- 12 hours ago
Today, more people are living past 100 than ever before — even though the maximum human lifespan hasn't moved past 115 years. But is that about to change?
I spent months talking to medical researchers, biohackers, and centenarians. I also went through a $12,000 battery of testing at a longevity clinic to find out how long I might live.
We cover everything that could radically extend human lifespan, including FDA-approved drugs, cellular reprogramming, and Bryan Johnson's $2 million "Don't Die" protocol.
I spent months talking to medical researchers, biohackers, and centenarians. I also went through a $12,000 battery of testing at a longevity clinic to find out how long I might live.
We cover everything that could radically extend human lifespan, including FDA-approved drugs, cellular reprogramming, and Bryan Johnson's $2 million "Don't Die" protocol.
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00Humans have doubled average life expectancy over the last two centuries.
00:04But the ceiling? It hasn't budged.
00:06Our maximal human lifespan is 115 years. This is statistics.
00:13But is that about to change?
00:14I've spent the past few months speaking to the pioneers who aren't just trying to push the limit on human
00:20lifespan.
00:20They want to eliminate it entirely.
00:23It will be a blink of an eye that we will go from, we're all dead, to, wow, maybe not.
00:30And I even went to a longevity clinic to find out how long I might live.
00:34They told me that about 15% of people who go through this array of testing find something that they
00:40need to do something about immediately.
00:42My father died last year, almost exactly one year ago, from pancreatic cancer.
00:47So this is a very personal journey for me.
00:50And I'm feeling definitely lightheaded.
00:51So why is it almost impossible to live past 115?
00:55And will anyone alive today be the first to escape death?
01:03And then you said you like these?
01:05It's hard to grasp just how much Helen Glover has beaten the odds.
01:10I don't have any friend that's over 90.
01:14Helen outlived her husband.
01:15I was married to him for 82 wonderful years.
01:18No, I'm sorry, 85.
01:21And two of her sons.
01:23And I saw him lying in that bed with his eyes shut.
01:26And I said, Mama's here.
01:30He was 82 when he died.
01:32Once you reach about age 30, your chance of dying doubles roughly every eight years.
01:36And you see that across populations, from poor countries to wealthy countries, it doesn't matter.
01:40That's called the Gompertz Law.
01:43It was first described in 1825.
01:45And it remains one of the most robust facts in human biology until today.
01:52At birth, the chance of dying within the next year is relatively high.
01:56That's the impact of infant mortality.
01:58But after that first year, the risk falls dramatically.
02:02And for decades, this line increases only gradually.
02:06Then something important happens.
02:08The risk of death goes from linear to exponential.
02:11And this is where we see the Gompertz Law in action.
02:14After age 30, mortality risk doubles every eight years.
02:18Then by age 105, the chance of dying basically flattens out around 50%.
02:24Basically a coin toss every year.
02:26And that rate of infant mortality may have seemed high at half a percent.
02:31But throughout most of human history, it was much, much higher.
02:35About 30%.
02:36That means one in three children died within their first year.
02:40That all started to change radically over the course of Helen's lifespan.
02:44What happened in those 150 years is we did a lot of prevention.
02:50We cleaned the water.
02:52We built sores.
02:54We have vaccination.
02:55So a lot of those prevention allow us to get older and older.
03:00Helen was born in 1917.
03:02A time when one in ten babies didn't survive until their first birthday.
03:06Children died by the millions from diseases we now treat with a five-day course of antibiotics.
03:12There wasn't even a polio vaccine until Helen was almost 40.
03:15Helen managed to hit age 100, avoiding the top two age-related killers that take out half of us.
03:21Cancer and heart disease.
03:22And now at 108, she's active and sharp as a tack.
03:26I'm setting you up if I do that.
03:28Uh-oh.
03:30I better not do that.
03:32Not only they live long, they live healthy.
03:35They get diseased 30 years after their children get diseased.
03:39Helen did have a fall a few years ago, and that required brain surgery.
03:43Since then, she's had to use a walker.
03:45But here's the thing.
03:46Helen didn't try to live so long.
03:48She just did.
03:49In the past 100 years, did you do anything special in terms of your diet, your health, your routine?
03:58I don't think so.
04:01My parents, my father made good money.
