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, ask him about the time he ran out of ammo and he'll know the story.
And, uh, I think he said he was awake for like the only time he slept was when he was concussed by an IED going off in like 48, maybe more hours.
He slept for a week, for two full days runs out of every different platform, every different magazine, every different piece of ammunition that he had.
And, uh, you just realized that, okay, that's, that that's what the job demands of you Ross Edgley, who I think, uh, wanted an intro to you to have a chat at some point, um, I asked him, you know, he's done all of these crazy swam, or did a triathlon holding a tree, uh, triathlon.
Uh, 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.
Uh, he's just done the longest single distance river swim in history.
Uh, it was 300 miles, 55 hours without touching land, without sleeping, without anything 55 hours straight through.
And, um, I asked him what his super power is and it completely makes sense.
All of those things together are him allowing to deal with sleep deprivation and to digest food in very strange situations.
Yeah. So people's digestion will shut down.
And also, 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.
Um, but then get back to moving and being horizontal.
If you feed me food, I need to be vertical for at least 45 minutes afterward, just the way my digestive tract is put together.
Sure. I don't like being horizontal.
Sure. Um, so what I'm saying is certain people deal with digestion, sleep in very, very, very different ways.
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. That's probably a little bit of an exaggeration, though maybe not by much, especially in extreme cases, it can be pretty nasty.
Shipped workers, firefighters, nurses.
Correct. Um, sleeping roughly with the day and night cycle, uh, 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 going to 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 going to be a big deal.
But regularity is a really, really good thing.
It'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.
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Going 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?
Walking and 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 Atea book title.
I just said by accident that, you know, the keeping the morbidity low, having the higher quality of life, because so something like just for people's reference frame, six to 12 ,000 steps per day for most people is totally cool.
But a better way to put that is probably if you're doing a lot fewer than five or 6 ,000 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, uh, 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 significant, 95th percentile intense exercise.
And I'm also not moving quite so much.
What would you say?
I imagine a lot of the audience fits into this particular bracket.
I 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 inactivity, 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 aerobic 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 and probably increases your 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 are 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 they're like, Oh, I'm doing good.
See you 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 were 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. So 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 therein 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, or do you see your Brazilian jujitsu as, is that contributing in that sort of manner?
My Brazilian jujitsu definitely counts as that.
And I do BJJ 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.
Um, I am absolutely not the model for longevity and quality of life.
I'm in a very perverse, very strange path, very understood, very chosen path.
I think you've, uh, at least partly ejected yourself out of that or sort of gently come into land abuse level.
Uh, but yeah, it just makes me think again, I have this idea called the manual pause, uh, guys at some point between 28 and 45 that have just wanted to get as jacked and lean as possible.
Maybe 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 the stairs or whatever.
I can't touch my toes or my shoulder hurts always.
Um, just again, thinking about people pivoting out of that.
And it seems to me that, uh, 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.
Um, for me, pickleball as a good example, I'm chasing the ball around a thing.
Very British, very British way of, of engaging.
That would be, yeah, maybe not bulls, bulls are polo.
Um, 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 and the physical activity participation literature.
I actually used to teach a class dedicated pretty much to this.
That is encouraging people to participate.
It's health behavior is a trip.
Like we know pretty well what to tell people to do, but then they'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 pallets 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 don't want to talk to, you're maybe kind of done, but if people are like, dude, are you going to make it to jujitsu again?
I heard you healed up.
You're like, I do. I should go back.
I love jujitsu. I'm going back.
Fucking social pressure, usefulness.
That was the thing that I realized when I started doing CrossFit.
And any fighting that you're most training for most people, unless you have a really cool gym training buddy, is you steeping in your own neuroses as you stare in the mirror listening to metal or dark thoughts if it's you.
And, and I realized, oh, this is awesome.
I'm like outsourcing all of my exercise motivation to this group of people around me, it 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 into exercise.
See that? That was good.
Have you considered playing American football?
I played cricket for a long time.
Excellent. That's it.
I don't want people to misconstrue this as us saying you need to bully your friends into 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 it is.
And that internally to people without anyone ever saying anything, you have this thought of like, well, all the guys are at jujitsu, I'm going to go.
