This Nobel Prize Discovery Changes Everything - David Friedberg

0:00 Speaking of prospering, how far off are we from age reversal, do you think?

0:04 That's one I'm most excited about.

0:06 Um, so have you looked at Yamanaka factors

0:08 or have you talked about this on your show before?

0:10 Uh, David Sinclair's been on and I know that he's

0:12 sort of tangentially associated with it, but assume no.

0:16 Do the 30,000 foot view of the Yamanaka factors.

0:19 So, every cell in our body has the same DNA.

0:22 Okay.

0:23 Uh, we know that.

0:24 And the DNA is in every cell because of a process called mitosis.

0:28 Every time we make a new cell,

0:30 from the time we're in the womb to today, we're making new cells.

0:33 Both our entire DNA gets copied over into every cell.

0:36 But what makes my eye look and act differently than my skin?

0:40 If it's got the same DNA, how's it different?

0:43 How's it different than my brain or my tongue or my feet?

0:46 They're all they're all those are different cells.

0:48 There's different cells in different organs in the body.

0:51 Those cells are different because the genes in the DNA are on or off.

0:55 M so there's a bunch of switches and the switches are either on or off

0:59 and that creates cellular differentiation which it's

1:02 what makes one cell different from another cell.

1:04 The eye cell different from the heart cell

1:06 different from the skin cell or the lung cell.

1:08 And the switches that are on or off are these little molecular switches.

1:12 They're molecules that sit on top of the DNA

1:15 and they keep that gene from working.

1:18 It blocks it off and then the other gene is open.

1:21 And when it's open, that means that your cell is making

1:25 RNA copies of that gene and turning it into a protein.

1:28 Zeros and ones.

1:29 Zeros and ones.

1:29 And each gene makes a unique protein.

1:32 The proteins that then come out do a bunch of stuff.

1:36 They're machines.

1:37 They're molecular machines.

1:38 And they're constantly doing all this stuff in your cell.

1:41 And that's what makes every cell different is

1:43 what genes are on and what genes are off.

1:46 And the complexity of this is astounding.

1:50 If you were to think about a cell being the size of Manhattan.

1:53 So imagine a cell is a is a is

1:55 a city the size of Manhattan with 500tory tall buildings.

1:59 That's how big it would be.

2:01 And every person is a protein.

2:03 There's 10 billion people living in this 500 story tall building

2:06 island of Manhattan going in between the buildings up and down

2:09 all day long building stuff together never sleeping always working

2:13 into each other having coffee making

2:14 stuff together breaking stuff together working.

2:17 10 billion of us.

2:18 Those are the proteins in the cell

2:20 in one cell running around doing stuff for 80 years.

2:24 That's one second in one cell.

2:26 That's how complex this is.

2:28 So the proteins that are on or off matter a lot and then they make stuff.

2:32 So that's why the eye cell does totally different

2:33 stuff than the brain cell or the heart cell.

2:36 As we get older, this is the current science on this.

2:40 It looks like what happens is we have DNA breaks.

2:43 DNA gets damaged from radiation and sunlight and bad eating

2:47 and alcohol and all the other As those DNA breaks happen,

2:51 your cell actually fixes the DNA.

2:53 It's very good at fixing it.

2:54 Goes in, there's a bunch of proteins.

2:55 They're the worker proteins that are repaired proteins.

2:57 They go in, they fix the DNA.

2:59 Every time the DNA gets fixed, there's a chance that those ones and zeros,

3:03 those ons and offs, get moved around a little bit.

3:06 And as they get moved around over time, they get moved to the wrong place.

3:11 So what ends up happening over time is that the wrong

3:15 genes get turned on and the right genes can get turned

3:18 off in a cell and then that cell stops working right

3:22 stops the eye cell stops doing what it's supposed to be doing.

3:24 The heart cell stops getting the right

3:27 electrical cascade to flow through the other cells.

3:30 all of the cells the the skin cell becomes a little wrinkled and eventually

3:32 if enough of those cells have

3:34 those epigenetic is what it's called epigenetic errors

3:38 you start getting wrinkles your heart stops beating as well you go blind all

3:41 these sorts of things happen with aging it looks like the root of all disease

3:45 may be aging and aging is a disease so it is a disease rooted

3:50 in the fact that the epigenetic factors

3:52 these little molecules move around in the wrong

3:54 place that's what we discovered is basically aging in 2006 a guy named Shina

3:59 Yamanaka found that he could take four proteins and put them on a cell.

4:05 They would go into the cell and they would move all of those epigenetic markers,

4:08 those ones and zeros to make that cell into a stem cell

4:13 which can then be turned into any other cell in the body.

4:15 So that was the magic thing he won the Nobel Prize for.

4:18 In 2016, another scientist published a series of papers showing that instead

4:22 of putting a lot of those four proteins on the cell,

4:24 you could put a small amount.

4:26 And if you put a small amount, instead of resetting all those molecular markers

4:30 and making that cell back into a stem cell, what it actually does,

4:34 it just moves those markers back to where they're

4:36 supposed to be to make it a young cell.

4:38 And suddenly that retinal cell becomes like a young retinal cell.

4:41 The skin cell becomes a young skin cell.

4:44 The heart cell becomes a young heart cell.

4:46 All of these cells get reset.

4:48 And they did this in mice and they made the mice age to like 250 plus years old.

4:52 They put it in monkeys.

4:53 The wrinkles went away.

4:55 and they've done it in um specifically applying it

4:57 to retinal cells in the eye and reversed blindness.

5:00 So

5:00 this is Sinclair's stuff, right?

5:02 Sinclair has one of these companies that's in clinical trials now.

5:05 And there's dozens of others.

5:06 Altos Labs is like one of the most

5:07 funded startups in history that no one talks about.