04:03We always had a cook and ate well and didn't do anything special.
04:10Studies have shown that the higher you go up on the longevity curve, the less individual habits matter.
04:17Exactly how much remains an area of debate.
04:20Jean Calment set the world record when she died at 122 years old.
04:25She famously drank red wine, enjoyed dark chocolate, and smoked until age 117.
04:32One recent study showed that once you account for random things like accidents and infections,
04:38up to half of how long we live comes down to inheritance.
04:43So the current theory is that super-agers carry dozens, if not hundreds, of small genetic advantages
04:49that together delay the things that kill the rest of us.
04:53So if the reason that Helen Glover lived so long is half luck, what can I do to live longer?
05:00I went to California to find out.
05:04Okay, here we are.
05:07Bye Waymo.
05:09Human Longevity is located in Silicon Valley, right near the San Francisco airport.
05:13It's one of the first clinics in America to offer a suite of tests under one roof
05:17that together paint a high-resolution picture of your current health and future risks.
05:22Good morning.
05:22Yes, that's me.
05:24Thank you so much.
05:25Nice to meet you.
05:26You too.
05:26First one.
05:27All right.
05:28The largest one.
05:28Wow, thank you.
05:29They put me in this large sort of conference room where you can get comfortable, get situated.
05:34They told me that about one in ten clients find something from this testing, like a tumor,
05:39that they need to act on immediately.
05:41However, this level of insight comes with a steep price tag, often ranging from $8,000 to $20,000
05:47for a full workup.
05:49And before I share the rest of this experience, please know that we didn't get this service
05:52for free.
05:53I paid a special discounted media rate.
05:55So what we're going to be doing next is I'm going to be taking you with me to do the
06:00rest of the stuff, like I mentioned, vitals, EKG, in-body, blood draw.
06:04I did want to mention there's a urine cup in the restroom.
06:06We want you to start voiding the first couple of drops into the toilet, and then you're going
06:09to hold the stream, open the wipe that's next there, next to the cup, clean the opening
06:14of the urine track, and then proceed with the rest of the collection into the cup.
06:17So you have to stop?
06:18Yes.
06:19Stop and start?
06:20Yes.
06:21That might be the hardest thing I have to do today.
06:24The day got going with pretty standard stuff.
06:26Blood pressure, temperature, pulse check.
06:28You just film that I'm wearing two pairs of socks.
06:31All right.
06:33That might not make the final cut.
06:35Then I stood on an in-body machine.
06:37Do not talk or move during the test.
06:39Which measures body composition.
06:41For the record, it's 246.
06:44Next up, the EKG.
06:47Then I did a few tests that aren't part of a normal checkup.
06:50Ah, that one hurt.
06:54This machine measured calcification in my arteries.
06:57The echocardiogram checked my heart function.
07:00And the DEXA scan measured my bone density.
07:05And I see you're all nose.
07:06Just want to make sure you're not wearing any medication patches, glucose modifiers, insulin
07:09pumps.
07:10The test that took the longest was the full body MRI.
07:14Is that comfortable?
07:15Yes.
07:15Okay.
07:16Great.
07:16All right.
07:17You ready?
07:17I'm ready.
07:18All right.
07:19We're going to get started.
07:20And the hardest part was the blood draw.
07:23One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.
07:26About to give 15 vials of blood drawn from my arm.
07:31And we'll see how I feel after that.
07:33By the way, if you like what you see, don't forget to like and subscribe, Business Insider
07:37YouTube.
07:38After that much blood loss, I started to feel lightheaded.
07:42The champagne of apple juice, Martinelli's.
07:45But it's a small price to pay.
07:47For the information I'll get back about my future health.
07:50This lavender vial here is the one that's going to go for the genomic sequencing.
07:54All you need is one vial to get like a full profile of a lot of the things that I'll
08:00be
08:00finding out.
08:01You know, including how you metabolize coffee and alcohol and how you metabolize different
08:06drugs.
08:07In addition to, I think, you know, your risk factors for other diseases.
08:14It took about three weeks to get my initial results back from human longevity.
08:18Over the nearly hour-long call with Dr. Pearson, I learned a ton of new information.
08:24But I'm just covering the biggest revelations here.