Social pressure is a hell of a drug.
It's a big deal. And also what, to the early point, like it should be something that you ideally look forward to and then it's fun.
You don't want physical activity and nutrition, everything in 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 involvement that you have already actually X's 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've got a real good thing going.
Yeah. I suppose there's a few times where a more nuclear option is required.
If you're Ethan Suplee 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?
Yes. Health behavior, health, health behavior.
I didn't even know, but it makes complete sense.
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, morbidity?
Stress has what has been described, I'd say pretty accurately as a hermetic response or, uh, 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 it secretes when it's overwhelmed, or actually like molecules they're studying now that have like longevity enhancing effects.
However, 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 round they're 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, they don't really pay the cost longevity wise.
And it's actually a bit of an enhancer, 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 your new movie, are you excited about it?
And they got these gossed over eyes.
It's not just the heroin that time that's lost 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 that 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, we'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 happened to me when I was a child, she wasn't even around.
Cause 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 and 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, uh, that I can say this in a space where millions of people will see it.
My wife sent me. So, uh, sorry, our, uh, the joke is super old.
Our adopted son, Jared feather, IFBB pro, um, he is like on exactly that level of crystal and eyes psychosis about work, but probably worse, which he considers a great honor, uh, and it is, but also it comes with a trade off.
He's a very amazing pro classic physique competitor.
And you've seen Jared in real life.
Like you're going to see Jared and you're like, why do we even train people that this exists?
I don't even belong to the gym, but Sebum who's in the same division, but has won six Olympias and Jared's placed like top five type six in some shows, but has never cracked that I think he will in the future, but, um, it was your podcast.
You had see them 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.
And it was like, if Crystal was like, LOL, and I was like, LOL, I sent it to Jerry because, and he responded with LOL.
Like, cause 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 who 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?
He's like, 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 are 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, grind, set mentality.
We never say that. Cause 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 that'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 that kind of stress in combination with an equal amount of rest and recovery is the Juvie as the French are inclined to say, I don't even know if that's a term middle of the bell tough because so many of us that are prominent for whatever
the fuck your case, massive success and intellect in my case, my curious head shape, um, you know, 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, pretty good.
If you're composed to do it, if you're composed to do it and you feel both overwhelm and the sneaking suspicion that you're a little bitch and you just need to go harder, you're not going to live as long as other people.
So funny. So I had a call this morning.
I had my first full genomic test done everything.
Uh, I can, I can show you it at some point unless you close the closet now.
Yeah, exactly. It turns out it is genetic.
Who knew? Um, that, uh, we went through and you talk about snips, different snips.
We've got this snip, we've got this snippet, et cetera.
And this is correlated with dot, dot, dot.
This allows you to methylate better.
This allows you to see sections of DNA, right?
There's a percentage number, how rare it is.
Oh cool. Uh, and presumably this is across population data or whatever they've got, uh, 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, 6 % of the population.
You've got two copies of this gene, 4%.
You've got one copy of this gene, 18%, two copies of this, every single one of them.
Dopamine drive, ruminative thoughts, epinephrine, nor genephrine.
Don't clear adrenaline.
Well, like all of the things that will just make you very compulsive, very motivated, very industrious.
And 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 that 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 is passed down?
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, uh, we can actually look at it.
So I was like reading the language of me, the building blocks that I was made for.
Dude, it was so fucking interesting.
I can send you the link.
It was like not that expensive.
It happened in a week.
You just swab 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, uh, you've got two copies of this.
I'm like, yep. In mom and dad and you go, got one copy of this and you can determine which parents, because you go, ah, yeah, that's, that's dad.
That's not mom or whatever.
The other way I brought, I was blown away.
I just can't stop thinking about it all day today.
So, um, yes, 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 yeah, you keep reading that genome.
You'll see some really crazy shit.
Yeah, it was cool. Um, so stress don't have overwhelming periods, uh, have overwhelming periods, but make sure that 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
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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 function health .com slash modern wisdom.
That's function health .com slash modern wisdom.
You mentioned about engagement, some sort of passionate engagement thing.
Yes. A thing you like to do.
Yes. What's that? Let me say something super, super quick about the stress thing.