5:09 Um they've raised, you know,

5:11 close to probably $10 billion at this point uh to pursue these technologies.

5:15 But basically what this means is we

5:17 are now discovering not just the four proteins,

5:19 but a whole bunch of other little molecules that we can put into a cocktail.

5:23 either we're going to drink it, take it as a shot, uh, uh, or take it as a pill.

5:28 It will get into our cells and it will reset

5:31 the epigenetic of that cell to make it young again.

5:34 They're starting with targeting diseases like a particular like

5:37 like blindness or glaucoma in the eye or, you know,

5:40 rheumatoid arthritis or some other heart issue and they're

5:42 applying these factors to the cells in that tissue only

5:47 locally locally.

5:47 But over time what'll end up happening

5:49 is this becomes a systemic treatment and they're

5:51 already doing it in animal models and then you can either do it continuously

5:56 or what I think will end up happening is we'll probably have a system

5:58 whereby these factors will be continu when I say the word factor I mean protein.

6:03 These proteins can be continuously made

6:05 and released inside our body as they're needed.

6:09 So we maintain our youth and we will live theoretically for as long as we want.

6:15 That's where this is headed.

6:16 And the technology shows now that we can do this in animals.

6:19 We can re redose them, redose them, and keep them.

6:22 Has it been done systemically yet?

6:24 You mentioned Yeah.

6:25 This is the mouse the mouse model where they've made these mice.

6:28 The equivalent of like having someone live like 200 plus years old,

6:31 you know, and this is like so early, they haven't even optimized the molecules.

6:34 They haven't optimized how you deliver the molecules.

6:36 They haven't optimized the dosing.

6:38 They haven't optimized the method of the do.

6:40 Like there's all these techniques that are going to be developed on top of this.

6:44 For every one year we can extend average human lifespan,

6:46 we're adding tens of trillions of dollars to GDP, right?

6:49 So this is also another big economic driver.

6:51 But it's not just how long people live,

6:52 it's how healthy they are and how energetic they are and how happy they can be

6:56 and they can now go out and not feel all the pain and have the disease.

7:00 You know, theoretically, this can lead to a reversal in rates

7:03 of cancer proliferation or reversal in diabetes or reversal

7:07 in many of these other diseases that are fundamentally

7:09 rooted in this kind of failure of your epigenome.

7:13 the the markers that are turn your genes on and off.

7:16 So this is a technology category that I am like I think is one

7:21 of these other things that you can kind of think about the compounding effect

7:23 free energy right like AI automation um uh and you know infinite labor uh

7:30 for people to do all the things they want to do and potentially living forever.

7:34 I mean you start to think about how these all kind of compound.

7:36 That's why I'm excited about the future.

7:38 like these very quickly become these sort of compounding

7:41 effects that drive us into a happier tomorrow.

7:43 And then again it becomes a question of abundance.

7:45 How do you want to spend your time you know again 100 years ago I don't

7:48 think people would have had the job option

7:50 of being a yoga instructor or being a podcaster

7:53 or being a wedding photographer or you know

7:55 go down the list like there's so many things that people have found joy in doing

7:58 with their time and they can be productive doing it.

8:01 I think more of that starts to happen tomorrow and it's

8:05 less of the like you got to go work the corporate

8:07 shitty job on a trading floor in a corporate office

8:10 at a cubicle or you know in a factory or all

8:13 the things that maybe we will look back one day

8:16 and say hey that was kind of limiting human potential like maybe

8:20 humans could do a lot more and maybe they should

8:22 and these shifts to more abundance give us that opportunity to do that.

8:26 How far do you think we're off from getting

8:28 to the stage where we can do age reversal?

8:32 One decade, five decades, way less than that.

8:36 Way less than that.

8:36 We are in clinical trials now on several of these cocktails.

8:43 And if there's always a risk in going from animals to humans,

8:46 but we've done it with human cells in um in vitro in in a petri dish,

8:52 and we see the effect that we are expecting to see.

8:54 So we have a lot of reasons to believe that you know over

8:59 the next 10 to 20 years um more of this starts to proliferate.

9:05 We've heard Peter Demandis' idea of longevity

9:07 escape velocity right that you need to stick

9:10 about every year that you live means that you're going to live a little

9:13 bit longer but that when you cross a particular threshold you just need to stick

9:17 about until this happens essentially or whatever

9:19 the equivalent is whatever the technology is.

9:21 Yeah, it allows you to extend lifespan indefinitely.

9:24 I think it's fair.

9:25 You just hold on.

9:26 Hold on.

9:26 It's It's probably the best long-termist view for looking after your health.

9:34 Yeah.

9:34 That now is not the time to it, right?

9:36 Totally.

9:37 Because in the past, there wasn't really any reason to stick about.

9:40 Yeah.

9:40 You're going to live 80 years or 70 years or 60 years,

9:43 but you know, you're playing around with fives and tens.

9:45 Whereas if the difference is between 80 and 100 or 80 and 120.

9:51 Yeah.

9:51 You're like, "Hey, keep it together." And by the way,

9:54 a lot of like the number one thing you can do to fix your epigenome,

9:57 which you can do without taking these drugs, is exercise.

10:00 Fasting.

10:00 Well, fasting helps.

10:02 Uh fasting does have an effect,

10:03 but exercise like exercise releases molecules that in many cells in your body

10:07 will go in and start to address the epigenome and make you more youthful.

10:11 And then there's other things that you can start to take.

10:13 some of this peptide stuff that people are

10:15 crazy about has shown that it has an effect.

10:17 Um, some of I I don't want to be prescriptive on these things.

10:20 Um, but there's a lot of ways that uh you can start to kind of edge your way

10:27 Mhm.

10:26 before all the big clinical stuff is done and and the big,

10:29 you know, products come out to market.

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