08:26The whole body MRI looked clean.
08:29So did the liquid biopsy, which is also known as a grail test that tests for over 50 kinds
08:35of cancers.
08:36Your weight was 246 pounds.
08:39Technically, I'm obese.
08:40Of those 246 pounds, 58 pounds were fat.
08:45That gives you a 23.6% body fat.
08:50On the other hand, I'm also very muscular.
08:52Your skeletal muscle index is actually very, very good.
08:56Skeletal muscle index, or SMI, is your weight in kilograms of muscle divided by your body's
09:04surface area.
09:05Your score was 9.8, close to 10.
09:08That's very, very high for a man, almost in the elite athlete category.
09:13My genetic tests were ready after about three months, and I'm happy to report that I have
09:18no additional risk for cancer.
09:20Again, we didn't find anything for you, which is absolutely great.
09:24I have an elevated risk for two neurological diseases.
09:28You have one copy of APOE3 and one copy of APOE4.
09:33So your lifetime risk for Alzheimer's is just like slightly increased compared to the general
09:38population.
09:39I will just say that my initial reaction to this is somewhat alarmed because that means that
09:45there's a one in four chance that I will get dementia.
09:48So for Parkinson's disease, you're in the 99th percentile for that.
09:53Your risk is up to 2.7 times higher than that.
09:58Wow.
09:59So your lifetime risk is about 2.7 percent.
10:03How do we feel about that?
10:05Uh, not great.
10:06Finally, a piece of good news.
10:08I have one of the genes that contributes to longevity.
10:11This FOXO3 gene we think could be related to a person's likelihood of living past the age
10:16of 90 or older.
10:18Some people who are like super agers had certain changes in this gene.
10:22You have one of those changes, which is why it says you're likely to live to the age of
10:2690 or older, which is great.
10:28Yeah, my maternal grandfather lived to be 98.
10:32I want to show you something.
10:33This is a photo of my grandparents.
10:35That's Grandpa Dan, who I'm named after.
10:38And this is a picture of him around age 94, 95, climbing to the top of a Mayan pyramid in
10:46Guatemala.
10:46And this is a photo from another trip we took where he's climbing to the tallest point in
10:51the Galapagos Islands.
10:52So, according to my genetic test results and looking at my family history, on the one hand,
10:58I have some things stacked in my favor to live a long life.
11:02On the other hand, cancer took out my dad before his 73rd birthday, and that's very recent for me.
11:08So, now that I know these things, what can I actually do to make a difference on the rest
11:14of my life?
11:14It turns out that part of the answer is already on the shelf at my local pharmacy.
11:19Okay, side note, I'm not getting the actual drugs right now, just the packaging, okay?
11:23So, I'm not getting free longevity drugs that aren't prescribed for me.
11:27Just want to be clear.
11:27Thank you so much, Rita.
11:29Have a wonderful day.
11:30Be well.
11:38We actually have four FDA-approved longevity drugs, although you might not know that we
11:44have that, but we do.
11:46None of these drugs were designed to slow aging.
11:49Each one was invented to treat something else, and the longevity benefits were discovered
11:54after the fact.
11:54The cleanest example is metformin.
11:57It started out as a folk remedy.
11:59It's an extract of the French lilac.
12:01In the 1920s and 1950s in Europe, people notice that if you take this extract, it can treat
12:08arthritis, it can prevent flu, you know, maybe malaria, lots of other things.
12:13But also, they've noticed that people who are taking these drugs, and if they have diabetes,
12:19it lowers glucose.
12:20But now, after decades of prescribing it to treat type 2 diabetes, researchers have something
12:26they never could have built from scratch.
12:28A huge pool of data to make decisions about public health.
12:33People on metformin had less cardiovascular disease.
12:35They have less cognitive decline in Alzheimer's.
12:37They have less cancers, and they die less, their mortalities decrease.
12:41That pattern, a drug prescribed to treat one thing, and then outperforming on other health
12:46measures, is not unique to metformin.
12:49Researchers have at least three more.
12:52First is a class of drug that's called SGLT2 inhibitor.
12:59They were meant for diabetes, and in diabetics and non-diabetic patients, they prevent renal
13:08disease, cardiovascular disease, and overall mortality.