You can have days and even weeks of extreme stress and it probably won't reduce your lifespan as long as you can commentantly afterwards.
Take days or even weeks of much lower stress until you feel like, yeah, I could, 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, uh, 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 to us holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, et cetera, um, it goes up.
That amount tends to go up and takes longer time to unplug.
Right. And so I remember I had met a gentleman who's a very nice man who was a, uh, a doorman in New York when I was on a vacation with my parents, I was like, my early twenties, went to the Dominican Republic and we were there for like a 10 days, which we thought was a really long time.
He was on vacation for three weeks and it all inclusive of 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 and I was like, that's weird.
Need a one week warmup to my holiday.
Dude, seriously. Cause 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, alright, uh, good to go.
Let's get in the car and drive off.
You're like, hold on a second.
That 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.
The 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 like a type A person with a type B problem or a type B person with a type A problem.
Right. Then 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.
It's been in my head pretty much since our last podcast, uh, white knuckling creativity and how you can't do that.
Uh, the fact that you don't just get to switch on or switch off the industriousness, like drive.
Yeah. Yeah. Motivation.
Yeah. It's a super interesting.
I think it's a really important thing.
Also. Do you really want to look back and just see that all you did was work like an absolute motherfucker 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.
I'll facetious aside for me, it would be an honor to die at work and having been known as a very hard worker, but for most people, they're like, man, there's all this life to live.
I remember, uh, I was in an English class at in college, uh, sorry, uni.
And, uh, I, um, 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, uh, had an opportunity to go, it was in the late sixties.
He had an opportunity to get on a bus and go to like Washington DC to protest something, but he didn't cause 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 one regret was that I
didn't get on that bus.
And 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?
Yeah. So, but for whatever it is, as far as how you want to live your life, which transitions into that next 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 going to help you.
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.
I 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, but you have to pay for that sort of thing.
Yes. 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'm just not up to date on the stuff.
So please ask chat GPT about this.
Ask chat GPT or a Claude 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 there that 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, 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, if I'm going to make it really far, I got to chill all the time
and never involve myself too passionately in anything cause passion gets the heart rate going and that's bad.
On the other hand, you want to consider it as, 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.
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 of people who create inventors statistically outlive like almost everyone.
It's really kind of strange composers outlive almost everyone because it, they have a mission.
And it keeps them seemingly so engaged that it may have some benefits of longevity game in some ways, some maybe this is a maybe, but here's the thing on the longevity side.
It's a maybe on the quality of life side, it's 100 % certainty, which is why it also categorically belongs in this discussion is even though the longevity stuff, the life span is correlated, maybe it's causative, the causation element of quality of life is 100 % of thing.
Your quality of life is measured in a bunch of different ways, but one of them is like, do you, are you really involved in what you're doing?
Do 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, uh, Oh, like I do podcasts and stuff.
And they're like, do you love it?
And you're like, that's all right.
It's a, 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.
You'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 causatively 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 there seems to be this sort of drop off towards death?
People that retire earlier, people that retire later.
Part of that. The other part as a big proponent of science, physically big, not smart, just big.
Um, I want to say that there's almost certainly a big feature of that dynamic.
It'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.
Uh, but, but there may very well be this situation where even if you still got it, if you quit work, your life drains of meaning.
And then yeah, it's probably multifactorial as well, providing you with a 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 your steps in it to, like it's, you know, all of these things work will set you free.
Ah, shouldn't say that to you.
You know, uh, 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 Birkenau or something.
And I was like, it's still right though.
And like, you know, my dad is as Ashkenazi as a guest.
So tell him that shit.
Oi, uh, okay. Other people I've heard that.
I just don't like them.
Chris, 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.
Yes. 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 birth rate decline.
No more adrenochrome, suck the spinal fluid out out.
What is Hollywood even doing to stay young and healthy?
Um, very, very similar statistical picture here.
As to the involvement stuff, passion involvement was something you like is seen in this situation with community and social relations.
Family friends community involvement are very tightly correlated with your longevity.
And 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 it was really great.
Um, it's a big deal and in many cases, People will get all of the socialization they want and no more.