13:12Another drug is osteoporotic drugs in a class that's called ethidronate.
13:18Women who take ethidronate and get to ICU, they don't die.
13:23Really fascinating, fascinating drug.
13:26And the fourth one is Ozampic, which are the GLP-1 agonists.
13:33It turns out that ethidronate is actually discontinued in some places in favor of better
13:38drugs to treat osteoporosis.
13:40And recent research has brought into question whether or not metformin has the longevity
13:45benefits originally thought.
13:47In any case, even the experts say that for someone my age, taking metformin isn't such
13:52a good idea.
13:53Metformin is not good for young people.
13:55It decreases their growth hormone level, which is good when you're young and not good when
13:59you're old.
14:00It decreases in men the testosterone sometimes.
14:03It prevents them to get their muscle to be as big if they exercise.
14:09So this is not a drug for young.
14:12This is a drug for somebody who starts to have this breakdown of aging.
14:16So here's the kicker.
14:18None of these drugs will get you to 115.
14:21They might get you to 90 in better shape than you otherwise would be.
14:25I'm not talking about people living forever.
14:27I'm talking, you know, maybe a 5% increase in lifespan, maybe a 10% increase in lifespan.
14:32That's kind of what I'm thinking.
14:33And I do think that's certainly feasible in the next few decades.
14:36There really is no supplement that has been convincingly shown to improve healthspan or
14:42longevity in people.
14:44What about other treatments like peptides or NAD, which is an injectable that I've actually
14:49tried before?
14:50It's not that those things can't make you feel better or that they're dangerous.
14:53It's just that there isn't enough long-term data to say definitively that they can extend
14:59human life.
15:00Supplements, everybody can buy.
15:02And we don't know what's in there.
15:04And we don't know if it's safe.
15:06And we don't know how it interacts with other drugs.
15:12So if drugs are only moderately effective at extending human life, what does science say
15:19actually works?
15:23For every one of us, before we talk about drugs, we can optimize or maximize four things.
15:31Our exercise, our diet, the sleep, and social connectivity.
15:38Take a look at these senior athletes, and you'll see how healthy habits set the course
15:42for their golden years.
15:43I've always exercised.
15:45Okay.
15:45Even as a young person, I always.
15:47And even before I swam, I went to the gym because they're at Acerlevy on 23rd and FDR.
15:56They had classes.
15:57And I would go there in the morning.
15:59Basically, I've always been an athlete.
16:01Ever since I was a kid, you know, I really enjoyed playing.
16:03You know, back in the day, we used to play stand-by football, basketball, soccer.
16:09Here's what the science says.
16:11VO2 max is one of the best predictors of overall cause of mortality.
16:16In other words, if you have a higher VO2 max, you're less likely to die than somebody who
16:21has a lower VO2 max.
16:23According to my whoop, my VO2 max is 44.
16:26The average score for men is 35 to 40.
16:29Brian Johnson brags about his elite score of over 64.
16:32The highest ever reported at 101 belongs to Christian Blumenfeld, a world-class triathlete.
16:39The good news is that VO2 max can be improved by alternating high-intensity workouts combined
16:44with low-intensity steady-state cardio.
16:46After age 40, strength training becomes a non-negotiable.
16:50That's because you lose up to 1% of your muscle mass every year after that.
16:53It turns out that grip strength is actually a really good indicator of how long you'll live.
16:59It's not about the strength in your hands.
17:01It's that this test is a proxy for your overall strength that you'll need to be aging healthily.
17:07I got this one on Amazon.
17:09And the way that it works is first you tell the strength trainer if you're male or female.
17:14Then you put in your age.
17:16And I'm going to put in 39.
17:17Okay.
17:18And then you hit start.
17:20So let's see what I score right now.
17:25Oh, not too bad.
17:26So this says the score was 65 kilograms.
17:28And that's considered strong for a male who's 39 years old.
17:32Studies have shown that for each 5 kilogram drop in grip strength, it leads to a 16% increase
17:39in all-cause mortality.
17:41In other words, the weaker your grip, the more likely you are to die young.
17:45When it comes to diet, caloric restriction has been shown to extend the lifespan in more
17:51organisms, from mice to yeast to worms, than any other intervention.
17:57And many studies indicate that incorporating whole foods instead of processed foods leads
18:02to better health outcomes.
18:04Here's what Tom, the 80-year-old power lifter, eats.
18:07The diet that I follow is low in added sugars, low in saturated fats.
18:13What that translates into is limiting fast food.
18:18Insufficient sleep is one of the strongest mortality predictors we can do something about.
18:22Since getting my results back from human longevity, this is the main thing I started taking seriously.
18:27I got a whoop to measure sleep scores and this red light therapy thing to help me wind down.
18:32I even met the guy who invented it.
18:34I'm here with the doctor, and the doctor's in the house.
18:36Are you a doctor?
18:37Well, I have a PhD, but not in medical science.
18:40I have a co-founder who is a medical doctor.
18:42Okay, good enough.
18:43So now I try to be in bed every night by 10 p.m.
18:45In the short term, prioritizing sleep has been the most beneficial change I made.
18:50Studies suggest the mortality risk from loneliness is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
18:55Helen's life centered around her faith community.
18:58When I grew up, I taught vacation Bible school when I was a teenager.
19:03I was a Sunday school organist, and I was secretary of the upper league.
19:07So I grew up in the church.
19:09And data consistently shows that married individuals outlive their single counterparts.
19:14So exercise, diet, sleep, and social connection, these seemingly basic things have the biggest impacts.
19:20So even if I spend the rest of my life doing all the things we've discussed so far,
19:25I should have a long and healthy life.
19:26But if that's my goal, how can I measure if these behaviors are making an impact?
19:34You've probably heard this term, pace of aging.
19:37And what that means is that, in my case, I'm turning 40 later this year.
19:42But based on my biometrics, my WHOOP calculates my age as 35.
19:48So how does that work?
19:51My name is Steve Horvath.
19:52I'm the inventor of the epigenetic clock, which measures aging.
19:57As we age, chemical tags called methyl groups attach to our DNA in predictable patterns,
20:02turning genes on or off.
20:04Horvath's breakthrough was an algorithm that reads methylation
20:08and estimates a person's age from almost any tissue in the body to within a few years.
20:14A UCLA colleague handed Horvath a data set gathered from sets of twins
20:19to answer an entirely different question.
20:22Can genetics determine sexual orientation?
20:25Horvath has a twin brother who's gay, so he decided to look at the data.
20:30And so I was very interested in that topic for personal reasons
20:34and analyzed his data set, this methylation data set,
20:39and saw no signal whatsoever for homosexuality.
20:44Then I just said, let me see whether there's an aging effect.
20:48And the rest is history, because the minute I looked for aging effects,
20:52I was really blown away at the very strong signal for aging.
20:57Today, anyone can find out their biological age.
21:00Dozens of tests claim to measure it using saliva and blood samples
21:04or by combining other metrics.
21:06My WHOOP actually calculates my age at around 35,
21:09which is four years younger than I am now.
21:12And then I took the labs that I got from Human Longevity
21:14and plugged them into this online calculator
21:17called the Bortz Blood Age Calculator.
21:19And this came up with my age as 35.6.
21:23So you could see that even with these age calculators,
21:25there's a little bit of variance in the results you get.
21:28The science on this remains squishy, but some people believe
21:31that they can keep their pace of age low enough to actually escape death.
21:35There's this concept called longevity escape velocity
21:38that today, for every year that you're alive,
21:41science is extending your life for about a third of the year.
21:44And there'll be some point in the future that for every year that you're alive,
21:47science is extending your life for more than a year.
21:50And when we reach that, that concept is longevity escape velocity.
21:53You know, the point is, it's not 50 years away.
21:57It's the next, you know, 15 to 20 years away.
22:00And some people have turned that quest into a kind of sport.
22:06The Longevity Cup is a year-long competition to lower biological age.
22:11And these three winners each took home a cash prize.
22:14The reason why it needs to exist is because I believe we might have a chance
22:21to achieve longevity escape velocity through competitions rather than other kinds of work.
22:29Are you talking about literally not dying?
22:32Yes, I am talking about literally not dying.
22:3653-year-old Michael Lustgarden won first place.
22:39He reduced his biological age by 22.1 years.
22:43I have more than 60 blood tests overall over that 10-year span.