Like I'm in 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.
However, 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 simple. 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.
Now, typically in many cases, it's just not a problem.
Middle school, too many fucking 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.
There 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 hangouts, be it with family and friends, be it with other people, being in a volunteering capacity, you don't have to have like deep closed 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.
We'll get back to talking to Dr.
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Modern wisdom. What you make of Dr.
Robert Walding as stuff is the Harvard longitudinal life study.
There's a, he came on the show.
Uh, and he had found that the single biggest variable in how long people lived was the number of close connections that they have.
I was more than smoking.
It was more than going to the gym, 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 mostly because you're 88.
Yeah, it's just a clock's ticking.
So, um, it, like I said, the, the correlational stuff is a big deal.
There are other ways in which it might not be causation driven.
If you are a curmudge any piece of shit and you're bad to yourself in your own head and you're bad to other people, you just won't have a lot of people around you.
Um, 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 in common with people, they all independently likely correlate or drive longevity.
Cause like when you have more money, you can just before better healthcare in many cases, and also if you have a lot of money, um, you probably high in trait conscientiousness, and so you probably care about your health and also eat well and exercise and all that shit.
Those people just tend to have more social connections than otherwise, but there's, 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, uh, 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, uh, because if you look at our ancestral
history, like lone humans just die real soon.
I'm a fucking lone wolf, bro.
Uh, all right. Here's a spear or just kidding.
You're the females of the tribe actually picked the plant that wraps the head of the spear.
So you don't have a spear anymore.
You have a fucking stick and there's a Buffalo.
This is one of you and that thing weighs 1600 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 loaner shit.
It's just like, I love that fucking lone samurai bullshit.
Like vibes wise, it's awesome.
Like I hate when the psychotic left, it's really like, you know, whatever 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.
And 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, normally 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 and water, just to keep going in a hole in the floor to poop and pee.
They're also going to die real soon because people need all those variables just cause 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.
We're seeing increasingly more as societies get wealthier and older a, 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, consume media at home.
You 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 that it's some kind of magic fairy dust effect.
We'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 purpose is largely gone because you, 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.
You aren't waking up at the right time.
So this sort of correction mechanism for a lot of other shit, having grandchildren and children around for whom you may 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.
Do parents live longer?
Do you know? I have no idea.
Almost certainly they do, but I wouldn't, uh, 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.
One is that in 2024 October.
Am I allowed to say when this was filmed?
Sure. 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 in a wide variety of studies done by different laboratories around the world, and we have a deep understanding of the causal
mechanism behind that I take.
And a man, uh, nicotinamide mononucleotide.
And, um, I was, my clip appeared in some other longevity podcast where I went on a longevity rant on one of my other videos and this longevity expert dude who seemed like sharp guy and knew what he's talking about.
He kind of clowned me on the NMM thing.
So I took another look through the literature and, uh, turns out, actually there is some very decent data for NMM having some, uh, longevity effects and actual mechanistic effects as well.
But the total number of studies on the breadth of populations has been studied on, it's just not enough for me to go sing in its praises all the fucking time, which is why I mentioned it now twice ever in public.
Pulled up for both times.
Yes. And, and so, um, it's just something I take as a hedging mechanism of like, maybe something, uh, I just swallow it, but I swallow a lot of other things.
Most in any case, I won't get in there.
So, uh, again. 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 resveratrol, 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 any more 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's selling you longevity supplements, they could be onto something and there could be some valuable stuff people have in the formulations that 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 going to make you live longer.
And to every single one of them are if their claims are extreme, they're bullshitting you.
What about metformin?
Metformin 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 and 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 it's not 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.
What I'm here to say is in, is in mid to late 2024, it's just not here yet.
And metformin it's not something you just should go out and take should be a conversation with your health provider.
Um, 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, uh, there's literature coming up a little bit now that some of the mechanistic effects that you see with metformin are even higher with some eglotide, uh, and a lot of the new anorectic drugs, the fat loss drugs.
So when people say like, well, I'm going to take this drug, but when I get off that, when I regain the weight and like, yeah, probably.
And they're like, well, so I just got to be on it forever.
Like, uh, huh. And they're like, but isn't that bad for me?
Like, no, it actually might be better for you to be on these drugs than not on these drugs in like seven out of 10 days.
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 porn addiction?
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 toxify your organs over time.
There's definitely a thing.
So there are some things like metformin, some magma tide that are in the conversation for like, Oh neat.
They have little, little longevity boosting effects, but 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 dare I say, anti -capitalist, um, anti -fitness industry, anti -supplement industry that will say the same things as I'm saying, and it'll be true.
Uh, I'm the opposite of all of those things, insanely pro capitalist supplement optimists, et cetera.
I just happen to think like, I don't, first of all, I want to lie to people.
I also don't sell supplements.
I would make any money off that.
Now, if I have to lie to people to make money, holy shit, welcome.
But it is 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.
We 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?
Autophagy. Autophagy.
Autophagy. There's another way to say that.
That's slightly a slur, so.
Which we both are. Yes.
I wake up in the morning and the switch has been flipped.
Always, my switch broke off through violent homosexual intercourse.
It was great time. Got a world record on Grindr.
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 Jack, but it's not that far off.
However, fasting had this thing a few years back where people were 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.
Um, meno henselman's 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 body weight lifetime overall.
So is there no truth to autophagy?
Autophagy happens all the time.
Autophagy itself, uh, can occur in the presence of food or not the presence of food, and if your caloric 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 declivities of if you fast and then feed.
But if you just eat regularly throughout the day, you get these little spikes and the area ends up being like very, at least very similar.
And so if you want to fast, if you suspect that your reading of the literature shows that actually has slight longevity benefits, I'm absolutely not going to stop anyway.
I think maybe that's the case.
Just at a, just a cold reading of the literature, I'm not inclined to believe that fasting has the holy grail.
Right. Like, cause some people like they're on the longevity kick, they're like, so you fast, right?
And they're like, no, they're like, oh, so you're just a fucking idiot.
Like, nah, that ain't it.
What about blue zones?
I don't like the color blue.
I like red zones. You're wearing blue.
Well, I hate shirts.
Awful. GBRS terrible.
Is this blue to you?
I don't know what it is to me.
Maybe I'm color blue.
Sort of blue, blue, green, teal, teal.
I love teal. I love teal Bennett.
Why are various staff members laughing at that?
Regularly when we do these shoots, uh, what it looks like to you, the untrained, unwashed masses, uh, it's just that there's light coming up from places, right?
There's light that everybody doesn't know.
So the fake sun outside and this fake light underneath all of this.
It's not even actual photons.
No, fake light, fake light.
Uh, and you can make these tubes any color that you want.
I 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 sucks.
Yeah, they do. But you're here in your shirt.
Yes. Sorry. Blue zones, blue zones.
Also, the fans are kind of bluish.
So they are 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 specifics of their diets, because here's how it works in fantasy internet land.
You 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 going to just really radically enhance your longevity and ultra specific other foods and diet types that you eat.
They're just going to croak you out real fast.
That's just not it.
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.
Yes. Can human brain interface thing.
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. What are the most promising areas when it comes to the future of aging research, et cetera.
Yeah. I'll probably do this.
I'll try to do this in order of how it's likely to appear in the future.
I'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 in this case, and you gave someone an iPhone fully charged.
And somehow the iPhone works through the time machine to access the modern internet.
It would be to the very best engineers fucking baffling, damn near magic.
But now we take it totally for granted and kids like jump in the pool with their 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's just, 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.
So this is a real thing.
And so when we, people are like, what is 2035 going to be like?
They mostly do a linear approximation extrapolation, but it's also a linear extrapolation with a 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 and you expected shit to suck like, yeah, your uncle probably
got gored by a bison every other day.
Shit was off. So things are going to get much better very quickly and then even faster.
Short of machines killing all of us or world war three crazy shit's going to happen here's roughly how I see the most likely timeline again, huge, just eat the whole salt shaker for this shit.
Buck a grain of salt, all the salt, but it's not good for longevity.
So until as long as your blood pressure is fine, you're good to go.
Okay. So probably one of the first things we're going to see is kaboshing entire categories of disease with insanely powerful drugs.