22:46And I also test eight times per year.
22:49Michael documents his routine on his website and YouTube channel in extreme detail.
22:53He eats one big meal each day.
22:55And his bodyweight workouts focus on mobility.
22:58The question is, how deep do you want to go down the rabbit hole after that?
23:01You've got to know the what's under the hood stuff, cells, proteins, metabolites, etc.
23:05These longevity athletes do take supplements.
23:08Possibly the most recommended one and research one is creatine.
23:12So I would perhaps take that or recommend that.
23:16But I was surprised to find out that they aren't shelling out a huge amount every month.
23:20A hundred dollars a month.
23:22Maximum 200.
23:24No more.
23:25So this is not out of reach.
23:28Definitely not in the developed world.
23:30For an average person.
23:32But there's one man who's already spent millions of dollars in his quest to achieve immortality.
23:38Meet the final boss of longevity.
23:40Brian Johnson.
23:43You've probably already seen some of Brian's extreme habits online.
23:47Yeah, a lot of people perceive my endeavor to be like this crazy rich guy doing weird things.
23:53And hopefully what I can explain to you today is actually what we're doing is very practical.
23:57My colleague, Hilary Brick, toured his high-tech home in 2024.
24:02We try to have perfect air, perfect water, and perfect light.
24:07Yeah, like it is a pharmacy in here.
24:08Everything you see in here is either measuring something or doing a therapy.
24:12Brian rotates his mostly vegetarian meals and has experimented with hundreds of supplements.
24:18This is a morning drink.
24:19This is Blueprint Longevity Mix.
24:21And it has 20 capsules into one drink.
24:23So give it a go.
24:24Okay, it smells kind of like Tang.
24:26He works out every day.
24:28And his home gym is filled with expensive recovery devices.
24:31Like, sauna has really good evidence.
24:34Like, there's a very good basis to start.
24:35Same with hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
24:38Brian is ruthless about getting into bed at the same time every day.
24:41But some of his stunts have caused cringeworthy reactions online.
24:45Like taking blood plasma from his son and then injecting his plasma into his father.
24:50Like, I never imagined in my entire life this kind of relationship with my child.
24:55Or posting about intimate moments with his girlfriend.
24:59Brian tweeted this on April 29th.
25:01Just gave Kate oral sex.
25:04Good night, everyone.
25:06This is her vaginal microbiome report.
25:08100 out of 100 score.
25:10Top 1% of all vaginas.
25:13Okay, I think we've had enough of this.
25:15But I guess that's the price you pay to become the internet's most famous longevity biohacker.
25:19You're a lot more in your face, you know, with some of the stuff you're putting out there.
25:24Was that a conscious effort?
25:25Or was it because you took shrooms?
25:30Yeah, I mean, this whole thing has been play.
25:35I started this as a scientific experiment.
25:37And then we just kind of messed around.
25:41Like, you know, I started posting nudes.
25:43You know, I live stream shrooms.
25:45I'm going to be doing 5-MeO DMT in the next week and a half.
25:48Oh boy.
25:49Now Brian's offering his $2 million protocol to others at a discount.
25:54$1 million to access all the treatments he does.
25:57We have tons of diggers.
25:58Yeah, in fact, we have more people who we can accommodate.
26:01Brian's 48 years old, but he told us he's got the skin of someone in their late 20s
26:05and the heart and lungs of an 18-year-old.
26:07So when does he think he'll achieve longevity escape velocity?
26:11I mean, I think I said that we would achieve it by 2039, where we would achieve biological
26:16escape in mortality, where one year of time would pass and I would stay the same age.
26:21But longevity scientists don't seem to be on board with this idea.
26:26According to others in the longevity space, Brian could be popularizing treatments that
26:30at best have no effect, and at worst, cause actual harm.
26:35Nothing is proven yet.
26:37People take these interventions without understanding what can be the long-term consequences of these
26:45interventions.
26:45I wouldn't suggest anyone to try it on yourself.
26:50First of all, Brian is a data set of one.
26:52He only experiments on himself.
26:54To be fair, he does discontinue doing things that don't have measurable health impacts.
26:59But that's not how public health research really works.
27:02The FDA-approved drugs we talked about earlier use data collected from thousands of people
27:07over decades.