We're going to 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 kaboshed who the fuck has, you know, anyone polio, like a human.
I mean, 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?
You'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 -Aid's in the future.
Like what's Kool -Aid?
You're like, it's, 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 kabosh entire categories of disease like that, you just take morbidity down, like crazy.
Because living with like chronic cancer or 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 seventies.
That might still be true in about eight years or so, but, uh, the distribution is going to close substantially.
And so the average person might live into their mid eighties, not a ton higher, but like way fewer people are dying.
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.
Uh, David Sinclair 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 are like, this is it.
When's it coming? And it's like, we needed some more time to get this going.
But there's nothing about aging, really.
That precludes re altering the expression of your own DNA to just do better cleanup and reverse your age as you present biologically chronologically.
No time machine yet.
Biologically it's a tractable problem.
There's nothing theoretically about it.
That's like, that's just impossible because again, it seems like, like the shit, the genie from Aladdin wouldn't even do, you know, 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 like, you're probably going to die by the time you're 27.
So if we put one half of your metabolic pathways into doing constant DNA cleanup, you just suck at everything else.
And then you die when you're 18, the world is not sufficiently stable for you.
And, uh, 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 like, get lazy about these anti -aging effects.
And you essentially just continue to live in a roughly 22 year old's body.
They'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 did a hole on my other philosophy channel.
I've done a whole thing about the implications, philosophically, conceptually, socially of what reverse aging is going to be like.
But Chris, can you imagine taking 100 million elderly Americans in 2037 and three months later, they all present as age 22, physically, 22 years old, cognitively sharp, like 22 energy, like 22 titties up, like 22.
What 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.
There's a chance it just never works out.
I would assign that as a low probability of that.
So aging reversal's a big deal.
They talk about this thing you brought up earlier, I think off camera, um, 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 crocodile, you might just never die because you're biologically just always 22.
So the most important thing for everybody now to live longer is to live longer.
So that's a huge statement.
It sounds like a tautology, but it really is a thing.
If you can just make it to the mid 20 thirties, there was a high probability that the, the great gentle, powerful arms of biotech are going to lift you the rest of the way, just go to 2035.
That's where you need to reach you, right?
You know, when the hero grabs the heroin's hand and lifts it into the helicopter, that type of shit.
So because 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 a nursing home who gives a shit up until quite recently, that was like
a valid trade -off you could make.
Like I'm going to live forever.
I'm going to 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 20 thirties, 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.
We 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 variance that basically like you'll just never get Alzheimer's and we know genetic variance that you're
probably going to get Alzheimer's probably really soon if we just rewire your DNA as an adult human, you take some pills or 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, but CRISPR makes these enormous leaps that you almost never hear about in the news is bullshit nerd talk, but now they have a pretty good control of the bacterial genome where they can trade in and switch it on.
Switch it off. 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 20 thirties, some, I should have a book called in the 20 thirties 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 the, so there's one that has 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.
The 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 we'll eventually be able to predict more or less all of the major functions of the metabolism, the human body, and because, uh, if you simulate like the, the, 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 % like functional functional, functional, simulation, so AI, this is absolutely intractable for any human brain to do or any number of groups of scientists on earth working together, but for AI, 2030s
AI, it would, there's a way if you just run the numbers, which like Ray Kurzweil has done, for example, and 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 a soccer ball really are?
Like fucking really complex.
But 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 on a completely different era of humanity, you want to be blue, sweet, you're blue.
You want Alfeers, you got Alfeers, no problem.
Whatever the fuck you want.
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.
So 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 can get to a point where people don't age and they don't die of disease and they're just kind of fucking dope and they even can 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, but here's the real cool stuff happens at some point and Jared feather.
And I have a little running kind of inside bed as to what happens first.
We don't know. At some point cybernetics is going to come in.
What the fuck is 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 ambulate.
It can grab some objects.
You have a little bit of feeling in there interacts with your nerves that shit that in 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 I want to be on record saying this, I'm getting the whole fucking thing done.
I want to 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 cybernetically 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 you 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.
And I'll tell you when this happens.
Um, 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 one's way better.
That is going to be the paradigm.
It already is to artificial limbs, for example.