27:08Also, don't forget that Brian's selling his own line of supplements.
27:12In fact, the Academy of Longevity scientists are struggling to separate themselves from influencers
27:17like Brian.
27:18For me, as the president of the academy that has all those people who are doing geroscience
27:22research,
27:23on one hand, I have to come and say, I'm really excited.
27:29I mean, the here is now, we kind of have lots of data.
27:32On the other hand, there is a lot of noise.
27:35The more we have progress in the science, the more noise there is.
27:38And that's not science at all.
27:40If somebody comes and say, we could live right now to be 150 years, that's, you cannot say.
27:48But there are new technologies that could reverse aging.
27:51And even the most conservative scientists have to admit they show promise.
27:56And these therapies target the most basic building blocks of life.
28:0220 years ago, a Japanese scientist named Shinya Yamanaka made a discovery that could change
28:08medicine forever.
28:09In Yamanaka, I discovered that just turning on four genes would be enough to take any fully
28:17grown adult cell all the way back to pluripotent stem cell, which is the stem cell that could
28:23make any kind of tissue.
28:24These four genes are now known as the Yamanaka factors.
28:27He won the Nobel Prize for his research in 2012.
28:31But researchers soon discovered that reversing aging comes with risks.
28:34Two of the factors are oncogenes, and that means when they're overexpressed, they help the cell
28:42to become proliferative, dividing without limit.
28:45So there is always in this reprogramming, there's always this cancer risk that people have to worry
28:53about.
28:53And people are trying to get around it by asking, can we reprogram them transiently?
28:59Just give a little burst of the Yamanaka factors, turn them on, and then figure out how to turn
29:05them off.
29:06It took another decade to start to tackle that hazard.
29:08In 2016, Spanish scientist Juan Carlos Ispisua Belmonte showed that briefly activating Yamanaka
29:15factors in mice could partially reverse signs of aging and extend life.
29:19The treatment targeted the animal's epigenetics.
29:22If DNA is the hardware, epigenetics is the software that tells the genes when to turn on,
29:28when to stay silent, and what kind of cell to become.
29:31Over time, those software instructions begin to break down.
29:34When you age, a lot of epigenetic signature to turn genes on is not as good as it was when
29:42you were young.
29:43So the Ispisua experiments reset some of the epigenetic changes that accumulate over time,
29:48without fully turning the cells back into stem cells.
29:51And the idea is, if you do it transiently, you minimize the cancer risk.
29:55If I hadn't seen the papers that came out in the last few years, I would have thought
30:00this was a relatively far-fetched idea for aging.
30:04And now companies like the Jeff Bezos-backed Altos Labs are trying to commercialize this
30:08technology.
30:09A number of others are going from a skin cell to an induced pluripotent stem cell, growing
30:16these stem cells to a large amount, differentiating them into a liver, and then growing you a
30:22liver based on your genetic code.
30:24Now, here's the reality check.
30:26In January 2026, the FDA cleared the first-ever human trial of a reprogramming therapy, Life
30:32Bioscience's ER100, a gene therapy for two age-related diseases, glaucoma, and a rarer condition
30:40called NAION.
30:42It uses three of the four Yamanaka factors, with the cancer-linked one deliberately left out.
30:47I mean, the eye is essentially nervous system tissue, the optic nerve, and so on.
30:52So those things, I think, if they worked, could be a real benefit.
30:58But scale matters.
30:59This is roughly 18 patients, two eye diseases, and it's designed only to test whether the
31:04therapy is safe, not whether it reverses aging.
31:07Still, it doesn't mean it might not one day take off.
31:10For example, in 50 years, when you'll be 20, you'll come and get a treatment, maybe an
31:17IV treatment, and we'll erase the aging from your cells, and maybe you'll be able
31:24to pass 115.
31:26But this is not the science that we have now.
31:30So now we've arrived at the biggest question.
31:33If everything we've discussed so far, lucky genes, good habits, drugs, and emerging cell
31:38therapies, can't guarantee that we live past 115, what about the sci-fi idea of freezing
31:44our bodies to wake up in the future?
31:47One of the things that you get really excited about when diving into the field of cryopreservation
31:51is you realize that this technology has already been in use for over 40 years on human tissues
31:56and cells.