So whatever the best technological progress speeds with biological progress, or at least technological progress speeds are going to drag you along for the ride.
And here's the thing.
If an, 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 put a fucking bionic arm just for vibes, but if a bionic arm three years later is 10 times better at everything that your arm used to do, then
your real arm, a few of your friends got it.
You're like, dude, you're nuts, bro.
You cut off your own arm.
Like, yeah, like you get tired at work.
Nope. It never gets tired.
Like, dude, I saw you hiking.
Aren't there a lot of like lions and shit around you're like, my arm is like a punch one lion and it just dies.
And like, I'm like, I've laid shoots lasers, whatever.
The lasers 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 way better, people will choose to excise their limbs and various other body parts eyes.
Think about this. Have you ever seen the movie?
Um, ghost in the shell, the cinematic condition it's a Scarlett Johansson's in it, so it's nice even if you put it on mute, but, uh, this one dude gets his eyes fucked up through an explosion.
He's like a special forces dude and he gets, uh, bionic eyes implanted.
And one of the features he talks about, he's like, yeah, they got this, they got that they got miles zoom.
I had to like, remind and go back.
Miles zoom, but 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 going to 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 realize out for shit.
They're like, well, there's a 0 .001 % that surgery goes wrong and you die.
You never can see again.
Fuck that. But if you're 87 and you need a fucking, you know, you can't even see anymore, I'm getting the fucking cybernetic eyes.
So the cybernetic stuff is going to start this process, which has a distinct end.
And that process is replacing human parts with machine parts until we can scan your brain, know 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.
One is sitting dormantly in the cloud so that when your robot body gets crushed by a boulder, cause you decided climbing Mount Everest, you wake up in a bed and you're like, what the fuck?
Where was I? And they're like, yes, you do.
I, this is not a philosophical debate at all.
This is a, this is a giant red herring.
I'll take this one on the chin.
I'm getting really pumped.
I can 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 robot body and turns it off, which one's the real you?
There'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 copy the brain.
So if the real you dies fucking on Mount Everest, and then you get uploaded to a new robot body and you wake up in a hospital bed and they're like, Hey, you died on Mount 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. Uh, you will be the real you in every sense of the word that feels like the real you.
You'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.
I think you'd have psychological continuity from that.
Obviously not from the dying thing.
You're not going to like 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, there I've, uh, 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.
And then it clones the thoughts.
And now there is an, a you that lives in the cloud that's looking over your head with the camera systems and stalling going, Holy shit, I can see into my own fucking that's me right there.
But the you in here, you're just looking up and you're like, okay, is there me?
Did the copying work?
And remember it's scanning everything live.
And so what they do at this is very morbid.
They'd probably do it in a better way, but they go, okay, you ready to for full transfer and you go, uh -huh.
And they go, they just cut your head right off.
So you biologically, you dies, but every part of the brain activity, including your experience of your own death is modeled and experienced live by cyber.
You, so go, Oh my God, I'm dying, 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 and God bless it.
Fuck it. It's weird.
I, 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.
There 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.
Cause in the cloud for 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, the 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 and 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 age reversal.
It shifts again. You make it to cybernetic shifts again.
If whoever makes it to when we're regularly uploading people into the cloud, short of the earth getting hit by a comet and all the computer systems going, you're never going to die.
You know, at some point the protons decay, whatever one times 10 to the one 26 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.
Now's the time to gather shit, especially if you're older, look, if you're 22, you want to smoke a shit load of cigarettes, fine.
You'll probably still make it.
Who gives a shit? You're like, you're, you're in the cloud smoking cigarettes.
I never quit. I never could X that one out.
Jesus. So, but if you're in your forties, especially if in your fifties and sixties and seventies, 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.
And then you're, you know, you're into some cool shit.
Dude, what a hopeful way to finish a conversation about longevity and dying.
Mike is yourself to ladies and gentlemen, dude, thank you so much.
You already know that I love all of this 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, 10 months or so, I told you when we trained together, it's been the, the best gains I've made in probably a decade using the app.
Uh, so I highly recommend people go and check it out at the website, which is.
Like if I know. Don't say that you say that what RP strength .com.
Yes, 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.