31:57So cryopreservation isn't purely theoretical.
32:00It's just that scaling from an embryo to a full human body is an engineering challenge
32:04of a completely different order.
32:06We know how to freeze things.
32:07You know, that's easy, but bringing it back is the hard part.
32:11Here's how one company that actually freezes people does it.
32:14Freezing means ice crystals.
32:16They destroy the tissue, and nothing would work after if you freeze it.
32:20So we do what is called cryopreservation, or the technical term is vitrification, using
32:27a so-called cryoprotective agent, which is pretty much a medical-grade antifreeze, bring the tissue
32:32to a vitrified state, which you can think of as a glass-like, amorphous state.
32:38It's a fluid, but the viscosity is so tremendously high that nothing moves anymore.
32:43The trick here is that with that technology, you can preserve tissue, organs, or whole organisms,
32:50including humans, for pretty much indefinite timeframes.
32:54It doesn't matter if it's 10 years, or 20, or 100, or even 1,000 years.
32:57So cryopreservation, I think the best way to think about it is to think of it as a stopgap
33:03measure, as a bridging technology.
33:05Even the people selling this technology can't guarantee it.
33:08That is what is called the aspirational goal of the scientific research.
33:14So aspirational goals don't mean they're going to happen.
33:17And there's one more frontier worth visiting before we close.
33:20If we could slow or stop the physical decline of the body, what about preserving the mind
33:26outside of it?
33:27Researchers claim to have simulated the brain of a fruit fly on a laptop.
33:32That's an exciting development until you realize that a human brain has 600,000 times
33:37more neurons.
33:38So something like the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror, where people can upload their
33:43consciousness after they die to a server, that's still squarely in the realm of science fiction,
33:48for now.
33:50Okay, so now you've met super centenarians and scientists.
33:55Longevity athletes and futurists who are trying to live long enough to let AI solve death.
34:00My entire project is about AI.
34:04And so obviously it seems as though it's about health.
34:09It's not.
34:10If you go forward in time to the year 2500 and you're there with intelligence at that
34:15time, whether it's human AI or some version, a combination, and they're looking back at
34:19this time and place, our century.
34:22And they're saying, what happened in the 21st century?
34:26I think they'll say two things.
34:28One is that's when Homo sapiens gave birth to super intelligence.
34:31And two, that's when Homo sapiens figured out they wouldn't die.
34:35But let's take a minute to think about what might happen if everyone actually lived
34:39past 100.
34:40A Pew Research Center survey found that over half of Americans said slowing the aging process
34:45would be bad for society.
34:47Americans who reach age 65 today can expect to live nearly 20 additional years on average,
34:53with women living longer.
34:54At the same time, the fraction of life spent with four or more serious conditions hasn't
34:59decreased.
35:00It's actually slightly increased.
35:02In other words, we're living more years and possibly a greater fraction of those in
35:07poor health.
35:08Our current retirement and health care systems are already a ticking time bomb.
35:12What we see families on trajectory for is a pretty significant shortfall of anywhere between
35:18hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars if they don't plan for their aging
35:24trajectory now.
35:26So if more people live even longer, the way we take care of the elderly will require a
35:31complete overhaul.
35:32There must be new insurance plans, new pension plans, elderly care.
35:37That's more than a trillion dollar industry overall.
35:41And right now, the richest Americans live approximately 15 years longer than the poorest.
35:46A gap that widened between 2001 and 2014.
35:50Unless treatments become as cheap and generic as statins, longevity advances could create
35:56two permanent classes of humans.
36:01This is my dad's grave and it's the first time I'm seeing it in person.
36:08Being here, coming to a place like this, remembering my father makes you realize this is where we're
36:14all headed.
36:14And maybe that's the point, that when we know we have a limited time on this planet, that
36:22we try to make the most of it.
36:23So is there a possibility that in the future, not everyone will end up in a place like this?
36:29Maybe.
36:30But even if that is possible, the question is, is it a good idea?
36:35Who gets that extra time?
36:37And what does it mean for the rest of us?
36:38Because me personally, I'm okay with knowing that my time is limited, not knowing exactly
36:45how much we have and just enjoying the ride.
Comments